Where Did It All Go Right?

by Andrew Collins

  Mum worked part-time as a secretary at Lings Upper School on the other side of the tracks (or the other side of Weston Favell Centre). She knew about ex-pupil Alan Martin. What she knew about him she wasn’t prepared to divulge, but it put her on the moral high ground. She seemed to know him better than I did, even though – as they were quick to point out – I spent most of my life at his flat while he tickled my chin and fed me grapes. I knew him to be a voluble, hospitable and generous pillar of the rock community. I saw no marauding shirt-lifter. He was my mate, and the manager of our band. And I liked girls.

  However, rather than dissuade my parents of my homosexuality while in the dock, I rather cruelly left it up in the air. Like many a musician before and after me, I rather enjoyed this new game of being sexually ambiguous. Was I or wasn’t I? We’ll be right back after these massages.

  * * *

  Let’s look at the evidence: since meeting Alan, I had fouled up my end-of-year exams and let off a worry-bomb among my schoolteachers; I had stayed out all night a couple of times (although never without Mum and Dad knowing exactly where I was); my hair had become incrementally more auburn and as such effeminate to more conventional eyes; and the band had played half a dozen gigs, most of them at a fairly rough pub in town called the Black Lion.5 During that period I had brought home four girlfriends, although admittedly only about once per girlfriend. But since when had an inability to keep a girlfriend meant latent homosexual tendencies? Perhaps I was just a bit crap at keeping them.

  It may be unfashionable to say so, but I don’t think I have a homosexual bone in my body. I’ve never had a homosexual bone in my body either. When Alan once climbed into bed with me in the middle of the night, I simply got out and slept on the floor. Well, I was sleeping in his bed, and he had been an over-garrulous host in offering to sleep on the settee that night. I think he wanted his bed back. Fair enough.

  I quite liked the cachet of seeming on the verge of an alternative lifestyle to my parents. It gave me an air of well-travelled mystery around the house. We went on our annual holiday to Jersey two weeks after the ‘Earth Song’ lecture, and I think Mum and Dad were glad to have me close at hand again and under the same roof for a fortnight. For those two weeks I happily regressed back to being the wide-eyed, brown-haired boy of the year previous. I befriended Lynn, the girl from Manchester whom I later went up to see, and I certainly looked heterosexual from where Mum and Dad were sitting, up on the balcony. (It’s ironic really that the year before, unbeknown to my parents, when I had the Spandau Ballet fringe and the shirts buttoned up one side, some kids at the Merton had shouted ‘Poof!’ at me in the coffee lounge.)

  Back in Northampton, for as long as the Lynn thing trickled on, I think Mum and Dad relaxed a little. They certainly refrained from shouting ‘Poof!’ at me on the stairs. Lynn at least kept my mind occupied for a lovelorn few weeks, and although I didn’t stop going to Alan’s flat, it stopped being my second home.

  I went back to school and tried in earnest to avert next June’s nightmare (the one Mr Coppock had predicted ‘unless improvements are made’). There was a riotous party round at the flat for Alan’s 20th birthday, starting at 5.20p.m. – and on a Wednesday too – but I spent most evenings at home when we weren’t gigging.

  I don’t know if the novelty of Alan’s flat had worn off. He was still Absolute Heroes’ manager (for which he took 0 per cent of our earnings I might add) and we still saw him a lot, but it was around then that pub culture took hold for the first time. This was after all the school year during which upper sixth-formers turned 18.

  I spent more time at the Bold Dragoon pub up in Weston Favell village than I had ever done at Alan’s flat, but my parents didn’t seem to mind, even during the week, and even though it involved me drinking Fosters (quite an urbane choice in 1982, by the way). I can only assume they felt that going to the pub was more ‘normal’ than hanging out behind locked doors with home tattooists. What harm could possibly come to me drinking illegally in a village pub beyond choking on a domino or falling into the open fire? The Bold became our new hangout, the hard-but-fair landlord getting more and more agitated every time one of our group celebrated his or her 18th in there. ‘Is that the last one?’ he would ask. Yes, we would lie.

  Mum and Dad gave me a top-up lecture a month into term, and Mum flew off the handle and said two inflammatory things to me:

  ‘I wouldn’t be very proud if you got a D at A-level!’

