I developed a system in 1982: I marked the beginning and the end of each relationship in my diary with coloured triangles. Thus, Rebecca was a lime-coloured triangle (28 days); Wendy4 was an orange triangle (25 days); Sarah – who I’m embarrassed to say I don’t remember, but she’s there in the book – a yellow triangle (10 days); Caroline, a pale blue one (her mum was one of our teachers at school – I think it’s called playing with fire – a misleading 46 days as I was away in Jersey for 14 of those); Lynn, red (a misleading 63 days since she was 1982’s Holiday Romance, and we only saw each other once afterwards – I took the coach all the way to Manchester so I must’ve been keen); Carol, brown (the dampest squib of them all, six days); and Fiona, pink (24 days). A pattern was emerging, one made up of multicoloured and in some cases overlapping triangles. My life had become a Venn diagram.
I don’t want this chapter to become a meaningless roll-call of girls’ names (Rebecca followed by Rebecca followed by Rebecca), nor am I aiming to come across like some auburn-haired Casanova ‘82. It is after all like a big game of musical chairs at that age. The truth is, I couldn’t find anybody I wanted to stay with for longer than 28 days. I got bored with them; they presumably got bored with me too, it’s just that I always got in first with the P45 phone call. I did occasionally pack a girl in face to face, but Fiona, for instance, I deliberately called while Grease was on telly so she’d be keen to get off the phone and back to John Travolta.
* * *
What did this string of brief, surprisingly chaste relationships teach me? Well, that I could get girlfriends (I did fancy myself a bit, but then I was in a band). That I was easily bored. That ultimately I preferred my male friends to any girl (the real quality time I spent in 1982 was with Pete and Craig and Matty and Vaughan, and a five-day biology field trip to Exmouth was more notable as a quasi-homoerotic male-bonding session than as a girl-hunt). Lust was something I saved up for pop stars and film actresses. I saw little crossover between the objects of sexual desire I cut out of magazines and the girls at school.
I’m needlessly ashamed to say I started compiling ‘Horn Charts’ in my diary, and here we see unattainable women like Bo Derek, Catherine Deneuve, Ann-Margret, Suzanne Dando, Lesley Ash, Keren Woodward, Denise the dark haired one out of Tight Fit, and Axa, the pneumatic she-warrior in a Sun cartoon strip, fighting it out for the top spot. (I would have paid most of my pocket money to actually see them do that.) Girls at school didn’t as a rule get a look-in. They were all too attainable. Like all boys in a band with a girl singer, I always fancied Jo G from behind my tom toms, but she was officially not for asking out, and we all kept a professional distance. Hence the allure, I guess. She may as well have been Keren Woodward.
So what was happening? What were girlfriends for? What was the point of awarding them the first coloured triangle, when I was already envisaging their second one?
I think I went out with girls in 1982 because:
I thought I ought to, and
I could.
During the previous lean years, I had filled all the no-girlfriend time with much more important and rewarding stuff: drawing caricatures with Paul Garner; learning the drums and forming the band with Pete and Craig; growing a floppy New Romantic fringe; watching as many films as I humanly could; and collecting Sainsbury’s trolleys from as far afield as the Mayor Hold car park in my clip-on brown tie. Even in 1982, the Year of the Triangle, I kept up the band, the films, the drawing, and the hair. I wrote Not the Sixth Form Revue, which we performed for three nights at school; I passed my driving test first go (and dented the bumper of Mum’s Metro the day after); I made endless humorous and elaborate tapes for my friends’ birthdays featuring Pythonesque sketches, sound effects and spoof songs; and of course, I found time to turn my diary into a work of art, a surrogate water cooler around which the whole gang would gather. BLOODY PRIVATE!
If I’m honest, girlfriends were way down my list of priorities, even when I had one. There were bursts of uncontrolled over-reaction when a new triangle appeared (the diary is full of heady and harmless nonsense like ‘I am going out with wonderful Rebecca … God, Paula’s beautiful … Where will I be tomorrow? I’ll tell you: Manchester with the girl of my dreams … etc.’), but at the end of the day I think I would have traded any of them in for Vaughan or Pete or Craig.
