Bit of a Blur (2 page)

It was him who gave me my first break in showbusiness. Possibly as a result of my performance in drag on camera, although that film never came to light again, I won the role of ‘Big Brownie’ in
The Gang Show
.

I joined my first band in Jay Burt-Smale’s bedroom. Jay Burt-Smale lived in Charminster. It would be hard to find a more deliciously normal place than there. The biggest shop in Charminster sold fish. It wasn’t clear if it was a shop or a hobby that had gone haywire. The front of the shop was quite ordinary looking, but it went on and on and the fish got weirder as you went deeper inside, just like the sea. There was definitely someone with a big need for fish behind it, like an alcoholic pub landlord. It was a bit out of anyone’s control, bursting at the seams and brilliant.

We were fifteen and also bursting at the seams, sitting there in Jay’s bedroom, surrounded by traffic cones and flashing lights from the roadworks outside. Jay’s mum had recently started going out with a bass player. She was pretty cool. She said we could smoke in Jay’s room, but Jay wouldn’t let us. Her new boyfriend had given Jay an electric guitar. Jay plugged it into his stereo and showed me how to play ‘Whole Lotta Love’ by Led Zeppelin; or maybe it was the theme music from
Top of the Pops
, it was hard to tell which. He could also play the line from the middle of ‘The Chain’ by Fleetwood Mac, which his mum had a copy of. He was working on ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ by U2 as well, but he could only get the first five notes. It didn’t matter. Learning the rest of it was a mere formality. We knew then that we would start a band and be brilliant. It would be easy. He’d only been playing the guitar a week and he could nearly do U2. I’d only just started, and I could already nearly do
Top of the Pops
and Led Zeppelin, and he was supposed to be one of the best guitarists around.

We formed the band there and then. I decided I would play keyboards. Synthesizers had arrived from the future. They had the same kind of appeal as spaceships and everybody wanted one. Mark Pepin, my new best friend, was going to play drums and ‘Rutter the Nutter’ was going to play a bass guitar. Nobody was certain at that stage exactly what a bass guitar was, but bands all seemed to have one.

I had spent a long time listening to ‘Blue Monday’ by New Order. It was so grey and beautiful. I went to a keyboard demonstration at a big hotel down the road with my dad. They had all the latest synthesizers there and they were excited about a new technology called MIDI. Everyone kept saying ‘MIDI’. It was very important, this midi business. I just liked all the buttons and the lights and the noises. They had synchronized all the keyboards together with a MIDI so that they all played ‘Blue Monday’ at the same time. It was too much for me. So was the keyboard: it was six hundred quid. I decided to play bass instead.

Mark got his drumkit, a Trixon. I got the bass for my sixteenth birthday in November, but I had to wait until Christmas for an amplifier. Then I wasn’t allowed to have it for another week for bad behaviour. I managed to find it, though, in the loft. Jay and Rut the Nut didn’t seem to be taking the band very seriously, but Mark and I played together in the cellar. We were getting pretty good at ‘The Chain’ and ‘Whole Lotta Love’, and ‘Blue Monday’ was coming along quite nicely.

Mark arrived one Sunday and told me he’d invited Dominic White to come round with his guitar. I was furious. Dom White, who I’d known since playschool, was a hippie with no social skills. I couldn’t believe Mark had invited him round to my house. Dom had quite a low opinion of me, too. He thought I was a grinning, middle-class twat. His mum dropped him off in her Mini. It was very full of amplifiers and guitars. We lugged everything downstairs. Dom said, ‘My mum wrremembers your mum.’ He had a bit of trouble with his ‘r’s. ‘Yourww mum says wot, wot, wot, I’m so middle class.’ I offered him a gin and tonic, but he ignored me. He was fiddling around with a soldering iron and a huge box that said ‘Vox’ on it. Mark and I went upstairs. Mum said, ‘Is that Dominic White? You used to be such good little friends at playgroup. He was such a good-looking little boy.’ Suddenly from up the stairs came a very loud ‘FUCK!’, three ‘SHIT’s and a number of quieter, broken, little ‘fuck’s. Mum was straight to the top of the stairs. ‘Dominic, I will not tolerate bad language in this house.’ It was very quiet. We went downstairs. Dom was flat on his back. He’d miscalculated on the soldering and connected himself to two hundred and forty volts. He and my mum made their peace and he decided to use one of his other amps.

