Bowie had long been present in our house thanks to my brother Alan. He had a ticket on his mirror for weeks, green with black type, that stated ‘Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars live at the Free Trade Hall’. This was 1973. I was nine years old and amazed he was going to actually see Bowie in the flesh. I asked him the next day what it was like. ‘A bloke ran on stage and kissed him,’ he said. Nowadays, a meaningless throwaway remark, but this was a time when a bloke kissing another bloke was very much frowned upon. I became increasingly fascinated by Bowie. I loved the way he had introduced a new way of looking at masculinity, partly because it put me in opposition to the status quo but also because he and those like him were sexy blokes. There was a message here – sexiness didn’t have to mean machismo. Trad macho wasn’t interesting, it was single faceted, and here were these people, including the glam-rock guys, doing something totally different – the hair, the make-up, the clothes. I didn’t see that so much with punk. That was more straight-out trad-hetero aggression. Johnny Rotten, The Clash, were more a celebration of anger. It was great that punk happened, and I benefited from it as much as anybody in terms of that anybody-can-do-it attitude, but in terms of sheer masculinity it didn’t interest me.
While I was captivated by Bowie, I didn’t have the balls or the inclination to go the whole hog and mimic the way he dressed and looked. Rod, while having opened the lid on androgyny, offered a more comfortingly male yet interestingly bohemian position. As I tended to do with anyone I liked, I over-invested in him. I had pictures of him on my wall and saw him countless times in concert, including at Belle Vue and the Apollo in Ardwick, a fascination born from performance as much as it was voice. I knew all his albums back to front. I wanted to be him, to the extent at one time I even entertained the idea of being a Rod Stewart impersonator. I’d got the hooter after all and could do his voice having studied him in a way matched only by the depth I would later study the characters I’d play. I knew everything about him. That he was born on Highgate Road on 5 January 1945, that he was once a gravedigger, everything. I pored over and absorbed it all. I now understand also that Rod was my way into black music, another cultural touchstone of the working class. I couldn’t have my hair cut like Marvin Gaye, but I could have it cut like Rod, who was obsessed with Sam Cooke in a way I’m obsessed with Marvin and Curtis Mayfield. I still recall the hair-on-the-back-of-the-neck moment I first heard Marvin sing ‘What’s Going On?’ and Curtis Mayfield’s ‘Pusherman’, with my mum’s backing vocal of ‘That’s about drugs that song! I don’t know why you’re listening to that!’
Dad had that cultural touchstone too. On a Sunday morning, he would listen to albums by Paul Robeson, the black American baritone equally renowned for his political activism in the US and Europe. Dad loved Sinatra (sometimes he’d have a bath and put the speakers in the bathroom), but he adored Robeson – ‘Marvellous voice’ – and thought he was a great man. Again, it set him out as different. None of my mate’s dads listened to Robeson, and I found it very curious that he invested in this deeply challenging music. It’s a big leap from Sinatra to Robeson, and, as a young boy, it only deepened the mystery of my dad for me. Looking back, though, there is a deep spirituality to Robeson, which I think explains it. My mum would always say it was depressive music, but to Dad it expressed something that ran much deeper. While the roguishness of Sinatra appealed, Dad loved Robeson for his moral strength, his fight for the underdog. Robeson would sing about slavery, most famously in ‘Ol’ Man River’ – ‘Tote that barge and lift dat bale’ – and his work for the civil rights movement would have been featured on newsreels at the cinema. Dad respected Robeson the man as well as Robeson the singer.
