by Alan Davies
Then Frankie Goes to Hollywood jumped up and injected the charts with some adult content with ‘Relax’, their pounding sex anthem. They followed that with ‘Two Tribes’, and its extraordinary video, featuring two actors in masks portraying the US and Russian presidents, Reagan and Chernenko, ripping into each other in a ring, while a baying mob of world leaders urge them to fight to the death, before descending into violence themselves while Reagan and Chernenko watch, wondering what they’ve started. Frankie Goes to Hollywood provided thrilling music with something approaching actual content.
‘Relax’ was number one for five weeks at the start of the year and re-entered the charts in the summer while ‘Two Tribes’ was at number one for nine weeks. For a period in July ’84 the two tracks were at numbers one and two.
Me and Justine spent two weeks travelling through France in my Mini that summer, with ‘Relax’ blaring out across the manicured gardens of various exquisite châteaux in the Loire valley. We drove first down to Paris, becoming hopelessly lost on le périphérique before seeking help at a service station. I showed the man behind the counter my map of Paris which he threw away from us to the other side of the room. He pulled out a map that showed the outskirts of Paris and jabbed his finger at it. My map was for inner Paris, the old city. I was clueless.
With a new map we found our way into the chaos of the city itself. My main thought was to avoid the Arc de Triomphe as I’d been told that no insurance company paid out for accidents on the notorious roundabout surrounding it. As we hesitantly navigated towards our hotel, which Justine had booked over the phone using her best O Level French, we heard someone shouting at us.
‘Paris?’ he called, pronouncing it Paree. He was hanging out of the driver’s window of a white Renault van.
‘Paree?!’ he called again.
‘Yes!’ I shouted. ‘Oui!’
He gestured for us to follow him and we dutifully did, eventually turning on to the Champs-Elysées.
‘Paree!’ he yelled happily, before veering off into another lane, never to be seen again. We were soon swerving our way around the Arc with cars zooming in all directions.
Eventually we parked underground beneath Notre-Dame and checked in to our hotel, thrilled and happy.
After one night in Paris we travelled down, staying in campsites, until we arrived at a caravan we’d hired for the week in Argelès-sur-Mer. We’d found that in the small ads. It belonged to a barrister’s clerk who worked in a chambers in London. I went to see him. He was a bit of a wideboy.
‘I know what you’re going down there for! Two eighteen-year-olds, going away on their own! First time away together is it?’
I didn’t say that Just was only seventeen. Not that it mattered. After much disagreeable ‘nudge nudge wink wink’ he gave me the keys and the directions. It was a happy fortnight. We arrived home after 2,000 miles in total and I took Just back to her house. Her mum was furious. We hadn’t called home once; it hadn’t occurred to me to do so. Also, we hadn’t used up our duty-free quota. No cheap fags! I sloped off home to get out of the firing line.
Soon afterwards me and Justine were back in the Mini heading for the University of Kent at Canterbury. It was my first choice on my UCCA form and I’d been offered a place for two Bs in my A Levels. I’d managed an A and a C. Theatre studies had gone a bit wrong. Thirty-five per cent of the mark was to come from a devised show and we had concocted a stage version of The Sweeney so bad it beggared belief. Our mockney accents alone ought to have had us down for a fail.
Two of us managed Cs, the rest D, E or nothing. Piers, the drama teacher, despaired. We could have dusted down the old Edward and Mrs Simpson show we’d done the year before. Would wandering around a badminton court in Essex, with a pompous look on my face, pretending to be Edward VIII have pushed me up to a B? Perhaps not, now I think about it.
Steve, my tutor, said I had eight points with five for an A in communications and three for theatre studies, the equivalent of two Bs. I was safe.
I wasn’t convinced and so headed down the A2 to try and convince someone in admissions to admit me.
We arrived, found the Registry and were immediately told there was no one there to help. Looking out from the campus over Canterbury with its beautiful cathedral I hoped I would be allowed to come.
Not that settling on Kent had been easy. With only two A levels I wasn’t able to apply for any of the more famous and over-subscribed drama departments at places like Manchester, Bristol and Hull. I went for Kent, East Anglia, Loughborough, Warwick and a teacher training course at a college in Cambridge.
At interview the teaching college gave me a polite brush-off as theirs was the only such course on my form; Lough-borough couldn’t have gone well as there was no offer from there; but the other three all offered a place for two Bs, largely on the strength, I suspected, of Steve Caley’s helpful reference.
UEA had a nice campus and, as it was in Norwich, they had a first division football team to go and watch. Warwick too had Coventry City only up the road, also in Division One, with the other Midlands clubs nearby. I’d be able to see Arsenal at plenty of away games.
I was surprised to receive an offer from Warwick as I’d gone into my shell a bit during an afternoon of drama exercises with other hopefuls.
