Where the Halling Valley River Lies

Book One – A Quartet of Essays and a Stray Pastorale
 
Chapter One – Leitmotivs from an English Pastorale
 
One thing is certain. Paul Runacles had not been born into a typically privileged upper middle class family, and so by the time he arrived at his college, he was bereft of a frame of reference; unlike the majority of his fellow pupils, weaned on the gilded sports of the British social elite.
And he escaped from his college once…like some kind of hysterical gymslip schoolgirl…just the once it was…around ’71 or ’72…to avoid being punished for something stupid he did.
It was an utterly pointless exercise as it was the last day of term, but he just panicked and bolted, and kept on running…until he ended up wandering through some muddy field in the heart of the English countryside before simply giving up and sitting by the side of the road.
But he never did it again, and in later years, when he looked back at his time as a public schoolboy, he’d insist if he possessed a single quality that might be termed noble…such as patience, or self-mastery, or consideration of the needs of other people, then he owed it to his education, and not least the four years he spent at his college.
Yet, looking at the facts after his eventual exit, you’d be forgiven for thinking he’d simply picked up from where he left off before he collapsed in that muddy field in the heart of the English countryside and started drifting in circles again…leaving so many tasks unfinished he effectively wrecked his gilded destiny. But in fact this was far from the truth, for he was never without purpose; but simply…he lacked the go-getter’s ability to turn his dreams to good account.
And looking back on all he’d lost in late middle age, he’d often weep silently to himself at night, at the end of yet another day spent doing really very little when he thought about it.
And there’d be times when certain pieces of quintessentially English pastoral music still had the power to evoke his strange and sudden flight, or rush of blood to the head, of over four decades ago. Such as Vaughan Williams’ “The Lark Ascending”, which bespeaks a passion for the Arcadian soul of England that verges on the ecstatic. And the same could be said for the opening sections of Mike Oldfield’s “Hergest Ridge”, which tended to convey to him a deep mournfulness silently existent beneath the picture perfect image of English privilege.
Any argument in favour of such a tragic element would be powerfully reinforced in his eyes by playing the music of the much-loved singer-songwriter Nick Drake, who was not so much handsome as beautiful in what could be called a classically English, soft, wistful, romantic, Shelleyan fashion, with seemingly perfect skin, full lips and a head of cascading curls.
And in some of his many photos, he bears an uncanny resemblance to the former Doors front man Jim Morrison; and like Morrison, he was a poet as much as a musician. But the likeness ends there, for while Morrison was able to conquer his natural shyness and become a wildly charismatic showman, Drake never mastered the art of Rock performance.
However, blessed with a precocious musical genius, he secured a recording contract with the Island label while still only twenty years old and at Cambridge University.
On the surface of things, he was destined for a long and happy life, but unlike his near-double, was unable to translate his enormous gifts into commercial success. And he became very seriously depressed as a result, dying mysteriously at the age of just 26, after having released only three albums in his lifetime.
Looking back from the vantage point of the early 2010s, Runacles couldn’t help thinking that in any era other than that ushered in by the Rock revolution, Drake would have pursued a career more suited to his background and temperament. As opposed to one which, while ensuring his immortality, clearly caused him an inestimable amount of pain.
And he came to maturity in a Britain whose young were in active rebellion against the Judaeo-Christian value system on which the nation had been founded. So was perforce affected by the spiritual chaos of the times, which propelled him towards the endless night of worldly philosophy, deadly for a mind as litmus-paper sensitive as his.
And listening in late middle age to such perfectly English examples of pastoral music as Drake’s “River Man”, which bespeaks a passion for the Arcadian soul of England that verges on the ecstatic, Runacles became suddenly cognizant of a colossal compassion within himself.
But not just for the youthful Runacles… who ran away from his college once like some kind of hysterical gymslip schoolgirl…so much as for the privileged classes as a whole…those traditionally educated at public schools.
A somewhat unusual receptacle for the milk of human kindness, some might say. But the privileged among us are surely no less in need of consideration than any other social class.
For despite the fact that the vast majority of those who pass through the British public school system go on to lead full and successful lives entirely free from melancholy, social advantage can clearly be a heavy burden to bear for some. Such as Nick Drake who sang so devastatingly of “falling so far on a silver spoon” in the dark pastorale, “Parasite”.
As to Runacles…he’d not been born into a typically privileged upper middle class family, and so by the time he arrived at his public school, he was bereft of a frame of reference, unlike the majority of his fellow pupils, weaned on the gilded sports of the British social elite.
Yet, a close connection existed in the shape of his paternal grandmother, born into what was once known as the lower gentry, in as much as her father was independently wealthy, and so had no need to work.
Yet, she left her first husband to live in Australia with a man she’d met in Ceylon while working on a tea plantation, a Danish citizen who’d allegedly once been a successful businessman, until a reversal of fortune reduced him to penury. The outcome was she was cast out into a kind of social exile, exacerbated by the Dane’s slow decline and death from multiple sclerosis. At least, that’s how Runacles saw it.
His mother, on the other hand, was the product of working class immigrants to British Canada from Ulster, Ireland and Lowland Scotland. And it amused him to think there was a good chance distant relatives of his continued to live in these regions.
But that was not the reason he had trouble adapting to public school life, for his brother positively thrived within it.
No, there was something intrinsically askew about Runacles himself. For after all, who thinks of running away on the last day of term without any purpose or aim, only to finish up collapsed by the side of a muddy field in the heart of the English countryside?
The truth is while public schools have long served as the traditional places of learning for future members of the British governing and professional classes, they have never done so in the capacity of pampering wet nurses.
And so not every child who finds themselves within the bosom of such institutions is able to develop along extraverted lines. For during Runacles’ time at his own college, there were boys who responded to the intensely hierarchical nature of public school life with varying degrees of self-effacement. And not just initially, for most new boys are inclined to quail when confronted with this ancient way of life for the first time, but afterwards too. So that they remained relatively quiescent even while succeeding within the system.
Yet he himself was not among them, for while he could hardly be said to have thrived, he was yet happy in his own way, and enormously popular. What they used to call a character. So this strange flight of his was totally out of character…especially seeing as he was famous for his resilience, having been one of the most intensely disciplined pupils of his generation.
But he never ran away again, and in later years, when he looked back at his time as a public schoolboy, he’d insist if he possessed a single quality that might be termed noble…such as patience, or self-mastery, or consideration of the needs of other people, then he owed it to his education, and not least the four years he spent at public school.
Yet, looking at the facts after his eventual exit, you’d be forgiven for thinking he’d simply picked up from where he left off before he collapsed in that muddy field in the heart of the English countryside and started drifting in circles again…leaving so many tasks unfinished he effectively wrecked his gilded destiny. But in fact this was far from the truth, for he was never without purpose; but simply…he lacked the go-getter’s ability to turn his dreams into good account.
Now, souls in thrall to the psychological persuasion might assert that failure in life is but the consummation of an underachieving childhood.
But the Runacles of the early 2010s had no time for theories of this kind, since pupils historically written off by their teachers via the medium of the school report have included the greatest Englishman of them all. No, not Runacles…Churchill.
While many might dispute this fact, and goodness knows Churchill has his detractors, few would go so far as to label him an underachiever.
And Runacles himself was offered multiple opportunities to turn his life around; so why didn’t he do it…simply in order to prove to the world that while a failure on the surface, he’d been a success all along?
There’s no sure way of knowing why…other than to have recourse to a theory earlier expressed in this piece, that there was something intrinsically askew about Runacles himself. For after all, who thinks of running away on the last day of term without any purpose or aim, only to finish up collapsed by the side of a muddy field in the heart of the English countryside?

And who knows how long he’d have sat there, had it not been for the fact that as he did so, his Divinity teacher happened to spy him while driving by before offering him a lift back to college.
And as might be expected, by the time he arrived, there was hardly anyone left; yet, he was summoned his housemaster, who assured him he’d not be punished, for after all, it was the last day of term, and school was over for a month or so, and he was therefore free to do as he wished within the limits of the law.
But there was no one to take him home, as his mother had earlier departed without him, as no one was able to tell her where he was. So he contacted his father, who then set about the hour-long journey from London to Berkshire to pick him up.
And he later heard from his friends about just how frantic with worry his mother been when, after innocently turning up to take her son home, she was informed he was nowhere to be found. One can only imagine what she went through. And looking back at this terrible afternoon from the vantage point of late middle age, it pained him deeply to think of her suffering.
But he never ran away again, and in later years, when he looked back at his time as a public schoolboy, he’d insist if he possessed a single quality that might be termed noble…such as patience, or self-mastery, or consideration of the needs of other people, then he owed it to his education, and not least the four years he spent at public school.
Yet, looking at the facts after his eventual exit, you’d be forgiven for thinking he’d simply picked up from where he left off before he collapsed in that muddy field in the heart of the English countryside and started drifting in circles again…leaving so many tasks unfinished he effectively wrecked his gilded destiny. But in fact this was far from the truth, for he was never without purpose; but simply…he lacked the go-getter’s ability to turn his dreams to good account.
From the time he was about seventeen, he was desperate to succeed as actor, musician or writer, yet the evidence suggests that despite an enchanting and extrovert personality he was under-equipped for the task he’d set himself.
For instance, he refused to apply himself to developing as a musician, even when being taught by a true virtuoso, as was the case towards the end of the ‘70s…when a future member of a super group struggled manfully to motivate him. And he was incapable of finishing a single cohesive piece of writing due to his tendency to allow his teeming imagination to take him from one unending digression to another.
As to his professional life, if you can call it that…it was marked by a similar desultory quality. And in the summer of ‘77, he worked briefly for a sailing school on the Costa Brava, but lost his job after a matter of weeks; and ended up drifting along the sea front and elsewhere in all his Disco Punk finery.
And later that year, he spent a short period of time at Merchant Navy School, before serving as a salesman in a long-vanished jewellery store in suburban Kingston, and after calling in sick while working as a filing clerk early in ’78, lost that job too. Still…he’d made a good friend on his day off in the shape of a pretty young Punk covered in safety pins who’d spied him wandering aimlessly around Kingston with spiky blond hair like his doppelgänger Billy Idol.
But by this time, he’d been accepted as a student at a prestigious drama school in the centre of London. Although when it came to his actual studies, he failed to convince the authorities he had what it took to succeed as a professional, so departed in the summer of ’79.
What a hopeless case… but then what kind of person decamps on the last day of term without purpose or aim, only to finish up collapsed by the side of a muddy field in the heart of the English countryside?
For that it was he did; and he never forgot it, for those four years he spent at boarding school were his rosebud years, when everything was heightened in terms of its effects on his temperament which was at once happy go lucky and high strung, an unusual combination perhaps.
And one that saw him at once almost universally popular, and yet beset by tics and twitches. Such as the head-shaking habit he thought he’d never kick. But which vanished soon after he quit college at the early age of 16, at which point he which he mutated by degrees from a round-shouldered youth with a Chaplin-esque walk into a full-blown narcissus. But what an inefficient Adonis he was…he couldn’t even cut it at acting school.
Although the ‘80s were a time of relative stability for him, and he worked as an actor for a time, before completing a degree in French and Drama.
But then he resumed his maundering ways. And perhaps it’s significant that one of his favourite songs while at college had been “Ramble On” by Led Zeppelin, a band revered by many of contemporaries. But then the vast majority of these wasted little time in settling into conventional occupations. So why not Runacles?
Why did he ramble on way beyond his college days despite the philosophy of stability the latter afforded him? It’s impossible to say for certain of course, but it may be that like self-styled poor boy and rover Nick Drake, he’d been blessed – or cursed – with the sensitivity of litmus paper. The upshot being that the messages being relayed by the counterculture penetrated more profoundly into his psyche than those of most of his contemporaries.
But that’s not to say he was alone in this respect, and when all’s said and done, he got off lightly.
But among those messages was a clear exhortation to drift, to wander, to rove, to ramble, which was one of the great leitmotifs of Rock from the outset. But, there being nothing new under the sun, its origins lay deep in the history of the avant-garde, which produced wanderers from life and art alike from the outset.
And its first stirrings could be said to have reached an apogee in the shape of the Byronic hero, who went on to exert such a powerful influence on French Romanticism. Which while the last, was surely the most powerful of the three great waves of Romanticism, for it was the true forefather of the avant-garde.
And Runacles became an acolyte of the latter from his late teens, falling in love with one of its icons after the other…Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Cocteau, Genet; and in time, he developed a taste for avant-garde nihilism, and its repudiation of all of the so-called bourgeois values, including sanity and health…even life itself.
He came to adore the idea of early death, and to resign himself to dying young himself, in fact not so much resign as commit himself. And it may be this refusal to settle into any kind of conventional existence was rooted in a desire to be one of Jack Kerouac’s “mad ones”, and so to “burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the sky”.
And by the time he quit university in 1985, he’d been a devotee of this dark ethos for several years, so that his art was more important to him than his life; and he welcomed every experience, no matter how ruinous to his health, if it could serve as fuel to his creativity. And the art that fascinated him most was literature, and he longed to be a published writer, but most of what he’d attempted to write since his late teens remained unfinished
But at university he’d evolved into a magnetically intense stage actor. And he inspired many with his performances; as well as his larger than life personality, so he was likened by one friend to Hesse’s Goldmund; by another to Don Juan; by still another to Buchner’s Lenz. While one of his tutors informed him he had the makings of a heroic figure, if not as actor, then as academic…and even writer.
But Runacles would not have been true to himself had he not failed to justify their faith in him, and so following his eventual departure, he sought work as a deliverer of novelty telegrams. But not for the money, which was excellent, so much as for the sheer joy of showing off, which points to something awry at the base of his soul.
And by the time he did, he was well on the way to developing an alcohol problem, which in later years he’d at least partly blame on what he termed a negative identity. Which is not to say he was negative in his attitude to others, for contrary to what may be believed given the evidence so far, the effect he exerted on others was almost overwhelmingly positive.
Yet he deliberately chose such an identity as a means of making himself more interesting than he would otherwise have been…to shock, in other words. And his motives in doing so weren’t entirely frivolous, for his attraction to the avant-garde was authentic, and rooted in a deep-rooted raging intelligence that also fuelled his constant, frenetic defiance of respectable society.
And looking back from the vantage point of late middle age, he’d muse that having foisted this nihilism onto himself for as long as he had, his litmus-paper mind had finally started to turn on him by the middle of the ‘80s.
To begin with, his empathetic powers started to recede, which caused him enormous distress, because he’d always found great comfort in his compassionate and affectionate nature.
And he started to drink as a means of restoring them. But what right did he have to them, when his negative identity included a corrosive cynicism of the type he so admired in his avant-garde idols? It’s as if he wanted it both ways…to be loved for his personal sweetness…and yet reserve the right to rage like Rimbaud whenever he felt like it.

Yet, his inner turmoil proved an asset when it came to his acting career, and he provided some extraordinary performances in the second half of the ‘80s.
The first of these took place at the University of Cambridge, where he studied for a term in the winter of ‘86 as part of their teacher training unit, before typically taking off in the early part of the new year. While the second was at Notting Hill’s famous Gate Theatre, where he received some fair reviews for his acting from various periodicals including the London Times.
But no sooner had he done so than our boy was on the drift again, taking a job as a teacher of English as a Foreign Language in one of several TEFL schools situated on London’s teeming Oxford Street. But to be fair, he needed the work, for the acting profession provides little by way of remuneration for all but a small minority.
And by the time he did, his drinking was under control, but long-term tendencies had developed into full-blown Obsessive Compulsive Disorder so that his day was marked by an endless series of rituals:
He’d part his hair so that it went from his crown to a specific point above one of his eyebrows, and carry a tiny mirror on his person for the purpose of checking on it throughout the day…iron his shirts inside out with the seams inclining to the right, and touch every item of clothing including his belt with said iron… arrange the items in his jacket pockets so that they went from left to right in terms of importance…constantly wipe the insides of his boots before dousing them with water…and hold an intimate part of his anatomy for a set number of beats…
But if the physical rituals were tormenting, the mental ones were even more so. And every time he met someone, he became beset by a need to compare them to someone else, so that some kind of card index set to work in his mind, proffering faces until to his horror it stopped at one resembling the person in question. And he’d not rest until he’d calculated the significance of their names.
It was as if his mind had assumed a life all of its own and started producing thoughts independently of his will. But he came to view it with a certain morbid fascination; and if he drank enough at night, he was able to sedate it. It was a wonderful feeling.
And yet for all the turmoil of his existence, he remained almost manically elated by life, so that on Saturday mornings, he’d often be seized by a sense of joy so intense it verged on the ecstatic.
For all that, though, he was at all times aware of a need to keep depression at bay, for on those rare occasions he succumbed to the blues, they were so violent he could be moved to minor acts of self-harm, such as punching himself, or striking his head against any available wall.
But they were usually short-lived, and once they’d moved on, the elation returned. It was a wonderful feeling.
Yet, there may have come a time when the latter started being produced not so much endogenously, as through alcohol. For although he didn’t drink on a daily basis, the effects of his nocturnal binges persisted throughout the day in the shape of a euphoria which he supplemented with endless cups of coffee.
But as might be expected, as a result of poor attendance and other issues, he lost his beloved job early in the 1990s.
And having found a degree of fulfilment in his post as an Oxford Street English teacher almost unmatched by any other means by which he’d attempted to make a living, he tried desperately to regain it. But his efforts were unavailing.
So by the summer he’d made a return to the stage, and despite the fact that his work was once more the object of justifiable acclaim, it was a short one. And by the end of the year, he’d embarked on another teacher training course…quitting this one before the end of the term. At which point, he set himself up once again as a peripatetic deliverer of novelty telegrams.
But the following winter saw him roving anew, ending up in Hastings, an English coastal town with a large London overspill population, a distinction it shares with several dozen towns throughout the UK, some new, some older towns like Hastings, expanded to accommodate the newcomers.
And once there, he set about taking a course intended to net him a TEFL certificate, entitling him to teach English as a foreign language on an international basis. Because, he still hankered after his days as an English teacher of foreign nationals, having effectively fallen in love with this vocation.
But if he thought he was going to pass the course, he had another thing coming, because although he was well-liked at Hastings, there were few who knew him there who’d not be of the opinion that something was troubling Paul Runacles.
Precisely what, they’d be at loss to say….but one things was certain…his mind had become such a chaos he was losing his ability to communicate normally with his fellow man. But he still only drank at night, and to such an extent there were times he lapsed into incoherency. It was a wonderful feeling.
Soon after returning to London with nothing to show for a fortnight’s hard graft and a fairly hefty sum of money, Runacles’ drinking assumed a lethal quality from early ’91, although in truth it had done so almost a decade earlier. But there was a new recklessness to it in that it became diurnal as well as nocturnal. And perforce, in later years, he’d have little recollection of the rest of ’91, and much of ’92 to boot, and so struggle hard to recall precisely how he spent his time.
Looking back from the vantage point of the early 2010s, he recalled quite regular work as a television walk-on. And among the parts he fulfilled as such was that of a crime scene photographer for a long-running British police series.
He also saw a lot of a close friend from East London, performing with him for a few years from about 1990 as half of a musical duo in various clubs, pubs and restaurants, and even busking on one memorable occasion, which saw the two musicians being showered with cigarettes from an appreciative member of Leicester Square’s homeless community.
And at some point in what may have been ’91…or ’92, he resumed his career as a deliverer of novelty telegrams for a third time.
While all throughout this period, he wrote…constantly…in a bizarre style replete with archaisms culled from various sources, some being ancient dictionaries, while one was a cheap facsimile of an ancient edition of Roget’s Thesaurus.
In the summer of ’92, he made one final attempt at passing the TEFLA certificate, but the strain proved too much for him, and he left before the course had finished.
While towards the end of the year, he was praised for his portrayal of Stefano in a production of “The Tempest” at Conway Hall in London’s Red Lion Square. This despite the fact he was intoxicated from his very first rehearsal to the second he quit the stage after the final curtain call.
While a little later, he accepted a small part in a play based on the life of James Joyce’s beautiful troubled daughter Lucia to be performed at the Lyric Studio, Hammersmith. By which time, he’d embarked on yet another teaching training course; and resumed his career as a deliverer of novelty telegrams for the fourth and final time.
And while his life was hectic, he lived it as if in a dream, which is to say in a state of near-constant elation occasioned by vast quantities of alcohol.
It’s difficult to explain the appeal of alcohol taken in the kind of quantities characteristic of Runacles’ intake towards the end of 1992 to all who are not nor have ever been alcoholic. But there is a theory held by several authorities on alcoholism that in certain alcoholics, alcohol comes in time to exert a morphine-like effect. Although how true it is it’s impossible to say.
While another proposes that in common with other drugs, alcohol can ultimately tamper with the body’s ability to produce the naturally occurring pleasure-inducing substances known as endorphins, such as serotonin and dopamine.
Certainly there came a time in Runacles’ life when the thought of an existence without his beloved elixir filled him with the utmost horror, for what would he be without it, other than the most hopelessly dull and timorous individual? Which would not have been the case for the Runacles of about ‘82, who was the most incandescent individual even when sober…a natural extrovert whose warmth, while verging at times on the fulsome, was viewed with almost universal appreciation.
And while much of this warmth remained in late ’92, it was being sustained by booze, in fact his entire existence was being held together by ethyl alcohol. So that when he finally did collapse under the strain of his responsibilities, it was a messy crash indeed, provoked first by alcohol alone, then by alcohol in cahoots with prescription medicine. And a few weeks after that, he suffered another crisis involving a potentially deadly combination of prescription medicines.
But by this time, he’d undergone a Damascus-style conversion to born again Christianity; so that his life from early ‘93 onwards was as tranquil as it had once been frantic. Not that it ground to a halt, but it certainly slowed down to a snail’s pace.

