I have played Wembley Arena, Elland Road and Yankee Stadium, Knebworth Rock Festival, the Budokan, the Fillmore San Francisco, before the endless meadows of Glastonbury and hundreds of thousands in Central Park. The hands typing these words have held Rory Gallagher’s 1961 Stratocaster, and the manuscript of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying in the late genius’s Oxford, Mississippi mansion. But I can promise you that I never felt a knot of apprehensiveness so terrifyingly pure as the one those psychiatric nurses tied in my throat.
David Mamet says the purpose of theatre is to create ‘cleansing awe’. That’s what seemed to come over me. Fran started into a twelve-bar boogie played with feline sloth. My hands were so sodden with perspiration that for a moment I couldn’t find purchase on my strings, and silently I faced the verdict that I must slink from the scene, scorched by my father’s mockery. And then Fran belted into ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, his right foot stomping time, a snarl about his lips, every sinew in him honed to assure anyone needing persuasion that a mean-eyed gunslinger had arrived. Lightning flickered in the snake-pit of my bowels. I strummed. The tourists yah’d. Fran turned to me and bellowed in Gaelic: ‘Scaoil amach an boibilín!’, an exhortation politely translatable as ‘Get out the little fella’, although boibilín has ruder meanings. When you hear it, you are being encouraged to go for broke. I tried. But my boibilín wilted.
You’ve seen teenagers busking. They’re often adorable but rarely the genuine stuff. ‘Lola’ by the Kinks and ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ and butcheries of Don McLean. Into this category I place my eighteen-year-old self, buds of toilet paper affixed to my neck where I’d cut myself shaving, tufts of recalcitrant fluff on my upper lip. I must have looked the sorriest virgin in all the south of England, which believe me is saying something. But Fran was already home. He’d everything he needed. Hiccuping like Buddy Holly, throwing pouty scowls at passing shoppers, he pawed at his crotch and swivelled like a stripper and karate-kicked the air before him. The crowd began to grow. By the time we hit the middle verse where the solo is meant to happen, he was jitterbugging with a woman who looked like a plain-clothes nun, so nobody was listening to the Scotty Moore licks I was murdering. Fran clambered a goodly way up a lamp post and gave a valedictory benediction to the throng before being persuaded back down by a constable. For one hideous moment I thought we were about to be nicked. Fran said it was a pity we weren’t.
Neither of us had thought to bring a hat. Fran ordered me to remove a sock and pass it around, but even though I was ragingly jealous that the punters had preferred him to me, I felt no one deserved my sock. Dr Shillibeer, peace be upon him, gave us his boater, insisting we put it to use. Luton has a proud tradition of hat-making, so perhaps he didn’t want to see us embarrassed before the German visitors. Four quid in coppers and two pfennig coins were all we collected, but our elation roared like a fever. We’d performed only seven minutes. Our prospects were good if you averaged them out, which, youthful and foolish, we did.
The whole of that afternoon we spent busking in the precinct as the sun blazed down on our initiation. Our clothes were sodden rags and our faces got burnt, and our throats grew sore from howling. From time to time we’d rest and enter the McDonald’s for sustenance, counting out tenpences into hot little stacks translatable into burgers and water. Then back we would speed to what we now felt was our pitch, where we’d belt out the ‘Blues in a Bottle’, a song with three chords, like a lot of the killers. It says nothing very significant about human existence. But I can never hear it without experiencing again the intense pierce of longing that attends all memories of transition.
That night, Philip Larkin spoke at an event in Reading University, for which I’d obtained two tickets. I’d been wowed by his work since discovering The Whitsun Weddings in Luton library at the age of fourteen, and the thought that he was coming to read within a hitch-hike of our town had literally kept me awake. When I imagine the evening, as I sometimes do, even now, I see ranks of packed seats and hear shush-peppered silence, as the Elgar of bicycle clips and rain on the window is led to the spot-lit lectern. He was elderly by then. He died in ’85. I pan around the hall as he opens a book. Below him, in the front row, two empty chairs gape.
‘Poetry is over,’ Fran slurred, in the Trap. He was always trying to shock you like that.