We were invited to find some space in their large drama studio and then told that we were to act as if making our way through a blizzard. I started to squint as if snow was blowing in to my face and put my hands out in front of me to shield me a bit from the weather. Moving forward I took small steps as the wind was blowing in to me and the ice was slippery underfoot. Now I was making gradual progress around the room, hoping they’d call a halt to this quickly. Should I be raising the stakes? Perhaps a bear could leap out at me from behind a tree? How would they know it was a bear though? Or that there was a tree. Were they mentally filling in the scenery as they watched? I’d have to mime being afraid of a bear in a blizzard very well. I might just look as if snow made me scream. Would they admit a chionophobic to a prestigious institution like this? Too risky. Perhaps I could become increasingly stuck in a snowdrift and, being unable to continue, gradually weaken through exposure, eventually succumbing to frostbite. In that scenario I may become delirious and begin talking to myself, even having two-sided conversations, that would allow me to show off my flair for making amusing remarks during improvisations, though it would be foolish to risk irony. Hallucinations were plausible for a dying man in an arctic tundra. Hallucinating what though? That only presented the same problems as the bear plan. Becoming trapped and deteriorating was feasible but now the timescale of the exercise was against me. To fully portray decline, illness and death (unless I had a St Bernard rescue me) could take hours when I was looking at sixty seconds tops. Just then my train of thought was broken as a supple interviewee, legs spread wide apart, bent double, and walking backwards around the room, nearly collided with me. She was having trouble seeing where she was going as she tried to look between her legs. Who walks backwards in a blizzard? Had I misheard? Had they said: ‘Walk as if in a hail of gunfire?’ Then, to my relief, they stopped it.
We also had to do audition pieces chosen from their list. I did Lady Macbeth which drew an appreciative remark. Or was it an ironic smirk? I probably thought it would show me as enterprising and fearless. They probably thought that they should have taped it for a good laugh later. See the eighteen-year-old boy – who smokes fags like James Dean with a stroke – give his Lady Macbeth sleepwalking in Essex routine.
Kent had a couple of things going for it, including a special fourth year with the option of specializing in directing or theatre in education but a more pressing concern was that the university I went to should have a karate society as I had decided I was going to take that up. Kent had ‘tae kwon do soc’, which was the clincher.
I settled on Kent. They accepted my results. I started in October.
I packed up the Mini and set off for four years away. I had a long goo
dbye with Justine. Several people had told me that relationships rarely survived one half heading to university. With no phone it would be difficult.
Justine followed me in her old Ford Escort (top speed 35 mph) for a few miles before turning off. As I watched her go in my mirror I began to cry. Any separation was hard for me, bringing to the surface all the sadness over my mum, but I loved Just, we’d been together for a year and, although I wanted to leave home, I was scared of going away. I cried most of the way there and then queued up at the college payphones for ages to speak to her later. This was going to be hard.
Two weeks into my first term I saw a poster for a concert in the college dining hall. I bought a ticket and went along. There were hundreds there. A couple of support acts played and then the main act came on. The singer walked to the microphone and introduced the first song by saying:
‘For the first time ever in a dining hall in Kent.’
Everyone laughed, but then he was known for his sense of humour, that Billy Bragg.
I never did any tae kwon do.
Arthur Scargill
The miners’ strike began in March 1984. By the time it was over, almost a year to the day later, it had exposed and entrenched rifts in British society to an extent unseen since the depression of the 1930s.
During the course of the strike, Billy Bragg revived and adapted a song called ‘Which Side are You On?’ written by Florence Reece (a coalminer’s daughter and a coalminer’s wife), in Tennessee during a miners’ strike in 1931. This moving song tells a tale of hardship in the teeth of a dispute. It’s a rousing cry for unity, a plea for strength in numbers. Travelling up and down the country playing at countless fundraising gigs for the miners, he sang the song over and over again. For many people, the question remained relevant for years, only with a small change, becoming: ‘Which side were you on?’
If you did not back the miners and their families in their struggle you probably lived in the south. Or Nottinghamshire, where the miners were resistant to the leadership of the National Union of Mineworkers’ president, Arthur Scargill.
Scargill was an abrasive Yorkshireman and a prominent figure, not just as the leader of the NUM, but as part of the far left wing of the Labour Party. With his frizzy red hair and dogmatic, aggressive manner he became a hero to those he led and a hate figure for those trying to break the strike.
A series of anti-union measures had been implemented by the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher, in an effort to control the power the unions had to orchestrate mass walk-outs, with voting at huge meetings where dissenters were in plain sight and potentially open to intimidation. Secret ballots were to be held in order to stage strikes in the first place. On top of that, it was made illegal to join picket lines in sympathy with members from other unions. A limit was placed on the number of pickets allowed by law.
All of these measures were intended to make it impossible for the NUM to run a strike as they had done in the past, when they had caused terminal damage to a Conservative government with strikes first in 1972 and then 1974, during which Prime Minister Ted Heath called a general election on the issue, only to lose to Labour. Prior to those strikes the miners hadn’t been out since the General Strike of 1926.
The NUM’s success of 1974 was assisted by cooperation from other unions, notably the dockers, who refused to unload imported coal, and to organized secondary picketing. The movement of coal into power stations was stopped and soon all power stations were targeted, as well as other heavy coal users.
