Book Two Chapter Seven My Future Positively Glittered

Chapter Seven  My Future Positively Glittered

Introduction

My Future Positively Glittered consists of two previously published pieces in slightly modified form, these being My Future Positively Glittered, now divided into two sections (Global Village Soul Boys and Hardly a Wunderkind), and Summer's End, whose first drafts were published at Blogster on, respectively, May 26 and May 29, 2006. In September of the same year, a further piece, An Evanescent Friendship, which had been first published at Blogster on the 10th of June 2006, was added. Final corrections were made in December.

Summer's End

1976 was the year in which I came increasingly under the influence of the decade of Brando, Presley and Dean which at the time was less in tune with my tastes than the stylish 1920s but I was keen for change and was a massive James Dean fan. So by degrees throughout the year, I replaced my old foppish wardrobe with the classic Rebel uniform of red windcheater, white tee-shirt, straight leg jeans, and loafers.

On occasion, however, I reverted to my old image such as the time towards the end of the legendary long hot summer of '76 that I wore top hat and tails and reddened nails to a party hosted by a friend from Prestlands. This took place in September. I know this to be an absolute certainty because I should have been at sea at the time, on the minesweeper HMS Kettleton. I think it was only a couple of days afterwards that Kettleton capsized and sank to the bottom of the North Sea following a tragic accident involving another larger ship while engaged in a Replenishment at Sea exercise. It resulted in the loss of twelve men most of whom I knew personally, given that only weeks earlier I'd spent a few days on Kettleton with more or less exactly the same crew.

An impression I can recall having at the time at the time with regard to those who didn't survive was that they were all natural-born gentlemen. I knew three of them quite well, and they were men of marked generosity of spirit and sweetness of disposition. That is not to say that the survivors weren't, far from it...many of them were good friends of mine. My point is that there was a deep gentleness about those who didn't make it, according to how I saw them at the time. It broke my heart to think of what happened to them.

Global Village Soul Boys

It may just be my imagination but 1977 was a far darker year than those that came before it. It was after all marked by the rise of Punk, a musical and cultural movement which could be said to have fatally disabled Rock's uneven progress as an art form by virtue of its DIY ethic, underpinned by a mood of raw rebellious fury. These elements combined with an extreme and often grotesque sartorial eccentricity to produce something utterly unique, and it spread like a raging inferno, deep into suburbia from its London axis, and so to other major British and international cities.

If by the end of the year I'd been caught up in Punk like thousands of others, at first I was relatively unmoved by it all. I preferred what could be called the trendy London club look, whose key elements included floppy college boy wedge, straight leg jeans or slacks, winklepicker shoes or boots, and baggy shirt worn with small collar archly upturned often over a plain white T-shirt.

Having recently renewed friendly relations with my old Welbourne buddies, I began attending a lengthy series of parties in various part of fashionable West and Central London as one after the other of them hit 21. Of them all, I was perhaps closest with Chris who shared my passion for the London party life and clubs filled to the brim with the fashionable and the beautiful.

Together we set about attuning our tired old images to what we saw as the coolest look of the day. Shortly after the start of the year, I'd purchased my first pair of winklepickers which was an essential acquisition for any self-respecting trendy. They were cream-coloured lace-ups if I'm not mistaken. I went on to acquire something of a collection of them for myself, including black shoes with sidebuckles, imitation crocodile skin shoes with squared off toes, and black Chelsea-style boots, all painfully pointed. By the spring of '78 or thereabouts I think I'd junked the lot as a means of sparing my poor feet.

This trendy London look might have been confused by some with Punk. For certainly like Punk it was adopted in reaction to the once ubiquitous hippie look, but it was married to a love of Soul music rather than primitive three-chord Rock. It was common among working class Soul Boys, although I was not to discover this until later in the year when I started hanging out at the Woodville Hall in Gravesend, Kent, while at Merchant Navy college in nearby Greenhithe. Through one of the guys at college I found out about the Global Village night club under the Arches near Charing Cross. The Global in '77 was something of a magnet for working class kids from various London suburbs who favoured the Soul Boy look which then consisted of such elements as the wedge haircut, often streaked with a variety of tints, brightly coloured peg-top trousers, and winklepickers, or beach sandals.

When the Soul Boy wedge was married to a passion for European designer sports clothing, it mutated into the so-called Casual style which exploded in the late '70s and early '80s on the football terraces, first allegedly in Liverpool, and then nationally, going on to influence a passion for casual sporting attire on the part of the youth of Britain and beyond that persists to this day. For the greater part of '77, it was the Soul Boy look I aspired to rather than that of Punk, although I started to flirt with Punk once I'd become aware of the monstrous vagaries of attire that were regularly on display on Chelsea's Kings Road and elsewhere in the early part of the year.

