Coal Black Mornings

by Brett Anderson

  Bizarrely, it was my least favourite subject at school. I found it elitist and unengaging; a joyless exercise in reciting dates and learning mnemonics; a dusty, irrelevant litany of dry theories taught by a corduroy-suited fossil. Unbelievably, the same teacher had been at the school when my father was there a generation earlier and he had similarly failed to ignite any flame in him, at least in any formal sense. Instead, I turned to the other school kids and, like countless other suburban boys in countless other suburban towns, formed the inevitable first band. Mine was hilariously called Suave and Elegant. Beyond it possibly being some sort of silly wry comment on coiffured eighties pop, I have no idea why it was called that other than the fact that it amused us. ‘Us’ being myself cast as singer, Simon Stevenson on bass guitar and my impish, mischievous friend Simon Cambers, a fantastic drummer and all-round musician whose restless, manic spirit still never fails to make me smile. Simon and Simon had previously been in another school band called The Pigs, and they had a kind of band theme song called ‘We Are The Pigs’. Years later, I would blithely steal the title but outrageously never credit them. I loved the brutal, homophonic meaning and wrote a lyric around it about a stylised riot – a kind of dark insurrection peppered with the suggestion of threat. By that point I had become obsessed with zoomorphism and felt I had made the title enough of my own for the steal to seem justified. In fact, mulling it over now, the idea of a band theme song is something I had thought original to my lyric for ‘Trash’, but I’m sure even that had some sort of primitive provenance with the original ‘Pigs’ and I’m sure there are probably other examples that predate both songs.

  But I digress. Back to 1984, and by this point I’d taken to swanning around in a cheap lemon-yellow suit I’d picked up in a sale at Top Man. I imagine I thought it suggested a kind of Bowie-esque sophistication, but the truth was I probably looked more like a cut-price Cliff Richard. The two Simons were both into heavy rock and would listen to a whole gamut of bands that left me cold, like UFO and Rush, so I think there was probably a naive attempt by us to emulate that kind of overly complex, dull musicianship. We all loved the Pistols, though, and Bowie, but perversely, along with the classic seventies canon, we loved his earlier, vaudeville incarnation: the theatrical whimsy of songs like ‘Please Mr. Gravedigger’ and ‘Karma Man’ and ‘Maid Of Bond Street’. The Simons also introduced me to Tyrannosaurus Rex, T. Rex’s earlier folky prototype. We thought the often deliberately verbose, wryly mystic titles and odd, charming, hippyish songs were wonderful, and would sit there in my room gazing at the album sleeves, which seemed like a portal to a different age. The sleeves discarded and the cheap guitars back in our laps, we would sit ploughing through one or other of our two awful, tuneless songs cramped together in my tiny bedroom, and suddenly my dad would push the door open and march in braying and booing and laughing at us, a strange look on his face as his emotions flickered between amusement and pity. He could be extremely quixotic, a borderline fantasist even. Throughout my childhood he would hubristically bang on about how I was going to be a concert pianist, but never bothered to even think about getting me piano lessons or any sort of formal training. One day, though, he dragged a broken, old, upright piano home, but it sounded so awful that it just sat sulking in a corner of our kitchen for years, unused, untuned and unloved, taking up space and supporting tea-cups. Maybe it was part of that whole inevitable challenge between generations that pop music used to be so effective at instigating, but my picking up a guitar seemed to trigger a latent sense of betrayal in my father. Even when I was releasing successful records in the nineties I remember him muttering a waspish aside about how my ‘little tunes’ couldn’t match up to the quality of Hector Berlioz or something similarly wounding. The only time I think I really impressed him with my career was when we eventually played the Royal Albert Hall and I sat him in a box to watch the performance. I think at last he could relate my work to the classical world with which he was so familiar, but even then after the gig he couldn’t resist commenting that he thought the guitars were ’too distorted’. ‘Well, Dad,’ I said, ‘they’re supposed to be.’

