Coal Black Mornings

by Brett Anderson

  I was a snotty, sniffy, slightly maudlin sort of boy raised on Salad Cream and milky tea and cheap meat, always scowling in photographs and a little bit downcast – not nihilistic or depressive really, but definitely glum, and always slightly befuddled. My mother once painted an unintentionally hilarious portrait of me, which I still own, depicting me standing gloomily in a field wearing a blue track suit with my hand poised over a packet of Sainsbury’s salt and vinegar crisps, a sort of jowly, puffy, mournful expression on my face as I gaze disinterestedly into the middle distance. Crisps were one of the few foods I really craved as a child, and I clearly remember a fantasy I would occasionally allow to spool in my head whereby when I was grown up and had enough money I would buy myself a small mountain of them. It’s something I really should do one day just to commune with my ten-year-old self. Like most young children I loved sweets, and when I was a little older would regularly take my 20p weekly pocket money up to an old-fashioned shop in the village called Harold’s and buy a quarter pound of rainbow drops or cough candy: sticky twists of mentholated boiled sugar kept on shelves in big glass jars and scooped out and weighed and placed in plain little white paper bags. Harold himself was a sort of hulking, muttering gargoyle, always faintly irritated that any child would have the temerity to want to hand over their money to him, and the whole shop had an ancient, gloomy calm, like you had somehow just stumbled into the previous century. All that sugar rotted my teeth, of course, which meant that a seemingly large period of my childhood was spent being dragged to the dentist’s in Haywards Heath. For a child of the seventies, the experience of visiting an NHS dentist before modernity had made the whole thing vaguely bearable was truly terrifying, and something I dreaded with a cold, penetrating, almost sickening fear. I would lie stiff and cowering with my mouth clamped open in one of those huge, wipe-clean, pale-green reclining chair things as the dentist jabbed and gouged and poked and drilled while I squeezed at my mother’s hand and tried to make it through the tears and the horrible pain. After the ordeal I would usually stumble, bloody-mouthed and vomiting down Haywards Road to the house of the only member of my extended family that had a bit of money: my dad’s Auntie Eva, my great-aunt, who lived by the park in a nice, old, red-brick Victorian house that smelled of string and spring flowers. On Saturday mornings, our family and a whole tribe of cousins would dutifully troop round to her house to have a coin or two pressed into our palms, and on the occasional evening we would crowd into her ‘front room’, sit on her plastic-protected furniture and gaze in marvel at her colour television. We only managed to afford a TV ourselves in the mid-seventies and even then it was just a tiny black and white set. She had married a fairly successful businessman, my uncle Jim, and then lost him to a stroke one fateful early spring, leaving her childless and with a kind of inherited status as the family matriarch. Her brother, my great-uncle Harry, was a kindly but mysterious chap with a bald shiny head and little tufts of hair growing above his ears which made him look a little like a koala bear, and who referred to 10p pieces as ‘florins’. He had lodgings in Pimlico and worked at Claridge’s as a handyman. He would often stay the weekend with his sister and regale us with tales of Eastern European princesses and city opulence. He was a confirmed bachelor and there was never a mention of a girlfriend. He was probably gay but born into a generation where public acceptance was impossible. In later years, Auntie Eva started to suffer from dementia. Her observations about the neighbours’ houses slowly moving towards her on stilts, or her habit of leaving a biscuit by my photo and then complaining to my dad that I hadn’t eaten it seemed surreal and hilarious at first, but soon assumed a darker edge as the condition ground grimly on.

  My dad’s sister, my auntie Jean, was a spirited, rambunctious woman who was obsessed with cats and Elvis Presley, and would totter and clop in her high heels and miniskirt around Haywards Heath under a huge, swaying, dyed-blonde beehive hair-do. She was the manageress of the local branch of Dorothy Perkins and lived with her husband, a sweet, meek man called Vic, in a flat above the shop on South Road with their burgeoning brood of children, a white long-haired cat called Kinky and a large illuminated tank full of tropical angel fish. I remember she used to drink Babycham out of those small painted seventies’ glasses, and my mum once made her a purple draught excluder in the shape of a snake. She is only a misty, washy memory for me, though, as her life ended in 1980 in a tragedy of almost iconic scale. She was found dead in a car with a man, who was presumed to be her lover, after they both succumbed to carbon monoxide fumes. As a child, overhearing the babble and conjecture at the time, it was unclear to me whether it was an accident or a suicide pact or even murder, as the gossip-mongers and the tittle-tattlers speculated and raked over the scant facts. I think the coroners returned an inconclusive verdict of ‘misadventure’, which only added fuel to the fires of rumour that burned fiercely in our sleepy town. It was naturally a drama of giant proportions within the family and a crushing tragedy to her surviving children and husband. It formed the inspiration for a song I wrote well over a decade later called ‘She’s Not Dead’, where I tried to borrow some of the detail to paint a probably highly stylised sketch of the heartbreaking episode. One of the original lines was ‘carbon monoxide sang as the engine ran’, and to be honest I don’t know why I didn’t keep it. It seems strange to me now, and not a little callous, that I can sit here and talk about how I have turned personal events that have crushed and redirected people’s lives into songs. Part of me feels that it’s a somewhat shaming and trivial thing to do, and I hope I’ve never cheapened anyone’s memory, but I think it’s important to realise that art generally is just a process of documenting and interpreting and channelling one’s experiences and turning them into something that lives in a place beyond reality. In my defence, at least the song is a good song, if that doesn’t sound too glib, and the characters in it hopefully have a certain grace and dignity. Well, that was honestly the intention.