By the summer, I was starting to as much resemble a Punk as a Soul Boy, squandering my youth like a profligate in night clubs and bars in Palamos on Spain's Costa Brava, while working by day as a sailing instructor. After a few weeks I lost my job, but stayed on for a time on a caravan site to pretty well just enjoy myself, notably at the disco where I spent many a night, with Donna Summer's A Love Trilogy a very special favourite.

Yes, I would have made a good professional playboy...but what I really wanted to be was an acting sensation such as charismatic wunderkind Peter Firth, who like fellow golden boy Gerry Sundquist was a Northerner who found success on the West End stage in the mid-1970s; although Firth had also been a child star. While in '77, he was the quintessence of the beautiful young actor of infinite promise. And if not an actor, then a Rock star...I just wanted to be famous.

Hardly a Wunderkind

In that selfsame year I was still ill-equipped for my ambitions, given that few if any actors become truly successful on the strength of their looks alone, which is surely why there are so many more pulchritudinous male models than actors. I had not yet appeared in a single play, except a handful at Welbourne which had provoked more hilarity than praise. My roles there consisted of two elderly women, a beauty with Mia Farrow hair conducting some kind of illicit liaison as I recall, and a posturing psychopath called Alec, this in The Rats, a little known Agatha Christie one act play. In short, I was hardly a National Youth Theatre wonder kid. I had written a few songs, but my guitar playing was yet threadbare and weak, even though I already had a good baritone singing voice. My future positively glittered before me.

An Evanescent Friendship

I underwent my final RNR voyage, destination Ostend in Belgium, towards the end of the summer of 1977. My best RNR pal Lofty was sadly not on board, but other friends were, among them, Damon, a tall and elegant red-haired man a little in appearance as I recall like the charismatic British actor Edward Fox, with a trace perhaps of Damian Lewis. If Lofty was of the type of the warm, bluff working class Londoner, then Damon appeared to be every inch the classic English gentleman, although altogether without coldness, being in his own way as warm as Lofty.

His family background was almost inconceivably tragic, and his soft and courtly manners masked a troubled inner life which he kept almost entirely to himself, as well as considerable physical courage. Yet I can imagine that back in '77 there must have been those who wondered why two such apparently educated sorts as Damon and I chose to serve as Ordinary Seamen.

I'm thinking in particular of some of the young guys of a certain RNR Division liaising with us to and from the port of Ostend in Flanders, Belgium. There was one incident I can recall quite clearly now when some of these feisty kids were grouping in an Ostend street intent on defending their honour for some wrong committed against them by some local youths. Damon and I made it clear that we had no intention of taking part, with the result that one of their number, a waiflike young salt of about 16 or 17, previously a pal of ours, turned to look at us with a look of sheer uncomprehending contempt on his beardless face and uttered: “What's wrong with youse guys?”, before dashing headlong into the melee. He was of course, implying that we were deficient in courage and manliness, but as I've already stated, Damon was the least cowardly of men. Moreover, according to what I observed and what he himself told me, he was more than averagely successful with the opposite sex. Yet, for his own reasons he chose to conceal his extreme personal toughness beneath a display of aristocratic refinement and reserve. While I was no less robustly heterosexual than he, I did not share the inner fortitude which would eventually see him assuming the uniform and calling of a naval officer. It had of course been his destiny all along. But not mine. My tenure with the Thames Division, RNR came to an end in late 1977 with an incredibly positive character report. However, I would never wear a military uniform again.

Chapter Eight Gilded Youth at the Silverhill School

Introduction

An initial draft of Gilded Youth was published at Blogster on the 1st of July 2006, since which time it's undergone considerable modification. The inclusion of the second versified section of Woodville Hall first published separately and in longer form at Blogster on the 18th of February '06, is a fairly recent development. It had been based on the bare essentials of an autobiographical short story written in 1978 or '79.

A “definitive” version of Gilded Youth was published at FaithWriters in December 2007.

The Woodville Hall escapists

In late 1977 I joined the former Merchant Navy School in Kent as a trainee Radio Officer. I formed several close friendships there; but closest of all was with Jayant, a lovable jack the lad of about 18 with a thick London accent who'd been born into nearby Gravesend's large Asian community. Jay certainly knew how to handle himself, but he was loyal and soft-hearted towards those he liked and trusted, and for a time we were inseparable.

It was through Jay I think that I started going to discos at Gravesend's Woodville Hall, depicted in the piece below. There young (white and Asian) kids would meet every week or so in late '77 dressed in escapist fashions which stood out in such bizarre contrast with the drabness of their surroundings. English suburban life in those days didn't include such modern day distractions as mobile phones, DVD players and the world wide web, and was dismally uninspiring as a result. Little wonder therefore that it gave birth to Punk and other outlandish youth cults, most of which are still in existence to some degree to this day.