Early in January 1993, while still attending meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, he received a call from a man who told him he was from an organisation by the name of Contact for Christ based near Croydon in Surrey.
 He’d got in touch with Runacles as a result of a card he’d filled in on a British Rail train some months previously. He tried to put him off, before he knew it, he was at his door, a neat, dapper man with a large salt and pepper moustache and gently penetrating deep brown eyes.
 He wanted to pray with Runacles, who promptly ushered him into his bedroom, where they prayed together at length.
Later, he found himself a guest at his house deep in the south western
suburbs where Runacles was asked to make a list of sins past requiring deep repentance. And once he’d done this, the two men spent a few hours praying over each and every one of these sins Runacles had made a note of.
The man was a Pentecostal of long standing, and therefore convinced that the more supernatural Gifts of the Holy Spirit such as Tongues and Prophecy are still available to Believers.
In this capacity, he opened Runacles’ eyes to many facts of the Pentecostal world, including the magazine “Prophecy Today”, then edited by the Reverend Clifford Hill, and the works of the late New Zealand Evangelist and writer Barry R Smith.
And to think there was a time Runacles viewed theories concerning the End Times, or Last Days prior to the Second Coming of Christ with rabid contempt. But he was changing on every level. In fact he was barely recognisable in the early nineties to the man of only a year or two previously, having become calm and sober, even sedate in manner.
But he’d not entirely lost his taste for underachievement, for in late ’94, he failed his third and final attempt at qualifying as a teacher. Only to go on to secure a personal rave review from the London Time Out for his acting in a little-known play on the Fringe, which is the London equivalent of Off-Broadway.
And his acting triumphs persisted throughout the ‘90s, a decade throughout which it could be said Runacles survived on the minute amount of energy he had left over after his collapse. But it was hard for him; and in terms of impetus, he was running on empty.
And it may be his experiences with alcohol and prescription medicine, and the health crisis these produced, had left him at the mercy of some kind of depressive condition. But if this was indeed the case, it was one which while debilitating was yet relatively mild.
For he still had a great capacity for joy. But a joy born of the peace that comes from the promise of eternal life, which is infinitely purer and more profound form than any earthly joy born of a love affair with the fleeting pleasures of the world. But which doesn’t necessarily preclude great suffering…for from the time of his conversion, he was engaged in a terrible struggle with what some Christians called the “old man”.
And there had always been a dark aspect to Paul Runacles, but not in a romantic, Byronic sense, although this appeal was something he’d always coveted. So much as one that was in terrible conflict with his warmer, more affectionate side, which was no less seismically intense than the other.
It had once made him a ferocious critic of what he saw as the follies of humankind, while threatening to turn his once tender heart to stone.
But as a Christian, he no longer sought to condemn people, so much as seek their eternal salvation. So this aspect was something to be confronted and tamed, rather than fuelled by corrosively cynical writings, and then partially controlled by lavish quantities of alcohol.
And from the mid ‘90s onwards, he went to war against it, little knowing he had the most colossal fight of his life on his hands. For having been sidelined, it’s as if it had assumed a terrifying new force, and was determined to win. And it manifested itself not just as depression, but intrusive thoughts that seemed to have a life and power all of their own, in so far as they had an ability to alter his mood and countenance for extended periods of time, which made him petrified of them, and so at all times inclined to permanent social seclusion.
The first phase came in ’95 when Runacles made contact with a former pastor who ran his own ministry from a tiny little village in the south of England after reading an article he’d contributed to “Prophecy Today”. And some time later, he travelled down to meet him where he laid hands on him in his capacity of what is known as Deliverance Minister. But this was just the first of several experiences of this kind, one of which saw Runacles being ministered to by a vicar in his ancient village church.
But nothing could cure Runacles of his restlessness, and, unable to settle in a single fellowship for any great length of time, he encountered a vast variety of churches throughout the ‘90s…affiliated to the Word of Faith; Vineyard, Baptist and Elim Pentecostal movements among others.
And in each one, he hoped to find a lasting solution to his shadow side, the darker Runacles who tormented him. And which he saw as a throwback to his pre-Christian self, incubated over the years through immersion in a decadent culture he now uncompromisingly rejected.
And as he did, he acted more or less consistently, notwithstanding a fairly lengthy period of office work, which stretched from about 1997 to 2000, by which time he’d performed in his final play for a long time.
He then made an attempt at launching a modest career as a session singer. And as such recorded a vocal in the style of chanson master Charles Trenet, which received some praise for its closeness to the original. In fact, so much so he was asked to record a second one in imitation of one of his favourite song stylists, Nat “King”Cole, which was rejected.
But while his session career floundered, his singing career was still in full swing, and he served as front man for a Jazz band for two years between 2000 and 2002. And yet when the latter folded, it was as if Runacles himself himself in a social sense.
But there was still some fight left in him. And in ‘03, he started taking himself seriously as a songwriter for the first time, before attempting to place some recently demoed songs with a music publishing company. But none were interested. So he turned to creative writing in early 2006. While at the same time, he set about recording a CD of popular standards, which finally saw the light of day in 2007. And while it received a rave review in the Musician’s Union magazine the following year, it sold in pitifully small quantities.
But he’d achieved a degree of artistic stability nonetheless; and this was reflected in his church life, for towards the end of the 2010s, he tired of church hopping, and permanently settled in a Church of England fellowship in the south western suburbs of London.
And being both Evangelical and Charismatic, it was highly sought after, with up to four services taking place each Sunday…which meant Runacles could conceal himself within the congregation if he so chose.
And so it seemed he was definitively quieted…a bizarre state of affairs for one who’d once been among the most frenetically extrovert of souls. But if he found himself all run out…as had been the case all those years ago, when he collapsed by that muddy field in the Arcadian heart of England. Well, it was only a temporary situation in his mind, and one day he’d be in a position to quit the wilderness after so many years of languishment
And yet there’d be times when, looking back on his youth he’d often weep silently to himself in the dead of night at the end of yet another day spent doing really very little when he thought about it.
But he was being typically harsh with himself. For hermitic as he was, he was far from worthless. For instance, in his eyes, he’d seen many results from a powerful prayer ministry. And he continued to grow as a musician, planning a future for himself as a singer-songwriter despite being in the midst of late middle age. While he was able to make a modest living as a writer after more than five years of trying to set the world wide web on fire with his pen…and failing.
And there’d be times when certain pieces of quintessentially English pastoral music still had the power to evoke his strange and sudden flight, or rush of blood to the head, of over four decades ago. Such as Gerald Finzi’s “A Severn Rhapsody”, which bespeaks a passion for the Arcadian soul of England that verges on the ecstatic. And the same could be said for Elgar’s “Elegy” which tended to convey to him a deep mournfulness silently existent beneath the picture perfect image of English privilege.
When he ran away from his college…like some kind of hysterical gymslip schoolgirl…just the once it was…to avoid being punished for something stupid he did. And it had been an utterly pointless exercise as it was the last day of term, but he just panicked and bolted, and kept on running…
And then there was a point he stopped, because he realised to his horror that he’d arrived back at his college. And he saw his mother’s car. And it pained him to think what she’d been going through while he ran around the English countryside like some kind of demented faun, only to finish up collapsed by the side of a muddy field in the Arcadian heart of England.
And having become newly enmired, he despaired of ever being fully free again. But he searched for solutions on a constant basis. And he comforted himself with the thought that even if he failed to effect an escape, God was beside him, while four decades previously he had no faith to speak of, other than in the pre-eminence of might. For after all, is God’s Grace not sufficient?
And he took courage from that fact, while continuing to plan for the time he’d find the strength to make good on the faith that had been placed in him by so many for so long. So when he looked back at memories of his youth, such as the time he ran away from his college on the last day of term without purpose or aim, it would be in peace not pain. And he might even return to the scene of his flight as if in atonement, and commune with the soul of his beloved England with a passion verging on the ecstatic, and then along with so many others, put the memory to rest for all time.
 
Chapter Two – The Coming of the Absaloms
 
Introduction

When it comes to the key events that helped to create the society that emerged in the American/Western World in the wake of the Second World War – arguably the most traumatic event in history – many would be inclined to cite the 1950s as the fulcrumic decade, and according to Charles Ealy, author of the article “Seeds of Change Sown in 1955”, published in Nov. 2005 in The Dallas Morning News, that’s especially true of its midpoint.
 For all that, though, it’s the mythic 1960s, with its Rock-Youth culture, and quasi-religious worship of sexual abandon and the use of mind-expanding drugs, that tends to be credited as the true decade of change, and with the reader’s permission, I’d like to trace the evolution of the most revolutionary decade of the 20th Century, by briefly depicting the culture whence it sprang, and then – and at greater length – the decade that both preceded and birthed it, with special emphasis on its central year of ’55.
 
The Coming of the Absaloms
 
Were they really so staid and conformist, those much treasured mom-and-apple-pie fifties? We’ve already established that they weren’t, and that they didn’t yield as if by magic to the wild, Dionysian 1960s…
 The truth is that far from being a sudden, unexpected event, the post-war
cultural revolution, whose repercussions continue to be felt throughout a tragic broken West could boast historical roots reaching at least as far back as the European Enlightenment. Since that time, the Western World has been consistently assailed by tendencies hostile to its Judaeo-Christian moral fabric, and what happened in the 1960s was simply the culmination of many decades of activity on the part of revolutionaries and avant-gardists, especially since the First World War. Even Rock, a music which the celebrated American evangelist John MacArthur once described as having “a bombastic atonality and dissonance” was foreshadowed at its most experimental by the emancipation of the dissonant brought about by Classical composers of various Modernist schools.
 Moving to the totemic year of ’55, I begin with a day marked by an event which had a colossal if still largely unrecognised influence on the evolution of American and Western culture, that being the 7th of October, on which five major 20th Century figures, namely, Elijah Muhammad, RD Laing, Ulrike Meinhof, Oliver North and Vladimir Putin, attained the ages of 58, 28, 21, 14 and 3 respectively.
 It was on that day that – at San Francisco’s Six Gallery at 3119 Fillmore Street – about 150 people gathered to witness readings of poems by Allen Ginsberg, Phillip Whalen, Phillip Lamantia, Michael McClure and Gary Snyder.
 All went on to be leading artists of the Beat Generation, a term which first saw the light of day in a 1952 article entitled “This is the Beat Generation”, written for the New York Times by John Clellon Holmes, author of the proto-Beat novel “Go” (1952). Holmes had allegedly coined the term following conversations he’d had with Jack Kerouac in 1948 with regard to the disillusioned generation that had emerged in America in the wake of the Second World War. 
 Kerouac the self-styled “shy Canuck” from Lowell, Massachusetts, also attended this epochal clarion cry to the counterculture, but didn’t read, preferring to cheerlead instead in a state of ecstatic inebriation. However, his roman à clef “On the Road” (1957) which centres on the mid-century wanderings he undertook in America and Mexico – largely with his muse and close friend Neal Cassady – remains Beat’s defining work. 
 After the reading, the Beat movement, which had existed in embryonic form since about 1944, left the underground to become an international craze, with the Beatnik taking his place as a universally recognised icon with his beret, goatee beard, turtle-neck sweater and sandals.
’55 was also the year in which Rock and Roll assaulted the mainstream thanks to hits by Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard and others, although it’s “The Blackboard Jungle”, which, released on the 20th of March, is widely credited with igniting the Rock’ n’ Roll revolution, indeed late 20th Century teenage rebellion as a whole. It did so by featuring Bill Haley & His Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock”, over the film’s opening credits. Originally a rather conventional blues-based song recorded by Sonny Dae and his Knights, Haley’s version, which was remarkable for its earth-shaking sense of urgency, ensured the world would never be the same after it.
In August of the year, Sun Records released a long playing record entitled “Elvis Presley, Scotty and Bill”, featuring the so-called King of the Western Bop who went on to become Rock’s single most influential figure apart from the Beatles.
On the 30th of September, James Dean died in hospital following a motor accident aged 23 after having made only three films, the greatest of which, Nicholas Ray’s “Rebel Without a Cause” emerged about a month afterwards. It could be said to be the motion picture industry’s defining elegy to the sensitivity and rebelliousness of youth, with Dean its most beautiful and tortured icon ever. As such his image has never dated, nor been surpassed. The modern cult of youth was born in the mid 1950s.
 However, Dean himself had been powerfully influenced by Montgomery
Clift and Marlon Brando, arguably the two foremost pioneers of the Stanislavski Method within the Motion Picture industry, who’d honed their craft in the late ’40s at the celebrated Actor’s Studio in New York City. The screen personas of Clift, Brando and Dean, in which vulnerability and defiance were fused to luminously magnetic effect served as prototypes of the neurotic and narcissistic individualism that went on to exert such a seismic influence on the evolution of the sixties counterculture in era-defining movies such as George Stevens’  “A Place in the Sun” (1951), Stanley Kramer’s “The Wild One” (1953), and Elia Kazan’s “East of Eden” (1954).
 Their mixture of incandescent beauty and sullen defiance was hardly new though, having been a feature of Romantic rebels again and again at least since the heyday of Byron and Shelley; and it could be said that their true spiritual ancestor was none other than King David’s much loved yet fatally rebellious son Absalom, of whom it was written in 2 Samuel 14:25: “But in all Israel there was none to be so much praised as Absalom for his beauty: from the sole of his foot even to the crown of his head there was no blemish in him.”
 Again and again, 1955 is cited by cultural commentators as the year in which things started to change in America and the West. When it comes to Britain, there seems to be no doubt that within the space of a mere two generations, a spectacular rise in criminal violence from the low rates of at least the previous two centuries, occurred from about 1955. This same rise coincided with increasingly large-scale denigration of such traditionally sanctified Christian institutions as marriage, pre-marital purity and the two-parent family, which had always been seen as the enemy by various revolutionary tendencies within art and politics, while being respected by the majority, and affected every industrial nation apart from Japan.
As in Britain, so in the US, but given America’s far greater size and complexity, the situation has of necessity been more extreme. Take a remarkable article written for the Fall/Autumn 1955 edition of the Trotskyist Fourth International entitled “Youth in a Delinquent Society”:
Its author, one Joyce Cowley, was at pains to emphasize the general conformity of American youth in the mid 1950s, while also making it clear that cautious conservatism was far from being the total picture, and that there’d been a sharp rise in crime since the onset of the decade. She also stated something to the effect that the nature of the crimes committed during this period were of a shocking gravity that had been relatively uncommon in the US in more recent decades. To support her point, she alluded to various phenomena which are all too familiar to those of us who came to maturity in the 60s and beyond, including the abuse of narcotics, and acts of gratuitous cruelty and violence, from teen gang rumbles to the senseless sacrifice of innocents.
But does all this mean that civilisation, not just in the US and the West, but as a whole, is irrevocably doomed? Many Christians are indeed of the belief that these are the final days prior to the return of the Lord, of which He speaks in Matthew 24:37: “But as the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the Son of Man be.” They may indeed be right, and there are many indications that this is the case. However, in the verse immediately preceding the one just quoted, Jesus makes it clear that when it comes to the precise day of the Second Coming, only God the Father knows: “But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.”
Thence, it may well be that if the nations of the West return to the Judaeo-Christian values on which they were founded, not half-heartedly…but with the kind of uncompromising passion for God that provoked the great revivals of history, like prodigals, broken and contrite in spirit, our great civilisation may yet survive.
 
Chapter Three – Weimar Shadow of Future Things
 
Introduction

Many cultures have made monumental contributions to the development of our great Western Judaeo-Christian civilisation, not least that of Germany, one of the most purely artistic, poetic, musical and spiritual nations in modern history. Yet it could be said that the greatest and most blessed nations are those most liable to decadence, a word which seems to seems to suggest both moral decline and a dark, sinister glamour; and few societies have been more associated with this latter quality than that of Germany between the wars, and that’s especially true of its then capital city of Berlin.
 The Weimar era, which came into being in 1919 and lasted until Hitler’s ascent to the Chancellorship in 1933, has been likened by some cultural critics to the contemporary West.
Indeed, 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 presaged by the Berlin of the 1920s, familiar to millions through Bob Fosse’s movie version of the Kander and Ebb musical “Cabaret”, itself a descendant of one of Christopher Isherwood’s two Berlin stories, “Goodbye to Berlin”, penned in 1933, but referring to incidents that took place between six to eight years earlier.
 Needless to say, the Weimar era was no isolated historical instance of a society in decline, having been significantly shaped by the culture which birthed it.
Germany was of course the birthplace of Luther and the Great Protestant Reformation that has exerted such a monumental influence on the evolution of Biblical Christianity. At the same time, by the dawn of the Weimar Republic in 1919, it had long been associated with myriad revolutionary and esoteric ideas.
For example, more than any other nation in the late 18th and early 19th Century, Germany 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 and of all its great nations, it was arguably Germany that had been most affected by this, even more so perhaps than France and Britain, and to the obvious detriment of Biblical Christianity, even while modernity thrived.
 Thence, the legendary hedonism of the so-called Golden Twenties could be said to have arisen as much – if not more – from her spiritual legacy as the more immediate source of a long and terrible war and its aftermath, but it’s this latter that we turn to now.
 
