Ramble Book

by Adam Buxton

  The experience of being initially indifferent to Bowie’s records, then finding myself drawn in when I was more familiar with them, was one that repeated itself with each of his Seventies albums, though the transition always took me by surprise.

  During the Easter holidays I managed to set aside my disappointment with Bowie’s potty mouth and borrowed my sister’s cassettes of Aladdin Sane and Diamond Dogs. It didn’t take me long to realise I’d been wrong to be so uptight about ‘Time’. Though the ‘wanking/ whore’ line still rankled, I found myself caught up in the grandiose emotional sweep of the song and was similarly taken with the title track, ‘Aladdin Sane’, with its dreamlike verses paving the way for the maddest and best genre-melting piano freak-out I’d ever heard. I’d play the song to people and when the piano solo started I’d nod sagely and say, ‘That’s Roy Bittan. Bruce Springsteen’s piano player. Pretty good, eh?’ But it wasn’t Roy Bittan. Mike Garson played piano on ‘Aladdin Sane’. Roy Bittan played on ‘Station to Station’ – a piece of information I’d read in David Bowie: An Illustrated Record but hadn’t properly processed because I was busy Bowie-ogling the pictures.

  Diamond Dogs took longer to appreciate, but once I was in, I was in deep, especially during the ‘Sweet Thing’ section, which initially I had dismissed as ‘pretentious’, a word I’d recently learned and tended to use about anything I found too emotional or arty. Once I’d been swept away by ‘Sweet Thing’, rather than re-examine my definition of the word, I concluded that actually I rather liked things that were pretentious.

  I wished Let’s Dance had been a lot more pretentious. It was the first new music Bowie had released since I’d become a serious fan, and whereas listening to his older albums felt like being part of a pretentious underground club (i.e. excellent), seeing the videos for ‘Let’s Dance’ and ‘China Girl’ on Top of the Pops left me feeling sort of betrayed. Though he looked lovely with his bleached hair and olive skin, maybe he was a bit too handsome now and a bit too ordinary, like the music, which sounded altogether too keen to be popular. If I was the kind of person that crapped on about people selling out, I would have said he’d sold out.

  At least he looked cool in the ‘Let’s Dance’ and ‘China Girl’ promos, but when I saw the deeply unpretentious performance video for ‘Modern Love’, filmed on the Serious Moonlight Tour, my heart sank. Seeing his yellow suit and bouffant hair, my first impression was of a big vanilla ice-cream cone from a van that did equally unpretentious hot dogs and burgers, both of which had probably sold out as well.

  I didn’t buy the album when it came out, but Mum got me the cassette for my fourteenth birthday and I discovered that the rest of the songs were as unappealing as I’d feared. There were the big slamming drums that I liked so much less than the robot percussion used by my favourite electronic bands, the squealing, honking horns that had none of the hazy warmth of ‘Changes’ or ‘Fill Your Heart’ and there was Stevie Ray Vaughan’s big macho guitar, which just reminded me of boring old-man bands. And what the shit was Bowie doing with that Welsh accent on ‘Ricochet’, a song that appeared to be trying to deal with the subject of Britain’s three million unemployed by having a groovy street party? Nope, I wasn’t having any of it.

  As usual, a few weeks later, I was having nearly all of it, and though Let’s Dance occupied a space far less personal than those Seventies records, it made me happy every time I heard one of the singles blasting out in public that summer.

  Towards the end of the year, Bowie’s performance in Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, in which he played a Second World War POW at a Japanese internment camp in Java, fleetingly raised the prospect of bringing my dad into the Bowie fold. Laurens van der Post, who had written The Seed and the Sower, the book on which the film was based, was one of Dad’s literary heroes and, he claimed, a friend. I suggested to Dad that he join me and my sister on a trip to see Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence at the Fulham ABC, but he said he was too busy. It would have been fun to see what he made of peroxide-blond Bowie defiantly munching flowers, saying, ‘What a funny face, beautiful eyes, though,’ to Takeshi Kitano and, as punishment for kissing Ryuichi Sakamoto on both cheeks, getting buried up to his neck in the sand until his lips got badly chapped and he died.

