Rescue of a Rock 'n' Roll Child

Sad Loves of a Seafaring Man

In late summer 1973 the minesweeper HMS Thames set out for Bordeaux in Gironde in the south west of France. It was my first voyage as an Ordinary Deckhand with the RNR and I was just seventeen years old.
During the trip I made my best-ever RNR friend in the shape of a fellow OD Colin who called me only a few years ago from his East London home to talk about old memories, including the time we became trapped by a gang of mangy-looking stray dogs late at night in la Rochelle in 1975 while searching for our ship after a wild night spent with locals at a bar, then a night club. Even more recently, another good RNR friend Taffy, who sailed with us to La Rochelle by way of the Ile de Re got in touch with me though the Blogster weblog. He could have knocked me over with a feather. After all the last time I'd seen him was close by to Waterloo Station when I was on my way to the Old Vic as an actor in the summer of 1980. Colin and his fiancee came to see the show, Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream", shortly afterwards, but I can't say how long. However, he did mention having spoken to Taff, who was his best friend. But I'm getting off the subject...
I also became quite friendly with the most unlikely pair of bosom buddies I ever came across in the RNR or anywhere else. One half was Jimmy, a tough-talking good-hearted working class ladies' man of about 23 who was rumoured to be a permanent year-long resident of HMS Thames, the other, an older man, possibly in his mid thirties, but just as much of a hellraiser as Jim even though he boasted the super-posh accent and patrician manner of a City of London stockbroker or merchant banker. Jimmy took me under his wing with a certain intimidating affection: "We'll make a ruffy tuffy sailor of you you yet!" he once told me, even though we both knew that that I'd never be anything other than the most useless sailor in the civilised world.
To make it clear just how much of a lubber I was, there was one occasion below deck during somekind of conference when, after having been asked by an officer what I thought of minesweeping, I replied that it was a gas...another when the ship had been prepared for a major manoeuvre and everyone onboard had retreated to their respective allotted positions, when I was found wandering on deck in a daze only to casually announce that I was taking a stroll. Incidents like these made me an object of good-humoured banter on the part of Jimmy and others for whom I was a sort of latter-day Billy Budd but without the seamanship.
The crew spent its final night together in a night club in the southern city port of Portsmouth - known as Pompey - although it might just as easily have been Plymouth. The main attraction was a limp-wristed drag queen who tried desperately to keep us entertained with cabaret style numbers sung in a comic falsetto, and bawdy jokes told in a deep rich baritone, but the poor man was remorselessly heckled. At one point he turned to me - at least I think it was me...I was wearing glasses at the time and so cowering with shame - and camply trilled something along the lines of: "Ooh...you look pretty, what's your name?". "Skin!" was what some of the sailors bellowed back...this being a nickname I had at the time, perhaps as in "a nice bit of skin" or something...
Some time later, the bearded sailor I'd been sitting next to all night asked me to hold the mike for him while he performed "William Tell" on his facial cheeks. What a star he was...the only trouble being that he had to be half out his mind with booze before he could perform. Not long afterwards he collapsed face down onto the table with an almighty crash from a mixture of drunkenness and exhaustion. I don't think he was the last one to do that either...

Back onshore, I resumed my growing passion for louche and shady music, art and culture. Yet, more and more in '74 I turned away from what I now saw as the old hat tackiness of Glam Rock, convinced that Modernist outrage had nowhere left to go. Instead, I turned my devotion to the more stylish glamour of previous Modernist eras and particularly the twenties and thirties.
At some point I started using hair cream to slick my hair back in the style of F. Scott Fitzgerald, sometimes parting it in the centre just as my idol had done. I started building up a new retro wardrobe, which came to include a Gatsby style tab-collared shirt, often worn with black and white college-style tie; several cravats and neck scarves; a navy blue blazer from Meakers; a fair isle short-sleeved sweater; a pair of grey flannel trousers from Simpsons of Piccadilly, a pair of two-tone brown and white, or "correspondant", shoes; and a belted fawn raincoat straight out of a forties film noir.
As the seventies went on my passion for the decadence of the West and especially the continental Europe of the golden age of Modernism of ca. 1890-1930 grew to obsessive proportions. This was especially true of its leading cities, in terms of their being beacons of revolutionary art, and of style, luxury and dissolution, such as the London of the Yellow Decade, Belle Epoque Paris, Jazz Age New York, and most of all Weimar Republic Berlin.
There were those cutting edge Rock and Pop artists who appeared to share my European love affair, such as Sparks and Manhattan Transfer, and Britain's own favourite lounge lizard Bryan Ferry. Much of the latter's work with his band Roxy Music was haunted by the languid cafe and cabaret music of the continent's immediate past. What's more, some of Roxy's followers sported the kind of nostalgic apparel favoured by Ferry himself, but they were rare creatures in mid-seventies London.
As for me, I wore my bizarre outdated costumes in arrogant defiance of the continuing ubiquity of long hair and flared jeans. In 1975, I even had the gall to go to a concert at west London's Queen's Park football stadium dressed in striped boating blazer and white trousers, only to find myself surrounded by hirsute Rock fans. The headliners were my one-time favourites Yes, whose "Relayer" album I'd bought the year before; but my passion for Prog Rock was a thing of the past. I'd moved on since '71, that is, towards far greater love of darkness and loss of innocence.
But there was nothing remotely dark about the time I fell in love with a Dutch girl Maria while sitting Spanish "O" level in June 1974 in Gower Street, central London. She didn't look Dutch, in fact, with her tanned complexion and long dark brown hair, she was Meditteranean in physical appearance, and even had the name to match.
It was probably Maria who came up to me, because I was so unconfident around girls in those days that I'd never have made the first move. Over the course of the next few days, I fell ever deeper in love, but I didn't have the courage to make my feelings known to her. This was so typical of me, to assume an attitude of diffident indifference when confronted by something or someone I truly desired. So, once we'd completed our final paper, I allowed her to walk away from me forever with a casual "I might see you around", or some other cliche of that kind.
For about a week, I took the train into London and spent the days wandering around the city centre in the truly desperate hope of bumping into her. One time I could've sworn I saw her staring coolly back at me from an underground train, possibly at South Kensington or Notting Hill Gate, just as the doors were closing, but typically I was powerless to act, and simply stood there like a lovesick loon as the train drew away from the station. In time of course, my infatuation faded, but even to this day certain songs will recall for me those few weeks in the summer of '74 that I spent in hopeless pursuit of a woman I didn't even know. They include Sweet Soul standards, "I Just Don't Want to be Lonely" by The Main Ingredient, and "Natural High" by Bloodstone, with its pathetic lines: "Why do I keep my mind on you all the time, and I don't even know you, why do I feel this way, thinking about you every day, and I don't even know you..."
Later on in the summer having recovered from an irrational adoration of a girl I barely knew, I found myself once again in Santiago de La Ribera by the Mar Menor or little sea, this being a large coastal lake of warm saltwater off Murcia's Costa Calida in southeastern Spain, and the summer of '74 was one of the most blissfully happy summers I spent there. Every afternoon, we used to meet on the balnario - or jetty - facing our apartment on the Mar Menor which was more or less deserted after lunch, that's myself and my brother, and Spanish friends both male and female, to listen to music and talk and laugh and swim and generally enjoy being young and carefree in a decade of endless possibilities.
To some youthful Spanish eyes back in '74-'76, I appeared as an almost impossibly exotic figure from what must have seemed to them to be the most radical and daring city in Europe, which of course London was. I played up to my racy image to the hilt, where in truth I was barely less sheltered and innocent than they were. There was a change with Franco's passing, and the birth of the so-called Movida, which could be said to be the Spanish and specifically Madridian equivalent of London's Swinging Sixties revolution.
By my last vacation in La Ribera in the summer of '84, it was I who was in awe of the local youth rather than the other way around. They seemed so cool to me, dancing their strange jerky chicken wing dance to the latest New Pop hits from Britain. By then of course most of my old friends had vanished into their young adult lives, and my time as Charly the English prince of Santiago de la Ribera had long passed. I was yesterday's man, and I was sad about it, but I couldn't expect to be chased forever. Some people have to actually grow up.

