I thank Mad magazine for dragging me out of the mire. I started getting this monthly fix of US satire in 1977,4 although it was the subsequent investigation of back issues from the late Sixties and early Seventies that really opened my eyes. Here, magazine by magazine, was a journey through America’s most turbulent years – Vietnam, Watergate, civil rights – and from a left-leaning, hippy perspective. Here’s what I learned from the jokes in Mad: the police are brutal, peace signs are good, smoking causes cancer, the environment is being destroyed by big cars and pollution, Nixon is a crook, drugs involving syringes are bad, drugs you smoke are good, and advertising is a confidence trick. Quite a difference from Dennis Healey saying ‘Silly Billy’ and Mr Humphries being free.
If only Mad had been enough to turn me into a 13-year-old libertarian. But influence on what I suppose we must call my politics, social and sexual, came from all quarters, and most of it was a long way from Mad’s informative insurgence. Puerile peer pressure at school was just as persuasive, and I accepted every playground convention without interrogation. When puberty set in, for instance, acne became an invitation for merciless ‘micking’ (the local vernacular for taking the mickey), even among friends: Dave Griffiths’s problem skin put us into pun overdrive, adapting song titles like Paul McCartney’s ‘Pimply Having A Wonderful Cyst-Pus Time’.
Parents were also a source of related mockery, if they were too poor (which meant you were a ‘tramp’), or too old, or, in my own mother’s case, too young and glamorous. It got back to the kids at school that she had a black skirt with a split in it – very risqué! – and the subsequent baiting reflected this. The fact that my dad mumbled was also a target for mickery (‘mumbly, grumbly dad!’). I took it like a man, just as Dave took his and Collier took his. At that age you’re beholden to the most brutal form of natural selection: forge alliances with the strong and stamp on any sign of weakness, difference or oily skin – including your own.
During the punk purge, Gaz Smith (for no-one was immune from micking) was pilloried for having an Elvis record in his house. It was probably his parents’ but that didn’t matter. ‘You luuuurve him,’ went the taunt from a disloyal Si Triculja when Presley died. A reasonably well-respected kid with impressive Oxford bags (the kind with the pockets) called Andy was given the nickname ‘Budgie’ because his father bred them. Couldn’t shake it. He was Budgie until he left that school.5 Burns was christened Willy Wetpants after the long jump indiscretion. Mr Eales the music teacher was legendary for his hairpiece – kids would blow at it when he wasn’t looking, and call him Wiggy. The fiery Mr Hughes had obviously had a brain operation – the scar was there to see – making him fair game. Compassion? Empathy? Benevolence? If it was too hard we couldn’t understand it.
The catalogue of sins that fed the culture of micking was vast: hair, skin, clothes, voice, parents, physical imperfection, or any deviation from the norm, whatever that was. It’s no wonder being a cccchhhw-tcherrr carried such an enormous penalty.
* * *
I’d love to say I rose above all this but I didn’t. I was just a kid who wanted desperately to fit in. When my old mate Hirsty was deemed a poof, I could no longer mix with him. (Still, he’s a vicar now, so I’m sure he’ll forgive me.) At least I grew out of it eventually. Not everybody does. I know plenty of otherwise perfectly nice people in their thirties with intolerant, right-wing views, and they live in London, not the sticks.
I feel fortunate to have experienced enough real life since moving to the capital and soaking up true cosmopolitanism that all childhood prejudices have been cleansed. My deep love of hip hop today has echoes of my appreciation of Roots in 1978 – the black experience, in particular the urban American one, is foreign to me but exerts an irresistible allure. It’s happened to many a white boy before me and since. When I rap along to The Wu-Tang Clan’s ‘Let My Niggas Live’ in the car (all the while guilty as hell for burning up fossil fuels), it is an intense but private pleasure. ‘Keep it that way,’ says my wife.
Today, some of my best friends really are gay! But I never really hated homosexuals at school, because frankly I had no idea what or who they were. I’d never met one. I thought they were like Dick Emery’s Clarence and I’d never seen anyone like that. (Noel Collier didn’t mince, wear floppy hats or carry a handbag.) I certainly hadn’t entertained anything as specific as the notion of anal sex, Honky Tonks.
