RESCUE OF A ROCK and ROLL CHILD
Chapter One: The Gambolling Baby Boomer
Birth of a Rock and Roll Child
I was born Friday 7 October 1955 at the tail end of West London's Goldhawk
Road and my first home was in Bulmer Place near Notting Hill Gate.
My brother was born two and a half years later, by which time my parents had
bought their own house in Bedford Park in what was then the London
Borough of Acton. Built by Norman Richard Shaw, Bedford Park was the
world's first Garden Suburb. By the 1880s it was a Bohemian centre for
intellectuals and artistic free-thinkers its residents going on to include most
famously the great Anglo-Irish poet WB Yeats. The painter Arthur Pinero was
another resident; as was the actress Florence Farr, who like Yeats was deeply
involved in mysticism and the occult.
Some time after the dawn of the next century the area had - significantly
perhaps - declined to the extent that bus conductors would shout out "Poverty
Park!" when their vehicles stopped on the Bath Road. However, the
foundation in 1963 of the Bedford Park Society led first to the government's
listing of 356 houses, and then much of the estate becoming part of the
Bedford Park Conservation Area. During my boyhood it was still
demographically quite mixed, but well on the way to being completely
gentrified. Working class future hard nut Roger Daltry had moved there from
Notting Hill a little time before we did, although he'd been born (in March
1945) at the Hammersmith Hospital in nearby Shepherds Bush. A few years
later he formed a Skiffle group, The Detours, which eventually mutated into
The Who, one of several English bands that conquered America in the late
1960s with a furiously hedonistic music and philosophy.
By '63, I'd been at South Kensington’s French Lycée for about four years and
my brother (born on the 2cnd of May 1958) had since joined me there. The
sixties' social and sexual revolution was already well under way; and yet for all
that, seminal Pop groups such as the Searchers and the Dave Clark Five - even
the Beatles themselves - were quaint and wholesome figures who fitted in well
in a still innocent Britain of Norman Wisdom pictures and well-spoken
presenters on the BBC Home or Light Service, of coppers, tanners and ten bob
notes, sweet shops and tuppeny chews. It wasn't until the Rolling Stones
achieved national infamy that the new Pop they'd first called Beat started to
present a serious challenge to the moral establishment of the UK, and so
perhaps start to evolve into the far more threatening music of Rock.
On the day I was born - 7 October 1955 - Nation of Islam leader Elijah
Muhammad reached the age of 58, and Scottish psychologist RD Laing, 28,
while Beat poet Amira Baraka, revolutionary leader Ulriche Meinhof and
Falklands hero Major Julian Thompson all hit 21. The future Colonel Oliver
North celebrated his 12th birthday, Judee Sill her 13th, Paul Weyrich his 8th,
Vladimir Putin his 3rd.
It was a day marked by an event which had a colossal if largely unrecognised
influence on the evolution of our culture, when at San Franciso's Six Gallery
about 150 people gathered to witness readings of poems by Allen Ginsberg,
Phillip Whalen, Phillip Lamantia, Michael McClure and Gary Snyder. All went
on to be leading lights of the Beat Generation, as did Jack Kerouac, the shy
Canuck from Lowell, Massachusetts, who attended but didn't read, preferring
to cheerlead in a state of ecstatic inebriation. His "On the Road" published two
years later, and dealing with his wanderings across America with his muse and
friend Neal Cassady remains Beat's most famous ever work. After the Six
Gallery reading, the Beat movement which had existed in embryonic form
since about 1944, left the underground to become an international craze, with
the Beatnik taking his place as a universally recognised icon with his beret,
goatee beard, turtle-neck sweater and sandals.
1955 was also the year in which Rock and Roll assaulted the mainstream
thanks to hits by Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard and others, although
it's "The Blackboard Jungle", which, released on the 20th of March, is widely
credited with igniting the Rock' n' Roll revolution, indeed late 20th Century
teenage rebellion as a whole. It did so by featuring Bill Haley & His Comets's
"Rock Around the Clock", over the film's opening credits. Originally a rather
conventional blues-based song recorded by Sonny Dae and his Knights,
Haley's version, which was remarkable for its earth-shaking sense of urgency,
ensured the world would never be the same after it. In August Sun Records
released a long playing record entitled "Elvis Presley, Scotty and Bill",
featuring the so-called King of the Western Bop who went on to become
Rock's single most influential figure apart from the Beatles.
On the 30th of September, James Dean died in hospital following a motor
accident aged 23 after having made only three films, the greatest of which,
Nicholas Ray's "Rebel Without a Cause" emerged about a month afterwards. It
could be said to be the motion picture industry's defining elegy to the
sensitivity and rebelliousness of youth, with Dean its most beautiful and
tortured icon ever. As such his image has never dated, nor been surpassed.
The modern cult of youth was born in the mid 1950s.
Many theories exist as to how the staid conformist fifties could have yielded
as if my magic to the wild Dionysian sixties, some convincing, others less so.
For me, if a little leaven is present in a theory for me it leavens, or spoils, the
entire lump, even when much of it may be sound. Far from being a sudden,
unexpected event, the post-war cultural revolution has historical roots
reaching at least as far back as the so-called Enlightenment, since which time
the West has been consistently assailed by tendencies hostile to its JudaeoChristian moral fabric. That said, its true source was the Serpent's false
promise to Eve that through defiance of the Creator she and Adam could be as
gods, knowing good and evil, which is at the heart of all vain, humanistic
philosophy.
What happened in the 1960s was simply the culmination of many decades of
activity on the part of revolutionaries and avant-gardists, especially since the
First World War. Even Rock, a music which the American evangelist John
MacArthur once described as having a bombastic atonality and dissonance
was foreshadowed at its most experimental by the emancipation of the
dissonant brought about by Classical composers of various Modernist schools.
Still, for all the change that raged around me in the sixties, my own little
world of the leafy suburbs of outer west London was an idyllic one which had
hardly changed from the day that I was born when the spirit of Victorian
morality was still more or less intact in Britain.
Tales of Tasmania, Manitoba (and a Child's West London)
By the time we moved to Bedford Park, My father had several successful years
as a classical violinist under his belt, and so was in a position to ensure that
my brother and I enjoy a far more stable childhood than his had ever been.
He'd been born Patrick Clancy Halling in Rowella, Tasmania, and raised in
Sydney as the son of one Carl Halling from Denmark, and an English mother,
the formidable Mary. She came into the world as Phyllis Mary Pinnock
possibly in the Dulwich area of south London and sometime around the turn
of the 20th Century, but she was always known as Mary to my parents,
brother and I.
According to Mary's sister Joan, her maternal grandmother’s maiden name
had been Butler, which allegedly links the family to the Butlers of Ormonde, a
dynasty of Old English nobles of Norman origin which had dominated the
south east of Ireland since the Middle Ages, and so making it a lost or
discarded branch. If Joan was right then I'm related by blood to many of the
most prominent royal and aristocratic figures in history, perhaps even all of
them.
These would include her namesake Lady Joan FitzGerald, daughter of James
Butler the first Earl of Ormonde, and alleged ancestress of Diana, Princess of
Wales. Lady Joan herself was the grandaughter of Edward the 1st of the House
of Plantagenet - who was "The Hammer of the Scots", and the king who
expelled the Jews from England - while her mother Eleanor de Bohun was
descended from Charlemagne, the greatest of all the Carolingian Kings who
may have been Merovingian through his great-grandmother, Bertrada of
Prum, the Merovingians and the Carolingians being two dynasties of Frankish
rulers who supposedly upheld the divine right of kings.
Mary grew into a beautiful young woman, with dark hair, green eyes, high
cheekbones and an exquisitely sculpted mouth. After losing her fiancé in the
First World War, she married an army officer by the name of Peter Robinson,
and they had two children in quick succession, Peter Bevan, and Suzanne,
known as Dinny.
At some point between Peter’s birth and that of his younger brother Patrick,
she travelled with her husband to Ceylon - now Sri Lanka - to find work as a
tea planter. There she met a Dane with a deep love and knowledge of the
spiritual traditions of the East, the mysterious Carl Halling. What followed
next I can't say for sure but I've been led to believe that at some point after
becoming pregnant with her third child, Mary fled with Carl to the island of
Tasmania where my father was born, although he was raised - as Carl’s son in Sydney, New South Wales.
It was in Sydney that Carl contracted multiple sclerosis, after which Mary
made some kind of living as a journalist and teacher, while an increasingly
sick Carl went on a desperate spiritual search for a miracle cure taking in Mary
Baker Eddy's mystical Christian Science sect, but sadly it was all unavailing
and Carl died just before the outbreak of World War II. According to his
wishes, he was buried in his native Denmark, although by then he'd allegedly
taken out dual citizenship, as had Mary.
All three children had earlier displayed considerable musical talent, Patrick as
a violinist, Peter as a cellist and Suzanne as a pianist. By the time Pat was nine
years old he was already the soloist for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, with
all his wages according to him being redirected by Mary into the family
account. Soon after Carl’s burial, Mary set off for London with her three
children in order that they might further develop their musical careers. Pat
studied at both the Royal Academy of Music and the Guildhall School of Music
and Drama, and joined the London Philharmonic 0rchestra while still a
teenager during the Blitz on London, serving in the Sea Cadets as a signaller,
and seeing action as such on the hospital ships of the Thames River
Emergency Service.
By this time my mother the former Miss Ann Watt was already a highly
accomplished and successful singer of both classical and light music, notably
with Vancouver's legendary Theatre Under the Stars. She'd been born Angela
Jean Watt in the city of Brandon, Manitoba. However, while still an infant
she'd moved with her parents and four siblings to the Grandview area of east
Vancouver. Grandview's earliest settlers were usually tradesmen or
shopkeepers, in shipping or construction work, and largely of British origin.
My own grandfather James Watt a builder by trade had been born in the little
town of Castlederg in County Tyrone, Ireland, then part of the United
Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Her mother Elizabeth was from
Glasgow, Scotland, having been born there to an English father from either
Liverpool or Manchester, and a Scottish mother.
She was the youngest of six siblings, namely Annie-Isabella, Robert, James,
Elizabeth (who died in infancy), Catherine and herself, and the only one of her
extended family to emigrate to the mother country - although Isa's only son
Don was resident in the UK for a good many years in the early'70s -which she
did shortly after the end of the war. She could just as easily have ended up in
the US, but a ticket came up for her to travel by boat to the UK and she
couldn't resist it.
Within a short time of arriving she met my father through their shared
profession, and they married in the summer of 1948. Seven years later, they
decided to have their first child, and so I was born at the former Goldhawk
Road site of Queen Charlotte's Hospital, which has since been moved to
nearby Du Cane Road, Shepherds Bush.
I was an articulate and sociable kid from the word go, walking, talking early
just like my dad before me, but agitated, unable to rest, what they might call
hyperactive today. And at some stage in the early to mid sixties I became a
problem both at school and home: a disruptive influence in the class, and a
trouble-maker in the streets, an eccentric loon full of madcap fun and halfderanged imaginativeness whose unusual physical appearance was enhanced
by a striking thinness and enormous long-lashed blue eyes. Less charmingly, I
was also the kind of deliberately malicious little hooligan who'd remove a
paper from a neighbour's letter-box, and then mutilate it before re-posting it.
I divided my time between the Lycée and my West London stomping ground
of Bedford Park, Chiswick, Hammersmith, and soon. From a very young age I
took Judo classes at the Budokwai in South Kensington, where one of my
teachers, a former British international, said he always knew that it was
Saturday when he heard Halling's voice. I was known as Alley Cat by the other
kids at the Budokwai, after my surname of Halling, and it was a pretty apt
name when you think of it. Later, I took classes at the Judokan in
Hammersmith, but if I thought I was going to raise Cain there I had another
thing coming, given that its owner was a one-time captain of the British
international team who'd served as an air gunner with 83 squadron during
World War II, later holding Judo classes in Stalag 383. He was a formidable
but fair man a little like my future housemaster at boarding school and I
worked well with him, going on to study Karate which I was still doing as late
as 1973 more of which later.
I was never happier than on those Wednesday evenings I served as what
would today be called a Cub Scout in the 20th Chiswick Wolf Cub pack, where
I was less of a menace than pretty well anywhere else. I remember the games,
the pomp and seriousness of the camps, the different coloured scarves,
sweaters and hair during the mass meetings, the solemnity of my enrolment,
being helped up a tree by an older boy, Baloo, or Kim, or someone, to win my
Athletics badge, winning my first star, my two year badge, and my swimming
badge with its frog symbol, the kindness of the older boys.
Beatlemania came to London in 1963 and I first announced my own status as
a Beatlemaniac at the Lycée in that landmark year, the very year I think I took
a dislike to an American boy Robert who later became my friend. I used to
attack him for no reason at all other than to assert my superiority over him.
One day, he finally flipped and gave me a rabbit punch in the stomach, but
Robert wasn't punished...perhaps because the teacher had a strong idea I'd
started the trouble in the first place.
By the end of the year, a single new group The Rolling Stones started
threatening the Beatles' position as my favourite in the world, although I was
initially disappointed by what I saw as a rough and sullen performance of "Not
Fade Away" on Top of the Pops, having heard so much about them. However,
during a musical discussion I can still see in my mind's eye, possibly in '65
with some of the new breed of English roses - who may have been flaunting
mod girl fringes, mini-skirts and kinky boots - I proudly announced that the
Stones were my favourite group in the world. I loved the way a martyred Mick
Jagger sang "Lady Jane" on black and white TV with surly, ever-defiant lips
surrounded by frenzied girl slaves as if she was a pagan deity and he her
prostrate votary.
One of the girls was a loyal Beatles fan, another a lover of British Blues band
the Animals, and she acted cooler than the rest as if the Animals were
somehow superior to mere Pop acts like the Fabs and the Stones. But then
Mick and co. had begun as a Blues band too...only to become side-tracked into
the world of Pop.
There was a point in the mid '60s when I was dubbed Le Général by my longsuffering form teacher at the Lycée in consequence of what she perceived as
my supremacy in the playground with regard to a tight circle of friends, and
my leisurely arrogance in the classroom.
Certainly, I was not above organising elaborate playground deceptions. One
involved me pretending to banish one of my best friends Richard from
whatever activity we had going on at the time. Richard played along by putting
on a superb display of waterworks which had the desired effect of arousing the
tender mercies of some of the girls who duly rounded on me for my hardheartedness; but I refused to budge. Richard was out. Of course it was all a big
joke, and Richard and I had never been closer.
I can remember going around to his house to lounge on his bed watching
"The Baron" or "Adam Adamant" before staying the night, just as he stayed
the night at mine; and in '67, by which time my wardrobe included a paisley
shirt and a pair of purple cords - to say nothing of the obligatory peaked cap he spent a week with me in the wilds of Wales as part of a course known as the
Able Boys. This was a combination of a simple sailing school and what could
be termed outward bound activities which involved us living in tents and
cooking our own food under the supervision of "mates". I spent one week
there with Richard, and another with my cousin Rod, about whom I'll be
saying a good deal more later on in the memoir. Suffice to say for now that he
was the son of my dad's brother Peter, and lived just opposite us in Bedford
Park with his dad, mother Marge, and little sister Kris.
If I was Le Général at the Lycée, back home I saw myself as the leader of the
kids whose houses backed onto the dirty alley that ran parallel to our side of
the Esmond Road in those days but has almost certainly vanished by now.
One fateful day I crossed the road to announce a feud with the kids of the
clean alley, so-called because unlike ours it was concreted over rather than
being just a dirt track. It was to cost me dear. Soon after the feud had thawed I
went over to pal around with some of the clean alley kids who I now saw as my
allies, but there must have still been some bad blood because before long a
scrap was under way and I was getting the worst of it. Finally I agreed to leave,
and as I shamefully cycled off my bike squeaked all the way home in unison
with great heaving sobs.
If my good mate local tough Steve had been with me it’s likely I would never
have had to suffer in this way. Steve lived virtually opposite us in Bedford
Park, but he was from another dimension altogether. He was a skinny cockney
kid with muscles like steel who seems to me today to have been born to wage
war on the bomb sites of post-war London. For some reason, he became
devoted to me..."Carly", he'd always cry - this being his pet name for me - and
he'd always be welcome at our house even though this brought my family
some disapproval in the neighbourhood. One of my mother's closest friends
warned her of my association with Steve as if genuinely concerned I might end
up going to the bad, but he was a good kid at heart as the piece below makes
clear. It was based on an autobiographical story about my childhood written in
about 1977, as was much of the material above as of the wolf cub section. I
versified it in the winter of '06, publishing it at the Blogster website on
February the 15th. It depicts my first meeting with Steve in the dirty alley
possibly in about 1965 or '66.
Wicked Cahoots
When he made
his first personal appearance
in the dirty alley
on someone else's rusty bike,
screaming along
in a cloud of dust
it rendered us all
speechless and motionless.
But I was amazed
that despite his grey-faced surliness,
he was very affable with us...
the bully with a naive
and sentimental heart.
He was so happy
to hear that I liked his dad
or that my mum liked him
and he was welcome
to come to tea
with us at five twenty five...
Our "adventures" were spectacular:
chasing after other bikesters,
screaming at the top
of our lungs
into blocks of flats
and then running
as our echoed waves of terror
blended with incoherent threats...
"I'll call the Police, I'll..."
Wicked cahoots.
This Glam Rock Nation
In September 1968 while still only 12 years old I became the youngest cadet at
the Nautical College Pangbourne, a naval college situated near the little
Thameside village of Pangbourne in the county of Berkshire. This probably
made me the youngest serving officer in the entire Royal Navy at the time.
Founded in 1919, she was still known by her original title of the Nautical
College Pangbourne, but by 1969 this'd been abbreviated to Pangbourne
College. However, the boys retained their officer status and spent much of
their time in full naval officers' uniform. What's more, naval discipline
continued to be enforced, with Pangbourne providing the hardships both of a
military college and a traditional English boarding school. In 1996, she
became fully co-educational.
The Pangbourne I knew had strong links to the Church of England, and so
was marked by regular if not daily classes in what was known as Divinity,
morning parade ground prayers, evening prayers, and compulsory chapel on
Sunday morning. If you missed any of these you would have been seriously
punished, although not necessarily with the cane. I was heavily disciplined
from my very first term, but I'm indebted to Pangbourne for the values it
instilled in me if only unconsciously. They were after all the same values that
once made Britain strong and great; and yet, by the time I joined Pangbourne,
they were under siege as never before by the so-called counterculture. While
failing to fully understand the implications of the cultural revolution of the
late 1960s, I passionately celebrated its consequences, and took to my heart
many of its icons both artistic and political, and that’s especially true of the
Marxist revolutionary leader Che Guevara.
In 1970, we moved from Bedford Park to a little industrial suburb close to the
Surrey-London border. Our own street was relatively gentrified, and several of
my parents' closest friends were from working class districts of West London
such as Shepherd's Bush and Notting Hill who'd since "made good" and so
had moved out to the suburbs like my dad.
I finally left Pangbourne in the summer of '72, after a decision had been made
involving my poor dad and those directly responsible for me at the college.
1972 could be said to be the year in which the seventies really began as the
excitement surrounding the alternative society and its happenings and be-ins
and love-ins and free festivals and so on started to fade into recent history. For
my part I couldn't wait to get to grips with the dismal new decade even if for
the first two years, I'd despised the rise of the new commercial chart Pop and
its teenybopper idols. I was of the school of Hard and Progressive Rock...Led
Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Yes and so on, but I was
changing, and for better or worse, this was going to be my era.
In late '72, I saw former Bubblegum band the Sweet on a long-forgotten
teenage programme called "Lift off with Ayesha", and with all the passion of a
former enemy I fell in love with their new camp image, all eye-shadow and
glittering outfits and massive stack-heeled boots. Several months later a
certain Rock chameleon - David Bowie of course - appeared on the chat show
Russell Harty Plus in January 1973 with his eyebrows shaved off and my
devotion to the strange culture taking over the land making even former
skinheads want to look like Charlie George or some other flash dressing hard
man became total.
So many of the popular songs of the era were like football chants set to a
stomping Glam Rock beat. It was the golden age of the long-haired boot boy
and every street seemed to me to be pregnant with menace in this Glam Rock
nation, as if the spirit of Weimar Berlin with its unholy mix of violence and
decadence had been resurrected in stuffy old England. It was a terrible time to
be young; but I of course loved it, lapped it up.
In late '72 I was launched by my dad on an intensive programme of selfimprovement.
Through home study and with the help of local private tutors I set about
making up for the fact that I'd left school at 16 with only two GCE – General
Certificate of Education - exams to my name, at ordinary level, of course,
which is why they were called "O" levels.
I took Karate classes at the Judokan in Hammersmith, west London…and
among my fellow students were hard-looking young men who may have been
led to the dojo by the prevailing Martial Arts craze that had been propelled by
the films of Bruce Lee and the “Kung Fu” television series, some of them
sporting classic '70s feather cuts as I recall.
I also went to swimming classes at a local baths, where I developed a
desperate crush on one of my fellow pupils who looked a bit like a skinhead
girl with a boyish crop which suited her angelically pretty features, and I think
she beckoned to me once to come and be with her but I just stood there as if
frozen to the spot. My heart wasn't in the swimming though, and this soon
became clear to one of the teachers who asked me why I was even bothering to
turn up. She had a point.
I took guitar lessons from a shy sweet man whose short back and sides and
baggy dad-style trousers belied a deep love of the rebel music of Rock and Roll
in his tiny little house near the Thames in suburban Surrey, and I probably
learned more from that man about basic Rock guitar than anyone alive or
dead, with the possible exception of a Pangbourne friend called Steve, whose
songs I stole with their simple chord progressions...C, A minor, F, G and back
again to C and so on.
In late '72, I joined the London Division of the Royal Naval Reserve as an
Ordinary Seaman, attending classes once a week on HMS President on the
Embankment, and at some point thereafter, it became clear to me that I'd
been singled out for my budding pretty boy looks. I think this came as a bit of
a surprise, but I was flattered rather than offended, as if a seed of narcissism
had somehow become implanted within me in late adolescence. I can only
wonder what effect this had on my healthy development as a normal male
human being.
It's not that I wasn't aware of being good-looking before '72, because there
had been the occasional comment about my looks by female friends of the
family for some years, and I'd even been made aware of being handsome as a
very young boy by some of the Lycee girls. However, none of this had ever
really registered with me, because I'd always been a typical boy in a lot of
ways, feisty, outgoing, self-confident and so on. That said, I’d also always been
highly sensitive, which points to what could be called a feminine side to my
nature, and I’d never gone through a phase of finding girls drippy or whatever.
In fact, from as far back as I can remember I'd been prone to falling hopelessly
in love with them especially if they were somehow unattainable to me.
What’s more, I was a born romantic, cherishing a grossly sentimental streak
all throughout my teens that placed me somewhat at odds with my peers.
While still only about fifteen and pretty thuggish for the most part I
nonetheless was capable of becoming entranced by notorious tear-jerkers such
as "South Pacific", which I saw with my mother at the cinema. John
Schlesinger's film version of the Thomas Hardy novel "Far from the Madding
Crowd", which I saw at Pangbourne, was another film that affected me very
deeply indeed, too deeply perhaps for an adolescent boy and it may have been
partly responsible for an obsession with lost love and high romantic tragedy
that remains with me to this day.
I had a dreamy almost mawkish side to my character even as an adolescent
and this must surely have exerted some kind of influence on the course of my
life, but in no way was I a typical delicate sheltered milquetoast, far from it.
For this reason, to realise that I was perceived by certain other men as a pretty
boy genuinely took me back, and I had not seen it coming, although – and I
can't emphasise this enough - it was a source of fascination to me, not shame,
nor rage.
The cult of androgyny was a powerful force in the Britain and to a lesser
extent all throughout the West in the early 1970s, having been incubated by
sixties Mod and then Hippie culture, and Rock acts as diverse as the Rolling
Stones, the Kinks, Pink Floyd, the Doors, Alice Cooper, T. Rex and David
Bowie. It had been some ten years since this Rock and Roll child had first been
confronted with male androgyny, although subtly, in the shape of the Beat
groups of the Mod era, but by '73, certain Rock stars were flirting with out and
out transvestism. However, you took your life into your own hands if you
chose to emulate them in the mean streets of London and other major British
cities – to say nothing of the country - and therefore few did.