I returned to London in late summer '74 with a deep tan and hair bleached bright yellow by the sun, and hanging long over my ears and down over my forehead.
Only days afterwards I found myself on HMS President, moored then as today on the Embankment near Temple station. This involved my passing through Waterloo mainline station, which wasn't tourist-friendly as it is today, with its cafes and baguette bars, but a dingy intimidating place complete with pub and old-style barber. There I was approached by a hoary old Scotsman, a former sailor who kept going on about how good looking I was. He even told me that he loved me; but he was harmless...just a sweet lonely old guy who wanted someone to talk to for a few minutes, which I was happy to do and then move on. It was all very innocent. I even went so far as to agree to a meeting with him the same time the following week, not that I had any intention of keeping it.
Besides, it wasn't long before HMS Thames was on its way to Hamburg, second largest city of Germany and its principle port. Once we'd arrived, one of the Chiefs - as in Chief Petty Officer - warned me not to wander alone in a city he called the armpit of the world, or rather something ruder. I mean me personally, what with the way I looked and all. So I joined up with a group of about three or four, and on our first night ashore we set off on a voyage into parts of the city such as the red light district St. Pauli with its infamous Reeperbahn, the so-called "sinful mile" which is lined with restaurants, discos and dives, as well as strip clubs, sex shops, bordellos and so on.
It was all so different to the quiet outer suburbs where an organised coach trip carried us possibly a day later. We ended up in a park where I had my picture taken on a bridge by a reporter for the Surrey Comet; then a group of breathless giggling schoolgirls asked me to be in some photos with them. I of course said yes, ever happy to oblige, and it was a bit of an ego boost for me, as if I needed one.
On the way back to the ship, one of the sailors pointed out that I'd been a hit with the Hamburg teenyboppers, while another snapped back that it was only because I was blond and blue-eyed, Teutonic-looking in other words. Whatever the truth, there was something touching about these sweet suburban girls and their simple unaffected joy of life, especially in the light of what girls barely older than they were subjecting themselves to in the sad lost northern Babylon of only a matter of miles away.

