Copyright
Published by Little, Brown
ISBN: 978-1-408-71047-0
Copyright © 2018 Brett Anderson
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
Little, Brown
Little, Brown Book Group
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
www.littlebrown.co.uk
www.hachette.co.uk
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
For Lucian
FOREWORD
This is a book about failure. It’s a book about poverty and family and friendship and the scruffy wonders of youth and, inevitably, it’s a book about love and it’s a book about loss. The very last thing I wanted to write was the usual ‘coke and gold discs’ memoir with which we’ve all become so familiar so any success in the story is implied. I’ve limited this strictly to the early years, before anyone really knew or really cared, and so the decision to end it at the point where I have, when we were all still starry-eyed and guileless, was utterly vital in order to achieve any sense of tone. I’ve always loved art and artists that find a place and have the discipline to stay in it; from Never Mind The Bollocks to Music For Airports, from Bruegel to Warhol, I’ve never seen repetition of themes as being a weakness, merely as essential in establishing identity. Anyway, the bloody-mindedness quite appeals to me. To stray beyond and to keep my voice fresh and void of cliché would have been impossible, and right now I have no desire to rake over those days again.
This then is a kind of prehistory; when all that I can bring to the second half of the story is a fresh perspective, here I am hopefully unearthing something new, hunched over the fossils of my past as it were. But sometimes it seems, looking back can be just as valuable as looking forward – learning from the person you were, often in the sense of how not to do things, but occasionally glimpsing those moments of wonder to which youth alone is often privy. For years I avoided writing anything, preferring the veil of silence and mystery to the inherent sense of exhibitionism contained within any such process, but for some reason I now feel an urgent need to impart. I suppose I have come to a stage in my life where I want to try to come to terms with who I am, and exploring my past on my own terms like this is a way to try to achieve that.
It’s interesting how writing it has made me ponder the broader concept of truth. Regardless of how valiantly you try to be faithful to the facts it will always only be from one point of view. Fascinatingly, though, others around you might see things differently or even see things the same way but choose to interpret them differently, so it’s important to understand that there is no such thing as absolute truth, just perspectives. Certainly, writing it has been a wrenching experience, and revisiting those distant corridors has at each point plunged me magically back, reliving the feelings: the breathless shivers of love, the crushing pain of loss and death, and forming the words for some of the chapters has been hard and at times pushed me to tears. Reading it through, there are moments where I come across as mawkish and cloying, or clingy and weak, and I see myself for the sometimes callow, anxious soul that I probably was and possibly still sometimes am, but I think at least it’s honest. We stumble through life leaving an embarrassing, sticky trail, and it’s often only at times of reflection like this that we realise quite what a mess we sometimes made.
There are things about ushering this out into the world that scare me, of course. I can’t say I’m looking forward to any gossip that might follow, and there’s a natural fear when you expose yourself so nakedly, but effectively I’ve been doing that for years. Strangely, I am less concerned about the reaction from those who have read this than the reaction from those who haven’t; it’s the misleading, ill-informed assumptions that I’m slightly dreading. I’ve learned over the years that no matter how carefully you tread around some subjects they will always push their way to the front like bullies and hog the headlines, denying the finer points the oxygen of publicity. It’s this disparity that I suppose I will have to accept with good grace as just an unfortunate part of the process. Given these misgivings, you might ask yourself why I’m bothering, and I have asked myself the same question many times, but if you will bear with me I will be wending my way towards some sort of explanation. It has, of course, stirred up feelings that I have denied myself for years and has inevitably fed into my current thread of song-writing, and for that alone it has been worth it. The last two albums I have written have both been very much about family and the sense of lineage with which parenthood imbues you, and those ruminations have led me to want to take this process to the obvious conclusion. At the time of writing this, I have no book deal and no real knowledge whether anyone will be particularly interested in publishing this as it is. There’s an old musician’s interview cliché that worthy but unimaginative band members trot out about how they just make music for themselves and if anyone else is interested then that’s just a bonus. I’ll adapt that by saying that I’m writing this specifically for one person – my son – and if anyone else is interested then that’s a bonus. When he’s old enough, which may indeed be when I am no longer around, at least he’ll have this to add a little bit of truth to the story of who his dad was and the passions and privations he lived through, and ultimately where we both came from. I think about my own father a lot, and now that he’s gone often mull over the real person he was; teasing out little fragments of memory and picking out the bones of truth from the carcass of characterisation for which I’m probably slightly guilty. If I had a document like this to read about him and his life, I would treasure it, so hopefully when my son is curious and eventually ready, he might one day pick this up and know that his father loved and lost and fought and felt, and hopefully that will mean something to him.