  I don’t mean to come across as unkind in sharing these little memories of my father as I know some of them don’t show him in the best light, but what I’m learning while writing this is that, as I uncover things about him that are buried deep in my memory, I’m also uncovering things about myself and the kind of person that I’m likely to become if left unchecked, so in that sense it’s very important for me to be truthful. Understanding my dad is, of course, a way of understanding myself. Whenever anyone asks me today about the nature of my relationship with my father the most accurate adjective I can find is ‘complicated’. He was a collection of fascinating people, some of which were charming and warm and kind and funny and loving, and some of which were belligerent and controlling and sardonic and cruel. One moment he would do sweet, selfless things like track me down on my paper round to bring me my coat because he was worried about me getting wet, and the next he would be distant and prickly and paranoid, and storm around accusing his family of ‘ganging up on him’. His was a combative, challenging sort of love, but along with the challenge came a depth of empathy that was somehow special to my relationship with him. Every son has at some time gazed into the mirror and seen their father staring back at them, and if they haven’t yet then they will do soon, because as you get older you find those familiar patterns and foibles you thought so unique to them repeating themselves in you. I assume a psychoanalyst would tell me that the frustrations I felt in him were frustrations and fears that I felt for myself that I projected on to him or something, but without wanting to drag this whole discussion towards that sort of dry, clinical lexicon it’s important for me to acknowledge that my documentation and description of my dad is partly one of myself: a dissection of inheritance, an analysis of the links in the chain that bond father to son and beyond. Decades later, I wrote some lyrics about this whole thing in a song called ‘I Don’t Know How To Reach You’ that tried to sketch a spectrum where I was just a point on a path between my dad and my own son. It’s an idea that quietly obsesses me as the landscape of parenthood slowly reveals itself.

  Anyway, my dad certainly never took my interest in pop music that seriously, and looking at my laughable lack of ability in those early years I would have to sympathise with him. Indeed, the idea of one of my boys following in my footsteps gives me night thoughts, and to advise them on embarking on such a precarious path would be ridiculous, I’m sad to say; the lonely dogged determination required, the blinkered arrogance, the long odds and the sheer luck involved in success seem almost insurmountable, and in the modern digital age the rewards incommensurate. Even though I’m glad that they did, I don’t really understand how my parents ever allowed me to pursue music as a career given that I had no training or particular early aptitude, so in many ways my dad’s lack of encouragement was totally understandable.

  My mother, however, was always less acerbic than my father; she would sit and hum our horrible tunes in a faithful spirit of cosy motherly support. She didn’t see music as this angry battleground of charged opinion that my dad did, and her tastes were much more populist – mainly sixties folk that she would listen to while painting or sewing. She was always making something, creating something or mending something. This wonderful sense of purpose must have bled into me a little: the idea that if you wanted something you made it yourself. Slowly I started to apply that spirit to my clumsy fumblings with song-writing.

  My father was outrageously outspoken about music, however, and would cruelly mock and poke at anything that wandered outside his narrow boundaries of taste. Once in much later years we again visited the Albert Hall to see a performance of Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. Before the main event there was an experimental piece by Béla Bartók. My dad hated it and as the last chords faded, in that split second between the final note and the first joyous rush of applause, he jumped to his feet and roar
ed ‘Rubbish!’ at the top of his voice, clear and loud against the stark, momentary silence. Five thousand shocked, angry faces swivelled towards us as I sat there throbbing with disbelief, my dad’s face a strange mask of triumph and defiance.