So I do feel needlessly guilty for some of the myopic and ill-informed prejudices I harboured as a teenager, but it’s not as if I joined the NF or went queer-bashing, and just as every plate of soba noodles I eat today cancels out a Lord Toffingham lolly I consumed in my youth, so – I like to think – every enlightened thought I have in my thirties compensates for an unenlightened one I had in my teens.6
Anyway, the most insidious influence on me as a malleable adolescent wasn’t Love Thy Neighbour or Si Triculja, it was my seemingly innocuous, laid-back Dad. When I approached voting age, he tried to blackmail me into becoming a Conservative by telling me that if Mrs Thatcher and the Tories were ousted, he would instantly lose his job, and wouldn’t be able to afford to give me my monthly allowance any more. And I believed him. Because I believed everything, and we are all Tories until proven innocent.
1 Nan and Pap Collins lived in a part of town that used to serve the factories. I expect they saw the first immigrants in the Fifties and Sixties as a threat. Nan never said anything offensive, but Pap’s claim about Butch barking at woggies didn’t even impress me as a tiny kid.
2 This was 1978, so we must have been aware of the up-and-coming Davidson and his trademark routines from the ITV sketch show What’s On Next? (1976–78) – he didn’t get his own show until 1979.
3 Another stylistic precedent was Ugandan despot Idi Amin, the subject of a humorous, fictional column in Punch, collected in a book which Uncle Jim introduced me to, and which I got for Christmas in 1975. This was written phonetically – dis, dat and so on – and I thought it was tremendously funny. It explains the pre-Roots presence of ‘de’ in my diaries. Again, you can wish it away all you like, but this was the Seventies: a confused and confusing time for all in the so-called New Commonwealth.
4 Mostly for the movie spoofs, which continue to delight me to this day, especially the Seventies ones (‘The Poopsidedown Adventure’, ‘The Ecchorcist’, ‘Rockhead’, ‘Airplot ‘77’) drawn by Mort Drucker, one of the most influential artists on my own drawing style. The man’s a god.
5 I hated Andy whatever-his-name-was. He deliberately ‘spilled’ water over a really good painting I was doing in art, out of jealousy one assumes. But then he was called Budgie by his mates and that must have led to a lot of pent-up bitterness. I screwed up the soggy artwork and methodically painted it again, but he was still called Budgie in the morning.
6 I experienced a very odd strain of guilt at college. A girl I went out with whose parents were in the throes of a messy divorce made me feel guilty – deliberately or otherwise – for coming from an unbroken home. I realise now that all this unnecessary pain and hand-wringing was just part of being a tortured art student. We worried about nothing.
1980
Selected Extracts From My Diary
ANOTHER BOOTS PAGE-A-DAY diary, oatmeal in colour and hand-decorated with a Joe Orton-style collage under transparent sticky-back plastic for protection. The collage features cut-out members of the almost-ran punk band 999 and their distinctive raffle-ticket logo, Marilyn Monroe, The Elephant Man, Gene Hackman (now officially designated My Favourite Actor) and a Dymo label reading ‘ANDY COLLINS. BLOODY PRIVATE’. I’m not sure it’s sincere – the diary wasn’t exactly secreted away under lock and key. I suspect it’s just the self-consciousness of a 15-year-old.
1980 is a car crash to look at, initially. Punk (still going in Northampton remember) dictates the design style and again, it’s a glorified sketch book, much of it filled with variable-quality cartoons of film stars, punk heroes and my mates (clearly for the reader’s benefi
t – bloody private indeed). Thankfully, things smarten up as the year progresses and punk subsides. Plus, the entries get longer again around August. No theories as to why.
Meanwhile, in-jokey school catch-phrases take over from Python quotes, and the real swearing begins …
Monday, 7 January
Got my record library order form back, which means I can go and get the Ruts LP I ordered before Christmas. Ace. Went up Craig’s this morning.1 Dad got me the Undertones album. It is really grate. Magic sleeve.
Saw Question Of Sport, Give Us A Clue, Coronation Street, In The Family. Saw Thunderbolt and Lightfoot illegally. Clint film. Norty bits.2
Thursday, 24 January
Got NME. Ace. They had the best group in the world on Nationweird today … yes, the Shadows. No, you ignorant twat, the Undertones. Them. They had live film of ‘Get Over You’.
I made up the numbers in our inter-form rugby. We lost 14–8. Saw Watch This Space. Craig, Pete et me went up de Supacentre. Craig got the Specials EP and I got ‘London Calling’ by the Clash. Plus Smash Shits.
Tuesday, 29 January
Got my two ordered Mad back issues back. No. 179 = ‘Moronic Woman’. No. 182 = ‘The Shootiest’. Ace stuff.
Went up Pete’s tonight. Been trying out our Undertones ‘remix’. Rhythm guitar = Pete. Lead guitar = Pete. Vocals and Undertone knowledge = moi. Drums? = me if poss.
