Friday, 25 December
The day after Poseidon Adventure.19 Otherwise known as Christmas Day. Ingredients: half a ton of relations, a surprisingly large pile of presents and too much food. Present highlights: some fun boots,20 a beautiful Bo Derek calendar, The Directory of Film Stars,21 and the ‘I Could Be Happy’ twelve-inch. Also received: Hedgehog Sandwich (not literally), 22 Ripping Yarns, record box, some personally printed letterheads, Quality Street (for a change!), felt tips, various useful things like scissors, pens and vodka liqueurs, Horror Stories, Duran Duran single, some cassettes, some macho Playboy talc etc. Family present: toaster sandwich thing. Not a bad haul, eh? I love my boots and Bo Derek.
Wednesday, 30 December
1981 was the year of … the new room, my first gig, Jo P, parties, Jack Nicholson, hair dye,23 Altered Images, The Brightest View, Rainbow, 6th form, O-levels, Ad-lib,24 Sainsbury’s, Jersey, Charles and Di, Paula, vodka, Hitchhikers’ Guide, The Video, Pernod, white Christmas, fun and drums!
1. I was so into films, I would watch anything. I actually went to see The Blue Lagoon twice, once at the ABC in January and once at Lings in March, which was stupid as it only counted as one film in my running total. (I must have really wanted to see Brooke Shields’s body-double topless.)
2. I ended up doing a painting on my door. Of me.
3. The 52 US embassy staff held captive by Iranian students in Teheran for 444 days, released just as Ronald Reagan was inaugurated (the Ayatollah wanted to humiliate the outgoing President Carter by delaying the hostages’ departure from Teheran Airport). But I really wanted a video.
4. Trinity was the area where Neil Stuart and Dave Freak lived. There was no Ripper there, I was merely making a point about the pigs.
5. Hard-hitting social commentaries about, respectively, smoking, authority, apathy, vanity, homogeny and football violence. Cheers.
6.The sweet Liverpudlian who cut hair, liked Japan and imagined she was ‘obese’ (she wasn’t). As we have established I went out with her for a whole month in 1982. It’s like a soap opera.
7. ‘Small’ meant large in our sarcastic world. Do you follow?
8. As in, how like the androgynous trend-setters who went to clubs such as the Blitz in London would I dress? The answer, on the night, was not very. I wore one of Mum’s scarves as a neckerchief but under a large coat. I slipped the neckerchief off.
9. ‘Sound of the Crowd’. It was pretty damn good.
10. The Philips 2000 system (with two-sided tapes): first casualty in the VCR wars, and Dad had bought rather than rented it. We eventually replaced it with … a BetaMax.
11. Replay: Spurs v Man City, 3–2.
12. The Lings leisure centre with the little cinema attached also had an athletics track.
13. More sarcasm.
14. I did much of my formative drinking at the Merton Hotel. Because our parents always knew where we were, they turned a blind eye.
15. The deputy manager at Sainsbury’s was the pantomime villain Mr Eccleston (he even had a moustache). We all hated him, but then he was the boss, and when you’re a worker (like I was pretending to be for the 18 weeks I was employed by Sainsbury’s), you hate the boss.
16. As in the film star Jacqueline Bisset, whom I fancied.
17. A Charles Bronson thriller directed by Don Siegel in 1977. You see, it was an event if I didn’t watch a film.
18. My final total for 1981 would be 121 films seen. In 1982 it was 144, and 1983 a storming 175. I have never stopped being proud of myself for this intense self-education.
19. The Poseidon Adventure ‘premiered’ on TV as we know in 1979, but it was on again on Christmas Eve this year – the third time I had seen it.
20. These boots were all the rage during the New Romantic years: black and sort of velvety, you tucked your pleated trousers into them (and then had to keep re-tucking them all night). Commendably effeminate though for a provincial lad.
21. Actually The Illustrated Directory of Film Stars by David Quinlan.
22. The second Not the Nine O’Clock News LP.
23. I had by now started to experiment with tints and dyes supplied by Carol. The sort other people can only detect if you stand under a bright light. (One such tint coincided with night-time carol singing so I was able to impress the others by shining a torch onto my hair all evening.)
