by Adam Buxton
My parents came to see the play and afterwards Dad, worried that I was in the process of becoming a monster, gently urinated on my parade. ‘You were good, old boy, but for God’s sake, don’t get any ideas about going into acting.’
‘Why can’t he?’ said Mum.
‘It’s just a terribly hard life,’ replied my pa, ‘fraught with sadness and disappointment, even if you’re good at it.’ (Oddly enough, that was exactly what Mum said about being gay when the subject came up a few years later.)
Acting wasn’t the only reason I was enjoying school more. By 1981 I had a best friend: a big, blond, charismatic boy called Tom. Tom was excellent at Latin, sometimes wore a spotty handkerchief like a cravat, claimed he had legally changed his middle name to ‘Apollo’, understood all the jokes in Not the Nine O’Clock News and showed me how to turn a can of Right Guard deodorant into a flame thrower.
Tom was also the first person I knew whose parents were divorced, which added greatly to his mystique. What was more, Tom’s mum was cool and weird and hooked him up with non-regulation Day-Glo socks (extremely ace), a T-shirt with Mickey Mouse’s head exploding (a bit much) and a load of Fat Freddy’s Cat and Freak Brothers comics (totally mystifying). Tom also shared my growing enthusiasm for music.
Throughout the whole of 1981 I knew and liked nearly every song in the Top 40 and was always one of the people crowded round the school TV to watch Top of the Pops at 7.20 p.m. on a Thursday. Particular favourites included Adam and the Ants, Madness, Toyah, Kim Wilde, The Human League, Altered Images, Soft Cell, The Teardrop Explodes, The Specials, Ultravox, OMD and, yes, Joe Dolce.
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RAMBLE
Joe Dolce’s comedy song ‘Shaddap You Face’, about the things his Italian mother would say to him as a boy, was a worldwide hit in early 1981 and was Number One in the UK charts for three weeks, famously preventing the epic ‘Vienna’ by Ultravox from reaching the top spot. I loved ‘Vienna’ and would play air syndrums whenever the mysterious video (imagine Fellini making a perfume commercial) was played on TV, but I didn’t have a problem with ‘Shaddap You Face’ being Number One, because I like funny songs. It made me laugh when the mother in the song would say to her little boy, ‘Why you look-a so sad? / It’s-a not so bad!’ only to immediately become impatient and say, ‘Ah shaddap-a you face!’ But laughter in music, as in so many other art forms, is dismissed as ephemeral and cheap, even when it comes with a very amusing Italian accent.
* * *
At home, my musical ally was my mum, then aged 42. She had been a Beatles fan as a young woman and as we drove back to boarding school on a Sunday night she was happy to make the transition from Disney cassettes to Radio 1’s Top 40 countdown. Dad, meanwhile, was 58 and regarded pop music as proof that society was in a state of collapse and would soon be extinguished.
One Sunday, in an effort to indulge me and my sister before we were dropped back at The Reformatory, Dad reluctantly switched off Wagner and let us listen to the Top 40. One of the new entries that week was ‘New Life’ by Depeche Mode, and within a few bars it was speaking to me on a very clear line, the way that ‘Cars’ by Gary Numan had done a year or two previously when I’d heard it on a jukebox while on holiday in Greece. Songs like these used a language of cool sounds to tell me that instead of wrestling with difficult emotions the ideal thing would be to behave like a robot from the future.
As ‘New Life’ played on the car radio I leaned forward for a better dose of boingy, synthy Depeche Mode goodness and to my surprise Dad suddenly started singing along as he drove. Wobbling his head from side to side, he screwed up his face and whined derisively: ‘Operay-ting, generay-ting, nyooo loyfe. Nyooo loyfe.’ It took a few moments before I realised Dad was taking the piss out of Depeche Mode as if he were a child in a playground. He practically spat when he was finished.
Part of me was crushed that he didn’t like it, but another part of me was impressed that he could come down to my level of juvenility. It didn’t make me think any less of the song. When Dad unleashed his impression of whiny Dave Gahan (pronounced ‘Garn’), it was one of the first times I remember thinking, ‘OK, I love you, but I think you’re wrong about this.’
