Coal Black Mornings

by Brett Anderson

  As music became increasingly important I started to make friends with kids who shared my love. Some had a bizarre habit of switching tribes literally overnight. My friend Simon Stevenson, a bright funny boy with a huge mane of curly Marc Bolan hair, with whom I’m still close, did this one day, arriving at school in cowboy boots and a studded denim jacket. He’d jumped ship and become a headbanger. He sold me his punk 45s and introduced me to that exciting narrow band of punk/metal cross-over music like Sabbath’s Paranoid and Motörhead by Motörhead, records drenched in snake-bite and patchouli and the throb of teenage danger. Simon Stevenson is the first of four Simons you will meet in these pages. For some probably generational reason it’s a name that’s followed me through my life, and is attached to four very different but very important characters.

  Another local boy I met, this time a John, lived up the road in a similarly depressing red-brick doll’s house. We would scurry off to his bedroom and play his punk singles, things like UK Decay and Sham 69 and The Cockney Rejects. We would learn all the words and imitate the postures and think we were both terribly grown-up. One day we were playing some dreadful plastic-punk offering, and his mum, Betty – a sweet, kind woman with curly, white, bottle-blonde hair – burst into the room, outraged at the swearing and tore the record off the turntable and smashed it in a kind of Daily Mail rage. The sense of transgression was exquisite and our fascination was piqued.

  Whether it was partly some sort of reaction to this general whiff of rebellion or not, the same boy and I once got into deep water at school for compiling a list of bizarre and hilarious imaginary punishments for all the teachers. It was a grotesque litany of almost medieval retribution including things like having them ‘hung by their hair from a helicopter’ etc. etc. The details were gory and exquisite, and were intended to have the same sort of macabre but darkly comic tone as the Edward Lear illustrations of which I had become so fond. Snatched by the hands of authority one lunch-time, however, they were soon stripped of any humour and interpreted as deeply pernicious, and we were forced to undergo the subtle but humiliating public ordeal of standing, heads hung in shame, in the busy central thoroughfare of the school known as Piccadilly Circus as the masses swarmed by and sniggered knowingly. I think the most effective punishment though was having the inner, dark machinations of one’s febrile imagination, no matter how comically intended, made so public, and for years I squirmed, wondering if the document had survived embarrassingly ‘on my record’. It planted a powerful seed in me as I realised how darkly seductive, but also how treacherous and dangerous, words can be.

  When I was a young child I don’t think I was particularly conscious of us being poor. I was too locked within my selfish, narrow child’s world to really have any sense of perspective. It never occurred to me that other children didn’t help their mothers pluck dead birds or skin rabbits, or that most people didn’t just huddle around a single open fire in the winter evenings for warmth; not that Oathall was full of rich kids – it was a Haywards Heath comprehensive school – but I gradually became aware that our lives, if not unique, were certainly marginal. One particular grim ritual forced home the cold, hard truth. As my father earned so little I was entitled to free school meals. For some reason, rather than doing it privately and discreetly, the unfortunate kids that fell into this unenvied little band were forced by the school to queue up in public for their special tickets in the large echoing canteen in full view of all the other sniggering, jeering children. To say it was a humiliating experience is a crushing understatement. It was like a Dickensian workhouse scene; a punishment for being poor, like being pilloried or put in the stocks: brutal, completely unnecessary and pointlessly cruel. The experience was truly scarring and made me utterly fearful of poverty. The memory of it often haunts me and makes me shudder with the fear that my own boys would ever have to go through anything nearly so horrible. A similarly crushing experience happened when on a Christmas day trip to London my father’s car broke down right outside Harrod’s department store in Knightsbridge. My mother, my sister and I had to get out and push while my father twisted frantically at the ignition key and pumped at the pedals to a dissonant chorus of angry car horns. The symbolism seems ridiculously appropriate and almost grotesque, our poverty spotlit against a backdrop of opulence and power; four insignificant figures lost in a desperate struggle while symbols of wealth gazed indifferently on.

