The Rotters' Club

by Jonathan Coe

  What happens to people like Harding, I wonder? Do they sign away their senses of humour with their first mortgage payment and turn into quantity surveyors? I lost touch with him as soon as we left school—we all did—so probably I’ll never know. I never worked out why he was like that, either: what motivated him. I was going to say that his only pleasure in life was to make people laugh, but maybe that wasn’t the point. Perhaps he was really doing it for himself. He liked to shock people, to find out how far he could go, and the kick was probably in seeing how other people reacted. The delirious outrage he used to provoke. Political correctness hadn’t been invented then, and increasingly, as we all got older, his comedy observed no boundaries, no standards of taste. It began to seem that the whole idea was simply to offend as many people as possible: boys, teachers, it didn’t matter.

  There’s one time in particular that sticks in my mind. About eighteen months before that other story. It was November, 1976, to be precise, two days before bonfire night. It would have been a Wednesday afternoon because that was when the Senior Debating Society used to meet. This was the time they were going to stage a mock version of the next day’s by-election, and Harding had volunteered to speak for the National Front.

  People forget about the 1970s. They think it was all about wide collars and glam rock, and they get nostalgic about Fawlty Towers and kids’ TV programmes, and they forget the ungodly strangeness of it, the weird things that were happening all the time. They remember that the unions had real power in those days but they forget how people reacted: all those cranks and military types who talked about forming private armies to restore order and protect property when the rule of law broke down. They forget about the Ugandan Asian refugees who arrived at Heathrow in 1972, and how it made people say that Enoch had been right in the late sixties when he warned about rivers of blood, how his rhetoric echoed down the years, right down to a drunken comment Eric Clapton made on stage at the Birmingham Odeon in 1976. They forget that in those days, the National Front sometimes looked like a force to be reckoned with.

  This particular by-election was a local affair, being held a few miles away in Walsall, and it had been prompted by the antics of another of the 1970s’ more colourful figures: John Stonehouse, the former Labour MP who had disappeared in Florida in November, 1974, was apprehended by the police in Melbourne a month later, and finally, after lengthy legal proceedings, received a prison sentence of seven years on twenty-one charges of fraud, conspiracy, theft and forgery totalling £170,000. (They did things properly back then.) His sentence was handed down during that fateful hot summer of 1976, when Britain had to appoint a minister for drought and Eric made his unfortunate remark at the Birmingham Odeon and we were all busy gearing ourselves up for life in the sixth form. The by-election was held on November 4th and it was the day before that that the Debating Society staged its own version.

  My memories of the occasion are blurred, obviously. I know that the music school concert-hall was packed out, and I was standing at the back with my friends Benjamin and Philip. Nice enough kids, despite having hippie-ish tendencies. At this stage in their lives it was an uphill struggle to get them to talk about anything except the band they were endlessly on the point of forming. A couple of years before, along with Harding, we had made up an inseparable foursome. Those loyalties were now beginning to fracture, slowly; but we were all still intrigued by him, and curious to know what kind of performance he was planning to lay on for us today.

  When he got up to speak, after the other three candidates had collectively bored us to tears, the first thing we noticed was that Harding had managed, somehow, to transform his physical appearance. He shambled on to the stage, crook-backed, bow-legged, his eyes glaring sullenly around him with a mixture of venom and settled disappointment at the world’s stupidity. He appeared to have aged about sixty years. I think the idea was to produce a parody of A. K. Chesterton, an unfamiliar figure to most of us, although the fact that he had been the NF’s leader for a few years was just the sort of thing Harding would make it his business to know. The rules of the debate stipulated that the candidates write their own speeches, but Harding ignored this, and reaching awkwardly into his blazer pocket with those palsied, old man’s hands, he produced what was clearly one of the Front’s own printed leaflets. All he did, from that point on, was to read it aloud.

  The reaction he got was probably the last that he—or indeed I—would have expected. The heckling died down and soon an astonished hush fell upon the audience. If nothing else, we learned that day that there is, in the language of pure racism, a kind of malign talismanic potency. Some of those phrases lodged in my memory and are still there, a quarter of a century later, like burn marks on the unconscious. He talked about “droves of dark-skinned sub-racials,” “race-degeneration,” “the lie of racial equality” and the threat to our “Nordic birthright of freedom.” After less than half a minute of this stuff Steve Richards, the only black kid in the school (nicknamed “Rastus,” in case you were wondering), walked out of the concert-hall, hot with pent-up fury. Harding noticed but it didn’t stop him. He started talking about “the maws of doom.” If the government didn’t abandon its policies of racial tolerance, he was saying, that’s where we would find ourselves. “The maws of doom!” he kept repeating. “The very maws of doom!” It became so absurd that a few people did start laughing, nervously. It became just about possible to regard the whole thing as an elaborate pisstake. But some of us were beginning to feel that Harding’s humour, if that’s what it was, was taking us to some pretty strange places lately.