Yes, the vocals are weedy and the melody is basic, but ‘New Life’ is operating (and generating!) on its own terms and exceeding targets in all departments. The sounds are harsh and inorganic compared with the warm tones of classical instruments, and Dave Gahan cannot sing like Ella Fitzgerald or Kiri Te Kanawa (my dad’s favourites, along with jolly old Wagner), but if he could sing like Ella he’d be doing different songs. For an oblique three-minute futuristic musical cyborg drama, you need reedy, emotionless Basildon vocals and burbling machine pulses delivered from a collection of circuits by a grumpy-looking midwife in a leather jacket – congratulations, Mr and Mrs Mode, it’s a hit!
It’s taken me 40 years to formulate that brilliant defence, and even if I’d been able to convey it to Dad back in 1981, I don’t suppose it would have changed his opinion of ‘New Life’. Instead, I just stared out of the car window and continued to fantasise about being a robot.
Tom’s Library
I could never get excited about superhero comics. I thought they tried too hard to be cool and funny and didn’t do an especially good job at either. I preferred Asterix and Tintin, especially the intensely trippy Tintin adventure The Shooting Star with the giant spider, exploding mushrooms and the end of the world. Later I went through a phase of thinking Charlie Brown and Garfield were clever and hilarious, and I loved the film spoofs in MAD magazine, though I found the drawings much funnier than the dialogue. Then Tom turned up at school with some books that raised the bar considerably.
In addition to his impenetrable stoner comics and Not the Nine O’Clock News book, Tom allowed me and the other straights to pore over his big coffee-table tomes of sci-fi and fantasy art by airbrush wizards like Roger Dean and Chris Foss, as well as a collection of classic record-sleeve art called The Album Cover Album, which I studied for hours, admiring the surreal imagery, the cool typography and the see-through underwear of the women on the cover of Country Life by Roxy Music. But the most in-demand items in Tom’s subversive library were The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist and Alien (The Illustrated Story).
The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist (or ‘Fo-eb Zeet-Geest’ as Tom and I mispronounced it) is still one of the odder things I’ve ever stumbled across. Phoebe is a beautiful, posh young woman who, entirely nude throughout the book, is kidnapped and rescued by assorted monsters and weirdos including Nazis, Chinese foot fetishists and lesbian assassins. I’ve since read that the series was intended to satirise the way female characters were treated in certain erotic comics of the 1960s, but that sailed way over my top bunk aged 11. Mainly I just couldn’t believe there was a comic in which the hero was a beautiful naked woman. Yes, she would occasionally kick ass, but I think if I told my daughter that Phoebe Zeit-Geist was a fable of female empowerment, she’d give me only the shortest bit of shrift.
Alien (The Illustrated Story) represented the only way 11-year-old Buckles was going to see any actual images relating to a film that loomed large in the dark, backlit corridors of my imagination. All I had seen of it was the creepy egg poster and a clip on Film 80 one night, which my mum switched off when she saw me watching from the doorway in my PJs. It seemed clear to me that this was a film so appallingly terrifying that if I was to watch it before I was at least 30, I would instantly lose my mind and spend the rest of my life wearing a straitjacket and rocking back and forth in a padded room (which is what mental illness was like in the 1980s).
Someone in a senior dorm had a copy of Alan Dean Foster’s novelisation of Alien and I had broken my ‘No Reading for Fun’ rule in order to verify the rumours that the film contained a scene in which a monster ripped its way out of a man’s tummy. Once I’d located the relevant paragraph, I wandered from dorm to dorm before lights out, reading aloud the chest-bursting description to anyone who was interes
ted, not so much to freak them out as to deal with my own fearful preoccupation by sharing it.
The arrival of Alien (The Illustrated Story) rendered my wandering audiobook minstrel skills instantly redundant, and little groups formed round Tom’s bunk to gaze at the spectacular full-colour, double-page illustration of what appeared to be a big snake with incredible abs and two big sets of teeth erupting from a man’s chest ‘in a scarlet shower of flesh and blood’. Most of Tom’s library was confiscated within in a few days, but by then it was too late; I had resolved that one day, though it would almost certainly undo me, I would see Alien.
Alien poster design from 12-year-old A. Buckles. Not having seen the film at that point, I decided instead of a nobbly egg, what the poster needed was incredible 3D lettering, a spaceship that looks like a Yorkie bar and a big angry snake fish.