  And:

  ‘I reckon I could get an E at A-level!’

  I felt affronted by these remarks. Getting any kind of A-level was actually a lot harder than Mum thought, and it’s all very easy to talk about getting one at the breakfast table, but not so easy to spend two years doing the essays and the projects and the note-taking. More pressingly, I could well foresee getting a D or an E so I wanted to create an atmosphere in which all passes were good passes.

  But through it all they never once grounded me, as American parents say (and do). In fact, I was encouraged to borrow Mum’s Mini Metro in which to drive to the Bold. I suppose it stopped me boozing, which was a good thing, but I’ll never forget Dad taking me to one side that November and having a manly chat:

  ‘Borrow Mum’s car whenever you like,’ he said. ‘You could use it to give a lift home to a girl.’

  A girl! Is that not priceless? They were trying to buy back my heterosexuality with petrol. However, I took his advice to heart and drove a new Bold regular called Della back to her house that very night. Nothing came of it – she lived on one of the eastern estates and there was a hole in the kitchen wall where her older brother had punched it during a family row. Della was not for me. But I appreciated Dad’s offer all the same. (It’s significant that Vorno faded from view somewhat once I’d passed my test, but not completely – I wasn’t that mercenary.)

  Mum admits today that me turning out gay would have been her worst nightmare, although I suspect only because of what the neighbours would say. If I’d got a girl pregnant around this turbulent time I think Dad would have patted me on the back. That’s something I suppose.

  * * *

  So my brush with gayness had passed without incident. At Christmas I met and fell for Jo – where else but at a week-long Christmas party at Alan’s flat? – and entered my first long-term relationship. But I still looked a fright and would do for quite some time. My hair expanded outwards and skywards through committed back-combing and upside-down blow-drying; it also got auburner; my turn-ups rose higher up my sockless legs, as did the sleeves of my second-hand dress jacket (this was the Eighties). I actually looked more and more effeminate as 1983 wore on,6 but I had a long-term female girlfriend on my arm, so how could Mum and Dad complain? They did, but how could they?

  I drove Jo everywhere, which meant I wasn’t getting pissed, and even though they couldn’t have known it for sure, I wasn’t on drugs. I never even saw or smelt a drug in Northampton – not to my knowledge anyway – until much later when a guy called Pete Hepworth7 on my art foundation course at Nene College offered me a puff of his joint on the Racecourse. It made me giggle for half an hour, but I never pestered him for any more. So much for getting hooked.

  Don’t forget I had never smoked. I’d come home with my donkey jacket reeking of fags on many occasions but it wasn’t my smoke – and I think Mum actually believed that. She’d given up years before, although she briefly and inexplicably took to having the odd More cigarette on holiday (the kind made of chocolatey brown paper). I called her bluff one year by demanding she give me one. She did. I smoked it reasonably convincingly. It was bloody horrible. No More, thanks.

  So despite appearances, I had turned out alright really. I never paid them back for the drum kit, even when Absolute Heroes brought home some door money from the Black Lion, but at least I never threatened to have my ear pierced, not once. It was a good year for Mum and Dad, 1983: in June the Tories got back in (low taxes, therefore my allowance was safe!), and in July we moved upmarket i
nto a new house with three toilets in the village (into the cul-de-sac where Craig’s family lived, staggering distance from the Bold).

  Simon was about to start a promising career in the army, while I had gained a place at nearby Nene to do my pre-degree foundation year (the first step on the road to legitimate higher education). This despite failing one of my A-levels as predicted by Mr Coppock. Biology. Nightmare. I got an O grade, which is the equivalent of having moved on not a jot in two years of study. (I know. Why didn’t the exam board just come round and slap me in the face? They knew where I drank.) I blame my failure squarely on repeats of the first series of The Young Ones, albums by New Order,8 George Clinton9 and Wasted Youth,10 the hot weather and the distraction of a general election. (Alright, maybe not the last one, but I could hardly blame Jo – she was studying concurrently for her O-levels. She passed all eight.)

  I finished with Jo just before the start of my first term at Nene. I won’t say I packed her in, that’s for kids, but I did end it and for her own good – she was feeling her age, which was two years younger than me, don’t forget. It turned out to be a dry run for the real, final split in October. Alan had by now moved out of his flat and bought a house in Southfields. I don’t believe I ever even went there.

