One summer, in an ill-advised moment of youthful enthusiasm, Simon Cambers and I decided to embark on a cheap holiday together. We chose Ibiza as there were rumours of riotous times to be had, which appealed to our wide-eyed teenage quest for adventure and encounter. Unfortunately, we found ourselves in San Antonio, a sort of grim 18–30 safari park, a microcosm of all the worst elements of low-cost Britain complete with kebab shops and pubs called the Red Lion, and awash with lager and roaming gangs of desperate, agitated, single young men from Kettering. On the first night, Simon became dehydrated after an evening of boozing and drank some tap-water to quench his thirst only to spend the next ten days in bed rolling around groaning and clutching his stomach as the gastro-enteritis he had developed worked its way through his body. For the rest of the holiday I wandered alone around the grotty, vomit-washed streets, disconnected and melancholy and wing-manless, locked in a Martin Parr hell of ‘Choose Life’ T-shirts and fried breakfasts, the heady promise of reckless, jolly escapades reduced to a bitter fantasy spotlit by the cold reality of my teenage diffidence as I found myself unable to mingle or meet. Ironically, decades later, the real beauty of the island would reveal itself as my wife introduced me to the quiet rural calm of the north where we would spend endless pampered, panting summers; the island’s other saltier side a strange and distant shadow.
Back in Haywards Heath, another term started at college, and once all the students had gone home I would wander down to the caretaker’s smoky cubby-hole of a room to collect my bucket of sprays and cloths, and go about my evening job: cleaning the college’s toilets, changing the loo rolls, filling the soap dispensers and mopping the tiled floors. Writing about it now, it probably comes across as unpleasant and demeaning, but I don’t remember it that way. I was just pleased to be making some money, and anyway it wasn’t slave labour; most of the time I’d sit around chatting, smoking roll-ups and drinking weak, milky tea with the caretaker – a wiry, tough, likeable ex-sailor with a sleeve of blurry blue tattoos, a severe hair-cut and an arsenal of anecdotes.
There was an industrial estate near the college and I managed to get a job there one summer in a factory called Worcester Valve. It was a bleak, depressing sort of place full of shuffling, spent, middle-aged men who seemed to pass the whole day complaining and leering at tabloids. I was given a hammer and shown outside to a huge pile of industrial valves. My job was to individually break off a little protruding metal arm from each of them and then throw the armless ones into a new pile. By the end of the summer the pile had shifted a few metres and I had spent every single moment of every single day performing the same dull, numbing task. It left me yearning for my mop.
There was another boy who I started to notice at college. He was very tall and strangely fascinating despite a kind of gauche Gothiness. I would notice him holding court in the sour-smelling common room, an audience of wide-eyed acolytes huddled around him hanging on his every word as he enlightened them about the nuances of Marxism or proportional representation. His presence was magnetic and compelling, and one day I wandered in to find him sitting alone playing some post-punk riff on an old bass guitar and started talking to him about music. His name was Mat Osman. I was a bit wary of him at first – he’d arrived at college via the posher rival school, Warden Park, with which Oathall was predictably locked in pointless, violent, endless feuds. His obvious sophistication and intelligence could be intimidating; he was able to discuss politics and culture with what seemed like great skill, and voicing opinion as fact he had a confidence bordering on arrogance. I decided I liked him. My earliest memory of Mat is as a kind of inchoate political firebrand; he organised a student protest about something or other, getting the whole college to evacuate the building en masse and sit down outside. As the principal, obviously well versed in the psychology of crowd control, picked off individuals and threatened them with suspension, the protest began to crumble. Mat was the only one with the wherewithal to realise that strength lay in unity so he shouted out, ‘Everyone stay sitting down – he can’t suspend us all!’ If his threatened expulsion had actually materialised I might not be sitting here writing this. He was principled and cultured in a way I hadn’t experienced before, which was exciting and inspiring, and I decided that there was a lot that I could learn from him.