I was at least building up an impressive repertoire of ex-girlfriends, which made me feel terribly experienced and worldly. Another landmark in late ’82: I mistakenly called Liza an ‘old flame’ in front of her in the Bold Dragoon pub and she slapped me round the face. I thought old flame simply meant ex-girlfriend, but she took it as an implication that she was on the back burner and at least it got me my first slap, which I must have earned by then (for ending it with Caroline by showing her photos of Lynn if nothing else). But because we all moved in the same social circles – Absolute Heroes gigs, Willowtree5 discos, the sixth-form common room, Alan’s flat and the Bold – it was impossible to avoid exes. We just had to get on with each other, there was no room for lingering resentment.
However, despite the teen anguish, we weren’t in love, any of us. We were just messing about. I ended up with crap O-level results and some seriously worrying school reports in the sixth form6 not because of girls, but because of the band, the films, the drawing, and the hair.
Oh, and being gay, but that deserves its own chapter.
1. Actually I have an alibi for history. Our teacher Mrs Horrocks thought she could crack the exam code, and using past papers, had worked out exactly which essay subjects would come up. She advised us which bits to concentrate on in our revision and, by the same token, which bits to ignore. On the day, it turned out she was completely wrong, and loads of us did badly. ‘U’ by the way is ‘ungraded’, which was the equivalent of the exam board coming round and slapping you in the face at the Bold Dragoon. They say Mrs Horrocks was in floods of guilty tears when the results came in, which is why I’ve changed her name.
2. Significantly, it was Nan Mabel and Pap Reg – ever the jet-setting, colour-telly-pioneering sophisticates – who went out and road-tested Jersey and the Merton for us. And they flew. And they hired a car. Definitely working for the CIA.
3. Another Jo, but not just another Jo. A 15-year-old girl from the NSG (Northampton School for Girls), we were together for 296 days, from December 1982 to October 1983 (thus I am skipping ahead a bit by mentioning it). It was the first relationship that behaved like one: it evolved, bedded in, developed catch-phrases and I didn’t get bored. Who am I now to say that just because we were under 18 we didn’t love each other? If we thought we did, we did. It was certainly the most mature coupling of my life so far – a very good, steadying influence on my luteinising hormones – and even though there was a lot of other stuff ongoing in my life (the usual: band, films, drawing, hair), we did spend a lot of time together for those ten months, and even had the odd row, usually borne out of Jo feeling she was throwing away her 16th year in a long-term relationship. She was two years younger and yet somehow still seemed a year older.
4. Interestingly, my mum’s favourite of all my teen girlfriends. Perhaps because Wendy actually spoke to her. What a spin doctor she was. Great big spiky hair too, which ought to have doomed her relationship with Mum from the start but didn’t. Had a laugh like a honking seal.
5. A regular party venue at the famous Billing Aquadrome, a caravan site near some water. Other party venues of choice at the time: the Sturtridge Pavilion (in deepest town), the Marina Bar (also at the Aquadrome), Opus II (town), Dallington Squash Club (miles away), the Regents (can’t remember) and the Masonic Hall (near Nene College – luckily, they let girls in).
6. My reports from the end of the lower-sixth, July 1982, horrify me now to look at. ‘Time is running out for Andy,’ warns my form teacher Mr Chennels. ‘He seems to think that by some good stroke of fortune he is bound to land on his feet – I hope he wakes up soon.’ Mrs Pearson suggests I remember that ‘biology is not creative or
arising from within, but learned, remembered and recounted as required’. Mr Coppock predicts that ‘unless improvements are made, next June could be something of a nightmare’. Mr Gilbert worries in English about my ‘lack of note-taking’, while even in art, Mr Mutton says he lives in ‘anticipation of wonderful things which seem increasingly unlikely’. I know. I was pissing it all away, wasn’t I? That’s what happens when you give the best years of your life to rock’n’roll.
1981
Selected Extracts From My Diary
A PATTERN IS now set. Another Boots page-a-day diary, this time burgundy, and another collage under transparent sticky-back plastic: U2, Gene Hackman, Dustin Hoffman, the logos of Duran Duran, Premier (‘1st in percussion’), Film Review magazine and a Sainsbury’s price label for ironic effect.
So it’s films, more films, post-punk music, being in a band and getting a job. This is the most colourful and best-kept diary so far, a riot of felt-tip, Caran D’Ache pencil and caricatures drawn elsewhere, cut out and stuck in with Pritt. Paul Garner had by now started a similarly styled journal and we would constantly compare them, hence the attention to upkeep and visuals. (And hence the erosion of honest text – because the diary has become an amateur film review and art gallery, I start to get behind with it. Entries are filled in days later. The immediacy is gone. It’s a sad day.)