1
I was born just after the first Summer of Love in the very room in which my father died thirty-eight years later. It was my parents’ bedroom. She was a would-be painter who made money sewing underpriced dresses for local, well-heeled but parsimonious ladies, and he was a postman at the time, later to become a swimming pool attendant, ice-cream man, window cleaner and eventually a taxi driver. Theirs was a world of lino and pregnancy tests, hired furniture and rent collectors; a country mile from the swinging sixties Carnaby Street cliché, and more akin to the joyless grey of post-war Britain than the popular Technicolor myth. The room was in one of those poky, claustrophobic, low-rise council houses – you know the type; they pepper the tatty parts of suburbia and the nation’s drab dormitory towns, cramped and pebble-dashed, exiled to the outskirts, ignored and forever driven by.
Ours was the house right at the edge of the estate in a place called Lindfield, a village perched just outside and swallowed up by Haywards Heath; an anonymous commuter town, a drab, dreary little train stop somewhere between London and Brighton. It was a place where, beyond the torrid kitchen-sink dramas of everyday lower-middle-class life, nothing ever really happened and probably nothing ever really will.
My parents chose the house because they thought it would be nice to raise their kids next to a wood, as indeed
it was but a few yards away beyond a graffitied, corrugated iron fence, and sat like a threat at the bottom of the concrete road was the local tip. At the weekend people would turn up to throw away their broken appliances and household detritus. It was a sea of rust and white enamel, a tangle of discarded furniture and springs and perished tyres and dried-up paint pots. To the local kids it was, of course, a wonderful and frightening playground, a source of constant fascination and danger. We would clamber over the rubble and mess around with the smashed-up mopeds and seized-up bicycle chains, unaware of the lurking dangers as we played in the skips with mercury from broken thermometers. Once, a small scuppered rowing boat appeared and became the centrepiece of our fevered games for a whole summer, until it was eventually vandalised and left to the cruel entropy of the elements. The area is a nature reserve now, and I sometimes wonder if the dog walkers and picnicking ramblers know about the rusting graveyard beneath their Wellingtoned feet.
The house was small. Very small. Before my father died, I would return there for dutiful Christmas visits and would always be shocked by its almost toy-like scale. I had a sister, too, the lovely Blandine, named after the daughter of the Romantic Hungarian composer Franz Liszt. My dad, Peter, had named my sister, so it was thankfully left up to Sandra, my mum, to name me. For this I’m eternally grateful, as due to either coincidence or judgement I was born on the very date of Horatio Nelson’s birthday, one of my father’s heroes and a key member of his ‘Big Three’ – an exclusive private club of idols that also housed Winston Churchill and the aforementioned Liszt. In later years, I remember my dad buying an enormous naval ensign Union Jack flag, which was almost as big as the house, and hoisting it up a makeshift flag-pole fixed to the wall of our tiny council house on each of their birthdays. Family lore tells me that terrifyingly I was millimetres away from being named Horatio but, according to my father, my mother named me after the actor Jeremy Brett, with some mutterings that it was also a nod to Roger Moore’s character, Lord Brett Sinclair, from The Persuaders – perhaps some subconscious harbinger for future events.
So there were four of us cramped within the brick and breeze-block rooms of this cheap little chip-board house: Blandine, in her dank north-facing bedroom; my mum and dad, penned into their cramped conjugal enclave; and me, perched at the edge of the house in a sunny box-room just about large enough to contain my child’s single bed and a few threadbare toys – a knitted woollen guardsman called Soldier, a grey mouse called Mouse and a horrible furry thing that I used to put up my nose called Tivvy, which my parents had got from some offer in the TV Times. My art college-educated mother painted clouds on the ceiling of my room, and I would lie there gazing at them, listening to the gentle sough of the traffic outside while my parents’ rows erupted and stormed a few feet away in the next room.
I was a nervous, twitchy, anxious child, prone to bouts of insomnia and lonely, terrified hours awake staring at the grotesque faces that the folds at the top of the curtains seemed to make. Once the sun rose, I would wait for everyone else to wake up, staring for ages from my window at a pair of trees growing near the abandoned mushroom factory at the bottom of our road. One I called The Mouse and the other I called The Clown, and I would gaze transfixed as they swayed and billowed, seemingly locked in their immutable dispute, buoyed and buffeted by the eddies and currents of the high wind.
In many ways my upbringing was extremely normal, but at the same time strangely atypical in a way as I felt like we never really fitted in. Officially we lived in a quaint Sussex village but our house was somewhere the tourists never visited; nestled in a scruffy estate on the outskirts and hidden well away from the chocolate-box fantasy world of the high street. We were dirt poor, existing in penury in a cheap council house, but my parents filled it with trappings more akin to the lives of upper-middle-class Hampstead intellectuals. Mum’s paintings were everywhere; she devoted her entire modest career to detailing the gently rolling Sussex countryside, and the walls would be full of her beautiful watercolour landscapes and intricately observed natural studies. Where her own work was absent she hung prints of Hendrick Avercamp, Vincent Van Gogh and Aubrey Beardsley. She had decorated the whole place with strong colours – midnight blues, William Morris wallpapers and her own rich velvet homemade curtains in the windows. And everywhere, of course, was the deafening torrent of my father’s classical music: Wagner, Berlioz, Elgar, Chopin and the ubiquitous, inescapable Liszt. My own musical education must have been formed in this turbulent crucible, forged by the Ring Cycle and Hungarian Rhapsody, hammered into shape like Brünnhilde’s breastplate by dark brooding musical landscapes and towering epic melodies. My dad would stand there wearing his slippers, his skinny little hairy legs poking out of his red silk dressing-gown, ‘conducting’ with his baton, lost in a delicious solipsism while his old Phillips reel-to-reel spooled on and on and the rest of us sat cowed and mute in the kitchen.