The Trumph of Decadence

In 1975 aged nineteen I became a student at Brooklands Technical College which lay then as now on the fringes of Weybridge, an affluent outer suburb of south west London. In semi-pastoral Brooklands as in my beloved Santiago de la Ribera, I learned to be a social being after years of near-seclusion, first at Pangbourne and then as a home student. So, attention went on to be a potent narcotic for me in the mid 1970s, but despite constant displays of flamboyant self-confidence, those who tried to get to know to know me on an intimate level found themselves confronted with a desperately diffident and inhibited individual.
The regular Brooklands Disco was a special event for me. On one occasion early on in a Disco night I got up in front of what seemed like the whole college and delivered a solo dance performance to a fiery Glam tune by one of my great favourites back then Bebop Deluxe possibly with white silk scarf flailing in the air to frenzied cheers and applause. I just blew everyone away.
On another, a trio of thugs who I suspect may have gatecrashed the Disco only to see in me the worst possible example of the feckless wastrel student strutting and posturing in unmanly white took me aside once the music had stopped clearly intent on some form of demented ultra-violence; but I stood my ground, insisting that despite what they may have thought I was just as straight as they were. Apparently convinced of this, after a few threatening words they vanished into the crowd, my cherubic face intact.
1975 again...and my music, swimming and Martial Arts sessions were no more, but the private lessons continued, mainly with a quiet slim young man with darkish curly hair called Michael. He lived alone but for a family of black cats in longtime Rock star haven Richmond-on-Thames, and was a musician as well as an academic who went on to play drums for a fairly successful Contemporary Folk outfit.
Michael exerted a strong influence on me in terms of my growing passion for European literature and Modernist culture. He had a special feel for French Symbolist poetry, but it was the less known literature of Spain that we studied together, from the anonymous picaresque novel "Lazarillo de Tormes" (1554) onwards, and embracing Quevedo, Galdos, Machado, Lorca, and others. He was also an early encourager of my writing, a lifelong passion that was ultimately to degenerate into a chronic case of cacoethes scribendi, or the irresistible compulsion to writecreatively. The result being that I was incapable of finishing a single cohesive piece of writing until well into the eighties when I managed to complete a short story and a novel both of which have since been destroyed but for a few fragments.
It was through Michael that I came under the spell of the Berlin of the Weimar Republic of 1919 to 1933. After I'd expressed interest in a copy of one of Christopher Isherwood's Berlin novels "Mr Norris Changes Trains", placed prominently in front of me on Michael's writing desk, he excitedy informed me that "Norris" had inspired the 1972 movie version of Kander and Ebb's musical "Cabaret" directed by Bob Fosse, itself somewhat based on the John Van Druten play, "I am a Camera". In fact, while a work of art in its own right written for the screen by Jay Allen, "Cabaret" had been largely informed by Isherwood's only other Berlin story, "Goodbye to Berlin", penned in 1939 but referring to incidents that took place between six to eight years earlier. Seeing "Cabaret" later on that year was a life-transforming experience for me, one of only a handful brought about by a film.
Weimar Republic Berlin has been likened by some cultural critics to the contemporary West, and it could be said that much of what's happened to the West since the end of the second world war was to some degree foreshadowed by the still horrifying decadence of post-war Berlin. Needless to say the Weimar era didn't spring out of nowhere. More than any other nation in the late 18th and early 19th Century Germany, birthplace of Luther and the Reformation, had played host to Higher Criticism, a school of Biblical criticism which flagrantly attacked the authenticity of the Scriptures. Moreover, late 19th century Europe had witnessed a significant occult revival in Britain, in France, but most especially perhaps in Germany. All this contributed to the terribly debilitated condition of Christianity in Germany in the years leading up to and includingthe implementation of the Third Reich in 1933. Ruined by remorseless attacks on the fundamentals of the faith, the German Church of the Weimar and Hitlerian eras was ripe for deception to the point of putrefaction.
By the onset of the '20s, crushed by war debt and blighted by urban violence between mutually hostile extreme right and left wing factions, Germany stood on the precipice of disaster. However, some kind of reprieve came with an increase of affluence in 1923, at which point Berlin's Golden Age began, and she became the undisputed world epicentre of artistic and intellectual foment. Under her auspices, great artistic freedom thrived in the shape of, among other phenomena, the painters of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement such as Beckmann, Dix and Grosz, Berg's ground-breaking opera "Wozzek", as well as the staccato cabaret-style music of Kurt Weill, Fritz Lang's dystopian "Metropolis", the scandalous dancing of Cabaret Queen Anita Berber and so on.
But Weimar Berlin remains best known for its notorious sexual liberalism which still has the power to shock as seen in pictorial and photographic depictions of the cabarets and night clubs in which license and intoxication flourished unabated. Given that several other Western cities in the twenties were hardly less hysterically dissolute than Berlin, it's little wonder that this key Modernist decade has been described by some critics as the beginning of the end of Western civilisation. In its wake came the Second World War, the collapse of the greatest empire in history, and the rise of the Rock'n'Roll youth and drug culture, which could be said to be the very triumph of Western decadence.

The Tears of a Woman

I made no less than three sea voyages in 1975, two as a civilian and one with the RNR, as well as spending a week with them docked at the Pool of London.
The first of these was destined for Amsterdam via Edinburgh and northern France on the three-masted topsail schooner TS Sir Winston Churchill of the Sail Training Association, now known as the Tall Ships Trust. Based in Portsmouth and Liverpool, the TST was founded in 1956 for the character development of young people aged 16 to 25 through the crewing of traditional tall ships, originally Churchill and the SS Malcolm Miller.
Among my shipmates were, apart from my 17 year old brother, several young men from Scotland and the north of England, some recent recruits to the RN, and a handful of older "Mates" who'd been given authority over the rank and file of we deck hands. In overall authority was the elegant, distinguished Ship's Captain, who also happened to be an alumnus of my own alma mater of Pangbourne.
It was an all-male crew, and I was quite well-liked at first although my popularity cooled in time. I kept a few pals though. One guy in particular stayed a good friend after we'd tried to impress a couple of girls together during a brief stay in France; St Malo, I think it was. He was a small baby-faced southerner with long dark hair worn shoulder length like the young Jack Wilde. I'd boldly put my arm around the one I fancied, Martine, and she'd got a little upset with me. Then, wandering around a little later in a mournful daze and desperate for Martine's address, 'Jack' gave it to me after she'd scrawled it on a piece of paper either for him or one of the other lads. I was drunk with relief for a while, just walking on air, because there was the danger of me coming down with a serious case of lovesickness had she become lost to me forever. I got on OK with a few of the others, and some were merely indifferent, but 'Jack' was Churchill's true prince.
Life on the Churchill was no luxury cruise. There were storms which saw seamen sprawled all over the deck being violently sick attached to the ship only by safety belts. On more than one occasion, we were turfed out of our hammocks in the middle of the night to help trim the sails...something I never took any part in, which can hardly have helped my reputation. I did climb the rigging once though, and that was just before we came into the port of Amsterdam, with dozens of us manning the yard arms, again attached only by safety belts.
The Dutch capital was marked by the same kind of open sexual license I'd witnessed only the year before in Hamburg, although without the same sinister vibrancy. I can remember a kind of perfunctory weariness about the decadence of Amsterdam, although that was only my impression as a 19 year old greenhorn. Today as then I'm sure the sad De Wallen red-light district is filled to the brim with hundreds of little illuminated one-room apartments, each with a singlewoman sitting in clear view of onlookers plying her lonely trade.
As for Edinburgh, just before setting foot in the city for the first time, one of the lads, dressed to the nines himself in the trendiest seventies gear, all flared slacks and stack-heeled shoes no doubt, warned me not to go strutting about Edinburgh town centre in a flashy boating blazer. I completely ignored his advice of course, so, waltzing some time later into an inner city pub in broad daylight wearing said blazer and blue jeans tucked into long white socks, a grinning hard man with long reddish curly hair asked me if I was from Oxford. Perhaps he was aware of the Oxonian reputation for producing flaming aesthetes, but I doubt it. I think he just took one look at my jacket and thought: "Who's thus flash ponce askin' tae ge' hus heed kecked in?", or worse. It may have been touch and go for a while as to whether he was going to inflict some serious damage on my angelic English face, but in the end he left me be. He may even have liked me. The unlikeliest people did in those days.