One of my big heroes as a boy had been all-American actor Steve McQueen,
who incarnated an uncompromising tough guy cool. And yet in '73, many of
my new idols were "prettier than most chicks" (as T.Rex kingpin Marc Bolan
once described himself). I can only wonder what effect this had on my healthy
development as a normal male human being, and the same goes for all of
those who worshipped at the altar of Glam.
I fantasised about fame and adulation as a Rock and Roll or movie star as
never before throughout the Glam era, and built an image based on David
Bowie, spiking my hair like him, and even peroxiding it at some point. Not
surprisingly then I didn't fit in at all in my new home town, unlike my brother
who was far more suited to the area than me with his strong cockney accent
and laddish ways, and he wasted little time in becoming part of a local youth
scene centred mainly around football, traditional sport of the British working
classes.
For my part, I came into my own in Spain, or rather Santiago de la Ribera on
the Mar Menor near Murcia, where the family had been vacationing since
about 1968. I think it was towards the end of my summer '73 holiday that I
finally started to be noticed in a big way by the local youth, most from either
Murcia or Madrid, and so la Ribera became vital to me in terms of my
becoming a social being among members of both sexes. A large ever-evolving
group of us became very close and remained so for four summers running.
Spain was such a sweet and friendly nation back then in the relatively
innocent early seventies, and the youth of La Ribera as happy and carefree as I
imagine southern Californians would have been in the pre-Beatles sixties.
What a time it was…a time of constant, frenetic change when everything
seemed to be mine for the knowing and the tasting in the wake of a social
revolution that had been all but bloodlessly waged on my behalf only a few
years before…but there was a high price to be paid for all that gambolling…
Chapter Two: The Triumph of Decadence
Sad Loves of a Seafaring Man
In late summer 1973 the minesweeper HMS Thames set out for Bordeaux in
Gironde in the south west of France. It was my first voyage as an Ordinary
Deckhand with the RNR and I was just seventeen years old.
During the trip I made my best-ever RNR friend in the shape of a fellow OD
Colin who called me only a few years ago from his East London home to talk
about old memories, including the time we became trapped by a gang of
mangy-looking stray dogs late at night in la Rochelle in 1975 while searching
for our ship after a wild night spent with locals at a bar, then a night club.
Even more recently, another good RNR friend Taffy, who sailed with us to La
Rochelle by way of the Île de Ré got in touch with me though the Blogster
website. He could have knocked me over with a feather. After all the last time
I'd seen him was close by to Waterloo Station when I was on my way to the
Old Vic as an actor in the summer of 1980. Colin and his fiancée came to see
the show, Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream", shortly afterwards,
but I can't say how long. However, he did mention having spoken to Taff, who
was his best friend. But I'm getting off the subject...
I also became quite friendly with the most unlikely pair of bosom buddies I
ever came across in the RNR or anywhere else. One half was Jimmy, a toughtalking good-hearted working class ladies' man of about 23 who was rumoured
to be a permanent year-long resident of HMS Thames, the other, an older
man, possibly in his mid thirties, but just as much of a Jack the lad as Jim,
even though he boasted the super-posh accent and patrician manner of a City
of London stockbroker or merchant banker. Jimmy took me under his wing
with a certain intimidating affection: "We'll make a ruffy tuffy sailor of you
yet!" he once told me, even though we both knew that that I'd never be
anything other than the most useless sailor in the civilised world.
To make it clear just how much of a lubber I was, there was one occasion
below deck during some kind of conference when, after having been asked by
an officer what I thought of minesweeping, I replied that it was a gas...another
when the ship had been prepared for a major manoeuvre and everyone
onboard had retreated to their respective allotted positions, when I was found
wandering on deck in a daze only to casually announce that I was taking a
stroll. Incidents like these made me an object of good-humoured banter on the
part of Jimmy and others for whom I was a sort of latter-day Billy Budd but
without the seamanship.
The crew spent its final night together in a night club in the southern city port
of Portsmouth - known as Pompey - although it might just as easily have been
Plymouth. The main attraction was a hyperactive drag artist who tried
desperately to keep us entertained with cabaret style numbers sung in a comic
falsetto, and bawdy jokes told in a deep rich baritone, but the poor man was
remorselessly heckled. At one point he turned to me - at least I think it was
me...I was wearing glasses at the time and so cowering with shame - and
camply trilled something along the lines of: "Ooh...you look pretty, what's
your name?". "Skin!" was what some of the sailors bellowed back...this being a
nickname I had at the time, perhaps as in "a nice bit of skin" or something...
Some time later, the bearded sailor I'd been sitting next to all night asked me
to hold the mike for him while he performed Rossini’s William Tell Overture
on his facial cheeks. Not long afterwards, he collapsed face down onto the
table with an almighty crash. I don't think he was the last one to do so that
night either...
Back onshore, I resumed my growing passion for all that was louche, bizarre
and decadent in music, art and culture, and yet, more and more in the mid
1970s, I turned away from what I now saw as the old hat tackiness of Glam
Rock, convinced that Modernist outrage had nowhere left to go. Instead, I
turned my devotion to the more refined corruption of the golden age of
Modernism of ca. 1890-1930, and especially to its leading cities, in terms of
their being beacons of revolutionary art, of style, luxury and dissolution, such
as the London of the Yellow Decade, Belle Époque Paris, Jazz Age New York,
and most of all Weimar Republic Berlin.
At some point I started using hair cream to slick my hair back in the style of F.
Scott Fitzgerald, sometimes parting it in the centre just as my idol had done. I
started building up a new retro wardrobe, which came to include a Gatsby
style tab-collared shirt, often worn with black and white college-style tie;
several cravats and neck scarves; a navy blue blazer from Meakers; a fair isle
short-sleeved sweater; a pair of grey flannel trousers from Simpsons of
Piccadilly, a pair of two-tone brown and white, or "corespondant", shoes; and
a belted fawn raincoat straight out of a forties film noir.
There were those cutting edge Rock and Pop artists who appeared to share
my nostalgic obsessions, such as Sparks and Manhattan Transfer, and
Britain's own favourite lounge lizard Bryan Ferry. Much of the latter's work
with his band Roxy Music was haunted by the languid cafe and cabaret music
of the continent's immediate past. What's more, some of Roxy's followers
sported the kind of nostalgic apparel favoured by Ferry himself, but they were
rare creatures in mid-seventies London.
As for me, I wore my bizarre outdated costumes in arrogant defiance of the
continuing ubiquity of long hair and flared jeans. In 1975, I even had the gall
to go to a concert at west London's Queen's Park football stadium dressed in
striped boating blazer and white trousers, only to find myself surrounded by
hirsute Rock fans. The headliners were my one-time favourites Yes, whose
"Relayer" album I'd bought the year before; but my passion for Progressive
Rock was a thing of the past. I'd moved on since '71…towards a far greater love
of darkness and loss of innocence.
There was nothing remotely dark, however, about the time I fell in love with a
Dutch girl while sitting Spanish "O" level in June 1974 in Gower Street,
Central London. She didn't look Dutch, in fact, with her tanned complexion
and long dark brown hair, she was Mediterranean in physical appearance, and
even had the name to match: Maria.
It was probably Maria who came up to me, because I was so unconfident
around girls in those days that I'd never have made the first move. Over the
course of the next few days, I fell ever deeper in love, but I didn't have the
courage to make my feelings known to her. This was so typical of me, to
assume an attitude of diffident indifference when confronted by something or
someone I truly desired. So, once we'd completed our final paper, I allowed
her to walk away from me forever with a casual "I might see you around", or
some other cliché of that kind.
For about a week, I took the train into London and spent the days wandering
around the city centre in the truly desperate hope of bumping into her. One
time I could have sworn I saw her staring coolly back at me from an
underground train, possibly at South Kensington or Notting Hill Gate, just as
the doors were closing, but typically I was powerless to act, and simply stood
there like a lovesick loon as the train drew away from the station.
In time of course my infatuation faded, but even to this day certain songs will
recall for me those few weeks in the summer of '74 that I spent in hopeless
pursuit of a woman I didn't even know. They include Sweet Soul standards, "I
Just Don't Want to be Lonely" by The Main Ingredient, and "Natural High" by
Bloodstone, with its pathetic lines: "Why do I keep my mind on you all the
time, and I don't even know you, why do I feel this way, thinking about you
every day, and I don't even know you..."
Later on in the summer, having recovered from an irrational adoration of a
girl I barely knew, I found myself once again in Santiago de La Ribera by the
Mar Menor, a large coastal lake of warm saltwater off Murcia's Costa Calida in
southeastern Spain, and the summer of '74 was one of the most blissfully
happy summers I spent there. Every afternoon, we used to meet on the
balnario - or jetty - facing our apartment on the Mar Menor which was more
or less deserted after lunch, that's myself and my brother, and Spanish friends
both male and female, to listen to music and talk and laugh and swim and
generally enjoy being young and carefree in a decade of endless possibilities.
To some youthful Spanish eyes back in '74-'76, I appeared as an almost
impossibly exotic figure from what must have seemed to them to be the most
radical and daring city in Europe, which of course London was. I played up to
my racy image to the hilt, where in truth I was barely less sheltered and
innocent than they were. There was a change with Franco's passing, and the
birth of the so-called Movida, which could be said to be the Spanish and
specifically Madridian equivalent of London's Swinging Sixties revolution.
By my last vacation in La Ribera in the summer of '84, it was I who was in
awe of the local youth rather than the other way around. They seemed so cool
to me, dancing their strange jerky chicken wing dance to the latest New Pop
hits from Britain. By then of course most of my old friends had vanished into
their young adult lives, and my time as Charly the English prince of Santiago
de la Ribera had long passed. I was yesterday's man, and I was sad about it,
but I couldn't expect to be chased forever. Some people have to actually grow
up.
I returned to London in late summer '74 with a deep tan and hair bleached
bright yellow by the sun, and hanging long over my ears and down over my
forehead.
Only days afterwards I found myself on HMS President, moored then as
today on the Embankment near Temple station. This involved my passing
through Waterloo mainline station, which wasn't tourist-friendly as it is today,
with its cafes and baguette bars, but a dingy intimidating place complete with
pub and old-style barber. There I was approached by a hoary old Scotsman, a
former sailor who kept going on about how good looking I was. He even told
me that he loved me; but he was harmless...just a sweet lonely old guy who
wanted someone to talk to for a few minutes, which I was happy to do and
then move on. It was all very innocent. I even went so far as to agree to a
meeting with him the same time the following week, not that I had any
intention of keeping it. Besides, it wasn't long before HMS Thames was on its
way to Hamburg, second largest city of Germany and its principle port.
Once we'd arrived, one of the Chiefs - as in Chief Petty Officer - warned me
not to wander alone in a city he called the armpit of the world, or rather
something ruder. I mean me personally, what with the way I looked and all. So
I joined up with a group of about three or four, and on our first night ashore
we set off on a voyage into parts of the city such as the red light district St.
Pauli with its infamous Reeperbahn, the so-called "sinful mile" which is lined
with restaurants, discos and dives, as well as strip clubs, sex shops, bordellos
and so on.
It was all so different to the quiet outer suburbs where an organised coach
trip carried us possibly a day later. We ended up in a park where I had my
picture taken on a bridge by a reporter for the Surrey Comet; then a group of
breathless giggling schoolgirls asked me to be in some photos with them. I of
course said yes, ever happy to oblige, and it was a bit of an ego boost for me, as
if I needed one.
On the way back to the ship, one of the sailors pointed out that I'd been a hit
with the Hamburg teenyboppers, while another snapped back that it was only
because I was blond and blue-eyed, Teutonic-looking in other words.
Whatever the truth, there was something touching about these sweet
suburban girls and their simple unaffected joy of life, especially in the light of
what girls barely older than they were subjecting themselves to in the sad lost
northern Babylon of only a matter of miles away.
The Triumph of Decadence
In 1975, I became a student at Brooklands Technical College which lay then as
now on the fringes of Weybridge, an affluent outer suburb of south west
London. In semi-pastoral Brooklands as in my beloved Santiago de la Ribera,
I learned to be a social being after years of near-seclusion, first at Pangbourne
and then as a home student. So, attention went on to be a potent narcotic for
me in the mid 1970s, but despite constant displays of flamboyant selfconfidence, those who tried to get to know to know me on an intimate level
found themselves confronted with a desperately diffident and inhibited
individual.
The regular Brooklands Disco was a special event for me. On one occasion
early on in a Disco night I got up in front of what seemed like the whole
college and delivered a solo dance performance to a fiery Glam tune by one of
my great favourites back then, Bebop Deluxe, possibly with white silk scarf
flailing in the air to frenzied cheers and applause. I just blew everyone away.
On another, a trio of roughs who I suspect may have gatecrashed the Disco
only to see in me the worst possible example of the feckless wastrel student
strutting and posturing in unmanly white took me aside once the music had
stopped clearly intent on some form of demented ultra-violence; but I stood
my ground, insisting that despite what they may have thought I was just as
straight as they were. Apparently convinced of this, after a few threatening
words they vanished into the crowd, my cherubic face intact.
1975 again...and my music, swimming and Martial Arts sessions were no
more, but the private lessons continued, mainly with a quiet slim young man
with darkish curly hair called Michael. He lived alone but for a family of black
cats in long time Rock star haven Richmond-on-Thames, and was a musician
as well as an academic who went on to play drums for a fairly successful
Contemporary Folk outfit.
Michael exerted a strong influence on me in terms of my growing passion for
European literature and Modernist culture. He had a special feel for French
Symbolist poetry, but it was the less known literature of Spain that we studied
together, from the anonymous picaresque novel "Lazarillo de Tormes" (1554)
onwards, and embracing Quevedo, Galdos, Machado, Lorca, and others. He
was also an early encourager of my writing, a lifelong passion that was
ultimately to degenerate into a chronic case of cacoethes scribendi, or the
irresistible compulsion to write creatively. As a result of it, I was incapable of
finishing a single cohesive piece of writing until well into the eighties when I
managed to complete a short story and a novel both of which have since been
destroyed but for a few fragments.
It was through Michael that I came under the spell of the Berlin of the
Weimar Republic of 1919 to 1933. After I'd expressed interest in a copy of one
of Christopher Isherwood's Berlin novels "Mr Norris Changes Trains", placed
prominently in front of me on Michael's writing desk, he excitedly informed
me that "Norris" had inspired the 1972 movie version of Kander and Ebb's
musical "Cabaret" directed by Bob Fosse, itself somewhat based on the John
Van Druten play, "I am a Camera". In fact, while a work of art in its own right
written for the screen by Jay Allen, "Cabaret" had been largely informed by
Isherwood's only other Berlin story, "Goodbye to Berlin", penned in 1939 but
referring to incidents that took place between six to eight years earlier. Seeing
"Cabaret" later on that year was a life-transforming experience for me, one of
only a handful brought about by a film.
Weimar Republic Berlin has been likened by some cultural critics to the
contemporary West, and it could be said that much of what's happened to the
West since the end of the second world war was to some degree foreshadowed
by the still horrifying decadence of post-war Berlin. Needless to say the
Weimar era didn't spring out of nowhere. More than any other nation in the
late 18th and early 19th Century Germany, birthplace of Luther and the
Reformation, had played host to Higher Criticism, a school of Biblical
criticism which flagrantly attacked the authenticity of the Scriptures.
Moreover, late 19th century Europe had witnessed a significant occult revival
in Britain, in France, but most especially perhaps in Germany. All this
contributed to the terribly debilitated condition of Christianity in Germany in
the years leading up to and including the implementation of the Third Reich
in 1933.
By the onset of the '20s, crushed by war debt and blighted by urban violence
between mutually hostile extreme right and left wing factions, Germany stood
on the precipice of disaster. However, some kind of reprieve came with an
increase of affluence in 1923, at which point Berlin's Golden Age began, and
she became the undisputed world epicentre of artistic and intellectual foment.
Under her auspices, great artistic freedom thrived in the shape of, among
other phenomena, the painters of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement such as
Beckmann, Dix and Grosz, Berg's ground-breaking opera "Wozzek", as well as
the staccato cabaret-style music of Kurt Weill, Fritz Lang's dystopian
"Metropolis", the scandalous dancing of Cabaret Queen Anita Berber and so
on.
However, Weimar Berlin remains best known for its notorious sexual
liberalism which still has the power to shock as seen in pictorial and
photographic depictions of the cabarets and night clubs in which license and
intoxication flourished unabated. Given that several other Western cities in
the twenties were hardly less hysterically dissolute than Berlin, it's little
wonder that this key Modernist decade has been described by some critics as
the beginning of the end of Western civilisation. In its wake came the Second
World War, the collapse of the greatest empire in history, and the rise of the
Rock and Roll youth and drug culture, which could be said to be the very
triumph of Western decadence.
The Tears of a Woman
I made no less than three sea voyages in 1975, two as a civilian and one with
the RNR, as well as spending a week with them docked at the Pool of London.
The first of these was to Amsterdam via Edinburgh and northern France on
the three-masted topsail schooner TS Sir Winston Churchill of the Sail
Training Association, now known as the Tall Ships Trust. Based in Portsmouth
and Liverpool, the TST was founded in 1956 for the character development of
young people aged 16 to 25 through the crewing of traditional tall ships,
originally Churchill and the SS Malcolm Miller.
Among my shipmates were, apart from my 17 year old brother, several young
men from Scotland and the north of England, some recent recruits to the RN,
and a handful of older Mates who'd been given authority over the rank and file
of we deck hands. In overall authority was the elegant, distinguished Ship's
Captain, who also happened to be an alumnus of my own alma mater of
Pangbourne.
It was an all-male crew, and I was quite well-liked at first although my
popularity cooled in time. I kept a few pals though. One guy in particular
stayed a good friend after we'd tried to impress a couple of girls together
during a brief stay in France; St Malo, I think it was. He was a small babyfaced southerner with long dark hair worn shoulder length like the young Jack
Wilde. I'd boldly put my arm around the one I fancied, Martine, and she'd got
a little upset with me.
Wandering around a little later in a mournful daze and desperate for
Martine's address, 'Jack' gave it to me after she'd scrawled it on a piece of
paper either for him or one of the other lads. I was drunk with relief for a
while, just walking on air, because there was the danger of me coming down
with a serious case of lovesickness had she become lost to me forever. I got on
OK with a few of the others, and some were merely indifferent, but 'Jack' was
Churchill's true prince.
Life on the Churchill was no luxury cruise. There were storms which saw
seamen sprawled all over the deck being violently sick attached to the ship
only by safety belts. On more than one occasion, we were ordered out of our
hammocks in the middle of the night to help trim the sails...something I never
took any part in, which can hardly have helped my reputation. I did climb the
rigging once though, and that was just before we came into the port of
Amsterdam, with dozens of us manning the yard arms, again attached only by
safety belts.
The Dutch capital was marked by the same kind of open sexual license I'd
witnessed only the year before in Hamburg, although without the same
sinister vibrancy. I can remember a kind of perfunctory weariness about the
decadence of Amsterdam, although that was only my impression as a 19 year
old greenhorn. Today as then I'm sure the sad De Wallen red-light district is
filled to the brim with hundreds of little illuminated one-room apartments,
each with a single woman sitting in clear view of onlookers plying her lonely
trade.
As for Edinburgh, just before setting foot in the city for the first time, one of
the lads, dressed to the nines himself in the trendiest seventies gear, all flared
slacks and stack-heeled shoes no doubt, warned me not to go strutting about
Edinburgh town centre in a flashy boating blazer. I completely ignored his
advice of course, so, waltzing some time later into an inner city pub in broad
daylight wearing said blazer and blue jeans tucked into long white socks, a
grinning hard man with long reddish curly hair asked me if I was from Oxford.
Perhaps he was aware of the Oxonian reputation for producing flaming
aesthetes, but I doubt it. I think he just took one look at my jacket and
thought: "Who's thus flash ponce askin' tae ge' hus heed kecked in?", or worse.
It may have been touch and go for a while as to whether he was going to inflict
some serious damage on my angelic English face, but in the end he left me be.
He may even have liked me. The unlikeliest people did in those days.
Within a few weeks of returning to London by train from Edinburgh, my
brother and I were setting off again, this time towards the Baltic coast of
Denmark by way of Germany's famous Kiel Canal as part of what is known as
the Ocean Youth Club. While we were once more supervised by Mates under
the command of a Ship's Captain, who was a lovable bearded larger than life
true character with a weakness for freaking out to John Kongos' "He's Gonna
Step on You Again", the OYC was more like a cruise than a trial by water,
utilising modern yachts rather than traditional tall ships.
My brother and I were quick to recruit a nice young guy from Wotton-underEdge called Simon as our chief crony who as it turned out we'd actually first
met while passing through Calpe, Spain, with our parents about ten years
previously. Soon after setting foot on Danish soil we three got talking to a
couple of girls who, as might be expected, had natural golden blonde hair. Our
efforts at romance were wholly innocuous, despite the reputation Scandinavia
had for progressive sexual attitudes in the '60s and '70s.
A less pleasant romantic episode took place towards the end of the trip,
which saw me in pursuit of a pretty German girl, Bettina. I was crazy for her,
and she made it pretty clear she liked me too, and yet I'd senselessly dumped
her for the sake of a night of drunken idiocy with my brother and Simon,
perhaps expecting her to run after me or something. Suddenly, overtaken by
sickly pangs of remorse, I set out to find her, and at some point during my
search, while walking along some kind of wooden pontoon I lost my footing
and fell fully clothed into the waters of what must have been Kiel Canal. I
wrote to Bettina, but she never wrote back, and I can't say I blame her. To this
day I can't understand what possessed me to ignore her so callously, just in
order to tie one on with the boys which I could've done any night of the week.
Self-sabotage was fast becoming a speciality of mine.
A little later on in the summer I sailed with the RNR to La Rochelle on the
Atlantic coast of France. Then shortly after that I was with the RNR again, this
time in the Pool of London, subject of a famous British crime film directed by
Basil Dearden in 1951 and referring to that stretch of the Thames lying
between London Bridge and Rotherhithe.
In order to reach my ship, I had to board some kind of launch with a group of
other seamen, one of whom, a strikingly handsome blond seaman of about 30
I knew only by sight, had taken unofficial charge. Once we were all safely
aboard, it was the turn of our self-appointed leader to join us, but as he
stepped off the launch, he somehow lost his footing and slipped into the
Thames beneath him. Within a matter of minutes his heavy clothing and
boots, helped by a vicious current, had dragged him beneath the river's surface
and he was lost.
Soon after returning to London, I told my mother what'd happened, and she
wept the tears of one who instinctively knew what those who loved this poor
man must have been feeling at the time. It was only then that the true
appalling tragedy of the incident hit home and I ran into the bathroom and
sobbed my heart out myself. Thinking back on it, a line from that beautiful
song "How Men Are" by Scottish singer-songwriter Roddy Frame comes to
mind: "Why should it take the tears of a woman to see how men are?"
It was in 1975 that I attempted to pass what is known as the AIB or Admiralty
Interview Board with a view to qualifying as a Supply and Secretariat officer in
the Royal Navy. This involved my taking the train down to HMS Sultan, the
Royal Navy's specialist training centre in Gosport, Hampshire, where I spent
three days attending various examinations and interviews intended to assess
my potential as a future naval officer.
On one occasion early on in the long weekend just before one assignment or
another, I was putting the final touches to my toilette in front of a handy
mirror when one of the guys I was sharing a dorm with felt it necessary to
remind me that I wasn't at a fashion show. He wasn't going to be coming along
with me that night to the disco, or any night for that matter, cheeky beggar.
But he was right.
Two guys eventually did agree to keep me company on one of the nights we
spent at Sultan, but they didn't really seem all that keen. As things turned out
they left me alone at a Gosport disco, dancing with a pretty girl with short
blond curly hair and the unusual name of Shiralee, which just happens to be
Indigenous Australian for "burden" or "duty".