  3

  Living with my father’s eccentricity there was always a sense that his mood could suddenly, capriciously sour and that the house would be plunged into a strange, dark theatre of Pinteresque tension. Paranoid episodes would overcome him and he would often complain that people were watching or talking about him. Towards the end of his life, when loneliness and depression had won its grim struggle, he lived in almost complete darkness, the curtains closed, convinced that someone outside was always observing him. Looming like a shadow on the edge of Haywards Heath was St Francis Hospital, a forbidding red-brick asylum built in the 1850s, home to the mentally unstable and source of much black humour and local legend and provenance of threat and rumour. In his darker, more reflective moments he was haunted by its spectre, terrified of ‘ending up’ within its dank Victorian passageways, lost to a netherworld of gurneys and burly, indifferent carers.

  He was born into a family that not so much didn’t value education as didn’t really seem to be aware of it. You were born within your class and didn’t aspire beyond it. I suppose the culture of the working-class ‘boy done good’ had yet to reach its footballing, pop-singing, nineteen sixties zenith, so my father, despite being an intelligent and sensitive boy, was marched unencouraged through the strata of low-level education, eventually finding himself channelled into a catering college in Brighton from which he drifted into a series of dead-end menial jobs that never offered him much satisfaction or his family much security. For a short while he was an ice-cream man, a gardener and a window cleaner, and during a period in the late seventies he bizarrely became a swimming-pool attendant at the local leisure centre despite the fact that he couldn’t swim. Heaven knows how he qualified for the post. I dreaded Tuesdays, which was the day of my class’s visit there for swimming lessons, knowing I would be mercilessly tormented by the other kids pointing at him and collapsing in fits of sniggering. When in the eighties he eventually settled on a modest career as a taxi driver his unreliable car became a symbol of our insecurity. By this time he’d upgraded from the Morris Traveller to a third-hand, mid-range Volvo which was forever breaking down and over-heating. My mother, my sister and I would wait anxiously for news of its well-being like fretful parents with a sickly child, painfully aware of how the outcome influenced our vicissitudes. Looking back, I suppose these pressures took their toll. Although he was never materialistic or ambitious, this constant cloud of anxiety and financial stress must have been responsible for the fissures and cracks that began to appear in him. The angry clashes with my mother would storm and spark while my sister and I would cower in our bedrooms, locked in a horrible, compulsive trance, unable to listen yet unable not to; sheltering from the accusations and the vitriol as the thudding, angry words and choruses of crashing crockery and slamming doors made their way up through the paper-thin walls. I know myself how supporting a family can feel like an overwhelming task sometimes, so my father’s struggles on what was effectively a bread-line wage take on a selfless, noble aspect that at the time I was completely unaware of, submerged as I was within my child’s world of football kits and double maths.

  As well as an imperious, dusty historicism, my dad had a genuinely bawdy streak. He could tell filthy, ribald jokes and would forever be making embarrassing comments, often in public which could feel mocking and often cruel. At the softer end of the scale there would be suggestive, priapic Steptoe-isms about ‘not looking at the mantelpiece when you’re stoking the fire’ and so on, but the business end could be graphic and tawdry and lubricious, and often wince-inducing. This got more uncomfortable as I beca
me older and drifted into prickly adolescence, but I remember it happening from a very young age, so he evidently didn’t bother to employ any sort of filter for the children. Perhaps it was a legacy of years rubbing shoulders with fellow unskilled workers in dead-end jobs where he had picked up the colourful language of the playgrounds and of the canteens and the kitchens as a means to fit in and assimilate, and probably to defend himself as he was physically slight. My grandfather’s violent, drunken rages had left him with a creed of physical pacifism – a noble attempt to break that ugly chain of inheritance for which I am forever grateful – but words had armed him with a different kind of weaponry that he would often use mercilessly. His shameless, sometimes vicious, turns of phrase must have informed the tone of many of my early songs, which I was often conscious of wanting to make similarly lewd, littering them with swear words and sexual imagery, enjoying the genuine shocking power that the language of the street can wield; a kind of Gilbert and George-esque world of toilet graffiti and felt-tip-scrawled cubicles. You can hear it in the verses of ‘My Insatiable One’, ‘To The Birds’ and ‘She’s Not Dead’, and in the dark suggestion of something like ‘Pantomime Horse’. It was probably partly a desire on my part to be confrontational but there was also an element of my wanting to use real language, not some sanitised series of anodyne pleasantries, and I suppose that was inherited from my father’s occasional rough estuary-isms.

