by Ray Winstone
When we got back from Wembley to Church Street – and this was bad timing on everyone’s part – there were a group of bikers blocking the entrance to the same alley where the first incident with the iron bar had taken place. I don’t know what they were doing there as none of our neighbours were bikers as far as we knew, but there were about fifteen of them, with ages ranging from twenty going up to about forty.
The Old Man pulls round into the alley to park, and at first he doesn’t see them. But as we get out of the car to go into the house, one of the bikers blocks his way and says, ‘You nearly fucking knocked me over.’
I’m shitting myself a bit now thinking, ‘Don’t just wade in, Dad, we’re on a hiding to nothing here.’ But never mind the odds not being exactly in our favour, after the night my dad’s had, I already know it’s gonna go off. ‘No, son,’ he says to this biker. ‘I didn’t nearly knock you over. If I’d have wanted to knock you over, I’d have fucking knocked you over, so get out of the fucking way.’
The guy does what he’s told, but as we walk on towards the house, the biggest of the bikers gets off his bike and says, ‘Who are you fucking talking to?’ By this time I’m already moving towards the gate where the iron bar is, because I’ve seen how it’s done and they’re more than mob-handed. At this point, the biker’s gone to throw a punch at my dad, and my Old Man’s hit him with a left hook of such force that the biker’s just gone down where he stood.
The geezer hits the ground so hard that you could see the dust come up in the glare of the streetlight. I know that sounds like something from a film, but I swear on my life it’s what I saw. I think Scorsese’s Raging Bull is the only movie that’s ever got the impact of that kind of punch right, and De Niro didn’t have an iron bar to hand either.
Before the biker’s even finishing bouncing up off the ground, my dad’s taken the iron bar off me. This other guy’s already coming at him – a black fella as it happened, which was unusual for a biker – and my dad’s knocked the teeth out of his head with the bar. Next thing I know he’s got the fella on the floor beating him round the ribs saying, ‘If you ever come back, I’ll fucking kill you.’ Needless to say, the lot of ’em fucked off – I’ve never seen a crowd disperse so quickly – and we never saw their leather jackets in that alley ever again.
That iron bar could do a lot of damage to people, and my dad knew how to go to work with it. I’m not saying this because I want to glorify these actions, but because that was the atmosphere I was brought up in. For a particular generation which came out of postwar England, that’s what was handed down to us. You had to get on with people working on the markets, but if someone came down and wanted it then you had to be able to dish some out, otherwise people would walk all over you. My dad wasn’t a gangster, but you don’t fuck with family people either.
I suppose by telling these stories I am condoning them in a way. I do regret my dad being in a position where he felt he had to do those things to protect me, but I understand where the impulse to do them came from. I’m not being PC about this because fuck it, that was our way of life, and the idea that these people got what they fucking deserved is embedded quite deep within me. I know that’s not necessarily the right way to think, and it’s something I’ve tried to change over the years – not so that your family doesn’t come first, but just because you don’t want the aggravation.
Some of the success I’ve had as an actor has probably been down to the fact that when people see me in those kinds of situations in films, they believe I’ve been in them in real life, which I have been. The sequence in Scum where I have to hit Baldy with the iron bar was one of the easiest I’ve ever had to do, because I’d seen it happen, and not too long before either. A lot of people might’ve been shocked by what went on in that film, but I certainly wasn’t.
I was nineteen going on twenty when we made the TV version of Scum in early 1977, and twenty-one going on twenty-two by the time we remade it for the cinema in 1979 after the first one was banned from being shown on the BBC. Although the second film is basically the same script as the first but with some extra violence and swearing added, the first is by far the scarier of the two in my opinion.
We’re all just babies really at that stage, so you get more of a sense of the terrible things kids will do to other kids, and the ways grown men will manipulate them. By the time we got to do the film, which was cobbled together on more of a money basis, we were young men instead of boys, and it was a stretch to imagine that we were in borstal rather than an adult prison.
A lot of water, and other drinks, would pass under the bridge in my life between the two Scums. A fair proportion of those fluids would be taken in establishments run by a mate of mine called Neville Cole. His brother Eamon was Tony Yeates’s godfather (in the being-there-at-your-christening sense, not in the mafia sense) and they were a couple of really good boxers who ran pubs and clubs. They used to have a big black fella who knocked about with them, a really nice bloke whose name was Tiny. Well, I don’t suppose that was what it said on his birth certificate, but that was what we all called him.
Neville’s original place was the Salmon and Ball. It was, and is, just down the road from the Repton, on the corner of Cambridge Heath and Bethnal Green Road – by the tube station where the terrible disaster happened in the Blitz. Neville changed the name to Tipples for a while. Locals would pronounce that in the proper East End style with a hard ‘p’ that was more like a ‘b’, so it sounded more like you were saying a cat’s name than somewhere you’d want to go to have a pint.
