I Blame Morrissey

by Jamie Jones

  The loosely applied school uniform rules allowed girls such as Jo to leave blouse buttons undone, fold over the waistbands on their skirts after they had left their mothers protective gaze and sport a look that made them look much older than us mere boys. I was amazed she agreed to the offer to go out with me. I didn’t have much to offer her in terms of personality, and my NHS specs and floppy brown hair hadn’t exactly had the girls running to my front door. Our coupling had been inevitable once I’d stolen her rucksack and she’d run after me as I half-heartedly made my attempted escape. As part of my strategy, I let her catch up with me behind the science block, where, stumbling over my words I asked her if she would go out with me? With only a moment’s hesitation, she advised me that she wanted to take up my offer and with a quick peck on the lips our union was secured.

  After seeing Bowie, I had quickly developed a mild addiction to the work of the Scottish rockers, Deacon Blue. I’d heard their single ‘Dignity’ on Radio One, taped it and couldn’t stop playing it. It was a story about a man saving up for a boat (called Dignity), which didn’t exactly resonate with my life but Ricky Ross’ husky, storytelling voice had me hooked. Having heard the single a hundred times, I persuaded Mum to buy the CD version of the album from which it came, “Raintown”. I was hooked from the first listen. It was the first time that I had experienced that incomparable rush of excitement and adrenaline when you put on an album and it instantly takes over your life, making everything else other than the songs contained within its sleeve seem utterly pointless.

  I also developed my first serious crush, on Ricky Ross’ covocalist (and I was to discover, wife) Lorraine Mcintosh. Whilst my mates were grasping their youthful hormones and gazing at pictures of Cindy Crawford, for me it was all about Lorraine.

  I don’t know if it was a conscious decision, but I knew with absolutely certainty that it was my romantic mission to indoctrinate Jo into the magical musical landscape created by Deacon Blue.

  They had some top tunes for a young couple who were just discovering emotions, kissing and politics, and ‘Raintown’ was our album of choice that summer. Well, I say ours, but I can only hope that Jo liked it as well, as I didn’t ever really check. To figure out what a girl was thinking or what she liked was way outside of my emotional range.

  World events came thick and fast in 1990, whether that be the start of the Gulf War or my becoming mesmerised by both the tune to Beats International’s sublime ‘Dub Be Good To Me’ and Lindy Layton’s dancing in the video. Jo and I would talk about such events, though not so much about my growing fondness for Ms Layton as Jo was the jealous type. In essence “going out” with each other was just a phrase that people used, we didn’t actually go to many places. Occasionally we would sit together in French class, much to the amusement of my mickey-taking mates and hold hands under the desk. She would write things like “Jo Loves Jay” on my wallpaper covered exercise book and I would put a functional tick next to it. I had no idea what else to do and she seemed happy with my formal approval. In the next break time, I would cross through her declaration of love with a black marker pen. I couldn’t risk my mates seeing such naked teenage emotion.

  Every Wednesday after school I would get the bus over to hers to sit and listen to music and she would take the short walk from school to my house to do the same every Monday. She was far smarter than me, both intellectually and in the ways of the world. Immediately prior to our starting to go out she had been seen out and about with one of the 16 year old lads at our school who had a moped. The moped was the ultimate status symbol of the callow youth looking to impress girls from 2 or 3 school years below them. The rumour in the playground was that he finished with her for being frigid. That word was used a lot by my peers but I didn’t really have a clue what it meant. I didn’t know much about relationships, or life outside of the school gates and our front room. I was still wearing my favourite Indiana Jones pants to school on non-PE days.

  Jo helped me find out more about life by insisting that we go for a walk every Monday evening. We would inevitably end up in a secluded, darkened corner round the back of the deserted school science block. There we would spend an hour, often in the pouring rain or freezing cold, kissing and fumbling our way into the next stage of our lusty quest to reach maturity.