Later in the night, I escorted Shiralee along a busy main road leading back to
Sultan, as she must have lived nearby. Cars sounded their horns as I kissed
her good night. What a lad I was, eh. Then I discovered that Sultan's main
entrance had been locked and was now being manned by an armed guard. If
the young man nervously trying to reach someone in authority within the
training centre on a walkie talkie was wondering exactly what kind of person
returns to base dressed to the nines after a night's disco dancing when he was
supposed to be in the midst of three days of gruelling tests and interviews that
were vital to his future career, then he gave no indication of it. He did however
eventually make contact with someone in authority, and I can remember
passing through an officer's mess soon afterwards and briefly exchanging
pleasantries with its airily affable occupants. English gentlemen of the old
school, they of course kept their actual opinions of me to themselves.
It may just be me, but I can't help thinking that had I returned to Sultan that
night before being locked out, I might have been in with a better chance of
passing the AIB, that is, as opposed to failing it, which I perhaps rather
predictably did. Ay, every inch the superstar.
One of the last notable incidents of the year took place in December, when
dressed in all-white with a fawn raincoat I took my friend Brenda, one of the
London Division Wrens but originally from the north of England, to a dinner
dance at London's Walford Hilton Hotel. We were joined there by a couple of
Brenda's close friends, a fair, bearded man in a suit, and his dark, extrovert
wife. The husband was one of those deeply gentle men I came across from
time to time in the 1970s. They weren't all bearded; but I can think of some
who were, such as the madcap ship's captain described above. What united
them was that they behaved with special protectiveness and affection towards
me, and I've never forgotten them for it.
Early on in the evening, Brenda became incensed when a group of older
seamen started teasing me from their table, which didn't bother me at all
because I knew these guys, and they meant no harm. Military life after all, is
fuelled by this kind of raillery, but Brenda insisted that their attitude stemmed
from the fact that I was "better than what they are", as she put it, possibly in
imitation of their strong cockney accents. She'd been taken in by my
appearance, which made me more dangerous by far than they, not just to
others, but to myself. With them, what you saw is what you got, and if it wasn't
always pretty, at least it was honest.
Chapter Three: My Future Positively Glittered
Those Landmark Years
For two years I'd slavishly emulated those artists who had either predated
Modernism or been part of its banquet years and beyond, but in '76 a new
decade, that of Brando, Monroe, Presley, Dean, and the first stirrings of the
Rock-youth revolution, started to influence the way I dressed and acted, so for
much of the year I dressed down in a workmanlike uniform of red
windcheater, white tee-shirt and cuffed jeans, as worn by Dean in Nicholas
Ray's "Rebel Without a Cause".
Dean had died a week to the day before I was born in late 1955 - seen by many
as the Year Zero of the Rock and Roll era - and the 20th anniversary of his
death appared to exert a strong influence on rising Pop stars such as John
Miles and Slik's Midge Ure. Slik were one of the biggest bands in Britain in
1976, with an image apparently modelled on fifties high school rebels such as
Dean’s Jim Stark, but sadly for them, and many other bands that had surfed
the Glam Rock wave or emerged in its wake, Punk was poised to make them
look outdated, a cardinal crime in the youth-obsessed Rock and Roll industry.
Yet, contrary to the time-honoured view, the music scene of mid-70s Britain
was far from stagnant, and many gifted and promising bands and artists were
sidelined by the Punk uprising.
There were still times, however, when I reverted to the old romantic escapist
image I'd adopted in defiance of what I saw as the leaden drabness of postHippie Britain, while immersing myself in an alternative world fashioned
entirely out of the past, and specifically the golden age of Modernism of ca.
1830-1930, and effectively discovering Modernist giants as Baudelaire, Wilde,
Gide, Cocteau (as well as many lesser poets, dandies and decadents from the
same period) for the first time.
One of these occasions came during the dying days of a famous long hot
summer, when I wore top hat and tails and my fingernails painted bright red
like some kind of hellish vision from Weimar Berlin to a party hosted by a
friend from Brooklands. It was mid-September, and I know that to be a fact
because I was supposed to have been at sea at the time on the minesweeper
HMS Fittleton. HMS Fittleton had been accepted into the RN in January 1955,
although she wasn't actually named Fittleton (after the Wiltshire village) until
almost exactly 21 years later.
I think it was only a couple of days afterwards that Fittleton capsized and
sank to the bottom of the North Sea following a tragic accident involving
another larger ship, the frigate HMS Mermaid. It resulted in the loss of twelve
men most of whom I knew personally, given that only weeks earlier I'd spent a
few days on Fittleton with more or less exactly the same crew.
She'd set sail from Shoreham in Sussex on the 11th of September 1976 with
the intention of reaching the port of Hamburg on the 21st for a three day
Official Visit, but never arrived. On the 20th she took part in the NATO
exercise "Teamwork" 80 miles off the Dutch coast in the North Sea, after
which she was ordered to undergo a Replenishment at Sea with the 2500 ton
frigate HMS Mermaid, and it was during this exercise that the bow waves of
the frigate inter-reacted with those of the sweeper to cause the two to collide.
For some reason I'd earlier decided to opt out of the trip by pleading sickness.
It was a decision that came to haunt me...despite the fact that had I taken part
in the RAS manoeuvre I'd almost certainly have been assigned to what is
known as the Tiller Flat, as had been the case on many previous occasions
during exercises of this kind. This would have put me below deck, making
escape difficult although not impossible. In other words, I may or may not
have survived the accident.
Of the twelve who didn't survive I knew three quite well, and they were all
men of remarkable generosity of spirit and sweetness of disposition, what I'd
call natural gentlemen, and it broke my heart to think of what happened to
them. I so wanted to comfort my shipmates for their loss, to bond with them
and be part of what they were going through. I wanted to have survived like
them. I went over it all again and again in my mind, until I drove myself
almost insane with regret and grief. Once more I'd taken the easy way out, but
this time it wouldn't be so easy for me to forget or explain away.
Looking back, I can’t help thinking that 1977 was a far darker year than those
immediately preceding it, mainly perhaps because it was marked by the
violent irruption into the British musical and cultural mainstream of Punk,
which could be said to have irreparably disabled Rock's uneven progress as an
art form. From its London axis, and yet with roots in the US it spread like a
raging plague throughout that landmark year, even infecting the most genteel
suburbs with an extreme and often horrifying sartorial eccentricity, which,
fused with a defiant DIY ethic and brutal back-to-basics Rock produced
something utterly unique even by the outlandish standards of the time.
For this suburbanite, '77 was a year of incessant partying as one after the
other of my old Pangbourne pals celebrated their 21st in houses and
apartments in various corners of trendy west and central London. Of all of
them I was perhaps closest with Craig, a future plutocrat of devastating style
and charisma who was yet barely less awkward than me. Despite this, he was
on friendly terms with a blindingly cool young fashion designer from the north
of England who forged cutting edge images for some of the most powerful
trendsetters in Rock music, and we went out with him a couple of times to his
favourite disco, Maunkberrys, in Jermyn Street. Apart from the Sombrero in
Kensington High Street, it was the classiest club I'd ever seen.
Soon after the start of the year, Craig had traded in his tired old velvet jacket
and flares combo for tight drainpipe jeans and black Cuban-heeled
winklepickers. I followed suit with a pair of cream-coloured brogues...black
slip-ons with gold sidebuckles...sham crocodile skin shoes with squared off
toes...and a pair of black Chelsea boots, all perilously pointed. By about the
spring of '78 I'd junked the lot for the sake of white shoes with black laces,
something I'd seen on a member of London Punk band 999.
Being the naif I was, I thought the style that dominated London's clubland
was somehow related to Punk, but I was way off the mark. Like Punk it was
the antithesis of the hippie-student look that was still widespread throughout
the UK, but deployed for posing and dancing to the sweetest Soul music rather
than as an act of violent social dissent. It was the property of the Soul
Boys...flash white working class kids with a love of black dance music much
like the Mods and Skins before them, although I was not to discover this until
later in the year when I was at Merchant Navy College in Kent.
It was through one of the college guys in fact that I found out about the Global
Village night club under the Arches near Charing Cross that was a magnet for
Soul Boys throughout '77, as well as a handful of Punks. Its key elements were
the wedge haircut, which could be worn with blond, red or even green streaks,
brightly coloured peg-top trousers or straight leg jeans, and the obligatory
winklepickers...or for a time, beach sandals.
The wedge was taken up at some point in the late 1970s by a faction of
Liverpool football fans known as Casuals who'd developed a taste for
European designer sportswear while travelling on the continent for away
matches. A passion for designer sportswear exists to this day among British
working class youth, being visible in every high street and shopping centre in
the land, although the Casual subculture has long been extinct.
For most of '77, I looked more like a Soul Boy than a Punk, not that I knew the
difference, even though while strolling along the Kings Road in what I think
may've been January, I was assaulted for the first time by the monstrous
varieties of dress being adopted by Punks about that time, and it'd only be a
matter of time before I too hoped to astound others the way they'd done me.
Sure enough, by the end of the year, I'd become a full-time Punk and stayed
that way until the Mod Revival started drawing me away around the summer
of '79. But that's another story.
The Restless and the Riotous
By the summer I was working as a sailing instructor in Palamos on Spain's
Costa Brava. For a time I was joined there not just by my dad but my cousin
Rod and his girl friend Lucy; and my brother stopped by for a few weeks, but
mostly I was alone. Rod and his sister Kris, together with my uncle Peter and
aunt Marge, had lived more or less opposite us in Bedford Park in the sixties,
and we'd holidayed together at my grandmothers' house near Montroig for
many years. A spellbinding guitarist while still in his teens as part of '70s Prog
collective Rococo, Rod now plays for Zero Point Force.
After a few months I lost my job, but stayed on in Palamos for several months
afterwards, parading around town by day, while spending most evenings at
the Disco where my favourite was Donna Summer and where each lost or
shattered affair left me feeling empty and disconsolate. One of these saw me
trying to track a girl down all the way to the campsite I knew she was staying
at, but having all but deliberately alienated her one horrible night at the disco,
she was nowhere to be found.
Perhaps this obsession with what lay just beyond my grasp bore some relation
to the ferocious thirst for fame that'd afflicted me even since as far back as I
can remember. I mean...I was hardly suited for it. Granted, I had the pretty
boy looks, but very few actors, or even musicians, become truly successful on
the strength of looks alone, and this was especially true of the seventies, an
age without MP3s or My Space or endless TV talent showcases. I'd not yet
appeared in a single play, except for a handful at Pangbourne.
My roles there included two elderly women; and one of these transvestite bit
parts had me standing onstage for a few brief minutes without uttering a
single word and then spending the rest of the play - Max Frisch's "The Fire
Raisers"- offstage. The other was as a maid in a one-act play by George
Bernard Shaw called "Passion, Poison and Petrifaction". Clomping around in a
dress with studded military boots speaking in a hysterical high-pitched voice, I
can remember bringing the house down with that one. I also played a society
beauty engaged in some kind of illicit relationship with my mate Simon, but
the name of the play escapes me. My only male role was in "The Rats", a little
known Agatha Christie one-act play, and my performance as a camp
psychopath showed real promise if the praise of the college nurse was
anything to go by…but when all's said and done, I was hardly a National Youth
Theatre wunderkind.
In terms of my other "talents", I'd written a few simple songs on the guitar,
but I still couldn’t play bar chords. I wasn't a natural born genius like my
cousin Rod. My singing voice was good, though, and already quite versatile. As
a would-be writer, I'd filled countless pages with endlessly corrected notes,
but there was nothing tangible to show for it all. It could hardly be said then
that my future positively glittered before me.
My final trip with the RNR came towards the end of the summer. My best
RNR pal Colin was sadly not onboard, but I had other mates to raise Hell with
such as Adam, a tall redheaded young man of about 26 who looked a little like
the youthful Edward Fox with a trace perhaps of Damian Lewis, that is in
hindsight.
Like me Adam loved music and fashion and clubbing - I think he was a
regular at Pantiles in Bagshot - and we hit it off from our very first meeting
back at President. He later confided in me about his early life which had been
marked by one tragedy after the other, and his quiet and courteous manner
masked a troubled inner life which he didn't like to flaunt any more than he
did an ability to look after himself in any situation no matter how violent. I
can remember one night in a south coast bar when for some reason a drunken
sailor took a serious dislike to me and clearly wanted to rearrange my pretty
face when Adam put himself in my place and caused the sailor to back off, no
doubt swearing furiously as he did. It was typical of him, and you
overestimated his refinement at your peril.
I can imagine though that there were those who wondered how he ended up
serving as a rating, as they would have done me. I'm thinking in particular of
some of the young guys from the division that sailed in liaison with us that
summer towards the port of Ostend in Belgium.
There was one incident when some of these hard young seamen were
gathering in an Ostend street for a scrap with some locals who had offended
them in some way. Adam and I made it clear we had no intention of joining in,
so that one of their number, a waiflike young sailor of about 16 or 17,
previously something of a pal of ours, turned to us with a look of utter
confusion on his beardless face and said: "What's wrong with youse guys?",
before joining his mates for the impending riot.
Adam just didn't see the point of fighting for the sake of it but he was no
coward as I've already made quite clear. This secret inner strength would
eventually see him being commissioned as an officer in the Royal Navy, which
had been his destiny all along; but not mine. My time with the London
Division, RNR came to an end in late 1977 with a surprisingly positive
character report, which I was very grateful for. If military life had never been
for me, it's a part of who I am, and my story would be all the poorer without it.
Even later in the summer I joined the former Merchant Navy College in
Greenhithe, Kent, which had merged with the Thames Nautical Training
College HMS Worcester nine years earlier, as a trainee Radio Officer.
I formed several close friendships there; but closest of all was with Jasbir - or
Jesse - a lovable hard nut of about 18 with a thick London accent who'd been
born into nearby Gravesend's large Asian community. Rough as he was, he
was loyal and kind-hearted towards those he liked and trusted, and for a time
we were pretty well inseparable. I used to endlessly nag about his attitude, not
that there was anything wrong with it...he was one of the kindest guys I've ever
known...but he had a habit of talking tough which intimidated some people,
including me at times. As things turned out, I was the one who quit college
first, even if he did follow me soon afterwards, which caused Jesse to wonder
why I'd taken what seemed to him like the moral high ground in the first
place. I couldn't answer.
It was through Jesse I think that I started going to discos at Gravesend's
Woodville Hall, subject of the versified piece below, which was based on an
unfinished short story written in '78 or '79. Pretty well every week for a while,
a gang of us from the college would head out to the Woodville Hall, where we
were treated like visiting royalty by the (mainly white and Asian) kids, whose
outlandish outfits stood out in such striking contrast to the industrial
bleakness of their surroundings.
English suburban life in those days didn't include mobile phones or DVD
players, personal computers or the world wide web, so was a fertile breeding
ground for wild and eccentric youth cults such as Punk, New Romanticism,
Goth et al. These last two were still in the future, but their seeds had been
sown during the heyday of Punk, whose influence pervaded the Hall together
with the Soul Boy look which was similar, although a lot less threatening.
The Woodville Hall Soul Boys knew how to dance like you wouldn't
believe...anybody would think they were students of Jazz ballet or something,
but they were just ordinary working class kids, who became stars once they
took to the dance floor.
The Woodville Hall Soul Boys
Soon after I'd paid
My sixty
0r seventy pence,
I found myself
In what I thought
Was a miniature London.
I saw girls
In chandelier earrings,
In stiletto heels,
Wearing evening
Dresses,
Which contrasted with
The bizarre
Hair colours
They favoured:
Jet black
0r bleach blonde,
With flashes of
Red, Purple
0r green.
Some wore large
Bow ties,
Others unceremoniously
Hanged
Their school ties
Round their
Necks.
Eye make-up
Was exaggerated.
The boys all had
Short hair,
Wore mohair sweaters,
Thin ties,
Baggy,
Peg-top trousers
And winklepicker shoes.
A band playing
Raw street rock
At a frantic speed
Came to a sudden,
Violent climax...
Melodic, rhythmic,
Highly danceable
Soul music
Was now beginning
To fill the hall,
With another group
0f short-haired youths...
Smoother, more elegant,
Less menacing
Than the previous ones.
These well-dressed
Street boys
Wore well-pressed pegs
0f red or blue...
They pirouetted
And posed...
Pirouetted and posed.
Farewell Gilded Youth
Soon after returning from the Merchant Navy College in December '77, I
auditioned for a place on the three year drama course at the Guildhall School
of Music and Drama in the City of London, which was really what I'd wanted
to do in the first place.
Incredibly, as I'd already failed two earlier auditions for RADA, Guildhall
accepted me for the course beginning in autumn 1978. I was exhilarated; but
that didn't stop me sinking further into the nihilistic Punk lifestyle. Having
been blown away by the hairstyle of one of a small gang of Punks I knew by
sight from nights out in Dartford in late '77, I decided to imitate it a few weeks
later. It was spiked in classic Punk style, with a kind of a halo of bright blond
taking in the front of the head, both sides, and a strip at the nape of the neck.
I've part of a photograph of myself wearing this style with a long Soul Boy
fringe at the front, before I eventually had it cut into the spikes. By the spring
of 1978, I'd shorn it all off and looked like a skinhead.
It was genuinely dangerous being a Punk in the late '70s, and you lived in
constant fear of attack or abuse if you chose to dress like one. After all, Punk's
culture of insolence and outrage was extreme even by the standards of
previous British youth cults such as the Teds, the Rockers, the Mods, the
Greasers, the Skins, the Suedeheads and the Smoothies.
Britain in those days was a country still dominated to some degree by pre-war
moral values, which were Victorian in essence, and a cultural war was being
fought for the soul of the nation. It could be said therefore that Punks were the
avant-garde of the new Britain in a way that would be impossible today. This
explains the incredible hostility Punks attracted from some members of the
general public.
Close by to where I shared a house with my parents in the furthermost
reaches of south west London where suburbia meets country I saw Hersham
Punk band Sham '69 shortly before they became nationally famous. I already
knew their lead singer Jimmy Pursey by sight; at least I think it was him I saw
miming to Chris Spedding's "Motorbiking" at a Walton disco one night.
The gig took place in a poky hall above a pub in the centre of a large bleak
industrial estate, itself surrounded by small drab council estates and endless
rows of council houses. I was often there on a Sunday in the late 70s, usually
with my brother and friends, but sometimes alone.
On one occasion I can recall, the usual Disco or Pop gave way to a violent
Punk Rock anthem which saw the tiny dance space being invaded by deranged
pogo-dancers as if they’d been summoned by some malignant deity. On
another, a Ted revivalist, a follower of classic Rock and Roll who favoured
flashy fifties-style clothing, tried to start some trouble with me in the toilet. At
this point, another Ted who'd befriended me about a year previously when I
looked like an extra from a ‘50s High School flick- I think his name was Steve stepped in with the magical words: "He's a mate!"
His intervention may have saved me from a hiding that night because Teds
had a loathing of Punks informed by their essential conservatism. To them,
Punks probably seemed to have no respect for anything. There was a time
Steve almost imploringly me asked me whether I was really into "this Punk
lark" or whatever he called it, and I assured him I wasn't. I may even have
added that I still loved the fifties, which was actually the truth to an extent;
but that wasn’t the point. The fact is that I lied to him to look good in his eyes,
which was a pretty low thing to do to a friend.
On New Years Eve, Jesse and I went to a party in London's swanky West End.
It was one of the last - perhaps even the very last - in a long series of
celebrations I'd gone to throughout '77 mainly as a result of friends from
Pangbourne reaching the landmark age of 21. It was also one of the last times I
ever saw Jesse. We stayed in touch until about 1983, meeting only once,
before eventually losing contact altogether. It was my fault; Jesse did all he
could to keep the friendship alive.
Before arriving, Jesse and I met up as arranged with budding oil magnate
Craig, an especially close friend from my days as Cadet C.R. Halling 173.
Introductions over, Jesse saw fit to impress Craig and I with a terrifying solo
display of his lethal street fighting skills. "I'm suitably impressed", said Craig,
and he looked it, and Craig was no wimp despite his upper class accent. An
unlikely trio, we got on like a house on fire that insane night which at one
point saw pouring a full glass of beer over my head.
What the beautiful dancer I'd spent most of the evening with thought of a nice
guy like me doing a thing like that she didn't say. In the late '70s, I met so
many people who might have done anything for me, and yet my one true
passion appeared to be the creation of endless drunken scenes, and a party
wasn't a party for me in those days unless I'd caused one, after which I simply
moved on. I've got plenty of time to myself to reflect on it all now...and the
sheer waste of youth, of life, of love makes me weep.
In the spring of 1978, I arrived in the famous Costa del Sol town of Fuengirola
near Marbella, with the intention of helping to set up a sailing school with a
young English guy of about 30 I knew only very slightly. He put me up in an
apartment, which was decent of him, but as things turned out the project
came to nothing. However, I stayed on in Fuengirola, living first in a hotel,
and then rent-free thanks to an American friend I made in town in her own
apartment. I became pretty well known locally as Coco, one of only two Punks
in Fuengirola, and front man for a Hard Rock band playing nightly at the city's
Tam Tam nightclub...with a Punk Rock frontman!
It was my first year as a full-time Punk in fact, and among the clothes I
favoured were a black wet-look tee-shirt with cropped sleeves, drainpipe jeans
of black or green, worn with black studded belt festooned with silver chain
kept in place by safety pins, fluorescent teddy boy socks, and white shoes with
black laces etc. I even had a safety pin, anaesthetized by being dipped into an
alcoholic drink, forced through my left ear lobe by a friend, but I removed it
once it had started to look dangerous.
I was always short of money, but I could order what I wanted at the Tam Tam,
and when I was flat broke I was bought toasted cheese sandwiches and bottles
of cold Spanish beer from someone who's still one of my favourite people ever.
We went clubbing most nights, and it was such a thrill to sit there with her
bathed in Disco lights as we sipped our drinks when the evening was still
young.
We spent time at Lew Hoad's Campo de Tenis, in Mijas, Marbella,
Torremolinos. One balmy night the legend that was British racing driver
James Hunt called out to her from the darkness, before exchanging a few
words with her, and then vanishing as suddenly as he'd arrived. I could barely
believe my eyes. It was that magical a summer, but I had to return to London
to take my place at the Guildhall once it was over. After all, I was going to be a
star, wasn't I.
A year later, I returned...but not to Fuengirola, even though the guys from the
band had so wanted me to come back and sing for them…Coco es el uniquo, as
the sticks man once said about me. I’d chosen to go with my parents to La
Ribera instead, and I felt a deep and overwhelming sense of exhaustion as I
stretched out in the Costa Calida sun…but I don't recall being especially
disappointed by the fact that only days earlier I'd been asked to leave the
Guildhall or rather strike out on my own as a performer. I was resigned to it,
even though my dream of being a gilded youth at the Guildhall had barely
lasted a year. It must have been the searing heat that made me feel so burned
out.
Just before quitting Fuengirola the previous summer of '78 I'd been
approached with an offer of singing in the Canary Islands, which I turned
down for the sake of the Guildhall. Who knows where it might have led, but
then it would have been a shame to have missed out on the Guildhall even
though it all ended in tears. It would take an entire separate volume to list the
incredible experiences that arose out of my time at that reverenced place of
learning of which my own dear dad was an alumnus…but I’ll be brief in
recounting my own.
What I will say is that at the Guildhall I was involved with a string of Rock and
Pop bands, and that with one after the other of these I performed at the Folk
Nights that were staged on a sporadic basis in the basement of the nearby
Lauderdale Tower and which were usually packed with students.
Through one of them, Rockets, I was talent-scouted as lead singer for a
guitarist of genius who was hoping to form a band at the Guildhall, and clearly
thought I'd cut it as a front man, but for some reason, the band was never
formed. He went on to play and write for one of the world's leading Rock
superstars, something he's done for nearly twenty years now.