Weimar Shadow of Future Things
 
Despite the fact that the bona fide Weimar era was set to dawn in all its gaudy decadent glory in early 1923, Germany was yet a terribly ravaged and traumatised land as a result of a long series of crises leading back to the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm III and military defeat in the First World War.
 Following on from the armistice, she was subject to still more bloody conflict in the shape of the German Revolution, which culminated in the Spartacist Uprising of January 1919, during which the Spartacist League and other leftist factions rose up in revolt in Berlin, only to be put down by paramilitary Freikorps consisting of volunteer soldiers, many of them on the extreme right.
 The liberal democratic Weimar Republic was established soon afterwards, but Germany’s post-war miseries had only just begun. During the debates in Weimar, a Soviet Republic was declared in Munich which was crushed by the Freikorps, resulting in the proliferation of far right movements throughout Bavaria. One of these was the German Worker’s Party, and several of its key founding members went on to exert a powerful influence on a young war hero by the name of Corporal Adolf Hitler with their shadowy brand of nationalism.
 To further compound the nation’s woes, The Treaty of Versailles was signed on the 28th of June 1919. Of its many provisions, one of the most vital required her to accept sole responsibility for causing the war and so to agree to drastic military restrictions, as well as a good many territorial concessions including the surrendering of all her overseas colonies. She also had to pay heavy war reparations, the total cost of which came to 132 billion marks, or £6.6 billion.
 The following month, while still in the army, Hitler was sent as a police spy by German Army Intelligence to infiltrate the ranks of the previously mentioned German Worker’s party in the mistaken belief that it was Socialist in ideology.
 The German currency was relatively stable during the first half of this year, but May brought the harsh London Ultimatum, which demanded reparations paid in gold or foreign currency, as well as 26% of the value of Germany’s foreign exports. Hyper-inflation followed soon afterwards, which resulted in the Mark becoming all but worthless. By January 1923, defaults on payments had grown so serious that French and Belgian forces felt compelled to invade the heavily industrialised Ruhr Valley close to the Franco-German border, where they set about securing reparations in the shape of coal and other commodities.
 Many Germans, including skilled workers, started working for the bare minimum necessary for the sustenance of life, as the nation started to become increasingly afflicted by unemployment, poverty, hunger, and even malnutrition, leading to widespread bitter unrest and resentment, one of whose expressions was the infamous Beer Hall Putsch of 8-9 November 1923. This was an attempt by Hitler’s National German Workers Party, including paramilitary storm troopers under the leadership of Ernst Röhm, as well as future leading Nazis, Hess, Göring and Rosenberg, at a revolution modelled on the Fascist March on Rome of the previous October. Of all the putschists, it was World War I hero General Ludendorff who demonstrated the greatest courage under fire, but he was to subsequently disown Hitler. As to the latter, he spent just a little over a month in Landsberg Prison after the putsch was decisively put down by the Army, where he dictated his memoirs, “Mein Kampf” to his friend and fellow inmate Rudolf Hess.
 Somehow, however, total economic collapse was halted under the chancellorship of Gustav Streseman – who was both charismatic and democratic, at a time when such politicians were in desperate need in Germany – by the replacement of the worthless Papiermark with the new Rentenmark, which was introduced on the 19th of November 1923. Streseman had earlier sought peace with Germany’s enemies by calling off all passive resistance of striking German workers in the Ruhr Valley, an act which while having a beneficial effect on the economy, served also to fan the flames of nationalist rage. Millions of middle class Germans had been left ruined and embittered by the period of hyperinflation, with the result that they became susceptible to extreme right wing propaganda, while many workers turned to Communism.
 For the time being, though, Germany – and specifically Berlin – became the supreme world epicentre of Modernism, of creative and intellectual foment not just in the fields of literature, architecture, music, dance, drama, cinema, and the visual arts, but of science as well. While she’d been a cradle of the Modern Impulse for centuries – a distinction she shared with several other Western nations including her closest European intimates, France and Britain – it could be argued that never before had she been quite so fiercely inclined in a cultural sense towards the radical and left-leaning, the experimental, the iconoclastic, the frankly scandalous, nor on so large a scale, as in the Weimar era.
Artistic innovation wildly thrived in Berlin in the years 1924-’29 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” (1925), as well as the staccato cabaret-style music of Kurt Weill, Fritz Lang’s dystopian “Metropolis” (1927), the spectacles of cabaret queen Anita Berber and her enigmatic companion Sebastian Droste, and so on. The same applies to that lost city’s notorious sexual liberalism, which still has the power to shock as seen in pictorial and photographic depictions of her cabarets and night clubs in which license and intoxication flourished unabated.
So much of what has become familiar to the West and beyond in the last half-century, from the philosophies that have dominated our academia for decades, such as Critical Theory and Deconstruction, all the way to the theatre of outrage that is the essence of Rock music pre-existed in some form in the Golden Twenties. But beneath the glittering carapace she carried within her the seeds of her own ruin, for despite the genius that flourished alongside the licentiousness, she was operating largely in defiance of the Judaeo-Christian moral values that have long formed the basis of Western society.
Given that several other European and American cities 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 Great Depression, the ineffable horrors of the Second World War, and the collapse of the greatest empire the world has ever seen, all of which were succeeded in turn by the dawning of the Rock and Roll era with its quasi-religious exaltation of youth…rebellion…sexual libertinism… and the universal use of mind expanding drugs.
Since the inception of this Social Revolution, many of its core values have supplanted the old traditional Judaeo-Christian ones – once damned as Bourgeois by artistic and political rebels – within the Western cultural mainstream. For some this might beg the question: Could a time be coming when the disasters that befell the once glorious Weimar Republic will appear to those of us still alive in the contemporary West to be little more than a dress rehearsal in comparison? For my part, I hope this will not be the case, but needless to say the future’s not in my hands.
 
Chapter Four – Adversary and the Birth of the Beats
 
It would be false, indeed absurd, to suggest that the Counterculture of the 1960s was a unique historical event devoid of precedents and precursors. In fact, it was merely the latest in a long line of alternative societies that can be traced at least as far back as the 18th Century. In other words, by the time of the Hippie revolution, much of the groundwork had already been done, not least during the two immediate post-war decades.
 During this brief 20-year period, the Existentialists, Lettrists and Beats became international icons of revolt… Britain’s first major youth cult surfaced in the shape of the Edwardians or Teddy Boys…a cinema of youthful discontent flourished as never before, fuelling a desire among many young people to be identified as rebels and wild ones…and Rock and Roll took over the world with Elvis Presley as its first true superstar. But it was the Beats who were the true precursors of the Hippies.
 Few today are aware of the existence of the Lettrists, that scandalous band of avant garde agitators who thrived in post-war Paris under the leadership of Isidore Isou, but their contemporaries the Beats continue to enjoy an exceptionally high profile. This may be the result of Paris ceding her time-honoured role as the world epicentre of the avant garde to New York City in the late 1940s, but whatever the truth, the Lettrists have been all but forgotten while the Beats have never been hotter.
 It had been earlier in the decade…around 1943, in fact…that a disparate group of would-be poets and authors of Bohemian inclination had coalesced around a brilliant angel-faced young Columbia University undergraduate by the name of Lucien Carr. The first to gravitate towards Carr was a fellow Columbia student from nearby New Jersey by the name of Allen Ginsberg. Through Carr, Ginsberg was introduced to Arthur Rimbaud, the quintessential post-Romantic bad boy poet whose terrible yet beautiful visionary verse and frenzied rebellious rage has exerted an influence on the development of the adversary culture of the post-Romantic West that is second to none or close to it. Rimbaud went on to significantly inform the evolution of Ginsberg’s own poetic vision.
 Also through Carr, the bookish-looking poet met the boyfriend of future Beat biographer Edie Parker, who was another of Carr’s Columbia friends. This was Jean-Louis Kerouac, known as Jack, who, from a French Canadian family from Lowell, Massachusetts, had until recently been a Football player of enormous promise. But soon after gaining a scholarship to Columbia, things had started to go awry for him.
First, he cracked his tibia during a game, and then repeatedly clashed with the coach Lou Little whom he accused of benching him to excess. The upshot was that he left Columbia in his sophomore year, and ended up drifting in New York City, where he met the two men – both through Lucien Carr – with whom he went on to form the nucleus of the Beat Generation, these being the aforesaid Ginsberg, and a friend of Carr’s from St Louis, the patrician William Seward Burroughs. 
  In 1957, Kerouac emerged as the movement’s undisputed leader with the publication of his second novel “On the Road”, a fictionalised account of the cross-country wanderings he undertook between 1947 and 1950 with his close friend Neil Cassady…famously named Dean Moriarty in the novel.
 Cassady, who bore a striking resemblance to the iconic movie star Paul Newman, was the son of an alcoholic whose early life had included the early loss of his mother, a childhood spent on Denver’s skid row, a spell in reform school, and eleven months imprisonment for theft. So while Kerouac was the genius behind Beat’s defining work, Cassady provided the inspiration as the Beat par excellence. 
 Oddly perhaps, Lucien Carr himself never went on to write anything of note, preferring to father a family and pursue a long career with the venerable news agency United Press International. It fell to his son Caleb, author of “The Alienist”, “The Angel of Darkness”,” Casing the Promised Land”, “Killing Time” and “The Italian Secretary” among other works to be the novelist of the family…but his place in literary history is secure. As Allen Ginsberg once put it, “Lou was the glue” of the entire Beat Generation, itself
the most significant avant garde movement of the 20th Century, as the primary impulse behind the ‘60s Counterculture.
It was in about ’64 , in fact, that Beat started to shift imperceptibly into the Hippie movement.
 ’64 was also the year the Beatles conquered America…but away from the mainstream, a certain Colorado farmer’s son and former Stanford University student called Ken Kesey set off on his legendary cross-country trip from California to New York on a psychedelic school bus he named Furthur, with one Neil Cassady doing most of the driving. He did so in the company of a band of counterculture pioneers, writers, artists, students &c., known as the Merrie Pranksters. Once in the Big Apple, they met up with the New York Beats including Jack Kerouac who, deeply patriotic and a devout Catholic at heart, was allegedly repelled by the Pranksters’ outlandish dress and appearance, and took no part in the coming psychedelic revolution, unlike Allen Ginsberg, who embraced it wholeheartedly.
 The first of the infamous Acid Tests occurred a short time later in 1965, and during these LSD-fuelled events, there’d be slide and/or light shows and experiments with cutting edge sound technology, and bands such as the Warlocks – later the Grateful Dead – or Kesey’s own Psychedelic Symphonette would regale the crowds with proto-psychedelic Rock.
Two years later, the Hippie, wild child of the Beat Generation, became an international media obsession, before setting about the piecemeal infiltration of mainstream society.
This slow co-option by the mainstream of the one-time values of the adversary culture could be said to be the ultimate triumph of the Beat Generation, and all the avant gardes that preceded her…but were Kerouac alive today…you can’t help but think he might be weeping at the thought of it.
For it’s as if he came to deeply regret the adversary culture he’d helped to foment; and yet felt powerless to control. And, instead of forgiving himself, effectuated a flight into the alcoholism that ultimately led to his dying at his mother’s home from cirrhosis of the liver at just 47 years old.
And while he was ten years older than his hero Thomas Wolfe, another in a long line of writers of great and original genius destroyed by the thirsty muse, he was yet far too young to suffer such a terrible and painful death. While any Christian worthy of the name must surely weep at the thought of any sorrow that leads not to repentance and salvation, but the endless night of fathomless desperation.



Chapter Five – From Avant Garde to Global Village
 
Introduction
 
It could justifiably be stated that we are currently living in a Western World whose moral world view owes much to values which until recently were associated with progressives operating within the arts, politics, philosophy, religion etc., and that this morality remains more or less constant, affecting everything from top to bottom in our society, despite sporadic shifts of power from the political left to the right. At the same time, traditional morality – founded on the West’s Judaeo-Christian heritage – is being increasingly seen as harsh and exclusivist, where once it held almost total sway.
In order to come to some sort of conclusion as to how this situation came about, as good a starting point as any would be the early 19th Century, at a time when the Romantic Movement was birthing the concept of an artistic avant-garde on the cutting edge of innovation, not just in terms of creativity, but societal change.
Plausibly, the avant-garde worldview was the scion of a greater revolutionary spirit that had been impacting the West at least since the dawn of the Enlightenment, the great European move towards greater Rationalism regarding the key issues of life. The Age of Reason began towards the end of the 18th Century, lasting until about 1789, the year of the French Revolution, which was one if its earliest fruits.
Many theories exist as to what – or who – was the main driving force behind this spirit, but it’s not the aim of this essay to attempt to unmask these, so much as to trace the course of the avant-garde throughout history, and so speculate on how so humble a tendency might ultimately have come to alter the entire fabric of Western civilisation through a process known as Modernism.
 
From Avant Garde to Global Village

It may have been the great English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley who, by asserting that “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”, was the first major artist to give expression to the concept of an avant-garde on the cutting edge of creative innovation. That said, the first actual use of the term in an artistic rather than military sense was probably made by the French socialist philosopher Henri de Saint-Simon in 1825 in his “Opinions Littéraires, Philosophiques et Industrielles” (1).
Whatever the truth, it’s a recent development, fostered by the early, and especially German and English, Romantics, whose influence on the development of the notion of the Artist as Rebel cannot be underestimated. Yet, it found its first spiritual home in post-revolutionary Paris…which begs the question, why Paris?
It’s impossible to say for certain of course, but what is beyond dispute is that of all the nations of Europe, few could lay greater claim to national genius than France…and that this genius is most encapsulated in her ever-enchanting capital city.
More particularly, though, by the 1830s, and following a long series of national traumas including the Revolutionary War itself, Paris had become the leading world incubator of the most charismatic originality of thought and behaviour. It was a uniqueness, moreover, that has tended ever since to verge on the downright bizarre when manifested by certain of her most gifted citizens, such as her celebrated poètes maudits (2), who have long been the ultimate apostles of the avant-garde.
It could be said that the first generation of these were numbered among the young men who – in the wake of the July Revolution of 1830 – congregated about such wild and brilliant youth as Pétrus Borel and Théophile Gautier, two writers of the so-called frenetic school of late Romantics. They did so with the purpose of enforcing the Romantic worldview in the face of widespread censure on the part of the despised respectable middle classes.
To the Gautier of the mid 1830s, this censure constituted a veritable Christian moral resurgence, which he rails against in the notorious preface to his 1836 novel “Mademoiselle de Maupin”, the first known manifesto of the doctrine of Art for Art’s Sake. Art in other words, as a religion in its own right.
These seminal avant-gardists have become known as the Bouzingos (3), although little distinguished them from the earlier Jeunes-France (4). They were originally members of a Romantic clique known as le Petit Cénacle (5) – allegedly founded by the sculptor Jehan du Seigneur, with Borel rapidly emerging as leader – whose role in the infamous Battle of Hernani at the Comédie Francaise theatre in February 1830 was paramount.
This took place on the opening night of Hugo’s play, “Hernani”, and was marked by violent scenes involving defenders of the Classical tradition, and Hugo’s supporters, who flaunted long hair and flamboyant costumes in defiance of everything the former held dear. In addition to Gautier, Borel and Seigneur, they included Gérard de Nerval, Philothée O’Neddy and Augustus MacKeat, all of whom went on to be numbered among the Jeunes-France.
According to one theory, while the first Bouzingos were a band of political agitators who took part in the July Revolution in wide-brimmed leather hats, their artistic counterparts were wrongly named by the press following a night of riotous boozing which saw some of them end up in prison for the night. They too embraced radical political views, because for the most part, the artistic cutting edge has inclined to the left, while containing an ultra-conservative element.
Needless to say, perhaps, they owed an enormous debt to the earlier English and German Romantics, who did so much to promote the myth of the artist as tormented genius ever-existent on the fringes of respectable society, a Bohemian in others words. Akin to the Bohemian was the Dandy, and of the poètes maudits of mid 19th Century Paris, several were both Bohemians and Dandies, depending on their circumstances at the time. They included Charles Baudelaire, whose essay “Le Dandy” (1863) is one of the defining works on the subject.
The great Parisian Bohemias of the 19th Century were the Left Bank of the Seine as a whole – including the Quartier Latin and Montparnasse – and Montmartre, which exploded on an international scale towards the century’s end, while the first literary work to officially celebrate the Bohemian way of life was Henri Murger’s “Scenes de la Vie de Bohème”(6) (1851). It went on to form the basis of Puccini’s opera “La Bohème” (1896), and the contemporary musical comedy, “Rent” (1996). Later Bohemias included London’s Chelsea, and New York’s Greenwich Village, but Paris remains Bohemia’s true and eternal spiritual capital.
 
The first waves of the avant-garde, and the Bohemias in which they thrived, ultimately produced the Decadent movement of the 1870s and ‘80s, and a multitude of minor sects, such as the Zutistes of the early ‘70s, which for a time included Verlaine and Rimbaud, and the later Hirsutes and Hydropathes, and finally, the great Symbolist Movement in the arts.
However, the spirit of the avant-garde could be said to have triumphed as never before in the shape of the massively influential and truly international artistic and cultural phenomenon known as Modernism.
In an artistic sense, she existed at her point of maximum intensity from about 1890 to 1930, producing such earth-shaking works as Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” (1913), T.S Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (1922) and James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (1922). Mention must also be made of such Modernist schools as the previously mentioned Symbolism, as well as Expressionism, Futurism, Dadaism and Surrealism. It could be said that she represented the triumph of the avant-garde, anticipating her future at the very heart of the cultural mainstream.
Furthermore, whenever Modernism is discussed with regard to the arts, parallel iconoclastic developments by figures such as Marx in politics, Nietzsche in philosophy, Freud in psychology and Darwin in science must be taken into consideration. They all served to fuel the Modernist agenda, which – according to certain cultural critics – is intrinsically antichristian…and there is substance to their argument, although several major Modernist figures have been professing Christians.
Taking things further, it could be said that rather than emerging from the avant-garde, Modernism actually predated it, that is, as a spirit rather than a movement as such, having roots further back into the depths of Western history, beyond the Age of Reason, to the Renaissance and its revival of Classical Antiquity.
 She seemed to undergo a falling away in terms of intensity in the years leading up to the Second World War, while the immediate post-war age brought renewed activity through the Existentialists and Lettrists of Paris, but more especially through the Beat Generation born in her new world epicentre of New York City.
Together, they helped to usher in what could be called an age of mass-modernism, although they weren’t operating alone, because by the early ‘50s, the Modern had formed a strong alliance with the popular arts. In fact, this had occurred some half century earlier with the genesis of Pop Culture, which gave rise to the cinema, and one of the first true Pop music genres in the shape of Ragtime. However, these were minor developments in comparison to the cataclysmic events of the ‘60s.
The single most powerful weapon in the Modernist armoury has been Pop Culture, and in terms of its evolution, the influence of the Beat Generation was enormous. That is especially true of its role as the begetter of the Hippie uprising, which took place between about 1965, with San Francisco as its centrifugal city, and 1967 when it peaked, before ceding to the year of revolutions, which was 1968.
One of the keynotes of late Modernism and the social revolution it provoked, most notably in the 1960s, has been the progressive acceptance by mass culture of beliefs once seen as the preserve of Bohemians and avant-gardists, the most obvious being the so-called “free love” once promoted so forcefully by angel-faced atheist Percy Bysshe Shelley.
This process was considerably facilitated by the Rock revolution which, after having begun around 1955-‘56, segued into the sentimental Pop music that reached its apogee with the Beatles. It then underwent a further quickening at the hands of harder, earthier bands such as those of the first British Blues boom; and so evolve into Rock pure and simple.
By the end of the ‘60s, Rock had become a truly versatile music, running the gamut from the most infantile hit parade ditties to musically and lyrically complex compositions owing as much to Classical music and Jazz as Rock and Roll. As such, it was an international language, with the power to disseminate values hostile to traditional Western morality as no other artistic movement before it, while the most powerful Rock stars attained – if only fleetingly – through popular consumer culture a degree of influence that previous generations of innovative artists operating within high culture could only dream of.
Yet, as the ultimate manifestation of mass-modernism, Rock has not functioned alone; in fact, from the outset, it was impelled by the cinema of youthful discontent of the early 1950s, whose magnetic icons, including Monty Clift, Marlon Brando and James Dean, could be said to have been Rock stars before their time. Furthermore, as the Rock revolution proceeded apace throughout the ‘70s, it was buttressed and enabled by a cinema finally freed from the shackles of the Motion Picture Production Code, which had been in force since 1930 but which was finally jettisoned in 1967, after at least a decade of declining efficacy.
At some point, it seems that Modernism’s unrelenting drive towards permanent societal change reached a logical conclusion. Indeed, once the classic values of the avant-garde had begun to wholly dominate the cultural mainstream, the West entered a Postmodern phase. When this occurred is open to conjecture, but 1980 has been put forward as a likely date. Certainly, after 1980, it became impossible for artists to épater le bourgeois (7) as they’d once done, and even when they strained to shock a public all but impervious to outrage, originality eluded them. Others have insisted Postmodernism began as early as 1950, on the eve of the television and Pop Music revolutions.
What is certain is that things have changed beyond all measure in the West in the last half century or so to the extent that in the 2010s, the age-old dream of political and artistic radicals, and their allies within the realms of religion, philosophy, psychology, science etc., of a world united by humanitarian values could be closer to becoming a reality than has ever been possible up to this point in time. In the meantime, the old world, the Judaeo-Christian one bound by love of God, love of country, and love of family, has to all intents and purposes been cast out into the wilderness, as if there can be no place for its ancient certainties in the paradise about to be born.
 