  I suppose there’s a good chance Dad would not have enjoyed it, but my sister and I did and came out even more in love with Bowie than we had been before. Mum gave Clare the soundtrack for Christmas, unaware that it was by Ryuichi Sakamoto, not Bowie, and I got into that, too, finding it superbly pretentious and enjoying it almost as much as the albums Mum had given me: Synchronicity by The Police and The Essential Jean-Michel Jarre.

  CHAPTER 10

  BROMPTON, UNFOLDED

  I have a folding bike. A pink Brompton. I’m aware that being a middle-aged man with a beard and a Brompton marks me out as a wanker for some people, but I don’t care. If you think convenience, comfort and a commitment to reducing my carbon footprint to save this beautiful planet is wankerish, well, I guess I’m just a massive wanker.

  One day I wheel my Brompton down to the end of Platform 9 at King’s Cross and get on the front carriage of the 14.12 to Cambridge (if I’m in the front carriage, it’ll be a shorter walk to Platform 5 at Cambridge to get the Norwich connection). The train isn’t busy and it’s direct, so after I’ve boarded I lean the Brompton, unfolded, against the doors on the opposite side. I always do this if I’m travelling at this time of day, knowing that when we’re pulling into Cambridge I’ll rejoin the bike and swiftly wheel it off the train when the doors open, rather than waste time folding and unfolding at either end.

  Then I take a seat, put on my headphones and zone out for 45 minutes.

  I look up when we’re approaching Cambridge to see that on this occasion several people have walked through the train in order to exit from the front carriage, which doesn’t usually happen at this time (it’s only just gone 3 p.m.). Probably the knock-on effect of cancellations. Now there’s four or five people all eager to be among the first to disembark at Cambridge and they’re standing round my unfolded bike as it leans against the exit doors.

  A couple of them exchange looks of contemptuous irritation when they see me stand up in my stylish high-vis jacket and Day-Glo yellow helmet. To me, the neon yellows and the bright pink of my bike frame say ‘PUNK’. At this moment, however, I suspect they suggest another four-letter word to my fellow commuters.

  I try to make my way over to the bike, but a large man with raincoat and briefcase is unwilling to step aside. He wants to teach me a lesson about selfishness. His hair is close-cropped and a fold of bristly skin sits in a muffin top above the back of his collar. ‘Excuse me,’ I say cheerily and edge past him to get to my Brompton.

  The man closest to the door, standing directly over my bike, is in his late thirties with backpack, jeans, chewing gum, headphones, greying hair, and a somewhat ratty aspect. He shoots me a disgusted look. I return his gaze with low-level defiance. He holds it.

  ‘Shame it doesn’t fold up,’ he says, looking down at my bike.

  ‘Oh, it does,’ I reply.

  ‘Why don’t you fold it up then?’

  ‘Because this train makes only one stop, so I knew it wouldn’t be blocking anyone’s exit.’

  ‘It’s blocking mine.’

  ‘When the doors open I’ll get out and you’ll be able to disembark without delay.’ Ratface rolls his eyes.

  My heart is pounding. My breathing is no longer under my control. The muscles in my face are betraying me. ‘People like Ratface,’ I think, ‘are not making the world better.’

  He chews his gum. Exhales mintily. Taps his fingers on the handrail to the music in his headphones.

  Then, for my benefit, he shakes his head slightly. Before I’ve thought better of it, I’ve said, ‘Why do you need to make this a problem?’

  ‘Why do I?’

  ‘Yeah. I’m interested. Why do you feel you need to make something like this into a problem?’

&nbs
p; ‘I’m just making a point, that’s all,’ says RF.

  ‘OK. And were you happy with my response to your point?’ I ask.

  ‘Yeah,’ he drawls, in a way that might not be sarcastic, though we both know it is.

  Tap, tap, tap, go his fingers to the almost certainly shitty music he’s listening to. I will say this for Ratface: he’s doing a much better job of pretending not to be flustered than I am.

  I look around at the other commuters who have been watching this exchange with interest. Judging by the frostiness of their expressions, they’re not on my side.

