Why Do I Say These Things?

by Jonathan Ross

  We got downstairs, and I wheeled Peter past the audience and over to the back, where there was an area without too many chairs where they obviously accommodated the wheelchair connoisseur. So I parked Peter up there and sat slightly in front of him to his left, and the girls came on. They seemed to be quite happy, healthy-looking young women. They danced up and down, got nice and naked – it was a perfectly enjoyable way to spend an evening. As they got into it, so did Peter, who began to make appreciative groaning noises. He used to make this grumbling noise often, and when the girls were on I noticed that he got a bit louder. But I thought it best not to look round because I assumed he’d found some way of applying friction in the downstairs department to enhance the experience. That theory seemed about right, because the noises grew increasingly urgent and frenetic and loud. So what started as a kind of low-level mish-mash of syllables and vowels, sounding rather like an old Jewish prayer, became louder and louder, and I didn’t want to look and spoil what was obviously an enjoyable but semi-private moment.

  Finally, when one of the girls had finished dancing, I heard him call out my name quite loudly over the music, which was something of a surprise – I was worried he might have used some fantasy involving me and a full English breakfast to help him go all the way. I turned to find that he had got his little finger trapped under one of the wheelchair handles, and his violent movements, whipped up by the naked ladies, had been such that he had managed to break it. He had snapped his little finger. He had sat there for a good twenty minutes in considerable pain trying to attract my attention, which was difficult bearing in mind there was Abba playing at full pelt and a young Chinese girl showing off her marvellous dim sums. I felt terrible, but probably not quite as terrible as Peter did.

  I bundled him back up the stairs, past the ladies in their gloomy changing nooks, who all came out to check he wasn’t too badly hurt and to peck him on the cheek or forehead. Outside, BC was waiting, furious with me for not taking proper care of Peter, and I suppose he had a point, but I pleaded circumstantial distractions. Anyway, I said my goodbyes as BC drove Peter off to Casualty. I figured that would be the end of it, but the next time I saw him he had a different carer with him. Old BC had gone. It turned out that just before Peter finally got home to his girlfriend he had asked BC to wipe all evidence of the strippers’ farewells off his face – and BC had refused. Peter’s comparatively new girlfriend had been understandably pissed off that her boyfriend had come home really late, with a broken finger and covered in strippers’ lipstick. She eventually forgave him, but Peter couldn’t forgive BC for not wiping him clean, so he sacked him.

  I have of course changed Peter’s name from his real one for the purposes of this book, just in case he doesn’t want whoever he’s with now to know about his past. But if you’re reading this, thanks for an unforgettably great night out.

  Never mind the bollocks, where’s a public toilet when you need one?

  How did I become this spectacular example of fully rounded, effortlessly sophisticated, worldly-wise maturity you see before you? It’s a question I have never been asked. But if I were, I would offer up three main influences as I grew from boyhood to slightly older boyhood. One, as you already know, was comic books. The next was TV, and the third and probably most influential of the lot was punk rock. Punk was, for me, right up there with the adventures of The Creeper and Dr Strange and Herbie the Fat Fury – all personal comic-strip faves of mine and if you’ve never read them then do yourself a favour; you’re never too old. But punk even overshadowed them for a while.

  If you were to view my life as a slice of sedimentary rock, you’d see several years of nothingness: just a bit of general TV-watching and trying to work out if I would ever learn to fly by jumping off the couch. Then, at about eight or nine, when I discovered comic books, you’d come across a fantastic rainbow-coloured layer. That was when everything changed for me, and my monochrome universe suddenly exploded into full technicolour with stereo sound. After that, along came Doctor Who and H. R. Pufnstuf , and Star Trek and Colditz , and Monty Python , and a bunch of other TV shows that I grew addicted to. Then, at sixteen, it was all blown away by the thrill of punk rock, from which I have never fully recovered. It’s slightly embarrassing to have to admit it, but more than anything I learnt at school, or from my parents, or from the day-to-day experiences at work and interacting with the real world, these are the forces that have shaped my malleable self into the man-monster that I am today.