In all the time I have been making music, nothing quite so fantastic as what happened in the next five minutes has ever happened again. Mark and I started playing ‘Whole Lotta Love’ and Dom joined in. He was quite loud, much louder than a stereo, louder than the drums. It was the loudest, best noise I’d ever heard and I was helping to make it. Dom was brilliant. I was just pedalling around the riff, and he was all over the place, high, low, fast, slow, rhythm, melody, harmony, it was shocking. I was in a band, an amazing band. I began to think that maybe Dom was the coolest man in the world.

Mark, Dom and I played together and smoked together and went to Pokesdown to look at guitars together. It was good but we didn’t have a singer. Singers weren’t that important in the sort of music we were listening to, or making, but to do gigs we needed a singer. We were at Mark’s house, near school, for a rehearsal. There were two drumkits in the bedroom he shared with his older brother, who was learning the drums as well. Mark said, ‘I saw Pete Arnold in town yesterday, he’s got a keyboard and some lyrics. I told him to come.’ ‘Arnold!’ said Dom and me, ‘Eew!’ Pete Arnold was the dribbly one who used to get the 17 bus with me. He didn’t get the bus any more. He’d moved house. As far as I knew, he was a grebo these days – a greasy headbanger. He arrived from the other direction, but still on a 17 bus, with his keyboard, which was large. He’d gone goth, big black spiky hair and an overcoat. He was, touchingly, very proud of his keyboard. He kept calling it a ‘synthesizer’, which was unfortunate, because it involved a lot of lisping and saliva. We played him what we’d been doing, but he wasn’t that impressed.

He started playing the chords of ‘Blue Monday’ at which point I started to think he might be all right. After all, we had spent all those bus journeys talking about music and I had thought Dom was a retard until I’d played music with him. Maybe it was worth letting him join in. Dom and Mark never wanted to play ‘Blue Monday’.

He wasn’t bashful. He said, ‘Mark, play a rock pattern. Dom, you play the chords on the second and fourth beats, to give it a reggae feel, bass should just follow the chords.’ We did exactly what he said and he played a melody on the keyboard with one finger. It was brilliant. We were writing our own songs, or rather Pete was.

Really, no band is ever any more sophisticated an arrangement than that: a group of people who enjoy making a loud noise together, despite their differences.

There were a lot of bands in Bournemouth and a scene. The nightclubs - and there were loads of them - were full in the summer and at weekends, but during the week they were empty. Some of them were really plush. Some were sticky. On weekdays they were host to dozens of bands who all played for each other and to each other, constantly splitting up and re-forming with new allegiances. It was great to have a reason to be in these places, other than looking at girls. Those nightclubs looked great when they were empty, all the lasers and spotlights blazing at the unemployable outsiders on the stage.

The first celebrity I ever met was the headmaster’s daughter. Being nobly born and also quite pretty had given her unshakeable confidence. Everybody fancied her and she wore her adulation like haute couture; it really made her look good. She thrived on it. Some of it didn’t fit her or suit her, but it was all precious stuff and she kept it safe. She was a star and she knew it.

I got to know her when I started working after school and at weekends at The Roysdean. The Roysdean announced itself as ‘a Methodist Holiday Hotel’. It was in Derby Road, just around the corner from home. Derby Road is all largish two-star hotels and prostitutes. The buildings are quite grand, laid to garden squares with avenues of mature pines. It’s really quite beautiful. Sandbanks, five miles to the west, is one of the most expensive neighbourhoods in the whole world: it’s pricier than most of Tokyo and Manhattan. It’s hard to say what makes that part of town so expensive and the Derby Road part such a bargain. From the air you can see that the whole of Bournemouth sits on a river plain. There’s definitely not one part that’s any more special than another; you’d expect to pay a bit more for a house near the sublime beach, but it’s hard to fathom the fiftyfold price difference between the fading Regency elegance of Derby Road and the East Cliff at the low end of the market, and the chintz territory of Canford Cliffs and Sandbanks, the super-expensive end. All the worst bands were from Canford Cliffs and Sandbanks, bad funksters with highlighted hair.