Friday, 1 February
2 much h/w. Went up Pete’s for another nearly-recording session. We’ve ditched copying the Undertones and we’re writing our own stuff. I’ve gotta come up with the lyrix. Pete’s gotta come up with the muzic. I’m on vocals, Pete’s on guitar. Name? Dunno. The Tramps? Alcatraz? The Beakys? The Comatose Villains?
Tuesday, 7 February
What the hell can we call our group (me + Pete)? Got it … Frenzy?
fren’zy n. fury, delirious excitement. – frenzied a.
Yes! Must be. What say Pete? I’ll ask him tomorrow. Did another recording-nearly session. Working on a number ritt by me, ‘Past Tense’. Good I tell you. Frenzy?
Wednesday, 8 February
Pete don’t fully agree with Frenzy. A few we thought up today: The Zips (hmm); The Outlaws (oh dear); Riot Control (like much); The Stereotypes (hmm); Psycho (oh dear); Enforcer (like much); The Bit-Parts (hmm).
2 much homework. Had shitty ‘glamour’ careers video.3 Got Stiff Little Fingers’ new new new release, ‘At The Edge’. Jolly good it is too. Went up Craig’s. Saw Coronation St, Benny Hill (rather norty). Had hare wash. Listening to John Peel, whose wife’s having a baby and Mikey Read is doing de show for him. Clash etc.
Thursday, 7 February
I’m just writing some rather interesting lyrics for a coupla new songs for us … me and Pete. Yes, our actual, agreed-on-for-the-time-being name is D.D.T.
Yes … D.D.T. Well, we like it. Erm … dichloro diphenyl trichloroethane (insecticide).
Craig came roond. A bitov h/w. Specials no. 1. Melissa got ‘Captain Beaky Freaky’. Badminton in games. Pricey and Ager had a great larf scrap. Had hair cut/spike.
Sunday, 10 February
Did my Smash Hits Specials album competition entry. Rather hopeful. Only six winners. Had to design 2-Tone man for record of choice. I did ‘Smash It Up’. You never know …
Saw Airport. Rather good film actually. First two thirds not so good; last third = excito.
Thursday, 14 February
Went to see Invasion of the Bodysnatchers with Paul Garner, Pete and Brian at the Film Society up College of FE.4 Only a quid to get in, not many people, good enough screen, no strict age restrictions – obviously, as it was a very worthy ‘X’. Only made last year. Not an old film at all. Don Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Len Nimoy, Veronica Cartwright etc. Really good’n’gory. Nice pod scenes, rather horrific, creepy and ace. Birds Eye peas, sweet as the moment when the pod went POP!
Tuesday, 26 February
Paul came down.5 We have compiled the 100 Best People in the World. Gene H is friggin’ well in there.
Saturday, 1 March
Yes it’s nearly my birthday. So as a birthday treat Dad paid for me, Craig and Paul to go to the ABC to see Nightwing ‘AA’ with Dave Warner etc. and nasty vampire bats and bitten-up people and blood and big caves and Indian territories and a lady run over by a jeep and great s. effects and blood and teeth and bats squeaking and good. Plus Billion Dollar Threat which was good for a larf.
And Simon is in a real much-sulko mood. He has laid there on his bed since 8.30 and it’s now 9.30. What a queer. Nan and Pap baby-sattedified. Saw Tales of the Unexzzpected about people turning into bees. Zzzzz.
Tuesday, 4 March
Yes it wuz my birthday. For a start I got £8.50 – because Nan’s fiver went towards a book … The Illustrated Encyclopedia of the World’s Great Movie Stars and Their Films (£7.95). Really ace. Melissa got me a great, bolus-shaped rubber and an ace ruler. Si got me the Rocky/Rocky II fotonovel. Too ace for words. And Mum’n’Dad got me an x quid Hitachi radio/cassette avec aerial, cassette player and recorder, FM, bass, treble, volume, four channels, earpiece, mains socket or batteries etc. It is tooo good.
Went up Paul’s. Going to buy blank cassette, Nightwing and Heaven Can Wait fotonovels, a Dickies single, Alien movie book?, two Mad mags.
Wednesday, 5 March
Dad didn’t get home till late last night but I found out dis morning that he had bought me the Dickies single ‘Fan Mail’ yesterday. It’s in red vinyl and with a spesh fold-out free colour 21"×14" poster. The single und the poster are rather goodo.
Still a loada anticlimax-type trouble brewin’ between WFUS, NSB, NSG, Lings, Trinity, Thom A Beckett etc. Everyone gangs up and goes home. But it gets the teachers and cops out. Never anythink happens. Know what I mean?