Hey, I wish you could see the pretty drawings, because the actual words now fall into second place, and great swathes are just movie reviews – dull third-party reading indeed. (Day one, 1 January, is dominated by a lengthy dissection of Papillon – rated four and a half stars in case you’re interested – and that’s how the year ends, with two reviews filling 28 December, The Thirty-Nine Steps and The Battle of Midway.)
The list of favourite people in the now traditional self-questionnaire at the front includes the Elephant Man and Barry Norman.
Sunday, 18 January
Undepressing things:
The Blue Lagoon is on next week.1
My birthday is in 44 days.
We are going to see U2 live.
Paula is probably coming.
I am definitely getting a new room.
I am definitely getting a new room.
My sore throat’s gone.
I am certainly getting a new room.
A new room! And it’ll be 10 foot by 10 foot and I’m helping to design it and have my own colour scheme and record player and I can paint something on one wall2 and I’ll just sit on my bed in it and admire the four walls and door. I could say ‘ace’. But I won’t. (It gets me very irritated.)
Monday, 19 January
If they can free hostages why can’t they buy me a video?3
Thursday, 26 February
On the way home from Dave F’s this morning the police force decided to stop me and look in my bag etc. I assume, as they said, ‘Sorry, mate,’ when they stopped frisking me, I am not the Trinity Ripper.4
Paul Bush (long lost Grendon-inhabiter) came down after lunch. He is into Rush, Peter Gabriel, pilchards on toast and drums. His sister’s going out with the lead singer of a group of whom the drummer’s going out with the bassist’s sister and his brother’s engaged to Paul’s other sister. Got that? No I’m fine.
Friday, 27 February
The Brightest View had recording session number two at Winsford ‘Living Room’ Studios. We put sound on tape from 10.30 till 5.10. Ace. We did ‘No Smoke’, ‘They Said’, ‘Dropout’, ‘Mirror Mirror’, ‘Average Girl’ and ‘No Penalties’.5 What a day. Good results. Sorry. Modesty. Positive results. Last Grange Ill of series. Cry. It continues not. I had some beautiful fried potatoes today.
Monday, 30 March
Depression (temporary). Don’t worry. Woke up in a rather depressed state of mind. Rode up Craig’s depressed and nearly finished Art CSE depressed.
However after tea I made Paula a sort-of-late-birthday card and stayed in and collected up £3 to get Paula a sort-of-late-birthday present record voucher and did all my homework and washed my hair and wrote my application to Sainsbury’s and ate an orange and a yogurt and found out that Craig is now going out with Rebecca Fourthyear.6 Ace.
Somebody’s had a gunfight with Mr Reagan in America. Big news. He’s alive.
Monday, 6 April
I could say: ‘One-six for the breaker on the side, bring it back, come on. Can you give me a nine on your rough twenty, good buddy? What’s your handle? That’s a big four and you’ve got Hi-Hat here, Hi-Hat. Can you give me a ten thiry-six ’cos there’s a lot of wallies bleeding over this channel. Pick a number, breaker. Roger-D, and it’s a ten-ten till we do it again, Polo.’ But I won’t. Went Vaughan’s. Mucked about on his CB. Got tickets for Peer Gynt. Small amounts of homework.7
Friday, 1 May
I think Vic is there. My room is under an epidemic of fun at the moment ie. today, its wonderful interior met a brand new bed plus all the burgundy topping, my once garage-bound drum kit, three shelves, a dartboard and a Spandau Ballet poster. O wow. (Oh shut up about your room, Andy.) Bin invited to John Lewis’s party. O good. How Blitzy8 shall I turn up? Oh my God the Human League’s new single9 is revolutionary! Oh, calm me down, someone.
Wednesday, 13 May
Video. Well it’s here. Yes, it is here. It exists and it’s ours and I love it. A Philips job10 with loads of cute black buttons all over it. Ooh, the little cassettes just pop out automatically and ask you to record Coronation St and FA Cup11 on them. Oh God, how ace and grey and real. I don’t even care that we didn’t practice tonight. Instead I went with Craig, Dave etc. to watch Cindy leg about in a Lings-ish athletix meeting,12 and I piled over her house to pick up my French oral sheets (good excuse). It took me nearly three hours to pick them up.