West Suburban Story

Soon after returning from the Merchant Navy school in December '77, I auditioned for a place on the three year drama course at the Silverhill School of Music and Drama in the City of London, which was really what I'd wanted to do in the first place. Incredibly, as I'd already failed two earlier auditions for RADA, Silverhill accepted me for the course beginning in autumn 1978. I was exhilarated; but that didn't stop me sinking further into the nihilistic Punk lifestyle. Having been bewitched by the hairstyle of one of a small gang of Punks I knew by sight from nights out in Dartford in late '77, I decided to imitate it a few weeks later. It was predictably spiked, with a kind of a halo of bright blond taking in the front of the head, both sides, and a strip at the nape of the neck. I have part of a photograph of myself wearing this style with a long Soul Boy fringe at the front, before I eventually had it cut into spikes. By the spring of 1978, I'd shorn it all off into a skinhead.

It was genuinely dangerous being a Punk in 77-78 and you lived in constant fear of attack or abuse if you chose to dress like one. After all, Punk's culture of insolence and outrage was extreme even by the standards of previous British youth cults such as the Teds, the Rockers, the Mods, the Greasers, the Skins, the Suedeheads and the Smoothies. At the risk of exaggeration, it could be said that Britain in those days was a country still dominated to some degree by pre-war moral values, which were Victorian in essence...and that a cultural war was still being fought for the soul of the nation. And that therefore Punks constituted the avant garde of a new Britain in a way that would almost certainly be impossible today, fact which might go some way towards explaining the extraordinary hostility they attracted from certain members of the British public.

Close by to where I shared a house with my parents in the furthermost reaches of South West London where suburbia meets countryside I saw Hersham Punk band Sham 69 shortly before they became nationally famous. I already knew their lead singer Jimmy Pursey by sight; at least I think it was him I saw miming to Chris Spedding's Motorbiking at the disco one night. This gig took place in a poky hall above a pub in the centre of a large bleak industrial estate, itself surrounded by drab housing estates and rows of council houses.

On one occasion that I remember, the Soul gave way to Punk which saw the tiny dance space being invaded by deranged pogo-dancers. I just stood back and watched. On another, a Ted revivalist, a follower of classic Rock and Roll who favoured flashy fifties-style clothing, tried to start some trouble with me in the toilet. At this point, another Ted who I think had befriended me about a year before when I was still dressing in '50s style, stepped in with the magical words: “He's a mate!” His intervention may have saved me from a hiding that night because Teds had a loathing of Punks informed by their essential conservatism. To them, Punks probably seemed to have no respect for anything. Later, or it may have been before I can't remember, he asked me whether I was really into “this Punk lark” or whatever he called it, and I assured him I wasn't. I may even have added that I still loved the fifties, which was actually the truth to an extent, not that that was the point. The fact is that I lied to him to look good in his eyes, which was a pretty low thing to do to a friend.

On New Years Eve, I took Jay to a party in swanky West or Central London. It was one of the last, perhaps even the very last, in a long series of parties I'd gone to throughout '77 thanks to my old Welbourne buddies, so many of whom were now based in and around the capital.

Before arriving at the host's house or apartment, Jay and I met up as agreed with budding oil magnate Chris, an especially close friend from my days as Cadet C.R. Halling 173. Introductions over, Jay saw fit to impress Chris with a terrifying solo display of his lethal street fighting skills. “I'm suitably impressed,” said Chris, and he was; and he was no wimp himself (to say the least). We all got on well that insane night which saw me pouring a full glass of beer over my head at one point in circumstances I'd rather keep to myself. What the beautiful student of dance I'd spent most of the evening with thought of a nice guy like me doing a thing like that she didn't say. But in the late '70s, I met so many people who might have done anything for me; and I've got plenty of time to myself to reflect on it all now..and the sheer waste of youth, of life...makes me weep.

The Costa del Punk

In the spring of 1978, I arrived in the famous Costa del Sol town of Fuengirola near Marbella, with the intention of helping to set up a sailing school with a young English guy of about 30 I knew only very slightly. He kindly put me up in an apartment, but as things turned out the project came to nothing. However, I stayed on in Fuengirola, living first in a hotel, and then rent-free thanks to a friend I made in town in her own apartment.