At one point he'd briefly joined a Guildhall-based Jazz-Funk band with
another friend of mine Mike, which was destined to become one of the most
successful acts of the eighties, chalking up one hit after the other in a Britain
in which Jazzy dance music was favoured by flash boys in white socks and
tasselled loafers. Mike had even invited me to an early rehearsal, and my
mother made a note of this in green ink after speaking to him about it on the
phone. Perhaps they could've done with a singer at that point.
Through another of my groups, Narcissus, I found only disgrace. It was the
second version of the band, and I'd formed it with Mike, the drummer from
Rockets, and another close friend Robin, but our one and only gig was a
disaster. I slapped on the make-up, and Robin and Mike had followed suit, but
being relatively untainted by personal vanity, the results were unsettling.
Sweet-natured Robin painted his Botticellian features like an ancient pagan
warrior, while gentle giant Mike saw fit to smother his with military-style
camouflage paint. Understandably, our set was accompanied by a riot of
heckling which although good-natured, eventually caused me to lose my rag
and throw a plectrum into the audience with a sarcastic "Here's to all my
loving fans!", or something equally pathetic.
I can't help thinking that this childish outburst did no end of harm to my
reputation, because the chutzpah of the natural leader who demands and gets
attention and respect through the sheer force of his personality was never
among my gifts. Rather I was blessed with the seductive charm of the social
climber for whom alpha status comes through the subtle exercise of exquisite
manners. In this respect I was perhaps a little like Julien Sorel, anti-hero of
Stendhal's "The Scarlet and the Black" who despite humble origins, succeeds
in ascending to the very top of the social ladder only to allow a single act of
madness to destroy all his good work.
My final band was the '50s revivalist act Z Cars, which even won a small
fanbase for itself. I was Carl Cool, lead singer and songwriter with a tattoo
painted onto my shoulder. My close friend Rob was Robert Fitzroy-Square,
the boy next door with the Buddy Holly glasses, who provided most of the
comedy. Punk Rocker Dave was Dave Dean the hard man of the band with the
don’t mess with me stare. Richard was Little Ricky Ticky, the baby at only 18
who could have been a heart throb had things worked out for us. Sadly, they
didn't.
After Dave left, we replaced him with Ian, a better musician by far than either
Rob or I, after which we tried to deviate from our usual three-chord doo-wop
or Rock with more complex songs, beginning with a tightly arranged version
of Arthur Crudup's "That's All Right Mama" complete with harmony backing
vocals. But we were hopelessly inadequate to the task and the band collapsed
soon afterwards.
Ian, Rob and I were also involved in the production of a musical comedy
based on the Scottish play, "Mac and Beth", which survived my time at
Guildhall, if only for a single performance. It was rewritten several times. I
wrote a long version myself about ten years ago, only to come to the
conclusion that it was too dark and violent before trashing all but a few pages
of it. Somewhere, however, there's a VHS copy of one of a handful of Guildhall
performances of the play.
There were emotional scenes at my farewell party held in the depths of the
Barbican Estate's Lauderdale Tower and some cried openly because I was
leaving. During the evening, my dear friend Gill - who'd played Beth to my
Mack in the previously mentioned "Mac and Beth" - told me to contact a
London-based impresario and agent well-known for offering young actors
their very first positions within the entertainment industry. Her own brother,
who'd recently starred in a TV comedy series had received his first break
through this flamboyant and warm-hearted man.
True to form, he gave me my very first paid job in the business a matter of
months afterwards, with the result that just before Christmas, I was doubling
as Christian (the Chorus Boy) and Joey (the Teddy Bear) - complete with furry
costume - in the pantomime "Sleeping Beauty" that began its run in Ealing in
West London, culminating at the Buxton Opera House in Derbyshire. A few
weeks later at the start of a new decade, I was offered the small part of
Mustardseed in "A Midsummer Night's Dream", to be directed by Richard
Cottrell at the Bristol Old Vic. My career was off to a flying start. Maybe
leaving the Guildhall when I did had been the right thing to do after all… but
oh the indescribable bliss of passing that summer's audition...
Chapter Four: West of the Fields Long Gone
Like Some New Romantic
Among those who appeared in the Richard Cottrell production of "A
Midsummer Night's Dream" at the Bristol Old Vic in early 1980 were future
Hollywood method legend Daniel Day Lewis, and Nickolas Grace, an actor
best known for his portrayals of flamboyant British eccentrics both real and
fictional, such as the stuttering Anthony Blanche – himself allegedly based on
Oxford aesthete Brian Howard - from the classic 1981 television production of
Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited".
The cast as a whole though was incredibly gifted and charismatic, and on
what I think was the eve of the first night, I was lucky enough to see a Vic
production of one of my favourite ever musicals, Frank Loesser’s “Guys and
Dolls”, with Clive Wood as Sky Masterson and Pete Postlethwaite as Nathan
Detroit…and I can honestly say this single show provided me with more
pleasure than any other theatre production I've seen.
After resuming my role as Mustardeed in the summer at the London Old Vic,
my next acting role came early the following year thanks to the kindness of an
old friend of my dad's, the actor Haydn Davies: they'd been at both RADA and
the Royal Academy of Music together. It was in a production by Peter Benedict
of "Satyricon", one of only two surviving examples of a novel from the early
part of the Roman Empire (the other being Apuleius’ “Metamorphoses”).
It’s believed to have been written by Petronius who evidently served as a
courtier specialising in fashion during the reign of the emperor Nero, and
according to its testimony, as well as Petronius’ own accounts of Nero’s
depravity written shortly before his death in 66AD, imperial Rome's infamous
decadence was already firmly in place long before her final fall in the third
century. Not that she ever died in a spiritual sense according to many
Christians holding to the premillenial view of prophecy…and who therefore
believe she’ll be fully revived in the last days before the Second Coming, with
the Antichrist as its head.
"Satyricon" opened in May 1981 at the Phoenix Theatre, Charing Cross Road,
and at first I had to content myself with serving as the show’s percussionist as
well as the ASM, but in time they offered me a small role, and closed the
following June.
Also in '81, I became a kind of part-time member of an initially nameless
youth movement whose origins lay in the late 1970s largely among
discontented ex-Punks, its soundtrack a largely synthesized dance music
influenced by German Art Rock collectives such as Kraftwerk and Can, as well
as Glam, Funk and Disco.
Its adherents were eventually dubbed the New Romantics presumably
because they affected a radical nostalgic devotion to eras past, whether
relatively recent ones such as the ‘20s or ‘40s, or more distant historical ones
such as the Medieval or Elizabethan. Ruffs, veils, frills, kilts and so on were
common among them, but then so were demob suits. Several of the cult's
more outlandish pioneers went on to become famous names within the worlds
of art and fashion. They stood in some contrast to more harder-edged young
dandies such as the Kemp Brothers from working class Islington. Their
Spandau Ballet began life as the hippest band in London, famously introduced
as such at the Scala cinema by writer and broadcaster Robert Elms in May
1980, before mutating into a chart-friendly band with a penchant for soulful
Pop songs such as the international smash hit “True”.
I attended New Romantic nights at Le Kilt and Le Beat Route among other
notable clubs of the day, and was even snapped at one of these by the
legendary London photographer David Bailey, but I was never a true New
Romantic so much as a lone fellow traveller keen to experience first hand the
last truly original London music and fashion cult before it imploded as all
others had done before it.
Still, despite its florid decadence, New Romanticism was always far more
mainstream than other musical trends which arose at the same time in the
wake of Punk, such as Post-Punk and Goth. For this reason, several of its keys
acts became part of what’s since become known as New Pop, which tended to
combine complex if accessible tunes with a telegenic image. I myself inclined
far more towards the shiny happiness of New Pop than the black-clad
bleakness of Goth, and this was reflected by a gaudy image so typical of the
decade's infamous tastelessness. Yet, while I rejected Goth as a fashion craze, I
was passionate about many of its primary influences such as dark
romanticism in all its forms and there was a duality about me which was true
of the eighties as a whole.
While it was no longer truly cutting edge by the end of '81, New Romanticism
went on to exert a colossal influence on the development of music and fashion
throughout the eighties, and partly inspired what became known as the
Second British Invasion thanks to a desperate need for striking videos on the
part of the newly arrived MTV.
As '81 went on, my acting career lost a little of its initial momentum, so some
kind of family decision was reached to the effect that I should return to my
studies with a view to eventually qualifying as a teacher. I went on to pass
interviews for both the University of Exeter, and Westfield College, London,
scraping in with two mediocre "A" level passes at B and C.
I wanted to stay in London so as to keep open the possibility of picking up
some acting work in my spare time, so in the autumn I started a four-year BA
degree course in French and Drama mainly at Westfield - but also partly at the
nearby Central School of Speech and Drama - while staying in a small room on
campus.
At first I was so unhappy at finding myself a student again at 25 that in an
attempt to escape my situation I auditioned for work as an Acting Assistant
Stage Manager, but it didn't come to anything. A short time later, while
ambling at night close by to the Central School, I was ambushed by a group of
my fellow drama students who may have seemed to me to incarnate the sheer
carefree rapturous vitality and joy of life of youth. Whatever the truth they
made me feel wonderful, and because of them and others like them I came to
love my time at Westfield, coinciding as it did with the first half of the crazy
eighties, last of a triad of decades in the West of unceasing artistic and social
change and experimentation.
The Playboy Philosophy which exploded in the 1960s could be said to have
reached its full flowering in the crazy eighties, even if the vast majority of
people whose salad days fell within its boundaries ultimately forged
respectable lives following a brief season as outsiders. Sadly I never did, and
I'm suffering terribly for it now…from a cruel nostalgia for the trappings of
status, security, respectability I once scorned. How bitterly I regret such shortsighted narcissism…the kind that's been promoted in the West for over half a
century now, as our society has given itself increasingly over to spiritual
rebellion and wholesale sensual abandon where once these were marginalized
as aberrant. They are the same workings of the flesh that corrupted the
antediluvian world, and which survived the Flood to be disseminated
throughout the nations to spell the end of one empire after the other, the
Babylonian, the Medo-Persian, the Greek, the Roman.
I had no excuse to embrace them, having been blessed at birth by every good
gift. That said, the most desired qualities - intelligence, beauty, talent - are
uniquely dangerous unless submitted in their entirety to God, not least to
those who possess them. The gifted are visible and therefore vulnerable, and
with more temptations than most, all too likely to fall prey to Luciferian pride
and Luciferian rebellion...like David's favourite son Absalom who was
physically flawless but morally bereft.
Little wonder therefore that so many of them are drawn to the power offered
by art, and especially music, the writer of the first song Lamech having been in
the line of Cain. Indeed, there are those Christians who believe that the
Cainites were the first pagan people, and that they corrupted the Godly line of
Seth through a sensual and wicked music not unlike much contemporary
Rock.
Of course not all Rock music is flagrantly wicked, far from it. Much of it is
melodically lovely. While in terms of its lyrics, its finest songs display the most
delicate poetic sensibility. The fact remains, however, that no art form has
been quite so associated as Rock with rebellion, transgression, licentiousness,
intoxication and death-worship, nor been so influential as such.
To think I once desperately sought fame as a Rock and Roll star myself, and if
not as Rock artist, then actor, or writer, and it was surely a good thing I never
gained this pagan form of immortality because had I done so, I'd almost
certainly have been used for the furtherance of the kingdom of darkness. Once
I'd served my purpose I may well have died a solitary premature death as an
addict, as has been the fate of so many men and women briefly animated by
the charismatic superstar spirit before being cruelly discarded by the Enemy
of Souls.
Ferocity of an Enfant Terrible
As I mentioned earlier, at first I fiercely resented being at Westfield, perhaps
because I viewed being back in full-time education at 26 as a giant
retrogressive step in terms of my acting career, but before long I'd embarked
on one of the happiest periods of my entire life.
Westfield in the early '80s was a hotbed of talent and creativity and I was
provided with almost unlimited opportunities for acting and performance.
Within days I'd made a close friend of a fellow French and Drama student, a
slim dark good-looking guy from the north east of England called Andrew,
who, despite a solid private school background and rugby player's powerful
wiry frame, dressed like a Rock star with his left ear graced by a fake diamante
earring and favouring skin-tight jeans worn with black pointed boots, and
together we went on to feature in Brecht and Weill's's "The Threepenny
Opera".
I had two small roles, the most interesting being Filch a petty street thief,
who'd been played by the French writer and actor Antonin Artaud in "L' Opéra
de quat'sous", one of two versions of the play directed in 1931 by G.W. Pabst. I
came to be so very proud of this fact because Artaud, an example of the avant
garde persuasion taken to its most horrific conclusion, was one of my most
beloved cursed poets. Through this production I went on to play jive-talking
disc jockey Galactic Jack in the musical play "The Tooth of Crime" by Sam
Shepard, who has allegedly spoken of being influenced by Artaud. A
coincidence perhaps, though Artaud's concept of a Theatre of Cruelty was
prophetic of so much post-war theatre, indeed art as a whole with its emphasis
on assailing the senses through every available device. Neil, the director had
been impressed by myself and Andrew in "The Threepenny Opera" and so cast
us in "The Tooth" in consequence, with Andrew taking the lead role of Hoss.
Before long I was channelling every inch of my creative energy into
performing at the now vanished college which became my whole world for two
glorious years, while any real ambition to succeed as an actor apparently
receded far into the background.
When it came to my French studies, in my essay writing I often flaunted an
insolent outspokenness perhaps partly influenced by my favourite accursed
artists but also reflecting my own exhibitionistic need to shock, and while
some of my tutors may have viewed these efforts with a jaundiced eye, one
came to thrill to them and await them with the sort of impatience normally
accorded a favourite TV or radio series. This was the wonderful Margaret (Dr
M.), more of whom later.
How close this love of scandalising by way of the written word brought me to
a seared conscience I can't say; but one thing is certain, my compassion
started to recede. This didn't happen right away of course. Yet, even during
those first two golden years, some of those who were drawn to me on a deep
emotional level betrayed a certain unease with their words, and I was
variously described as intense, inscrutable, mysterious, disabused and sad.
So, why didn't I cross the line beyond which it becomes impossible for a
person to respond to the Holy Spirit? After all, from about 1983, I started to
decline as a human being. Perhaps it was something to do with the prayers of
believing friends and relatives, so that something precious was kept alive
within me during those dark years. Certainly, I never fully stopped being a
caring person, and I can recall being outraged by those avant-gardists who
advocated actual cruelty or the harming of innocents. How then did I square
this with my adoration of certain favoured artists who thrived on verbal
violence and scenes of madness and destruction? The fact is I couldn't,
hypocrite that I was.
This love affair with destruction kept company with a savage fury towards
what I perceived as social injustice, the chief targets of this high and mighty
dudgeon being dictators on the right wing of the political spectrum, indeed the
political right as a whole, but when it came to left-wing oppression, I was no
less indignant.
The 1980s was a decade of protest and riot in the UK, and all throughout its
years of raging discontent, I allied myself with one radical lobby after the
other, including Amnesty International, the Anti-Apartheid Movement,
Animal Aid, Greenpeace and CND. I marched against the nuclear threat in
London and Paris, lectured for Amnesty while blind drunk to a roomful of
middle-aged Rotarians, had a letter published in the newspaper of the AAM,
and was a remorseless disseminator of radical rants, tracts, pamphlets etc.
Mine was the righteous fury that is rooted in a false notion of the perfectibility
of Man, that fails to recognise that oppression stems from the sin we all share,
that has no real satisfying motive other than its own existence. In time, it
started to turn inwards, and to eat away at the reserves of tenderness that
meant so much to me, its malignity enhanced by alcohol and dissolute living,
and an addiction to astrology and other occult topics, and scandalous art and
philosophy. My soul effectively started to cave in, and while it was ultimately
saved from terminal ruin by God, I don't think it's ever fully recovered from
the damage I inflicted on it. Such is my own "thorn in the flesh"...
This first remnant from my Westfield diaries, "Some Sad Dark Secret"
testifies to some extent to a former tendency to mental vehemence. It was
based on notes contained within a single piece of scrap paper which I recently
unearthed and probably dating from 1982 or '83. The first three sections
contain words of advice offered me by Margaret, the fourth and fifth, further
words offered me by another of my Westfield tutors, and which served to
upbraid me for a didacticism he considered to be reminiscent of Rousseau. He
was of course referring not to the painter Henri, but the Swiss-born writer,
philosopher and composer, who was also – according to many – not just one
of the chief inspirers of the French Revolution, but the Romantic movement in
the arts with his emphasis on subjectivity, notably in his revolutionary
autobiographical writings.
His assertion that Man is born free while being everywhere in chains, which
stemmed from his belief in the essential goodness of Man, has assured him a
place of honour in the history of Socialism, which is significantly predicated
on such a belief. Fused with the mystical and occult tendencies that have been
its time-honoured companions, Socialism was effectively my religion at the
time. Were I to have survived into middle age still convinced of the
perfectibility of Man under certain social conditions, the outcome would
almost certainly have been bitter disillusion, because its is only through the
regeneration of the heart that comes through faith in Christ that a person can
be changed. I learned this truth the hard way.
Some Sad Dark Secret
Dr M. said:
“Temper
Your enthusiasm,
The extremes
Of your
reactions,
You should have
A more
Conventional
Frame
On which to
Hang your
unconventionality.”
The tone of some
Of my work
Is often
A little dubious,
She said.
She thought
That there
Was something
Wrong,
That I’m hiding
Some sad and dark
Secret
From the world.
She told me
Not to rhapsodise,
That it would be
Difficult,
Impossible, perhaps,
For me to
Harness
My dynamism.
“Don’t push People”,
She said.
“You make
Yourself
Vulnerable”.
Dr H. said:
“By the third page,
I felt I’d been
Bulldozed.
I can almost see
Your soapbox.
Like Rousseau,
You’re telling us
What to do.
You seem to
Work yourself
Into such an
Emotional pitch…
And this
Extraordinary
Capacity for lists.
The Westfield Players
In the summer, a faction of us – mostly culled from the Drama department –
took Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Directed
by the brilliant Dawn with Shakespeare's Illyria transformed into a Hippie
paradise, I played Feste as a Dylanesque minstrel strumming dirge-like folk
songs with a voice like sand and glue.
Most of the Westfield contingent's male players couldn't have deviated more
from the politely liberal norm we seemed to encounter nightly at the Fringe
Club on Chambers Street if we'd tried. Among the strangest were Gianni (Sir
Toby Belch), a dashingly handsome Italian charmer of passionately held
humanitarian convictions…myself (Feste) the anarchic product of multiple
social and educational influences…and Ged (Malvolio) a tough but colossally
kind-hearted Scouser with slicked back rockabilly hair usually dressed down
in denims as was the fashion at the time. Ged I think had been around during
the Punk days at Eric's in Liverpool, and was a fascinating, charismatic guy
with a hilariously dark sense of humour. He and his girlfriend Gail, who'd
designed the flowing Hippie costumes, and was also a very dear friend, never
stopped encouraging me nor believing in me. We were all so close despite
sharing a single house, albeit a large one, on what I think was Prince's Street,
and there was barely a cross word spoken for the entire fortnight we occupied
it.
During my second year I lived in an upper floor apartment in Powis Gardens,
Golders Green, sharing it with my close friends from the French department,
Andrew and David. Both were from the north of England, Andrew, a former
alumnus of Sedbergh College, from Darlington, and David, whose alma mater
was the famous Catholic school Ampleforth, from Hull. David was an
incredibly gifted pianist and guitarist who despite a misleadingly serious
demeanour was a warm, affectionate, witty, eccentric character who endlessly
buzzed with the nervous energy of near-genius. He might not have wanted to
ape the way his flatmates dressed and behaved, but he was fiercely protective
of us despite our shallow social butterfly ways.
Soon after moving in, I decorated the walls of my room and the lounge, which
doubled as David’s bedroom, with various provocative images including
reproductions of Symbolist and Decadent paintings, and icons of popular
culture and the avant-garde. I was determined to live like an aesthete, even if
it meant doing so on a shoestring in a cramped little flat in suburban north
London, and to this end I organised what I optimistically called a salon, which
although well-attended didn't survive beyond a single meeting. We were a
pretty shoddy imitation of the new Brideshead generation that was thriving in
Oxford in the wake of the TV series.
We drove our effusive landlady half-crazy at times through heavy-footedness
and other crimes of upper floor thoughtlessness, although I don't remember
her complaining all that much despite the fact that we weren't averse to drinkfuelled discussions extending well into the night. In common with most of my
friends I tended to drink heavily at night, but almost never during the day.
The truth is that self-doubt wasn't an issue for me in the early eighties and I
was a truly happy person, in fact so much so that I may have exaggerated my
capacity for depth and melancholia as a means of making myself more
interesting to others. In the final analysis though, what possible reason was
there for me to be discontented, given that my first two Westfield years were
fabulous...an unceasing cycle of plays, shows, concerts, discos, parties set in
one of the most beautiful and bucolic areas of London?
My second year drama project was centred on the one-act play "Playing with
Fire" written by Swedish poète maudit August Strindberg. I was allotted the
task of supplying the music for the production as well as the leading role of
Knut, a sardonic Bohemian painter forced to endure the adulterous behaviour
of a friend Alex who following an invitation to stay with him at the house of
his upper middle class parents for a few days, embarks on a torrid affair with
his wife Kerstin. Alex was played by budding playwright Vince, while lovable
Czech loon Ondrej played Knut's hated bourgeois father.
We performed the play a total of three times over the course of a couple of
days. Later in the year, I was asked by Vince to play one of the leads in a
brilliant but provocative short play of his known as “Wild Life”. I seemed to
appear in one play or show after the other that second year at Westfield…reperforming Feste with the Edinburgh cast more or less intact…playing the
Novio in Lorca’s “Blood Wedding”…my former idol Che in a Rice-Lloyd
Webber showcase and so on and so on…my energy and love of life and people
apparently knowing no limits.
The piece below, adapted from notes I made during this timeframe - with the
first verse actually containing references to "Twelfth Night" - captures the
spirit of those heady first two years at Westfield, a college then in its twilight
time prior to being incorporated into Queen Mary on east London’s grim Mile
End Road, far, far from the semi-pastoral beauty of Hampstead. It also
provides some indication of the unquenchable desire for attention, affection
and approval that characterised me back then, and the way it affected some of
those who cared for me most.
Gallant Festivities
It was my evening, that’s
For sure At last I’m good
At something 27 years old
I may be, but…
“Spot the
Equity card…”
“It’s your aura, Carl…”
I even signed
One of Phil’s friends’
Programmes “When are you going
To be a superstar?”
Said Luce
A few days ago That seemed to be
The question
On everyone’s lips.
“You got Feste perfectly,
Just how I envisaged it”
“…Not only when
You’re onstage
but off too!”
At last, at last, at last
I’m good at something…
And so the party…Chloe
called me...I listened…
…To her problems…
References
To my “innocent face”…
Livvy said:
“Susy seems Elusive
But is in fact,
Accessible;
You’re the opposite You give to everyone
But are incapable
Of giving in particular.”
M. was comparing me
To June Miller
Descriptions by Nin:
“She does not dare
To be herself…”
Everything I’d always
Wanted to be, I now am…
“…She lives
On the reflections
Of herself in the eyes
Of others...
There is no June
To grasp and know…”
I kept getting up to dance…
Susy said: “I’m afraid…
You’re inscrutable
You’re not just
Blasé,
Are you?”
I spoke
Of the spells of calm
And the hysterical
Reactions
Psychic
Exhaustion
Then anxious elation...
A Hateful Work Ethic
I'd say things started to go a little wrong for me once I left Westfield in the
summer of '83 with a few months to spare before travelling to Paris to work as
an English language assistant in a French secondary school, the Lycee JeanPaul Timbaud. This spelled my exile from the old drama clique, and I'd not be
joining them in their final year celebrations, and the knowledge of this must
have affected me. I was after all severing myself from a vast network of gifted
friends of whom I was deeply fond, and so losing an opportunity of growing as
an artist in tandem with like-minded spirits. I could have opted for just a few
weeks in France, but did I really want to be deprived of the chance of spending
more than six months in the city I’d long worshipped as the only true home of
an artist?