The Crystal Set
In 1981 the two things I wanted most in the world were an Atari 2600 video games console and a Walkman. My dad felt that buying me either of those things would have the same effect on my development as shooting me full of heroin. He still clung to the hope that his eldest son might be moulded into a person who appreciated books, the natural world and the company of other humans, rather than becoming just another dull-eyed consumer drone, obsessed with gadgets that would isolate him from anything real or important (he would have loved being a parent these days).
Dad’s idea of a compromise was to give me a crystal radio set for my twelfth birthday. This was an inexpensive piece of kit consisting of a couple of bits of wire, three tiny electronic components, a little plastic dial and a single flesh-coloured earpiece that, when assembled, could pick up faint AM radio signals. It required no external power and no batteries, which made Dad happy, as he hated how much batteries cost and would become apoplectic if he ever came across a battery-operated gadget that had been left switched on. Not a problem with the crystal radio set.
I knew there was no way I was getting the Atari, but I was so disappointed that my parents hadn’t got me a tape player or even a real radio that I just shoved the crystal set under my bed, unopened. Then one incredibly boring and depressing Sunday afternoon I got it out and put it together.
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RAMBLE
It’s hard to communicate to anyone born in the Internet Age just how dull, bordering on physically painful a Sunday in England could be at the end of the 1970s and early Eighties, even in central London. In deference to Jesus, anything that might provoke even the mildest excitement was off the menu.
Everything was closed – literally everything – and TV (by some way the most powerful domestic entertainment device in those days) was neutered by televised church services and current affairs programmes.
Sub-Ramble
I would sometimes watch the Sunday-afternoon political interview programme Weekend World, presented by Brian Walden, not because I relished Walden’s crackling exchanges with the politicians of the day, but because I loved the theme tune – a short blast of supercharged rock that preoccupied me partly because I assumed I would never be able to identify it.
Thirty years later I googled ‘Weekend World theme tune’ and that tantalising childhood mystery was gone in six seconds – it turned out to be a section from a song called ‘Nantucket Sleighride’, a long, otherwise tedious track by Mountain. Yay! The Internet!
Nowadays any hint of boredom can be treated instantly with a couple of clicks that will deliver punching, kicking, special powers and space lasers, but when I was little, the only time anything that exciting found its way into your home was Christmas, and in those days Christmas took an eternity to come round.
One Sunday afternoon, Dad found me with my face inches from the thick, curvy glass of the boob tube, trying to make out patterns in the static as if I were Carol Anne in Poltergeist. Remember static? The Digital Revolution got rid of that before the Internet, Wi-Fi and portable screens banished boredom forever.
Now, the dream I dreamt as a child of an entertainment ubiquity has come true, but I’m too old to celebrate it. I’m just some old fart who thinks we threw boredom out with the bathwater before realising how valuable it was, not just philosophically but physiologically. Did you know, for example, that when we become bored our brains release a protein-rich neuro-balm that not only mends broken synaptic pathways, it also forms new ones vital for creative thought? OK, so I made that up, but it sort of sounds right, doesn’t it?
* * *
I assembled the components of my crystal radio set on the plastic base provided and after a few hours of fiddling I got a faint blast of white noise through the earpiece. Then, turning the dial in tiny increments, I started to hear voices and music. It was thrilling, as if I had made contact with aliens from a distant galaxy where they also had middle-of-the-road music and annoying radio adverts.
We weren’t allowed electronics at boarding school; they were worried expensive gadgets might cause feelings of envy and resentment or get stolen. Nevertheless, some children lucky enough to own radios or tape players smuggled them into school where, sure enough, they caused envy and resentment and got stolen. I decided the chances of someone stealing my crystal radio set were very low, though, so the following term, having installed a false bottom in my tuck box, I sneaked it in.
For a while I got into a routine of lying in my bunk after lights out and surfing the airwaves, slowly and softly, finding the clearest signal coming from a station that identified itself as Radio Luxembourg – The Great 208. A DJ called Stuart Henry would play all my favourite songs from the Top 40 at the time: ‘Bedsitter’ by Soft Cell, ‘Spirits in the Material World’ by The Police, ‘Joan of Arc’ by OMD and, one night, a song I didn’t know. A stripped-down electronic song that pulsed and twinkled urgently, stirring the emotions despite a vocal that sounded bored and detached. ‘At last!’ I thought. ‘The apotheosis of all my romantic robot dreams!’