Three
MY GUITAR-PLAYING improved but I failed my First Year exams. Dad clarified to me with a visual aid, his enraged and scarlet face, that if I didn’t catch myself on and stop acting the maggot I could betake myself from the protection of his fatherly armpit to ‘live in some dosshouse with winos’. It drove him berserk that my brother and I had begun to address him as ‘Jimmy’ and my mother by her own forename, Alice. Naturally, seeing his disconcertment unfurl into fury only served to encourage the over-familiarity. We kept it up, undaunted.
‘Yo Jimzer. Hey Jimbo. ¡Ola, Jaime! Mon Jacques? Wee Shaymus!’ My brother, on retiring to bed, would call Waltonistically ‘Night, Jim-Bob.’ This resulted in the increasingly resigned paternal valediction, ‘Take the back of my arse and boil it.’ I don’t know how Alice could stand us.
Having refused to answer the examiners’ questions on his hate-figure Wordsworth, Fran was invited to continue his studies elsewhere. A kindly tutor, Declan Kiely, was interceding on his behalf, but the Prince of Perfumed Grandiosities hitch-hiked to Paris. I was left to spend the summer being supportively bawled at by my father as I sweated for the August retakes. Worse, Dad secured for me a part-time position at his workplace, Whipsnade Zoo, I think as a means of teaching me the lesson he reckoned I sorely needed, that menial labour of the kind that must be endured by ingrates who mock their elders’ efforts can be monotonous, tiring and dirty.
When you face at nine in the morning a flock of 130 unbiddable Chilean flamingos that are to be shepherded into the new enclosure they do not wish to enter, it doesn’t matter as much as you might imagine that they are pretty. Dad would hand me a shovel. ‘Wakey-wakey, College. Stop daisying around. The buffalos want mucking out when you’re done.’
A postcard arrived from Le Fran wishing me ‘bonne chance’ in an irritating way. He was writing this outside Samuel Beckett’s apartment building in the Boulevard Saint-Jacques. It was only a matter of time before ‘he meets me’. I wondered what Monsieur Godot would make of Stanton Poly’s grand fromage. I’ll be honest. I was glad he was gone.
I learned a few songs, kept up at my practice, and with Shay attended the Rolling Stones concert at Ashton Gate stadium, Bristol. I can’t say that musically it was the greatest event in history, but battling our way up the front for ‘Satisfaction’ was fun. To be within twenty feet of the chain-smoking scarecrow that turned out to be Keith Richards was to feel the joyous thunder that a summer day can bring when you’re young and at a gig with your brother. The repeats came around, and I scraped the grades I needed. In congratulation, Jimmy and Alice bought me a second-hand electric guitar, a gorgeous cranberry-coloured Epiphone modelled on the Gibson ES-335. My daughter has it now. Second Year began. There was no sign of Fran. I fell in love.
G O’C, a dark-eyed student of Educational Psychology, chatted with me sometimes as we waited for the bus. Her parents had bought her a pony. It was clear that G and I were not of the same socio-economic stratum – Jimmy regarded horses as animals you backed at Kempton Park, not as pets to be ridden by sensitive teenage girls – but we clicked all the same, albeit briefly. She played dulcimer, knew a lot of English and Scottish traditional airs, and they gave us something to talk about. The death of my sister, to whom I was close, had taken my dearest female friend. I’d spent my teens attending a school where all but two of the teachers were at least technically men. I was tongue-tied around girls and I lacked Shay’s handsomeness.
We’d been talking music at the bus stop now and again for a week when G invited me to her brother’s 21st. This took place at the mother’s vast house in Marston Moretaine – Daddy wasn’t on the scene, having discovered adultery in R
adlett – and to crunch my way up its gravel drive and enter that many-windowed restatement of the Tudor-cum-Georgian sluiced me with glinting dread. A professional DJ was inflicting the criminal works of Haircut 100 on the vulnerable young, and the cake was the size of Alice’s fridge. I was the only boy in the marquee who had attended a soccer-playing school, but everyone was welcoming, especially G, who revealed to me the rudiments of how to approach ‘a fork supper’ before blushingly playing her dulcimer for the company over dessert, at Mum’s somewhat sherried insistence. We walked in the garden. Well, one of the gardens. There were others, for roses and statuary. I still remember the sweetness of our hesitant little intimacies, the teeth-bashing, palate-licking, tongue-sucking, vacuum-creating, dare-I-open-my-eyes teenage kisses. She loved Joan Armatrading, Mansfield Park and Pride and Prejudice. Dear G, if you’re reading this now, as who knows, you might, I send belated abjections for my gormlessness.