  He got six votes, by the way: more than five per cent of the total. Not bad, but the NF candidate in the actual by-election did much better. We were a friendly lot, in the West Midlands, back in 1976.

  The following day I was privileged, if that’s the word, to attend the first and, as it turned out, only rehearsal of Philip and Benjamin’s band.

  I should reiterate, at this point: the 1970s was a very strange era. Music is another example. You wouldn’t believe the stuff that people—clever people, too, for the most part—used to listen to with a straight face on their dads’ music centres or in their student bedsits back then. There was a band called Focus— Dutch, I think they were—whose keyboard player used to break off from hammering away at his Moog synthesizer to start yodelling into the microphone. There was a band called Gryphon who used to call a sudden halt in the middle of some rock’n’roll riff, whip out their recorders and crumhorns, and launch into a spot of medieval riddle-me-ree. And the grand-daddy of them all, of course, was Rick Wakeman, with his monstrous concept albums about Henry VIII and King Arthur—one of which, I seem to remember, he presented as a live ice-skating spectacular at Wembley Stadium. Peculiar times.

  If this sort of music was your thing, there was one book that was bound to be weighing down the Army and Navy Stores rucksack you carried into school with you every morning. My reference, of course, is to J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Needless to say, this was Philip’s favourite reading matter and this fact was reflected in the series of names which he’d attempted to inflict, over the last few weeks, on his unfortunate musical colleagues. Lothlorien was one of them. There was also Mithril, Minas Tirith and Isildur’s Bane. In the end, though, they managed to surpass themselves and settled for the silly name to end all silly names. They called themselves “Gandalf’s Pikestaff.”

  Philip and Benjamin had somehow managed to dredge up a trio of would-be collaborators for that first rehearsal, and I’ve never seen anxiety written so eloquently on three faces as when Philip started handing out the chord sheets to the first song, which must have extended to at least fourteen pages. They were covered with dwarfish runes, Gothic calligraphy and Roger Dean-style illustrations of dragons and busty elfin maidens in various stages of provocative undress.

  “What’s this?” said the drummer, apprehensively.

  Philip explained that his first composition was to be a rock symphony in fi
ve movements, totalling some thirty-two minutes in length (i.e. even longer than “Supper’s Ready” from the Genesis album Foxtrot), and narrating the entire history of the universe from the moment of creation up until roughly, as far as I could make out, the resignation of Harold Wilson in 1976. The title of this catchy little number, destined to be a surefire hit in the soul clubs of Wigan, was “Apotheosis of the Necromancer.”

  Well, they gave it their best shot, I’ll allow them that. For about five minutes, anyway. But Philip had chosen the wrong moment, historically, to make his personal bid for progressive rock superstardom. This was late in 1976, remember? Word was beginning to filter through, even in a cultural no-man’s-land like Birmingham, of a new kind of music that was springing up in places like London and Manchester. Names like The Damned and The Clash and, of course, The Sex Pistols were beginning to be whispered around. It was the glorious rebirth of the two-minute single. No more guitar solos. Concept albums were out. Mellotrons were verboten. It was the dawn of punk or, as Tony Parsons more accurately called it, dole-queue rock. And even my upper-middle-class schoolchums were beginning to catch on.

  It was the drummer who sounded the first note of rebellion. After tinkling away on his ride cymbal for what must have seemed an eternity, as part of an extended instrumental passage that was meant to evoke the idea of zillions of far-off galaxies springing into life, he suddenly announced, “Fuck this for a game of soldiers,” and started to lay down a ferocious backbeat in 4/4. Recognizing his cue, the guitarist whacked up his volume and embarked upon a riotous three-chord thrash over which the lead vocalist, an aggressive little character called Stubbs, began to improvise what the charitable might describe as a melody. Now here’s an interesting thing. He was singing the first words that came into his head, probably, but what do you suppose they were? Bizarrely, it was that stupid phrase from Harding’s fascist speech the day before. “The maws!” he was screaming. “The maws! The very maws of doom!” Over and over, like an incantation, as the music got more and more frantic and Philip ran to the front, waving them to stop this hideous racket, and then, when they just ignored him, standing and watching with his arms folded, until Benjamin joined him, and put his arm around his shoulders, and they both just stood there on the sidelines, watching it crumble, this project which had taken them years to put together. There was a fire in Stubbs’s eyes, at that moment: a kind of demonic exhilaration, fuelled by sheer, unpolluted delight in trashing something, kicking something over. That was how our school’s first punk band was born, and that was their name, from then on, The Maws of Doom, and although it was funny watching it happen like that, I felt sad as well, sad for Philip, sad for the dream that had so quickly fallen to pieces around him.

  It wasn’t really until the next evening, though, that I knew exactly how he must have felt.