  Thus began a clean slate, and the year that Mum and I really fell out.

  1. Keyboard player, Spinal Tap.

  2.Forgotten German diva, very much in the Grace Jones mould, and big at Northampton’s only New Romantic nightclub, Das Bunker. I never went there (it was over-18s only) but Vaughan did – further fuel to the fire of my hero-worship. Alan even DJ’ed there.

  3. Don’t be fooled by the fragrant, rural street names. They’re all like that in the eastern estates. Alan’s subsequent Blackthorn flat was in a street called Great Meadow, Wendy lived in Sidebrook Court, Jo in West Priors Court and so on. It makes Northampton sound like a village in Morse.

  4. Alan is now married with two kids and lives in New Zealand. He’s very keen for my mum to know this. ‘You should tell her that I’m now leading a very respectable lifestyle as the manager of a newspaper, I have my own business, I own a house with a harbour view, I no longer drink and I spent three years as a youth worker!’

  5. We played the Black Lion a great deal, but it was one of the only halfway decent live venues in Northampton at that time. It was all function rooms and pubs. For the record – and this means a lot to me – Absolute Heroes also played the Marina Bar, the Sturtridge Pavilion, the Paradise Club, Dallington Squash Club, the County Ground and the Five Bells. And Daventry Youth Centre, our only out-of-town gig. Thanks for letting me share that with you.

  6. Some hard kids actually punched me in the side of the head for looking a poof on the racecourse after a party in 1984. I was with the distinctly heterosexual-looking Simon that night, who, like the good infantryman he was, suggested we run like hell. I can only assume he thought I might fight like a girl and didn’t fancy the odds.

  7. He wasn’t called Hepworth but that’s what we called him (after learning about the sculptress Barbara Hepworth). This was art school, you squares.

  8. Power, Corruption and Lies (Factory, 1982).

  9. Computer Games (Capitol, 1982), Clinton’s first solo album, the one containing ‘Atomic Dog’. It was a new boy called Dave ‘Newboy’ Payne, from the white socks heartland of Essex, who introduced me to funk.

  10. The Beginning of the End (Bridgehouse Records, 1982). Who remembers Wasted Youth? They were The Strokes of their day, albeit not American or successful. They weren’t local and yet nobody outside of the Alan’s flat scene seems to have heard of them (they’re not even logged in Mick Mercer’s book Gothic Rock). This album was reviewed in Sounds and described by a man called Jim Reid as ‘quite possibly the worst record released this year. If you like your juvenile rock obsessions cloaked in New York leather … then, mate, Wasted Youth are the boys for you.’ Where do I sign?

  sixteen

  Wayward Up Lancaster

  I wish you were going away, not Simon!

  Mum to Andrew after a row, Sunday, 13 February 1983

  Didn’t really mean it – your loving Mum xx

  Written without my knowledge in my diary on the same day

  I’M NOT A parent and have no plans to be one, so I can never really know the clawing, bittersweet pain of seeing your children grow up and leave home. I was emotional enough when our two cats were spayed and had to stay at the vet’s overnight, so I can at least hazard a guess at what it must be like. In 1983, aged 40 (funny age), Mum lost Simon to the British Army, and a year later, aged 41 (funnier age), she lost me to the weird and frightening world of art school. (So did Dad of course, aged 42 and 43, but as we’ve established he’s a stoic individual with constant recourse to the bigger picture.) Her two boys, gone.

  She and I had a row on the day I left. It was only right and proper that we did. We’d been at loggerheads ever since July’s house-move. We lived in the genteel Weston Favell village now, where Mum foolishly imagined a better class of neighbour to be twitching the net curtains. If I may say so, she developed ideas above her station the moment her feet hit the gravel drive. She made the commonest of errors – equating money with class. In fact, the residents of Kestrel Close were just like the residents of Winsford Way: white-collar wage slaves made good. (If ‘good’ can be measured by length of gravel drive.) These weren’t posh people, and nor were we.