Within a few weeks of returning to London by train from Edinburgh, my brother and I were setting off again, this time towards the Baltic coast of Denmark by way of Germany's famous Kiel Canal as part of what is known as the Ocean Youth Club. While we were once more supervised by "Mates" under the command of a Ship's Captain, who was a lovable bearded larger than life true character with a weakness for freaking out to John Kongos' "He's Gonna Step on You Again", the OYC was more like a cruise than a trial by water, utilising modern yachts rather than traditional tall ships.
My brother and I were quick to recruit a nice young guy from Wotton-under-the Edge called Simon as our chief crony who as it turned out we'd actually first met while passing through Calpe, Spain with our parents about ten years previously. Soon after setting foot on Danish soil we three got talking to a couple of girls who, as might be expected, had natural golden blonde hair. Our efforts at romance were wholly innocuous, despite the reputation Scandinavia had for progressive sexual attitudes in the '60s and '70s.
A less pleasant romantic episode took place towards the end of the trip, which saw me in pursuit of a pretty German girl, Bettina. I was crazy for her, and she made it pretty clear she liked me too, and yet I'd senselessly dumped her for the sake of a night of drunken idiocy with my brother and Simon, perhaps expecting her to run after me or something. Suddenly, overtaken by sickly pangs of remorse, I set out to find her, and at some point during my search, while walking along some kind of wooden pontoon I lost my footing and fell fully clothed into the waters of what must have been Kiel Canal. I wrote to Bettina, but she never wrote back, and I can't say I blame her. To this day I can't understand what possessed me to ignore her so callously, just in order to tie one on with the boys which I could've done any night of the week. Self-sabotage was fast becoming a speciality of mine.
A little later on in the summer I sailed with the RNR to La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast of France. Then shortly after that I was with the RNR again, this time in the Pool of London, subject of a famous British crime film directed by Basil Dearden in 1951 and referring to that stretch of the Thames lying between London Bridge and Rotherhithe.
In order to reach my ship, I had to board some kind of launch with a group of other seamen, one of whom, a strikingly good-looking blond seaman of about 30 I knew only by sight, had taken unofficial charge. Once we were all safely aboard, it was the turn of our self-appointed leader to join us, but as he stepped off the launch, he somehow lost his footing and slipped into the Thames beneath him. Within a matter of minutes his heavy clothing and boots, helped by a vicious current, had dragged him beneath the river's surface and he was lost.
Soon after returning to London, I told my mother what'd happened, and as she wept the tears of one who instinctively knew what those who loved this poor man must have been feeling at the time, the true appalling tragedy of the incident hit home and I ran into the bathroom and sobbed my heart out myself. Thinking back on it, a line from that beautiful song "How Men Are" by Scottish singer-songwriter Roddy Frame comes to mind: "Why should it take the tears of a woman to see how men are?"

Still in '75 I attempted to pass what is known as the AIB or Admiralty Interview Board with a view to qualifying as a Supply and Secretariat officer in the Royal Navy. This involved my taking the train down to HMS Sultan, the Royal Navy's specialist training centre in Gosport, Hampshire, where I spent three days attending various examinations and interviews intended to assess my potential as a future naval officer.
On one occasion early on in the long weekend just before one assignment or another, I was putting the final touches to my toilette in front of a handy mirror when one of the guys I was sharing a dorm with felt it necessary to remind me that I wasn't at a fashion show. He wasn't going to be coming along with me that night to the disco, or any night for that matter, cheeky beggar. But he was right.
Two guys eventually did agree to keep me company on one of the nights we spent at Sultan, but they didn't really seem all that keen. As things turned out they left me alone at a Gosport disco, dancing with a pretty girl with short blond curly hair and the unusual name of Shiralee, which just happens to be Indigenous Australian for "burden" or "duty".
Later in the night I escorted Shiralee along a busy main road leading back to Sultan, as she must have lived nearby. Cars sounded their horns as I kissed her good night. What a lad I was, eh. Then I discovered that Sultan's main entrance had been locked and was now being manned by an armed guard. If the young man nervously trying to reach someone in authority within the training centre on a walkie talkie was wondering exactly what kind of person returns to base dressed to the nines after a night's disco dancing when he was supposed to be in the midst of three days of gruelling tests and interviews that were vital to his future career, then he gave no indication of it. He did however eventually make contact with someone in authority, and I can remember passing through an officer's mess soon afterwards and briefly exchanging pleasantries with its airily affable occupants. English gentlemen of the old school, they of course kept their actual opinions of me to themselves.
It may just be me, but I can't help thinking that had I returned to Sultan that night before being locked out, I might have been in with a better chance of passing the AIB, that is, as opposed to failing it, which I perhaps rather predictably did. Ay, every inch the superstar.
One of the last notable incidents of the year took place in December, when dressed in all-white with a fawn raincoat I took my friend Brenda, one of the London Division Wrens but originally from the north of England, to a dinner dance at London's Walford Hilton Hotel. We were joined there by a couple of Brenda's close friends, a fair, bearded man in a suit, and his dark, extrovert wife. The husband was one of those deeply gentle men I came across from time to time in the 1970s. They weren't all bearded; but I can think of some who were, such as the madcap ship's captain described above. What united them was that they behaved with special protectiveness and affection towards me, and I've never forgotten them for it.
Early on in the evening, Brenda became incensed when a group of older seamen started teasing me from their table, which didn't bother me at all because I knew these guys, and they meant no harm. Military life after all, is fuelled by this kind of raillerie. But Brenda insisted that their attitude stemmed from the fact that I was "better than what they are", as she put it, possibly in imitation of their strong cockney accents. She'd been taken in by my appearance, which made me more dangerous by far than they, not just to others, but to myself. With them, what you saw is what you got, and if it wasn't always pretty, then at least it was honest.