Notes: 1) “Literary, Philosophical and Industrial Opinions” 2) Accursed Poets 3) Also known as Bousingos and Bousingots 4) Young- France 5) Little Cenacle 6) “Scenes of Bohemian Life” 7) Scandalise the Bourgeoisie.
 
Book Two – Your Lethal Life and Other Versified Leftovers
 
1. It Wasn’t So Long Ago
 
I shaped a heart outside her door
With the matches I’d procured
We had our season in the sun
Our romance when we were young
 
It wasn’t so long ago
A new time may have grown
And so many tears have flown
But it wasn’t so long ago
 
A melody plays from time gone by
All the years between them fly
I’m back in her tender arms once again
Embracing in the summer rain
 
It wasn’t so long ago
A new time may have grown
And so many tears have flown
But it wasn’t so long ago
 
Time rushes by like a hurricane
And leaves so much chaos in its wake
Run to the one you love tonight
Say something tender
Find it in your heart
Don’t wait too long
 
Two lovers kissed on a summer morn
And a lifetime love was born
A love that makes a man a king
And a maid’s heart start to sing
 
It wasn’t so long ago
A new time may have grown
And so many tears have flown
But it wasn’t so long ago
 
2. (Your Beautiful) Lethal Life
 
Shooting star
With a quicksilver mind
You deserve to go so far
Can’t someone stop you
Before you ruin your soul
With irreversible harm?
 
Drinking all day
Every single day
Out of your head on booze
Is this the life
Is this the way
A gifted child should choose?
 
Your beautiful lethal life
My friend
Has sent you around the bend
Your foolish defiant
Dionysian dance
Could soon be at an end
 
But you don’t care
Do you shooting star
As you drift in your blissful dream
 
3. Thoughts of a Forlorn Flâneur
 
Early days as a flâneur
I recall the couple
On the Métro
When I was still innocent
Of its labyrinthine complexities
Slim pretty white girl
Clad head to toe
In new blue denim
Wistfully smiling
While her muscular black beau
Stared straight through me
With fathomless, fulgorous orbs
And one of them spoke
(Almost in a whisper):
“Qu’est-ce-que t’en pense?”
Then it dawned on me…
The slender young Parisienne
With the distant desirous eyes
Was no less male than I

Being screamed at in Pigalle
And then howled at again
By some kind of wild-eyed
Drifter who told me to go
To the Bois de Boulogne to seek
What he clearly saw as my destiny
Getting soused in Les Halles
With Sara
Who’d just seen Dillon as
Rusty James
And was walking around in a daze
Sara again with Jade
At the Caveau de la Huchette
 
Cash squandered
On a cheap gold-plated toothbrush
Portrait sketched at the Place de Tertre
Paperback books
By Symbolist poets
Second hand volumes
By Trakl and Delève
And a blouson noir from
The Marché de Puces
At the Porte de Clignancourt
 
Métro taken to Montparnasse
Where I slowly sipped
A demi-blonde
In one of those brasseries
(Perhaps)
Immortalised by Brassai
Bewhiskered loup de mer
In a naval officer’s cap,
His table bestrewn
With empty wine bottles
And cigarette butts,
Repeatedly screeched the name
“Phillippe” until a bartender
With patent leather hair,
Filled his wineglass to the brim,
With a mock-obsequious
“Voilà, mon Capitaine!”
 
I cut into the Rue de Bac,
Traversed the Pont Royal,
Briefly beheld
Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois,
With its gothic tower,
Constructed only latterly,
In order that
The 6th Century church
Might complement
The style of the remainder
Of the 1er Arrondissement
Before steering for the
Place de Châtelet,
And onwards…les Halles!
 
4. Wicked Cahoots
 
When he made
his first personal appearance
in the dirty alley
on someone else’s rusty bike,
screaming along
in a cloud of dust
it rendered us all
speechless and motionless.
But I was amazed
that despite his grey-faced surliness,
he was very affable with us…
the bully with a naive
and sentimental heart.
He was so happy
to hear that I liked his dad
or that my mum liked him
and he was welcome
to come to tea
with us at five twenty five…
Our “adventures” were spectacular:
chasing after other bikesters,
screaming at the top
of our lungs
into blocks of flats
and then running
as our echoed waves of terror
blended with incoherent threats…
“I’ll call the Police, I’ll…”
Wicked cahoots.
 
5. The Woodville Hall Soul Boys
 
Soon after I’d paid
My sixty
0r seventy pence,
I found myself
In what I thought
Was a miniature London.
I saw girls
In chandelier earrings,
In stiletto 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, rhythmic,
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 pirouetted
And posed…
Pirouetted and posed.
 
6. Spark of Youth Long Gone
 
Two days ago, I decided
To realise
Some cherished memories
Of my beloved little pueblo;
So I drank about five glasses
Of Monteviejo
In preparation for
The rediscovery of
The town of my heart.
Firstly, I sat in the bar
Where I used to meet
All my friends,
And was assaulted
By the prices of the drinks
And the volume of the music.
I searched the place
With my eyes
For the innocence and laughter
Of yesteryear, but in vain…
The young people are forced
Into tight little groups
So atmosphere
Is ponderous and alienating.
Where is the fun?
The wild and foolish socialising?
The comic local music?
All gone. I could cry.
Oh, these nerves, this living death.
I am so full of fear,
Lethargy and fury
I can hardly function.
There’s a lack of innocence
Of simplicity
And is this change
From deep within me?
The freedom,
The spark of youth
Is gone
Or have I merely lost it?
Sophistication spoils
The city ravages
Senses refined
By knowledge and wine.
 
7. Some Perverse Will
 
I’m a restless man
I am never
Still
I’m always spurred on
By some perverse
Will
The grass is never
Green
No peace here
To find
Some demon
Of motion’s
At work within my
Mind
No bed is too soft
That I won’t
Abandon
It’s sweet calm
And comfort
For a softer
One
I’m a restless man
I am never
Still
I’m always spurred on
By some perverse will.
 
8. London as the Lieu
 
Until recently, I had the impression
Of decaying
Along with the moral standards
Of contemporary Europe
With London as the lieu
To which all autoroutes lead.
 
In my room, I was surrounded
By debris
Of my existence,
Lacking the will even to clear
The carpet, whose colour,
Incidentally I came to forget.
 
I ceaselessly tampered with my hair,
Growing it long,
Having it cropped, hennaing it red,
Dyeing it blue-black, bleaching it near-white;
It fell out in bunches,
Dessicated and exhausted.
 
My face grew sallow and haggard,
With bloodshot, inflamed,
Glazed, blue-ringed orbs
And bitten, bloated, ravaged lips.
My body lost its athletic aspect,
And became shapeless and emaciated.
 
9. Lone Birthday Boy Dancing

Yesterday for my birthday,
I started off
with a bottle of wine…
I took the train
into town…
I had half a bitter
at the Cafe de Piaf
in Waterloo…
I went to work
for a couple of hours or so;
I had a pint after work;
I went for an audition;
after the audition,
I had another pint
and a half;
I had another half,
before meeting my mates,
for my b’day celebrations;
we had a pint together;
we went into
the night club,
where we had champagne
(I had three glasses);
I had a further
glass of vino,
by which time,
I was so gone
that I drew an audience
of about thirty
by performing a solo
dancing spot
in the middle
of the disco floor…
We all piled off to the pub
after that,
where I had another drink
(I can’t remember
what it was)…
I then made my way home,
took the bus from Surbiton,
but ended up
in the wilds of Surrey;
I took another bus home,
and watched some telly
and had something to eat
before crashing out…
I really, really enjoyed
the eve, but today,
I’ve been walking around
I’ve had only one drink today,
an early morning
restorative effort;
I spent the day working,
then I went to a bookshop,
where, like a monk,
I go for a day’s
drying out session…
Drying out is really awful;
you jump at every shadow;
you feel dizzy,
you notice everything;
very often,
I don’t follow through…
 
10. All Through the Ages
 
All through the ages
I have faithfully waited
Now I’m ready
For you
To make this dream come true
All through the ages
I have faithfully prayed
You’d come and rescue me
You’ve been
So far away
All through the ages
I have faithfully kept
Myself so pure for you
Except a crush or two…
All through the ages
I have faithfully waited
Now I’m ready
For you
To make this dream come true.
 
11. Time Travel
 
Time Travel’s set me free
And sunk its
Sharpest hooks in me
 
In disguise as a young man
In the city
But the bright young lights
No longer belong to me
I’m not a London man
I’m just a carbon copy
Doing some travelling
 
Time Travel’s set me free
And sunk its
Sharpest hooks in me
 
Seeing faces that I knew in ‘77
When I was young
And in love with London town
But please don’t ask me
Where those thirty years
Have flown to
They’ve just gone travelling.
 
Time Travel’s set me free
And sunk its
Sharpest hooks in me
 
Lady, though your sweetness
Is such a blessing
Tender angel
Please don’t lose your heart to me
For I’m a visitor
From a distant generation
Doing some travelling
 
Time Travel’s set me free
And sunk its
Sharpest hooks in me
 
12. Toilers of the Sea
 
Come away with me
To toil upon the sea
Come away and see
How sweet sea life can be
I’ll sing “Bonny Dundee”
Off the coast of Old Guernsey
You and me,
Are toilers of the sea, toilers of the sea.
 
Help me put that wrecked
Romance away from me
Help me understand
How it was lost at sea
It wasn’t destined to be
She belonged to another not me
So I let them be
Whatever will be will be
For the salty old likes of me
For toilers of the sea, for toilers of the sea.
 
I can stand it if you’re
There with me
For the solitary life at sea
Is enough to make you sea crazy
With the whales and gulls for company
 
We can ponder on
The ocean’s mysteries
I’ll unveil a few of
My old sea stories
You’ll see how kind a tar can be
I promise you’ll be safe with me
When we’re out at sea
As toilers of the sea, as toilers of the sea.
 
13. A Song of Summer
 
Faith, where’s your smile
Don’t be a melancholy child
Can’t you see
That the summer’s come?
 
Stuck in your room
With your winter curtains drawn
While the suburbs
Are all bathed in sun
 
No more winter time lows
Only joy now because
We can shake off the blues
Faith, there’s no time to lose
 
We can go for a cruise
Down the Thames
Or down the Ouse
Or just snooze under summer’s sun
 
Find a village green
Watch some cricket,
Take some tea, as you please
Summer’s made for fun
 
Get some sweet summer air
Feel the breeze in your hair
Forget that sad old affair
He’s not worth all the tears
 
Cast you cares on me
I can set you free
Don’t let me wait too long
Summer will soon be gone
 
No more winter time lows
Only joy now because
We can shake off the blues
Faith, there’s no time to lose
 
We can go for a cruise
Down the Thames
Or down the Ouse
Or just snooze under summer’s sun.
 
14. Stevie B and Me
 
Stevie, we were free,
Stevie, you and me,
On that golden day
Was it 68?
The decade’s last few days,
The whole wild world was crazed,
But where we were was peace
For you and me at least.
 
If I stop for a moment,
I dream groves and country paths,
Green’s “Albatross” is playing
In this our past,
Whole empires were falling,
The old ways were fading fast,
Things never last,
But you and I
Found pleasant peace at last.
 
We weren’t friends for long,
These things aren’t too strong,
We were far from home,
Together less alone,
We drifted far apart,
Hardened up our hearts,
We had so far to fall,
Four years took their toll.
 
We walked and talked
For many hours
Safe under Blue Berkshire Skies.
 
Stevie, we were free,
Like we’d never been,
On that halcyon day,
Stevie B and me.
The decade’s last few days,
The whole wild world was crazed,
But where we were was peace
For you and me at least.
 
15. The Ones We Love
 
Though we fight every day
I can say Honey,
I do love you
With a love,
A burning love
A tender love
A kind of love
That’s forever true
 
It seems that it’s the truth
Between man
And woman
And age and youth
It’s true that we do
Hurt most the one we love
 
So many times I’ve let you down
I’ve messed you ‘round
And I still do
I know it’s weird
It seems absurd,
But I never ever wanted to
 
You know it’s often said
And I’ve seen it
Many times
In all the books I’ve read
It’s true that we do
Hurt most the ones we love
 
You’ve got to forgive me, babe
Sometimes it’s hard
To control the things
I do and say
I’m just a weak and sinful man
Yes I am
Trying to do the best I can
 
It seems that it’s the truth
Between man
And woman
And age and youth
It’s true that we do
Hurt most the one we love.
 
16. Like all the Moonstruck Do
 
If I fell in love with you
I would like to
Make my dreams come true
You could fulfil all yours too
So come on angel
Just one look will do
I’ll lose my heart to you
Like all the moonstruck do
 
We could go all round the world
Just like other
Moonstruck girls and boys
So come on angel
Don’t be scared
We are only young once
Say the word
I’ll lose my heart to you
Like all the moonstruck do
 
Bali Frisco Rio or wherever
You may choose
The world’s our oyster, angel,
There’ll be no more bad news
We could escape tomorrow
I tell you we can’t lose
We will soon be
Saying bye bye to those blues
 
If I fell in love with you
I would like to
Make my dreams come true
You could fulfil all yours too
So come on angel
Just one look will do
I’ll lose my heart to you
Like all the moonstruck do.
 
17. I Let You Go
 
What was I thinking
I let you go
I wasn’t drinking still
I let you go
Where was my head at to
Let you go
I can’t accept that I just
Let you go
 
I wish I could make
Amends
So we could at least
Be friends
I have no real
Reason why
I let you say goodbye
 
Did I confuse you when
I let you go
Such a fool to have
Let you go
You were so precious still
I let you go
Worth more than jewels still
I let you go
 
I wish we could start again
I’d be quite a diff’rent man
I’ve learned quite a lot
Since then
I know how to keep a friend
 
We could meet up in the
Centre of town
And I’d explain my motivations
About how I came
To let you down
And all those other
Explications and complications
 
I’m not asking for
Romance
Just give me half
A chance
Cos’ I got a real
Good heart
So how ’bout
A brand new start?
 
What was I thinking
I let you go
I wasn’t drinking still
I let you go
Where was my head at
To let you go
I can’t accept
That I just let you go
 
18. Time Was I Was (A Wand’rin’ Star)
 
Time was I was a wandering star
With a restless quenchless soul
Time was I had an unquiet heart
And from dream to dream I’d roam
 
Well I thought I was a free bird
And I didn’t have a worldly care
Till I found myself abandoned and
Alone I cried but you weren’t there
 
Now all I really want is you is you is you
 
Time was I played the gadabout
Thought I did not need a home
Time was I thought I was so smart
I could do it all alone
 
Till it dawned on me that there would
Come a time when you would say: OK
If that’s the way you want it, babe,
I’ll leave you to go on your way
 
Now all I really want is you is you is you
 
Book Three – Seven Chapters from a Sad Sack Loser’s Life
 
Chapter One
 
Sometime in the early 21st Century, it occurred to David Cristiansen, and not for the first time, that he was a loser. In fact not just loser but a king-size loser, a loser among losers, a loser supreme.
The contemplation that he was the best at what he did afforded him some consolation at those times of the day when his status in life meant the most to him; such as in those last few hours before he turned in for the night.
Yet the fact remained he’d failed in almost every conceivable area of life. And so ended up living alone in an apartment adjacent to his parents’ suburban home at the advanced age of 55, unmarried and childless, and without fortune, profession or vehicle.
As to the areas in which he hoped to succeed since he was a teenager with the world at his delicate feet, he had precious little to show for his labours but for a few baubles of which he was unfeasibly proud. But in the end, they amounted to very little; and deep down inside he knew that all too well, despite the swaggering attitude he affected.
And it hurt him terribly to realise he wasn’t a genius after all, so much as a regular sad sack with delusions of grandeur; as actor, musician and writer.
“I’m not done yet,” he’d boast to himself, or to anyone else who might listen, and to look at him, you might think he had a point. For despite his age, he still possessed a remnant of what was once a truly remarkable physical beauty; as well as a magnetic charm that drew others to him irresistibly.
Yet, many would insist David was foolish to lament all he had lost in terms of opportunities for fame, status and glory and all the wondrous things that accompany these. For after all, these are things one cannot take with us when we quit this earth, and life is short, so terribly short that it is described in the Bible as a “vapour”.
And there were times his still handsome eyes failed to see this truth, as if they’d become clouded o’er by the tears he often shed at night for his wasted past, and for the pain he felt when he thought of all he had lost. While at others, it became manifestly clear to him, and he rejoiced as the most fortunate of men. Yet, it could have all been so different.
He’d been born at the tail end of the Goldhawk Road, a lengthy street within the limits of inner West London, while his first home was a little Victorian cottage in the long-demolished Bulmer Place in Notting Hill. And you’ll search in vain for it in any London map, although you’ll still be able to locate a Bulmer Mews, tucked away some yards
from the main road of Notting Hill Gate.
His brother Dany was born two and a half years later, by which time his parents had been able to afford their own house in Bedford Park in what was then the London Borough of Acton.
During David’s boyhood it was still demographically mixed, yet well on the way to becoming completely gentrified.
Future Who front man Roger Daltry had relocated there from nearby Shepherds Bush when he was 11 years old in 1955 or ’56.
And a few years later, he formed a group in the Skiffle style called The Detours, which would go on to shape-shift into The Who, whose furiously hedonistic music and philosophy would go on to make a permanent impression on the Western psyche; and help fuel the British Invasion of the American Pop charts.
David’s father Pat had been born Patrick Clancy Cristiansen in Rowella, Tasmania, and raised in Sydney as the son of a Danish father and English mother.
At around eight years old, he won a scholarship to the Sydney Conservatory of Music, soloing for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra on a single occasion shortly afterwards.
And soon after his father’s death on the eve of the second world war, he set off with his mother and two siblings for Denmark, his father having expressed a wish to be buried in his native land. And then on to London where he studied both at the Royal Academy of Music and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
He joined the London Philharmonic 0rchestra while still a teenager, and during the Blitz on London, served in the Sea Cadets as a signaller, seeing action as such on the hospital ships of the Thames River Emergency Service.
While David’s mother had entered the world as Angela Jean Elizabeth Watson in the city of Brandon, Manitoba on the 13th of November 1915. However, while still an infant she’d moved with her parents and four siblings to the Grandview area of East Vancouver.
Many of Grandview’s earliest settlers were in shipping or construction work, and largely of British origin. Indeed, Angela’s own father was a builder and electrician from the little town of Castlederg in County Tyrone, Ireland. While her mother hailed from the great industrial city of Glasgow.
At high school, she came into her own in the Glee Club, thanks to a singing voice of rare beauty and quality. And in time was able to make her living exclusively as a soprano singer; while many of her greatest triumphs took place at Vancouver’s famous Theatre Under the Stars in Stanley Park, which officially opened on August the 6th 1940.
After the war, she hoped to expand her career either in the US or the UK, but despite a successful audition for the San Francisco Light Opera Company, ultimately opted for England, a ticket to sail having become available to her.
And so she set off for the country of her forefathers laden with letters of recommendation from her singing teacher, as well as numerous press cuttings from her brilliant Canadian career.
And within a short time of doing so, she met Pat Cristiansen through their shared profession, and they married in the summer of 1948.
Seven years later, they decided to have their first child, but Angela was repeatedly informed by her doctor she might miscarry. In the event, David breathed his first on the 7th of October 1955.
While his first school was a kind of nursery school held locally on a daily basis at the private residence of one Miss Henrietta Pearson, and then aged 4 years old, he joined the exclusive Lycée Francais du Sud Kensington, where he was to become bilingual by the age of about four years old.
Almost every race and nationality under the sun was to be found in the Lycée in those days… and among those who went on to be good pals of David’s were kids of English, French, Jewish, American, Yugoslavian and Middle Eastern origin.
His first two closest playground pals were Esther, the dusky scion of a successful Norwegian character actor and a beautiful Israeli dancer, and Craig, an English kid like himself, and for a time, they formed an unlikely but inseparable trio:
“Hi kiddy,” was Esther’s sacred greeting to her beloved blood brother, and David would respond in kind.
While not a typical Lycée father in his patched canvas trousers, David’s father Pat was determined Dany and he enjoy the best and richest education imaginable, and to this end, he worked, toiled incessantly in the tough London session world.
And so that they be distinguished from the common run of British boys with their short back and sides they were dressed in lederhosen with their heads shorn like convicts. These boys would be different. And David certainly set himself apart from the outset not least though his physical appearance, whose remarkable thinness was enhanced by long-lashed blue eyes so enormous as to verge on the alien.
He was also the kind of child who’d remove a periodical from a neighbour’s letter-box on Esmond Road, and then mutilate it before re-posting it…donate a loaf of ancient green bread to another by posting it over the wall…and destroy still another’s brand new balsa wood fence while trying to retrieve a stray ball, going through one rung after the other with a sickly dull thud…thud…thud…much to the hilarity of his close pal Jacko. But the neighbour couldn’t see the funny side.
The era’s famous social revolution kicked in in about 1963, and yet for all that, seminal Pop groups such as the Searchers and the Dave Clark Five – even the Beatles themselves – were quaint and wholesome figures in a still innocent England. They fitted in well in a nation of Norman Wisdom pictures and the well-spoken presenters of the BBC Home or Light Service, of coppers, tanners and ten bob notes, sweet shops and tuppeny chews.
It was in ’63 that Beatlemania invaded David’s world, and he first announced his own status as a maniac at the Lycée in that landmark year; but within a short time, a single new group had started threatening the Beatles’ position as David’s favourite in the world. They were the Rolling Stones; although an initial reaction to what he saw as a rough and sullen performance of Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away” on TV, was one of bitter disappointment.
But before long, he’d become utterly entranced by these martyrs to the youth movement, and during a musical discussion he had in about 1965 with some of the new breed of English roses, who may or may not have been flaunting mod girl fringes and kinky boots, David proudly announced his undying fealty.
One of the girls was a Fab Four loyalist and had the requisite seraphic smile, while another preferred a certain Geordie combo, and acted cooler than the rest, as if these British Bluesmen were somehow superior to mere Pop acts like the Beatles and the Stones. While David felt compelled to ask her a question about her favourite band, while casting aspersions upon the physical loveliness of one of their number, which provoked a flustered response from the apoplectic Pop fan.
 