24. In time-honoured sixth-form fashion, we discovered irony round about now and watched certain kids’ shows religiously, like Rainbow – every lunch hour – and this, Ad-Lib, a suitably ropey ITV teatime magazine show with Duncan Goodhew among its gang of upbeat presenters (also actors Tilly Vosborough, Dave Nunn and Oona Kirsch). These were the Supermarket Sweep and Neighbours of our day.
fifteen
Alan’s Flat
Just because you’re gay,
I won’t turn you away
If you stick around,
I’m sure that we can find some common ground
Billy Bragg, ‘Sexuality’ (1991)
THE FLASHPOINT CAME in the summer of ’82 and had it not been for all that dyed New Romantic hair in my eyes I would have seen it a mile off. My relationship with Mum and Dad was coming to a head. The honeymoon was almost up.
I was, in the immortal words of Viv Savage,1 having a good time all the time: gigging, writing, rehearsing and enjoying the first modicum of local fame with Absolute Heroes, making highly wrought birthday cards and tapes for all my mates, and notching up seemingly endless parties at the Willowtree function room; Mum and Dad were understandably concerned that I had taken my eye off the academic ball. I had actually kicked it over a fence.
My bloodless O-level grades were enough to clinch me a place in the sixth form, but – as I found out in term one – A-levels seem timed not just to run counter to your galloping hormones, but also to coincide with the age of the provisional driving licence, almost-legal drinking and Saturday jobs. Indeed, merely being in the sixth form with all its perks (common room, kettle, tuck shop, study periods, ‘distinctive blazer’) creates precisely the wrong environment for work. It did for me anyway.
The problem underlying all this was easy to see. I’d decided by now that I really could do art for a living (despite the stingy C they gave me for my O-level – a sign that I was misunderstood, obviously). My naïve childhood jotter fantasy had found a precedent: there were art colleges, I’d discovered. While my peers were thinking about university places in Bath and Bristol, I pinned my hopes on studying art. (I know what you’re thinking: studying art = oxymoron. And, as someone who spent four years doing it, I can’t really argue.) Of course, you can’t just do art A-level and spend the rest of the time eating Aeros from the tuck shop and organising the revue. So I took English, because I liked writing, and – to make up the numbers – biology, one of my few Bs, which did at least involve a bit of drawing (aorta and xylems and mitochondria mostly).
My whole attitude was wrong from the day I first donned the maroon blazer: I was doing one subject I truly cared about – but thought I was so good at already I didn’t need to put any further effort in; a second subject I liked but was only taking as a fall-back (‘At least get English, then you can always be a journalist if the art career falls through,’ said my parents, clearly out of their minds); and a third subject which was the equivalent of the Guinness Book of Names, the sort of tome I took out of the library simply because you were allowed four and there were no others about vampire films or Tony Hancock.
Mr Chennells was bang on when he wrote at the end of my first year, ‘He seems to think that by some good stroke of fortune he is bound to land on his feet.’ I did think that: I lived by that rule. My first 17 years on earth had seemed like one long ‘good stroke of fortune’ (I wonder if he meant to type ‘stroke of good fortune’?). I blame my parents for this sense of enormous well-being. They were the ones who had brought me up in an atmosphere of fun, freedom, farmhouses and fish fingers. I figured this was what life was going to be like for the foreseeable future: drawing
cartoons, putting triangles in my diary and playing a drum kit which I hadn’t even paid for. Apart from the wobbly start at Weston Favell, the U in history, and perhaps my ingrown toenail, life had been pretty sweet for Andy Collins. (FANS … AUTOGRAPHS LATER!) Where was the evidence that I couldn’t surf through the next few years?
On 4 March 1982, my 17th birthday (whereupon I erroneously wrote ‘I am a man!’ in my diary), I was a massively confident, energetic and happy human being. My horoscope from the paper that day was telling: ‘Your solar chart looks positively divine. There is little that I can guard you against, except maybe a bit of waste and extravagance. Apart from that you are the life and soul of the party, and the year ahead of you looks delicious.’
Nothing about biology essays, you’ll notice, but then horoscopes are a load of shit. Nevertheless I believed that the stars had aligned for me that day: I was the life and soul of the party, the year ahead did look delicious. Let me through, I’m a Pisces!