Earlier in the year, my close friend Monique, a brilliant dynamic woman of
North African Jewish ancestry had told me something to the effect that while
many were drawn to me, they sensed la mort in me. The fact that she was in
thrall to the intellectual worldview, and familiar with the works of the great
psychologist Freud who identified a death drive subsequently dubbed
thanatos (although Freud himself never referred to it as such) may have had
something to do with this observation.
Precisely what she meant by death I can’t say, but she may have identified
some kind of will to destruction - and specifically self-destruction - in me. As
things turned out she was right, although this was barely embryonic in the
early '80s if it existed at all. I’d attribute it to a cocktail of intoxicants, each
one potentially fatal to the human spirit, including alcohol, the most obvious,
astrology and the occult, and intellectualism. All of these exerted a terribly
negative effect on my development as a human being in my view. While
intellectualism is not evil in itself of course, it's my contention that
intellectuals are more tempted than most by various dark lures including
pride, rebellion and sensuality. The same could be said of those blessed with
great beauty, or talent and so on.
Intellectuals have been among the most powerful and often also dangerous
men and women in history, and the Modern World has been significantly
shaped by the wildly inspired views of geniuses such as Rousseau, Darwin,
Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. Their theories - and especially those of Marx and
Freud and their apostles both orthodox and schismatic - fanned the flames of
a largely bloodless revolution in the 1960s and while this had been quenched
by about 1972, the philosophies that inspired it, far from fading themselves,
set about infiltrating the cultural mainstream where they became more
extreme than ever, and so entered the realm of the Post-modern, while
remaining the ultimate consequence of centuries of Modernist influence on
the Judaeo-Christian fabric of Western civilisation.
However, I was never a true scholar like Monique, so much as someone who
was both troubled and fascinated by the idea of hyper-intellectuality. Reading
Colin Wilson's "The Outsider" in the early '80s, I especially identified with
those intellectuals who were tortured by their own excesses of consciousness
such as T.E. Lawrence, who wrote of his "thought-riddled" nature.
As a child I was extrovert to the point of hyperactivity but by the time of my
late adolescence I found myself becoming subject to rival drives of equal
intensity. One of these was towards seclusion and introspection, the other,
attention and approbation. It seems this duality is common among sensitive
artists and intellectuals, and may help to explain why so many of them have
sought some form of escape from the complexities of their inner nature, even
to the point of madness.
In my own quest for renown, I subjected my body, the creation I tendered so
lovingly at times, to a ruthless almost derisive work ethic which couldn't have
differed more from the noble impulse first identified by the German social
philosopher Max Weber, and which he dubbed the Protestant Work Ethic. For
Weber, the latter didn't so much give birth to Capitalism, which of course it
didn't, as facilitate its growth in those nations in which the Reformation had
been most successful. If the work ethic beloved of the Calvinist Pilgrims who
forged the first American colonies was intended for the glorification of God,
mine was a decadent late variant entirely given over to the promotion of the
self.
To this end, I consumed a variety of intoxicants, not just because I enjoyed
doing so but because they enabled the constant socialising that brought me
the attention, affirmation and approval I so craved...my narcissistic supply,
some might call it, and they'd have a point. How else to explain the sheer
demented fervour of my endless self-exaltation? That’s not to say that I wasn't
loving towards others because I was, but precisely what kind of love was it that
I spread so generously about me? One thing it wasn’t was agape, the selfless
love described in 1 Corinthians 13…in fact it was a form so unacceptable to
God that it would have seen me damned and in Hell had I actually managed to
drink myself to death.
I was hardly less heartless towards my mind than my body, treating it as an
object of research and experimentation. Little wonder then that I turned in
time to drink as a means of pacifying it, although alcohol still wasn't a serious
problem for me in the early '80s, when my exhausting daily regimen tended to
be fuelled instead by massive quantities of caffeine tablets. That said, Monique
didn't like it when I drank to excess as if she'd already singled me out as
someone who'd go on to develop a drink problem. In this as in other things
she showed remarkable insight.
The piece below first existed as a series of scrawled notes based on several
conversations I enjoyed with Monique in 1982 or '83. One of these resulted
from an incident in which I'd made a fool of myself by storming off during a
gig after having broken a guitar string. As the guitar belonged to my flatmate
David who was in the audience, he quite reasonably expressed his displeasure
out loud, while my musical partner Aidan told me to keep playing. Feeling
humiliated without any real cause, I threw an atypical temper tantrum before
storming out of college and making my way back to Golders Green. After a
period spent wandering aimlessly in Golders, I eventually bumped into
Monique who'd come looking for me...
She Dear One Who Followed Me
It was she, bless her,
who followed me...
she'd been crying...
she's too good for me,
that's for sure...
"Your friends
are too good to you...
it makes me sick
to see them...
you don't really give...
you indulge in conversation,
but your mind
is always elsewhere,
ticking over.
You could hurt me,
you know...
You are a Don Juan,
so much.
Like him, you have
no desires...
I think you have
deep fears...
There's something so...so...
in your look.
It's not that
you're empty...
but that there is
an omnipresent sadness
about you, a fatality..."
Chapter Five: From Paris to Cambridge Town
From Paris to Golders Green
In the autumn of 1983 I took residence in a room on the grounds of the Lycée
Jean-Paul Timbaud - which consisted of a general upper secondary school and
an additional vocational school or LEP - in Brétigny-sur-Orge, a commune in
the southern suburbs of Paris some sixteen miles south of the city centre.
It was during those early days in Paris that I became infected for what I
believe to be the first time in my life by a serious sense of self-disillusion, as a
new darkness spread over my mind.
This sea-change marked the onset of a real drink problem that went way
beyond the usual student booze-ups into the murky realm of drinking alone by
day, and there seems little doubt to me today that at its heart lay a conscience
that was starting to become calloused through repeated defilement. My wellbeing, however, remained relatively unaffected, in fact, for those first few
months - the occasional violent depressive attack aside - I was happy,
blissfully happy to be a flâneur in the city which had inspired so many great
poets to write classics of the art of urban idling. I wrote of my own experiences
usually late at night in my room with the help of wine and cigarettes, and
while few of these notes have survived, some incidents that may have once
been committed to paper are still fresh in my mind.
There was the time, for example, that I sat opposite a same-sex couple on the
Métro when I was still innocent of its labyrinthine complexities...she a slim
white girl dressed from head to toe in denim, who with lips coyly pursed gazed
into some wistful middle distance, while her muscular black boyfriend stared
straight through me with fathomless eyes until one of them said almost in a
whisper, Qu'est-ce-que t'en pense?
I recall the night I took the Métro to Montparnasse-Bienvenue, where I slowly
sipped a demi-blonde in a brasserie, perhaps of the type immortalised by
Brassai in his photographs of the secret life of '30s Paris. At the same time, a
bewhiskered old alcoholic in a naval officer's cap, his table strewn with empty
wine bottles and cigarette butts, repeatedly screeched the name "Phillippe!"
until a pallid impassive bartender with patent leather hair filled the old man's
glass to the brim with a mock-obsequious Voilà, mon Capitaine!!
I can also remember the afternoon when, enacting the role of the social
discontent, I joined an anti CND march through Paris which ended with a
bizarre street cabaret performed by a troupe of neo-hippies whose sheer
demented defiance may have filled me with longing for a time when I treated
my well-thumbed copy of the Fontana Modern Masters bio of Che Guevara by
Andrew Sinclair as some kind of sacred text...
A day spent as a flâneur would often end in a movie theatre perhaps in the
soulless Forum des Halles shopping mall, and there was a point I started to
hate the movies I chose, as I struggled more and more with fits of deep and
uncontrollable depression. For the first time in my life, I was starting to feel
worse after having seen a film than before, the result perhaps of creeping
anhedonia - a reduced ability to take pleasure in the everyday activities of life
that make it exciting for the majority of people...vacations, friendships, the
sharing of food with kith and kin and so on - which is one of the principle
components of clinical depression, and a common spur to alcoholism and
drug addiction. I grew bored of watching others perform. What joy I reasoned
was there in watching some dismal movie when there was so much to do in
the greatest city in the world?
I'd never really been any kind melancholic up until this point but this
situation may have started to change in my first few months in Paris, when if
somehow my travels failed to produced the desired uplifting effect, I'd fall
prey to a despair that was wholly out of proportion to the cause. As a means of
protecting myself I started squandering my hard-earned cash on baubles and
fripperies...these wholly pointless trinkets including a gaudy short-sleeved
Yves St Laurent shirt with Zebra designs, a gold and black retro style alarm
clock which made a horrifically loud ticking sound, a gold-plated toothbrush
which I never actually used, a black and gold cigarette holder and matching
lighter, a portrait drawn of me at the Place de Tertre which made me look like
a cherubic 12 year old, a black vinyl box jacket procured at the Porte de
Clignancourt flea market, and Folio volumes by fin de siecle writers Barbey
d'Aurevilly, Villiers de L'Isle Adam and Joséphin Péladan. It had become a
constant battle.
Could the kids who loved to wave and coo at me from all corners of the Lycée
have guessed that their precious Carl, the smiling blond Londoner who looked
like a lost member of Duran Duran was a secret dark depressive...and a
collector of the literary works of late 19th Century decadents...and a social
discontent given to recording snarling rants against the callousness of
Western society on a cheap cassette tape recorder? The simple answer is never
in a thousand years, for I was leading a double life, perhaps even a multiple
one; little wonder therefore that I was starting to drink to try and make sense
of what was happening to me, which was something akin to the fracturing of
the personality.
It wasn't long before I tired of the solitary existence of the flâneur...but then
becoming more sociable may have simply been the result of being in one place
for a significant length of time and nothing more meaningful than that. In
fact, I'd befriended Marie my counterpart as English assistant in the
neighbouring town of St Genevieve des Bois in my first week in Paris, when I
was taking classes at the Sorbonne intended to prepare my for the year ahead,
and we went on seeing a lot of each other. She'd been a close girlhood chum of
my own great Westfield friend Astrid at convent school, and one of the first
times we met up was with Astrid when we saw "Gimme Shelter", the
documentary of the Rolling Stones 1969 American tour which culminated in
the infamous Free Concert at the Altamont Speedway in northern California.
This of course famously marked the end of the Hippie dream of peace and
love.
Another close friend was Gilles, a maths teacher at the LEP who was the
rebellious son of an army officer, and a furious hedonist who worshipped the
Rock and Roll lifestyle of Keith Richards and other British bad boy musicians.
I still see him now, tall, thin, dark, charismatic, with his head of wiry black
hair, dressed in drainpipes and Cuban heeled boots, playing the bass guitar but brilliantly- at some unearthly hour with friends following a night's heavy
partying before rushing to be with a girl friend as the dawn broke.
My best male friend was Igor, another teacher at the LEP. He was the son of
Yugoslavian parents from the suburb of Bagneux whose impassive manner
belied the exorbitantly loving and unstable soul of a true poet. He fell in love
with Marie at first sight, and spent the whole night on a train bound for the
south of France in a romantic delirium singing the songs of Jacques Brel. He
loved us both in fact, and referred to our slender swan necks as being typical
of what he called "le charme anglais".
So many of the people of Bretigny went out of their way to make me feel
welcome and content from the headmaster all the way down to the kids some
of whom staged near-riots in the classroom whenever I appeared. I felt so
unworthy of their kindness, of the incredible hospitality that is characteristic
of ordinary French people; but if I was much loved in the warm-hearted
faubourgs, in Paris itself I was sometimes as much a magnet for menace and
hostility as approval…beginning with the time I was hysterically threatened in
Pigalle only days after arriving in the city. I was verbally assaulted again later
in the year on a RER train by some kind of madman or derelict who told me to
go to the Bois de Boulogne to meet with what he saw as my inevitable violent
destiny. I spent an entire train journey from Paris-Austerlitz to Bretigny with a
self-professed voyou with chilling shark-like eyes who nonetheless seemed
quite fond of me, as he made no attempt to harm me and even gave me his
number, telling me that unless I phoned him as promised I was merely what
he termed un anglais c**. Mention must also be made of the sinister skinhead
who called me une tapette anglaise for trying on Marie's wide-brimmed hat
while travelling home by train after a night out with her and Astrid. After
they'd gotten off at St Genevieve, I was left at his mercy as I made my way
alone to my room in the insanely driving rain, but thankfully he'd vanished by
then. Do I hate then now? No, I wish them all well…they kept me on my toes
and made me the man I am today, someone who can get on with anyone.
I left Bretigny without saying goodbye to so many people that it's painful for
me to think about it, but frenetic last hour socialising had left me exhausted
and demoralised. However, there was one final get-together, organised by
Marie and a few other friends. Igor was there of course, as well as another
close friend from the LEP, Jean-Charles, and several mutual friends of myself
and Marie. Sadly though, Gilles wasn't. I bumped into one of his girl friends in
the course of the evening, and she was incredulous I hadn't invited him.
Seized by guilt, I phoned him at his home to ask him to make a last minute
appearance, but in a muted voice, he told me it was too late for that. It was the
last I ever heard of him. I never saw Igor again either, although he did phone
me once from Paris. On the other hand, Marie and I stayed friends until the
early ‘90s, by which time she'd got married to a fellow church-goer and former
Cambridge University alumnus Paul, whom I liked enormously.
My parents stopped by that night to pick me up on their way to La Ribera
where we were due to stay for a few weeks before returning to the UK, and
after a day or so spent sightseeing we set off. Soon after arriving it became
clear to me that my beloved pueblo had changed beyond all recognition. Eight
years after Franco's death and Spain's innocence was long gone and Western
urban decadence and violence had penetrated even into the deepest
provinces.
In Murcia, while quietly drinking in a night club with Bruno, a very dear
friend of mine from La Ribera's golden age, his future wife Ana, and other
friends, I found myself in the surreal position of being visually threatened by a
local Punk who clearly objected to the bootlace tie I was wearing which
immediately identified me as a hated Rockabilly. This would never have
happened ten years before, or perhaps even five.
As for the youth of La Ribera itself, where once they'd been so endearingly
naive, now they seemed so worldly and cool, in fact far more so than me,
dancing like chickens with their elbows thrust out to the latest New Pop hits
from the UK such as King's "Won't You Hold My Hand Now (These Are Heavy
Times)", which I endlessly translated that summer. They even put the club
kids of La Piscine to shame.
I returned to Westfield in the autumn of 1984, and I can't help thinking it
was soon afterwards that my recent past started haunting me for the first
time, but I may be wrong. Perhaps it never occurred to me that only a few
years previously I'd known legends of sport and the cinema, mythical figures
of the theatre, blue bloods and patricians, and they'd been kind, generous of
spirit to this nonentity from the outer suburbs. Now I was nearly 30, with a
raft of opportunities behind me, and a future which looked less likely than
ever to provide me with the fame I still ached for with all my soul.
At first I lived off-campus, thinking it might be fun to coast during my final
year as some kind of enigma freshly returned from Paris; but before long I
desperately missed being part of the social hub of the college, even though this
was a virtual impossibility for a forgotten student in his fourth year. However,
I did eventually move back onto campus to occupy a tiny little room in the
Berridge hall of residence in nearby West Hampstead NW9.
Thinking that being in a play might help raise my faded profile, I accepted a
small role in Cole Porter's "Kiss me Kate", which was being directed by my
close friend Mark Crowther, a sweet gentle guy who looked a little like Green
Gartside of '80s Sophisti-Pop band Scritti Politti, with a shade perhaps of Val
Kilmer or Linus Roache. But it was all too little too late. My time as one of
Westfield's leading prodigies had long passed, and other, younger golden
children had come to the fore since my departure for Paris, such as the kid
named Bill whom my long-time friend and champion Astrid described as
being some kind of new edition of me due perhaps to his versatility as
musician, actor, comedian and so on. The first I saw of him, he was playing
Gorgibus in the original French in a production directed by Astrid of Moliere's
"Les Precieuses Ridicules", a part she'd originally earmarked for me, but I
turned it down. To say he went on to greater things would be an
understatement.
I read incessantly throughout the year for the sheer pleasure of doing so. For
example, while Eugene O'Neill's "The Iceman Cometh" was a compulsory part
of the drama course, there was no need for me to wade through "O'Neill", the
massive two-part biography of the playwright - published in 1962 and 1972 by Arthur and Barbara Gelb, but that didn't stop me. In fact it was a joy to do
so.
I made this descent into the depths of O'Neill's tortured psyche at a time
when I was starting to drink during the day at Westfield, often
getting hammered around lunchtime in the bar in the company of various
friends, such as Vince, my friend from "Playing with Fire", or even earlier
thanks to a can or two of extra strong lager. Vince was still trying to persuade
me to join forces with him against an indifferent world, he with his writing
and me with my acting, but for reasons best known to myself I wasn't playing
ball. He'd always sensed something really special in me, which was
variously described as energy, intensity, charisma, but for all the praise I
received from Vince and others, I didn't seem to have a very high opinion of
myself. I'm not quite sure why.
I recently watched the testimony of a former violent offender through a
website called Transformed Lives, and he described himself as having a big
ego and low self esteem before he became a Christian, and this may have been
my problem. It's possible that while I had the vast ego of a narcissist that
requires constant attention and approval, I somehow also suffered from low
self-esteem...which would indicate actual Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
Whatever the truth, I was going through one of my perverse phases, affecting
a world weariness which I simply didn't have at 30, but which upset and
alienated a really good friend, something for which I feel utterly ashamed.
It wasn't long before Vince had left college, and for good this time - he'd
already somehow spun out his allotted three years to four - and without taking
his degree...leaving me to stew in my stupid pseudo-cynicism.
My principal final year tutor was my beloved Margaret, and subject of study,
the works of literary genius Andre Gide. I thrilled to the perverseness of
Gidian characters such as the urbane Menalque from "The Immoralist"
(1902), who awakens the Nietzschian superman in Michel, the novella's
protagonist, the feral Lafcadio from "The Vatican Cellars" (1914), who
commits a crime of terrible cruelty simply for the sake of doing so, and the
demonic Passavent, from "The Counterfeiters" (1926), his only novel
according to his own definition of the term. While figures of such
unmitigated depravity are commonplace today, in countless novels, plays,
films, videos etc., when Gide created his monsters, they still had the power to
shock. I view them with a different pair of eyes today.
On a lighter note, a special favourite of mine by Gide, who was always
a magnificent storyteller, was the novella "Isabelle", which appealed to my
softer, more romantic side. Written in 1911, it's the tale of a young student
Gérard Lacase who stays for a time at a Manor house in Normandy inhabited
by two ancient aristocratic families in order to look over their library for
research purposes, and while there becomes bewitched by the portrait of
the mysterious "Isabelle" only to become disillusioned upon finally meeting
her.
By the same token my favourite ever play by O'Neill was another story of
hopeless love, "A Moon for the Misbegotten" (1947), although "A Long Day's
Journey into Night" (1956) came a very close second. Both feature Eugene's
tragic yet infinitely romantic elder brother Jamie. I became fascinated by him;
and read all about him in the massive O'Neill biography by the Gelbs. Poor
Jamie. How richly blessed he'd been at birth with beauty, charm, and intellect.
While part of the Minim Department of Notre Dame University, Indiana, he
was one of founder Father Edward Sorin's most favoured princes, destined for
a glittering future as a Catholic gentleman of exquisite breeding and learning;
and then a prize-winning scholar at Fordham, the exclusive Jesuit university
from which he was ultimately expelled for a foolish indiscretion.
He was also potentially a very fine writer, although he only left a handful of
poems and essays behind, and the owner of a beautiful speaking voice which
ensured him work as an actor for a time alongside his father James. His one
true legacy, however, is Jamie Tyrone, the brilliant yet tortured charmer who
haunts two of his brother's masterpieces with the infinite sorrow of promise
unfulfilled.
"The Wanderer of Golders Green" was formed from notes made while I was
taking my finals in the summer of '85. It reflects what was a longstanding obsession on my part with romantic weltschmerz - literally world
pain - and should not be taken too seriously as such. That said, mention must
be made of the intense saturnine melancholy that was making more and more
inroads into my naturally sanguine temperament, and at nearly 30 I still
wasn't famous, and may have been drinking as heavily as I was partly as a
means of coping with this painful fact. What is certain is that from the age of
27, alcohol became more indispensable to me than ever before.
The Wanderer of Golders Green
I decided on a Special B
Before the eve.
I bought a lager
At the Bar
And chatted to Joy.
Then Paul
Bought me another.
I appreciated the fact
That he remembered
The time he,
His gal Carol,
And Rory Downed
An entire Bottle
Of Jack Daniels
In a Paris-bound train.
A tanned cat
Bought me a (large) half,
Then another half.
My fatal eyes
Are my downfall.
I drank yet another half...
My head was spinning
When it hit the pillow
I awoke
With a terrible headache
Around one o'clock.
I prayed it would depart.
I slowly got dressed.
I was as chatty as ever
Before the exam...
French/English translation.
Periodically I put my face
In my hands or groaned
Or sighed My stomach
was burning me inside.
I finished my paper
In 1 hour and a half.
As I walked out
I caught various eyes
Sandra’s, Judy’s (quizzical) etc…
I went to bed…
Slept ‘till five…
Read O’Neill until 7ish...
Got dressed
And strolled down
To Golders Green,
In order to relive
A few memories.
I sang to myself A few memories
Flashed into my mind,
But not as many
as I'd have liked It wasn't the same.
It wasn't the same.
Singing songs brought
Voluptuous tears.
I snuck into McDonalds
Where I felt At home,
Anonymous, alone.
I bought a few things,
Toothpaste and pick,
Chocolate, yoghurts,
Sweets, cigarettes
And fruit juice.
Took a sentimental journey
Back to Powis Gardens,
Richness
And intensity,
Romantic
And attractive…
Sad, suspicious and strange.
I sat up until 3am,
Reading O’Neill
Or writing (inept) poetry.
Awoke at 10,
But didn’t leave
My room till 12,
Lost my way
To Swiss Cottage,
Lost my happiness.
Oh so conscious
Of my failure
And after a fashion,
Enjoying this knowledge.
Of All Sad Words of Tongue or Pen
My first employment after leaving Westfield in the summer of 1985 was as a
deliverer of novelty telegrams. This often brought me into potentially
hazardous situations, but for me the risk was worth it, because I was getting
well paid to show off and party, two of my favourite occupations at the
time...but it was an unusual way of life for a man of thirty.
What I really wanted was the immortality provided by fame, and I didn't care
whether this came through acting, music or literature, or any other means for
that matter, but until my big break came, I was content to feed my addiction
to attention through the novelty telegrams industry. I evidently had no deep
desire to leave anything behind by way of children, nor for any career other
than one liable to project me to international renown. How then did I end up
as a PGCE student at Homerton College, Cambridge in the autumn?
The truth is that once again I'd yielded to family pressure to provide myself
with the safety net that's been dear to the hearts of parents of wouldbe wunderkinds since time immemorial, and despised by the artists
themselves: the great English singer-songwriter Nick Drake once told his
father it was the one thing he didn't want. For my part, I was so unhappy
about having to go to Cambridge that just days before I was due to start there,
I arranged to audition for yet another Jazz Funk band. They asked me to learn
a couple of songs...Level 42's "The Chinese Way" was one of them, but I never
made it. I was late and desperately drunk on the afternoon of my audition, so I
just threw in the towel and resigned myself to Cambridge. For all I know they
may still be waiting for me, relics from an age of tasselled loafers and white
socks.
From the time I arrived in the medieval university city of Cambridge, one of
the most beautiful and celebrated in the world, I was made to feel most
welcome and wanted by everyone, and I made some wonderful friends at
Homerton. They included Jonathan, a poet and actor from Downham Market
in Norfolk, Dean, a genius singer-songwriter from Yeovil in Somerset who
eventually went on to become part of London's psychedelic underground,
Claire, a stunning red-head whose beauty and charm belied the fact that she
hailed from Slough, a massive suburban area to the west of London.
When I made my first appearance at the Manor Community College in the
tough London overspill area of Arbury where I was due to begin my period of
Teaching Practice the following January, the pupils reacted to me as if I was
some kind of visiting movie or Rock star. My TP would've been a breeze.