A new pay deal was won and the three-day weeks, called because of the energy crisis created by the strike, were over.
In 1974, similar tactics yielded a similar result, and a catastrophic defeat for the Conservatives, who spent much of their subsequent time in opposition plotting the legislation and the tactics to win a similar battle the next time it occurred.
Pit closures were announced in 1984 that were to cost 20,000 jobs. They were announced in the spring, when demand for coal was about to drop off, and after coal had been stockpiled.
The NUM refused to comply with what they considered to be anti-union legislation in calling their strike and opted for mass and secondary picketing once again.
These mass pickets were now illegal, allowing the police to be used to uphold the law. Local men stood toe-to-toe. Men from the same towns and villages, some with miners’ helmets, some with policemen’s helmets. As the picketing grew, however, policemen from across England were sent to take on the miners.
The picketing became riotous in particularly brutal encounters at the Orgreave coking plant near Sheffield. Five thousand miners were confronted by police in riot gear from ten counties. There were many injured on both sides. The miners, now cast as lawbreaking thugs, were vilified in the right-wing newspapers, but the sight on television of police horses charging, and the striking men being struck with batons, made it clear to many that the Tory government had created an environment where they could use the police as a force against the people.
The NUM suffered from further new legislation that allowed the courts to sequester funds from unions that participated in illegal strike action.
There was real poverty in the mining communities while the police were earning large sums in overtime, a fact that some were not slow to mention as they taunted the miners in increasingly unpleasant battles.
There was never a full strike as East Midlands branches of the NUM refused to join in, believing it to be folly to break the new laws. Scargill was convinced there was no way to win without adopting the successful tactics of 1974.
The miners’ wives, struggling to feed their families, carried placards that read:
As the summer wore on it became clear just how much coal had been stockpiled and how successfully the Tories had plotted their new legislation. The miners were resilient and their communities received support from all over the country. This strike was different from those in the ’70s that had been about securing good pay for the miners. It was about the closure of pits and the permanent decimation of the industry in favour of cheaper imported coal. Arthur Scargill’s assertion that these closures of the so-called ‘uneconomic’ pits would only be the beginning was repeated throughout the bitterest and most divisive labour dispute in post-war British history.
Down south, in suburban areas like Loughton, the notion of uneconomic pits, i.e. those pits where it is unprofitable to continue to mine, was an open-and-shut case. Rarely mentioned was the social cost of closing down communities, with the resultant economic cost of providing social security and housing benefits to the thousands thrown on to the dole, never mind the other businesses that would now go under because of their reliance on the wages of miners.
The extent of support for the miners in middle-class areas was slim to none. In our house it was me. By now I was a card-carrying member of the Labour Party, with Clause 4, printed as it was on the back of that membership card, learnt off by heart:
to secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.
Well, I knew the first line anyway.
I knew my dad thought the injuries to the police were disgraceful, and that he was scornful of Scargill, who was so strident and uncompromising that he was a hard man to like, even if you considered the defence of the miners’ communities important. I had no money to help the miners, so I just watched the strike on TV while wearing badges saying ‘Coal not Dole’.
Sitting in my Mini one evening, talking to my stepmum about my dad and our differences, she drew a distinction between the two of us by saying that he was a more establishment figure than me. This pleased me. I warmed to this theme and said that maybe when I was having disagreements with him I was:
‘… taking a subconscious swing at the establi
shment’.
Out of the corner of my eye I could see her stifling a laugh. We’d spent a good half an hour on the subconscious with our psychologist in communications studies by then, so I was an expert of course.
I was determined to establish clear ideological water between myself and the rest of my family. It dismayed me that my stepmum sympathized with McGregor of the coal board (who, to my mind, was evil) because of the difficult decisions he had to make, with millions of pounds at stake.
It seemed an accident with money was always the big fear in the south, since there was no industry left to speak of, so the notion of a decimated community had no relevance.
The Sloane Rangers’ Handbook came out at the time and I bought it for my dad’s birthday since it was about posh people and he spoke in a posh voice. The book made fun of ‘Sloanes’, the posh Fulham and Kensington girls epitomized by the new Princess of Wales. My dad was no more a Sloane than he was a member of Chernenko’s politburo. He looked at it bemusedly and I failed again to point up our differences.
If anything, I was closer to the Sloanes than he was, being a regular at workshops run at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square by their Young People’s Theatre Scheme. It was a long way from Loughton on the tube but it seemed worth it to be involved at such a famous theatre.
The Royal Court had been at the forefront of new writing in the British theatre since the ’50s. It prided itself on discovering and nurturing new writers and on fostering the expression of challenging ideas on its famous stage. Upstairs at the Royal Court was a smaller theatre, called Upstairs at the Royal Court. I went along hoping to one day be cast in a play, but my eagerness to please and garner attention led to my spoiling one workshop, when I asked if the game we were about to play was going to be ‘the one where…’ and gave away the ending.
‘Yes,’ said the man running the workshop, ‘and now you’ve ruined it.’