  I consider their irritation. It’s understandable. I get irritated by people dragging wheelie bags, especially on rough surfaces. I don’t like the noise, but they also take up extra space and they’re gradually destroying historical pavement surfaces in places like Venice.

  The thing is, I’ve thought through my irritation with wheelie bags on several occasions and concluded that it’s not actually reasonable. Wheelie bags may take up more space, but on the whole they allow people to move faster. And cobble erosion is the least of Venice’s problems. So why can’t other people realise that their irritation with me and my foldy bike is similarly unreasonable?

  We pull into Cambridge and the train comes to a stop. Now I must disembark with 100 per cent efficiency to show my fellow passengers that my unfolded bike and I haven’t slowed them down at all, and they’re just miserable arseholes. My hand hovers over the button for the doors as I wait for it to become active.

  It’s a long moment, during which I make a decision.

  I look over at Ratface and say, ‘I’ll make sure I fold it from now on.’ He seems confused. I just handed him victory on a silver tray, and he doesn’t know what to do with it. He goes for a look that says: ‘Whatever, you’re still a wanker with a Brompton.’

  Maybe. But I’m the wanker who got off that train first.

  * * *

  RAMBLE

  A NOTE ON THE MONIKER ‘RATFACE’

  I don’t approve of commenting negatively about a person’s physical appearance. In fact, I think making any comment about the way someone looks is unhelpful, unless you’re describing them for storytelling purposes. I decided to call the man in this story ‘Ratface’ for a few reasons:

  1. Giving him a nickname makes him more of a character.

  2. Giving him a negative nickname conveys my dislike while giving the reader a humorous insight into my own petty defensiveness.

  3. He was a rat-faced twat.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 11

  1984

  I think 1984 was the year I really fell in love with Joe. I was a boarder, as were most of the people I was friendly with, but Joe was a day boy, so for my first few terms at Westminster he seemed slightly spectral, drifting about sardonically during the day before vanishing at the end of school or earlier if he had any skippable lessons in his timetable.

  By 1984 we were in the same classes for English and art, subjects we both enjoyed, and maths, which baffled us both. Rather than try seriously to understand whatever our maths teacher, Dr Barron (aka Dr Boring), was explaining, we sat at the back and drew comics. Joe’s comic was about a flamboyantly camp James Bond-style hero called Hyde Pilchard. Mine was a Hyde Pilchard rip-off filled with tortured puns delivered by a smarmy, square-jawed superhero called Vernon Crazy.

  Occasionally Dr Barron (imagine a less pointy Mr Burns from The Simpsons) would bust us doodling away and lose his shit, but on one occasion he just smiled and said, ‘If only you two put as much effort into your studies as you do into those comics, you could achieve so much.’

  At the end of another lesson Dr Boring called me and Joe over and we braced ourselves for a talking-to about our ongoing doodlism, but instead he presented us with photocopies of some of his own artwork – beautiful, robotically precise line drawings of various Christopher Wren-designed school buildings and Westminster Abbey’s ancient cloisters, through which we trudged to Chapel every other morning. Looking at Dr Boring’s drawings was one of the few times it properly sank in that we went to school in an extraordinary place.

  I’d love to be able to report that from then on Joe and I knuckled down and fell in love with the beautiful magic of mathematics, but it didn’t happen. Just now I had to use the calculator app on my computer to figure out how old my dad would have been in 1984, even though my dad was born in 1924. I’m sorry, Dr Boring.

  As well as our struggles with maths, Joe and I bonded over an aversion to football. We liked to think we were above the ‘beautiful game’ and the grunting, angry monkey boys that got so emotional about it, but perhaps the truth was that, as with maths, we just couldn’t be bothered to make the effort with something we knew we’d never be any good at. Friends of ours who adored football would say that Joe and I were better suited to standing on the sidelines and making snide comments than actually getting involved and being part of a team. Well, that may have been true or maybe we just preferred pastimes that didn’t include incessant angry shouting, casual racism and violence. For any sensitive football fans reading, that last sentence was just a bit of light-hearted football-style banter, so please don’t beat me up next time you’re out yelling at people in a big threatening mob.