Asked to choose the setting for our first proper date, I opted for the dramatisation of The Elephant Man at St George’s Theatre, Luton, thinking to impress my girl. ‘People like ourselves’ did not attend the theatre, Jimmy advised darkly. He employed this phrase with such frequency and certitude that Shay and I, to mock him, abbreviated it to ‘PLO’. We were English kids by then. We thought this Irishman funny. But it was impossible to dislodge his scripturally detailed and finely calibrated credo, his personal Leviticus of prohibitions. The PLO washed their hair in the bath once a week, anything more being suspect. Male PLO members visited a proper barber’s, not ‘Peter’s Hair Fashions’ on Bute Street, a place we enjoyed telling him was ‘unisex’. Ladies went to Mrs Ogilvy at Dion Creations on the roundabout for a blow-dry and set, and bought the Sunday roast in Freddie Baxter’s coming home. Their men opened doors for them and regarded all females with knightly respect, hence no ‘bra-burner’ could ever emerge from, or belong to, this tribe whose women knew only the unending contentment that any ‘normal woman’ could want. The PLO did not eat vegetarian food, go on skiing holidays, vote for the Social Democratic Party, enjoy ballet if male, sports if female, practice transcendental meditation, name children after non-saints or geographical features such as rivers, drink wine or ‘cocktails’, listen to BBC Radio 4, read The Times or any broadsheet newspaper, wear any item of clothing usually associated with the opposite gender, play tennis, or watch it on the television, or even mention it in his presence, and they did NOT frequent any non-pantomime-offering theatre unless they happened to work in its cloakroom. ‘Getting above yourself’ was a grievous danger, Jimmy felt, since it invariably led to unhappiness, even suicide. The PLO ought to be grateful for being the PLO. I dismissed him as a reverse-snob. I should have listened.
During the opening moments, the distinguished actor Derek Chapman strode stark bollock-naked on to the stage and began assuming one by one the hideous disfigurements of unfortunate Joseph Merrick while an unseen narrator enumerated them. A sound issued forth from the velvet darkness beside me as he started flopping his head and drooling. It was the sound of G O’C exclaiming in horror ‘Sweet Jeeeeeeeezis’. The next tryst I organised was to Peter Shaffer’s Equus, a piece I thought she’d like, given her interest in ponies, but it turned out to be a somewhat shriek-inducing work in which a mentally unhinged boy called Alan discovers he wants to fuck a horse. The last bus to Marston Moretaine was quiet enough that night. G, usually a good sport, was disconcerted. I had sensed a little friction between us in recent weeks and was hoping there’d be more of it before the evening was through, perhaps in Mum’s hydrangeas. But no. G explained that the trouble wasn’t me, it was her. She’d love us to be friends. No, she really, really would. We didn’t see each other again.
Fran returned from his boulevarding, sporting a goatee and cape, like some species of bebop-loving vampire. Inexplicably he was permitted to resume his studies, but it would be required of him to repeat First Year and apologise in writing for disrespecting his teachers, one of whom had all but threatened a departmental strike were Wordsworth ever traduced again. You can imagine Fran’s private response, wretchedly ungrateful boy that he was, but I won’t repeat it here. He penned the necessary apologies but refused to repeat, instead offering – yes, ‘offering’ – such was the arrogance – to sit all the First Year examinations the following weekend. This was allowed. To the fury of some, he scored A’s and high B’s in every paper.
Over the summer he’d been listening to George Brassens, Jacques Brel and des chanteurs comme ça, and claimed to have punctuated his idleness with polymorphous fornications, the consumption of absinthe, visits to Oscar and Jim out in Père Lachaise Cemetery, and narrow escapes from the pox. Paris offered ‘diablerie’, his new favourite word. (‘Knucklehead’ was his favourite old one.) He had enjoyed a married Russian air hostess in her hotel room one lunchtime and a Jesuit in civvies the same night at Les Halles. As for the evening, he’d gone boating with the bisexual twins from Grenoble – his eyes crossed in Proustian recollection. For a while he tried to persuade me that we should ‘busk in French’, since ‘Luton was ready’, he felt.
