Where Did It All Go Right? (36 page)

12
Phil was a very cool honorary uncle, what with the linesman’s gig and a very dry Lancastrian sense of humour. We once went with him to some Beazer Homes League game and he sprayed Ralgex muscle-rub on his legs in the changing room, telling us it made him run faster. We believed him. Looking back, Phil and Eileen must have been my first Catholics – they had religious pictures and crosses around the house, which I thought creepy at the time.

13
Lyrics from ‘Into The Valley’ by The Skids.

14
More arcane religiosity: veils and candles. It was like another world to us pagans.

15
Some kind of joke. We took it with us on our next long car journey though.

16
I have affectedly adopted ‘spiny’ as an adjective meaning good – it derives from the Pirhana Brothers sketch in
Monty Python
: ‘Dinsdale was convinced he was being watched by a giant hedgehog whom he referred to as “Spiny Norman”. Normally Spiny Norman was wont to be about twelve feet from snout to tail.’ I liked the Gilliam drawing of him in the
Big Red Book
.

17
One of our playground catch-phrases of the time was ‘I heard that! Pardon?’, testament to writer Peter Tinniswood, from whose BBC sitcom
I Didn’t Know You Cared
(1975–79) it came. The character who said it was deaf Uncle Staveley, played by Bert Palmer, then Leslie Sarony in the final series.

18
With which the transformation from square to punk rocker is complete.

19
Just trying on a couple more irritating made-up adjectives for size.

20
You can’t blame me for this one: I heard Compo say it on
Last of the Summer Wine
.

21
One of mine. Perhaps I should have mastered the English language before I started adding to it.

22
Paul Freeman was a key punk figure. He unwittingly became my musical mentor, as he had a boxful of ultra-cool singles, from Dr Feelgood’s ‘Milk And Alcohol’ in white vinyl to something by Cowboys International in clear. And he had cowhorn handlebars.

23
Now he looked like a true thug. I wouldn’t be joining him on this particular journey. This was hardcore.

24
One by one they fell – Gaz went under the clippers next. Lee Masters showed that he had a mind of his own after all by abstaining. I admired him for that.

25
Quite how this arose is a bit murky, but once I’d turned fourteen, Margaret must have rashly promised to take me to a ‘AA’ at the pictures – she said she liked scary movies, but had no-one to go with. I held her to it, and we went to see
Coma
, a middle-aged woman and a teenage boy. It was as odd as if Dad had taken our cousin Jane to the cinema.

26
I always bought whisky liqueurs for Pap Reg.

27
The Tourists? Punk? What a generous door policy I was operating.

28
She would come to regret letting me slow-dance with her, the lovely Cindy Offord. I foolishly took it as encouragement and mooned over her for years, on and off. She never let me near her again.

29
From Jonathan Green’s
Dictionary Of Slang
(I knew it would be in there!):
Wag/wag it/off
vb. [mid-19C+] to play truant (cf.
BUNK OFF; PLAY THE WAG
). [
HOP THE WAG
] Don’t be too impressed – I was too much of a scaredy-cat to wag it much.

30
This act of artistic crowd-pleasing happened with the full approval of our teacher, Miss Szkopek. What a sport she must have been. I even drew her as a big curly-permed ball with a pair of large, round glasses on and ‘peg’ trousers sticking out the bottom and she let me get away with it.

31
‘I’ll think about it.’ How those words retrospectively burn a hole in my heart. How many girls told me they were going to think about it? And why did I believe them? Cindy Offord didn’t need to think about it. She knew.

32
… And no Lego.

twelve

Uncle Punk

IN HIS DEFINITIVE
chronicle of punk,
England’s Dreaming
, Jon Savage is perfectly clear about what happened in 1979: ‘Punk was over. Humpty Dumpty had fallen off the wall and there was no way of piecing him together.’

He pinpoints the death of punk to 4 May, the day the Conservatives swept to power under Margaret Thatcher, an event logged in my 1979 diary, as we have seen, with the positively Shavian insight, ‘Oh. Hmm. New Prime Minister. A woman. Ooh dear.’

What I didn’t note in my diary that day was the death of punk. For though historically and culturally, Savage is spot on, he speaks only for London. For Northampton and the other ‘faraway towns’ to which The Clash might have been calling, punk had just arrived.