I had packed in my soul-destroying Sainsbury’s job before Christmas – with Mum and Dad’s blessing, I might add, as I’d protested it was interfering with my A-levels. (Well it was, but so would the Saturday activities I replaced it with: drinking, sleeping, and hanging around the Grosvenor Centre.) They bought me a Hitachi SDT-1000 faux-stack hi-fi for my birthday and I thanked them kindly, put it in my new bedroom and played my new Bauhaus and Gina X2 albums on it. And what’s more, the day after my birthday, Vaughan passed his driving test, a hugely significant pivot, as it freed him up to become my willing chauffeur in his second-hand red Viva aka the ‘Bossmobile’ (I called him the Boss, not because he looked anything like Bruce Springsteen, or indeed because he was the boss at the printers where he worked, but because I hero-worshipped him). Positively divine.
What could possibly go wrong?
* * *
Thus began a new period of my life where I no longer needed my dad, or anyone else’s, to come and pick me up from parties. I was, thanks to Vaughan and the Test Centre at Gladstone Road, independent for the first time. Well, dependent on him but he didn’t mind. He was only a year older than me (and still lived at home) but seemed about five years older with his car and his job, and this was where the floodgates opened.
Vaughan (or Vorno as we called him) introduced me to Alan Martin, another senior chap who was also in gainful employment. Better than that, he worked at Our Price records in town, which seemed to be just about the coolest job anyone could have aside from being Barry Norman or Jacqueline Bisset’s ballet-dancing husband. (Alan owned a full-size cardboard cut-out Gary Numan and everything.) An occasional DJ, he was part of the local rock scene: although Our Price was a chainstore, individual branches still had character in those days, and Alan’s was a noted hangout. As a result he seemed to know everybody. A gregarious bear of a man with Seventies hair and a Toyah fixation, he was interested in Absolute Heroes and came to see us rehearse in the school hall with a view to becoming our manager (this was before our first gig). We initially called him Mr R Price, for a joke, but were secretly flattered that a man who worked in a record shop was interested in us. He was also an inveterate giggler and hard not to like.
He stopped giggling briefly a month later when his parents effectively threw him out of the house. I was unlucky enough to be a spectator at this cathartic moment in Alan’s life (Vorno had driven us round there). I guess the row had been brewing for some time, but on this particular balmy evening, Alan and his equally bearlike Mum had such a steaming head-to-head he ended up storming out, with both parents screaming obscenities at him as the Bossmobile pulled out of Poppyfield Court3 at high speed. I must admit I was quite shocked at the expletives they came out with, which just shows what a sheltered home life I must have led. But then Alan did live in Lings.
At least he used to. The next thing we knew – and I think you may be ahead of me here – Alan had moved into a flat in nearby Blackthorn. He was officially the first friend I’d ever had who didn’t live with his mum and dad. So now, right in the middle of my A-levels, I had one mate with a car and another with a flat. It was a recipe for the best of times and the worst of times.
Alan’s flat became mythic almost immediately. He shared it with a bloke called Nigel, and it became a magnet for a whole host of us who lived with our parents. Don’t start thinking Jonathan King at the Walton Hop – we were most of us aged around 17 and 18, and Alan and Nigel were only 19 going on 20. No luring went on. We loved it there, and Alan and Nigel had to clear up the cups when the rest of us had driven off into the night (or been driven off, by guess who). Alan’s flat was a place where you could open a tin of Birds Devonshire custard and eat it all with a spoon. The place also acted like a miniature singles bar, serving instant coffee, Marmite, Rice Krispies and mushy peas at all hours, and playing musical selections from the collection of, well, a man who worked in a record shop. And cardboard Gary Numan was there to watch over us.
When the flat started to become a scene, Alan wrote a message to me in my diary: ‘Why, you young fool, you’ll end up like me and Nigel if you come up much more … BLOODY PERVERTED!!!’ He didn’t mean it literally, although if Mum had happened to glance at my journal she’d have seen from my little cartoons that a typical Saturday night round Alan’s might involve Nigel administering a home-made tattoo to someone called Phil with a sewing needle and some ink, or Nigel shaving off all his body hair. To make matters more suspect – for Mum anyway – I slept over a few times. Eek.