  His lack of a formal education led him to seek out the knowledge that he felt he’d been denied. He became obsessed with history and would probe us with endless quizzes about the battle of this or the fall of that. We were forever being harried and hustled around castles and churches and stately homes, sitting in countless soggy National Trust car parks drinking stewed tea from Thermos flasks as the rain pounded angrily on the car roof. Having been born within the fading influence of the British Empire, he was a committed royalist and could recite the order of succession and dates of birth and death of every monarch since William the Conqueror, and would regularly stand to attention and salute the national anthem during BBC2’s Closedown. We started collecting the symbols of this autocracy – old British coins and stamps – and would trawl through junk shops and tatty antique fairs searching for the elusive bargain that would turn our fortunes. Looking back, this was a golden age when I was still essentially a sweet, simple little boy unfettered by the fractious seeds of adolescence, and who still believed the myth in which all young sons need to believe: that my dad was strong and faultless and always right. There was a point when we were inseparable, lost and locked together as we rummaged through our dusty world of Penny Blacks and First Day Covers; when I was still too young to challenge him in any way, and he was still romantic enough about parenthood to want to try to give me the kind of loving bond with my dad that he had never had with his. Perhaps he was living through me the upbringing denied him by my grandfather’s angry fists and, indeed, whenever I was bought the ubiquitous seventies Airfix model kits, it was always my dad who insisted on making them, exiling me to the role of spectator and denying me my imperfect child’s touch. It was something that never felt excluding, though, merely considered and strangely caring. There was a sense that through kindness to me he was passing on kindness to a childhood spectre of himself. I have the same odd sort of feeling sometimes with my own boy as I gaze upon his vulnerable little form. It’s probably one of the reasons nature makes sons look like their dads.

  He started collecting military memorabilia, his centrepiece being a Napoleonic naval sword that he hung proudly above our little grey-tiled fireplace. The contrast between the grandeur of the antique and the scale of the room must have looked ridiculous, but it was something that he was proud to own, and he was forever polishing it and speculating about in which particular battle it might have seen action. Years later, during one of my ill-advised impromptu teenage parties thrown while my parents were out for the evening, a couple of gatecrashers stole it and were chased down the road and rugby-tackled by my good friend Simon Cambers who, thank god, had the wherewithal to react.

  My dad also started picking up old coronation mugs, which began decorating the kitchen; his pride and joy being one depicting Edward VIII, the king who abdicated – probably some sort of rarity. It got smashed during one of my mother’s rages, though, and I still own the badly glued, imperfect relic and all his other commemorative cups. When he died, Blandine and I were faced with the Herculean, heartbreaking task of sorting through all his stuff, and they were amongst the few trinkets I really wanted to keep; their quirky mix of the imperious and the mundane somehow capturing an essential thread of his character.

  He loved eccentric, oddball Victoriana as well, and when he wasn’t listening to Liszt would read Edward Lear’s strange and wonderful nonsense poems out loud to us, chewing deliciously over each mad stanza of ‘The Jumblies’ or ‘The Dong with a Luminous Nose’. I may have acquired my love for internal rhyme from those dusty couplets, and became fascinated by their surreal, often macabre, accompanying illustrations of giant insects or people cutting their own fingers off. Today I often read exactly the same insane little verses to my own son, enjoying the sensation of mirroring the past and of a pleasing sense of continuity, a consciousness of being part of something bigger than oneself.

  My father was always dressed immaculately, often in the three-piece suits that my mum had made for him. In the whole thirty-eight years that I knew him I never remember him once without a tie. In the black and white Box Brownie photos I have of him as a young man he’s dressed in smart Rat Pack-style suits, his hair coiffed like James Dean, but the more louche styles of the seventies transformed him into a kind of crumpled Victorian dad with a hint of the Romanovs about him: bearded, elegant, reposed in a tatty, red, padded antique-silk dressing gown, and with a briar pipe permanently clamped between his tobacco-stained teeth spewing out plumes of smoke and turning the air thick and bluish. In a bizarre homage to another of his heroes, T. E. Lawrence, he somehow acquired full Arab robes and would often parade around his council house dressed like Peter O’Toole’s double cast adrift in some bitterly ironic parallel universe.