Everything was falling into place for me at Cambridge...I was young
and strong, and at the very height of my powers in terms of looks and
talent…and I was offered several golden chances to succeed as an actor within
its hallowed confines. Towards the end of the first term, the then president of
the world famous Cambridge University Footlights Dramatic Club had gone
out of his way to ask myself and Jonathan to appear in the sole production he
was preparing to mark his year-long tenure. He was a Homerton man, and so
clearly wanted to give a couple of his fellow students a break, after having seen
us perform a couple of Jonathan's satirical songs for the club. This was a
privilege almost without measure, given that since its inception Footlights
has nurtured the talents of Cecil Beaton, Jonathan Miller, Germaine Greer,
David Frost, John Cleese, Peter Cook, Graham Chapman, Eric Idle, Stephen
Fry, Emma Thompson, Hugh Lawrie and Sasha Baron Cohen among many
others. I could have been added to that list.
As if this opportunity weren't enough to persuade me to stay put, a young
undergraduate, renowned for the high quality of the plays he produced
personally asked me to feature in one he intended putting on during the Lent
Term after seeing me interpret the part of Tom in Tennessee Williams' “The
Glass Menagerie" some time before Christmas. Someone told me that if he
took an interest in you, you were pretty well made as an actor at Cambridge.
What more did I want? For Spielberg himself to be in the audience and
discover me? I can actually remember being quite disappointed that he wasn't
a talent scout from outside of the university. That's how self-deluded I was. I
was so obsessed by fame that I could barely wait to get my clammy hands on
it, and yet it seems that whenever I was offered a serious chance at achieving
it, I bungled it.
In my defence though, I did feel trapped by the course, and was finding it
heavy going. In order to pass, you had to spend a full year as a teacher after
completion of the basic PGCE. That meant it would be two years before I was
free again to call myself an actor and work as such. It just seemed an awfully
long time, when in fact it wasn't at all, and two years after quitting Cambridge
I was even further away from my dream than when I'd started off. The truth
is I left Homerton for no good reason, and my decision still pains me to this
day, although my faith helps me to cope with the anguish the idiocies of my
youth have left me with. Without it these words from Whittier's “Maud
Muller” might tear me to shreds of utter nothingness:
For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: ‘it might have been'.
Within a matter of hours of the start of the Lent Term of 1987, I was gone,
vanished into the night in the company of a close friend I'd wheedled into
helping me out. It wasn't her fault; she'd originally told me to go to
Cambridge, and just get stuck in, but I hadn't listened.
Once I was free I started to furiously audition, commuting to London
from rural Hampshire where I was living at the time, not far from the coast
near Portsmouth, but it was music rather than acting I was interested in at the
time, not that it ever really mattered to me how I became famous...Pop star,
movie star, model, it was all the same to me, just so long as fame was the
result. There was the Jazz-Funk band from what may've been Croydon - they
didn't seem to believe me when I told them I knew one of the guys from level
42 - some kind of Funk band from near Ladbroke Grove, a Rock 'n' Roll
revival band from Pompey itself...but none of them took to me and I can't say I
blamed them. I was usually tanked up to start with, and then there was the
question of my image. I think it's fair to say that highlighted hair, ear studs
and skin tight jeans didn't go down all that well in the places I chose to
audition.
I returned to London in the summer of 1987 to a minor flurry of creative
activity. First, I took part in a rehearsed reading at the Gate Theatre in Notting
Hill directed by Astrid, and then, again at Astrid’s behest, in a week-long
benefit for the Gate entitled "Captain Kirk's Midsummer Log" for which I
served as MC together with the comedy troupe Flash Haddock as one Mr
Denmark 1979, a comic monstrosity created for me by Astrid, and each time I
appeared onstage to sing or do some impressions, I brought the house down.
Among those appearing on the bill were writer and comedienne Jo Brand,
satirist Rory Bremner - whom I'd known in both Edinburgh and Paris - and
Patrick Marber, originally a stand-up comic, but best known today as a
playwright.
The Denmark character, winner of a Scandinavian male beauty contest in
1987 who’d been lunching out on this paltry victory ever since, went down so
well at the benefit that I wrote an entire show around him which premiered at
a new variety venue called Club Shout in what I think was 1988, again to great
success. By this time, he'd convinced himself he'd been at the forefront of
pretty well every major cultural development since the dawn of Pop, only to be
cravenly ripped off by Sinatra, Elvis, the Beatles, the Stones, Punks, Rappers
and so on.
He lasted until about 1995, when I decided to permanently give up the idea of
being a comedy cabaret performer. My acting career followed suit only a few
years later.
1987 was also the year I first got seriously involved in walk-on work for
television and the cinema, beginning with the sitcom "Life Without George",
although I wasn’t entirely new to the game. For example, I briefly feature as a
side drummer (at an English village fete set in the 1950s) in Guy Hamilton's
"A Mirror Crack'd" (1981), based on the Agatha Christie novel and featuring
Angela Lansbury as Miss Marple. Produced by a friend of my father’s, Richard
Goodwin, it also starred Elizabeth Taylor, whom I'd briefly met as a child, and
Geraldine Chaplin, whose father Charlie I'd met through my dad some time in
the early 1970s, as well as Kim Novak, Rock Hudson, Tony Curtis and Edward
Fox. Also, in Charles Jarrott's "Poor Little Rich Girl" (1987) based on the life
of the Woolworth heiress Betty Hutton, with Farrah Fawcett as Hutton, I can
be glimpsed gesticulating in a white suit in front of a primitive mike as
seminal twenties crooner Rudy Vallee. But these were just isolated episodes.
From around 1987, I took the work more seriously, first in the sitcom "Life
Without George", and then in long-running police series "The Bill" in which I
played a scene of crime photographer for about five years.
Soon after I'd finished my work for "Life Without George" I started rehearsals
for Astrid for a play called "The Audition" written by the Catalonian dramatist
Rudolf Sirera - with English translation by John London - due to have its
London premiere at the Gate early in the winter of '88. It was apparently set
by Sirera in pre-revolutionary France, but Astrid updated it to the late 19th
Century, with a setting reminiscent of Wilde's "Dorian Gray", or a Parisian
equivalent. It involves the kidnapping of an actor Gabriel De Beaumont by a
certain decadent Marquis, who goes on to sadistically toy with his
victim before finally murdering him. It received mixed reviews in The Times,
The Telegraph, The Stage and other British periodicals, with myself and Steve
who played the Marquis receiving some modest praise for our performances.
I should have capitalised on these reviews, but Rob a close friend from the
Guildhall now working as a teacher at the Callan School of English in Oxford
Street, had earlier encouraged me to join him there. As I'd already trained
with them and been offered a job by the time "The Audition" had got under
way, I went ahead with Callan's soon after it had wrapped. It was a blissfully
social period of my life but my theatrical career suffered. Not that I was
entirely inactive in this respect, in that I continued to perform as Mr
Denmark, and at one point entered a singing competition at a South
Kensington cocktail bar called Pip's in the hope of gaining a residency there,
but it didn't work out.
I could write a whole book on my time at Callan's alone, indeed on pretty
much any of the major episodes of my life, "Rescue of a Rock 'n' Roll Child"
being merely one version of it, to which multiple layers could be added to
create something approaching an accurate self- portrait, although it's doubtful
whether this will ever come to be realised in the time I have left, however
much or little this might be.
Chapter Six: Lone Birthday Boy Dancing
The Joy of a Fool
Being a teacher at the Callan School of English was a dream job for me. It
provided me with a social life on a plate, as well as enough money to finance
the hours I spent each evening in the Champion public house in Wells Street
where some time after 7.30pm after the final class had ended, student and
teacher alike would meet to drink and talk and laugh and do as they wished
until closing time. I'd usually leave at about 10.30pm to catch the last train
home from Waterloo, although sometimes I'd miss it and have to catch a later
train. On more than one occasion I'd fall asleep on this train and end up deep
in the Surrey hinterland. I can swear I spent one night wrapped in newspaper
on a station bench. At other times, there'd be a party to go to, or the Callan's
disco, which would be held on an occasional basis on Wardour Street.
Most of the teachers socialised with their own kind, but I preferred the
company of the students, and at any given time it would be almost impossible
to extricate me from my circle of favourites from Italy, Japan, Spain, Brazil,
Poland, France etc. This proved frustrating to my good friends Stash and
Noddy when they were trying to organise rehearsals for a band we were
supposed to be getting together. Thanks to me, this never happened
despite some early promise: Noddy was a gifted guitarist from Brazil; Stash a
potentially good front man. Like myself he was a "resting" actor, in fact one of
several among the Callan teachers. They were a fascinating diverse crowd, and
I made many friends from among them, but my best buddy was Stash. That is
apart from Rob, who'd recommended the job to me in the first place.
I spent my spare cash on clothes, cassettes, books...as well as rent during the
months I spent as a tenant in Hanwell, a blue collar suburb close by to the
more middle class district of Ealing, west London. My landlord Robin was a
friend of my father's from the London session world. He was a small bearded
always nattily dressed Welshman especially gifted at Folk and Jazz, and an
almost preternaturally glamorous figure with a Celtic wildness who was yet
enormously warm and charming. I also spent several hundreds of pounds
being initiated into the art of self-hypnosis by a distinguished Harley Street
doctor who specialised in hypnotherapy and nutritional medicine, in the hope
of finding a solution not just to my excessive use of alcohol, but the Obsessive
Compulsive Disorder to which I was becoming increasingly subject in the late
1980s.
Yet, despite the drinking and the OCD, I was exorbitantly happy during this
period of my life. Any melancholy I affected - in my writings and elsewhere should be taken with a pinch of salt in the light of the fact that for me sadness
was the ultimate mark of artistic and emotional profundity, and I coveted it
with all the passion of one who was by nature essentially high-spirited. Indeed
it may be that it was this very carefree frivolity of mine, this absence of angst,
that prevented me really getting anywhere as an actor. Looking back at my
pre-Christian existence, the overwhelming impression I have is of a man
whose primary emotional condition was one of utter exaltation and
enraptured joy of life.
The piece below, "Strange Coldness Perplexing" provides some indication of
my emotional condition during my time at Callan's, including a tendency as I
see it to veer wildly between the conscious effusive affectionateness I aspired
to, and sudden irrational involuntary lapses of affect, as well as my intense
devotion to my favourite students which was reciprocated by them with
interest. It was forged using notes scrawled onto seven sides of an ancient now
coverless notebook, possibly late at night following an evening's carousal and
in a state of serene intoxication. All punctuation was removed and extracts
from the notes tacked together not randomly as in the so-called cut up
technique but selectively and all but sequentially.
Strange Coldness Perplexing
the catholic nurse
all sensitive
caring noticing
everything
what can she think
of my hot/cold torment
always near blowing it
living in the fast lane
so friendly kind
the girls
dewy eyed
wanda abandoned me
bolton is in my hands
and yet my coldness
hurts
the more emotional
they stay
trying to find a reason
for my ice-like suspicion
fish eyes
coldly indifferent eyes
suspect everything that moves
socialising just to be loud
compensate for cold
lack of essential trust
warmth
i love them
despite myself
my desire to love
is unconscious and gigantesque
i never know
when i'm going to miss someone
strange coldness perplexing
i've got to work to get devotion
but once i get it
i really get people on my side
there are carl people
who can survive
my shark-like coldness
and there are those
who want something
more personal
i can be very devoted to those
who can stay the course
my soul is aching
for an impartial love of people
i'm at war with myself…
A Cult of Nowness
In early 1990, I lost my position as a Callan teacher. I begged for the return of
my beloved job...not just in person, but by letter and through poor Rob, but
the Callan authorities refused to be persuaded and I don't blame them in the
slightest. They'd shown incredible tolerance towards my insultingly slack
approach to punctuality and other abuses of what was a very fair system for a
good long time, until finally their patience snapped.
So...a happy time in the greatest job I ever had ended in tandem with the
crazy nineteen eighties. Looking back, the closing of this decade of excess
seems like the end of a golden age. It was the last of a triad marked by frenzied
persistent social upheaval and artistic innovation, much of this taking place
within the two leading late Modern forms of creative expression, the cinema
and Rock and Roll.
Rock as I see it is has never been just a simple popular music derived from
Rhythm and Blues, Rockabilly, Boogie Woogie and so on...so much as an
enormously influential international subculture of varying artistic and
intellectual substance. Some critics have even gone so far as to describe it as a
religion, and they have a point…because Rock has possessed a spiritual
dimension since its inception, and an intellectual one since about 1965;
and many would single the one-time Protest singer Bob Dylan out as the
person who more than any other helped to invest mere Beat music with
genuine artistic credibility.
Since Dylan's glory days as Pop's first true poet, there have been many Rock
artists who've looked to earlier strains of Modernism for lyrical inspiration Romanticism, Symbolism, Beat, Existentialism, even Deconstruction - and it
could be said that Rock has been the main engine of the avant-garde impulse
in the West since the late 1960s, with all the rebelliousness and nihilism this
word entails. Those who like me were born in the mid 1950s, and so grew up
in the sixties, were unavoidably affected on a deep and perhaps largely
unconscious level by the post-war cultural revolution of which Rock was such
an essential part. And I contend that from quitting formal education aged 16
to coming to faith some two decades later, I was in thrall to a cult of instant
gratification that's been growing progressively more powerful throughout the
west since about 1955.
If what I'm saying is false, then why didn't I build a future for myself during
those years, in terms of a profession, a family, financial security, and so on?
The truth is that before quitting the booze for good, I viewed all these with an
indifference verging on contempt and it hurts me deeply to realise the extent
to which I sabotaged my life with such a negative identity. Well, I'm certainly
paying for it today…through the low social status which might seem cool to a
privileged young hipster, but which is a terrible humiliation for a middle aged
man. But perhaps a useful one.
Reluctantly delivered after almost two years from the shackles of a job I
genuinely loved, I briefly revived my acting career thanks once again to the
influence of my dear friend Astrid. She recommended me for the part of Feste
for a production of "Twelfth Night" due to be staged shortly at the Jacksons
Lane theatre in Highgate, north London. Somehow she knew the director
Lesley, and after a successful audition, I set about re-learning Feste's lines,
and arranging the songs according to the original primitive melodies. These
were well-received, as was my performance...one woman even going so far as
to tell me that I was the greatest Feste she'd ever witnessed. Once again, the
Fool of Illyria had served me well. In keeping with the festive spirit of the play,
rehearsals and performances were followed and to a lesser extent
accompanied by some pretty heavy partying by myself and most of the
members of the cast, and we were thick as thieves for a time, until the
inevitable sad dispersal.
It was while travelling by train to and from Highgate for the "Twelfth Night"
rehearsals that I started feeling the need to anaesthetize myself as never
before against what I saw as nocturnal London's ever-present aura of menace,
which may or may not have been more intense than a decade previously. After
all, I'd been attracting hostile attention for the way I looked since the early
seventies. What's more, years of hard living were almost certainly starting to
take their toll on my nervous system. In addition to alcohol and nicotine, I'd
been ingesting vast quantities of caffeine for years, although I may have
stopped taking this in solid form by the onset of the nineties. Consequently, I
started drinking on the way to rehearsals, and for the first time in my career as
a professional actor during rehearsals; and was even drunk for the dress
rehearsal itself, but never during the actual performances. I think I gave Leslie
my word about that.
Later in the year, in the autumn, I began another PGCE course, this time at
the West London Institute of Education, now part of the University of Brunel,
becoming resident in Worple Road in nearby Isleworth. I began quite
promisingly, and fitted in well, making a lot of friends, and as might be
expected, excelled in drama and physical education. I didn't drink during the
day and on those rare occasions I did, it was just a question of a pint or so with
lunch, and had mentally determined to complete the course, but as the
following piece testifies, at night it was altogether another matter.
It was adapted in 2006 from a letter typed during the WLIE days to an old
Westfield friend Georgina, now a professional photographer. When it was
recovered, having never been finished, nor sent, it was as scrap paper, lost in a
sea of miscellaneous mementos.
A Letter Unsent
Dear Georgina
I haven't been in touch
for a long time.
Sorry.
The last time
I saw you
was in
St. Christopher's Place.
It was a lovely evening...
when I knocked
that chair over.
I am sorry.
Since then,
I've had not
a few accidents
of that kind.
Just three days ago,
I slipped out
in a garden
at a friend's house...
and keeled over,
not once,
not twice,
but three times,
like a log...
clonking my nut
so violently
that people heard me
in the sitting room.
What's more,
I can't remember
a single sentence
spoken
all evening.
The problem is...
A Thrilling but Lethal Lifestyle
My Teaching Practice was due to take place towards the end of the first
term but I was desperately behind in my work, so provisionally removed
myself from the course in order to decide whether it was worth my carrying on
or not. The authorities were in agreement with my decision. In the event I
decided to quit, and met with the head of my course to discuss this, and she
was very agreeable, making no effort to dissuade me.
However, rather than immediately return to my parents' home I stayed on in
Isleworth in order to rekindle my five-year old career as a deliverer of novelty
telegrams. I also continued to work as a walk-on artist for the TV series "The
Bill", based in the tough south London suburb of Merton in Surrey. Still in
Isleworth, I became half of a musical duo formed with a charming young guy
called Mark whom I met after he'd put an ad in the Stage newspaper for acts
for a movable variety show he was putting together at the time, and I did a few
shows for him as Mr Denmark 1979. Although he was specialising as a singersongwriter at the time, Mark's since developed into a true Renaissance
man…an accomplished actor, comedian, songwriter, performer, writer, film
maker and esoteric thinker. We remain close friends to this day.
I wanted to call the band Venus Xtravaganza, but we settled for Mark's choice
of The Unknowns...if we were ever called anything. We began by busking
together in Leicester Square, and then settled down for rehearsals in the hope
of getting some gigs. Early on, our repertoire consisted largely of early Rock
and Roll and Tamla Motown songs, but before long we started filling out our
act with originals, one or two by me, but most by Mark.
Early in 1991 I took off to the seaside town of Hastings for a month or so to
attempt to pass a TEFL course down there. How vividly I recall the thrill of
seeing seagulls hovering over central Hastings soon after arriving at the
station for my interview, which I passed, but I couldn't say it went well. I
constantly avoided my interviewer's eyes until she virtually ordered me to look
at her, then saying something like: "I said look at me, not stare". This as if to
emphasize her belief that I didn't stand a snowball's chance in Hell of passing.
Winter 1991 was arctic in a way I haven't known an English winter to be since.
Not literally of course, but I can remember wearing several coats just in order
to be able to bear a cold that apparently doesn't exist any more in this country.
I worked like a trojan but I was struggling terribly, tormented by OCD and its
endless demands on my time and energies in the shape of rituals both physical
and mental. I didn't drink at all during the day, but at night I was sometimes
so stoned I was incoherent. Predictably perhaps I was failed. I asked the
authorities if they might reconsider, but they made it clear to me that their
decision was final.
It was a bit of a let-down for sure, but I'd loved my time in Hastings, a
beautiful old town that's since become a major London overspill area, even
while continuing the search for some kind of spiritual solution to my mental
troubles…this leading me to a "church" in Claremont Road which was far from
the kind of I’d ultimately to seek out. At least part of the reason for my
torment may be provided by the following extracts from a letter my mother
wrote me during a fascinating but fruitless sojourn:
"...I had a chance to look at your library...I could not believe what I saw. These
very strange books, beyond my comprehension, most of them, and I thought
what a dissipation of a good mind that thought it right to read such matters...I
feel very deeply that you have up to your present state, almost ruined your
mind. Your happy, smiling face has left you, your humorous nature, ditto,
your spirited state of mind, your cheerful, sunny, exuberant well-being, all
gone. Too much thought given to the unhappiness and sad state of others
(often those you can not help, in any way)...I've said recently that I am
convinced that anyone can get oneself into a state of agitation or distress or
anxiety by thinking or reading about, or witnessing unpleasant things, and the
only thing to do is to, as much as possible, avoid such matters, to not let them
get hold in the mind. Your fertile mind has led you astray. Why, and how?"
How many millions of mothers over the course of the centuries have asked
this of offspring who've been inexplicably drawn to the shadowlands of life
only to lose their way back to sanity? Only God knows. Most of course,
successfully make the journey back before settling into a normal mode of life,
but the danger of becoming lost is always there, especially for those who
remain in the shadows far beyond adolescence. Eternal adolescence is
arguably one of the prime features of our era, facilitated by its exaltation of
youth. And while there are those who'd insist that far fewer young
people today are in thrall to the dark glamour of self-destructive genius than
in previous Rock eras, the worldview still very much exists.
The following summer of 1992, I made another attempt at passing the TEFL
course, this time at Regent's College in the beautiful north London park. But
by this time I was drinking all day every day, and of course it was a disaster,
even though I worked hard and even gave some good classes. I still have some
video footage of myself giving a class and not for single second would anyone
watching it believe that I was out of my head on booze.
It was a fabulous summer, and much of it I spent in a state of manic
hyperactivity. Bliss it was to stride in the warm suburban evening sun to my
local station with the Orb's eerie "Blue Room" throbbing over and over in my
head on my way to yet another long night of drinking and socialising to the
point of ecstatic insensibility. I could've passed out on any one of these wild
nights and awoken again in Hell, but that didn't concern me. The romantic
decadence associated with the eighties was no longer even remotely current,
and there was a new spirit as I saw it, a mystic techno-bohemianism which
appeared to me to be everywhere in the early nineties. I wanted to visit as
many clubs and venues as I could where it was being celebrated, but as things
turned out I only ever went to one, CyberSeed in Covent Garden, which was
poorly attended and only lasted a short time. However, had I not become a
Christian, wild horses couldn't have prevented me from further exploration.
Later on in this final beautiful lethal summer of intoxication, soon after
appearing as Stefano in "The Tempest" at the Conway Hall in Red Lion
Square, I set out on yet another PGCE course...this time at the University of
Greenwich in south east London. Bearing the suffix fe for Further Education
its purpose was to train myself and my fellow students to teach pupils in sixth
form colleges and other further education establishments. On top of this, there
were the gigs with Mark, the novelty telegrams, and who knows what else, and
I loved every second of a frenetic lifestyle which the following piece – almost
certainly drafted on 8 October 1992, or perhaps a year earlier - serves to evoke
it at its apex...and there's a twilight mood to it, with the birthday boy
performing his Dionysian solo dance in defiance of the wholesale ruin of
mind, body and soul he's so obviously invoking.
Lone Birthday Boy Dancing
Yesterday for my birthday,
I started off
with a bottle of wine...
I took the train
into town...
I had half a bitter
at the Cafe de Piaf
in Waterloo...
I went to work
for a couple of hours or so;
I had a pint after work;
I went for an audition;
after the audition,
I had another pint
and a half;
I had another half,
before meeting my mates,
for my b'day celebrations;
we had a pint together;
we went into
the night club,
where we had champagne
(I had three glasses);
I had a further
glass of vino,
by which time,
I was so gone
that I drew an audience
of about thirty
by performing a solo
dancing spot
in the middle
of the disco floor...
We all piled off to the pub
after that,
where I had another drink
(I can't remember
what it was)...
I then made my way home,
took the bus from Surbiton,
but ended up
in the wilds of Surrey;
I took another bus home,
and watched some telly
and had something to eat
before crashing out...
I really, really enjoyed
the eve, but today,
I've been walking around
like a zomb;
I've had only one drink today,
an early morning
restorative effort;
I spent the day working,
then I went to a bookshop,
where, like a monk,
I go for a day's
drying out session...
Drying out is really awful;
you jump at every shadow;
you feel dizzy,
you notice everything;
very often,
I don't follow through...
Chapter Seven: Reborn in the Nick of Time
Reborn in the Nick of Time
The period embracing the autumn of 1992 and the first few weeks of winter
may well have been the most debauched of my entire existence.