Slap bang in the middle of all this sleaze, Mum and Dad went to a school parents’ evening (I think we can see where this is heading) … the kind that culminates in a serious ‘chat’ on their return. ‘They made me admit I’m a lazy sod,’ says my diary for 21 April, and you should read the next bit in an over-sincere American accent: ‘Admitting it to them was admitting it to me.’ I vowed to pull my socks up. The next day I stayed in and caught up on my English essays and copied up a backlog of biology notes and did some life drawing and went to bed at 9.45 p.m.
And the day after that I went back to Alan’s flat.
Actually, there were two Alan’s flats, just like there were two Miss Ellies on Dallas. The Blackthorn one, over in the eastern wilds of Northampton, lasted for about six weeks. Then, tragically, Alan moved back in with his parents, which was seen by all as a moral defeat, mainly because we’d have nowhere to go and eat tinned food and do silly stuff on beanbags. In July, he did the decent thing and moved into a second flat, much closer to the town centre and thus even more of a refuge for passing waifs and strays. (‘This flat will be full of me for a long time,’ I wrote on the day he moved in, just in case Mum was reading and feared that she might have wrested me from Alan’s sinister clutches.)
Alan now shared with a guy called Martin, who may or may not have been gay (he had a moustache – he was). There was a feeling that Alan himself might be gay – he didn’t have a girlfriend in the whole time I knew him.4 This was the early Eighties: dabbling with bisexuality was all the rage. Certainly one or two gay-seeming types started to enter the expanded flat orbit now that it was in a more cosmopolitan (for Northampton) spot. Considering what a default homophobe I had been in my early-to-mid teens I am proud to say that by now, with my horizons stretched, I couldn’t care less about anyone’s sexual preference. I didn’t feel preyed upon and if these slightly camp people were gay or bi, they were also a right good laugh. Plus, there were always plenty of girls around.
Significantly though, none of these girls was my girlfriend. I’d briefly been out with Wendy, whom I met through the flat dating agency, back in June, but we seemed to make better friends than a couple and were happier parted and flirtatious than tied-down and anxious. But Mum hadn’t forgiven me for finishing with Wendy, and she was out to get me.
One night I came home from the flat, around 11 p.m., and said this rather provocative thing to Mum and Dad, who were still up, watching telly:
‘God, I think I was one of the only people at the flat tonight who wasn’
t gay!’
Light the gay touchpaper and stand well back …
This was Mum’s signal to snap. Even though I had made it clear in my assessment of the evening that I wasn’t gay, she took it to mean that I had – as she had long suspected – been sucked into a den of iniquity and could ‘go a bit funny’ at any moment. She genuinely thought I was about to end up BLOODY PERVERTED, and for my own sake – to save my soul – she laid into me.
Mum had sat passively back and watched for five months as I’d become a brainwashed, work-shy bum-slave of Alan and his evil cohorts. Now she was mad as hell and she wasn’t going to take it any more. Can you picture Michael Jackson hanging on to those two trees in the video for ‘Earth Song’? The bit where the wind almost knocks him off his feet and it’s a bit like the end of the world? It was actually a bit like the Collins front room that night, although I don’t think Jacko’s sexuality has ever been in as much doubt as mine was. The combined browbeating I got from Mum and Dad made parents’ evening seem like a soothing damp cloth on my face.
They tried to ban me from visiting Alan’s flat. I wasn’t having any of that. Mum, who always led these assaults from the front, threw at me my poor performance at school (which I couldn’t argue with – they’d read the ‘good stroke of fortune’ report), my stupid auburn hair (now tending to stick upwards with backcombing and spray), my clothes (tending towards old black T-shirts, rolled-up jeans, sailing pumps and no socks to even pull up) and even my approaching driving test (lessons paid for by them). For this ethical, mental and sartorial decline she blamed, among others, Absolute Heroes (‘They’re never going to get you anywhere!’ – or was it just, ‘They’re never going to get anywhere’?), Vorno (for driving me astray), and Alan, the great Satan at the centre of this inferno. To adapt The Poseidon Adventure tagline: Hell, backside up.
Where Did It All Go Right? Page 32