  4

  The time came to sit some exams and I did okay, sleep-walking into A-level courses at Haywards Heath Sixth Form College – a blank, generic, institutional building just up from the railway station and cast adrift amongst a small sea of offices and lower-middle-class houses. At Oathall, if you were a bright kid you were automatically ushered towards the sciences and maths, presumably destined for some sort of dull, functional engineering-based career. The logic must have been that people from a comprehensive school in Haywards Heath simply didn’t become artists or musicians. I always found physics absolutely fascinating, however, especially Newtonian mechanics, which seemed so neat and elegant and satisfying. It helped that our teacher, a Mr Bamford, was truly inspirational, one of those fabled, script-written educational alchemists who could fill with urgency and life what in others might come across as dry and dusty. Legend has it that after leaving teaching he unexpectedly became a priest, which only further added to his mystique and charisma. A-levels didn’t similarly inspire me, though, and I found myself becoming bored with education and regretting my choices. To fill the void, music’s magic and allure began to grip me, and I discovered a whole swathe of early eighties left-field records. Bands like The Cult, Joy Division, The Cocteau Twins, Lloyd Cole and most importantly The Smiths became regulars on my turntable, relegating UK Subs and Stiff Little Fingers to the dusty forgotten corners of my collection, where they languished, exiled and deposed like medieval kings.

  I started hanging out with yet another Simon, this one a Holdbrook – a warm, thoughtful, sometimes troubled boy who shared my fascination with the murkier corners of life and with whom I felt the thrill of mutual outsiderdom; two small-town dreamers trapped in a dreary suburban cell, yearning for the thrill and promise beyond. Like a thousand other dreamers in a thousand other suburban towns we were convinced that our experience was unique, but it made it no less special that it wasn’t. His family had a bit more money than mine so he lived in a more well-to-do part of town, but still nothing you’d call posh; the boxy houses were just a little less boxy, and they could afford to actually buy things rather than make them or find them, which to be honest probably seemed posh to me. As a form of escapism we tumbled into an idealised nineteen sixties chimera. It seemed like an antidote to the functional, grey concrete world we were born into, and in a way it helped me to assimilate the absence of my sister. She was always a strong, determined, fiercely independent person, and had left home years before leaving behind her empty north-facing bedroom, her record player and a stack of anachronistic vinyl. I would wander into her room and wistfully play her records, latching on to this music from the past because it seemed somehow a part of her. Like any younger sibling I looked up to her and probably massively romanticised her life at art college and, yes, I missed her terribly.

  Simon and I would sit in his bedroom thrumming ineptly along on our cheap electric guitars and would write songs with unintentionally hilarious titles like ‘String The Years Together Like Beads’ or ‘Homage To The Beatles’. It sounds highly comical now, but I think at the time it felt exciting and fresh and vaguely outré because it sat so uncomfortably with the popular Zeitgeist of Bryan Adams and Bruce Springsteen. Inspired by the romance of sixties psychedelia and through a fascination with Aldous Huxley’s famous book we discovered the wonders of lysergic mushrooms: free, extremely potent and growing plentifully in the misty autumn fields that bordered the hinterlands of our humdrum town. On September mornings we would set our alarms and meet up, dazed and still sleep-fuddled, and traipse in Wellingtons and cagoules over the dewy autumn grass searching for the precious white cargo, which we would smuggle back home and brew into tea. The hours would merge and shift as we wandered dazed and aimless through the back streets and over the ring roads and roundabouts, marvelling at the perversity and lost in the labyrinths of our babbling thought. Years later I would write a song called ‘Where The Pigs Don’t Fly’ about these episodes, which over the decades inspired so many little vignettes and ideas, and the title of an old forgotten B-side ‘This World Needs A Father’ came directly from one such addled foray. ‘Where The Pigs Don’t Fly’ was my attempt to marry the mundane with the surreal in the vein of Barrett-era Floyd; the references to ‘stolen ice-cream vans’ and kids covering their jumpers in roses were little snippets of childhood memories which I planted within the song’s wobbly, trippy framework. The original slightly inept version that I wrote on my old Aria Elecord was much quirkier and frailer than the version that made it into the studio, which was somehow more robust and seventies-sounding. The line ‘Where the pigs don’t fly, I do’ was I suppose an attempt to sum up how perverse it felt stumbling through the dreary suburban streets in an utterly altered state, the manicured order of the everyday world reduced to a strange and laughable mirage.