By this point, in a kind of ill-advised Dylanesque homage, I’d taken to busking folk songs around Haywards Heath. I’d stand outside Sainsbury’s in South Road with Simon Holdbrook bawling out inept versions of ‘With God On Our Side’ or ‘The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald’ until we were moved on or, as was more usual, paid a few coins to stop. One day I brought my guitar to college, and Mat overheard my tuneless fumbling and asked me to join his band. They were called Paint It Black and they needed a guitar player, so I joined them in one of those pre-fab modular Portakabins found on school and college grounds the world over, and we ran through a series of simple derivative pieces. In my experience there’s always a thrill in playing music with other people; it’s a kind of willing self-deception that lulls you into a pleasurable trance which often belies the objective quality of what you’re actually doing. Hence the existence of so many awful bands ploughing on under the illusion that they are creating something extraordinary. We were no different, but the experience must have given us some sort of momentum as we stumbled gamely on and organised more rehearsals.
There was this local boy who Mat knew called Gareth Perry. He had a reputation as a handsome lothario, and as his brother was a famous model – the toned hunk holding the baby in the ubiquitous black and white eighties poster – he had a certain parochial mystique. Such proximity to the distant corridors of fame and glamour was certainly intoxicating to us small-town wannabes, but more importantly he could actually sing. He had a strong, X-Factor judge-pleasing soul/pop sort of voice and an obvious presence, so he ended up being our front man. For some reason we would often rehearse at my house, all crammed into my dank, north-facing bedroom with my Pink Floyd mural and my collage of strange photos. Perched on my single bed we would plough enthusiastically through our repertoire of five-chord songs with predictable titles like ‘She’s The Knife’ or ‘Reasons For Leaving’, while my dad continually interrupted trying to interest us in pictures of Chopin’s death mask or his new book about Elgar. The harsh censure that he’d reserved for my previous band seemed to have eased somewhat, possibly because he seemed to believe that Mat was, at least superficially, some sort of reincarnation of Franz Liszt. Indeed, in one of the many portraits of the composer that hung on the walls the likeness was uncanny, both sharing the same hawkish profile and distant, imperial countenance. Mat politely answered and reanswered the barrage of questions about his family’s heritage, but my dad refused to be any less fascinated by him. Anyway, we soldiered on with the rock-by-numbers repertoire for a while until slowly the Zeitgeist began to bleed in.
During the mid-eighties, spearheaded by bands like The Smiths, alternative music was challenging the tenets of rock and starting to invert the posturing of the seventies. Songs about weakness and failure and the drudgery of real life began to resonate powerfully with me, and inspired by the C86 movement and the shambling bands we renamed ourselves Geoff. Its ridiculous, comic ordinariness appealed to us as a kind of wry celebration of the prosaic. We all started dressing in an unofficial uniform: tight turned-up jeans and big shoes and odd, dark-blue denim factory-workers’ jackets that looked like truncated lab coats. We would trudge down to Brighton every now and then to stand smoking in a winding queue with all the other fashion victims, waiting to receive our £2.50 box-cuts in a barber’s by the station called Freddy’s. The look was very much inspired by the eighties student fashion for aping the iconography of socialism, but I think we believed, in a probably misguided way, that we’d introduced our own twist. I part-exchanged my old, red, Westone Thunder 1-Active electric guitar for a cheap semi-acoustic 335 copy in a vain attempt to sound more like Johnny Marr, and we chiselled away at our sound. Unfortunately, as
the lead guitarist I simply wasn’t technically a good enough musician to pull it off, and the songs that we thought were starting to sound a bit like ‘Cemetery Gates’ were probably actually sounding more like ‘Happy Hour’. Nevertheless, we achieved some minor local attention as exponents of what the town rag called ‘Bedroom Rock’ and we would ‘gig’ exclusively, you’ve guessed it, in people’s bedrooms, inviting a paltry, disinterested audience who would mutter through the songs and feign enthusiasm when we finished.