I tell yoo this radio wot I got too ace. I’m listenin’ to Jonathan Peel now. Had nice supper. Coffee and cow sandwich. Did you know I can’t draw Robert Redford? Jacqueline Bisset is nice enough to put a poster up of her today. I can draw my mate Gene.
Craig come down. Did our intriguing Jane Austen h/w. Who is Jane Austen to inconvenience us?
Friday, 7 March
Went up Creeeegie’s house. He was up the Centre with Andy Bonner.6 I sat and watched TV with his mum till 8.00, then us three had a larf in his room when they came back. Craig bought Smash Hits for me because I have come in the top six in the 2-Tone competition. My entry’s bin printed. It’s really good to see my name in the mag in print. I’ll be getting a Specials album. Goodo. Got Bodysnatchers fotonovel. Ace.
Saturday, 8 March
Paul und me went town. He got a magic M*A*S*H poster and some pencils and I got three black pens, drawing book, blank cassette, Siouxsie and the Banshees LP from r. library.
Chron & Echo sent a coupla blokes down art skool this morning because our classes have got one week to live. Bleedin’ education cuts. Took photos of our class and just me.
Matish Neil lent me lods of Mads inc. French Connection, Cuckoo’s Nest. Watching Tales of the Unexplainable.
Tuesday, 11 March
Craig is still going out wiv Sarah. Paul and me did our mafs h/w. My photo and Dad’s ed cuts letter waz in the Chronic & Eccho. Ace photo of moi. Paul’s Dad got me the original to keep. Ace. Also Tony, Dave and Louis. (Paul, Neil, Jeff, Simon cut off!)
Saw Grollywood about directors. Went oop Paul’s.
Thursday, 13 March
Had some cheese on toast tonight. ‘March 13th and all’s well.’ 10.12 and John Peel is playing ‘You’ by Delta 5. It is so ace, ace, ace. I am listening to John Peel. I did go up Paul’s and we did have a laugh. They are playing ‘Going Underground’ by Jam on John Peel. At this moment in time.
I can’t draw Hackeline Bisset. They are now playing the Slits on JP. I haven’t read Alien completely yet. My old diareary does make Paul crack. Tucker Jenkins is a bottom lip.
Mum n Dad did go to parunts evening tonight. 10.00 and all’s well. I say, this Slits record ‘In The Beginni
ng There Was Rhythm’ is rather goodo. But now JP’s playin’ Flexys Midway Bummers (Dexys Midnight Runners). My toe isn’t swollen. It was last year though. Bed = 10.00-ish. What does ish mean?
Friday, 21 March
Boring day. (Got my biology book wot I paid for at school.) But it waz a gud laugh tonight. I rode up Pete’s. Pete and me rode up Craig’s. Craig, Pete and me nackered ourselves riding up Dave’s. Dave, Craig, Pete and me went round Howkins’.7 Howkins, Dave, Craig, Pete and me then went round Matt’s.8 Later we went round Howkins’ again and ended up back at Dave’s till 9.00. Ace.
Thursday, 3 April
Went up Craig’s s’morning. Went up Craig’s s’afternoon and tonight. Where … did … you … get … that … blank expression … on your face.
Craig, Pete, Andy and me went off to the Girl Guides (don’t let that put you off) + Fanciers FC Disco at the Fanciers Club. It was a real good place. Also went: Cindy, Sarah, Jo Gosling, Lisa … They played mostly good music (Specials, Beat, Madness) but too much disco. But whoo cares. There was no proper slow dance at the end, but I’m probably seeing Lisa again.9 I know her number. We didn’t get the chance to dance, but me and Howkins sat with her for 45% of the night (7.30– 10.30). Craig made it up with Sarah. Howkins really likes me for being slightly luckier with Lisa than him. Shit, I’m sorry Howkins.
Sunday, 6 April
Nan got me my Easter present – a pack of Matchmakers. Pretty appropriate. Lisa came down this afternoon. Great. She came down at 2.30. We went up Craig’s later and I walked her home to the Arbours.
Recorded ‘Gangsters’, UB40, Selecter, ‘Echo Beach’, ‘Poison Ivy’. All ace. God, Lisa is nice. Did some to my Poseidon Adventure picture. What record reminds me of Lisa? ‘Nite Club’? ‘Teenage Kicks’?
Tales of Unexplainable = ‘Fat Chance’.
Saturday, 12 April
Leeds 0–1 to Crystal Palace. Oh bum. Me + Paul rode all the way up Neil’s and Neil wasn’t at Neil’s. So we returned. It killed us that bloody ride.
Where Did It All Go Right? Page 28