Like me, music gave Dad a sense of self, whereas my brothers never felt it so deeply as a source of definition. The music they listened to, though, was equally startling. They started bringing in Liquidator by the Harry Jay All-Stars, The Upsetters’ Return of Django. Again putting me out of sync with my peers, I liked the suedehead stuff they were into, which combined a punk ethic with a smarter, more formal, dress code. Keith even went through a bit of a dandy stage, velvet loons, or cowboy boots with his jeans tucked in. He was so macho in every other way, and yet he enjoyed the campery of that look and could pull it off. The twins demanded that we watch Top of the Pops, which delivered the spectacle of two identical people very unselfconsciously grooving to the music. My mum would be watching the lads, I’d be wondering if I could move like them, and my dad would be sat there going, ‘You’re bloody crackers, the pair of you. What are you doing? That’s not music.’
The radiogram in the living room was the bigger portal to this whole new world beyond Salford. Reggae and ska entered my universe and I used to think the B-side of a single was absolutely extraordinary, because the only time you ever heard a band on the radio was when they played the A-side over and over again. Now I could hear them doing something entirely different. I’d put a B-side on with great excitement – and more often than not it’d be terrible. The B-side of ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ is ‘A Salty Dog’.
I would buy singles while Mum and Dad had albums. They had Whipped Cream and Other Delights by Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass. The cover stuck in my mind – a woman licking her finger, covered in a big mountain of cream that just stopped at her breasts. The music was pretty good too. Ray Conniff and His Orchestra’s album covers were a little more staid.
The drinking came with the music, and by the time I got to college I was a regular in pubs in and around Little Hulton. I’d grown up knowing all about working-class pub culture. My dad might not have gone as often as he used to, but he still loved a drink, as did my mum, and I’d listen to them talk about the nights they’d enjoyed and the people they’d seen. I also had two older brothers who worked hard all week and then at the weekend pubbed and clubbed all round Manchester, coming home full of stories about the scrapes they’d got into. Inevitable, then, that as soon as I was old enough to get served, I was in the pub myself with my mates. We started out, aged fifteen, scallywags, in the New Inn on Walkden Road, and it wasn’t long before we had a cluster of regular haunts – the White Horse, Stocks, Ellesmere, Bluebell, Albion, and Inn of Good Hope included. The whole idea of being a pub drinker appealed to me as a persona. I liked the acting of it as much as the drinking itself. Same when we’d drink bottles of cider under the railway bridge before discos. Again, I was looking around for a self, before going into an industry where I could be a multitude of them.
I have a black-and-white photo of my dad with his brothers and mates sat around a pub table heaving with glasses, everyone alive with laughter. He looks like he’s in his thirties but in fact he’s probably not that much older than me when I was doing the same thing. I love that picture. Dad’s idea of a good time. And mine. Still is. I think back and know, while I might have been trying to be Rod Stewart, David Bowie, Ian McCulloch and Arthur Seaton, for sure the man I was most trying to be was him.
For now, I would have to wait. I would never truly find my dad until I stepped out at the RSC as Macbeth. I saw, and heard, him clearly then.
7
ADVENTURE
‘Getting married? I don’t fancy that. Settling down? No thanks.’
I was eighteen with a headful of mad dog-shit, women, boozing and acting. I have reams of teenage diary entries to prove as much, none of which will be appearing here.
There’s very little room for refinement in that mix, but what I did know was that, as much as I loved them, Mum and Dad’s life wasn’t for me. My destiny in Salford was to get a job, get hitched, and have kids. Nothing wrong with that, but I’d had a keen view of my parents’ marriage, and those of others, and decided to go a different way. I knew my mum loved my dad, and that he loved her, but I felt, rightly or wrongly, that there was something missing. My panic at the prospect of the 9–5, and being born, living and dying in the same area, which my family had done eternally, was manufactured from the same place. It didn’t feel like there were any
horizons. It felt as if decades of low expectations had become genetic. My grandparents had passed their institutionalised expectation of life on to my mum and dad, and now they – and I hold no blame in them for this, because it was based on reality – were passing it on to us. Keith had become an apprentice woodworker, Alan an upholsterer, and they would both go on to become highly skilled professionals, but there didn’t seem much option beyond a traditional working-class trade.