Shortly after that, I was offered the position of front man in a Hard Rock band playing nightly at the Tam Tam night club. I became something of a town character, Coco the Punk as I was known, one of only two Punks in Fuengirola, most of the kids who became my close friends being still in thrall to the Hippie sixties. '78 was my first year as a full-time Punk in fact, and among the objects of my excess were a black wet-look tee-shirt with cropped sleeves, drainpipe jeans of black or green, worn with black studded belt festooned with silver chain kept in place by safety pins, fluorescent teddy boy socks, and white shoes with black laces etc. I even had a safety pin, anaesthetized by being dipped into an alcoholic drink, forced through my left ear lobe by a friend. I removed it once it had started to cause my whole ear to throb.

For the most part, it was a summer of love and leisure, of endless lotus eating mostly spent in the town itself, but also at the famous Campo del Tenis, or nearby Mijas...and even on one occasion each as I remember it, in Marbella, Torremolinos, Puerto Banus. I was often short of money, but I could order as many drinks as I wanted at the Tam Tam; and when I was flat broke I was bought toasted cheese sandwiches and bottles of cold Spanish beer or whatever else I wished for by a very dear friend. One night the charismatic British racing driver James Hunt called to her from out of the darkness of a balmy Andalusian night, before vanishing as suddenly as he'd arrived. Yes, it was that incredible a summer.

I returned to London in September 1978 to take my place at the Silverhill, but by the following summer, I was back in Spain...not Fuengirola though, despite the fact that my friends from the band had wanted me to carry on with them as lead singer throughout '79. I feel bad to this day at having let them down so badly; we were so close as a band. There was something about the Spanish character that resonated with me; I can't say exactly what, but I always got on so well with the Spanish.

In my wisdom I'd chosen instead to go to La Ribera, the little former fishing village in the south eastern province of Murcia.

I felt a deep and overwhelming sense of exhaustion as I stretched out on the wooden balneario overlooking the Mar Menor, but I don't recall being especially disappointed by the knowledge that I wouldn't be returning to the Silverhill for the autumn term of 1979. It may have been just the Costa Calida sun that made me feel so burned out.

Farewell Lauderdale Tower

Just before quitting Fuengirola the previous summer of '78 I'd been approached with an offer of singing in the Canary Islands, but I'd turned it down. Who knows where it might have led; but then had I travelled to the Canaries with the band, I wouldn't have gone to the Silverhill through which so many incredible experiences came. It would take an entire separate volume to list them all.

What I will say is I was involved with an almost unbroken succession of Rock and Pop bands. Through one of them, Rockets, I was offered the position of lead singer for a guitar player of genius who's played with one of the world's leading Rock superstars since 1990. Through another, Narcissus, which I formed with my mates Simon and John, I found only disgrace when our bizarre image resulted in a cacophony of heckling. For the most part, I was the sweetest and most mannerly of guys of guys, but I had a nasty habit of shooting myself in the foot at the worst possible moments, or shooting my mouth off, one of the two. It's as if I was determined to go back to being the dud I'd once been.

My final band was the '50s revivalist act Z Cars, which even won a tiny fan base for itself. I was Carl Cool, lead singer and songwriter with a tattoo painted onto my shoulder; while Robert Fitzroy-Square was the boy next door with the Buddy Holly glasses, who provided most of the comedy, Dave Dean, the Punk kid, and Little Ricky Ticky, the baby of the band at only 18.

There were emotional scenes at my farewell party held in the depths of the Barbican Estate's Lauderdale Tower and many cried openly because I was leaving. During the evening, a close friend Tasmin told me to contact the impresario Harry Creasey, well-known for offering young actors their very first positions within the entertainment industry.

True to form, he gave me my very first paid job in the business a matter of months afterwards. So just before Christmas, I was doubling as Christian the Chorus Boy and Joey the Teddy Bear complete with furry costume in the pantomime Sleeping Beauty that began its run in Ealing in west London, culminating at the Buxton Opera House in Derbyshire. Then early on in the new year, I played Mustardseed in A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Bristol Old Vic.

From the Vic era, I offer the following relic from an unfinished tale which I went on to edit and versify. I rescued it last year from a battered notebook I was in the habit of scribbling in during spare moments offstage while dressed in my costume and covered in blue body make-up and silver glitter. While doing so, some of this glitter was transferred from the pages with which they were stained more than twenty six years ago onto my hands. It was an eerie experience.

Along Whiteladies Road

I remember the grey

Slithers

Of rain,

The jocular driver

As I boarded the bus

At Temple Meads,

And the friendly lady

Who told me

When we had arrived

At the city centre.

I remember

The little pub

On King Street,

With its quiet

Maritime atmosphere

And the first read-through.

I remember tramping

Along Park Street,

Whiteladies Road

And Blackboy Hill,

My arms and hands

Aching from my bags

To the little cottage

Where I had decided to stay

And relax

In beween rehearsals,

Reading, writing,

Listening to music.

I remember my landlady,

Tall, timid and beautiful...