  Joe told me that the best way to avoid football was to sign up for ‘Leisure Swimming’. This entailed a walk to the Queen Mother Sports Centre in Pimlico followed by about 20 minutes of sploshing about in the pool along with the other football dodgers, misfits and oddbods. With our weekly dose of physical exercise taken care of, we’d wander over to a café just a few hundred metres from what, a decade later, would become the Channel 4 building on Horseferry Road, and there we each ordered a pack of Salt & Vinegar Chipsticks, a Pyramint and maybe a can of Quatro before sitting down to discuss a variety of important topics: was the new Thompson Twins album Into the Gap even better than Quick Step & Side Kick? Who was the funniest guy in the Police Academy film – the one with the mad voice or the one who did impressions of electrical appliances? What was the secret of the insane creature transformations in American Werewolf in London and The Thing? (Running the film backwards, said Joe.)

  Most of the time, however, the conversation came round to the same question: who in our year was a ‘dude’ and who was a ‘goony bird’?

  Tribes

  By the end of 1984 several groups and wider social tribes had begun to emerge from the mulch of boys in our year, each with their own distinctive hairstyles, musical taste and dress codes. Joe and I formed the core of a little gang of friends who, depending on your perspective, were either cool, fun, creative guys or insufferably smug cunts.

  There was Ben Walden, a horse-racing enthusiast and passionate fan of Billy Bragg whose father was the political TV interviewer Brian Walden, the man who proved to be one of Margaret Thatcher’s most formidable media sparring partners. ‘Your dad does Weekend World? Wow! Do you know who does the theme tune?’ was one of my first questions for Ben.

  Ben’s parents split up when he was little, and Joe and I theorised that growing up in an atmosphere that was sometimes fraught had contributed to a brooding intensity he channelled into his main passion: acting. His George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was a revelation, his Iago in Othello was a triumph and his annoying Italian guy in A Servant of Two Masters was much less annoying than it could have been, so for the next few years Ben – also known by the deliberately inappropriate luvvie nickname ‘Bunny’ (to be said in a gruff cockney accent) – was a crucial part of whatever creative scheme Joe was cooking up and I was tagging along with.

  Mark Sainsbury was one of the Sainsbury’s supermarket family, which initially I found hard to get my head round. ‘So, could you could go into Sainsbury’s and just take whatever you wanted without paying for it?’

  ‘No,’ said Mark.

  ‘So, do you get in trouble if you shop in Tesco?’

  ‘No,’ said Mark.

  ‘So, do you live in a massive house with servants?’
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  ‘Well …’ said Mark.

  Mark’s house (not the London one, but the one in the Hampshire countryside) had columns out the front, so many floors that they had a lift and works of art on the walls that I recognised from books. On one visit when Mark’s parents weren’t there, Joe and I zipped about and, with the greatest care and respect, licked and kissed the surfaces of some of the most famous paintings by artists that included David Hockney and Claude Monet. For anyone interested, Hockney’s paintings have a sweet, tangy taste, but Monet’s too tart to mention.

  Boundlessly gregarious and easy-going, Mark was determined neither to be defined by his family’s wealth nor to pretend it didn’t exist. He threw the best parties and Joe and I were often on hand to help with the party prep, making giant wall hangings by spraying Terry Gilliam-style cartoon faces on old sheets and draping fairy lights as we listened to tape compilations and discussed the guest list. I came to learn that the party prep was often more fun than the party itself.

  Zac Sandler’s superpowers were art, music and comedy. It was he who introduced us to the explosive, deconstructionist strangeness of early Viz comics and constantly made up funny songs that he would serenade us with in Yard between lessons. Wearing an earnest expression, Zac sang peculiar lyrics that would occasionally give way to invented scat phrases, often delivered in a high-pitched yelp: ‘Rooty-shpooty’, ‘Neesa-hooteh’, ‘Tit-a-hooteh’, etc. Zac was also the first of us to draw his own comics, in which he combined his own entertainingly odd outlook with elements of Viz and the sci-fi magazine 2000 AD, which published some of his work a few years later. If our little gang was like Pink Floyd (which, other than the fruity accents, it wasn’t), Zac was our Syd Barrett.