I'd get up early, possibly about six, and then prepare myself for a day ahead
with a bottle of wine, usually fortified, then I'd keep my units topped up
throughout the day with vodka or gin, taking regular swigs from the
miniatures I liked to have with me at all times. Some evenings I'd spend in
central London, others with my new friends from the college, and we were a
close and pretty wild crowd for a while. There were times in town when I
couldn't keep the booze down, so I'd order a king-sized cola from MacDonalds
which I'd then lace with spirits before cautiously sipping from it through a
straw. I was a euphoric drunk and so almost never unpleasant...but I was
unpredictable...a true Dionysian who'd cry out on a British Rail train in the
middle of the afternoon, causing passengers to flinch with alarm...or perform
a wild disjointed Karate kick into thin air on a crowded London street. One
afternoon I tore my clothes to shreds after having arrived too late for an
audition and a barman who served me later on in the day asked me if I'd been
involved in a fight...and then there was the shameful night at Waterloo station
- or was it Liverpool Street? - that I had to be escorted across the concourse to
my train by one of the drunks who used to sleep rough at mainline stations
back then.
However, all these insane incidents came to a head one night in early 1993 in
an Indian restaurant in Hampton Court close to the Surrey-London border. I'd
been dining there with two female friends when, suddenly feeling like pure
death, I asked the one closest to me whether I looked as bad as I felt. She told
me I did, so I got up from the table, walked a few paces and then collapsed as
if stone dead in the middle of the restaurant. I was then carried bodily out into
the fresh night air by two or three Indian waiters, one of whom set about
shocking some life back into me by flicking ice cold water in my face. "Don't
give up", he pleaded, his voice betraying true concern...and in time thanks to
him some semblance of life returned, and I was well enough to be driven
home.
Yet, within two days I was drinking as heavily as before, continuing to do so
virtually around the clock until the weekend. I then spent Saturday evening
with my close friend from the restaurant, and at some point in the morning of
the 16th after having drunk solidly all night I asked her to fill a long glass with
neat gin and each sip took me further and further into the desired state of
blissful forgetfulness.
I awoke exhilarated, which was normal for me following a lengthy binge. It
was my one drying out day of the week, and so I probably spent it writing as
well as cleaning up the accumulated chaos of the past week. One thing I
definitely did was listen to a radio documentary on the legendary L.A. Rock
band the Doors which I'd taped some weeks or perhaps months earlier. I
especially savoured "When the Music's Over" from what was then one of my
favourite albums, "Strange Days" released in the wake of the Summer of Love
on my 12th birthday, 7 October 1967. This apocalyptic epic with its unearthly
screams and ecstatically discordant guitar solo seemed to me about living in
the shadow of death, beckoning death, mocking death, defying death.
I powerfully identified with the Doors' gifted singer Jim Morrison...who'd
been drawn as a very young man to poets of darkly prophetic intensity, such as
Blake, Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Artaud, as well as the poets of the Beat
Generation, who were themselves children of the - largely French - Romantic
poètes maudits, whose works have the power to change lives, as they surely
did Morrison's. His philosophy of life was clearly informed by Blake, who
wrote of "the road of excess" leading to "the palace of wisdom", while his hell
raising persona came to a degree from Rimbaud, who extolled the virtues of "a
long, immense and systematic derangement of all the senses" as an angelfaced hooligan in the Paris of the early 1870s. What a price he paid...dead at
just 27...like Jones, Hendrix, Joplin before him, and so the '60s dream was
revealed as the beguiling chimera it'd been all along.
After having spent the day revelling in my own inane notion of myself as a
poet on the edge like my heroes, at some point in the early evening I got what
I'd been courting for so long...an intimation of early death, when for pretty
well the first time in my life alcohol stopped being my beloved elixir and
became a mortal enemy, causing my legs to lose sensation and my life force to
recede at a furious and terrifying rate. In a blind panic, I opened a spare bottle
of sparkling wine I had about the house even though I'd hoped not to have to
drink that day. Once I'd drained it, I felt better for a while, in fact so much so
that I took a few snaps of myself lounging around looking haggard and
unshaven, with freshly cropped hair.
Soon after this macabre photo session I set off in search of more alcohol.
Arriving at a local delicatessen, the Asian shop-keeper nervously told me that
the off-license wasn't open for some time yet. There was nothing for me to do
but take refuge on a nearby green, where I lay for a while, still dressed I
imagine in the shabby white cut-offs I'd been wearing earlier. Finally, the offie
opened and I was able to buy more booze. I can't remember what I bought, but
I think it may have been a litre of gin, because that's what I was guzzling from
the next day. One of the last things I remember doing on Sunday evening was
singing hymns in a nearby Methodist church as the tears flowed...tears of
remorse, tears of fear, tears of desperation.
I've no further memory of what happened that hellish night, but there were
many such nights ahead. At least one of these saw me endlessly pacing up and
down corridors and stairs in an attempt to stay conscious and so - as I saw it not die...and each time I shut my eyes I could have sworn I saw demonic
entities beckoning me into a bottomless black abyss. I set about ridding my
house of artefacts I somehow knew to be offensive to God from what I think
was the night of the 16th and 17th onwards. Many books were
destroyed...books on astrology and numerology and other mystical and occult
subjects, books on war and crime and atrocity, and books about artists some
call accursed for their kinship with drunkenness and madness and death.
I genuinely believe though that for all the horrors I underwent, it was during
that first night that I came to accept Christ as my Saviour. Had my violent
conversion not come about when it did, I might have been lost forever,
depending of course on where a person stands on the issue of Predestination
and Free Will, but I'd have surely immersed myself in the new Bohemianism
of the 1990s. The adversary values of the sixties had apparently vanished by
about 1973, when in fact they'd simply gone back underground, where they set
about fertilising new anti-establishment clans such as the Anarcho-Punks and
the New Age Travellers who quietly flourished throughout the '80s. Around
'92, some kind of amalgam between these tribes and the growing Rave-Dance
movement produced yet another great counterculture, and I was ready…ready
as I’d never been to take my place as a zealot of the New Age/New Edge, only
to be delivered from its seductive grasp by a violent "Road to Damascus"
conversion to Christianity. However, if I'd been reborn against all the odds, I
still had to suffer in the physical, if only briefly.
Many Christians are of the opinion that the longer a person puts off coming to
Christ the less likely it becomes of their ever doing so and I'm among them. I
also believe that Christians who convert relatively late in life may be required
to pay a far higher price for the follies of their pre-Christian existence than
more youthful converts, especially if these include alcohol, drugs, fornication,
and involvement in the occult. God can and does heal Christians damaged by
their pre-conversion sins but He's not obliged to do so as his Grace is
sufficient, so while I was almost certainly already a Christian by the morning
of the 17th of January, my ordeal was far from over. I somehow made it into
New Eltham that Monday morning for classes at the University, but by
evening I felt so ill I started swigging from my litre bottle of gin. I also phoned
Alcoholics Anonymous at my mother's request, and agreed to give a meeting a
shot.
Next day, on the way to Richmond College, I got the feeling my heart was
about to explode, not just once but over and over again. After classes, I tried
walking through Twickenham but I couldn't feel my legs and was struggling to
stay conscious, so I ended up ordering a double brandy from the pub next
door to the Police Station. I was shaking so much the landlord thought I was
fresh from an interrogation session. Later, I was thrown out of another pub for
preaching at the top of my voice, then, walking through Twickenham town
centre I started making the sign of the cross to passers-by, telling one poor
young guy never to take to drink like some kind of walking advert for
temperance and he nodded without saying a word before scurrying away.
Back home, in an effort to calm myself down, I dug out an old capsule of
Chlomethiazole, a sedative commonly used in treating and controlling the
effects of acute alcohol withdrawal, but dangerous, in fact potentially fatal,
when used in conjunction with alcohol. I still had some capsules left over from
about 1990 when I'd been prescribed them by my then doctor, which meant
they'd long gone beyond their expiry date. For a time I felt better and was able
to sleep, but soon after waking I felt worse than ever. Later, at an AA meeting,
I kept leaving the room to douse my head in cold water, anything to shock
some life back into me, to the dismay of my sponsor Don who wanted me to
stay put, as if doing so would exert a healing effect.
Next day saw me pacing the office of the first available doctor, who seemed at
a loss as to what to do with me, but then it may have been touch and go as to
whether I was going to stay on my feet or overdose on the spot and die on him.
It was he who prescribed me the Valium which caused me to fall into a deep,
deep sleep which may have saved my life, and from which I awoke to sense
that a frontier had been passed and that I was out of danger at long last.
The piece below first existed as a series of rough notes scrawled on a piece of
scrap paper in the dying days of 1993 and are a pretty accurate account of the
incidents I've just described.
Oblivion in Recession
The legs started going,
Howlings
In my head.
Thought I'd go
Kept awake with water,
Breathing,
Arrogantly telling myself
I'd stay straight.
Drank gin and wine,
Went out,
Tried to buy more,
Unshaven,
Filthy white shorts,
Lost, rolling on lawn,
Somehow got home.
Monday, waiting for offie,
Looked like death,
Fear in eyes
Of passers-by,
Waiting for drink,
Drink relieved me.
Drank all day,
Collapsed wept
"Don't Die on Me".
Next day,
Double brandy
Just about settled me,
Drank some more,
Thought constantly
I'd collapse
Then what?
Fit? Coronary?
Insanity? Worse?
Took a Heminevrin
Paced the house
All night,
Pain in chest,
Weak legs,
Lack of feeling
In extremities,
Visions of darkness.
Drank water
To keep the
Life functions going
Played devotional music,
Dedicated my life
To God,
Prayed constantly,
Renounced evil.
Next day,
Two valiums
Helped me sleep.
By eve,
I started to feel better.
Suddenly,
All is clearer,
Taste, sounds,
I feel human again.
I made my choice,
And oblivion has receded,
And shall disappear...
Called by Contact for Christ
To reiterate an earlier assertion...there is a widely held belief within
Christianity that the sooner a person comes to Christ the better when it comes
to their immortal soul. The same could be said for their subsequent
relationship with God. There may for example be serious health problems
resulting from a former self-destructive lifestyle which could damage their
effectiveness as Christian witnesses.
On the other hand, one possible advantage of being a late convert is a
testimony with the power to cause those normally sceptical of the
transforming power of the born again experience to sit up and take notice.
Such as that of this rescued Rock and Roll child...raised in an age in which
messages of revolt...and defiance of all forms of authority, society, the family,
God himself were being spread by an adversary culture led by Rock music. We
drank deeply we children of the sixties from the spiritual darkness that was all
around from about '65 onwards, and it affected us in ways I believe to be
unique to us. That darkness has been a thorn in my flesh ever since my first
days as a Christian, when I suffered from panic attacks that at one stage could
be triggered simply by venturing beyond my front door, and I've never been
able to fully throw it off.
I struggled on with the PGCE, partly at the University of Greenwich, and
partly at Richmond College, Twickenham, while rehearsing for a couple of tiny
parts for the play “Simples of the Moon” by Rosalind Scanlon, under the
direction of Astrid. Based on the life of James Joyce's troubled, fascinating
daughter the dancer Lucia Joyce, it premiered at the Lyric Studio,
Hammersmith on the 4th of February 1993“Simples of the Moon”. I also
attended occasional drugs and alcohol counselling sessions at a church in
Greenwich, south east London with dear Elaine, a lovely blonde woman of
about 45 with a soft and soothing London accent and the gentlest pale blue
eyes imaginable.
The only time I ever knew her to lose her composure was when I announced
over the phone that a matter of hours after deciding of my own volition to stop
taking Diazepam, I'd switched to Chlomethiazole...unaware at the time that
when it interacts with Valium, it can be fatal. However, enough time had
passed between my taking the capsule and calling Elaine for me to be out of
acute danger, and I can recall her literally laughing with relief at this
realisation.
I owe so much to people like Elaine, and my AA sponsor Don - who kept tabs
on me during my very worst time - and other AA friends like Alan, who had
such a soft spot for me because it had only been a short time before we met
that he’d been in an even worse state than me. As far as I’m concerned, they're
the salt of the earth. Still, I chose to attend only a handful of meetings before
stopping altogether.
One of the reasons for this was that a matter of days after coming to Christ, I
received a phone call from a counsellor for an organisation called Contact for
Christ based in Selsdon, south London. I think he'd got in touch as a result of
my having half-heartedly filled in a form that I'd picked up on a train, perhaps
the previous summer while filled with alcoholic anticipation as I slowly
approached Waterloo station by British Rail train with the sun setting over the
foreboding south London cityscape. Knowing me I tried to put him off, but he
was persistent and before I knew it he was at the door of my parents' house, a
trim, dark, handsome man in late middle age called Spencer with gently
piercing coffee coloured eyes and a luxuriant white moustache, and at his
insistence we prayed together.
Some time later I visited him and his wife Grace at his large and elegant
house where suburb meets country just beyond the Greater London border.
On that day, he and I made an extensive list of aspects of my pre-Christian life
he felt required deep repentance, and we prayed over each of these in turn. My
continuing use of tobacco was one of the lesser issues addressed, and while it
may have been coincidental, soon after I'd taken my last Valium, I stopped
enjoying cigarettes, so that a single draw was enough to interfere with my
breathing for the rest of the day, and so rob me of a good night’s sleep.
In addition, we discussed which church I should be attending, and there was
some talk of my joining Spencer and Grace at their little family fellowship in
the suburbs, but in the end, Spencer gave his blessing to Cornerstone Bible
Church, where I went on to be baptised by the pastor.
Cornerstone, known today as Cornerstone the Church, is a large fellowship
affiliated to the Word of Faith Movement and specifically Rhema Ministries of
Johannesburg, South Africa, pastored by Ray McCauley. I'd attended my very
first service there even before becoming a Christian in late 1992. Drunk at the
time as I recall, I’d sat next to a beautiful blonde woman of about 55 whom I
later discovered to be a successful actress who at the height of her career in
the sixties had appeared in television cult classics “The Avengers” and “The
Prisoner”. Apart from an elder from the Jesus Fellowship, who’d laid hands on
me at a meeting of theirs in central London, she was my very first Christian
mentor, if only for a very brief period of time. However, I was never to see or
speak to her again as I didn’t return to the church for several months, and by
the time I did as a new believer, I think she’d moved to another church. We
kept on missing each other, and she died in June 2001. I’ve never forgotten
her.
Descent into the Hothouse
In the early part of '94, I set out on the final phase of the PGCE (FE) at the
University of Greenwich in New Eltham, south east London. To recap, there'd
been two previous attempts at passing this exam, the first taking place in
1986-'87 at Homerton College, Cambridge, and the second, in 1990, at the
former West London Institute of Higher Education, based on two campuses in
the suburbs of Isleworth and east Twickenham. The third was the only one I
actually managed to complete, although not successfully...mainly I think
because I didn't show enough authority in the classroom at Esher College
where I did my Teaching Practice. To their credit, my tutors at Greenwich did
offer me the opportunity of retaking just the TP component, but I chose to
turn them down. Perhaps I was a little put out about being failed after so
much time and effort…but if I was, it wasn't for long because in September I
successfully auditioned for a newly formed fringe theatre group called Grip
based at the Rose and Crown pub in Kingston for the role of Roote in Harold
Pinter's little known "The Hothouse".
While perhaps not among Pinter's greatest plays, "The Hothouse" is a
superbly written piece nonetheless, and supremely Pinteresque, with its
almost high poetic verbal virtuosity and inventiveness and dark surreal
humour laced with a constant sense of impending violence. Written in 1958, it
wasn't performed until 1980, when it was directed by Pinter himself for
London’s Hampstead and Ambassador Theatres.
From the auditions onwards, I gelled with the American director Tim because
while most of the auditions I'd attended up to this point had hinged on the
time-honoured method of the actor performing a piece from memory before a
panel of interviewers, Tim had us reading from the play in small groups,
which enabled us to attain a basic feel for the character and so feel like we
were actually acting rather than coldly reciting. For me, this is the only way to
audition.
Once he'd told me the part of Roote was mine, I devoted myself to his vision
of Roote, the pompous yet deranged director of an unnamed English
psychiatric hospital: the Hothouse of the title. He demanded of me an
interpretation of Roote which was deeply at odds with my usual highly
Method-oriented, subtle, intense, introspective and yet somehow also
emotionally vehement approach to acting, but his directorial instincts were
spot-on, as his production went on to receive spectacular reviews not just in
the local press, but in the international listings magazine Time Out in which
my performance was described as “flawlessly accurate” and “lit by flashes of
black humour”. An amazing triumph for a humble fringe show.
A major agent went out of her way to express her interest in me, and asked
me to ensure my details reach her which I did...but I never heard from her
again, possibly due to the shabby condition of my CV at the time, and I didn't
pursue the matter further. Why I didn't more fully exploit the opportunities
offered me by the unexpected success of "The Hothouse" and so go on to the
West End superstardom some may have seen as mine for the taking remains
something of a mystery.
In my defence I can only say that since my recent conversion my priorities
had shifted so that I viewed worldly success with less relish than I'd done only
a few years before. Also, I badly missed the relaxation alcohol once provided
me with following my work onstage, and the revels extending deep into the
night during which I’d throw my youth and affections about me like some kind
of maniacal gambler. So, while I still loved acting itself, the process of being an
actor had become pure torture. I'd boxed myself into the position of no longer
being able to enjoy social situations as others do, nor to relax. This may have
been something to do with what the state of my endorphins, the body's natural
feel-good chemicals, there being a theory doing the rounds today that these
can be permanently depleted by long-term abuse of alcohol and other
narcotics...but I'm in no position to either endorse nor dismiss it myself.
To further complicate matters, towards the end of '94 I started suffering from
deep tormenting spiritual problems for which I'd ultimately seek a solution in
the shape of what is known as Deliverance Ministry. This came first through a
venerable evangelist called Frank, who laid hands on me after lunch at his
home deep in the heart of the Devonshire countryside…but there were further
sessions...one of these taking place at night in a beautiful old Anglican church
with just myself, the vicar, and the vicar's wife in attendance.
Within a short time of “The Hothouse” reaching the end of its two week run,
Grip’s artistic director Martin asked me if I’d like to audition for his upcoming
production of Jim Cartwright's two-handed play “Two”. Naturally I said yes
and so after a successful audition, found myself playing all the male characters
opposite a brilliant Liverpudlian actress Jane who played all the female, and
by the end of the run the houses were so packed that people were sitting on
the side of the stage at our feet, something I'd never experienced before on the
London fringe. Yet, as much as I loved working with Martin and Jane, I
dreaded the end of each performance, which would see me make my excuses
as soon as it was possible to do so without causing anyone any great offence to
anyone.
Release from what had become a torturous dungeon of sobriety came while I
was attending some unrelated function at the Rose and Crown a day or so
following my final performance in "Two", when a guy I'd only just met offered
to buy me a drink and I asked for a glass of wine. Apart from the time at my
parents’ house a few weeks earlier when I took a swig of what I thought was
water but which turned out to be vodka or gin, this was the first alcohol to
pass my lips since January '93.
This single glass of wine made me feel amazing, doubly so given the purity of
my system. I cycled home that night in a state of total rapture, feeling for the
first time in months that I could do anything. Over the next few week my
drinking increased, reaching a climax in a pub in Twickenham where I met an
old university friend who'd just finished a course at St Mary's University
College in nearby Strawberry Hill, and where I drank and smoked myself into
a stupor.
Cycling home afterwards, I took a bend near Hampton Wick and came off my
bike, striking my head against a bus shelter. I stayed flat on my back for a
while abject and stinking of drink -I could've sworn I saw a shadowy figure
running towards me as I lay there in the dark - but before long I was shakily
resuming my journey home. However, weeks of controlled drinking and one
massive binge, possibly combined with the ill effects of a violent blow to the
head, resulted in my becoming ill and virtually incapacitated for what might
have been as long as a fortnight. Time and again during this awful period I'd
awake from a feverish semi-sleep, dizzy, faint and nauseous, with my face a
deathly yellowy pale, but each time a single further second of consciousness
seemed beyond me I felt the Lord breathing life back into me and the terror of
dying subsided. All I could do was lie around, waiting, praying for a return to
normality...and when this came, I determined never to drink again as long as I
lived. But we swiftly forget our sojourns in Hell...
Chapter Eight: A Final Distant Clarion Cry
The Twilight of an Actor
A few months after appearing in Jim Cartwright’s bitter-sweet two-hander
“Two”, I performed in one final play at the Rose and Crown theatre, the
character-driven comedy “Lovelives”. Written entirely by the cast, it consisted
of a series of sketches centring on the disastrous antics of a group of singletons
who'd come together at a lonely hearts club in the suburbs. Perhaps then it
chimed perfectly with the spirit of British post-war comedy and its
characteristic celebration of banality and even failure. A great success at the
R&C, it could in my view have been developed into a television play or even
series, but sadly, as is all too often the case, a brilliant cast dispersed after the
final show.
Later in '95, I played two small roles in a production at the Tristan Bates
theatre near Leicester Square of the famous Greek tragedy "Iphigeneia in
Taurois", written by Euripides somewhere between 414 and 412 BC, these
being Pylades, constant companion of the main character Orestes, and the
Messenger, who I played as a maniacal fool with the kind of "refined" English
accent once supposedly affected by policemen and non-commissioned officers.
Directed by a close friend, the houses were sparse at first, picking up towards
the end of the run.
A few months later in January '96, I joined a Christian theatre company based
at the Elim Pentecostal church in West Croydon, Surrey called Street Level,
going on to serve variously as MC, script writer, actor, singer and musician
with two other members, married company leader Sally, and 19 year old
Esther from nearby Sanderstead.
Together, we toured a series of shows around schools in various - usually
tough - multicultural areas of South East London. One of these, “Choices”, was
almost entirely written by me, although it had been based on an idea by Sally
who also heavily edited it for performance purposes. On the whole, the kids
were incredibly receptive to our productions, and we were greeted by them
with an almost uniform affection, and there was an incredible chemistry
between Sally, Esther and myself...and then things started to go wrong.
Towards the end of the summer, Sally asked me to write a large scale project
for the group, suggesting a contemporary version of John Bunyan’s classic
Christian allegory "The Pilgrim’s Progress". This I set about doing, and after
some weeks of labouring over what turned out to be an unwieldy and often
violent epic marked by scenes of the blackest humour, I started to have second
thoughts about carrying on with Street Level. The play, "Paul Grim's
Progress", had left me in a bad way, and I didn't fancy too many more of the
long and costly train journeys that were necessary to get me to Croydon and
back. Consequently I began to withdraw, which wasn't a very kind thing to do
because Sally had started to depend on me, especially since Esther’s departure
at the end of the “Choices” tour. What's more, she’d taken on the
responsibility of new productions, and the training of a fresh crew of young
Christian actors.
As things turned out, "Paul Grim's Progress" was never produced, which is
not surprising because although artistically it was a good piece, it was overly
dark for a Christian play, with some scenes like something out of a horror
movie. In terms of my Christian life, I was still only a little over three years
old, and it showed. In time I destroyed all but a few pages of it.
By the time I made my final exit from Street Level, I'd long defected from
Cornerstone to the Thames Vineyard Christian Fellowship, part of the
Association of Vineyard Churches founded by John Wimber in the 1970s. This
was as a result of being told by a phone friend that the Vineyard movement
contained members whose spiritual gifts were in the realm of the truly
exceptional. My curiosity aroused, I went along one Sunday evening and had a
powerful experience which made me want to stay; and so I did.
As with Cornerstone I joined a Home Fellowship group where I completed
part of the Alpha course, which had been pioneered by Nicky Gumbel of West
London's famous Holy Trinity Brompton. I'd visited HTB at some point in the
mid '90s, when it was at the height of the revival movement known as the
Toronto Blessing. This was so called because it'd been ignited in January 1994
at the Toronto Airport Vineyard Church by St. Louis Vineyard pastor Randy
Clark, who'd himself received it from South African evangelist Rodney
Howard Brown during a service at Rhema Bible Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma,
then pastored by Kenneth Hagin Jr., father of the Word of Faith movement.
Word Faith being now one of the major strains of Charismatic Christianity,
with its emphasis on "Positive Confession".
The Anointing spread to the UK in the summer of 1994 where it was
eventually dubbed The Toronto Blessing by The Daily Telegraph. Its main
centres included HTB, Terry Virgo's New Frontiers family of churches and
Gerald Coates' Pioneer People. Pioneer's centre at the time was a cinema in
the Surrey suburb of Esher, which I visited a couple of times, and which was
so packed that I was forced to stand all throughout the service, a situation
which was duplicated when I dropped in at the London HQ of the Universal
Church of the Kingdom of God one afternoon around about the same time.