More than anything, I was scared that if I didn’t break out and do something different, it would make me like my dad. I would inherit his anger and bad-temperedness. I looked at him and thought, I am not going to work nine to five in a factory because it will do to me what it did to you. My dad had loads of happiness in his life. He loved my mum and he loved his kids, but there was something very unresolved in him. Unfulfilled potential had scarred him, and I was going to avoid the same fate at all costs. Otherwise I, too, risked turning into that man who came home and scared the living shit out of his own son.
The problem I had was that if I didn’t want a trade, didn’t want to stay in Salford, then what was I going to do? At that point, I was just a lad, a bit arsey, a bit different, who didn’t fit, or rather didn’t want to fit, into any preordained boxes. There was also, even at that age, an ego, formed, I believe, from having identical twin brothers. As I hatched a plan, how much of me was saying, ‘I’ll show you – I’ll do enough for two’? It must have affected me. They were eight years older than me, handsome, and had each other. What had I done that I didn’t get a twin? I was definitely competitive with them. I wanted to do things they either didn’t or couldn’t – hence the overwhelming desire to beat them on the squash court.
It was at that point I began to talk about acting, a choice so left-field that Mum and Dad went for it, because they, having seen what I was like, couldn’t think of anything else I could do. They could see that somehow it fitted me, and I considered it the only chance I would ever have of adventure, an opportunity to go to London, see another side of life, one beyond the boundaries of a mapped-out existence. I’d seen my Uncle Paul already do so, forging a career in journalism that would later take him to Northern Ireland as head of news on the Belfast Telegraph and then Fleet Street as executive news editor on the Daily Telegraph. Paul, a truly lovely man, died in 2019 and is hugely missed.
Dad also recognised, as did I, that I was someone who would find it difficult to shut up and be constrained, and that could cause me problems in an office or factory environment. Overarching all that, he knew that to be an actor was to display what he had in abundance, a love of words.
Whiteacre was also in the mix. The fact he’d experienced that heaven meant that when I came home from tech one day and went, ‘I want to be an actor,’ in his generosity, and his understanding that there might be a way out, he went, ‘Yes.’ My acting was his Whiteacre. One could never have happened without the other.
‘They’ve told me if I want to pursue it then I need to go to drama school in London,’ I told him. This is where in the clichés of film and TV the working-class dad spits his fag out and chokes on his cup of tea. Not Dad.
‘Well, how do you do that?’
‘You send £8 in a letter and apply.’
‘All right,’ he said, ‘we’ll give you that.’
If Dad hadn’t thought an acting career was a possibility, he certainly wouldn’t have spent any money on it. The truth was it really captured his and Mum’s imagination. Whereas before they’d been looking at me in mild bemusement, thinking, I’ve no idea what this one’s going to do, when I dropped acting on them they had the capacity to think, You know what? That might just work.
Dad in particular was relentlessly positive, romancing about it in a way my mum most definitely wasn’t. She wanted me to do it, but she was much more concerned about the more shadowy side, the uncertainty of the industry, what might await me in London. She had to rein in his enthusiasm a little. Dad wasn’t interested in the ins and outs of the situation. For him, there was something more to it. The ambition I had always harboured was one day to play for Manchester United. Nothing more, nothing less. Thing is, when I said that to him I was always disappointed in his reaction. It didn’t bring the sun out. The contrast when I said I was going to be an actor couldn’t have been more pronounced. Not only did the sun come out, but it was scorching in its glow. The rock of my life at that age was my mother, but nobody was more emotionally touched and moved than my father. I had underestimated him hugely. He had an intuitive knowledge of my personality, that I wouldn’t survive in an overtly macho world, not because I was sensitive, just because I’d get bored.
When I said to him I was going to be an actor, he believed it. His first thought was, He could do that. He was 100 per cent behind it, and yet there was no more evidence to back it up than there was to say I’d be that mythical footballer of my imagination. We didn’t know any actors and there’d never been any family connection with the profession. What he did, I believe, was hold an inner thought – ‘This might be your chance.’ My dad – thank you, Dad – did that for me. Something that no one had ever done for him when football offered him a similar route through the exit door of a predictable working-class life.