  Bowie and Jo had changed my immature boy’s mindset. I was moving away from posters of Ninja Turtles and Wookies to walls full of pop stars. I wasn’t so interested in watching the likes of Newsround and Blue Peter anymore and, instead, was often sneakily setting up our video recorder to tape the late night film on Channel 4.

  Slap bang in the middle of that glorious summer came the World Cup. It’s hard to put into words how much Italia ’90 changed the way that people viewed football in England. Well, I knew nothing of England as a whole, but it certainly changed views in my 5 square mile home patch of Southern Peterborough. Thanks to Thatcher demonising football fans and the disasters at Heysel and Hillsborough, if you showed an interest in football prior to that World Cup, you were naturally assumed to be a hooligan by most people. My mum had always sniffily said to her friends: “Yes, Jay goes to watch the football, but he doesn’t ever get into trouble and we are hoping he will grow out of it”.

  The World Cup that year even changed how Mum thought about football. It was a tournament littered with poor England performances in the early rounds but thanks to Gary Lineker’s goals v Cameroon, England were through to the semi-final. Everything was set up perfectly as far as I could see for that “Night in Turin” and the game against West Germany.

  My dad had never been that keen on football. In fact his only interest in the beautiful game was to wind me up about defeats for The Posh and to hide the local daily paper from me so that I couldn’t get the up to date(ish) football news. I had my revenge by ringing the premium rate Club Call line to get my football news fix, thus sending our phone bill through the roof. Dad would walk around the house ranting about the bill and how he “only used the phone in emergencies”. British Telecom ruined that particular scam when they introduced itemised billing.

  On the evening of the semi-final, Dad came home from work talking about how much he was looking forward to the game. Of course, he showed his inner-Peterborian by informing me that he was, “Sure we will lose”. With our tea and the washing up dispatched by 6.30pm as well as my mum and sister packed off to watch TV upstairs, Dad and I settled down in our front room with a mug of sugary tea each. I was resplendent in my blue England kit, full of hope that we would win the match and go on to win the World Cup. What could possibly go wrong? I instinctively knew that this was going to be a special night in our house; we would soon be celebrating a win that would be remembered for years to come.

  As it was a warm night, we had our front room windows wide open and could hear the shouts and squeals as our neighbours watched the game. At least, I hope that’s what they were doing.

  I howled at the screen when West Germany opened the scoring and knocked the lampshade off the big light when Lineker bundled home the equaliser. I gripped Dad’s arm as tightly as I could to avoid crying along with Gazza when he was booked, and hardly noticed as Dad prattled on nervously about cheating and two World Wars and one World Cup. After an emotionally exhausting 90 minutes and then extra-time, the score was 1-1, and the game was set to be resolved by a penalty shootout. I was quite relaxed at this point as I remained convinced that we would win. It had been 24 years since the greatest country on the planet had won the World Cup, so it stood to reason that it was going to happen now. I stuck on my England/New Order’s anthem “World in Motion” record, and screamed along at the top of my voice to John Barnes rap about being the “England man”. It occurred to me, for the first time, that all might not go to plan when Dad came into the front room carrying his 30th cup of tea of the night and announced “I’m going out into the garden, I can’t watch this. Shout me as the penalties are taken, I’ll leave the door open”.

  Both sides scored their first
3 penalties with consummate ease. Walking up to take our next spot kick was Stuart Pearce. As an emotionally stunted juvenile, you couldn’t be certain of many things in life but walking across my TV screen was one of those certainties in the shape of Stuart Pearce. I knew that he would score. He was Psycho. He was the ultimate Englishman. He was England.

  He missed.

  Some moments in any young life are frozen in time, and that was one.

  “SHHHHHIIIIITTTTTT, SHHHHIIITTTTT…….. DAAAAAAAAAAAAAD……. NNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOO”.

  As Dad ran back into the house, I knew that he was caught up in the moment because he didn’t clip me round the ear for shouting “Shit” out of our front door. He put his arm around my shoulder and we stood and watched in silence as West Germany scored their next penalty. Next up for England was Chris Waddle who sprinted to the ball and then blasted it high into the warm Italian night. England were out of the World Cup.