Those Landmark Years

For two years I'd slavishly followed those artists who'd either predated Modernism or been part of its banquet years and beyond but in '76 a new decade, that of Brando, Monroe, Presley, Dean, and the first stirrings of the Rock-youth revolution, started to influence me way I dressed and acted, so for much of the year I dressed down in a workmanlike uniform of red windcheater, white tee-shirt and cuffed jeans worn as worn by Dean in Nicholas Ray's "Rebel Without a Cause".
Dean'd died a week to the day before I was born in late 1955 - seen by many as the Year Zero of the Rock'n' Roll era - and the 20th anniversary of his death influenced rising Pop stars such as John Miles and Slik's Midge Ure to adopt what could be called the '50s rebel look, in spite of the fact that Punk was poised to destroy the final vestiges of Glam escapism forever. Not that this actually happened of course, as Glam returned stronger than ever in the '80s, especially in America.
But there were still times I reverted to the old romantic escapist image...the one I'd adopted in defiance of what I saw as the leaden drabness of the post-hippie age, while immersing myself in an alternative world fashioned entirely out of the past and specifically the golden age of Modernism of ca. 1830-1930, and effectively discovering Modernist giants as Baudelaire, Wilde, Gide, Cocteau (as well as many lesser poets, dandies and decadents from the same period) for the first time.
One of these occasions came during the dying days of the long hot summer of '76, when I wore top hat and tails and my fingernails painted bright red like some kind of hellish vision from Weimar Berlin to a party hosted by a friend from Brooklands. It was mid-September, and I know that to be a fact because I was supposed to have been at sea at the time on the minesweeper HMS Fittleton. HMS Fittleton had been accepted into the RN in January 1955, although she wasn't actually named Fittleton (after the Wiltshire village) until almost exactly 21 years later.
I think it was only a couple of days afterwards that Fittleton capsized and sank to the bottom of the North Sea following a tragic accident involving another larger ship, the frigate HMS Mermaid. It resulted in the loss of twelve men most of whom I knew personally, given that only weeks earlier I'd spent a few dayson Fittleton with more or less exactly the same crew.
She'd set sail from Shoreham in Sussex on the 11th of September 1976 with the intention of reaching the port of Hamburg on the 21st of that month for a three day Official Visit, but never arrived. On the 20th she took part in the NATO exercise "Teamwork" 80 miles off the Dutch coast in the North Sea, after which she was ordered to undergo a Replenishment at Sea with the 2500 ton frigate HMS Mermaid, and it was during this exercise that the bow waves of the frigate inter-reacted with those of the sweeper to cause the two to collide.
For some reason I'd earlier decided to opt out of the trip by pleading sickness. It was a decision that came to haunt me...despite the fact that had I taken part in the RAS manoeuvre I'd almost certainly have been assigned what was known as Tiller Flat duty, as had been the case on many previous occasions during exercises of this kind. This would have put me below deck, making escape difficult although not impossible. In other words,I may or may not have survived the accident.
Of the twelve who didn't survive I knew three quite well, and they were all men of remarkable generosity of spirit and sweetness of disposition, what I'd call natural gentlemen, and it broke my heart to think of what happened to them. I so wanted to comfort my shipmates for their loss, to bond with them and be part of what they were going through. I wanted to have survived like them. I went over it all again and again in my mind, until I drove myself almost insane with regret and grief. Once more I'd taken the easy way out, but this time it wouldn't be so easy for me to forget or explain away.