There were a dozen kids from school who worked at The Roysdean, including the headmaster’s kids and their gangs. We were all united in our disdain for Methodists, the hotel and its management. We were quite good at pretending to behave ourselves, and the jobs did get done, but there was a lot of larking around. You can’t pay people ninety pence an hour and expect them to give everything.

I was mainly in the kitchens, washing up and mopping. It smelled pretty rank in there, a mixture of slops, cabbage and disinfectant, but the tea was excellent. It’s one thing that hotels full of old people really excel at, tea. They fed us, too. People who work in hotels always get fed. People who are hungry and handling food just tend to eat it. It’s very hard to stop them. It was lowly work, but I was happy. I was in love with most of the girls who worked there.

I loved girls, music and France. I fell for France on holiday and on French exchanges. I went to Germany, too, but they just wanted to play table tennis. In France everything was exotic, erotic, dangerous and fabulous. Cool women on mopeds smoked cool cigarettes and knew about cheese and poetry.

I liked reading too, but writers themselves didn’t seem to be very appealing people until I turned over a school copy of
L’Etranger
by Albert Camus in the first year of the sixth form. There was a picture of Albert on the back: Gitane glowing from the corner of a sulky pout, long skinny mac and James Dean hair. It said on the flap that he played football, in goal, for Algiers.

Everything about that book resonated. It ding-donged with adolescent feelings of pointlessness. I bought a long mac with pockets big enough to carry books in. Books and records were the great sources of truth.

My ‘A’ level results weren’t just bad, they were astonishing. I had been a model student throughout school, I’d been encouraged to sit entrance exams for Oxford in French and in Chemistry just a few months before, but things had gone downhill rapidly. A succession of girlfriends and late nights in empty nightclubs had taken their toll. Life is not wide enough for Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll, and French and Chemistry. I had been expected to get A grades, but I’d dive-bombed out of the system. It was very scary all of a sudden.

I’d missed my second-choice college as well, and even failed to match what was basically an unconditional offer from a grubby college called Goldsmiths in south-east London. In three very clear letters the flimsy piece of paper spelt out doom. I went round to my girlfriend’s house.

She’d got two As and a B and so had her friend, who was there. They were ecstatic. They were both going to Bristol. The fragile veil of young love was shaken hard by the spectre of failure. I was pretty much dumped there and then. I went home to sleep it off. It was pretty rough at home, too. My mum was despairing. I wrote things down a lot and listened to Joy Division.

I got a job at Safeway, stacking shelves. Nothing could be as horrible as working in that supermarket. Everything about it was off. The management team were all bullied and all bullies. I had to wear a bow tie and a bright green apron. There were quite a lot of staff, but there was no camaraderie or joy. I started at the bottom. The further up the chain you got the more horrible you had to be to stay there. I found it hard to hang on to that job and I was broken-hearted and bandless. The Rising, my first group, had disintegrated, but I was playing the old piano more than ever.

All the bands used to go to Circles coffee shop on the top floor of Dingles, the department store. It was the daytime headquarters of the Bournemouth music scene. I used to meet my friends there, too, and that was where I first laid eyes on Justine. Everybody knew Justine. Justine Andrew was the prettiest girl in Bournemouth and she was going out with the bass player in the best band in town.

A few years ago I was looking through some photographs of a backstage party at the Beastie Boys’ ‘Free Tibet’ concert in New York. There were photos of all the New York models, and the photographer had done a little book. They were all in it - Helena Christensen, Stella Tennant, Liberty Ross, Jasmine Guinness. I turned over another leaf and there was a full-page photograph of Justine: she was quite at home in the pretty girls’ big league with her green eyes, pointy nose and huge open smile, a smile that melted rocks.

I remember very clearly that the first time I saw her she was wearing a poncho and eating a toasted teacake, which seemed quite extravagant.

Duncan Collier, from Mulberry Phut, the band with the seventeen guitarists, who used to get the 17 bus with me, was moving to Ireland and the house in Charminster, where he lived with other members of the Phut, was available to rent. Justine was going to live there with the keyboard player from the now defunct Reader’s Wives. They, too, had been torn apart by the university system. The drummer with the ten A grade ‘O’ levels had left to study accountancy. I was offered a room in the house.