  It was Guy Fawkes’ night, and there was a massive bonfire being lit in Cofton Park. A thin crowd of people gathered, rockets were sent flying into the Longbridge sky, and sparklers were passed around. I spotted Benjamin and his family soon enough, but was wary of making contact. There was a problem between his dad and mine. Mine was a shop steward, Benjamin’s was management. Both worked at the Leyland factory. They said hello to each other, eventually, and there was some kind of edgy conversation. Benjamin’s dad was in a good mood because of the by-election result. The Tories had won, with a massive swing. The biggest swing since the War, we were being told. The signs had been stacking up all year and now there was no escaping it: the Callaghan government was finished, even if they could last out their current term. The Labour majority was wiped out, Denis Healey was going to the IMF begging for money and you could just feel public confidence ebbing away. This result proved it. Meanwhile, waiting in the wings was a new breed of Tory and these people meant business. Their rhetoric was fierce: it was anti-welfare, anti-community, anti-consensus. In a couple of years, maybe less, they were going to be in power and they were going to be there for a long time.

  Benjamin had a little brother whose name was . . . well, perhaps I shouldn’t tell you that. He might not thank me for it, these days. He was a few years below us at school, but we all knew him. You couldn’t miss him, actually. There was something strange, something freakish about this boy. He was wise— or at least intelligent—way beyond his years. He was a Midwich Cuckoo, and he scared the shit out of us. When it came to politics, I didn’t know what his views were, but he was bound to have them. He had views about everything. Anyway, that night, I found out.

  “Hey—Duggie! Duggie! Duggie!” He came running up to me, sparkler in hand. I felt like sticking one on him, the cheeky bastard. Nobody called me Duggie.

  He held the sparkler up in front of my face and said, “Wait. Wait.”

  I was already waiting. What else was there to do?

  “Here you are,” he said. “Look! What’s this?”

  At that precise moment, his sparkler fizzled out. I didn’t say anything, so he supplied the answer himself. “The death of the socialist dream,” he said.

  He giggled like a little maniac, and stared at me for a second or two before running off, and in that time I saw exactly the same thing I’d seen in Stubbs’s eyes the day before. The same triumphalism, the same excitement, not because something new was being created, but because something was being destroyed. I thought about Philip and his stupid rock symphony and I swear that my eyes pricked with tears. This ludicrous attempt to squeeze the history of countless millennia into half an hour’s worth of crappy riffs and chord changes suddenly seemed no more Quixotic than all the things my dad and his colleagues had been working towards for so long. A national health service, free to everyone who needed it. Redistribution of wealth through taxation. Equality of opportunity. Beautiful ideas, Dad, noble aspirations, just as there was the kernel of something beautiful in Philip’s musical hodge-podge. But it was never going to happen. If there had ever been a time when it might have happened, that time was slipping away. The moment had passed. Goodbye to all that.

  Easy to be clever with hindsight, I know, but I was right, wasn’t I? Look back on that night from the perspective of now, the closing weeks of the closing century of our second millennium— if the calendar of some esoteric and fast-disappearing religious sect counts for anything any more—and you have to admit that I was right. And so was Benjamin’s brother, the little bastard, with his sparkler and his horrible grin and that nasty gleam of incipient victory in his twelve-year-old eyes. Goodbye to all that, he was saying. He’d worked it out already. He knew what the future held in store.

  After that, anyway, I didn’t hang around at the bonfire for much longer. It was nearly eight o’clock, which meant The New Avengers on ATV. Joanna Lumley would soon be running around the countryside in some skimpy outfit, and I wasn’t going to miss it just for the sake of a few Catherine Wheels. You had to take your pleasures where you could, in those days.

  7

  THE BILL BOARD

  Thursday, 9 December, 1976

  THEATRE SPECIAL

  As the Senior Drama Soc goes into dress rehearsals for its Christmas production of “Othello,” we bring you exclusive interviews with the two leading players.

  Steve Richards as OTHELLO

  Interview by Doug Anderton

  “I see him as a noble man, a man of courage and action, but he has this fatal weakness which is that he has a bit of an ego on him. And that’s where Iago is able to move in and do his bit of mischief.”

  This down-to-earth but insightful reading of one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragic heroes is typical of the fresh perspective being brought to the role by Steve Richards of the lower science sixth.

  Already well known as the undisputed star of both the rugby First XV and the cricket First XI, Steve is a newcomer to the world of back-stage tantrums and first-night nerves. But is he enjoying the experience so far?

  “It’s been fantastic,” he grins. “The rest of the cast are a great gang, and despite the heaviness of the drama, w
e’ve been having a real laugh most of the time. You know, at first I was daunted by the challenge of this part. I’d read ‘Othello’ when I was doing O-levels and I knew there was a real mountain to climb there, for any actor. But I like to drive myself. I like to push myself. That’s how you get the best out of yourself and that’s what I reckon this school is all about, isn’t it?”