Friday, 29 May
Andy Collins … you know him as pupil of Weston Favell Upper School, ex-member of NCFE Film Club, drummer with Brightest View, drawer of caricatures and O-level candidate 46100 10045. Well now … Andy Collins the employee of J Sainsbury Ltd. Earned my first three or four quid by watching nice films, having a tour of behind-the-scenes Sainsbury’s, trying out my little box-opening utensils and having a cup of tea. Skin-tight overall13 (I’m getting a new one don’t worry).
Wednesday, 12 August JERSEY
Ow my legs! Owowow. How can it be unbelievably hot for four days running? Who cares! Orca is one cool book. Our waiter calls Melissa ‘Peach Melba’, Pap ‘Mr Smith’. Me ‘John’ or ‘Steve McQueen’. Cool catering. Corn flakes – bacon tomato – minestrone – plaice peas chips – Bakewell tart ice cream more ice cream – soup – Virginia ham pineapple sauce – sherry trifle – beautiful.
OK, so ‘ace’ got on our nerves. Well ‘cool’ is beginning to push its luck. For Your Eyes Only on Sunday perhaps. JJ Stewart Show was a laugh. The best Merton cabaret I’ve seen. JJ was a really horny bloke playing his mixture of trombones, trumpets etc. suggestive chat all the way through. I think I’ve had about 16 ciders so far this holiday.14
Tuesday, 18 August
Went on a shit walk to Corbiere.
Si won (wait for it …) 40 quid on the bingo. Lucky. What a job! Air pistol shop here we come. Lucky!
Wednesday, 2 September
Yes! 6th form! Yes here I am – in the WFUS lower sixth! I’m in Mr Chennells’ form (promising) and I’m doing my three As – Art Eng Bio. Haven’t got my cool ‘distinctive blazer’ yet. I’m in no great hurry. I’m really into the sixth. I don’t think Craig is! Some people are hard to please.
Saturday, 12 September
This man gets in the way of my life sometimes.15 Unpredictable!!
‘Be a Deputy Manager’ Part 1:
8.20am ‘You will be sacked if you do not work constantly. Collect trolleys at your tea break. DIE or LEAVE.’
18.06pm ‘Well done, lads. You’ve done an excellent job. KISS.’
Got an xtra 50p in me wage packet today (why? who cares?) so I had a Britvic 55 for tea break. Classy, eh?
Gaw, I had a real workout on my d
rums today. Lovely. I’m going to get into real 35mm photography. Bad tragic news: Leeds ****ing lost 4–0 to Coventry. Jackie Bisset16 is in love with a ****ing Russian ballet dancer twat. Cry!!
On a lighter note … £14.50. Hahahahahaha.
Thursday, 17 September
Rubik’s fucking Cube can turn an average human being into an uncontrollably violent, axe-wielding madman can’t it? Aha – I got a copy of the instructions. The instructions can turn an average human being into an uncontrollably violent, axe-wielding madman!! It says, ‘Now you will have an even number of U sides facing upwards.’ LIKE HELL! I tried it about a dozen times and I NEVER EVER ended up with an even number. (Add ‘fucking’ between each word there.)
How to really solve a Rubik’s Cube.
Chuck the bugger away.
Go to bed.
I didn’t watch Telefon.17
it looks suspiciously like an ‘A’
it clashes with everything
bor-ing.
TOTP was relative bolox.
Monday, 19 October
Yes it’s true! ITV have got Close Encounters for Christmas. My God no. Yes yes yes! Words I say a lot lately: twang – wonderful – bum – cool – into. Don’t ask why. (I think) I saw exactly 83 films in 1980. I have seen 77 this year so far (I think).18 Interestin’ eh?
Saturday, 28 November
Round-up time: Obsession of the week: Cindy/Dustin Hoffman. Record of the week: ‘Visions of China’ Japan. Great Expectation of the week: fancy dress party. Hint of the week: I’ve spent £4 on Paul’s Xmas pressie (that was ruthless, sorry). Dr Who of the week: Patrick Troughton. Sex Object of the week: Janet Ellis (Jigsaw). Haircut of the week: John Taylor/Robert Redford. That was good wasn’t it?
Where Did It All Go Right? Page 31