Me and Tony Yeates saw a geezer put a gun to someone’s head in there, once. We were only young fellas at the time – seventeen or eighteen at most – and we were in there having a Sunday lunchtime drink when we noticed two smart old boys and a couple of young ‘uns sitting together. There was some uneasy laughter and then it all kind of went quiet. We looked round and saw that one of the young fellas had pulled out a gun and put it to the old boy’s head. I say the old boy, but he was probably in his fifties – the same age as me now.
The young guy never swore at him, he just said, ‘If you dig me out, I’ll blow your head off.’ The old guy replied, ‘Come on, son, there’s no need for that – we was just having a laugh.’ A silence followed that seemed to last quite a long time, then the kid put his gun away and got up and left. There was no shouting and screaming or calling the police. Everyone just went back to their drinks.
After a while Neville opened up another place down on the Mile End Road, near Trinity Green. He set it up with a geezer called Martin Nash, and I only realised recently that this was probably where they got the name Nashville’s from. My mind must have been on higher things at the time. There was certainly no one in there wearing rhinestones, although the odd cowboy might have put in an appearance.
For my money, quite a lot of which I spent in there, Nashville’s was the best club in London. The vibe of it was somewhere between an East End disco and a piano lounge. Me and Tony Yeates were in there on the opening night and we were in there when it closed, and we had a lot of good times in between. The only note of sadness in these memories is that we lost Neville Cole a couple of years ago. He was a good man, and him dying would’ve been sad enough even if he hadn’t won the fucking Lottery a while before he died. The truth of the old phrase ‘You can’t take it with you’ was never more starkly or harshly demonstrated.
CHAPTER 17
BENJY’S NIGHTCLUB, MILE END
Neville and Martin really used to look after us. They were running things, and we were the kids on the firm. Being in that role in a group always tends to get you a fair bit of piss-taking, and we were no exception. One day they took me and Tony aside and told us they’d booked a champagne table for us down at Benjy’s nightclub in Mile End as a ‘little treat from the boys’. They said there were a couple of nice girls who wanted to meet us. Obviously, we knew how to pull a bird, but we weren’t the type of kids to look a gift horse (or a gift bird) in the mouth, so w
e were there on time with bells on. Of course the two girls who turned up were both geezers – how were we to know Thursday was gay night?
That kind of thing is part of growing up, and Neville and Martin didn’t mean it cruelly – either to us or the two gay guys. As it turns out, Tony and his mate have been very happy together. (Only joking, Tony, I know the cracks are starting to show.) Benjy’s has had more name changes than West Ham have had away kits in the thirty-five years since, but last time I looked it was still hanging on, despite the council’s best attempts to relieve it of its licence.
If Neville and Martin were ideal mentors when it came to East London nightlife, which they were, I was going to need someone to do the same job for me when it came to acting on film. And I couldn’t have asked for anyone better than Alan Clarke. OK, I’d got the part in Scum because I had a boxer’s walk, but I had no agent and no idea of what I was getting into.
The original TV version was a two-bob fucking BBC production where you had to get down to London Bridge under your own steam and then get the train down to Redhill. There was some messing about on that train which I can’t even tell you about, but let’s just say if the kids from Scum got in your carriage, you probably knew they were there. I think they based the kids from Fame on us, only we never wore the leg-warmers (though we could have done with them in a way, because it was freezing fucking cold on that set). Once we got there, we didn’t really have too much idea of the kind of thing we were making, as Clarkey was keeping it all together in quite a secretive way to get what he wanted out of us.
I felt comfortable being around the Anna Scher boys, but they were their own gang and I wasn’t part of it, which suited how I was and was also good for the film. We became mates over the years, but they were from North London. Now, Islington might not look a long way from the East End on the map, but the possibility that they might be Arsenal or Spurs supporters did not sit comfortably with me (Phil Daniels even supported Chelsea, for some reason which he was never able to adequately explain). It probably made it easier for me to be around a load of guys who never really acted like they were actors. I can’t speak on their behalf, but I don’t think most of us even booked that as our job description.
The performance I gave in Scum (and the later film version which more people have seen and is basically a cinematic Xerox of the first one) was purely down to Clarkey. He got the anger out of me, and I suppose the cunning, but what was really clever was the way he made it look like I was aware of what I was doing technically, even though I wasn’t. I was on the screen a long time in those films for an actor with so little experience, and left to my own devices I would have had no idea of how to pace what I was doing. It was Alan who made sure I did what I did in the right places so the whole thing hung together properly.
Alan Clarke was an Evertonian, a tall, skinny guy with a scar on one side of his face, which I think he got from falling on a step outside a pub drunk, but that’s his story, not mine. The best introduction to his character would be a tale he told me about him and Roy Minton (the writer of Scum). They were both quite fiery individuals, to put it mildly, and once they were coming down in a lift at the BBC when an argument came to blows. Basically, they’re having a fight in this lift – eyes wide, nostrils flaring – then when it reaches the ground floor and the doors open, who should be outside but Moshe Dayan? The Israeli military leader and foreign minister – who was famous for the eye patch he had to wear after a sniper’s bullet smashed some binoculars he was using – had obviously seen some brutal conflicts in his time, but Alan never told me if he tried to intervene in this one.