  Once we even managed to get hold of some acid: strange illicit little squares of blotting paper printed with a fingerprint-shaped dose of LSD. Joining us was a boy who would become my lifelong friend – the picaresque and often hilarious Alan Fisher. It was a beautiful summer’s day in the mid-eighties and we had drifted up to Beechhurst, a kind of gentle, old-fashioned, suburban amusement park with a bowling green, miniature railway and pitch-and-putt course sat on the outskirts of the town. It was, incidentally, where my parents had held their wedding reception a generation earlier, and it was the setting for one of the oddest and most memorable afternoons of my life as the three of us stumbled for hours around the miniature golf course, shaking with laughter, the point of the game forgotten as groups of frail grannies gazed on in amused confusion, probably wondering what could possibly be that funny. Those were wonderful, wonderful times when the future stretched out limitless and unchained, dappled with possibility, and like all young people we thought we were immortal and that those times would last for ever.

  Simon’s story was later to unfold as a tragedy, however. He became depressed in his early twenties and ended up taking his own life. Those hazy, sun-kissed days with him would become all the more poignant as the years rolled on and he remained for ever the warm, lovely boy who wasn’t to be. I went to his funeral back in Haywards Heath in the nineties with my father and managed to endure it quietly until the service ended with the Beatles’ ‘Let It Be’. As the beautiful, plaintive melody swelled and grew I was reminded of all the afternoons we had sat in his bedroom listening to the same song, and I finally lost my control and wept like a baby in my dad’s arms. The lyrics to the song ‘Breakdown’ were written with him in mind and a decade later I tried in vain to do his memory some sort of justice with the song ‘Simon’, but I learned that the artifice of music can never quite describe something as complete as a person. It just ends up feeling like so many pretty words.

  It was a strange, in-between sort of time. I was free from the grids and structures of school but still too young to grasp any tangible path, and I found myself coasting in a desultory way. I became sucked into a vaguely misogynistic, parochial world of underpowered motorbikes, minor shoplifting and drunken episodes on village greens. My friend Simon Cambers and I both managed to scrape some money together to buy cheap, third-hand Yamaha DT 50s, and we would whizz and splutter around the ring roads and roundabouts of Haywards Heath, flouting traffic laws and causing concern. Our favourite trick was to wear Spiderman or Mr T masks underneath our bike helmets and overtake cars and watch the shocked, confused expression of the drivers as we swivelled our heads round to face them. I was usually dressed in an old sixties black biker’s jacket that my dad had given me, on the back of which I’d written Lou Reed in white paint, and my hair-cut was a homemade effort I’d stupidly effected in front of the mirror one ill-advised evening. I was aiming for a severe, punkish sort of crop but ended up looking wretched and patchy like a c
ancer patient or an escapee from a laboratory. Unbelievably, in those days young men were able to drive reasonably powerful motorbikes with absolutely no test or training. I was an utterly awful driver with zero road sense and no appreciation of how to maintain my bike, so it came as no surprise to anyone when I eventually smashed it into a wall after trying to overtake a car on a bend in the rain with bald tyres and very nearly killed myself. The ribbons of permanent scars that still wind up my legs are always a harsh reminder of my blithe, youthful recklessness. I think that during this whole period I was exploring my limits and thresholds in the way that young men do, challenging myself in an attempt to emulate what I perceived masculinity to be; a vision that was being passed down to me through the usual channels but distorted by the overtly laddish culture of my drab satellite town. Before I had the maturity and confidence to become myself, I think, I was playing around with the idea of becoming someone else; trying on the clothes that didn’t really suit me and developing those brittle layers, that fragile emotional shell that many men wear all their lives as they strive to become an almost fictional construct – an amalgamation of other people’s traits garnered from idols and parents and peers.