by Alan Davies
More leaflets arrived and I went around Loughton putting them through doors. With the second batch came a larger poster of a size to replicate the floor area of a battery cage. The poster showed another desperately unhealthy bird and claimed that eight such birds would live their entire lives in a cage the size of the poster. Other cages would be on top and below, so the chickens would both defecate on other birds, and be defecated on themselves. All day, every day, for their entire lives. Like the turkeys kept packed into huge dark sheds in readiness for Christmas, the chickens would peck at one another, so would often have their beaks partially removed. That poster went on the wall too. This was the new me, the anti-battery farm, anti-nuclear, anti-Nazi, anti-apartheid anti-‘me of two years previously’.
There were other animal groups who similarly progressed their cause through posters and literature. Animal Aid produced large black-and-white images taken secretly in a laboratory for animal experiments. Up on my wall they went: a cat with an electrode implanted in its head, a monkey being prepared for a heart transplant, rabbits enduring the Draize test, in which cosmetics are dripped in to their eyes to see if they go blind. Animals are killed after experiments so I knew that these awful images were precursors to death. I had a wall full of excruciating torture where I used to have ‘Marco, Merrick, Terry Lee, Gary Tibbs and yours truly’ from Adam and the Ants.
My dad wandered into my room one evening, as he was prone to do, at any time of day or night, to amuse himself. I wasn’t allowed to have a lock on the door. He looked in horror at the ghoulish spectacle of tormented cats, dogs and other animals.
‘What on earth are these?’
‘Posters.’
‘They’re horrible. Where are all your footballers?’
‘There’re still footballers.’
‘These aren’t very nice for a bedroom wall, are they?’
I was monosyllabic until he left, probably thinking I’d turned at best peculiar, and at worst mad. I was appalled that he didn’t understand or take any interest in my new passions.
My black-sheep status had long been assured. My bedroom was no sanctuary and just because I dreaded walking up the front steps every time I came home didn’t mean I was able to make a plan to escape.
So there I was, fifteen and empathizing with animals in laboratories. I needed to get out more.
Chickens’ Lib eventually became the Farm Animal Welfare Network, or FAWN. Animal Aid is still going strong. Both groups would be delighted to hear from anyone who has a spot that needs filling with a poster or two. Violet would be pleased, I’m sure.
1982
John Belushi
John Belushi was a product of the VCR age. Without the video cassette recorder there is no love for John in England. We would not have seen him. Animal House and The Blues Brothers, two of the finest comic films ever made, were seen, by me and my friends exclusively, repeatedly and somewhat surreptitiously, on tatty over-played VHS cassettes. We saw these films over and over again. My own tally was: Animal House eleven times; The Blues Brothers fifteen times.
Initially, Animal House was attractive to us teenagers because we’d heard tell of naked girls featuring, and there is a scene, shot through the dormitory window of a girls’ fraternity house, that’s devoted to just that intriguing subject.
Belushi’s character, John ‘Bluto’ Blutarsky, is up a ladder watching a room full of nubile college students pillow fighting before bed. He gazes wide-eyed, agog, with his caveman simplicity caught in lady-headlights, as unattainable beauty frolics before him. Then the most attractive and senior girl, immaculate snob Mandy Pepperidge (played by Mary Louise Weller), exits to private quarters in the next room and Bluto, remaining at the top of the ladder, face set in determination, jumps inch by inch sideways to see her through the next window. As he settles in to his new position, he turns to the camera and raises a conspiratorial eyebrow of triumph. Half undressed, displaying much of her what Lloyd Cole and the Commotions would call ‘Perfect Skin’, Mandy enters a private reverie before the window, eyes half closed as if in a fantasy that many men would share as a dying wish. At this moment, Bluto’s own half-closed eyes open wider, in the realization that something is wrong, as he tips slowly away from the window, falling backwards without ever changing his position, landing thirty feet below on his back still grasping the ladder on top of him. It’s well-established by this point in the film that Bluto is impervious to pain, leaving the audience free to laugh as their own climax to a sequence of unparalleled sex-comedy. Bluto exists as a hedonista in a land of prim American college hypocrisy. Everyone else is obsessed by sex too, even the stuck-up ones, but he wears his primal urges on his sleeve.