Sometimes Mat and I would write stuff at his house. Despite a patina of middle-classness, his beginning wasn’t much grander than my own. He and his brother Richard had been brought up in a similarly boxy little house in a similarly depressing part of Haywards Heath by his single teacher mother. Although his family was much better educated than mine, it was still trapped in the same sort of grim lower echelons of the British class system: baked beans for tea and the stale fug of paraffin heaters. Richard was a bit younger and, although now always faultlessly charming, I remember him as being comically grumpy. One afternoon we were sitting in Mat’s room listening to Forever Changes when Richard suddenly barged in and shouted ‘The sixties were rubbish and Love are rubbish!’ and then stormed out again in a cloud of stroppy, teenage righteousness.
The band stumbled on for a while, but without any proper gigs booked, and once the initial adrenal enthusiasm had worn off an inevitable inertia began to creep in. I think Gareth may have ‘gone travelling’ or something, and as university beckoned our interest in the band faded, the members cast adrift in different cities, the songs forgotten and the name nothing but an amusing footnote.
5
For my parents, I think higher education seemed like a distant, unfamiliar, slightly forbidding world where only the offspring of the privileged dare venture. They filled my life with a rich tapestry of art and music and books and beauty, but apart from a few chats with my sister I was forced to navigate the formal channels of schooling alone and unmentored. There wasn’t much effective careers advice from my college either, so I found myself studying subjects that bored me and was left with qualifications that seemed irrelevant. When it came to applying to university the only vaguely arts-oriented course I could do with science and maths A-levels was something called Town and Country Planning, for which I was accepted at Manchester. Looking back, my choice of city was very much influenced by the music that I was listening to. I’d fallen in love with the Fall’s wiry surrealism – records like This Nation’s Saving Grace and The Wonderful and Frightening World had become almost sacred to me – and I had worn my stylus down to a nub playing Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures. Meanwhile, The Smiths’ colossal shadow of influence was ever growing; theirs was such a unique place in the world of pop – cultish and still distinctly marginal but with the reach to make thrilling little forays into the mainstream, so being a fan felt just as transgressive as being into the Pistols years earlier. They had hovered around my consciousness until one solitary evening when I was listening to Peel on late-night Radio 1 and heard Johnny Marr’s gnawing, insistent guitar hook coming through my tiny transistor speaker and Morrissey’s saturnine promise of leaping in front of a flying bullet, and that was it for me. Theirs was a truly special chemistry, at once familiar but unique, a perfectly balanced dance between jangly conceit and pitch-black humour that held me enthralled for years. The eloquent paeans to the confusions and complexities of life resonated powerfully with my teenage self, and I felt their pull dragging me further in as I trudged around Manchester’s wintry tarmacked streets. My choice of city had been another highly idealistic decision on my part. I had a very romanticised vision of what living there would be like and imagined some sort of gritty crucible of bohemian creativity where I would meet a pool of like-minded musicians, when in reality life within the student community felt somehow soulless and disconnected as I struggled to meet anyone with whom I felt much kinship. I loved the city’s hard, post-industrial edge but life there quickly began to feel testing, and I grew tired of the gaggles of over-excited toga-draped pranksters who roamed the corridors of Owen’s Park, the huge, forbidding, nineteen sixties hall of residence I’d ended up in, unable and unwilling to summon up the enthusiasm required to join their shrill, drunken games. One of the few pools of light in the gloom was a fellow planner called Dave McGuire with whom I had become close. He was a shrewd, friendly, hulking redhead from Darlington who shared the same taste in music and had a similarly sour slant, and who for some reason called everyone ‘Wilf’. We would buy bottles of fortified wine called Night Train Express and trudge up Oxford Road to the union to attend cheap gigs – groups like The Weather Prophets, The Bodines and all of those C86 outfits that filled the post-Smiths’ break-up landscape – and stand at the bar in our second-hand turned-up 501s with our subsidised lager trying to look heedless and inscrutable while the bands thrashed away.