During this golden era, David divided his time between the Lycée and his West London stomping ground, and from a very young age, took Judo classes in South Kensington. And it was there that one of his teachers, a former British international who’d fought in the first ever World Judo championships in Japan, once despairingly confessed:
“I always know it’s Saturday when I hear Cristiansen’s voice.”
Later, he took classes in the somewhat rougher London suburb of Hammersmith. But if he thought he was going to raise Cain there he had another thing coming, given that its owner was a one-time captain of the British international team who’d served as an air gunner with No 83 Squadron RAF during World War II. He later held Judo classes in Stalag 383.
David resumed classes with him in the early ‘70s, this time in Karate, until he got it into his head that he no longer wished to have anything to do with anything martial, precious blooming aesthete that he was.
For all that, though, he was rarely happier than on those Wednesday evenings he attended the 20th Chiswick Wolf Cub pack.
Memories such as the solemnity of his enrolment, and being helped up a tree by an older cub to secure his Athletics badge remained with him for many years afterwards. As did the times he won his first star, and his swimming badge, with its peculiar frog symbol, as well as the pomp and the seriousness of a mass meeting he attended, with its different coloured scarves, sweaters and hair.
And then there was the Saturday afternoon when, following a soccer match between rival cub teams during which David dirtied his boots by standing around in the mud, and his elbow by tripping over a loose bootlace, an older cub offered to take him home. So they made their way to the bus stop through underground passageways teeming with rowdy kids, both white and West Indian, all shod in black plimsolls with elastic side strips…or so it seemed.
“Shuddup!” shouted David’s new protector,
“Where exactly are you taking me?” David queried anxiously.
“The bus stop at Chiswick ‘Oigh Stree’ is the best plice, oi reck’n. You be awroigh’ theah, me lil’ mite.”
David became convinced he’d never see his home again, and so started to loudly wail, his cherubic little face contorted into a hideous mask of anguish; and as they mounted the bus, faces both white and black suddenly turned towards him in concern, and what a strange sight he must have made, this tyke in distress, surrounded by a bevy of older wolf cubs.
After a few moments, David’s new found friend, his brow furrowed with concern, as if he’d done his frail young charge some unspeakable wrong, assured him:
“Oim gonna drop y’orf where yer dad pu’ y’on.”
Then, David saw a street he recognised, and promptly left his seat, grinning uncontrollably:
“This’ll do,” he announced.
“Wai’, Dave!” his friend cried out, “are you shoa vis is awroigh’?”
“Yup!” David replied him, as he stepped off the bus, which then moved on down the street and out of his life forever.
There was a point in the mid 1960s when David was dubbed “Le Général” by his form teacher, by which time he’d be found barking orders in the playground to a tight circle of friends. While in the classroom, he’d sit at the back, leaning against the wall with his cronies, while pretending to smoke a fat cigar like a Chicago tough guy.
Certainly he was not above organising elaborate playground deceptions; and one of these involved his pretending to banish one of his best friends, Bobby, from whatever activity they had going on at the time.
Bobby played along by putting on a superb display of water works, which had the desired effect of arousing the tender mercies of some of the girls. They duly rounded on David for his hard-heartedness, but he refused to budge, and of course it was all a big joke, and Bobby and he had never been closer.
If he was “Le Général” at the Lycée, back home he saw himself as the leader of the kids whose houses backed onto the dirty alley that ran parallel to his side of the Esmond Road.
One day, he crossed the road to announce a feud with the kids of the clean alley, so-called because it was concreted over rather than being just a dirt track.
Soon after the feud had thawed, Dany and he went over to pal around with some of the clean alley kids who he now saw as his allies, but there must have still been some bad blood because before long, a scrap was under way and he was getting the worst of it.
“Hit him, David,” his brother urged above the chilling din of the clean alley loyalists baying for his hot young blood to flow, but the best he could manage was to briefly get his antagonist into a headlock. Finally he agreed to leave, and as he cycled off, one of the clean alley kids kicked his bike, so that it squeaked all the way home in unison with great heaving sobs.
But if David’s good mate Paulie had been with him on that afternoon in the clean alley, it’s unlikely he would have had to suffer as he did. He lived virtually opposite the Cristiansen family in Bedford Park, but was from another dimension altogether, a skinny cockney kid with muscles like pure steel who seemed to have been born to wage war on the bomb sites of post-war London. And when he’d made his first personal appearance in the dirty alley on someone else’s rusty bike, screaming along in a cloud of dust it rendered all its denizens speechless and motionless.
“Davy!” He’d always cry when he wanted his treasured friend’s attention, while their wicked cahoots included howling at the top of their lungs into random blocks of flats, and then running away, as their echoed screams blended with incoherent threats of:
“I’ll call the Police, I’ll…”
Yet, David’s mum made a point of liking him; and he was always welcome to come to tea with the Cristiansen family at five twenty five; even though one of her closest friends, Helena Jacobs, expressed concern over David’s association with Paulie, as if he might end up going to the bad. And incredibly, she was not alone in thinking this. For far from being some latter day Jack Dawkins, is it not fair to say David was just a lovable little imp causing mayhem in a leafy London suburb; and as one of those premature romantics who never go through a phase of detesting the fair sex, blessed with a naturally tender heart?
And if ever proof was needed that puppy love can be as agonisingly painful as its adult counterpart, it came in the shape of his adoration, as a fantastically skinny nine year old, of a young blonde girl of about his age with a strong London accent whom he met through no fault of his own in the midst of that most mythologized of decades of recent times.
It was the year of ’65; and he knew this to be an absolute fact thanks to certain songs which, even when played in the early 2010s, took him violently back to the time of his love for little June Cassidy.
And each and every one of these tunes, such as the Fab Four’s “We Can Work it Out” and Pet Clark’s strangely bitter-sweet “My Love” stemmed from that most totemic of years when Pop started mutating piecemeal into Rock; and London was in mid swing with Carnaby Street as its trendy epicentre.
She announced herself to him with a radiant smile one afternoon while they were both attending classes at their local swimming pool soon after asking him whether his name was David. After he’d confirmed to her that indeed it was, she confessed her reason for having so unexpectedly entered his world:
“My mum knows your mum,” she chirpily informed him, before explaining that her mother Maryanne had become friendly with David’s own mother through their mutual attendance of a sewing class in what would have been a local education centre. She then turned to her friend and, still smiling, more or less reiterated what she’d told David:
“My mum knows his mum.”
But if she was overwhelmingly friendly during that initial meeting, she was never so pleasant again, but the more David was ignored, the more he adored. And on one occasion, he may have tried to attract her attention by swimming ever so close to where she was sitting on the edge of the pool with a friend, only to get caught up in the splashing of her feet; but he could have sworn she smiled to her friend at this point, and he clung to the hope that this indicated some kind of affection for him.
But such hope was forlorn, for she never spoke to him again, and he was driven to distraction by her indifference, even to the point of looking up her mother’s name in the telephone directory. And oh with what joy he saw it clearly written there, Maryanne Cassidy, and it restored some kind of control to him, so that the intensity of his love was somehow mitigated thereby.
In fact, it consoled him to realise that should he so desire, he could call her, and speak to her, but what would he say? After all, they weren’t friends; in fact, she didn’t even seem to like him, so he let it go, and in time, his love receded.
Yet he carried its memory far into adulthood, despite the fact that were she still alive, she might have grandchildren of the same age she’d been when she’d so enchantingly introduced herself to David in that totemic year of ’65:
“My mum knows your mum!”
 
He left the Lycée in the summer of 1968…before spending a few months at a crammer called Davies so as to become sufficiently up to scratch academically to pass what is known as the Common Entrance Examination.
Taking the CE is a necessity for all British boys and girls seeking entrance into private fee-paying schools, including those known as public schools, which are the traditional secondary places of learning for the British governing and professional classes.
And the vast majority of those who go on to public schools begin their academic careers in preparatory or prep schools, and so for the most part leave home at around eight years old.
The school his father had selected for him was the Nautical College, Welbourne, and somehow, he managed to pass the CE, so that at still only twelve years old he became Cadet David Cristiansen 173, the youngest kid in the college, and an official serving officer in Britain’s Royal Naval Reserve.
Founded at the height of the British Empire, Welbourne still possessed her original title in ’68, while her headmaster, a serving officer in the Royal Navy for some quarter of a century, wore his uniform at all times.
However, in ’69, she was given the name Welbourne College, while the boys retained their officer status, and naval discipline continued to be enforced, with Welbourne serving both as a military college and traditional English boarding school.
The Welbourne David knew had strong links to the Church of England, and so was marked by regular if not daily classes in what was known as Divinity, morning parade ground prayers, evening prayers, and compulsory chapel on Sunday morning.
Later in life, he felt indebted to her for the values she’d instilled in him if only unconsciously, even though, by the time he joined Welbourne, they were under siege as never before by the so-called Counterculture. While failing to fully understand the implications of the cultural revolution of the late 1960s, David was to passionately celebrate its consequences, and take to his heart many of its icons, both artistic and political.
Yet, from the outset, he desperately wanted to distinguish himself at Welbourne…and especially at sports, starting with the great ruffianly game for gentlemen of Rugby Football…and oh with what longing he gazed at the sight of colours on the blue blazers or striped blazers of those who’d earned them on the playing fields of Welbourne.
Traditionally awarded in public schools and universities for sporting excellence, colours weren’t everything David desired; but for a few years they came pretty close.
But he’d not been born into a typical British family, and so attended a prep school…as has ever been the case for the vast majority of those destined to pass into the public school system.
Although, it would be false to assert that Welbourne was exclusively composed of the sons of the privileged, because she wasn’t. And neither was she a narrowly Anglo-Saxon institution, because during David’s time, he knew American, West Indian, Middle Eastern and South African cadets as well as British ones, and several of these were close friends of his.
What’s more, she was supplemented in the autumn of ’68 by cadets from a recently dismantled training ship, founded in 1885 by a wealthy businessman and keen yachtsman for the rescue of London slum boys who would then be trained for service in the Royal and Merchant Navies.
Most fitted in well, as indeed did David, but he was never going to be one of Welbourne’s wonder boys…despite his having been kept back an extra year in the third form, which should have put him at an academic advantage; but didn’t. And he may have done so partly in response to the meningitis he succumbed to in Spain during his first summer vacation. And which necessitated his being hospitalised for a time in Zaragoza, where he became the white-haired boy of several of the medical students, who hailed from such diverse regions of the Spanish-speaking world as Peru and Puerto Rico.
Yet, there were those teachers and pupils who insisted that while criminally idle, he was also intelligent…a bit of a fraud then, or what the French call a fumiste; but for all that, his behaviour did sometimes verge on the medically alarming.
On one occasion, for instance, he went for an eye test in the village, only to return to college without having taken it, before announcing that he’d forgotten why he’d gone into town in the first place. As for his hygiene, at one point it was so minimal that the bottoms of his feet were literally as black as soot, as if someone had painted them:
“Talk about ‘Paint it Black’, Cristiansen…”
“When did you last wash your feet?”
But he never stopped longing to be recognised as being good at something, even going so far at one point as to become a member the college boxing team. As such, he suffered punch-drunkenness at Eton at the hands – or rather fists – of an elegant young adonis with a classic Eton flop. He later commented on an especially cruel blow he’d inflicted on David with a certain degree of remorse…and how deceptively graceful he was, this flower of Eton…king of all public schools.
However, around ‘69, some time after having seen a TV programme about young revolutionaries who idolised Che Guevara, David became a Che acolyte himself, and one of the greatest accolades he ever received while at college came in consequence of a short story he wrote about a young man who becomes involved with Che in his revolutionary activities in South America.
And following on from his infatuation with Che, he came to fancy himself as a full-blown Communist, covering various items with the hammer and sickle, including at various times, a school notebook, and his own hand, which provoked an older, far larger boy into setting about him in a spirit of mock-outrage…but he’d fallen hard for the Hard Left and that was that.
In fact, his time at Welbourne coincided with the Counterculture being at its point of maximum intensity, which is to say between the infamous year of rioting and street fighting of 1968, and that, four years later, when the sixties really and truly came to a final close and which was defined in Britain at least by the artifice and decadence of Glam Rock.
And one sweet afternoon, David found himself longing to join the Hippie throngs he saw flocking in all their ragged multicoloured glory to the Reading Rock Festival from the window of a college coach. For rebellion was everywhere in a desperately imperilled West, and several of David’s circle dreamed of a world of Bohemian freedom lying only just beyond the confines of their college, while intensely close friendships were forged in secret wooded places where they were united by a love of Rock music and its icons with their defiantly androgynous clothes and floating, flouting hair.
Yet, by the early 2010s, David would insist if he possessed a single quality that might be termed noble, such as patience, or self-mastery or consideration of the needs of other people, then he owed this blessing to his education. Within this sphere, he’d place the four years he spent at Welbourne, whose authorities extended him a fair and decent report following his premature departure in the summer of 1972.
They also gave him a good send-off in the college magazine, mentioning his time in the Boxing and Swimming teams, and his tenure as 2cnd Drum in the college band. And so he’d bless his old friend and sparring partner, and wish her a long life in her sylvan sanctuary deep in the Arcadian heart of the English countryside.
 But some forty years theretofore, he moved back into his parents’ home in West Molesey, a small industrial suburb close to the Surrey-London border where they’d relocated from Bedford Park at the start of the decade.
Their own street was quite gentrified, and their two closest neighbours, businessmen with roots in inner West London…Jack at number 12 being the son of a former boy soldier during the Great War; while Johnny at number 16 was the product of what he proudly called “abject poverty” in Shepherd’s Bush.
He was still a hippie at heart; and yet 1972 could be said to be the year in which the androgynous seventies really began, as the excitement surrounding the Alternative Society and its happenings and be-ins and love-ins and free festivals and so on started to fade into recent history.
The golden age of the long-haired boot boy had lately come to pass, and every street seemed to David to be pregnant with menace in the Glam Rock nation he’d returned to, while so many of the songs were like football chants set to a stomping Glam Rock beat. It was as if the spirit of Weimar Berlin with its unholy mix of violence and decadence had been resurrected in stuffy old England.
Such a terrible time to be young; but for better or worse, it would be David’s era, and he’d come to love it, lap it up…
And a change came over him in the summer of ‘72, which may have been caused to some degree by the prevailing zeitgeist, but which can also be traced back to a single defining incident.
This took place in a bar in the little former fishing town of Santiago de la Ribera, close to the Mar Menor, a large coastal lake of warm saltwater off Murcia’s Costa Calida in southeastern Spain, where he’d been vacationing with his family since about 1968.
It involved a young man he’d idolised for several years, and who incarnated a kind of old-school Iberian macho cool. He was quite fair of complexion, as opposed to swarthy, as might be expected, and stocky, with muscular arms. And if he’d worn a medallion and identity bracelet, he’d have been typical of his kind.
By that summer, he was sporting collar length hair, which was still quite rare among Spanish men, as well as large-collared shirts, which he elected not to tuck into his trousers. The style of these meant that his hair would occasionally get caught between neck and collar, which necessitated his flicking it out with a sweep of his hand, and coquettishly tossing his head. This he did one evening in full view of Castilla’s clientele.
While these gestures seemed perfectly in keeping with his swaggering machismo in David’s besotted eyes, there was another of Castilla’s patrons who was less impressed, and he duly muttered his misgivings. But rather than put David off, he came to covet the notoriety that had suddenly been afforded the young Spaniard.
Yet while this incident may have marked the beginning of the end of his identification with undiluted masculinity, his interest in the opposite sex was no less forceful than that of any other male in late adolescence. And if an attractive female happened to speak to him in a public place, he’d be in acute danger of falling in love on the spot. In fact, he didn’t even have to be spoken to:
It was on the ship Patricia while travelling back from vacationing in Spain late in the summer of ’72 that he fell in love by sight with a fellow passenger…a young Spanish girl he saw several times about the ship but was too frightened to approach. So he became obsessed by her, even to the point of roaming the streets of London for several days in succession in the vain hope of somehow bumping into her.
Two songs especially served as the soundtrack to this irrational spell of romantic insanity; and these were “Betcha by Golly Wow” by the Stylistics, and “Last Night I Didn’t Get To Sleep At All” by the 5th Dimension. And like all the loves he’d ever lost, they’d remain with him for the rest of his inchoate life.
As would the vision of a seventeen year old, sauntering late one afternoon in the receding sun, his quest in tatters, yet, who is suddenly drawn to a girlish voice floating downwards from an apartment of a lofty dwelling in the heart of the ancient city of his birth, causing him to ponder, if only fleetingly…“could that be she?”
 