Only after several viewings of Animal House did it dawn on me that it is Bluto’s own unprecedented expansion, in the face of this beauty’s unguarded flight of fancy, that forces his bulk away from the wall and outwards, past the vertical, into an irreversible concession to gravity.
Bluto, like Belushi’s ‘Joliet’ Jake Elwood, in The Blues Brothers, also had an unerring, unconsidered reflex for the optimum anti-establishment stance in any situation. This made him a profoundly attractive character for adolescents. He is governed only by his instincts, which are for the breaking of Bad Law and the pursuit of pleasure: girls, drinking, music and the occasional high-speed pursuit. This is a fifteen-year-old boy’s manifesto for a good life. It’s a manifesto that manifestly cannot last, as all around adolescents, older young men can be seen, ditching said manifesto to take on responsibilities such as gainful employment. It’s also a manifesto later returned to by some men, in what is commonly called the ‘mid-life crisis’.
Speeding up the M11 in a friend’s father’s Ford Granada, I watched from the back seat as the driver, just seventeen years old, swigged from a bottle of booze before shouting, ‘A hundred and twenty, boys!’ as he looked down at the speedometer. We were happy to re-enact, in any approximate way, scenes from Animal House, in this case an epic ‘road trip’ in which a borrowed car is returned in ruins after a journey of alcohol-fuelled chaos. The Ford Granada in question fortunately came back down the M11 unscathed, with all its occupants.
Videos were usually watched, by now, in what had become the smoking room of our new house. We had moved next door into the Newbys’ place. The reason for the move was the enlargement of our family as my dad had married the nice neighbour across the road from us. I now had a stepmother, whose choice to come and live with us seemed extraordinarily risky to me, but then my opinion was not sought as, of course, I was sixteen. My stepmother has since spent the best part of three decades striving to improve the lives of all concerned. A literally thankless task but one she approaches with great kindness and unflagging effort.
Also entering the fray was a new elder stepbrother, a keen smoker and VHS enthusiast, who offered advice and derision in equal measure as he watched me taking apart the Yamaha FS1M 50 cc motorbike handed down to me from my brother on my sixteenth birthday. Holed up in the garage, at the end of the drive that used to be part of my bicycle lap when I was imitating Barry Sheene, we would share cigarettes and Swarfega.
The little smoking room at the front of the house allowed access to the garage. It was as another viewing of Animal House neared its conclusion that it became apparent it would be a good idea to copy one of the film’s highlights and stage a toga party in the garage, when dad and stepmum were away on holiday.
The garage was a source of huge anxiety to my dad. Full of car and motorcycle parts, unlimited dirty tea mugs, reeking of fags, oil, grease everywhere, it was a great place to hang out but not in any sense clean or tidy. In order to stage a toga party in there we were going to have to work to get it clean. By piling everything in to an Escort van on the driveway, we suddenly revealed the spacious tiled area that had once apparently served as Mr Newby’s snooker room, above which he had built a large living room with a beautiful sprung dance floor (since carpeted after we turned up). The Newbys, they knew how to live.
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bsp; To generate a party atmosphere we installed coloured light bulbs of low wattage. This was remarkably effective. Music came courtesy of a friend’s portable record player. This piece of equipment, portable only in the sense that the rocks used at Stonehenge were portable when they came from Wales, played 12″ records in a vertical position. The size of a Mini Metro, the latest in cutting edge technology, it was to an mp3 player what Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine was to, well, an mp3 player. But it worked and people always brought records to parties. All we had to hope was they could find the courage to leave their houses in bed sheets.
No one disappointed. Star of the toga line up was Danny, who arrived in a pink sheet with Pontin’s Holidays embroidered on the side. Everyone had sheets on, about twenty of us in all. We did not have Otis Day and the Knights as they did in the film but we danced and we laughed and we managed to ignore the one-time NF supporter’s astonishing body odour that was usually shielded by his New Romantic attire.