His was an obsession to end obsessions; he talked about Liszt in reverential, quasi-religious tones and even flirted with the idea of ‘taking his minor orders’ in homage to Liszt’s later journey of faith – a preposterous idea given his status as a confirmed atheist. He was once called up for jury service, and after a two-week hiatus returned to reveal that when asked to swear on the Bible he had refused and demanded instead to do so on a biography of Franz Liszt; something, he said, he really believed in.
In the black and white years of the sixties he cruised around Haywards Heath on an old BSA bike with a sidecar clamped on, in which my mother would anxiously crouch and perch, fearful of any damage to her hair-do. As the family grew he acquired a three-wheeled Robin Reliant, the Sinclair C5 of its day, drivable with a motorcycle licence: a brittle fibreglass shell on wheels offering nominal protection and little dignity. By the time I arrived he drove us all around in a tatty, racing-green Morris Traveller, which was so decrepit that in September little mushrooms would grow from the rotten wooden side-frames. My sister and I would rattle around, seatbelt-less on the back seat, singing Abba songs. The car would vibrate worryingly when we drove at any speed on the motorway, and if you looked closely you could see the road rushing by through little fissures in the floor pan. Unbelievably, every couple of years my father would manage to drive it all the way to Raiding in Austria on a pilgrimage to Liszt’s birthplace, where he would take a small sample of soil from the ground to wear in a phial around his neck.
Living under my father’s roof involved picking your way through a complex wilderness of seemingly pointless rules. He once wryly described his only indulgences in life as being ‘an ounce of tobacco and a copy of the Radio Times’, which he would jealously guard with a Gollum-like grip. Woe betide anyone who removed it from its special tartan holder, or got to it before he could schedule his listening pleasure with a series of Biroed circles, or even more transgressively took it from its home under the small wickerwork stool where he liked to place his feet while puffing and wheezing endlessly on his ever-present briar pipe. There were other rules about the proper time to eat plums and the ‘correct’ way to tie a tie, which on reflection don’t quite translate, but at the time seemed narrow and petty, always betraying a sense that he was desperately trying to wrest control over the moving pieces of his world.
He was born into a military family and brought up in a depressing Haywards Heath council estate called Bentswood: an enclave of identical, boxy, nineteen thirties houses cloyed with alcoholism and violence and failure, the smell of stale sherry and dog food and the wintery fug of three-bar fires. My grandparents’ house was littered with military memorabilia like Kukri knives, ornamental ammunition shells and trinkets from India where their family had been stationed for the first few years of my father’s life. His mother was a frail, high-cheek-boned, bird-like woman, timid and browbeaten, and her husband, my dad’s own father, was an abusive, hard-drinking soldier who seemed to care for little else but Khan, his enormous black Labrador, and who eventually threw his own son out of the house because Peter fina
lly managed to stand up to him, unable to inure himself to the storm of invidious drunken brutality with which my grandfather ruled his pebble-dashed fiefdom. This upbringing left my dad with a legacy of absolute physical pacifism towards me, but in his murkier moments Larkin’s gloomy prophecy of familial inheritance expressed itself in subtler ways. The dank claustrophobia of our doll’s house was often paralleled by my father’s capricious moods – the charming, crumpled eccentric supplanted by a brooding bully, the climate thick with tension and threat. His was a generation that simply wasn’t given the tools to control and address its inner ghosts. My father’s black dog slowly gnawed away and eventually killed him; a pernicious chain of events leading him towards isolation and depression and haemorrhage.
I must have some distant Scottish heritage, obviously, because of our surname, but also because my grandfather was a drummer and bagpipe player in the marching band of the Royal Scots Fusiliers. He was a distant, formal-looking, old-fashioned sort of man with combed-back, oily, Macassared hair and a ravaged drinker’s face, who bizarrely was one of the few people you will ever hear about who died twice. After a series of unforgivable violent, drunken episodes his marriage finally crumbled and he staggered off to stay with old army friends or sleep at doss houses. The truth is sketchy but he seems to have drifted into a cycle of homelessness and extreme alcoholism, so no one was surprised when sometime in the nineties, after a long period of estrangement and rumours of nights spent on park benches, we were told that he had died – news to which my father seemed to react with a strange indifference. At least ten years later, however, he received a phone call from some institution asking if he would contribute to his father’s funeral. It transpired that he had actually been alive all that time: drifting and drinking and spiralling further downwards. My dad was never able to forgive him for his reign of domestic terror and harboured such bitter hatred towards him that, despite the shock, he refused to contribute.
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