Chapter Two
 
Soon after returning from Spain in the summer of 1972, David Cristiansen was launched by his dad on an intensive programme of self-improvement.
Through home study and with the help of local private tutors, he set about making up for the fact that he’d left formal education at 16 with only two General Certificate of Education passes to his name, where a respectable amount would be no less than five.
He took Karate classes in Hammersmith, and among his fellow students were hard-looking young men – some of them flaunting classic ‘70s feather cuts – who may have been led to the dojo by the prevailing fashion for all things Eastern, such as the films of Bruce Lee, and the “Kung Fu” television series.
And while he enjoyed them for a time…in fact, far more than the swimming classes he attended weekly in Walton on Thames close by to his own little suburban village of West Molesey, they were destined to be short-lived.
This possibly due in part to his growing fascination with an androgynous way of life inspired by Glam Rock, which was yet quiescent in late 1972. While Classic Rock was still foremost in his affections if the earliest long players of his nascent record collection were anything to go by.
And he was successfully initiated into the basics of the Rock guitar solo by a shy and sweet-natured man of about 45 by the name of Gerry Firth, who gave lessons from a tiny little abode in an alley on the edge of Walton. For it was there that he lived in apparent content with his wife and golden-haired infant daughter.
While his profound love for the rebel music of Rock and Roll was wholly belied by an appearance which was almost militantly square, even by the standards of middle-aged men in those days. For he wore his salt and pepper hair in a severe short back and sides style, which he supplemented with shirt and tie and sleeveless sweater, and great baggy grey flannel trousers.
Was every inch the typical British seventies dad in other words; that is, on the surface of things, for the truth was infinitely different.
And on one memorable occasion, David tried to persuade him of the superior merit of Classical music on the basis that it’s “well-played”, which Gerry countered with:
“Well, isn’t Rock Music well played?”
David was baffled by his argument, because despite his own preference for Rock, he had no great belief in its artistic merits.
Another thing that bewildered him about Gerry Firth was his admiration for Marc Bolan of seminal Glam Rock band T. Rex, a man he’d always derided as much for his pretty-boy appearance as his simplistic three-chord Pop.
As to Glam, while it was a genre that veered wildly between Pop chart stompers by Bolan, and the more sophisticated decadence of major talents such as David Bowie and Todd Rundgren, it was yet to make any kind of impression on David. For he still favoured the hirsute macho men of the Heavy Rock movement.
“Don’t you find him effeminate?” David once asked him of Bolan, fully expecting Gerry to express due horror at the thought of Bolan’s startling choirboy looks, while continuing to enjoy his catchy tunes. But Gerry trumped him with an answer that caused his adolescent jaw to drop:
“Not as excitingly so as Mike Jagger!”
“Mick Jagger”, said David, correcting the older man as if in a trance.
“Mick Jagger”, Gerry conceded, still with the same stubborn fixed smile on his face.
By the following year, he’d become a massive Bolan fan himself. But at the time he was aghast at what he saw as the older man’s defence of what was still to him the indefensible.
Sadly, Bolan died in a car accident close to his home in Barnes, West London at just 29 years old. Yet, following his premature quietus, he underwent something a transformation both in terms of his persona and his music, both attaining classic status where they remain to this day.
For after all, Bolan must have had something to have so delighted Gerry Firth…to the extent of making a sixteen year old look square for detesting everything he stood for. Quite a blow struck on behalf of the old hipster guard in the generation wars that were still being fought back then.
Late in the summer, David signed up for five years service with the Thames Division of the Royal Naval Reserve based on HMS Ministry on the Embankment near Temple station. And not long afterwards, it became clear to him that he was attracting some attention by virtue of his budding pretty boy looks. But far from being offended by this development, he found it strangely flattering…as if a seed of vanity had been implanted within a boy who’d spent the last few years as a swaggering lout.
To a degree then, it was a case of an ugly duckling suddenly finding themselves to be a swan, and enjoying the resultant notoriety, such as that latterly conferred on the young Spaniard of the Bar Castilla.
Not that he’d ever been ugly…in fact, several of his mother’s female friends had already commented on his looks; but he’d never seen himself as any kind of Adonis. In fact, with his twitching head, greasy lank hair, bony round shoulders and splayfooted walk, he was more like the adolescent from Hell.
Having said that, though, he had nurtured a sentimental streak throughout his teens that placed him somewhat at odds with his peers.
It also made him susceptible to such notorious tear-jerkers as Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “South Pacific”, whose movie version, which he saw at the flicks with his mother at about 15 years old, had a life-changing effect on him.
And the same applies to John Schlesinger’s stunning screen adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s “Far from the Madding Crowd”, which may have initiated a lifelong love affair on his part with hopeless love and high romantic tragedy.
Yet, the softening process that took place in the closing months of 1972 was unprecedented in its sheer intensity, and can be at least partly attributed to the spirit of the times. For popular culture was changing, and hirsute Rock and Roll stars in scruffy denim flares were no longer the last word in cool. While the cinema was producing a new breed of film idol who was a far cry from the he-man of old.
It received a further boost when, towards the new year, he saw former Bubblegum band the Sweet on an afternoon Pop programme called “Lift Off With Ayesha.”
The Sweet had once incarnated all he opposed in terms of commercial chart Pop, yet, watching them prance around in high heels and make up, pouting and preening like a quartet of hysterical transvestites, he underwent what was little short of an epiphany.
Then, several months later, veteran hopeful Rock star David Bowie appeared on the chat show “Russell Harty Plus” with his eyebrows shaved and a glittering chandelier earring dangling from his left ear, and so David’s devotion to Glam became total.
Even David’s mother was charmed by Bowie, when, towards the end of the interview, after Harty had made a joke about his dainty strap-on platform shoes, he referred to the chat show host as “silly”, before flashing an impossibly innocent smile:
“Aww, he’s sweet,” said Miss Ann, who was also enchanted by the wit of Elton John when he appeared on Harty’s show a short while later. But when she caught sight of the cover of the first New York Dolls album, which David had latterly ordered by post through his usual outlet, she told him that apart from the hardest hard core pornography, she couldn’t imagine anything quite so repulsive to the eye.
Yet, Bowie’s sphinx-like charisma was so potent that even some of the most unreconstructed of macho men were drawn, irresistibly, to his art, which combined the most seductive melodies with complex, deeply literate lyrics.
For the cult of androgyny was a powerful force in Britain in 1973, having been earlier incubated by both Mod and Hippie culture, and musical acts as diverse as the Stones, the Kinks, Alice Cooper, the Stooges and T. Rex.
Furthermore, it was reinforced in the cinema by several movies featuring angelically beautiful men.
And yet, you still put yourself in danger if you chose to parade around like a Glam Rock star in the mean streets of London or any other major British city in the early 1970s; and therefore few did.
But David fantasised about fame and adulation as never before throughout the Glam era, and he built an image based on his idol Bowie, spiking his hair like him, and even peroxiding it at some point.
And there will surely be those students of human psychology who will wonder precisely what effect the gender revolution exerted on young men such as David who came to manhood at a time some of the foremost male heroes of the culture resembled beautiful women.
And they did so of course in direct defiance of strict Biblical commands concerning sexual appearance.
Yet David had initially resisted the seductions of Glam, until its leading exquisites came to represent something quite deliciously taboo to him. And he sought to emulate them, resenting his adolescent stubble, which he smothered with concealer along with unsightly acne spots, and which he would soon enhance with subtle application of rouge.
And quite understandably perhaps, he didn’t entirely fit in in his blue collar surroundings, unlike his brother who wasted little time in becoming part of a local youth scene centred mainly around football, traditional sport of the British working classes.
As to David, he came into his own in La Ribera, and it was towards the end of the summer of ’73 that he finally started being noticed in a big way by the local youth, most of whom were from either Murcia or Madrid. He’d croon for crowds of La Riberan boys and girls, who’d make requests for their favourites:
“Oye, David, canta la de Gilbert O’Sulliban!”
“Conoces Cat Estebens?”
“Canta como Sinatra!”
An ever-evolving group forged an incredible closeness that summer that lasted for a full four years, and oh what magical summers they were for both Dany and David. They’d never forget them, nor be able to fully recapture the purity of the joy they knew in the still so innocent Spain of the final years of the Franco regime.
 
Even later in ‘73, the minesweeper HMS Thamesis set out for Bordeaux in Gironde in the south west of France. It was David’s first voyage as an Ordinary Deckhand with the RNR, and he was just seventeen years old.
He struck up a friendship with the most unlikely pair of bosom buddies he ever came across in the RNR or anywhere else.
One half was Mickey, aged about 23, and rumoured to be a permanent year long resident of HMS Thamesis. The other was just as much of a lad as Mick even though he boasted the patrician manner of a City of London stockbroker or merchant banker.
Mick took David under his wing with a certain intimidating affection:
“We’ll make a ruffy tuffy sailor of you yet,” he once promised him, even though both men knew he’d never be anything other than the most useless mariner in the civilised world. And there was one occasion when, during some kind of conference being held below deck, he was asked by an officer what he thought of minesweeping, and he replied:
“It’s a gas!”
On another, after the ship had been prepared for a major manoeuvre, such as a jackstay transfer, and every hand was in their respective allotted position, he was found wandering about on deck in a daze, and when asked what he thought he was doing, casually told them:
“Just taking a stroll…”
And it was incidents like these that made him the object of much good-humoured banter onboard the Thamesis, where he served as a kind of latter-day Billy Budd. Although without a tithe of the young foretopman’s seamanship.
Its crew spent its final night in a club in the southern port of Portsmouth, though it might just as easily have been Plymouth.
The main event was a hyperactive drag artiste who tried desperately to keep them entertained with cabaret style numbers sung in a high woman’s voice, and bawdy jokes told in a deep manly baritone, but he was way out of his depth and the Thamesis salts subjected him to a savage barrage of heckling for his pains.
At one point – perhaps in the hope of seeing a friendly face – he turned towards David, and excitedly trilled:
“Ooh…you look pretty, what’s your name?”
“Skin!” the sailors bellowed back, as in “a nice bit of skin”, which may have referred to David’s appearance.
A little while later, the tar with the beard who’d been seated next to David all night asked him to hold the mike for him while he performed Rossini’s “William Tell Overture” on his facial cheeks. And he ended up passing out on the table in front of him after having collapsed face down with an almighty CRASH!
But he wasn’t the only one to suffer such an undignified fate that bacchanalian night.
And speaking of bacchanals…as soon as he was back onshore, David resumed his growing passion for all that was louche, bizarre and decadent in music, art and culture.
However, increasingly from ‘74 onwards, he turned away from what he now saw as the old hat tackiness of Glam Rock, convinced that Modernist outrage had nowhere left to go. Instead, his devotion started to centre on the more refined corruption of the golden age of Modernism of ca. 1890-1930, and especially its leading cities, in terms of their being beacons of revolutionary art, and of luxury and dissolution. They included the London of the Yellow Decade, Belle Époque Paris, Jazz Age New York, and most of all, Weimar Republic Berlin.
At some point in ‘74, he started using hair oil or brilliantine to slick his hair back in the style of F. Scott Fitzgerald, sometimes parting it in the centre just as his idol had done. And to build up a new retro-style wardrobe.
This went on to include a Gatsby style tab collar, which he wore either with striped collegiate tie, or cravat or neck scarf. Over this, he might wear a short-sleeved Fair Isle sweater, a navy blue blazer from Meakers, and a belted fawn raincoat straight out of a forties film noir. His grey flannel trousers from Simpsons of Piccadilly typically yielded to a pair of two-tone correspondent shoes.
There were those artists in the Rock and Roll vanguard around 1974-’75 who appeared to share his love affair with the languid cafe and cabaret culture of the continent’s immediate past. Among these were established acts, such as David Bowie and Roxy Music, and newer ones such as Steve Harley of Cockney Rebel; and Ron and Russell Mael from L.A band Sparks. Some of Roxy’s followers even went so far as to sport the kind of nostalgic apparel favoured by Ferry himself, but they were rare creatures indeed in mid-seventies London.
As for David, he wore his bizarre outdated costumes in arrogant defiance of the continuing ubiquity of shoulder-length hair and flared denim jeans. And in the summer of ’75, he would even go so far as to attend a concert at West London’s Queen’s Park football stadium in striped boating blazer and white trousers like some refugee from a Cambridge punting party.
While all the while he was surrounded by hirsute Rock fiends, including his professorial friend Jim, who felt moved to enquire of him:
“You’re just taking the mickey, aren’t you…”
But he was deadly serious. And even though the headliners were his one-time favourites Yes, whose “Relayer” album he’d bought the previous year, his passion for Progressive Rock was a thing of the past.
And he’d moved on since ’71…towards a far deeper love of darkness and loss of innocence.
But there was nothing even remotely dark about the time he fell in love with Dutch beauty Marianna, while sitting his Spanish “O” level in June 1974 in Gower Street, Central London. Although she didn’t look Dutch; in fact, with her tanned complexion and long dark brown hair, she was Mediterranean in appearance.
It was probably she who approached David, because he’d have never made the first move, and in all the time he knew her, he didn’t have the guts to tell her how he felt. So, once they’d completed their final paper, he allowed her to walk away from him forever with a casual “I might see you around”, or some other cliché of that kind.
For about a week, he 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 he could have sworn he saw her staring coolly back at him from an underground train, possibly at South Kensington or Notting Hill Gate, just as the doors were closing. But he was powerless to act, and simply stood there as the train drew away from the station.
In time, his infatuation faded, but certain songs – such as “I Just Don’t Want to be Lonely” by The Main Ingredient, and “Natural High” by Bloodstone – would continue to recall for him those few weeks in the summer of ’74 which he spent in hopeless pursuit of a woman of whom he knew quite literally nothing.
It wouldn’t be long before he’d forsaken his twenties style image; nor started to wonder whether Marianna had been slightly repelled by the vast expanse of white forehead that had been revealed by his slicked back hair, slicked back with hair oil or brilliantine.
Once he stopped styling his hair like Valentino, his romantic appeal started to swell by degrees…but this didn’t return Marianna to him. She was lost to him forever, and whether he ever fully recovered from her loss is open to debate. The chances are…he never did.
 
In July, David’s father decided that a week-long yachting course in the little village of Lymington on the south coast of England might help him develop some sorely needed moral fibre.
He was to reside for this period in a guest house owned by the gracious Mrs Edith Drummond-Smith, whom David came to see as belonging to a type of quintessentially English upper class widow native to the sailing-besotted villages and hamlets of England’s south coast. To him, they were all charming if slightly aloof, immaculately spoken, kind, calm and considerate, and distinguished by the most beautiful manners imaginable; although for all David knew about them, Mrs Drummond-Smith may have been the only one to be so blessed.
For he knew little of the arcane secrets of heartland or rural England, his father and mother having originated from the commonwealth nations of Australia and Canada respectively, while his earliest months were spent in a tiny little workman’s cottage in London’s Notting Hill. His veins could boast English, Scottish and Scots Irish, and possibly also Danish and Irish blood. Yet, he dressed as a perfect English gentleman, or rather how such an individual might have dressed several decades theretofore, which rendered him an unusual figure in a Britain still dominated by long hair and flared trousers.
Also resident with Mrs Drummond-Smith were Gilles, a Belgian boy of about twenty, and Mr Watts and his teenage son Dylan, and while all were on the same course as David, they had different sailing instructors.
For example, David had been allotted the course director, Captain Peter St Aubyn, which was propitious, as he was an alumnus of his own alma mater of Welbourne College, a private school of military stripe situated in the wealthy county of Berkshire near London.
All four became firm friends, David and Gilles becoming especially close. As to Dylan, he liked to listen to David’s theories on music and fashion, and was fascinated by his use of brilliantine, even going so far as to dab some in his own hair on one occasion. He did so in the hope it would make him resemble the man who was for him, an icon of “smoothness”, a synonym for cool in those days. This being singer-songwriter Bryan Ferry who was also a favourite of David’s; in fact, David’s twenties-inspired wardrobe was remarkably similar to Ferry’s.
On the first day of the course, David discovered who would be sailing with him for the duration of the week; namely Corin, a cool, tall, dark young man of 28 with a full moustache and typically sporting fashionably heavy spectacles, Tom, a sweetly genial man of about sixty or seventy, and Simon and Peg, a deeply pleasant young married couple. To say nothing of the skipper, a charismatic presence whose wryly solemn countenance concealed a warm heart and “pythonesque” sense of humour.
That evening, David dined in what may have been the clubhouse of that bastion of Englishness and English privilege and English exclusivity, the Yacht Club…perhaps even the Royal Lymington Yacht Club itself.
He did so in the company of Corin, who informed him of his humble origins and the fact that through natural resourcefulness and sheer hard graft, he’d ascended to a managerial position within his chosen profession. They’d become good friends despite David’s bizarre affectations, and Corin’s suspicion thereof…but Corin couldn’t help but warm to the kid despite himself.
But uncompromisingly masculine men such as Corin were always a little perturbed by David, as Hemingway had been of his friend and fellow writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom he met in Paris in 1925. And in the essay collection “A Movable Feast”, he describes Fitz as having “a delicate long-lipped Irish mouth that, on a girl, would have been the mouth of a beauty.”
David loved to play the clown for those who both liked and despaired of him; and Corin certainly fell into this category, but then so did Captain Peter St Aubyn, as he was to discover once they’d finally set sail.
“Take the helm, David, steer 350,” he ordered, and David duly did as he was told, before settling himself comfortably at the helm as the yacht meandered peacefully through Hampshire waters under a balmy midsummer sun.
“Mmm, he cooed, perhaps a little like the youthful Kenneth Williams, this is nice…”
“Oooh, you thing,” said the skipper, causing David to lash out with a sneaker-shod foot, much to the good captain’s amusement.
And then there was the time Corin goaded him for having wrongly plotted a course, and he snapped like a petulant schoolboy.
“Oh shut up,” he hissed, “let’s see you do better!”
And once again, the skipper came up with his catchphrase, but with even more glee than the first time:
“Ooh, you thing!”
On the second or perhaps third evening of the course, there was a large informal get-together at the clubhouse which included David, Corin, Gilles, Dylan and four or five other yachtsmen, the course’s acknowledged wunderkind Daryl among them.
“He comes alive in the evening, this boy,” Corin told the assembled yachtsmen, clearly referring to David’s propensity for getting tight each night, and the shenanigans that inevitably ensued.
“I’m not an alcoholic,” said David.
“You drink three pints to my one,” Corin countered, “so you’ve certainly got potential.”
At this point, David decided for reasons best known to himself to have a dig at easy-going course whiz-kid Daryl:
“Daryl,” he said, “how long have you had long hair?”
“What…long hair?” said Daryl, “what’s that got to do with anything…is my hair long…I don’t know anything about that.”
“Do you realise that twenty years ago with your hair as it is, even though it’s only a little below your ears, you would have been hounded, persecuted, beaten, for being a deviant, a freak, are you trying to ignore that?”
“And you would have been accepted?” said Daryl.
“Oh yes,” David replied, looking over his attire, “knife edge pressed flannels, blue blazer, white V neck pullover, open neck shirt and cravat, a bit sporty, I suppose, but utterly acceptable.”
“How safe!” scoffed Daryl.
“Safe?” said David incredulously, “that’s something I never am, safe.”
“Well, quite frankly, I think you look ridiculous!”
Following this last statement of Daryl’s, David could no longer contain his hilarity…but his laughter was like no other his new friends had ever heard, nor would hear again. For it assaulted the soft-carpeted clubhouse’s quiet and respectable clientele as if it had proceeded from the depths of Hell themselves.
Daryl, struggling gamely to control his own mirth, had gone a redder shade of tomato, while Corin, quivering with glee, hid his face in an attitude of mock-mortification.
“I disown him,” he gibbered, “he’s insane, insane.”
Gradually the hysteria subsided, and Corin decided it was time David had a taste of his own medicine.
“How do you get those bracelets on your wrist?” he queried, referring to the four or five bangles David liked to wear on one wrist in those days:
“Easily”, David languorously replied, displaying his remarkably slender wrists, “I have very graceful wrists.”
“Let me see,” said Corin, almost in a whisper, and David duly handed him one of his bangles, before it was passed around the entire group, each member attempting, with considerable difficulty, to put it on his own wrist. Presently, it was back in David’s possession, but rather than express his relief, he cried out in his distress, having discovered it had been cruelly mutilated by one or another member of his party.
“My bracelet,” he hollered, “look what you’ve done to it…I entrusted it to you and you’ve gone and twisted and bent it.”
The group stared as one at David, not knowing whether to look sincerely sorry for what they’d done, or merely laugh at his distress, and so settled for a nervous cross between the two. After several uncomfortable moments, Gilles broke the silence by requesting to see the injured bracelet.
“Let me see eet,” he said, “I weel try to feex eet.”
Everyone was hushed as the Belgian contemplated the bangle, touched it, turned it round and rattled it, and finally, with considerable calm, placed it on the floor. He scratched his head, as if trying to settle on a decision, and ended up extricating one of his shoes.
David looked a little concerned at this turn of events, but in a desperate attempt to preserve his cool, lit a cigarette, which promptly fell from his slim white hand when a terrible crack like a tree hit by a sudden flash of lightning echoed throughout the clubhouse.
Gilles was attempting to persuade the bracelet to revert to its original shape by raising his shoe, profuse with studs, before repeatedly bringing it down on the trinket with all the strength he could muster.
“Oh come on, it’s not funny,” David protested, reaching out to retrieve his precious bauble, which a grinning Gilles now held out for him, but which, far from being shattered beyond repair, was barely altered from its original slightly misshapen state.
“Ees all right, David,” Gilles chuckled, “I was eeteen’ zee floor wiz my shoe, not your brezlet.”
David looked at Gilles, then he looked at the other lads, then his eyes began to sparkle, his throat to gurgle, before it all came out at once, that terrible infernal laugh:
“Hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi…”
“I’m not with him!” cried Corin
“We’ll get thrown out!” said Daryl.
“He’s insane…in-sane!”
“Come on, drink up, lads,” David barked suddenly, having made a rapid recovery from his latest paroxysm, “let’s go where the action is, let’s go and find a party or something!”
“No, it’s not worth it,” said Daryl, “we’re having a good time here. You’re a real laugh, David, just so long as you don’t go too far. We might as well stay.”
“Not me,” David announced, “I’m getting out of here. I need a change of atmosphere. Who’s coming?”
“Yeah, might as well,” Corin volunteered
“Yah, me too,” the boy from Belgium followed suit.
So, the trio left the clubhouse, and before long, they were heading along a main road, although to precisely where they hadn’t the slightest notion. David performed his manic laugh to each passing car, sometimes even going so far as to stand in the road as he did so, before fleeing at the final second. After a time, though, he tired of this lethal activity and took to chatting to Gilles, with whom he felt such a strong rapport.
“That Belgian girl in your group is nice, isn’t she?” he said.
“Oh yes,” said Gilles, “eef only ‘er farzer wuren’t weez ‘er all zee time.”
After a time alone, they found themselves being trailed by two pretty teenage blondes; and perhaps urged by Corin or Gilles, David turned around to confront them with an unlit cigarette in his hand.
“Can I have a light, please?” he said, looking intently at one, then the other of the two young women, one of whom was slim and petite, the other, far taller, and yet with the same long blonde hair. After he’d succeeded in getting his cigarette lit, he made an effort at conversation.
“So, what shall I do, stay here with you, or go back to my friends?”
“Stay ‘ere,” one of the girls mumbled, almost inaudibly, in a strong London accent.
“Pardon?” said David, and both girls answered him by smiling, so David bid them goodbye, and the trio then continued on its way, with the two girls in hot pursuit.
“Why don’t you turn around?” Corin suddenly said.
“Why?” said David.
“They like you,” Corin announced.
“Really?”
“Course they do. If you can’t see that, you’re more short-sighted than I thought you were.”
So David returned to his admirers.
“What are your names?” he asked them.
“My name’s Julie,” said the smaller of the two, “and this here’s Sue…what’s yours, baby?”
“Why do you call me baby?” asked David.
“Because you look like one,” said Julie.
“I happen to be all of eighteen years old,” said David, feigning indignation.
“We thought you was abaht twen’y,” said Sue.
“Really? Well I’m eighteen and my name’s David.”
“Wha’s your name?” said Julie, gesturing towards Gilles.
“My nem eez Gilles,” he replied.
“Where are you from?” Sue asked David.
“London. Why?”
“You sahnd Ameri’an or somefing.”
“Well, I am half-Canadian.”
“Oh, that would explain it,” Julie resolved.
“Why,” David went on, “where do you girls come from?”
“We come from London an’ all,” said Sue, “sarf London.”
“What are you doing down here?”
“We’re spendin’ a few days on ‘er dad’s boat,” Sue went on, pointing at Julie.
“Has your dad got a boat?” David asked, as if amazed these two cockney waifs should be associated with the super-posh world of yachting.
“A yacht!” cried Julie, “not just a boat. Don’ come from any old family, I don’.”
For reasons best known to themselves, the three young men set on their way once again, and once again, they were followed by the girls, who took to kicking a stray tin can around to make their point.
“I weesh Coreen were not ‘ere,” Gilles whispered into Shane’s ear.
“Why?” said David.
“Eez prezence eez deesconcertin’ zem.”
As if to confirm what Gilles had just said, the girls suddenly turned a corner and left their half-hearted suitors to their own devices.
“See ya, then!” they cried.
“Bye, girls!” said David.
“Bye, David darlin’!”
And with that, they disappeared, doubtless feeling, quite reasonably, that they’d given David and Gilles every opportunity to demonstrate their romantic interest in them.
“I wonder where zey went?” Gilles wistfully enquired.
“I shouldn’t worry about it,” said David, “you’ve got your Belgian girl, haven’t you?”
” ‘Ave I?” said the forlorn Belgian. Perhaps he couldn’t understand why David had behaved in such a cavalier fashion towards two girls who’d clearly been besotted with him on sight. But then Gilles was a normal young man, devoid of the loser gene that causes those such as David to waste and squander every good gift that comes their way.
It’s as if they don’t have enough to fight against, or fight for…perhaps a little like WASP prince Hubbell Gardiner, as played by Robert Redford in the romantic movie masterpiece “The Way We Were”. For at the beginning of the film, a short story of Gardiner’s, “An American Smile” is read out in class by his college professor in which he describes himself as “in a way…like the country he lived in; everything came too easily to him.”
 