  When punk came along I was, of course, the perfect age for it. I turned sixteen in November 1976, just as it all kicked off. Unless, that is, you were one of the lucky few who were involved in the scene’s embryonic stages. That was a fairly small group, maybe just one or two hundred people, who knew the bands or already went to the shops or hung out in the gay bars or went to the art schools that all helped to nurture the movement as it spread by word of mouth. As for the rest of us, punk didn’t really come to our attention until the music papers picked up on it, usually only to rubbish it. And, of course, when the Sex Pistols made their infamous and unforgettable appearance on the teatime magazine show Today , hosted by Bill Grundy.

  I remember only a very few key television moments from when I was a kid. One was being allowed to stay up with my dad to see Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin take their first steps on the moon in 1969. For some reason my brothers weren’t there, and my sister, who would have been tiny then, was tucked up in bed. We watched it together on a small black and white TV, and I couldn’t quite work out whether it was real or not. I also have clear memories of watching Monty Python’s Flying Circus with Mum and Dad – and, later, a Marx Brothers film with my brothers – and laughing so much I literally fell off my chair. And kept laughing on the floor.

  But watching the Sex Pistols being goaded by Bill Grundy, a presenter who must have inspired the creation of Roger Melly in Viz , on 1 December 1976 was different. It was like someone had jumped into the television from the real world and shouted out to me to wake up and start living. It was incredible, and all the more remarkable when you look at it now (it’s easy to find on YouTube). Rather than mad-eyed harbingers of anarchy and destruction, the Pistols and their fellow punks look like silly, slightly nervous kids having a laugh. It was only because of the dreary pomposity of TV and newspapers back then (as opposed to the desperate desire to appear hip that characterizes both media today) that it made such a splash.

  In fact, if the incident hadn’t been given so much publicity – Today wasn’t broadcast outside the London area – punk might never have taken off in the way it did. But the Mirror ’s decision to put the story on its front page, under the headline ‘The Filth and the Fury’, spread the word to the whole country. It made those of us who had seen these naughty kids show no respect for an authority that we all secretly knew was lousy and hypocritical feel like fabulous, dangerous rebels.

  Nobody used the f-word on telly in those days, let alone before the watershed, which even today would be a bit of an issue. It was as if the Pistols had gone around and emptied a small bag of poo on the doorstep of every boring grown-up in the country. I was amazed, excited, shocked, horrified and, crucially, frightened. These blokes and the weird boys and girls in their entourage were pretty scary. When something both arouses and terrifies you, you’re hooked. And so, drawn to this anarchic group of urchins who looked – although admittedly in their case it seemed to be through choice – as awful as I did, I took to reading the music papers avidly, awaiting the latest editions of Sounds and NME with the kind of feverish anticipation previously reserved for the imminent arrival of another issue of Fantastic Four .

  It wasn’t long before I met a kindred spirit, another Leytonstone teenager, whose imagination had also been caught by the notorious interview. I’ll call him Steven. He lived at the end of my road, on the other side, and although I knew him to nod to as we walked past each other, we went to different schools so there was no chance we might be friends – until punk entered both
our lives at pretty much the same moment. A few days after that fateful appearance by the Pistols, I noticed he had had his hair cut a bit shorter and looked to be wearing a badge on the lapel of his blazer.

  The key signs that you were about to leave the normal world and become a punky outlaw were threefold: one, shorter, spikier hair; two, straighter trousers; and three, badges, possibly but not necessarily accompanied by a skinny tie and a sneer. They couldn’t be any old badges, of course. Ideally they had the name of a punk band on them, or a swastika or a rude word. The swastika thing died out pretty quickly, I’m relieved to say. It was never about liking Nazis but about trying to shock people, and even then I thought it was in poor taste. I just didn’t have the balls to tell anyone to stop.

  I, too, had started wearing straighter trousers and badges, and had just asked my mum for a shorter haircut, and Steven recognized these signs in me. We crossed the road at the same time, met in the middle and became immediate allies. I can’t say I ever liked him, to be honest, and I’m sure he felt the same way about me, which is to say he didn’t feel much of anything. But you needed someone to walk around with so you didn’t feel like a total tit, or risk getting beaten up for being a punk. You also needed to have someone to go to gigs with, or concerts as we rather prissily called them at first.