  In the early eighties my sister left home, bound for art college in Worthing, a faded, South Coast retirement resort dominated by the superannuated which became faintly mythical for me. I revelled in the off-kilter juxtaposition of the armies of shuffling pensioners and the restless, rowdy subculture of young art students. There, she met Tim, a young man who for a while became a bit like my older brother. He was a huge fan of sixties bands and his enthusiasm was contagious. Together they introduced me to all of that forgotten music – The Beatles, The Kinks, Bowie, The Who and Zeppelin – and all the pre-punk records that during the early eighties had been cast aside by fashion’s relentless march. You have to remember that this was before glossy music monthlies or YouTube or shuffle culture or any real revisionism – when there was no expectation that anyone should bother to investigate the music of the past, and because of that they tended not to. Uncovering these things involved a kind of breathless, archaeological thrill. While other school kids were getting into Thompson Twins’ chart pop or post-punk, I was starting to unearth records by Jefferson Airplane, Robert Wyatt and early Floyd, song-based relics from a hazy past. Vaguely echoing my father I revelled in the slight outsiderdom of this, enjoying being out of step and slightly perverse.

  It was around this time that Blandine brought home a battered old Spanish guitar and a simple beginners’ chord book. She taught me a few things and I fumbled around the fretboard, gamely attempting to master a few basic chord shapes. It must have sounded bloody awful as I thrashed away crudely around A, D and E, not realising for starters that you simply don’t play a classical guitar like an acoustic, but it planted a seed and I soldiered on with a cloth-eared enthusiasm. I wrote a few simplistic ditties that aped the singer-songwriter genre and found that I could just about hold a note, so I started to enjoy toying with the interplay between words and melody, and began the f
irst faltering steps on the path that would lead to a lifelong fascination with that elusive alchemy. It dawned on me that songs, like rabbit hutches or three-piece suits, could be things within reach that I might one day be able to make. I saw how their basic frameworks were constructed and that even though mine were as yet poorly assembled, crude and inelegant, they still somehow functioned no matter how primitively. From a very early age I remember being acutely conscious of melody in music. I have a vivid memory of lying on my parents’ bed one afternoon while my mother fiddled around with her hair, humming to myself with my face pressed against the fusty white covers and thinking about the series of notes I was singing and how they worked against each other. It sounds obvious now, but I became aware that this was essentially how all music began – with someone playing around with notes – and that realisation somehow made music’s creation less of a mystery. As almost everything at home was homemade the idea of making one’s own songs didn’t really seem like a stretch.

  Looking back I can see how the melodies I wrote that ended up defining me were a strange but direct combination of things I was hearing at home. The bombast of my father’s music was inescapable, and even though I would often balk at its pomposity I can’t deny that I was subconsciously always trying to capture something of its drama. The storming intellectual arguments and sour, clashing debates we used to have about music had laid a foundation and made me highly opinionated on the subject, instilling in me a similar religious fervour and a view that, to adapt the old Bill Shankly adage: it wasn’t just a matter of life and death – it was much more important than that. And it’s an attitude I’ve never felt I should apologise for, despite how po-faced the haters might think it makes me look. Years later we were described by the press as ‘the most humourless band since Joy Division’ which was meant as a wry slight, but I only took it as a massive compliment; why shouldn’t something as transforming and life-affirming and celestial as music have a heft and a gravity that transcends the trivial and the everyday? I’ve always really hated irony in music seeing it as a kind of cowardice, a mask to hide behind for those who don’t have the bravery or conviction to really expose themselves. I have my father’s wild-eyed passion to thank for the fact that I’m sometimes guilty of taking it very seriously and for the fact that during lengthy episodes of my life music has meant absolutely everything to me.