Like many Charismatic churches, UCKG upholds the Fivefold ministry, and so
believes that the five gifts referred to in Ephesians 4:11, namely Apostle,
Prophet, Evangelist, Pastor and Teacher, are still in operation.
My last hurrah as an actor came in the spring of '98, when I started
rehearsing for a production of Shakespeare’s infamous Scottish Play, to be
staged at Fulham’s Lost Theatre in the summer. And despite the fact that my
three cameos - as Lennox, the Doctor, and an Old Man - were praised by cast
and audience members alike, I’ve not acted since beyond a handful of ill-fated
auditions. What's more, while I’m still open to the possibility of film or TV
work, the likelihood of my ever appearing onstage in a play again is virtually
nonexistent. Quite simply, the passion to perform in front of a live audience
that raged within me like a forest fire for more than two decades has long been
extinguished, or rather turned to dread.
Some months after my final performance at the Lost Theatre I wrote the
prose piece that eventually turned into “Such a Short Space of Time”. Its
creation took place in what I recall as the glorious summer of 1999 which was
of course the last of the millennium, and my parents were on vacation at the
time, so I was often at the house where I’d spent my adolescence and young
manhood, performing a variety of tasks such as watering my mother’s flowers,
or just simply soaking up the atmosphere of a place I loved.
Taking sneaky advantage of my parents’ absence I transferred some of my old
vinyl records onto cassette, something that my own ancient hi-fi was incapable
of doing. It was an unsettling experience...to listen to songs that, perhaps in
the cases of some of them, I’d not heard for ten or fifteen years, or more, and
which evoked with a heartrending intensity a time in my life when I was filled
to the brim with sheer youthful joy of life and undiluted hope for the future.
Yet as I did so, it seemed to me that it was only very recently that I’d first
heard them, despite the colossal changes that’d taken place since, not just in
my own life but those of my entire generation. And so I was confronted at once
with the devastating transience of human life, and the effect the passage of
time exerts on us all.
Such a Short Space of Time
I love…not just those…
I knew back then,
But those…
Who were young
Back then,
But who’ve since
Come to grief, who…
Having soared so high,
Found the
Consequent descent
Too dreadful to bear,
With my past itself,
Which was only
Yesterday,
No…even less time…
A moment ago,
And when I play
Records from 1975,
Soul records,
Glam records,
Progressive records,
Twenty years melt away
Into nothingness…
What is a twenty-year period?
Little more than
A blink of an eye…
How could
Such a short space
Of time
Cause such devastation?
Dispersals and Beginnings
A few months later and the troubled, turbulent 20th Century gave way to the
21st to the sound of fireworks frantically exploding all throughout my
neighbourhood.
Phoning my father that night to wish him a happy new year I discovered that
my mother was desperately ill with flu. It’s crossed my mind since that she
may have become susceptible to the flu virus partly as a result of stress caused
by the fact that I’d latterly quit yet another course; this time an MA in French
and Theory of Literature from University College, London, which was one of
the most prestigious of its kind in the world. In time though, her incredible
Scots-Irish constitution - shared by so many of the early pioneers of the
American South and West - saw her through to a complete recovery.
I'd found the course magnetically compelling on an intellectual level, despite
an awareness that writing extensively about Literary Theory might come
increasingly to disturb me, and perhaps even challenge my faith, given its
emphasis on what is known as Deconstruction, a term coined by French
philosopher Jacques Derrida. I withdrew on the advice of one or two members
of the church I was attending at the time, Liberty Christian Centre, a satellite
of the Kensington Temple, another London church which had been receptive
to the Anointing as well as the subsequent Brownsville Revival, and part of the
Elim Pentecostal movement. It's a decision that's haunted me ever
since...although its rightness was recently corroborated by an American pastor
whose sermons are among the most brilliant I've ever heard.
Subsequent to making it I started playing guitar for Liberty at the urging of
my friend Marina, Russian wife of Pastor Louis of New York City. She went on
to become worship leader, alternating as such with Martha, another close
friend, originally from Peru. It was Louis who’d got in touch with me the
previous summer through KT about joining a cell group at his home in the
Surrey suburbs. This eventually mutated into Liberty, with which I forged very
close ties from the outset. Then, shortly after agreeing to be Liberty's lone
musician, I quit my position as a telephone canvasser for an e-commerce
company based in Surbiton, Surrey, thus bringing a fairly lengthy period spent
as an office worker to an end.
A real change in my professional fortunes came around Christmastime when I
was made lead singer for Nuages, a Jazz band named after the instrumental by
the great French Gypsy Swing guitarist Django Reinhard, which had earlier
been formed by Barrie, an old friend of my father's going on to be
complemented at various times by my dad, bass player John, and myself. We
went on to cut several very fine demos arranged by Barrie, but they didn't
result in the interest they deserved, given the talent involved.
In early '01, Pastor Louis decided to dissolve Liberty, which was a sad event
for all of us, so I made yet another return to Cornerstone, to be joined there by
Martha and a couple of other friends from the LCC. What's more, I stayed in
close touch with gifted guitarist Paul. We cut a few demos together of some
Christian songs I'd written at the inspiration of a visitor from KT, and may
work together again yet. Around about the same time, while working as a
door-to-door leafleter, I took a short computer course at my local adult
education centre, but nothing came of it in terms of employment.
The following summer, in the wake of the 2002 Shelton Arts Festival, Nuages
disbanded, which was a real shame because we'd finally found the audience
we’d been searching for all along at the festival, evidenced by the passion with
which our first performance there was greeted. The day after our final show, I
started working from home making appointments for a travelling salesman,
and was briefly very successful at it, until things started tailing off in the
autumn and I was let go. By this time I'd effectively left Cornerstone for good,
although I have returned a few times since. This sudden exit came in
consequence of a desire born of intensive internet research to seek out
churches existing beyond the Pentecostal/Charismatic fold, these being
Cessationist, which is to say they don't accept that the more spectacular Gifts
of the Holy Spirit such as Tongues and Prophecy are still in operation. Up
until then, any church that didn't encourage the speaking in other tongues I'd
not recognised as being truly Christian. That is not the case today.
One of my main inspirations during this period of wandering was the
Cessationist Sermon Audio website, and I downloaded so many of their
sermons that my computer may've crashed as a result. I was also inspired by
the many online Discernment Ministries, although not all of these were - or
are - Cessationist, and among the churches I visited were Bethel Baptist
Church (Wimbledon), Christ Church (Teddington) and Duke Street Church,
(Richmond), all located in the pleasant and affluent outer suburbs of south
west London.
Bethel is an Independent Fundamentalist Baptist church based on the US
model and therefore using the King James Version of the Bible only. I went to
three possibly successive services at Bethel, and fully intended to return for a
fourth and so witness the preaching of Sermon Audio favourite David Cloud of
Way of Life Ministries, but never did. What happened was that I was held up
at Wimbledon British Rail station for over an hour on my final Sunday at
Bethel and this may've put me off travelling by train to church, although I was
also tiring of the constant new boy status of the inveterate church-hopper.
Christ Church is part of the Free Church of England which separated from the
established C of E in 1844 in response to the High Church Anglicanism of the
then Bishop of Exeter, Henry Phillpotts. It’s Evangelical, as well as liturgical
and Episcopal, and its member churches adhere to the Doctrines of Grace,
also known as the five points of Calvinism, namely Total Depravity,
Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace, and the
Perseverance of the Saints. According to Calvinism, those who form part of the
Elect have been predestined to final salvation by God, and that no one can
come to saving faith through their own free will due to total depravity.
Duke Street is also a Grace (Baptist) church, while Bethel is Free Will. As a
result, many Calvinists would describe it as Arminian, after the Dutch
theologian Jacobus Arminius who emphasized free will and individual
responsibility when it comes to responding to the Gospel. They would not,
however, be entirely accurate in doing so because true Arminians maintain
that salvation can be lost, while most IFB fellowships believe in the doctrine of
Once Saved Always Saved. In short, they are neither Calvinist nor Arminian,
which is an oxymoronic statement to some believers.
For me, all true believers are united by a clear adherence to certain key
doctrines forming the basis of the one true faith without which there can be no
salvation, even when they may be divided by non-saving inessentials, or
secondary truths. For example, while I’m an upholder of baptism by full
immersion, I certainly don’t believe adherents of infant baptism to be heretics,
at least not automatically. On the other hand, I have a real problem with those
who maintain that a person must be baptised in order to be saved, because the
Bible makes it clear that we are saved by faith alone. That said, every Christian
should be baptised by full immersion because God commands it, and God
urges us to keep his commandments. Also, while I believe that Christ's return
will be followed by his establishing a literal thousand year reign on earth,
which makes me a pre-millennialist, a person can insist that Christ won’t
return until after the millennium, or that the millennium lies in the past, and
still be a saved Christian. What are at issue here are justifiable differences in
scriptural interpretation.
Before 2003 which was my year of relentless internet research, I'd known
next to nothing about the finer points of my faith, although I was fairly well
versed in the subject of prophecy thanks to having been introduced to this
early in my Christian life by Spencer and Grace, through various magazines
and books such as “Prophecy Today” and the works of Barry R Smith. I had no
clue as to the meaning of Calvinism or Arminianism, Predestination or
Foreknowledge, Cessationism or Continuationism and so on, but that didn't
affect the state of my soul, in fact, no one is either saved or damned by
believing one or the other of these distinctions, but by faith alone, with true
saving faith producing the fruits of repentance. No Christian has a perfect
knowledge of the truth, but I believe there is unity to be found between
Evangelicals adhering to the fundamentals of the faith irrespective of what
church they choose to worship in, but this can never be achieved at the
expense of compromising the pure Word of God.
Until recently when I became a member of Duke Street, I hadn't been settled
within a church since 2001, which points to a deep inner turbulence that I still
haven't managed to understand...although it may be at least partly
attributable to the fact that I accepted Christ relatively late. After all, the Bible
makes it clear that each person who rejects the sovereignty of the fleshly realm
for Christ’s sake will know incessant tribulation and persecution. Perhaps this
is especially true of repentant Christians who come to faith following a
relatively long period of time within the decadent heart of the world as avid
flunkies of the Flesh. However, as comfort these late converts have a true and
infinitely worthwhile purpose in life. This was something that constantly
escaped me in my youth, for all the fierce, flaming fanaticism of my beliefs and
ideals.
In many ways though I’ve been my own worst enemy. One by one I’ve had to
slay evil habits left over from my pre-Christian existence. In my early days as a
Christian for instance I still entertained a fixation on the occult, albeit from a
Christian perspective. Now I can barely stand to look at pages filled with
occult information and symbols. Most recently I’ve had to address the matter
of my dress, which may not seem very important to some - God looks at the
heart after all - but I disagree. For close on a decade I was more or less
addicted to designer sportswear, and among the objects of my love affair were
shady baseball caps, sweat tops with massive logos, flashy striped trakkie Bs,
and chunky branded trainers...and I wore an ear stud to boot. Some Christians
associate earrings on men with ancient pagan idolatry, and specifically the
notion of being enslaved, and that makes good sense to me. I've recently come
to realise that if a Christian's outer appearance fails to reflect a changed life,
he may be cheating others of the chance of coming to Christ through him. He
will also be cheating himself of respect, and God of potential converts. In
short, I think it’s time I started looking like the Christian I profess to be.
Perhaps then I might actually start acting like a person worthy of the name.
In a general sense the year 2000 turned out to be something of a turning
point for me, not just spiritually, but in terms of my entire personality, which
has become more inward looking, even by the standards of the previous seven
years. Significantly perhaps, the previous year had been the first since I was
about 17 that I faced the world with my hair its natural medium brown after
having dyed it for nearly three decades. What prompted this was not a sudden
loathing for the vanity of the bottle blond, but the fact that the peroxide-based
streaking kits I favoured were causing me to have breathing difficulties. At
first I missed being blond, but in time I came to prefer my natural colour after
years of youthful blond androgyny.
For throughout my twenties and for much of my thirties I remained in a state
of extended adolescence, blond being after all the natural colour of eternal
youth. As a result I took no real responsibility as a man in the true sense of the
word, as leader, provider, protector, etc, opting instead for a variety of
marginal male personas, such as man about town and dandy, Punk agitator,
hellraising libertine, self-destructive genius, shadowy man of learning and so
on ad nauseam. I’ve ditched them all as so much pretentious claptrap.
I've elicited a lot of admiration in my time for attempting to take the romantic
bohemian rebel existence to its logical conclusion when all around me were
conforming at a furious rate, and perhaps still do. But the price for doing so
has been high, in terms of social and financial humiliation, for which I've no
one to blame but myself. If I thought they'd listen I'd tell the young...listen to
your parents, not the voices of fashionable rebellion...because they're trying to
protect you from social failure out of knowledge of how painful this is beyond
a certain age.
Young people still worship at the altar of romantic rebellion as they've done
since time immemorial, but perhaps not to the same degree as my own poor
generation. We came to maturity to a frenetic Rock soundtrack in the tailspinning nineteen sixties, and who can say what effect it had on us, this
music...tailor-made to inspire a generation scornful of deferred gratification, a
generation of hipsters.
However, Rock was far more than another mere music form…being a total art
involving poetry, theatre, fashion, but even more than that…a way of life with
a strong spiritual foundation. It could be said that its first true ancestor was
the great 19th Century artistic and cultural movement known as Romanticism,
which reached a climax with Nietzsche who by declaring God's death, cleared
the way for the eventual rule of a Do Your Own Thing philosophy so dear to
the heart of Rock and Roll culture. Of course, nothing is new under the sun,
but a strong case can be made for Romanticism as having birthed the notion
of the artist as tormented genius at the vanguard of social revolution and
eternally defiant of middle class restraint and respectability.
The March of the Modern
Tracing the history of the artist as rebel...it was the great English Romantic
poet Percy Bysshe Shelley who may've been the first to give expression to the
notion of an artistic avant-garde by asserting that “Poets are the
unacknowledged legislators of the world”.
Then, in the post-Napoleonic Paris of the early 1830s, a seminal avant garde
emerged. They were the Jeunes-France, a band of young Romantic writers
allegedly dubbed the Bousingos by the press following a night of riotous
boozing on the part of some of their number. Their leading lights, among them
a fiery Theophile Gautier decades before he became an establishment darling,
cultivated dandified and eccentric personas intended to shock the bourgeoisie,
while inclining to political radicalism. Needless to say perhaps, they owed a
great debt to the earlier English and German Romantics, as well as previous
generations of dandies, such as the Muscadins and Incroyables of the dying
days of the Revolution. They were the Rock and Roll bad boys of their day.
The first Bohemian wave eventually produced the Decadents, and the great
Symbolist movement in the arts, both of which came into being around 1880,
notably in Paris, where the so-called Decadent Spirit was born, whose most
infamous fruit could be said to have been the novel “Against the Grain”, an
account of the sensation-seeking existence of a reclusive aristocrat Jean des
Esseintes by Joris Karl Huysmans.
In general though the 19th Century was assailed by a succession of inspired
works from the pens of Romantic rebels, each more ferociously avant-garde
than the one coming before, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Jarry and
especially Nietzsche, among them. Falling under the latter's spell since his
death in 1900 have been politicians, writers, psychologists, Rock stars,
anarchists, and many of the philosophers whose works have formed the basis
of the literary Theory that currently dominates Western academia. In short his
influence over the development of the modern Western soul has been
incalculable, perhaps greater than any other philosopher or artist.
However, the avant-garde spirit truly exploded on an international scale with
the Modernist movement in the arts, which was at its level of maximum
intensity from about 1890 to 1930. This extraordinary period birthed such
masterpieces of innovation as Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” (1913), T.S
Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (1922), James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (1922), as well as
dozens of revolutionary art movements including Expressionism, Futurism,
Dada and Surrealism, as well as Serialism in music, and the ascent of Jazz
which together with the moving picture industry formed the bedrock of
popular Modernism, or pop culture. Although Jazz was ultimately supplanted
by its wayward spawn, Rock and Roll, also a son of the Blues.
One possible definition of Modernism in an artistic sense is the avant-garde
removed from its spiritual home of Paris and then transformed into an
international movement of cataclysmic power and influence. In terms of the
Modern as a cultural phenomenon, on the other hand, some critics trace its
roots to the so-called Enlightenment of the 18th Century, which produced
great defiance of God on the part of lofty Reason, and so for them, Modernism
is a precursor of the avant-garde, rather than a spirit that arose out of it.
Others go even further back into the depths of Western history for its origins,
to the Renaissance and its revival of Classical Antiquity. What is certain
though is that the contemporary West has reached the very limits of the
Modern Revolution, and one of the results of its having done so as I see it is
the mass acceptance of revolutionary beliefs once seen as the preserve of the
avant-garde; especially with regard to traditional Christian morality.
This process could be said to have accelerated to breakneck speed around
1955-‘56, when both the Beat Movement and the new Pop music of Rock ’n’
Roll were starting to make strong inroads into the mainstream. Some ten
years after this, there was a further frenetic increase in momentum as Pop
began to lose its initial sheen of innocence, and so perhaps evolve into the
more diverse music of Rock. This coincided with the growth of the Hippie
counterculture.
The eclectic art of Rock went on to run the gamut from the most infantile pop
ditties to complex compositions influenced variously by Classical music, Jazz,
Folk, and other pre-Rock music forms, and so become an international
language disseminating values traditionally seen as morally unconventional as
no other artistic movement before it. As a result, certain Rock artists attained
through popular consumer culture a degree of influence that previous
generations of innovative artists operating within the bounds of high culture
could only dream of.
A Final Distant Clarion Cry
I fell under the influence of various Fundamentalist Christian critics of Rock
music for a brief period in 2003, which made me feel inclined to destroy all
traces of Rock music in my possession, even though I’d long lost any real taste
for Hard Rock by then, whether in the shape of Metal, Punk, Goth, Grunge or
whatever. However, by the summer of 2003 my attitude had mellowed to the
extent that I felt able to write about an hour’s worth of Rock songs in response
to a request from my dad for songs for a possible collaboration with the son of
a close friend, but these were as far from Hard Rock as it’s possible to be,
being influenced by such relatively benign and melodic genres as Folk, Pop
and Soul.
The songs, some new, some upgrades of old tunes, were recorded on a Sony
CFS-B21L cassette-corder, which I think has been discontinued, and were
generally well-received despite having been crudely recorded. Pat even went
so far as to suggest that I record them properly in a studio, which was a high
compliment indeed, given that unlike me, he’s a trained musician who’s been
a professional since the age of 9, where I’m just a primitive with an ear for a
catchy tune.
A year or so later a project was mooted by Pat which involved the recording of
a popular standards album featuring myself and harmonica genius James
Hughes as well as his own London Swingtette. In spring 2008, the CD was
finally released with the title “A Taste of Summer Wine”, due to the fact that
Jim’s playing had long been featured on the much loved situation comedy
“Last of the Summer Wine”, including the theme by Ronnie Hazelhurst, and
Pat had served as leader for the show for some time. A year on, and the
writing project “Rescue of a Rock and Roll Child” looks set to follow suit after
more than three years of labour. It's the first one I’m pretty well 100% sure
won’t end up being shredded or deleted.
As I've stated elsewhere, soon after becoming a Christian I destroyed most of
what I’d written up until that point, and then wrote quite happily for a time as
a Christian, until it seems that God called a halt to my literary activities. It was
as if I was being saturated with an almost tangible leaden darkness which took
me over to the extent of altering the expression in my eyes.
Once again I started destroying any writings I managed to finish, sometimes
dumping whole manuscripts in handy dustbins or one sheet after the other
down murky London drains. This went on until about 1998 when I more or
less gave up creative writing altogether, which is a good job given that these
early Christian writings reflected a continuing preoccupation with subjects
that’d held me spellbound prior to my conversion such as mysticism and the
occult, which were being glorified through me despite a false warning tone.
This I strongly believe. What's more, some of my writings mixed truth and
fiction to produce a pointless and deceptive hybrid.
Finally, in January 2006, I believe God made it clear that I was mature
enough to be able to write again, and so I started tentatively publishing pieces
at the Blogster website with the first autobiographical one being written
sometime around the spring of 2006. As things stand, I'm desperately trying
to put the finishing touches to the memoir that evolved out of them, in
fact, since 2006, I've done very little except write, so there's really not much to
say by way of wrapping things up.
What I will say is that shortly before last Christmas I was accepted as a
member at Duke Street Church, which made me very proud, and filled with
gratitude towards those who supervised my application.
Around about the same time, I was informed that Margaret my one-time
mentor at Westfield College had died aged 84 in her adopted village of
Woodstock, Oxfordshire. The executor of her will, Christine, who was also the
publisher of her final book, "Proust et ses Contemporains" in 2006, asked me
to read one of the lessons at her funeral and deliver a eulogy in the capacity of
a former student. This took place in the parish church of St Martin's in the
beautiful village of Bladon, where Winston Churchill is buried, which is
significant given that Margaret was one of the founding members of the
Churchill Centre and had written on the great man's relationship with the
Christian faith. His parents and children and other members of his family are
also buried in St Martin's Church, Bladon.
I discovered through Christine and her friend and co-executor Polly that
Margaret had been born in 1924 as an only child of working class parents in
Lancashire, but had gone on to gain a place at Oxford University, before
becoming a lecturer there and then at Westfield. What an ascent...from
humble northern roots to a lectureship at the most hallowed place of learning
in history...little wonder she was so fragile, almost febrile as a person, but so
kind, so single-minded in her devotion to those who shared her passionate
view of art and life.
It was such a sad experience for me to be reunited with Margaret after nearly
a quarter of a century while being unable to communicate. It made me realise
how important it is to stay close to friends and family, because there comes a
time when it is no longer possible to reconcile with them. It's too late; they've
gone; and the world is always so much the poorer for their sudden absence
and silence.
What else have I done since 2006? How have I spent my time? As I
mentioned earlier, much of it has been devoted to writing, but I also
sporadically seek out work, both artistic and otherwise. I recently acquired a
good many friends at the enormously popular Face Book social networking
site, most from my Guildhall and Westfield days, which was a source of great
joy to me. My reclusive body may have become sluggish through the
melancholy brought by age and vicissitude, but I've a heart that teems with
affection for the friends of my past.
In terms of my online life, every so often I find myself immersed in a
labyrinthine search for information related to a subject that has me briefly in
its thrall. As a result it requires mental processing through a punishing bout of
research and the fervid taking of notes. The most recent topics to beset me
were the nature of the giants of Genesis 6:4, and the spread of pagan religion
following the destruction of the Tower of Babel when God confused the
languages, and I couldn't wait to be free of them. As a general rule I'm most
content when at peace with my faith, and least while lost in an endless quest
for cyber-knowledge with one page linking incessantly to the other until
information overload becomes a serious threat. From time to time, however,
I'm tempted to venture beyond my comfort zone into the mysteries of the
Bible and history. It's hard for the intellectually curious to resist doing this,
and according to the Bible, knowledge shall increase (Daniel 12:4) in the time
before the Second Coming of Christ, and this may well be via the miraculous
medium of the World Wide Web.
There's really not a whole lot left to add to this particular piece of writing.
Some months ago, I started work on a second volume of memoirs, this one
being woefully inadequate as a full account of my existence, although quite
successful as an undercoat. That said, whether future layers will ever actually
be applied to it remains to be seen. It may just be that writing will be sidelined
in the same way that music has since 2006, but then that's highly unlikely.
Writing is something I've wanted to do since I was about 17, and now that I'm
finally able to bare my soul to the world thanks to the miraculous
magnificence of the internet, the chances of my lapsing into cyber-obscurity
are pretty slim.
In conclusion, for anyone still interested, I'll be resuming work on my second
autobiographical volume as soon as I'm done with the "Rescue"...and I do
hope there is...someone who's persevered this far I mean. After all, it's not just
about me; this is a testimony more than anything else. And one that's now at
an end.