Where Did It All Go Right?

by Andrew Collins

  Saturday, 8 December

  Got my photoz back. Went Christmas chopin (shoppin’). Got torch and two badges for Si, How Green Was My Valley for Nan M, Boys From Brazil for Pap C, Catherine Cookson book for Nan C. whisky liqueurs for Pap R,26 tights for Mum. Plus a ‘Coronation St’ Mad mag for me. And a Sex Pistols badge. Rather ace. Good day’s chopin I think. I’ve rap’d up all my prezzies. Leeds drew 1–1 to Man U (wankers). Connor scored.

  Tuesday, 11 December

  Disco at school. What an ace disco. Me and Andy Howkins went as Undertones eg. rolled up jeans and DM boots. Loads of other punks eg. Paul Freeman, Si, Mark etc. Went wiv Craig McKenna and left me bike up his house. About five punk records eg. Tourists,27 Sham, Skids and more. And Si and me wore our Harrington jackets inside out ie. tartan. Loads of mods up there. Madness etc. Few smoochy records at the end. And I had a smooch avec Cindy Offord. I had my hands full. Aaaaaahhhhhh. I’m in a trance now. O Cindy.28

  Thursday, 13 December

  Still secretly (nearly) in love with Cindy. Because of an ace design for a Xmas card I did for Mervyn at Dad’s work he gave me a little reward. They’ve printed out loads of cards for all their clients and I got one and a £5 record voucher (spend it on Sat).

  Had wanky hard Maths 1 exam. Put up my Sham poster. Had all 4th year cross-country. It was rather longue to say the least. I came 128th out of 180 boys. I am so nackered. Uncle Brian baby-sitted. Did two posters for the school bookshop. Wagged swimmin’.29

  Sunday, 16 December

  Went up both Nans. Chemistry revision. Saw EBC1. Must see Cindy tomorrow. Ask her out?

  Thursday, 20 December

  Got 65% in art. Got 63% in French. And considerably less in maths. Saw TOTP avec Skids record of whom I bought on November 16. You see I know a good thing when I first hear it. And Blinkety Wank and Dawson Watch.

  Scored three goals in water polo for our team in swimmin’. Drew teachers on the blackboard in French.30 Must ask Cindy out tomorrow. Please. I must.

  Friday, 21 December

  Got a Christmas card from Cindy, that beautiful girl I asked out today. Yes I actually asked her to go out wiv me. She wants time to think about it,31 so she will tell me when she next sees me. Soon I hope.

  My other secret passion along with Cindy is sugared dates. They are as lovely as Cindy. I had a whole bowlful tonight. They were delicious. Got Christmas NME. It’s really ace.

  Last day of term. Left school at 3.00. Craig came round tonight. We listened to the Dickies album. He lent me ‘Pretty Vacant’ and ‘Ever Fallen in Love’ by Pistols and Buzzcocks. It snowed. Not really fluffy. Enuff to settle and freeze. Got 83% biology and 73% chemistry.

  I really did ask Cindy out. Got cards from Cindy, Wally, Si, Glen, Pete. They won the dustbin on 3-2-1. Ace, magic, at last.

  Tuesday, 25 December

  Grate Christmas Day. My presents: super quality bristle dart board, Leeds dart flights, Monty Python’s Life of Brian LP, Life of Brian book, book of the film of Alien, desk tidy, 24 quality pencils, new page-a-day diary, giant drawing pad, Jasper Carrott book, book of graffiti, Skids badge, Undertones badge, Radio 1 diary, complicated game, dart sharpener, squash ball, bike clips, comb, ace Undertones t-shirt, pencil sharpener, 2nd Clapperboard Quiz Book, £4.50 in vouchers, Matchmakers, Dymo label printer.32 Everybody came today.

  1. Peter Day was a friend of Simon’s. Odd cove. He claimed (on this very day) to have whittled a stick of wood using what was clearly a butter knife. Simon expressed disbelief, so Peter set about trying to cut his finger with said knife to prove how sharp it was. We fetched his mum.

  2. Punk has not yet arrived.

  3. Nene College of Further Education adjoined Weston Favell Upper School by the playing fields.

  4. Oh yeah, be impressed, we did actual bricklaying in building craft. And wallpapering. Girls did it too, naturally. This was very much the modern world.

  5. This didn’t last long. What was I thinking? Swot.

  6. I include this only because it is so very awful. I’m aware that much of the boyish charm has now trickled away and my diaries exhibit a teenage smugness that can irritate, but hey, as Bruce Hornsby would later observe, that’s just the way it is. The Goodies books and Monty Python have a lot to answer for, stylistically.