Though they soldiered on in name, the Sex Pistols had effectively ceased to exist when Johnny Rotten walked offstage at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco on 14 January 1978;
¹
and when Sid Vicious died of a heroin overdose on 2 February 1979, there really was no piecing together punk’s founding fathers.
Fortuitously
for those of us who were just turning 14 and living in the provinces, Sex Pistols product did not dry up. Death for them was not the end. My first ever punk single, purchased on 27 March 1979, was ‘Something Else’ by the Sex Pistols, a cover of the 1959 Eddie Cochran song and a Number Three smash.

Its ‘video’, taken from Julien Temple’s
Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle
movie (released later that year), featured Sid Vicious getting out of bed in some off-white pants, cupping his bollocks, sneering in a mirror, getting dressed and bombing down some country lanes on his motorbike (he was sure fine lookin’, man). On
Top of the Pops
, Jimmy Savile felt moved to warn the nation that riding without a helmet is dangerous. So was taking heroin and
possibly
stabbing your girlfriend (although it could have been the drug-dealer).

A punk Johnny-come-lately I may have been, but I was hooked into the Pistols universe there and then, dimly aware that it existed only in memorial. I remember Vicious’s death, if only for the fact that Jo Gosling wore a black armband to school the Monday after, in doing so confirming her status as coolest kid in the playground. (I bet they made her take it off.) Back in February I can’t say I’d shed a tear for Sid – in fact, on the day of his overdose, Stuart Skelton gave me an ELO pin-up and I received two back issues of
Mad
through the post – but I loved him now.

Thus it was that punk came in the front door on 27 March 1979, and the Electric Light Orchestra were bundled out the back. It was no less than a conversion, as decisive as seeing the light, and very timely, as being 14 years old means being a rebel, and here was my ride.

* * *

Punk had entered my consciousness before ‘Something Else’ and its handsome picture sleeve. It was out there. To my credit, I had bought ‘Rat Trap’ by The Boomtown Rats in November ’78 and ‘Heart Of Glass’ by Blondie in February ’79 – which at least shows a flash of new wave sympathy – but I had also bought singles by Racey and Violinski during the same period. My diary makes no record of it, but I
must
have been aware of the Pistols’ ‘God Save The Queen’ in 1977, even in my royalist pomp. Surely
John Craven’s Newsround
did some kind of report …

As a rule, while punk was sweeping the nation in 1976, 1977 and 1978, I was busy elsewhere: glueing Airfix models together, playing with Matchbox cars and listening to
Grease
. Clearly, my age was a factor. As was the hard reality that all the major punk tours passed Northampton by, in favour of more glamorous places like Leicester and Birmingham.
²
So I have two alibis.

Records show that when the Buzzcocks joined The Damned and The Vibrators on the bill at the 100 Club punk festival on 21 September 1976, I was chuffed at getting two Corona Fizzical stickers off Martin Soards. When Steve Jones called Bill Grundy a ‘fucking rotter’ on live TV, 1 December 1976, I was busy making a Christmas card for Mum’s squash coach. While The Clash were sending masonry flying on the White Riot tour in May 1977, I was learning a simple tune on the xylophone in rehearsal for a special form assembly.
³

On 7 January 1978, at a late Christmas party round at Nan and Pap Collins’s, the kids put on an elaborate show for the grown-ups: Simon, Melissa and I, plus cousins Jane and Paul. I have a fuzzy memory of this DIY extravaganza – I camply wore one of Nan’s dresses and sang ‘Hey Big Spender’ at one point – but my diary entry tells us that I also did an ‘impression’ of someone called ‘Uncle Punk’. I’ve no idea who this character is. Perhaps I made him up. I know impersonating him involved wearing my black PVC jacket (purchased from the Kays catalogue during my
Fonz
phase) and sticking my hair up in some way. I used Melissa’s toy guitar for rocking effect, and I must have sung something punky. Did I pretend to spit? Wear a safety pin? If only camcorders had been around to record what seems to be my very first acknowledgement of punk.

In December that year I wrote a facile parody of a punk lyric in my diary (‘Let’s all gob on a diary, lads/It’s the latest craze’), accompanied by a cartoon of an imaginary group, Pete Pungent and the Snotrags (this is very much the time of Kenny Everett’s Sid Snot and Gizzard Puke). It seems I was more aware of punk as per parodies and cheap gags on TV than I was as a potential source of personal insurrection or head-turning music.