The most important thing I learned from Alan was that putting a performance together in a film is all about the moments where you demonstrate your power as a character. You’re telling a story that might stretch over a year of someone’s life or even longer, and you’ve got to compress a man’s whole emotional appearance changing into an hour and a half. I wasn’t capable of structuring that believably on my own because no one had ever taught me how to do it. Of course, I didn’t see how much Alan was shaping what I was doing at the time. It took me a long while to actually develop some discipline about acting, and only once I’d done that did I realise the extent of Alan’s influence. That’s the mark of a clever teacher, when you are learning things without realising it.
I never forgot the way he went to work with me. There were moments when he’d just whisper in my ear and make me very calm and relaxed by saying, ‘Don’t worry about them, just concentrate on what you’re doing.’ Then there were other times when he’d say, ‘You’re fucking me about here’, and that would upset me, because I had a lot of respect for him. Obviously, he was just saying that to wind me up, but it worked because I’d get really fucking mad.
I’ve learnt to use that technique on myself over the years. Sometimes on a set even now I’ll call myself a cunt or whatever to liven myself up. It’s the acting equivalent of having Jackie Bowers in your corner. The director might think I’m angry with him when he hears me grumbling away to myself, so I’ll have to explain that I’m not being horrible, I just talk to myself a lot before a scene. It’s funny sometimes when I come out of it to see other actors looking at me as if to say, ‘Well, what’s the matter with you?’
Most of what you’re taught at drama college relates to the theatre rather than cinema, so you have to kind of start from scratch once you make that shift. Being in front of a camera never worried me in itself. Of course, the first thing people will tell you is: ‘Forget about the camera. Don’t even think about it, just do what you do.’ I actually found that advice very easy to follow at first. ‘I’m not going to worry about the camera, let the camera worry about me’ was the way I approached it.
Ignorance is bliss on a film set, because when you’ve got no idea of what’s happening, you can just get on with it. Things only start to get complicated once you learn more about the technical side – what the different lenses are and how close the shots are going to be. That’s when you start to second-guess yourself. One minute you feel perfectly at home, and then you know too much. Suddenly your only option is to relearn how not to be aware of the camera by making the knowledge you’ve picked up work for you on a technical level without it looking like that’s a conscious process. That’s when acting becomes a whole different game.
One thing I would say is that the old saying that the camera never lies is bullshit, because it does. I’ve done things I thought were blinding and when I’ve seen them played back they were shit. It works the other way too, but when you watch something you thought was going to be terrible and it actually works, that’s normally because the director, for whatever reason, didn’t let you in on what they were trying to get.
The most important thing when you’re shooting out of sequence – which is how it’s normally done – is learning to sort the script out in your head as you’re going along. People often think it must be difficult to do things in a different order to how they’re seen, but it can actually work out better that way. For example, if you do the end before anything else, you understand where you’ve got to get to and you can start to think about all the different shapes you can put in along the road. In other films – Nil by Mouth would be a good example – you don’t need to have so much of a journey through it so you can just play each moment and not worry about the next one.
Alan Clarke was well known for having a clear political agenda, and as my little disagreement with Vanessa Redgrave showed, I wasn’t always in tune with left-wing opinions. If anything, my family background pushed me more to the right. Even though he’s working-class, my dad would always vote Tory.
Some people find that difficult to understand, but there’s a long tradition of grafters who run their own businesses being quite right-wing – Margaret Thatcher’s dad was a grocer after all. You’ve worked hard to get what you’ve got and you don’t like the idea of other people getting something for nothing. I can appreciate and even agree with that opinion, but my
political views have never been quite as fixed as my dad’s were.
Sometimes I’ll watch documentaries about working-class people fighting for their rights and see the kind of conditions they lived in and think, ‘Dad, what were you talking about?’ I’m not saying I’ve got more left-wing as I’ve got older, but maybe I’ve moved a bit closer to the middle of the road. Socialism doesn’t add up in my mind, but it wouldn’t make sense for me to be a Tory either. After all, both sides of my family came out of the workhouse, and the Conservatives are the kind of fuckers who put us in there. You can’t say that’s not a conflict of interest, so why should I fucking vote for them now?
As a rule I try to judge individual issues and political personalities on their merits. What I look for is that quite rare brand of politician who makes an honest attempt to do what he or she has said they’re gonna do. They don’t necessarily have to succeed, they just have to give it a go. The other mob – the ones who promise one thing and then do something totally different the minute they get in power – are much more numerous. But as far as I’m concerned they should be held to account under the Trades Descriptions Act, the same way a butcher who sold you venison which was actually horse would be.
All of this is a roundabout way of saying that I didn’t really have a problem with the underlying politics of Scum, which were what a lot of the controversy surrounding the film was about. I didn’t view it so much as a political thing of left versus right. For me it was a simple matter of people who were in authority – whether that was the warders or the other boys – treating the kids who were under them like shit.