This was back when if you were from a ‘disadvantaged’ family you could claim a full grant so, as well as my fees, my accommodation and paltry living expenses were also paid for. The truth was I hadn’t yet developed expensive tastes so during weekends there I would just buy a loaf of bread and eat Marmite on toast for breakfast, lunch and dinner, chomping away as I listened enraptured to The Hounds of Love or The Queen Is Dead on the same crappy Boots Audio record player I’d dragged up from Haywards Heath, the Pennine rain pounding against the pavement eighteen floors below. Other weekends I’d pick up my brown paper-bagged, vegetarian-takeaway breakfast from the hall canteen and scurry over to Chorlton Street coach station. I’d sit munching my hard-boiled egg on the National Express travelling down the M1 to Victoria from where I would get a train back to Sussex to visit Alex Goldman, the inevitable small-town sweetheart with whom I was conducting a fraught, failing, long-distance relationship. We’d met at college where I’d been ensnared by her crimped, lacquered hair-do and her obvious feminine wiles, and we had been locked into the usual teenage pact of lust and recrimination for a while. She lived with her kind, sweet parents at the time in a comfortable bungalow in Burgess Hill. I was staying there that famous night of the great storm of 1987 when an oak tree toppled and fell across the house snapping the central beam and stopping a few feet from my head. If the door in the room in which I was staying had not been closed and given extra support I’m told the tree would have crashed through the lintel and crushed my skull like an egg-shell. I just remember being savagely snatched from my sleep by a hellish, screaming sound and reaching up to feel wet oak leaves and bark just above my head, and crawling out, fuelled by fear and instinct, through the broken glass accompanied by the flash of torches and shouts of panic and confusion. Apparently I insisted on finding my socks first. Well, one should always be properly dressed.
While I was nearly being killed by trees or struggling around Rusholme pretending I was in a John Osborne play, back in Haywards Heath my mother had been waiting patiently to leave my father. Like most people of their generation my parents had married far too young. They were still essentially almost kids themselves when they committed to each other back in the early sixties, and after the romance and the thrill of infatuation had faded, and the disorienting fog of child-rearing had cleared, they were starkly confronted with each other, raw and real in the unforgiving daylight; two people who despite some shared experience actually had little in common and who inevitably over the years had begun the slow, cold, lonely drift towards estrangement. I think my father had made that fatal old mistake of taking her for granted, and certainly his language towards her over the years had merged into disrespectful, unflattering nicknames and lazy in-jokes, which replaced any previous tenderness or kindness and betrayed a numbing of his feeling towards her. Their twenty-five years together had followed the well-trodden path from infatuation to indifference with all the points in-between and had slowly shifted into a joyless, grinding war of attrition. They might have loved each other at one point but I’m not sure if they ever actually really liked each other, and when passion fa
des where there is no fondness or respect there is sometimes little else to hold things together. My mother had selflessly endured his ever-darkening moods, cutting asides and bleak frustrations in that old-fashioned way that parents did in those days ‘for the good of the children’. I admire her flinty stoicism but feel sad that she must have been so unhappy for so many years. My father was utterly, utterly destroyed, however, having had absolutely no suspicion that anything was amiss; his fragile world shattered when he came home from the taxi rank one day to find her things gone and her stark little letter sat on the mantelpiece. He had built a wall of fantasy around himself, at the core of which was the myth that his wife was happy and that their marriage was still working. The regular unkindnesses he visited on her must have been alien to this fiction so he chose to ignore them. Even years after she left him he would wallow in this denial, telling me how people often remarked that they ‘were always holding hands’ or something similarly sugary. His infuriating arrogance often reminded me of Dalí’s famous improbable elephants with the impossibly spindly legs; the fragile structure of his reality always at the point of buckling under the weight of his grandiose self-deception. But behind it all, of course, was hiding a small and frightened man, and as his life fell apart I was filled with sadness and an impulse to help. I decided to leave Manchester, mainly to spend time with him and help sweep up the shattered pieces, but also admittedly because I was finding student life there dull. I moved back to my cramped little bedroom in Haywards Heath and made my dad tea and listened through the walls as he shuffled around his tiny broken kingdom and sobbed himself to sleep. There were endless stale weeks peppered with fraught, angry episodes that dissolved into puddles of pity, boil-in-the-bag dinners and glum hours trudging around the nature reserve or sat listening to Chopin, but slowly he began to be able to face the day and I thought it was time for me to move on.
Coal Black Mornings Page 6