For the next few weeks I listened to Radio Luxembourg at the same time every night, hoping to hear the song again, until one night they played it, and rather than going immediately into another song, the DJ announced, ‘The sound of Kraftwerk there. Their name is German for “power station” and that’s a number from a few years ago called “The Model” that’s been reissued on a double A-side with their song “Computer Love”.’
I bought the single (my first) for 99p from WH Smith’s on the Earl’s Court Road, with a record token I got for Christmas that year. Most people’s first singles are mildly embarrassing – something naff by a children’s cartoon character or a DJ who turned out to be a sexual predator – but for once my taste was impeccable, and I suppose that’s partly thanks to Dad and the crystal set.
Alison
There were certain weekends during term time when no one was allowed out of school, and activities were organised to prevent 350 students aged 9 to 13 going maximum Lord of the Flies. One summer weekend, Tom and I were the only boys to sign up for the senior disco-dancing class. Our plan was not to take the class seriously and to disrupt the efforts of the girls to learn dance routines for music we did not respect: ‘Super Trouper’ by ABBA (boring), ‘This Ole House’ by Shakin’ Stevens (sad) or ‘Making Your Mind Up’ by Bucks Fizz (mega chronic).
The poster for the disco-dancing class said ‘Dress cool’, so Tom suggested we wear T-shirts underneath Sunday-best suit jackets that we turned inside out to reveal the shiny inner lining. A tie worn round the forehead like a bandana completed a look that was more than just cool, it said: ‘Watch out, because these two 11-year-old guys don’t give a solo fuck and are going to take the absolute piss out of your pathetic girly disco.’ Then we arrived at the gym.
Groups of girls, mainly from our year, who previously we’d considered annoying if we’d considered them at all, were now ranged before us in silver leggings, hot pants, pedal pushers, leg warmers, tank tops, deely boppers, lipstick, eye shadow and glitter. (One of the advantages of boarding school, depending on your perspective, was that at moments like these ther
e were no parents around to say, ‘You are NOT going out dressed like that!’) Tom and I, responding obediently to our monkey-boy/patriarchal programming, were instantly beguiled and decided to abort our piss-taking mission.
We were too young to be struggling with any desires more powerful than simply to flirt and make a few of the girls laugh, but to the extent we were able to do so, both of these produced an unfamiliar surge of excitement. My attention quickly focused on one girl I’d never spoken to before, though I’d seen her and her pals around and always found them vaguely irritating. In homage to the Pink Ladies from their favourite film Grease, they would often pretend to chew gum (real gum was contraband) and make belittling comments about passers-by in American accents. It was infuriating but also sort of funny.
To my mind the funniest, cheekiest and prettiest one of the Pink Ladies was called Alison, and unless I was greatly mistaken, as we struck heroic poses for our first dance routine – ‘Prince Charming’ by Adam and the Ants – Alison was smiling at me. Or possibly laughing at me. But even if she was, I felt for the first time that ridicule (or, as Adam Ant would have it, ‘rid-di-kewl’) was nothing to be scared of.
* * *
RAMBLE
Before I was a full-time Bowie bore, I loved Adam and the Ants. Most of us did. Their album Kings of the Wild Frontier was always playing in the senior common room and every track was catchy and fun to sing along with despite being quite odd, like a lot of chart music in the early Eighties. When they played ‘Antmusic’ at a school disco, I pulled away from the wallflowers and danced along for the first time, thinking, ‘So this is the point of discos!’
More importantly, Adam Ant was called Adam (which is also my name), and he was handsome and pretty at the same time (again, check!), but best of all, he was known to be short (5 foot 6 – the same height I am now). For some reason Dad’s reassurances that I was ‘taller than Napoleon and Genghis Khan’ didn’t stop me fretting about my height when I was young, and finding out that Adam Ant was a fellow short man provided genuine comfort. You can imagine how excited I was when I saw my first Danny DeVito film.