The £8 was duly sent with an application to the Central School of Speech and Drama, and, on 5 January 1983, I travelled down for my audition, choosing a passage by Grandier, a priest accused of witchcraft, from John Whiting’s The Devils, as my contemporary speech. Grandier has a melancholic tone that I felt I could embody, but I had no real understanding of the text. To say I was naïve would be an understatement. There was an underlying irony to the scene of which I was totally unaware. I just said the words.
I was also required to deliver a set Shakespeare speech, in my case Gratiano from The Merchant of Venice – ‘Let me play the fool. With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come.’ Again, I had no idea what I was doing. No idea at all. I didn’t work with anybody on either speech and had no self-belief whatsoever. I really didn’t.
After delivering both pieces, I thought that would be it for the day. If I was wanted for a recall, I’d receive a letter. But I was sat chatting with some of the other hopefuls when a bloke came out to us. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘we’re recalling these four people.’ He proceeded to read out the names. I was one of them.
‘The recall’, he added, ‘is this afternoon.’
‘What?’ It was a shock to say the least. But there was nothing for it but to get on with it. Again, no idea. Hope over expectation.
Towards the end of the afternoon I was given the verdict. ‘We’d like to offer you a place.’ I’d be starting in September for three years.
I stumbled out into Swiss Cottage, found a phone box, and rang my mum and dad. Mum burst into tears. Dad was, to use one of his expressions, chuffed to little mintballs. By the time I got to Euston, all that was left was the milk train. It was the early hours when I got back to Manchester.
Stepping wearily off the train, I looked down the platform. There was one person on it. In his hat, coat and scarf. My dad. He took me home, slept in his chair, and went straight to work.
Receiving the news that I’d got in at drama school was the first time it became real to the three of us. Again, Dad’s passion for the idea was palpable. The day after I was accepted, without me knowing it, he rang the Worsley Journal. There was a knock on the door – a journalist and a photographer.
‘What’s this?’
‘Your dad rang us.’ Not my mum, my dad.
But we were all very naïve. Mum had expressed some reservations, but we didn’t realise the odds were stacked so high against becoming a working actor, let alone a successful one. Ours was a very romantic notion. I had no idea about the levels of unemployment, which were a fact then, and a fact today. Only when I got to drama school was the reality drummed into me. Perhaps it was better to be naïve. Mum and Dad were, after all, required to make a considerable investment going way beyond that initial eight quid, taki
ng out a covenant where they agreed to pay for my accommodation while Salford Council paid my fees, the lowest at the time because Central was grant-assisted by the Inner London Education Authority, which is now defunct.
It was odd in a way. Financial unpredictability wasn’t something that Dad enjoyed. For working-class people, their lives are ruled by money. And yet, while the uncertainty of an acting income was never mentioned, he was very against the twins having their own businesses. The prospect scared the hell out of him. Maybe it was because they were going into a working environment where he understood the difficulties. He’d have been thinking about tax and national insurance and how much easier it would be to have a company deal with those things rather than doing it yourself. For him, it was much better to know the job was there, whereas for a small businessman there is always uncertainty. He couldn’t have that kind of an opinion about me. He couldn’t say, ‘Listen, pal, you can’t play Romeo,’ because it wasn’t his territory. It was so out there.
That weekend, my mum and dad bought me The Complete Works of Shakespeare.
‘Oh, you’re going to be reading a bit of Shakespeare, are you?’ noted the woman behind the counter.
My dad didn’t hesitate. ‘No,’ he said, ‘it’s for my son. He’s an actor.’
‘He’s not an actor, Ron,’ Mum interjected, ‘he’s just got in at drama school.’
I Love the Bones of You Page 8