  I threw myself onto the floor in a melodramatic mess of tears, snot and smeared specs. Dad picked me up with his shovel sized hands and gave me a hug. My dad was a typical working class man and, in 1990, working class dads only gave their kids a hug if they’d had a limb amputated. I sat there weeping into his shoulder, thinking about how crap life was and knowing without doubt that I would never be this upset about anything, ever again. I eventually went up to bed, still blubbering and refusing to take off my England kit. I cried myself to sleep muttering to the end about how unfair everything was.

  In the midst of my World Cup heartbreak, I realised that the tunes of Deacon Blue and the Blow Monkeys (who had become my 2nd favourite band) were not enough to heal this kind of pain. I needed something raw, something real, something exciting. The songs on Radio 1 were saying nothing to me about my life so I had no idea where I would find such musical enlightenment. It didn’t happen immediately but later that summer, playing through our car stereo, sat outside my Nan & Grandads caravan on a wet Cromer afternoon, I found what I was searching for. I found a voice that sounded like a barking seal and a guitar sound that resembled a mallet hitting a plank of wood. I found Billy Bragg.

  Rather than joining in with a family game of Cluedo, I sat in our sky blue Ford Escort and rifled through the cassette tapes that I had liberated from the glove box. After a quick blast of Madonna’s “True Blue”, I found a tape that had a cover upon which was a huge cartoon head with a furnace as the mouth, and a hand scooping money into it. The cover had on it the words “Billy Bragg – Talking With The Taxman About Poetry” and a sticker that said “Pay No More Than £3.99”. As most shops were charging £7 for a tape, my first thought was, “What an idiot this bloke is for not wanting to make more money”.

  I hadn’t been that interested in politics up to this point. My dad had recently been made redundant from his job at a local factory and had struggled to find another job for a while. Despite that, my dear Mother had caught the 80’s bug and desperately wanted to be middle class. As a small child, we lived in a house that had an outside toilet. Between smashing my football against the fence and pretending that the trees in our garden were the Endor forest, I liked the fact that I could nip for a quick wee without having to take my shoes off and go inside. Mum had other ideas though. How could she be aspirational middle class with our own car, hi-fi stereo with graphic equaliser and still have an outside toilet? The toilet door was soon locked, never to be opened again. My mum was a gigantic pile of confusing contradictions. She was desperate to join the middle classes but would also stand in our kitchen screeching along to Billy Bragg’s left wing political anthems with her distinctively awful singing voice.

  ‘Talking With The Taxman…’ was a delectable mix of Billy telling stories, with songs about his lack of desire to tie the knot (The Marriage), and the “I’m an idiot and she left me” love-song (Honey, I’m a Big Boy Now). The political ram-raid named “Ideology”, wandered over and smacked me full in the face. It made me sit up and take notice of the world around me, rather than just concentrate on me and mine. In the song, Billy doesn’t seek to deliver a complicated message or dress up the meaning in fancy words; it’s raw, almost primal language.

  I sat in the car and listened to that tape 5 or 6 times all the way through, finding a different song to fall in love with each listen. I knew that from hereon in it was me and Billy against the world. He had given me a blueprint of how life should be lived, both politically and in affairs of the heart. I was primed to listen to anything and everything that he had to say. From that day onwards I told people that I was a socialist, but in reality I was a Braggist.

  I spent the next week listening to that album on constant repeat before it snapped and I knew I needed to go out and get some more Bragg tunes.

  I had a few record shops to choose from. We had the expensive (HMV and Our Price), the old style independent (Andy’s Records) and the hippy run 2nd hand haven that, in Peterborough, was called House On The Borderland.

  Our Price was always my first point of call. That wasn’t an effort to be cool or trendy; it was just the closest record shop to the bus station.