  Of course, reactionary relatives like Nan Mabel would say, ‘Ooh, very posh!’ when they saw the new house, in the same way that Cilla Black says, ‘Ooh very posh!’ when a contestant on Blind Date reveals that he or she works for a PR company. I’m afraid Mum took the ‘very posh’ literally. And because she was now apparently landed gentry (even though she worked as a school secretary), my ever-worsening appearance became an unbearable thorn in her side. It wasn’t what she thought of the army trousers and Oxfam macs I wore to Nene College, or the fingerless gloves I wore at the dinner table, it was the barons and baronesses with the binoculars who lived either side of us.

  I sympathise with Mum now of course. I looked quite dreadful in 1983–84, although not as bad as Paul Garner who often came to call for me in the mornings (he had effectively adopted the ‘look’ of a Vietnam war veteran combined with werewolf Eddie Quist from the film The Howling). I have no idea what the residents of Kestrel Close actually thought of me, or him, because these people didn’t exactly spend a lot of time chitchatting over the garden fence, forming Young Wives groups or accompanying each other down the welfare. Unlike the good folks of Winsford Way and Ashbox Close, they kept themselves to themselves.

  So, this final school year was agony for Mum, and as a result, second-degree agony for Dad. When it came to taking sides in a domestic firefight he rightly took Mum’s and backed up her hysterical all-out attacks with more restrained low-level cover. But he and I had some important bonding sessions that year – he accompanied me on the train to London to look round Chelsea (the only parent there that day), and he drove me back to the college with my bulging portfolios for the interview. Mum wouldn’t have been seen in public with me. Thus she and I grew detached in our new detached house, and when Kevin Pearce – a schoolfriend of Simon’s at a loose end after he’d joined the army – filled the vacancy left by long-term girlfriend Jo in October, a regimen of furtive hairstyling took hold.1 At weekends I would drive to Kevin’s parents’ house and in his bedroom – to the sound of Death Cult, SPK2 or the Bunnymen’s ‘Killing Moon’ – we would backcomb our hair into rock-hard Robert Smith haystacks using gallons of Boots hairspray. 3 Kevin’s mum turned a blind eye, even though they too lived in a cul-de-sac.

  Off we would go into town, fully sculpted, to hang out at whichever wine bar allowed in weirdos that week and drink blackcurrant and lemonade (me, because I was driving, and Kev out of moral support – and because it seemed like a very gothic thing to drink). Our hair would not move. It was fixed. And by the time I rolled in, Mum and Dad were in bed. In the
morning it would be flattened by sleep and they were none the wiser. I had no wish to cause trouble you see.

  The row we had on the day I left home was about clothes. Mum forbade me from packing some item of clothing – it could have been my army trousers, the dirty blue mac with the ripped lining, or just something second-hand and painty – and I touchéed her. ‘As of tomorrow,’ I said. ‘I can wear anything! You won’t even know what I’m wearing!’

  She withdrew in tears. Not because I was right and could indeed from then on wear a clown costume and a Carmen Miranda fruit hat, but because she was heartbroken that I was leaving home. She was about to relinquish her maternal role irrevocably, and effectively cut out a part of her own femininity, casting it aside for ever. One of her chief functions on earth – one to which she had devoted 19 of her 41 years – was over, done with, gone. I was too fat-headed to see it. (I think I understand women better now, but it took another ten years of pain to get there.)

  Dad set me straight and I felt bad. (I already felt bad but for different reasons.) I packed the offending piece of rag anyway and Mum gave me a kiss on the doorstep when I left. It was probably our first mother-and-son kiss since 1978 (kissing Hayley had made kissing Mum seem all wrong so I stopped). The whole unnecessary blow-up was a learning experience, and a healing one. After my first homesick week of college I put Mum and Dad at Number One in my People Charts.4

  Morrissey only got to Number Four.

  * * *

  So that was the end, beautiful friend. I was no longer resident of my mum and dad’s house or a citizen of Northampton. They kept my bedroom for me, left the Smiths pictures Blu-Tacked to the walls like the grieving parents of a murder victim, and I duly returned every holiday (because the halls of residence chucked us out), and played at being my pre-college self, hitting the town with Kevin and going to the Bold, and occasionally, if our leave coincided, seeing Simon. But I was, as predicted, a visitor. Overspill.