There was a view among the student body that Second Year didn’t matter too much, that you could cruise your way along and no one would notice, so intent were the professors on caning the freshers and cramming the soon-to-be graduates. I’m afraid Fran and I took to that view like trout to the fly. By the end of October ’82 we were up to our old ways, spending many more hours on the busk around town than on library, lecture or literature. One afternoon, while playing a solo outside Cavendish’s shop, I saw Mum approaching down George Street with our neighbour, Mrs Bavister, with whom she sometimes went to the pictures. I wouldn’t have thought it possible that Fran and I could leg it so fast, ardent smokers and committed layabouts that we were. We even left our collection-hat behind on the pavement. That evening, over tea, she looked at me meaningfully before sliding a handful of coins across the table. The hat she kept and perhaps destroyed. Thank God, she said nothing to Jimmy.
By now, Fran and I had put together what a forgiving person, perhaps a social worker, might be prepared to call ‘a set’, a collection of numbers we were able to perform without actual murder being done, merely grievous bodily harm. We were the sixth-best buskers in Luton.
Occasionally the subject of forming a band would arise, since the sonic possibilities of two guitars are limited enough. Fran, initially, was reluctant. He’d get into one of his head-wrecking sermons on the dangers of ‘ambition’. But even then, I knew this was camouflage. The busking thing was, well, a thing: an activity between us, a means of asserting the friendship. He’d never dream of stating it directly but he didn’t want a stranger coming in. Other kids of that age reveal themselves in great lolloping doses, as though they’re spraying you with a fire hose. Fran used an eyedropper. For a while I went along with his non-verbalised insistence that we maintain the little circular fort we’d built against the world. But you know what it is to be young. You’re a taxi-light lit. And then, of course, there was Trez.
She and I disagree about the first time I saw her. She insists it was in Freshers’ Week of 1982, that we were briefly introduced in the Trap by a couple of classmates, but of this I have no recollection. I know she began attending the Poly that month, having dropped out of Harlow Tech. What is certain is that I was alone in the concourse on 3rd November ’82, trying to put together an essay about Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, a work described by Fran as ‘norvacious’. Strictly speaking, this adjective meant possessing the admirable qualities of the Stranglers, more precisely of their music, derivation being from the title of their album Rattus Norvegicus. But other things, and other persons, could possess norvaciousness also, an all-round peerless excellence. (‘Bach is proper norvacious, I’m telling you, Rob.’) For some reason I glanced up as the wind blew leaves down the corridor. It was my nineteenth birthday. Life was about to change.
A posse of boisterous Agricultural Science students – brilliantly, we called them ‘Aggies’ – ha
d erected a stand near the commemorative bust of John Bunyan and were soliciting for membership of their society. ‘Ag-Soc’, they called it. Fran called it ‘Goat-Soc’. They’d accuse him of being the leader of ‘Quare-Soc’. Many were in that particularly creepy form of fancy dress comprising Afro wigs, ‘comedy’ breasts and granny’s bloomers. Vulpine howls and unpleasant music involving the spangling of banjos added to the unimaginable sordor. They looked like an Appalachian novelist’s first wet dream as they battered their bodhráns and twirled their shkirts and tweaked their polyurethane nipples. The compulsory inflatable sheep had been borrowed from Uncle Pat in the care home and was brandished at passers-by or offensively stroked or subjected to unprintable indignities. Drink had been taken, you felt. A ‘blow-up rubber woman’ clad in full Sligo Rovers strip was seated on one animal-handler’s shoulders like a girlfriend at Woodstock. It’s at moments such as this that you wonder in your heart if universal suffrage is wise.
Anyhow, there I sat, steely, urban and superior, when the most inspiritingly lovely human I had ever seen in my life came walking down the corridor like a vision. Many student girls of the era dressed in her mode: layers of charity-shop puffery, adorned with crucifixes and rosary beads, unmatched Doc Martens, leather jacket. Early Madonna was the icon and the look was attainable on little money. But no one did it like Trez. No one ever would. I had died and gone to Oslo.
A very firework display of lewdnesses arose from the peasantry as she approached. Would she care to join Ag-Soc? The craic was only feersh. They’d give her an oul ride on the thractor. ‘Go home and wank Dobbin,’ she smiled, sweeping by. I took ‘Dobbin’ to be the name of a horse.