  Until then, Steven’s musical horizons hadn’t extended much beyond Queen, who ironically had been booked to appear on Today that fateful night but had pulled out, allowing the Sex Pistols to sneak in when the producers got desperate. His parents’ record collection was well stocked with stuff like the Stones, and I think they might even have had a Velvet Underground album, so they were quite hip, even if they didn’t look it. His mum was a plump owlish little thing with glasses and his dad – actually his stepfather – was thickset and balding. He always reminded me of the bloke married to Olive in On the Buses . Seeing as his mum looked a bit like Olive as well, I’m sure you can imagine the mixed emotions I felt when Steven took me into their bedroom one day and we unearthed from his stepdad’s sock drawer some fuzzy Polaroid photographs featuring his parents engaged in a spot of group sex. Two things of note leapt at me from the pics. Firstly, his mum had kept her glasses on, really old-fashioned National Health jobs, too, but they made the event somehow more absurd and slightly sexier at the same time. Secondly, his stepdad’s face could not be clearly seen in any of the photos, but Steven identified him by his socks.

  Now, I haven’t ever been to a swingers’ party, and don’t really want to go – like bungee jumping and anal sex, they’re OK in theory but I suspect the reality would prove a little too intense and uncomfortable. I was still very much a virgin at the time, and I assumed then, as now, that most people took their socks off before sex. And this wasn’t just any sex, this was special-occasion sex. We could tell because they had peanuts and crisps out in bowls. Even if there weren’t any house rules written down, you’d assume most gentlemen would take off their socks, if only to avoid looking silly. Steven produced the socks under discussion, a dark-purple pair, and they were without doubt the same as those in the picture. The mystery of why his stepdad kept them on as he entered another lady while his wife kept the nuts and crisps in circulation continues to haunt me to this day. Did he have a toe missing, or perhaps a terrible fungal condition on one foot? Maybe he had hooves, or his feet were an odd colour, or bionic. I shall never know.

  Having established we both wanted to be punks, and having shared our dismay over his parents’ leisure activities, we got to talking about going to an actual punk-rock concert. This was a pretty big deal because neither of us had ever been to any kind of live show before. We didn’t have a clue how you went about it: whether you bought tickets in advance or just wheeled up and paid to get in. We didn’t even know what you did when you got there. We had no point of reference: in 1976 there was of course no internet, but also no such thing as music TV. Hardly any music videos were made by bands, and those that were made didn’t get shown that often. You could see live performances on telly occasionally, but they were normally shown taking place in pretty sterile environments, like the studio of The Old Grey Whistle Test . Even with our limited experience we knew that a punk-rock gig in a London pub or club wasn’t going to be anything like that, and we were a bit scared about what it might involve. The music press had begun to write slightly more favourably about the bands, after their initial scorn. But the regular press enjoyed describing punks as little better than animals, and we were worried that there might be some truth in what they wrote, although of course that only served to add to the excitement.

  After a few weeks we finally plucked up enough courage to give it a go. Our first gig – sorry, concert – was at the Hope and Anchor pub in Islington: we went to see X-Ray Spex, fronted by Poly Styrene, with Lora Logic on saxophone. It wasn’t just how to comport ourselves at the gig that bothered us. We were really anxious about how we were going to get ourselves to the venue, because at that time there was what amounted to a turf war going on between the punks and just about everybody else. The Teddy boys in particular took exception to punks, which I suppose wasn’t altogether surprising.

  Although the Teds were roguish and had a whiff of the criminal about them, they were very smartly turned out in their Edwardian jackets, with quiffed hair and well-pressed tight trousers, and punks had started wearing a sort of demolished version of their look, including drapes with safety pins attached. They’ve almost died out now, the Teds, which is a shame. They looked great, in a cartoonish way, but I guess we have as much chance of seeing kids dressing as cavemen as we do of seeing another revival of the Teds.

  Steven and I imagined there’d be Teddy boys wielding razor blades round every corner, and there was also a story circulating among the punks that Teddy boys liked to pin you to the ground while the Teddy girls stabbed you in the eye with their stiletto heels. I doubt that ever happened, but to two sixteen-year-old wannabe punks about to head across town to their first-ever punk concert it seemed inevitable. For safety’s sake, we resisted the temptation to wear anything that would give the game away, dressing in jumble-sale jackets, with a skinny tie apiece our only concession to punkdom. Once we reached the Hope and Anchor – hopefully without incident – we would go into the toilets and attach the five or six safety pins and handful of badges that we’d carried with us, allowing us to mingle with both eyes still intact.