  7. A true rite of passage from the pre-video age: your first ‘AA’ certificate film, aged 14. Animal House did not let me down, boasting three scenes with bare breasts in. I’d seen my dad’s Mayfair ladies, but you can’t beat moving pictures.

  8. The denial begins.

  9. Not in a picture sleeve. So I stuck ransom-note lettering on it. I was that Blue Peter punk.

  10 That career in film criticism moves ever closer.

  11 A rare glimpse of the outside world from my diary here. Perhaps even through the thick fug of self-absorbed teen angst I sensed that something momentous was happening when Mrs Thatcher entered Downing Street and promised to bring harmony where there was discord.

  12 Phil was a very cool honorary uncle, what with the linesman’s gig and a very dry Lancastrian sense of humour. We once went with him to some Beazer Homes League game and he sprayed Ralgex muscle-rub on his legs in the changing room, telling us it made him run faster. We believed him. Looking back, Phil and Eileen must have been my first Catholics – they had religious pictures and crosses around the house, which I thought creepy at the time.

  13 Lyrics from ‘Into The Valley’ by The Skids.

  14 More arcane religiosity: veils and candles. It was like another world to us pagans.

  15 Some kind of joke. We took it with us on our next long car journey though.

  16 I have affectedly adopted ‘spiny’ as an adjective meaning good – it derives from the Pirhana Brothers sketch in Monty Python: ‘Dinsdale was convinced he was being watched by a giant hedgehog whom he referred to as “Spiny Norman”. Normally Spiny Norman was wont to be about twelve feet from snout to tail.’ I liked the Gilliam drawing of him in the Big Red Book.

  17 One of our playground catch-phrases of the time was ‘I heard that! Pardon?’, testament to writer Peter Tinniswood, from whose BBC sitcom I Didn’t Know You Cared (1975–79) it came. The character who said it was deaf Uncle Staveley, played by Bert Palmer, then Leslie Sarony in the final series.

  18 With which the transformation from square to punk rocker is complete.

  19 Just trying on a couple more irritating made-up adjectives for size.

  20 You can’t blame me for this one: I heard Compo say it on Last of the Summer Wine.

  21 One of mine. Perhaps I should have mastered the English language before I started adding to it.

  22 Paul Freeman was a key punk figure. He unwittingly became my musical mentor, as he had a boxful of ultra-cool singles, from Dr Feelgood’s ‘Milk And Alcohol’ in white vinyl to something by Cowboys International in clear. And he had cowhorn handlebars.

  23 Now he looked like a true thug. I wouldn’t be joining him on this particular journey. This was hardcore.

  24 One by one they fell – Gaz went under the clippers next. Lee Masters showed that he had a mind of his own after all by abstaining. I admired him for that.

  25 Quite how this arose is a bit murky, but once I’d turned fourteen, Margaret must have rashly promised to take me to a ‘AA’ at the pictures – she said she liked scary movies, but had no-one to go with. I held her to it, and we went to see Coma, a middle-aged woman and a teenage boy. It was as odd as if Dad had taken our cousin Jane to the cinema.

  26 I always bought whisky liqueurs for Pap Reg.

  27 The Tourists? Punk? What a generous door policy I was operating.

  28 She would come to regret letting me slow-dance with her, the lovely Cindy Offord. I foolishly took it as encouragement and mooned over her for years, on and off. She never let me near her again.

  29 From Jonathan Green’s Dictionary Of Slang (I knew it would be in there!): Wag/wag it/off vb. [mid-19C+] to play truant (cf. BUNK OFF; PLAY THE WAG). [HOP THE WAG] Don�
��t be too impressed – I was too much of a scaredy-cat to wag it much.

  30 This act of artistic crowd-pleasing happened with the full approval of our teacher, Miss Szkopek. What a sport she must have been. I even drew her as a big curly-permed ball with a pair of large, round glasses on and ‘peg’ trousers sticking out the bottom and she let me get away with it.

  31 ‘I’ll think about it.’ How those words retrospectively burn a hole in my heart. How many girls told me they were going to think about it? And why did I believe them? Cindy Offord didn’t need to think about it. She knew.

  32 … And no Lego.

  twelve

  Uncle Punk

  IN HIS DEFINITIVE chronicle of punk, England’s Dreaming, Jon Savage is perfectly clear about what happened in 1979: ‘Punk was over. Humpty Dumpty had fallen off the wall and there was no way of piecing him together.’

  He pinpoints the death of punk to 4 May, the day the Conservatives swept to power under Margaret Thatcher, an event logged in my 1979 diary, as we have seen, with the positively Shavian insight, ‘Oh. Hmm. New Prime Minister. A woman. Ooh dear.’