But all that changed in March 1979, thanks largely to
Smash Hits
, which I had just started showing an interest in. Stuart Skelton, he of the ELO poster gift, bought some issues to school and I was instantly captivated by the magazine’s unique selling point: the song words. Prior to D-day (or P-day) I took a keen interest in obtaining the lyrics to ‘Sound of the Suburbs’ by The Members and ‘Lucky Number’ by Lene Lovitch (sort of punk, certainly screechy and something Nan would bristle at on
Top of the Pops
). On 23 March I took down the names of all the kids I considered to be punks at a school disco: Bill, Lee and Si, of course, although not Gaz (I think he was more of a soul boy), plus three others, Jon, Paul and Mark. A line was drawn on the dancefloor. The DJ played the Pistols and the Skids that night; the tide was turning. I think Si wore his V-neck jumper without a T-shirt underneath, which struck me as punk in the extreme. And then, on 27 March, I gave myself to Sid.

Praise be.

As well as ‘Something Else’ I got ‘Everybody’s Happy Nowadays’ by the Buzzcocks, again in fetching pic sleeve, which is something punk singles had over non-punk singles in those grey days. Art was intrinsic to the movement.

Never mind that my dad actually bought my two punk singles for me – from a trendy record shop called Revolver in Wellingborough (where his office was). That’s not the point. He also bought me my first singles case that day too, a starter pack for
the
aspiring punk rocker. Dad bought many of my punk singles for me – it was easier for him to slip out at lunchtime than it was for me to get into town after school. I think he quite liked going in there in his suit with the crazy names of my singles on a piece of paper and handing it to the greaser behind the counter. I hope they treated him with the respect he deserved.
⁴

In future weeks, whenever I’d saved up sufficient pocket money, I expanded my collection with seven-inchers by Squeeze, Sham 69, The Dickies, The Clash, The Ruts, Tubeway Army, The Skids and The Undertones, all the while perfecting their logos for reproduction on folders and exercise books. John Peel quickly became my late-night guru, listened to, as is traditional, with a single earpiece under the bedcovers. What myriad delights I heard there beneath the candlewick, from The Slits to The Dixie Cups.

By the time of the next school disco in July, I considered myself a card-carrying punk, and pogoed with the best of them – but I had one important step yet to take: the haircut. I wore cap-sleeved T-shirts, straight-leg jeans, and the regulation Harrington jacket (black, zip-up, tartan lining) but my hair was strictly pre-punk, flicked at the sides and parted. On 17 August, another landmark day, I asked Carol to cut my hair short enough for it to stick up on top. She did. The drawing in my diary suggests a modest crop, but getting it up off my earlobes was a mini-revolution.

Of course in these enlightened post-Gary Rhodes times, spiky hair is
nothing
. Everybody’s got it. But in 1979, I was a true non-conformist for wearing my hair – let’s face it –
fluffy
. There’s a photo of me in the back garden in September, ostensibly modelling a batch of homemade punk badges (Ruts, Sham 69, Buzzcocks, the Virgin records logo), but in my maroon V-neck and jeans and spiky-top I do look quite edgy. Mum put up with it valiantly – well, it was her mate Carol who was styling me! And anyway this, as it transpired, was kids’ stuff, hairwise.

So that was it. Transformation complete in the space of six months. No more proof were needed that I was a punk. I looked like one, I had loads of punk singles, I hated Abba, I had posters
of
the Skids and Generation X up on the bedroom pin-board, I jumped up and down and kicked out at discos, and I had the
New Musical Express
delivered every Thursday. Nan Mabel was beside herself with worry. She assumed the next step would be a safety pin through my cheek and my immediate arrest. She’d obviously got me mixed up with Uncle Punk.

‘You ain’t one of these punks are you?’ Nan would say.

‘Yeah,’ I would reply.

‘Of course he’s not,’ Mum would interject.

* * *

I don’t wish to make my metamorphosis seem glib in retrospect. If it seems to be all about wearing the right clothes and buying the right singles, it was. (I decorated a lampshade at the time with all the correct punk logos, although including AC/DC showed a measure of confusion.) I now appreciate punk as a cultural paradigm shift and a necessary wave of disenfranchised youthful defiance in the face of ineffectual party politics and social disintegration, not to mention an enema for the music industry, but aged 14 in Northampton, it was more about badges. I’d love to talk up my allegiance as something truly seditionary but I was just a kid with pocket money. There were, however, no gigs in town for me
not
to go to (or none that I knew about); and punks didn’t even hang around the town centre in 1979. There was no scene, just a few pockets of attitude and violent dancing at youth clubs. But punk was important to me because it was my first push for individuality. Not everyone fancied themselves a punk; most kept their flicks and danced to disco records. It was my first taste of tribalism and identity.