Around 11 p.m. my brother appeared, in striped pyjamas and a woollen dressing gown, like a 1920s housemaster coming to quieten an unruly dorm. He began telling people to go home. They did not. The next day he told our dad, phoning from Greece, that we’d had a party, perhaps in an attempt to spoil their holiday, having failed to spoil the toga fun. This could have caused a nuclear reaction but fortunately we now had a stepmum who presumably received news from her son that the garage had been cleaned, some friends had been over to listen to some records, and all the cats had been fed. The joy of two parents.
Animal House was a fount of inspiration for teenage misbehaviour. At school a Bluto-inspired food fight engulfed the dining hall. This was unimaginable rebellion in that place. It started when someone’s jelly was put on their seat as they sat down and it finished with every surface covered in food scraps. A happy riot of chip-flinging and pie-dodging. Inevitably I was caught, with one or two others, while the majority made their escape. I was enjoying it too much and had long since stopped caring about the disciplinary regime, scoring an impressive fourteen detentions that term. The vile second master, Mr Millett, who, at five feet tall, suffered very obviously from Napoleon Syndrome had the capacity to terrify small boys but was laughable trying the same tactics in the face of adolescents taller than him. He would swish a cane in the face of small boys but not bigger ones, who may well have responded with the ubiquitous Essex challenge: ‘Come on then.’
A long afternoon of dining hall cleaning could not eclipse the joy of the food fight though I felt a familiar pang of unfairness when my school report stated that I had taken part in the fight but not the clean-up. Outrageous! Cleaning that hall was the only work I’d done all term and now I was being denied credit for it. Injustice!
John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd’s creation on Saturday Night Live of the Blues Brothers led to a film that transcended cult status to become a classic musical comedy. Belushi’s performance in Animal House and their ratings-pulling turns on SNL gave them a popularity that enabled them to attract an extraordinary array of musical stars, such as Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Ray Charles, Chaka Khan and Cab Calloway, not to mention Steve Cropper and Donald Dunn from Booker T and the MGs.
At house parties I would always carry a cassette of the soundtrack album and, with friends, try to re-enact dance routines from the movie. We’d quote lines and sing along to their version of ‘Rawhide’. We never adopted the Menin-Black-style suits they favoured – it would have felt like school uniform – but I did have a T-shirt that read:
Dan Aykroyd now talks about the Men in Black as possibly real, having seen one, the day his television show about UFOs was cancelled. What John Belushi would make of that is impossible to say: he died from a massive drug overdose on 5 March 1982.
Six months after I saw them play live, and soon after Belushi had gone, James Honeyman-Smith of The Pretenders died from a heart problem brought on by excessive cocaine abuse. Ten months after that a second Pretender, Pete Farndon, was also dead from a drug overdose.
All these deaths made little impact. I knew nothing about drugs. No one I knew even smoked joints at that time. We just went to the Reindeer on a Friday night, drank beer, smoked fags and played records on the jukebox. There was no such thing as ecstasy and no one talked about drugs.
Some time later, after we’d all left school, one of the kids who we’d been skiing with died from a drug overdose. I don’t know what drugs he took but I was told it was suicide. He was liked, prone to risk-taking, but funny. His parents were wealthy and they had a big place out in Essex. We would go over there sometimes and swim in their pool. I don’t know what happened but all of us who knew him were shocked and ignorant of the danger he’d been in.
John Belushi died in a Los Angeles hotel room while his wife and his best friend, Aykroyd, were desperately trying to contact him from New York, and another man, hired to help protect him, was travelling to save him. That they were unable to reach him in time remains a terrible tragedy.
He was the ultimate hedonist in Animal House leading to a generation of imitators but, thankfully, teenagers playing at hedonism is only play. However wild we thought we were at the time, we knew nothing.
Kenny Roberts
Riding a 50 cc motorcycle gave me freedom. At sixteen I had my Yamaha FS1M. It was not the FS1E, or fizzy, but everyone called it a fizzy anyway. Fizzm didn’t seem to work.