Looking myopically back, the landmark year of 1977 was in many ways a far darker one than those coming just before it. It was after all marked by the violent irruption into the British musical and cultural mainstream of Punk Rock, which could be said to have fatally disabled Rock's uneven progress as an art form with its savage DIY ethic and brutally rudimentary three-chord music. Fused with an extreme and often horrifying sartorial eccentricity, these elements produced something utterly unique even by the outlandish standards of the time. From its London axis, and yet with roots in the US, it spread like a raging plague throughout the year even infecting the most genteel suburbs.
For this not so genteel suburbanite '77 was a year of non-stop partying as one after the other of my old Pangbourne pals celebrated their 21st in houses and apartments in various corners of trendy west and central London. Of all of them I was perhaps closest with Craig, a future plutocrat of devastating style and charisma who yet still hardly more worldly-wise than me. One of his best friends was a blindingly cool young fashion designer from the north of England who forged cutting edge images for some of the most powerful trendsetters in Rock music and we went with him a couple of times to his favourite hang-out of Maunkberrys in Jermyn Street. Apart from the Sombrero in Kensington High Street, it was the classiest club I'd ever seen.
Soon after the start of the year, Craig'd traded in his tired old velvet jacket and flares combo for tight drainpipe jeans and black cuban heeled winklepickers. I followed suit with a pair of cream-coloured brogues...black slip-ons with gold sidebuckles...sham crocodile skin shoes with squared off toes...and a pair of black Chelsea boots, all perilously pointed. By about the spring of '78 I'd junked the lot for the sake of white shoes with black laces, something I'd seen on a member of London Punk band 999.
Being the naif I was, I thought the style that dominated London's clubland was somehow related to Punk, but I was way off the mark. Like Punk it was the antithesis of the hippie-student look that was still widespread throughout the UK, but deployed for posing and dancing to the sweetest Soul music rather than as an act of violent social dissent. It was the property of the Soul Boys...flash white working class kids with a love of black dance music much like the Mods and Skins before them, although I was not to discover this until later in the year when I was at Merchant Navy College in Kent. It was through one of the college guys in fact that I found out about the Global Village night club under the Arches near Charing Cross that was a magnet for Soul Boys throughout '77, as well as a handful of Punks. Its key elements were the wedge haircut, which could be worn with blond, red or even green streaks, brightly coloured peg-top trousers or straight leg jeans, and the obligatorywinklepickers...or for a time, beach sandals.
The wedge was taken up at some point in the late 1970s by a faction of Liverpool football fans known as Casuals who'd developed a taste for European designer sportswear while travelling on the continent for away matches. A passion for designer sportswear exists to this day among British working class youth, being visible in every high street and shopping centre in the land, although the Casual subculture has long been extinct.
For most of '77, I looked more like a Soul Boy than a Punk, not that I knew the difference, even though while strolling along the Kings Road in what I think may've been January, I was assaulted for the first time by the monstrous varieties of dress being adopted by Punks about that time, and it'd only be a matter of time before I too hoped to astound others the way they'd done me. Sure enough, by the end of the year, I'd become a full-time Punk and stayed that way until the Mod Revival started drawing me away around the summer of '79. But that's another story.

The Restless and the Riotous

By the summer I was working as a sailing instructor in Palamos on Spain's Costa Brava. For a time I was joined by my dad and my cousin Rod and his girl friend Lucy, and my brother stopped by for a few weeks, but mostly I was alone. Rod and his sister Kris, together with my uncle and aunt Peter and Marge, had lived more or less opposite us in Bedford Park in the sixties, and we'd holidayed together at my grandmothers' house near Montroig for many years. A spellbinding guitarist while still in his teens as part of '70s Prog collective Rococo, Rod now plays for Zero Point Force.
After a few months I lost my job, but stayed on in Palamos for several months afterwards, parading around town by day, while spending most evenings at the Disco where my favourite was Donna Summer and where each lost or shattered affair left me feeling empty and disconsolate. One of these saw me trying to track a girl down all the way to the campsite I knew she was staying at, but having all but deliberately alienated her one horrible night at the disco, she was nowhere to be found.
Perhaps this obsession with what lay just beyond my grasp bore some relation to the ferocious thirst for fame that'd afflicted me even since as far back as I can remember. I mean...I was hardly suited for it. Granted, I had the pretty boy looks, but very few actors, or even musicians, become truly successful on the strength of looks alone, and this was especially true of the seventies, an age without MP3s or MySpace or endless TV talent showcases. I'd not yet appeared in a single play, except for a handful at Pangbourne.
My roles there included two elderly women, and one of these cross-dressing bit parts had me standing onstage for a few brief minutes without uttering a single word and then spending the rest of the play - Max Frisch's "The Fire Raisers"- offstage. The other was as a maid in a one-act play by George Bernard Shaw called "Passion, Poison and Petrifaction". Clomping around in a dress with studded military boots speaking in a hysterical high- pitched voice, I can remember bringing the house down with that one. I also played a society beauty engaged in some kind of illicit relationship with my mate Simon, but the name of the play escapes me. My only male role was in "The Rats", a little known Agatha Christie one-acter, and my perfomance as a camp psychopath called Alex showed real promise if the praise of the college nurse was anything to go by. But when all's said and done, I was hardly a National Youth Theatre wunderkind.
In terms of my other "talents", I'd written a few simple songs on the guitar, but I still only knew a few chords. I wasn't a natural born genius like my cousin Rod. Although to be fair, I did go on to become a pretty good songwriter with my own playing style. My singing voice was good though, and already quite versatile. As a would-be writer, I'd filled countless pages with verbose scribblings, but there was nothing tangible to show for it all. It could hardly be said then that my future positively glittered before me.

My final voyage with the RNR came towards the end of the summer. My best RNR pal Colin was sadly not onboard, but I had other mates to raise Hell with such as Adam, a tall red-head of about 26 who looked a little like the actor Edward Fox with a trace perhaps of Damian Lewis, or at least that's how I see him in hindsight.
Like me Adam loved music and fashion and clubbing - I think he was a regular at Pantiles in Bagshot - and we hit it off from our very first meeting back at President. He later confided in me about his early life which'd been marked by one tragedy after the other, and his quiet and courteous manner masked a troubled inner life which he didn't like to flaunt any more than he did an ability to look after himself in any situation no matter how violent. I can remember one night in a south coast bar when for some reason a drunken sailor took a dislike to me and obviously wanted to smash my face in, and Adam stepped in to save me from what might've been a vicious beating. This was typical of him, and you overestimated his poshness at your peril.
I can imagine though that there were those who wondered how he ended up serving as a rating, as they would've done me. 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 Belgium in that year of my final spell as a military man. There was one incident when some of these hard young seamen were gathering in an Ostend street for a scrap with some locals who'd offended them in some way. Adam and I made it clear we'd no intention of joining in, and one of their number, a waiflike young sailor of about 16 or 17, previously something of a pal of ours, turned to us with a look of utter confusion on his beardless face and said: "What's wrong with youse guys?", before joining his rampaging mates.
Adam just didn't see the point of fighting for the sake of it but he was no coward as I've already made quite clear. This secret inner strength of his would eventually see him being commissioned as an officer in the Royal Navy, which'd been his destiny all along. But not mine. My time with the London Division, RNR came to an end in late 1977 with a surprisingly positive character report, which I was very grateful for. The RNR did all right by me and I honour them for it, and if military life had never been for me, it's a part of who I am whether I like it or not. My life story would be all the poorer without it.