The Isle of Wight is separated from the mainland by a strait of the English Channel known as the Solent, and on David’s penultimate day, a trip to this island county lying to the south of Hampshire took place, and the entire course was involved.
Lunch was in a public house in the port of Yarmouth to the east of the island, where tall, slender English gentlemen of the old school, clad in double-breasted reefer jackets and flannels or white duck trousers, were apt to take a tincture or two between sails. Some sported bow ties, and others, magnificent handlebar moustaches which appeared to betoken a former membership of the Royal Air Force. Their wives favoured large navy-blue pullovers, silk scarves and slacks, although by nightfall they’d be in full evening dress.
Back in Lymington for tea, David happened to bump into Sally, a fresh-faced young sailing ace, possibly in her early 20s, who typically scorned the use of beautifying products, but for whom David had a soft spot nonetheless.
“Hello,” he said, “where are you going?”
“Back to my room,” Sally replied.
“Oh”, he went on, “hey, apparently there’s a get-together of all the crews on the course tonight, you know, a few drinks, a bit of dancing, a lot of laughs, are you going?”
“I don’t know, I…”
“Oh, go on,” he urged, “I’m going.”
“Well…okay,” she said, “I suppose I’ll go…uh…this is where I turn off.”
“Oh. Well…”
“See you tonight then.”
“Yes, bye…hey wait! Do you know my name?”
“Yes, of course I do, David, bye!”
“Bye, Sally!”
Back at the guest house, the clock struck five to find David dressed to the nines as was his wont, and taking tea with Mrs Drummond-Smith, who’d have been scandalised had anyone suggested he was anything other than a deeply likable young man with a single, glaring fault: forgetfulness.
She had a duty to charge her guests for the packed lunch she made for each of them every day, even if they forgot to take it, but never did in David’s case, despite the fact he was the only one of her guests to routinely leave his lunch behind.
She seemed to have something of a soft spot for him, for he may have reminded her of the bachelor dandies of her youth.
A little later, David, Corin and Gilles set out together for the dance, briefly stopping off at a pub for some much needed Dutch courage, although David’s was the greatest need by a hectare or three.
“Half of bitter, please,” Corin ordered.
“Half a shandy, pleez,” came Gilles’ modest request.
“Double scotch for me please,” said David…and a mere ten minutes later, he was ordering a second one, while Corin wisely passed, and Gilles ordered his usual half of shandy. Some ten minutes after this, David started up on the pints.
“Come on, David,” said an exasperated Corin, “let’s go”.
“We mus’ go,” Gilles agreed.
“Drink up!” Corin went on, “we don’t want you in a disordered state before the dance, now, do we?”
David swallowed his pint and the three departed the pub. Shortly afterwards, they arrived at the site of the evening’s festivities which was a large hall filled with tables and chairs with a space left for dancing. But David’s first concern was locating Sally.
He saw her sitting next to a slim, smart, casually dressed young man with fashionable light blond collar length hair and a neatly trimmed beard, and approached the apparently happy couple, perhaps half-expecting she’d quit her date just to be with him.
“Hello, Sally,” he said.
“Hello,” she replied.
“Do you want a drink?” he asked.
“Er, no thanks,” she said, “but I will have one later on.”
“Okay then,” he agreed, before making his way to the bar.
“Double scotch!” he ordered…and then some ten minutes later, he ordered a second one, soon after which, things went a bit hazy for him. However, one thing is certain…the evening ended with his jumping fully-clothed into the filthy waters of Lymington harbour.
What happened is that Corin and Gilles had spent some time wrestling with him, pretending they were about to throw him in, and then, as if exhausted by their efforts, they relented. At which point, to their amazement, David launched himself in by his own volition, before spending some time in his soaking wet clothes discussing music with a coterie of hippies encamped nearby listening to “The End” by the Doors.
 The final day of the course was a melancholy one for David. For someone had told him it was possible to catch a deadly disease from swimming in the waters of Lymington harbour.
Around lunchtime, Dylan’s father Mr Watts found him gazing into the very part of the harbour into which he’d elected to project himself the previous evening, and set about reassuring him that in all probability he’d escape from his injudicious dip unscathed.
Soon afterwards, David set off for the final time for Mrs Drummond-Smith’s elegant domicile in order to pack in anticipation of his father’s arrival, expected later in the day. On the way there, he had a chance meeting with Captain Peter St Aubyn, who urged him to mend his ways in a spirit of paternal concern:
“David”, he said, “stop the drinking and the chasing of the birds…it’s a hard world out there…”
While he was touched by the skipper’s words, he might as well have told him to stop breathing. He was only 18 after all.
That’s not to say, however, that the vast majority of young people at any given time aren’t equipped for success, because they are. It’s just that the David Cristiansens of this world are never among them. For them, the party never ends, until it’s forcibly closed down forever.
Soon after reaching the guest house that had been his home for the past fortnight, David discovered that his dad had already arrived. In fact, he was getting on famously with Mrs Drummond-Smith, with whom he was engaged in an animated discussion, whose central topic was: David himself.
“He is a little eccentric,” he told her at one point, which caused the gracious lady to almost cry out in protest, as if it had been a mortal insult.
“Eccentric?” she exclaimed, “oh, anything but…but he does have one fault, I’m afraid to say….he is rather forgetful.”
She then went on to tell David that Gilles had been looking for him earlier on in the day, and was sorry to have missed him. Of course, were this today, the two young men would have already exchanged e-mail addresses or cell phone numbers. But in those days, precious friendships and romances forged over extended periods of time were all too often discarded overnight to be lost forever. The reason being that the only way to stay in contact was via telephone or snail mail, which required a certain amount of dedication, and not everyone had the patience for it.
The words of singer-songwriter Carole King’s “So Far Away”, from her classic “Tapestry” album from 1970, “So far away, doesn’t anyone stay in one place anymore?’, could be said to be an apt description of social life in the mid 1970s for some people. You could say goodbye to a person you loved on any day of the week, in any month of any year, and never see them again as long as you lived.
Indeed, after the summer of ’74, David never saw Gilles, or Corin, or Dylan, or Daryl, or Sally, or Captain St Aubyn, or Mrs Drummond-Smith, or the two blonde teenagers who’d tried so hard to elicit his romantic interest ever again. But he never forgot them, nor the events of that faraway summer of so long ago. 

Chapter Three

The summer of ’74 was one of the most blissful lifelong loser David Cristiansen ever spent at the beautiful little former fishing village of Santiago de la Ribera; and there were a good few of those.
Each afternoon, he’d meet up with friends both male and female on the jetty facing his apartment on the Mar Menor, which was more or less deserted after lunch, where they’d listen to Bowie on cassette, or Donny keening “Puppy Love” on a portable phonograph, and generally enjoy being young and carefree in a decade of endless possibilities.
To some youthful Spanish eyes back in ’74-’76, David was an almost impossibly exotic figure from what was then the most radical and daring city in Europe, and he played his image up to the hilt. In truth, though, he was barely less sheltered and innocent than they, and how wonderful it felt for him to bask in their soft Mediterranean loveliness for a few brief seasons.
However, a change came over Spain with Franco’s passing, and the birth of the so-called “Movida”, which could be said to be the Spanish equivalent of London’s Swinging Sixties revolution. So that, by David’s last vacation in La Ribera in the summer of ’84, it was he who was in awe of the local youth rather than the other way around. For they seemed so cool to him, dancing their strange jerky chicken wing dance to the latest New Pop hits from Britain.
By then, of course, most of his old friends had vanished into their young adult lives, and his time as the undisputed English prince of La Ribera long passed.
He returned to London in late summer ’74 with a deep tan and his long hair bleached bright yellow by the sun.
Only days afterwards, he found himself on HMS Ministry, moored then as today on the Embankment near Temple station. This involved his 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, he was approached by an old sailor who kept going on about how good looking he was; but he was no predator, just a sweet lonely old Scotsman who wanted someone to talk to for a few minutes, and David was happy to oblige.
He even went so far as to agree to a meeting with him the same time the following week, but he had no intention of keeping it. Besides, it wasn’t long before HMS Thamesis was on its way to Hamburg, second largest city of Germany and its principle port.
Once they’d arrived, one of the CPOs warned David not to wander around Hamburg alone, for fear he might end up being ravaged and dumped in some back alley, or worse.
He duly joined up with a group of about three or four other ratings on his first night ashore, and they headed straight for the Reeperbahn in the bewitchingly vicious St Pauli red light district, which was in such stark contrast to the leafy outer suburbs, where David found himself, possibly a day or so later, through a specially organised coach trip.
A gang of them ended up in a park where David had his picture taken on a bridge by a reporter for the Surrey Comet, before a group of breathless tittering schoolgirls asked him to join them in some photos.
On the way back to the ship, one of the sailors announced he’d been quite a hit with the Hamburg teenyboppers, while another wryly opined:
“It’s cos ‘e’s blond, innit…”
Whatever the truth, their simple unaffected joy of life must have seemed so touching to David, especially in the light of what girls barely older than they were subjecting themselves to a mere few miles away.
Some months later, in what was by then ‘75, David became a student at Prestlands Technical College which lay, then as now, on the fringes of Weybridge, an affluent outer suburb of south west London.
In semi-pastoral Prestlands, as in his beloved La Ribera, he learned to be a social being after years of near-seclusion, first at Welbourne and then as a home student. So, attention came to be a potent narcotic for him in the mid 1970s.
However, despite constant displays of flamboyant self-confidence, those who tried to get to know to know him on an intimate level found themselves confronted with a paradoxically inhibited individual.
The regular Prestlands Disco was a special event for David. And on one occasion early on in a Disco night, he got up in front of what seemed like the whole college and delivered a solo dance performance, possibly with white silk scarf flailing in the air, to a fiery Glam tune by Bebop Deluxe to frenzied cheers and applause.
On another, a trio of roughs who may have gate crashed the Disco only to see in David the worst possible example of the feckless wastrel student strutting and posturing in unmanly white, took him aside at the end of the night, doubtless intent on a touch of the old ultra-violence:
“Oy you, we bin watchin’ you, you’re a poof, ain’tcha…”
But David stood his ground, insisting that despite what they may have thought about him, he was just as straight as they. Apparently convinced, they then vanished into the departing crowds after muttering a few dark threats.
‘75 again, and David’s music, swimming and Martial Arts sessions were no more.
But the private lessons continued with Mark, a slim young academic with long darkish curly hair who lived alone but for several black cats in long time Rock star haven Richmond-on-Thames. For as well as being a private tutor, he was a successful session musician.
Specialising in the French Symbolist poets, he exerted a strong influence on David in terms of his growing passion for European Modernist art and culture. However, it was the less well known literature of Spain they studied together, from the anonymous 16th Century picaresque novel “Lazarillo de Tormes”, and embracing Quevedo, Galdós, Machado, Dario and Lorca.
Mark was also an early encourager of David’s writing, a lifelong passion that would degenerate in time into a chronic case of cacoethes scribendi; or the irresistible compulsion to write. As a result of this, he became incapable of finishing a single cohesive piece of writing until well into the eighties when he managed to complete a short story and a novel, both of which he went on to destroy but for a few fragments.
It was significantly through Mark that David came under the spell of the Berlin of the Weimar Republic of 1919 to 1933:
After he’d expressed interest in a copy, conspicuously placed in front of him on the desk they shared, of one of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin novels, “Mr Norris Changes Trains”, Mark told him in animated tones that it had inspired the 1972 movie version of the Kander and Ebb musical, “Cabaret”. In fact, while a work of art in its own right written for the screen by Jay Allen, and directed by former dancer Bob Fosse, “Cabaret” had been largely informed by Isherwood’s only other Berlin story, “Goodbye to Berlin”.
  Seeing “Cabaret” later on that year was a life-transforming experience for David, one of only a handful brought about by a film, and the beginning of a near-obsessive preoccupation with the Berlin of the Weimar era.
So much that has become familiar to the West and beyond in the last half-century, from the deconstructive philosophies that dominate our academia, to the theatre of outrage that is the essence of Rock music, pre-existed in some form in the Berlin of the Golden Twenties, during which she existed as the undisputed world epicentre of the Modern impulse.
Under her auspices, great artistic freedom thrived in the shape of the painters of the New Objectivity movement, such as Beckmann, Dix and Grosz, the staccato cabaret-style music of Kurt Weill, Fritz Lang’s dystopian “Metropolis”, and the provocative dancing of Cabaret Queen Anita Berber, and her epicene companion, Sebastian Droste. And then there’s the notorious sexual liberalism, which, through pictorial depictions of her cabarets and night clubs, has carried a power to shock even as far as the jaded 21st Century.
But beneath the glittering carapace, she bore within her the seeds of her own ruin, for despite the genius that flourished alongside the licentiousness, she was operating largely in defiance of the Judaeo-Christian moral values that have long formed the basis of Western society. Given that several other European and American cities were hardly less hysterically dissolute than Berlin, it’s little wonder that the key Modernist decade of the twenties has been described by some critics as the beginning of the end of Western civilisation. 
In its wake came the Great Depression, the unspeakable horrors of the Second World War, and the collapse of the greatest empire the world had ever seen, all of which were succeeded in turn by the dawning of the Rock and Roll era, and its quasi-religious exaltation of youth, which some critics see as the very triumph of Western decadence.
Decadence…that loaded word had a very special meaning and power for David Cristiansen in the mid 1970s…ever since his mother had used it, in fact, in reference to a series of photos of Germany’s Weimar era featured in an edition of the Sunday Times magazine:
“Why do people want to be decadent?” She’d asked, as if genuinely concerned for those featured, which of course she was, having been raised in a Salvationist home in the idyllic Vancouver of the 1920s, and therefore imbued for life despite herself with a Christian worldview.
But to David Cristiansen, the answer was obvious, because in his Rock and Roll eyes, decadence was so heavy with the mysteries of the most forbidden sins that he could scarcely wait to become its incarnation; and while he would fall far, far short of his goal, he’d almost die trying to attain it.
 