  I now knew that Billy Bragg had insisted that all his albums had the “Pay No More Than…..” sticker on the front cover. However, as I made my way to the CD racks, I found that the management of Our Price, being good capitalists, weren’t going to pay any attention to this socialist nonsense. There in the rack sat Billy’s “Workers Playtime” album with a dirty great £13.99 sticker proudly displayed on the cover.

  I couldn’t afford such an outrageous price. I only had £9 in my pocket, and that had been scraped together from my £3 a week pocket money and my Sunday paper round which paid a measly £1.50 a week. Due to these financial pressures, I was lucky to be able to afford one album a month, so it had to be the right one and at the right price.

  With my face set to maximum smugness, I approached the seemingly 7ft high counter with “Workers Playtime” in hand, and said to the bloke behind it:

  Me – ‘You can’t charge £13.99 for this CD!’

  Him – ‘You what?’ (customer service was universally awful in 1990)

  Me – ‘You can’t charge £13.99 for this CD!’

  Him – ‘Shop policy is that we charge that for obscure CD’s.’

  Me – ‘Obscure? This is a Billy Bragg album.’

  Him – ‘Yes mate and you’re the only one that’s ever brought it up to the counter to query the price, let alone actually buy the bloody thing. We class that kind of album as obscure.’

  I, of course, didn’t have £13.99, so had to take the long slow walk of shame back to the front of the store, where I replaced the CD in its rack. I walked out of the shop, grumbling to myself about ‘capitalist bastards killing music’ and as I wasn’t looking where I was going, didn’t notice Jo walking towards me until I almost bumped straight into her.

  A simple “watcha” was exchanged, no hug or kisses to both the cheeks as we weren’t French. As always when I met Jo up town I knew that it was going to cost me money, in the form of “going for a coffee”. It was the height of Peterborian sophistication to go for a coffee at a coffee shop, not a café. We had such a shop at the top of the Queensgate shopping centre that was glass fronted so that you could look down at the shoppers below.

  Thanks to my carefully managed financial resource and my constant harping on about it, Jo knew with absolute certainty that she would be buying her own coffee. She had recently managed to get a Saturday job at the local Barrett’s shoe shop earning £3 an hour so, compared to me, she was loaded. Whilst stood there saying “Watcha”, I’d remembered that I only had £9 and a return bus ticket in my pocket, and still had to find a record shop that would sell me a Billy Bragg CD album at the correct price of £7.99. Quite simply I couldn’t afford to go for a coffee, or even take the risk that I may have to pay for my own drink if Jo didn’t offer to pay for us both. It didn’t occur to me at any point to put off the buying of an album for a week and go for a coffee with my girlfriend.

  I could fee
l a sense of terror at being denied the ultimate prize of a Billy Bragg album, so blurted out;

  “I can’t come for a coffee, I’m in a rush and I only have enough money to buy a CD. I’ll see you at school on Monday, yeah.”

  I strode off, away from the girl who’d just wanted to spend half an hour of her lunch-break with her boyfriend. I had put a Billy Bragg CD before love. She should have saved herself a lot of heartbreak and grief and “packed me in” there and then. Instead she watched me wander off towards House On The Borderland. I’m not sure if she did watch me go. I didn’t turn around. I was in a rush to get my hands on some Billy Bragg.

  House On The Borderland was in a grim area of the city centre, squeezed between a late night burger bar and a tattoo parlour. It was run by an old hippy who would happily have banned all non-hippy types from entering.

  The shop itself was stacked with thousands of vinyl albums and other 1970’s memorabilia, with the scent combination of joss sticks, cats and damp clinging to my clothes and nostrils with such force that I wondered if the shops very existence depended on infecting unsuspecting customers with the smell. Whenever I walked in, I would look around and be convinced that the hippy wasn’t actually on the shop-floor. Then…slowly…. he would rise from behind the racks of old Hawkwind records, looking like Dylan from the Magic Roundabout, and nod in my direction. It wasn’t a nod of hello; it was a nod of “Hmmm that bloody boy is back in here again, seeing how many crap CD’s and tapes he can get for a fiver”.