Even later in the summer I joined the former Merchant Navy College in Greenhithe, Kent, which'd merged with the Thames Nautical Training College HMS Worcester nine years earlier, as a trainee Radio Officer.
I formed several close friendships there; but closest of all was with Jasbir, or Jesse, a lovable hard nut of about 18 with a thick London accent who'd been born into nearby Gravesend's large Asian community. Tough as he was he was loyal and kind-hearted towards those he liked and trusted, and for a time we were pretty well inseparable. I used to endlessly nag about his attitude, not that there was anything wrong with it...he was one of the kindest guys I've ever known...but he had a habit of talking tough which intimidated some people, including me at times. As things turned out, I was the one who quit college first, even if he did follow me soon afterwards, which caused Jesse to wonder why I'd taken what seemed to him like the moral high ground in the first place. I couldn't answer.
It was through Jesse I think that I started going to discos at Gravesend's Woodville Hall, subject of the versified piece below, which was based on an unfinished short story written in '78 or '79. Pretty well every week for a while, a gang of us from the college would head out to the Woodville Hall, where we were treated like visiting royalty. Mainly white and Asian, the kids of Woodville Hall would dress themselves up in outlandish outfits which stood out in striking contrast to the industrial bleakness of their surroundings.
English suburban life in those days didn't include mobile phones or DVD players, personal computers or the world wide web, so was a fertile breeding ground for wild and eccentric youth cults such as Punk, New Romanticism, Goth et al. These last two were still in the future, but their seeds had been sown during the heydey of Punk, whose influence pervaded the Hall together with the Soul Boy look which was similar, although a lot less threatening. And these Soul Boys knew how to dance like you wouldn't believe...anybody'd think they were students of Jazz ballet or something, but they were just ordinary working class kids, who became stars once they took to the dance floor.

Woodville Hall Soul Boys

Soon after I'd paid
My sixty
0r seventy pence,
I found myself
In what I thought
Was a minitiure London.
I saw girls
In chandelier earrings,
In stilleto heels,
Wearing evening
Dresses,
Which contrasted with
The bizarre
Hair colours
They favoured:
Jet black
0r bleach blonde,
With flashes of
Red, Purple
0r green.
Some wore large
Bow ties,
Others unceremoniously
Hanged
Their school ties
Round their
Necks.
Eye make-up
Was exaggerated.
The boys all had
Short hair,
Wore mohair sweaters,
Thin ties,
Baggy,
Peg-top trousers
And winklepicker shoes.
A band playing
Raw street rock
At a frantic speed
Came to a sudden,
Violent climax...
Melodic, rythmic,
Highly danceable
Soul music
Was now beginning
To fill the hall,
With another group
0f short-haired youths...
Smoother, more elegant,
Less menacing
Than the previous ones.
These well-dressed
Street boys
Wore well-pressed pegs
0f red or blue...
They pirhouetted
And posed...
Pirhouetted and posed.

Farewell Gilded Youth

Soon after returning from the Merchant Navy College in December '77, I auditioned for a place on the three year drama course at the Guildhall 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, Guildhall accepted me for the course beginning in autumn 1978. I was exhilerated; but that didn't stop me sinking further into the nihilistic Punk lifestyle. Having been blown away 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 spiked in classic Punk style, 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've 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 the spikes. By the spring of 1978, I'd shorn it all off and looked like a skinhead.
It was genuinely dangerous being a Punk in the late '70s, 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.
Britain in those days was a country still dominated to some degree by pre-war moral values, which were Victorian in essence, and a cultural war was being fought for the soul of the nation. It could be said therefore that Punks were the avant garde of the new Britain in a way that would be impossible today. This explains the incredible hostility Punks attracted from some members of the general public.
Close by to where I shared a house with my parents in the furthermost reaches of south west London where suburbia meets country 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 a Walton 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 endless rows of council houses. I was often there on a Sunday in the late 70s, usually with my brother and friends, but sometimes alone.
On one occasion that I remember, the Soul gave way to Punk which saw the tiny dance space being invaded by deranged pogo-dancers. On another, a Ted revivalist, a follower of classic Rock'n'Roll who favoured flashy fifties-style clothing, tried to start some trouble with me in the toilet. At this point, another Ted who'd befriended me about a year previously when I looked like an extra from "American Graffiti" or some similar '50s movie - I think his name was Steve - 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 thatwas 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, Jesse and I went to a party in London's swanky West End. It was one of the last, perhaps even the very last, in a long series of celebrations I'd gone to throughout '77 mainly as a result of friends from Pangbourne reaching the landmark age of 21. It was also one of the last times I ever saw Jesse. We stayed in touch until about 1983, meeting only once, before eventually losing contact altogether. It was my fault; Jesse did all he could to keep the friendship alive.
Before arriving, Jesse and I met up as arranged with budding oil magnate Craig, an especially close friend from my days as Cadet C.R. Halling 173. Introductions over, Jesse saw fit to impress Craig and I with a terrifying solo display of his lethal street fighting skills. "I'm suitably impressed", said Craig, and he looked it, and Craig was no wimp despite his upper class accent. An unlikely trio, we got on like a house on fire that insane night which at one point saw pouring a full glass of beer over my head.
What the beautiful dancer I'd spent most of the evening with thought of a nice guy like me doing a thing like that she didn't say. In the late '70s, I met so many people who might have done anything for me, and yet my one true passion appeared to be the creation of endless drunken scenes, and a party wasn't a party for me in those days unless I'd caused one, after which I simply moved on. Well, I've got plenty of time to myself to reflect on it all now..and the sheer waste of youth, of life, of love, life sometimes makes me weep.