  My mother loved to roam in the countryside and be amongst the trees and the twittering things, so fine weekends were usually spent wandering on the South Downs. Sometimes she and my sister would embark on epic three-day journeys across the downland. When my dad and I went along they were relatively painless but would usually double as a foraging expedition – blackberries in the late summer and mushrooms in the autumn. If we weren’t tramping around the Wealdland pathways you could find us visiting castles or churches. My dad became obsessed with brass rubbing, and we regularly had to stand around draughty rural naves while he kneeled, frowning over his waxen effigies, telling us about their distant, irrelevant lives. We would often have to endure onerous journeys to faraway transepts and stand around for hours, bored and distracted. Our holidays were spent almost exclusively in Britain (I first flew at the age of thirteen), usually in hired camper-vans or in stationary caravan parks in places like Devon or Suffolk over depressing rainy October half-terms. The caravans were even more claustrophobic than our tiny house and always smelled of wet cardboard and Harpic. It rained and it rained, and we spent endless resentful hours cooped up listening to the radio, my father crouched, sulking over his guide books and my mother fussing around making cups of tea in the tiny kitchenettes.

  Back home, our lives trundled along. Behind the rubbish tip the local kids had discovered an earlier, presumably pre-war section of the dump and the craze of ‘bottle-digging’ was born. We would traipse over the wasteland armed with trowels and spades, and come back laden with antique pots and jars and dark-coloured glass-ware emblazoned and embossed with archaic-looking and obsolete brand-names: bloater paste pots, ‘codswallop’ bottles containing little glass marbles and even small phials darkly warning of ‘poison’ in raised glass letters. The cream of these would be ferried off to the local antique shops and sold for a few pence, only to be glimpsed again a week or so later, sparkling and clean and horribly marked up.

  The woods and wilderness behind the estate became a kind of lawless playground for all of us kids. On
ce you stepped beyond the order of the concrete and on to Wealdland clay you entered an unruly empire of teenage tribes, a kind of Lord of the Flies disorder with air-pistolled gangs and minor violence; a self-regulating world that the local adults rarely bothered to enter. There would be little coteries of kids who would build camps – basically a small area where someone had dragged an old mattress and some other bits of household rubbish to give a vaguely domesticated feel – in which we would sit around and drink lemonade from family-sized bottles and play cards and gossip about football. Inevitably, your camp would be wrecked if a rival gang discovered it: the mattress pissed on and the ‘furniture’ smashed. One year the older boys built an elaborate underground warren complete with ‘bedrooms’ and corrugated iron roofs and candle-lit walls. It survived for a whole summer and was the back-drop to many rumorous episodes until it too eventually succumbed to vandalism and rainwater.

  The first school I remember was one of those red-brick Victorian village primary schools, the kind that still have separate Boys and Girls entrances – the legacy of some skilled nineteenth-century stonemason. It was a sweet and relatively happy time: a summery, hazy watercolour of tarmac playgrounds, conkers and five-a-side football, all bathed with that seemingly immutable, timeless, school smell of crayon-tips and sour milk and polished floors. It was troubled only by the pinched, irritated spectre of one Miss Holden, an old-fashioned, slightly terrifying teacher who approached the art of winnowing children a little like Miss Jean Brodie in the Muriel Spark novel. She would establish elites within her class and encourage them and goad them and expect excellence, and sometimes even folk dancing. I’m pleased to report that there is almost certainly no surviving photographic evidence of me with bells tied around my legs holding a Morris stave. These were the days before obsessive parental involvement in schools, when once the child was delivered into the classroom and the clock struck nine the teacher’s rule became hegemonic. It was an absolutism that often bordered on abusive. I remember one poor child, who had become somewhat a target, being dragged down the corridor by his hair like in a scene from The Wall while being screamed at for being like ‘the cow’s tail – always behind!’. But despite a few pockets of unpleasantness, I can’t pretend that my time there wasn’t relatively carefree.