  What I didn’t note in my diary that day was the death of punk. For though historically and culturally, Savage is spot on, he speaks only for London. For Northampton and the other ‘faraway towns’ to which The Clash might have been calling, punk had just arrived.

  Though they soldiered on in name, the Sex Pistols had effectively ceased to exist when Johnny Rotten walked offstage at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco on 14 January 1978;1 and when Sid Vicious died of a heroin overdose on 2 February 1979, there really was no piecing together punk’s founding fathers. Fortuitously for those of us who were just turning 14 and living in the provinces, Sex Pistols product did not dry up. Death for them was not the end. My first ever punk single, purchased on 27 March 1979, was ‘Something Else’ by the Sex Pistols, a cover of the 1959 Eddie Cochran song and a Number Three smash.

  Its ‘video’, taken from Julien Temple’s Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle movie (released later that year), featured Sid Vicious getting out of bed in some off-white pants, cupping his bollocks, sneering in a mirror, getting dressed and bombing down some country lanes on his motorbike (he was sure fine lookin’, man). On Top of the Pops, Jimmy Savile felt moved to warn the nation that riding without a helmet is dangerous. So was taking heroin and possibly stabbing your girlfriend (although it could have been the drug-dealer).

  A punk Johnny-come-lately I may have been, but I was hooked into the Pistols universe there and then, dimly aware that it existed only in memorial. I remember Vicious’s death, if only for the fact that Jo Gosling wore a black armband to school the Monday after, in doing so confirming her status as coolest kid in the playground. (I bet they made her take it off.) Back in February I can’t say I’d shed a tear for Sid – in fact, on the day of his overdose, Stuart Skelton gave me an ELO pin-up and I received two back issues of Mad through the post – but I loved him now.

  Thus it was that punk came in the front door on 27 March 1979, and the Electric Light Orchestra were bundled out the back. It was no less than a conversion, as decisive as seeing the light, and very timely, as being 14 years old means being a rebel, and here was my ride.

  * * *

  Punk had entered my consciousness before ‘Something Else’ and its handsome picture sleeve. It was out there. To my credit, I had bought ‘Rat Trap’ by The Boomtown Rats in November ’78 and ‘Heart Of Glass’ by Blondie in February ’79 – which at least shows a flash of new wave sympathy – but I had also bought singles by Racey and Violinski during the same period. My diary makes no record of it, but I must have been aware of the Pistols’ ‘God Save The Queen’ in 1977, even in my royalist pomp. Surely John Craven’s Newsround did some kind of report …

  As a rule, while punk was sweeping the nation in 1976, 1977 and 1978, I was busy elsewhere: glueing Airfix models together, playing with Matchbox cars and listening to Grease. Clearly, my age was a factor. As was the hard reality that all the major punk tours passed Northampton by, in favour of more glamorous places like Leicester and Birmingham.2 So I have two alibis.

  Records show that when the Buzzcocks joined The Damned and The Vibrators on the bill at the 100 Club punk festival on 21 September 1976, I was chuffed at getting two Corona Fizzical stickers off Martin Soards. When Steve Jones called Bill Grundy a ‘fucking rotter’ on live TV, 1 December 1976, I was busy making a Christmas card for Mum’s squash coach. While The Clash were sending masonry flying on the White Riot tour in May 1977, I was learning a simple tune on the xylophone in rehearsal for a special form assembly.3

  On 7 January 1978, at a late Christmas party round at Nan and Pap Collins’s, the kids put on an elaborate show for the grown-ups: Simon, Melissa and I, plus cousins Jane and Paul. I have a fuzzy memory of this DIY extravaganza – I camply wore one of Nan’s dresses and sang ‘Hey Big Spender’ at one point – but my diary entry tells us that I also did an ‘impression’ of someone called ‘Uncle Punk’. I’ve no idea who this character is. Perhaps I made him up. I know impersonating him involved wearing my black PVC jacket (purchased from the Kays catalogue during my Fonz phase) and sticking my hair up in some way. I used Melissa’s toy guitar for rocking effect, and I must have sung something punky. Did I pretend to spit? Wear a safety pin? If only camcorders had been around to record what seems to be my very first acknowledgement of punk.

  In December that year I wrote a facile parody of a punk lyric in my diary (‘Let’s all gob on a diary, lads/It’s the latest craze’), accompanied by a cartoon of an imaginary group, Pete Pungent and the Snotrags (this is very much the time of Kenny Everett’s Sid Snot and Gizzard Puke). It seems I was more aware of punk as per parodies and cheap gags on TV than I was as a potential source of personal insurrection or head-turning music.