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 put me up in an apartment, which was decent of him, 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 an American friend I made in town in her own apartment.
I became pretty well known locally as Coco, one of only two Punks in Fuengirola, and front man for a Hard Rock band playing nightly at the city's Tam Tam nightclub...with a Punk Rock frontman! How wierd that must've seemed. It was my first year as a full-time Punk in fact, and among the clothes I favoured 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, flourescent 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. But I removed it once it'd started to cause my whole lug to throb.
I was always short of money, but I could order what 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 someone who's still one of my favourite people ever. We went clubbing a lot, and it was such a thrill to sit there with her when the evening was still young. We spent time at Lew Hoad's Campo de Tenis, at Mijas, Marbella, Torremolinos...one night the legend that was 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. It was that magical a summer. But I had to return to London to take my place at the Guildhall once it was over. After all, I was going to be a star wasn't I.
A year later I was back...but not in Fuengirola, although my close friends from the band had wanted me to return as front man, no...I'd chosen to go with my parents to La Ribera instead. But it'd been three years since I was there for any length of time, and everything had changed beyond all recognition. I felt a deep and overwhelming sense of exhaustion during my first few days in the town, but I don't recall being especially disappointed by the fact that only recently I'd been told by the Guildhall authorities that they thought it'd be best if I left...or rather strike out on my own in the acting world. I was resigned to it, even though my dream of being a gilded youth at the Guildhall had barely lasted a year. It must have been the Costa Calida sun that made me feel so burned out.
Just before quitting Fuengirola the previous summer of '78 I'd been approached with an offer of singing in the Canary Islands, which I turned down for the sake of the Guildhall. Who knows where it might have led, but then it would have been a shame to have missed out on the Guildhall. So many incredible experiences came out of my year at that reverenced place of learning and culture that it'd take an entire separate volume to list them all. So I won't.

What I will say is that at the Guildhall I was involved with a string of Rock and Pop bands, and that with one after the other of these I performed at the occasional Folk Night as it was called whereby a crowd of students gathered after classes to perform songs or whatever they chose at the nearby Lauderdale Tower.
Through one of them, Rockets, I was talent-scouted as lead singer for a guitarist of genius who was hoping to form a band at the Guildhall, and clearly thought I'd cut it as a front man, but for some reason, the band was never formed. He went on to play and write for one of the world's leading Rock superstars, something he's done for nearly twenty years now.
At one point he'd briefly joined a Guildhall-based Jazz-Funk band with another friend of mine Mike, which was destined to become one of the most successful acts of the eighties, chalking up one hit after the other in a Britain in which Jazzy dance music was favoured by flash boys in white socks and tasselled loafers. Mike'd even invited me to an early rehearsal, and my mother made a note of this in green ink after speaking to him about it on the phone. Perhaps they could've done with a singer at that point.
Through another of my groups, Narcissus, I found only disgrace. It was the second version of the band, and I'd formed it with Mike, the drummer from Rockets, and another close friend Robin, but our one and only gig was a disaster. I slapped on the make-up, and Robin and Mike had followed suit, but being relatively untainted by personal vanity, the results were unsettling. Sweet-natured Robin painted his Botticellian features like an ancient pagan warrior, while gentle giant Mike saw fit to smother his with military-style camouflage paint. Understandably, our set was accompanied by a riot of good-natured heckling. But I finally lost my rag and ended up throwing a plectrum into the audience with a sarcastic "Here's to all my loving fans!", or something equally pathetic.
I can't help thinking that this childish outburst did no end of harm to my reputation, because the chutzpah of the natural leader who demands and gets attention and respect through the sheer force of his personality was never among my gifts. Rather I was blessed with the seductive charm of the social climber for whom alpha status comes through the unceasing exercise of exquisite manners. In this respect I was perhaps a little like Julien Sorel, anti-hero of Stendhal's "The Scarlet and the Black" who despite humble origins, succeeds in ascending to the very top of the social ladder only to allow a single act of madness to destroy his life.
My final band was the '50s revivalist act Z Cars, which even won a tiny fanbase for itself. I was Carl Cool, lead singer and songwriter with a tattoo painted onto my shoulder. My close friend Rob was Robert Fitzroy-Square, the boy next door with the Buddy Holly glasses, who provided most of the comedy. Punky Dave was Dave Dean the hard man of the band. Richard was Little Ricky Ticky, the baby at only 18 who could've been a heart throb had things worked out for us. But they didn't. First Dave left, and after we'd replaced him with Ian, we tried to deviate from our usual three-chord doo-wop or Rock with a tightly arranged version of Arthur Crudup's "That's All Right Mama" but we weren't up to it musically and the band collapsed soon afterwards.
Ian, Rob and I were also involved in the production of a musical comedy based on the Scottish play, "Mac and Beth", which survived my time at Guildhall, if only for a single performance. It was rewritten several times. I wrote a long version myself about ten years ago, only to come to the conclusion that it was too dark and violent before trashing all but a few pages of it. Somewhere, however, there's a VHS copy of one of a handful of Guildhall performances of the play.
There were emotional scenes at my farewell party held in the depths of the Barbican Estate's Lauderdale Tower and some cried openly because I was leaving. During the evening, my dear friend Gill - who'd played Beth to my Mack in the previously mentioned "Mac and Beth" - told me to contact a near-legendary London-based impresario and agent well-known for offering young actors their very first positions within the entertainment industry. Her own brother, who'd recently starred in a TV comedy series had received his first break through this flamboyant and warm-hearted man. 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, theatre director Richard Cottrell offered me the part of Mustardseed in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at the Bristol Old Vic. Maybe leaving the Guildhall when I did had been the right thing to do after all. But oh the indescribable bliss of passing that summer's audition...

1978? 1979

Fri, Nov 21st - 1:59PM

Fri, Nov 21st - 1:55PM

Fri, Nov 21st - 1:00PM

Fri, Nov 21st - 12:25PM

Fri, Nov 21st - 12:12PM