  The murkier years were yet to come when I was dumped unceremoniously into the large local comprehensive, Oathall: a forbidding, bleak nineteen thirties building that serviced the wider surrounding area. It seemed enormous and daunting to my guileless eleven-year-old self, and indeed the sheer volume of shrieking, grey-trousered urchins was intimidating. There were about thirty-five children per class and nine classes in every year, so the school was home to about fifteen hundred kids. It was huge, it was loud, and at times it could be terrifying. I arrived there in the late seventies when tribalistic pop culture was arguably at its peak and the playgrounds were awash with rival gangs. Even the younger kids would try to adapt themselves to the gestures of their various adopted groups: the punks spiking up their hair, the headbangers growing theirs, the mods in their Parkas and differently tied ties, and the Rude boys with shorn hair and a carpet of Two Tone badges across their regulation, maroon school jumpers. All of the tribes were relatively harmless except the skinheads, who flirted in an ill-informed way with hard right politics and adopted the style and belligerence of those early eighties racist thug groups like the National Front and the British Movement. As I’d formed early close friendships with one boy whose family were from Nigeria and another whose were Indian, I was closer to the constant threat of harm, and got to witness their disgusting, spittle-flecked spite close up: their sixteen-hole boots, their sticks and their hateful, hateful words. The school was awash with the kind of minor violence and intimidation that the teachers were unable or unwilling to do anything about. The time-honoured patterns of persecution – of the weak by the strong, of the unworldly by the knowing – found a sort of strangely comfortable acceptance within its concrete playgrounds and chain-link fences. It was only because I was fairly tall and good at sport that I escaped the ever-present threat of ‘the bog-wash’ or worse – the regular, vicious, gang beatings that groups of unruly older kids would dish out to those younger boys they thought wouldn’t fight back.

  I never bought bondage trousers or dyed my hair but fell in love with punk rock music quite early on. My father’s classical obsession seemed somehow provoking and confrontational and non-inclusive, and led me to embrace punk’s starkness and primitive, vital energy with the added sense that instead of being part of an irrelevant, faded, bygone age, this was an expression of my life and the world I saw around me: the white dog shit on the pavements, the vandalised, piss-stained phone boxes and the constant miasma of threat and fear and that somehow, through its expression of truth, it contained its own equally valuable nobility. Never Mind The Bollocks was, I’m still proud to say, the first album I ever bought and it heralded a lifelong love affair with alternative music. I scraped the money together doing odd jobs and paper rounds, and marched down to Haywards Heath market one Sunday to buy it, scurrying back home with my prize where it sat semi-permanently on the turntable of my record player for months like some sort of undefeated champion. Of course, living in the outer suburbs you acquired trends and fashions literally years after they had been and gone in London, so the Pistols’ career arc, like the light from a distant star, had already passed by the time I bought the record. Nevertheless, it seemed utterly, utterly vital and I fell into its grooves, learning every moment of its beautiful insurrection. Still today, I often use ‘Bodies’ as intro music, its carnal, primitive scream never failing to create the same Pavlovian response it created in me all those years ago sitting there in my little bedroom staring out over Newton Road. From there I started listening to what was more contemporary stuff – the post-punk early eighties netherworld of bands like Crass and Discharge – music that politicised punk’s restless disorder. I would be upstairs in my room playing The Feeding Of The 5,000 as loud as my cheap sound system would allow while downstairs my dad would be blasting out the Enigma Variations. If you stood somewhere on the stairs you would be able to experience a bizarre Eno-esque hybrid. Crass fascinated me. Gee Vaucher’s nightmarish, surreal and highly politicised sleeves were somehow both beautiful and intimidating; timelessly elegant but acerbic, relevant and taut with threat. The songs dealt with the kind of themes I’d previously thought alien to pop: warfare, domestic abuse, religion, indoctrination, and everywhere a restless, questioning, dissenting voice dissecting and criticising social mores and accepted political structures. I always played the albums at 33 rpm, not realising they were intended to be played at 45, and I fell in love with the slowed down, hellish yowl that seemed so in keeping with the content. One day, though, someone told me of my mistake and when I heard the music for the first time at the intended speed somehow the magic was lost.

  My paper round was pretty much my only source of income and so became essential in order that I could buy records. I would haul myself out of bed at five-thirty some mornings, and blindly stagger and wobble around the sleepy cul-de-sacs of Haywards Heath on my bike pushing copies of the Mid-Sussex Times through aluminium letterboxes. For this I was paid £3.25 a week – slave labour by today’s standards but a princely sum in 1981. With an extra £1.25 from my Sunday paper round, I had enough to feed myself with a steady drip of vinyl: Brand New Age, The Stations Of The Crass, Sid Sings and many other such hallowed minor gems found their way back to my bedroom and on to the altar of my turntable. It was an old, third-hand Boots Audio thing that my sister had given me when she left home. The potentiometers were ancient so one of the speakers would often splutter and crackle like it was clearing its throat, and the sound was scratchy and utterly lacking any real body or heft. But I’ve always wondered if its lack of precision and clarity didn’t somehow inform the way I began to listen to music. Because the stereo was so thin-sounding I guess I learned to not listen to the bottom end in music, and I didn’t really
get the point of the bass guitar until I was well into my twenties. For me it was all about the top-line and the song, and in the same sort of way that Pete Townshend wrote versions of pop hits that he’d apparently misheard, so I began to hear music through the distorting prism of my broken hi-fi and sieve out the bits that didn’t seem important. I became oblivious to any subtlety in music, and fell in love with songs that spoke to me clearly and simply, just following the power of the chord sequences and the words and the melodies. This eventually fed into how I started to write – forever stumbling around searching for the big, billowing chorus and the coup de grâce of the simple, killer hook. Anyway, it’s always, always been about making things your own; imitation will only get you so far. The parameters of my ability, though at first a limitation, actually ended up being a strength as I incrementally developed the only style I could – my own.