The bike had been run in by my brother, who was now crawling around Loughton in a Ford Escort. With L plates and a provisional licence, at a restricted top speed of 30 mph, you were free to go. After brief instruction from my dad on how to operate the clutch I was loose.
It was an immense and undimmable thrill, being a buzzing danger to myself and others. With my customarily chronic dress sense I paired the navy blue paintwork of the bike with a bright red open-face crash helmet. My dad purchased an unbelievably uncool waxed Belstaff jacket, not the über-cool distressed-leather versions favoured latterly by Hollywood stars, but a waxy, multi-pocketed affair, such as may have been worn by a special constable on a wet night in 1958.
Clothing had always been a problem. As kids, our casual wear came from Shattins on Debden Broadway. Shat tins. Shat in. Shat. If they’d called it Shit-Shat it would at least have had a ring to it. T-shirts in Shattins must have cost minus four pence, since they appeared to shrink on the way home, never mind in the first wash.
Fortunately, I was never embarrassed by having cheap and tasteless clothes at primary school since, although the school did not have a uniform when I went, my dad thought it should, and dressed me and my brother in grey shirts, black trousers and black school shoes. The only kids in uniform at the school. Put that together with short back and sides haircuts and we looked like extras from Lord of the Flies. Still, it was preferable to the misshapen catastrophes from Shattins we wore at weekends, which carried enough static electricity to power your bike, if you could only harness the current.
Waxy jacket and open-face helmet in place, I would career out on to Loughton High Road and venture forth to the Reindeer on a Friday night. There I met a couple of lads who rode Honda XL250s. They were seventeen and had passed their tests. Another kid had a Yamaha DT125 and took me on the back of it for an exhilarating ride through Epping Forest.
High Beach, up in the forest, has long been a meeting place for bikers and I’d heard tell of gangs. One night, as I was sitting on my fizzy chatting to my mate Ji (pronounced to rhyme with eye and short for Jeremy), two big bikers throbbed up alongside and asked where Queen’s Road was. I said I’d show them and buzzed off, they cruised alongside me, it was only two minutes away. When we got there ( Ji had run up on foot) they said we could come into the house they were visiting. The living room was entirely empty except for a crowd of leather and denim enthusiasts and a huge keg of beer. The furniture was in the garden. We were in the middle of what appeared to be a Hell’s Angel party. Several people had jackets with ‘Sidewinder’ stitched on to them so I presume it was their do. Everybody was ver
y civil but we struggled to keep them interested in our conversation so we were basically ignored until we left.
When hacking along Epping Forest’s bridle paths after dark, the way ahead would be a sea of reflective rabbits’ eyes which became bouncing furry bodies as you approached. Riding in there in daylight was risky and on one occasion I was spotted by a forest ranger who pursued me through Buckhurst Hill, Woodford and down to Chingford Plain. I was reckless but nimble. He had power but not the abandon of the teen, who is happy to leave forty feet of rubber alongside a line of cars as he locks up his rear brake before swinging right into traffic and away down Ranger’s Road past Butler’s Retreat. I lost him and went home with adrenaline pumping. Ten minutes later he rang at the door, having tracked me down via my pesky number plate. He never even managed to speak to me. My stepmum stonewalled him on my behalf. I saw him walk back to his bike and leave. I was so grateful for her protection I went and thanked her immediately. She told me that he’d said I had been riding ‘like an idiot’. Doesn’t he mean ‘brilliantly’? I thought. Just because he couldn’t keep up. And me on a fifty.
Except I wasn’t on a fifty now. My fizzy had a big bore kit on it which meant a larger piston and increased engine capacity. 60 cc of mayhem!
This piece of kit had been purchased from a lad in Buckhurst Hill who had a garage full of bike bits. I went out to a parts shop on Eastern Avenue that sold me a larger rear sprocket and over to Walthamstow for a bigger piston and piston rings. I had to make that journey twice as, after I’d fitted the new big piston, I kick-started the engine without putting the cylinder head back on. The piston shot up and out of the engine before crashing into it on the down stroke and breaking. I was below competent as a mechanic but I really wanted more speed. The big bore kit took top end up to a mind-blowing 42 mph.