  But all that changed in March 1979, thanks largely to Smash Hits, which I had just started showing an interest in. Stuart Skelton, he of the ELO poster gift, bought some issues to school and I was instantly captivated by the magazine’s unique selling point: the song words. Prior to D-day (or P-day) I took a keen interest in obtaining the lyrics to ‘Sound of the Suburbs’ by The Members and ‘Lucky Number’ by Lene Lovitch (sort of punk, certainly screechy and something Nan would bristle at on Top of the Pops). On 23 March I took down the names of all the kids I considered to be punks at a school disco: Bill, Lee and Si, of course, although not Gaz (I think he was more of a soul boy), plus three others, Jon, Paul and Mark. A line was drawn on the dancefloor. The DJ played the Pistols and the Skids that night; the tide was turning. I think Si wore his V-neck jumper without a T-shirt underneath, which struck me as punk in the extreme. And then, on 27 March, I gave myself to Sid.

  Praise be.

  As well as ‘Something Else’ I got ‘Everybody’s Happy Nowadays’ by the Buzzcocks, again in fetching pic sleeve, which is something punk singles had over non-punk singles in those grey days. Art was intrinsic to the movement.

  Never mind that my dad actually bought my two punk singles for me – from a trendy record shop called Revolver in Wellingborough (where his office was). That’s not the point. He also bought me my first singles case that day too, a starter pack for the aspiring punk rocker. Dad bought many of my punk singles for me – it was easier for him to slip out at lunchtime than it was for me to get into town after school. I think he quite liked going in there in his suit with the crazy names of my singles on a piece of paper and handing it to the greaser behind the counter. I hope they treated him with the respect he deserved.4

  In future weeks, whenever I’d saved up sufficient pocket money, I expanded my collection with seven-inchers by Squeeze, Sham 69, The Dickies, The Clash, The Ruts, Tubeway Army, The Skids and The Undertones, all the while perfecting their logos for reproduction on folders and exercise books. John Peel quickly became my late-night guru, listened to, as is traditional, with a single earpiece under the bedcovers. What myriad delights I heard there beneath the candlewick, from The Slits to Th
e Dixie Cups.

  By the time of the next school disco in July, I considered myself a card-carrying punk, and pogoed with the best of them – but I had one important step yet to take: the haircut. I wore cap-sleeved T-shirts, straight-leg jeans, and the regulation Harrington jacket (black, zip-up, tartan lining) but my hair was strictly pre-punk, flicked at the sides and parted. On 17 August, another landmark day, I asked Carol to cut my hair short enough for it to stick up on top. She did. The drawing in my diary suggests a modest crop, but getting it up off my earlobes was a mini-revolution.

  Of course in these enlightened post-Gary Rhodes times, spiky hair is nothing. Everybody’s got it. But in 1979, I was a true non-conformist for wearing my hair – let’s face it – fluffy. There’s a photo of me in the back garden in September, ostensibly modelling a batch of homemade punk badges (Ruts, Sham 69, Buzzcocks, the Virgin records logo), but in my maroon V-neck and jeans and spiky-top I do look quite edgy. Mum put up with it valiantly – well, it was her mate Carol who was styling me! And anyway this, as it transpired, was kids’ stuff, hairwise.

  So that was it. Transformation complete in the space of six months. No more proof were needed that I was a punk. I looked like one, I had loads of punk singles, I hated Abba, I had posters of the Skids and Generation X up on the bedroom pin-board, I jumped up and down and kicked out at discos, and I had the New Musical Express delivered every Thursday. Nan Mabel was beside herself with worry. She assumed the next step would be a safety pin through my cheek and my immediate arrest. She’d obviously got me mixed up with Uncle Punk.

  ‘You ain’t one of these punks are you?’ Nan would say.

  ‘Yeah,’ I would reply.

  ‘Of course he’s not,’ Mum would interject.

  * * *

  I don’t wish to make my metamorphosis seem glib in retrospect. If it seems to be all about wearing the right clothes and buying the right singles, it was. (I decorated a lampshade at the time with all the correct punk logos, although including AC/DC showed a measure of confusion.) I now appreciate punk as a cultural paradigm shift and a necessary wave of disenfranchised youthful defiance in the face of ineffectual party politics and social disintegration, not to mention an enema for the music industry, but aged 14 in Northampton, it was more about badges. I’d love to talk up my allegiance as something truly seditionary but I was just a kid with pocket money. There were, however, no gigs in town for me not to go to (or none that I knew about); and punks didn’t even hang around the town centre in 1979. There was no scene, just a few pockets of attitude and violent dancing at youth clubs. But punk was important to me because it was my first push for individuality. Not everyone fancied themselves a punk; most kept their flicks and danced to disco records. It was my first taste of tribalism and identity.