  Of course we didn’t see a single Ted, and no one gave us a second glance, but we felt like heroes for having made it there in one piece. The room where bands played at the Hope and Anchor was very small – it probably held only about 150 people – but the gig was just fantastic, it really was. It wasn’t that X-Ray Spex were the best band in the world, but they were good, and dressed weird and were interesting and swore on stage.

  It was also the first time I’d had the chance to try the pogo. This easy-to-master punk dance basically involved jumping up and down on the spot, wiggling your body a bit from time to time like a big fish, and occasionally attempting to spit towards the stage.

  Among the tightly packed young blokes down at the front, it was the only form of dancing you could do. There weren’t many girls down there. There weren’t many girls at punk gigs anyway, and those you did meet weren’t all that easy on the eye, it has to be said. But the problem with pogoing in the glorified cellar of the Hope and Anchor was the very low concrete beams in the ceiling. Seeing as I had stupidly positioned myself under one of the lowest, when I launched into my inaugural pogo I nearly knocked myself unconscious. It hurt, and I felt dizzy, and I managed to lose my glasses so I couldn’t see, and of course I felt remarkably self-conscious. I had to go and sit down for the first couple of numbers, which I thoroughly enjoyed even though I was afraid I was going to be sick. Overcoming the mild concussion, I waded back in for the rest of the gig and started jumping and flailing for all I was worth.

  The best part came on the journey home. Now fully comfortable in our new identities as genuine, courageou
s, anti-establishment punk rockers, Steven and I entered the old lift at the Angel tube station – one of those great big ones with an iron grille you slammed shut before it would move. Just before we did so, two of the band got in with us. We couldn’t believe it. To us, the prospect of meeting someone, anyone, who was actually in a band was so remote it was like encountering a person from a parallel universe. Of course, that was one of the great things about punk: it swept away the barriers between us and them, between those who came to hear the music and those who made it. To make it even more exciting, one of them was Lora Logic, the sax player. We told them we’d been to see them, how they were the greatest band on the planet, how we would be going to see them every time they played. I also decided that I had fallen in love with Lora Logic and would marry her. Neither of those things came to pass, but at that point it was a dead cert.

  As our confidence as punks grew, we began to experiment a little with clothes. Punk turned up its nose at ready-made fashion, especially in the early days. Unless, of course, you had the dosh to buy your clothes at Seditionaries, formerly SEX, the iconoclastic and pricey shop on the King’s Road set up and run by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood. The punk spirit of improvisation and experimentation suited me down to the ground, as I never had any money and still wanted to spend whatever ready cash I had on gigs or comic books. We bought jackets and shirts from junk shops and ripped them up or customized them with spray paint.

  I once only narrowly avoided being beaten up while wearing one of my more imaginative creations. I’d got a white butcher’s jacket, or maybe it was a chef’s jacket, from a shop that supplied the catering trade, splashed it with red paint to simulate splattered blood, written the words ‘Psycho Killer’ – taken from a Talking Heads song of the time – in big letters on the back and, the pièce de résistance, adorned it with plastic dolls’ faces from a craft shop. These I’d customized by either sewing up the lips or burning out the eyes with a cigarette end. Actually, I probably didn’t use a cigarette end because I didn’t smoke, but that was the look I was striving for. The result was quite grotesque and I was thrilled. But the first – and last – time I wore my Psycho Killer jacket in public, I got chased for a mile and a half by a bunch of young fellas – not even Teds – who’d seen me from their white van and were so upset that they jumped out to give me a kicking. Fortunately they didn’t catch me as I hid behind the bins in the back alley that served the local Southern Fried Chicken shack – the Box o’ Chicken, it was called. While I was there I collected a handful of chicken bones, thinking I might be able to sew them on to my next creation. I forgot, and found them in my pocket, covered in a mouldy, furry slime, the next time I put on the jacket.