David made no less than three sea voyages in ‘75, 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 to Amsterdam, via Edinburgh and St. Malo, on a three-masted topsail schooner TS Sir Francis Drake of the Society for the Training of Young Seafarers.
Among his shipmates were his 17 year old brother, Dany, 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 deck hands.
In overall charge, though, was the suave Ship’s Captain, who also happened to be an alumnus of David’s own alma mater of Welbourne.
It was an all-male crew, and David was well-liked at first, even if his popularity faded in time, with a few good pals remaining him…such as the small cherubic southerner with long dark hair worn shoulder length like the young Jack Wilde, who stayed loyal to him after they’d tried to impress a couple of girls together during a brief stay in St Malo, France.
He got on fine with a few of the others, but ‘Jack’ was a true prince who’d helped him out in his time of need:
What happened is that David had fallen hard for one of the girls, Françoise, and was wandering around in a mournful daze after having failed to pluck up the courage to ask her for her address:
“Oh, I really like Françoise,” he whined, over and over again, but his misery was genuine. That is, until Jack handed him a piece of paper containing Françoise’s address. It transpired she’d scrawled it down just before leaving them, and for a time, David was drunk with relief at the news, just walking on air, because there was the danger of his coming down with a serious case of lovesickness had she become lost to him forever, but thanks to Jack, he’d found her again.
There were heavy storms, and on at least one occasion, the crew were ordered out of their hammocks in the middle of the night to help trim the sails, and while David took no part in this, he did climb the rigging once, just before the Churchill docked at Amsterdam harbour.
Dozens of boys manned the yard arms, to which they were attached by their safety belts alone. David had been determined to make the climb, even though the experience made his legs shake throughout.
The Dutch capital was marked by the same kind of open sexual licence he’d witnessed only the year before in Hamburg, although it seemed to him to lack the German city’s sinister vibrancy. Then – just as today – the sad De Wallen red-light district was filled to the brim with hundreds of little illuminated one-room apartments, each with a single woman 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, warned David not to go strutting about Edinburgh town centre in a flashy boating blazer with his long white socks tucked into the same blue jeans he’d worn for sailing. But having only packed a handful of clothes, David was forced to ignore his advice, and, waltzing some time later into an inner city pub in broad daylight, a grinning hard man with long reddish curly hair asked him:
“Are you frae Oxford, son?”
Perhaps he was aware of the great university’s reputation for producing flaming aesthetes like Brideshead’s Anthony Blanche, and if so, it may have been touch and go for a while as to whether he was going to inflict some serious damage on David’s angelic English face, but in the end he left him be. He may even have admired his chutzpah. But there was just something about David…something that repelled physical violence, some mysterious protective force.
Within a few weeks of returning to London by train from Edinburgh, David and Dany were off to sea again, this time as part of the Mariners Club of Great Britain, bound for the Baltic coast of Denmark by way of Germany’s Kiel Canal. And while they were once more supervised by “mates” under the command of a Ship’s Captain, the Mariners’ utilised modern yachts rather than traditional tall ships.
The Cristiansens were quick to recruit a handsome young blond guy called Cy from the Stroud district of Gloucester as their best pal and confidante for the trip. It turned out they’d actually met him some ten years previously while passing through Calpe, Spain, either on their way to or from their grandmother Mary’s home on the Costa Brava.
Soon after setting foot on Danish soil they got talking to a couple of girls who, as might be expected, had natural golden blonde hair, but their efforts at romance were wholly innocuous, despite the reputation Scandinavians had in those days for progressive sexual attitudes.
A less pleasant romantic episode took place towards the end of the trip, which saw David in pursuit of a pretty German girl called Ulrike. He was crazy for her, and she made it pretty clear she liked him too, and yet he’d senselessly sidelined her for the sake of a night of drunken idiocy with his brother and Cy, perhaps expecting her to run after him or something.
Suddenly, overtaken by sickly pangs of remorse, he set out to find her, and at some point during his quest, while walking along some kind of wooden pontoon, he lost his footing and fell fully clothed into the waters of what must have been the Kiel Canal.
He was a pathetic figure the next day, with his fancy dandy clothes all laid out on deck.
“What happened last night?” the captain breezily asked him.
“Well”, he hazarded in response, “I was looking for this girl and…”
“You live in a dream world, David.”
Indeed he did, and self-sabotage was fast becoming one of his specialities.
 
Also during that summer, David 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.
Up to this point, he’d not had any ambitions beyond becoming a celebrity, or rather major Rock and Roll star. And to this end, he’d made countless recordings of himself singing and playing his own simple songs on a series of portable cassette tape recorders. And all too often, these sessions culminated in a full-on tantrum, such as the time he hurled a newly purchased machine against his bedroom wall, totalling it instantly.
So he took the train from Molesey, first to the nearest big city of London, and from there to the port of Gosport on the south coast of England. For this was where he’d spend three days within the gates of HMS Stirling, a shore-based specialist training centre, attending various examinations and interviews intended to assess his potential as a future naval officer.
His father was delighted at this unexpected turn of events, little suspecting that in his desire to join the Senior Service, he was driven not by any selfless instinct to serve, so much as a vision of a privileged existence of refinement and elegance. And if this sounds distinctly Wildean for a mid ‘70s youth, then it was perfectly in keeping with what we’ve learned of David so far.
For as stated earlier, he’d never been anything other than a typical scruffy, sporty, ruffianly male until around about his 17th birthday, when he fell under the spell of Glam Rock as purveyed by artists as diverse as David Bowie, Alice Cooper, Marc Bolan, Rod Stewart, Elton John, the Sweet and the New York Dolls.
And about a year after that, he started to move away from the gaudiness of Glam towards a fascination for those artists whose rebellion against middle class respectability manifested itself as dandyism, or the tendency to ostentatiously over-dress. And this they invariably combined with that typical corollary of dandyism, decadence.
They included poets Charles Baudelaire, who affected dandyism in the Paris of the 1840s, Jean Cocteau, whose playground was the Paris of the so-called Belle Epoque, and the aforesaid Oscar Wilde, whose delight it was to scandalise the late Victorian bourgeoisie of the London of the 1880s and ‘90s.
Thence, David arrived at HMS Stirling as an immaculate aesthete. Doubtless complete with foundation style make up and some blusher and eye shadow, where most of the other candidates might have favoured standard issue jumbo collared shirts and great billowing flared trousers.
His foppish attire was compounded by a face that would have made him a perfect choice for a casting director scouting around for someone to play Dorian Gray in yet another celluloid version of Wilde’s only novel. By the same token, he could have played Waugh’s Sebastian Flyte with no less facility…or Highsmith’s Dickie Greenleaf…or any number of kindred idle male beauties. But the role of a naval officer was clearly way beyond him, and it wouldn’t be long before he’d provoked someone of a more serious cast of mind to intense irritation.
The “someone” in question turned out to be a northern lad with a little hint of a moustache who, finding David putting the final touches to his toilette before some assignment or another in front of a handy looking glass, felt moved to remind him:
“It’s not a fashion parade, mate…”
He wouldn’t be joining David at the disco that night, or any other night for that matter; but you couldn’t fault his dedication, nor his powers of observation.
Two guys were eventually persuaded to keep him company, but their hearts weren’t in it, and they sensibly returned to base for an early night, leaving David alone at the disco…where he befriended a shy young woman with short golden curls by the name of Shirlee, with whom he spoke about the AIB, and his fear of failing.
“Oh, you’ll pass,” she told him with a reassuring smile.
But if she’d looked a little closer at his wardrobe, with its boating blazers and striped college ties, and shoes fit for the Charleston rather than the Latin Hustle, she might not have spoken so confidently. For, far from bespeaking the status of the perpetual high achiever, they may have constituted a disguise, distinctly overdone, and donned daily by an individual who’d tasted failure too many times for one of such tender years.
When David finally returned to Stirling himself, he was shocked to discover that her main entrance had been locked and was now being manned by an armed guard.
As the young man set about trying to make contact with his superiors, he must have wondered what kind of person returns to base in the small hours, dressed to the nines, while in the midst of three days of tests and interviews that were supposedly vital to his future career. But he gave no indication of it.
And in time, his efforts were successful, so that shortly afterwards, a sheepish David Cristiansen was forced to pass through an officer’s mess in order to reach his room. And after briefly exchanging pleasantries with its airily affable occupants, he retired for the night.
As might be expected, David failed in his noble attempt at passing the AIB, and never did get to wear a naval officer’s uniform.
Perhaps he’d have stood a better chance if just for once he’d done the right thing and gone to bed early rather than rave it up at the disco in all his finery…but then again perhaps not. For after all, few if any naval officers have been historically selected on the basis of how good they look in a well-cut uniform.
Like all dandies he could be said to have partaken to some degree of the nature of the infamous Biblical character Absalom, about whom it was said in 2 Samuel 14: 25:
“But in all Israel there was none to be so much praised as Absalom for his beauty: from the sole of his foot even to the crown of his head there was no blemish in him.”
And yet, Absalom’s flawless beauty was ill-matched by a vain and reckless character which ultimately secured his ruin. As to David, despite exceptional artistic gifts, he’d spend much of his early adult life trying to find a place for himself in the world with little real success. And on those precious few occasions when those gifts came close to fulfilling his lifelong dreams of fame and glory, all too often, he mysteriously sabotaged his chances. It was as if despite his endless self-promotion, he felt that failure was all he deserved; and so failure became his destiny.
  The summer of ’75 also saw David spending a week with the RNR in the Pool of London, a stretch of the Thames lying between London Bridge and Rotherhithe.
Halfway through the week, he decided to attend a nearby club known as the Little Ship, which he knew for a fact to be hosting a discotheque. For oh how he loved to dance – quite alone – to the sweetest Soul music, for Soul it was still known in ’75, as opposed to Disco.
And Disco he came to associate with a commercialised form he saw as closer to pure Pop than Soul. And which was epitomised at its best by the Bee Gees’ soundtrack to “Saturday Night Fever”, for which he had a lot of respect, and at its worst by the infamous novelty Disco tune.
And so dressed in a white open neck shirt worn sporting style with striped boating blazer and white trousers and shoes, he made his way to the Little Ship alone.
Once he’d had a drink or two, and the Soul had seeped through to his bones, he hit the dance floor possibly with a cigarette smouldering elegantly in his hand, and he was in his element. But within a short time of his having done so, the up tempo songs gave way to a long series of slow tunes, and he began to scan the departing dancers for a partner.
Soon his unfeasibly long-lashed blue eyes fell upon a slim girl with a head of bobbed curls of a striking yellowy blonde, who was frantically shooing her friend away in order to make room for David; and he walked up to her and asked her to dance. She agreed, and they danced, wordlessly, for what must have been a full half hour, until, exhausted, David’s new found companion informed him she had to rejoin her friend, which she did, leaving David at a loss as to what to do next.
The bond had been broken. But then, as they’d not exchanged a word despite having been intimately locked together for aeons, there’d barely been one to begin with. And then he spied her at the bar, conversing with her friend, and he acted cool towards her, as she did him, and they made no effort to approach each other, and the moment was gone for good.
Perhaps David then returned to the floor to dance alone as he’d done earlier, like some kind of Mod, lost in a narcissistic reverie.
But David was no refugee from an age when peacock males were supposed to have been more interested in their beautiful images than any romantic experience with a woman. For later that night, while a power boat was ferrying him out to his ship in the glittering Pool of London, he announced to one of the officers onboard:
“I’m in love!”
At which point the officer, a tall languorously elegant man with a charming, approachable manner, graciously replied:
“That’s good news.”
But if he’d divined the condition of the handsome sailor’s soul, he’d have spoken differently. Yes, David was in love, but his love was nowhere to be seen, and he’d returned from his night of dancing desperate to be reunited with the slim blonde angel he’d held so close for a blissfully brief thirty minutes or so, only to lose her forever.
But that was David, and he’d be back on that disco floor again before too long, risking his heart again before too long, dying a little of his solitude again…before too long. And oh how he loved to dance.

Since 1974, David had worshipped at the altar of those artists who had either immediately predated the age of Modernism or been part of its Banquet Years, and beyond into the Golden Twenties and so on.
However, in 1976, a gaudy new era started to influence the way he dressed and acted, and for much of that year, he dressed down in a workmanlike uniform of red windcheater, white tee-shirt and cuffed jeans as worn by ‘50s icon James Dean in “Rebel Without a Cause”.
Dean had died a week to the day before David was born in late 1955, and the 20th anniversary of his death appeared to exert a strong influence on rising Pop stars such as John Miles and Slik’s Midge Ure.
Slik were one of the biggest bands in Britain in 1976 with an image straight out of “Rebel” or a dozen lesser fifties delinquent movies. Sadly for them, though, and for many other bands who’d surfed the Glam Rock wave or emerged in its wake, they would be unjustly ousted by the Punk uprising.
As entranced as David was by the fifties, there were still times when he reverted to the old escapist dandy image he’d adopted in defiance of what he saw as the leaden drabness of post-Hippie Britain, while discovering Modernist giants such as Baudelaire, Wilde, Gide, and Cocteau for the first time.
One of these occasions came during the dying days of a famous long hot summer, when he wore top hat and tails and his fingernails painted bright red like some kind of hellish vision from Weimar Berlin to a party hosted by a friend from Prestlands.
It was mid-September, and David would have been at sea at the time, serving as Able Seaman David Cristiansen on the minesweeper HMS Kettleton.
A day or so afterwards, there was an accident involving Kettleton and a far larger ship, which resulted in the loss of twelve men, most of whom he knew personally. Of the twelve who didn’t survive, David knew three quite well, and they were all men of remarkable generosity of spirit and sweetness of disposition, and it broke his heart to think of what happened to them.
He so wanted to comfort his shipmates for their loss, to bond with them and be part of what they were going through. He wanted to have survived like them; and he went over it all again and again in his mind, until he was driven almost insane with regret and grief. But he’d taken the easy way out, and this time it wouldn’t be so easy for him to forget or explain away.
And the world took a darker turn for David Cristiansen…as the following year was marked by the irruption into the British cultural mainstream of Punk.
From its London axis, it spread like a raging plague…even infecting the most genteel suburbs with an extreme and often horrifying sartorial eccentricity, which, fused with a defiant DIY ethic and a brutal back-to-basics brand of hard-driving Rock produced something utterly unique even by the standards of the time.
David was assaulted for the first time by the monstrous varieties of dress adopted by the early Punks while strolling along the Kings Road the morning after a party in what may have been January 1977, and it would only be a matter of time before he too hoped to astound others the way they’d done him.
However, for most of ’77, he dressed in a muted form which first took shape as a pair of cream brogue winkle pickers. And which he went on to supplement with black slip-ons with gold side buckles, mock-crocodile skin shoes with squared off toes, and a pair of black Chelsea boots. All perilously pointed; in fact so much so that within a year or so, they’d finish up being jettisoned into the murky black waters of the Thames.
His new look evolved by degrees at the endless series of parties he attended as one after the other of his old Welbourne pals celebrated their 21st in houses and apartments in various corners of trendy West and Central London.
Of all of these, he was perhaps closest with future oil magnate Chris, who was still finding his feet in London’s most exalted social circles. These included Adrian Proust, a friend of Chris’ from the north of England who forged cutting edge images for some of the most powerful trendsetters in Rock music.
David joined them a couple of times at Maunkberrys in Jermyn Street; and apart from the Sombrero in High Street Ken, it was the classiest club his suburban eyes had ever seen.
Being the rube he was, he thought the style that dominated London’s club land was somehow Punk-related, but he was way off the mark. While it was the antithesis of the hippie look that was still widespread throughout the UK, it was deployed not as a gesture of violent social dissent, but for posing and dancing to the sweetest Soul music.
It was partly the realm of the Soul Boys, whose love of Black Dance music was a legacy of the Mods and Skins that preceded them.
Yet while the Soul Boys were largely working class hard nuts from various dismal London suburbs, some Soul lovers were in fact not Soul Boys at all, so much as elegant trendies. But with a penchant for floppy college boy fringes, plaid shirts worn over plain white tee-shirts, straight leg jeans, and the by now obligatory winkle pickers. And these were the kind to be found at such sumptuous places as the Sombrero.
The Soul Boys also favoured the wedge haircut…which could be worn with streaks of blond or red or even green, brightly-coloured peg-top trousers and winkle pickers or plastic beach sandals.
Speaking of the wedge, it was taken up at some point in the late 1970s by a faction of Liverpool football fans who’d developed a taste for European designer sportswear while travelling on the continent for away matches. Thence, the Casual subculture was spawned.
And its passion for designer labels persisted well into the 2010s, being manifest in every small town and shopping mall throughout the land.
By the summer, David was working as a sailing instructor in Palamos on Spain’s Costa Brava, although he lost his job after only a few months. But instead of heading straight back to London, he chose to stay on in Palamos, parading around town by day, while spending most of his evenings at the Disco dancing to Donna Summer’s “Love Trilogy”.
As much as he loved the party life, what he wanted most of all was to enjoy it as a successful working actor like golden boys Peter Firth and Gerry Sundquist, both of whom found fame on the stage before branching out into movies and TV, although Firth had begun his acting life as a child star.
The problem was, he wasn’t really cut out for the task. Granted, he 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 My Space or endless TV talent showcases.
He’d had no acting experience to speak of, except a handful of roles at Welbourne, all but one of which involved him wearing women’s clothing.
The first was in Max Frisch’s “The Fire Raisers”, which saw him standing stock still as an old woman for a few brief minutes without uttering a single word.
The second, in a short play by George Bernard Shaw called “Passion, Poison and Petrifaction”, saw him clomping around as a household maid in dress and studded military boots, and each time he spoke in the falsetto he’d selected for the part, the house erupted.
A third garnered some praise from one of the cadets for a convincing performance as a Holly Golightly style socialite; while his only male role was as psychopath Alec in a little known Agatha Christie one-acter called “The Rats”, one of whose key lines was:
“Darlings, how devastating!”
And if the praise of the college nurse was anything to go by, it showed real promise:
“What are you going to do with your life, David? You’re a good actor…”
But when all’s said and done, he was hardly a National Youth Theatre wunderkind. And in terms of his other “talents”, he’d written a few simple songs on the guitar, but he still couldn’t play bar chords. Although he managed a passable take-off of Sinatra.
While as a would-be writer, he’d filled countless pages with endlessly corrected notes, but there was nothing tangible to show for it all. It could hardly be said then that his future positively glittered before him.

Chapter Four

David Cristiansen’s final trip with the Thames Division of the Royal Naval Reserve came towards the end of the summer of 1977.
And while his best oppo Lofty O’Shea wasn’t onboard, he had other mates to raise Cain with, such as Damon Cates, a tall redhead of about 26 who looked a little like Edward Fox in “A Day of the Jackal”.
Like David, he loved music and fashion and the Soul Boy and Punk scenes, and they hit it off from their very first meeting back at HMS Ministry.
He later confided in David about his early life which had been marked by one family tragedy after the other; and his reserve masked a deep and complex sensibility. But he was not a man to flaunt it; nor an ability to handle himself in any situation. Such as the time an intoxicated sailor took a sudden, violent dislike to David in a south coast bar, and was clearly keen to do some serious damage to his pretty cherub’s face. At which point Damon placed himself between David and his aggressor, before telling him to back off in no uncertain terms.
Doubtless, though, there were those who wondered how such a natural-born gentleman ended up on the lower deck…such as the guys from another division altogether, based far away from the fleshpots of London where a simpler, harder way of life prevailed, who sailed with them that summer to the port of Ostend in Belgium.
And when some of them were squaring up with some locals who had somehow offended them, Damon and David made it clear they had no intention of joining in.
Which prompted one of their number, a little waiflike sailor of about 16 or 17, to turn to them and ask, “What’s wrong with youse guys?” with a look of utter bewilderment on his beardless face. But Damon simply didn’t see the point of fighting for the sake of it. While a secret inner fortitude would eventually see him being commissioned as an officer in the Royal Navy, which had been his destiny all along; but not David’s.
His time with the Thames Division, RNR, came to an end in late 1977 with a surprisingly positive character report. And if military life had never been for him, it became an important part of his identity nonetheless.
  Even later in the summer, he joined the former Merchant Navy School in Greenhithe, Kent, as a trainee Radio Officer.
He formed several close friendships there; but closest of all was with Jayant, from Gravesend, a tough Thameside town in North West Kent with a large Indian community. And for a time, he and David were inseparable.
And it was through Jay that David started going to discos at Gravesend’s Woodville Hall.
And pretty well every week for a while, a gang from the college would take the train to Gravesend, to be treated like visiting royalty by the – mainly white and Asian – kids, whose outfits stood out in such striking contrast to the industrial bleakness of their surroundings.
For English suburban life in those days didn’t include mobile phones or DVD players, personal computers or the world wide web, and so was a fertile breeding ground for way out youth cults such as the Punks and Soul Boys.
There were girl in chandelier earrings, wearing evening dresses and stiletto heels, which were in stark contrast to the hair colours they favoured, such as jet black or bleach blonde, with flashes of red, purple or green. Some wore bow ties, while others hanged their school colours around their necks.
The boys favoured short hair, thin ties, mohair sweaters, baggy, well-pressed peg-top trousers of red or blue, and winkle picker shoes. And when they took to the floor to pirouette and pose, they could forget the ordinary cares of their working class lives and become superstars for a brief few hours.
David enjoyed his time at Merchant Navy School and made several good friends in addition to Jay, but ultimately had to realise it wasn’t for him.
And soon after returning to London, he auditioned for a place on the three year drama course at the Silverhill School of Music and Drama in the City of London, which was really where he’d wanted to go in the first place.
And Silverhill took him on, which was a bit of a surprise to him to say the least, seeing as he’d already failed two earlier auditions for the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts.
Yet, it failed to prevent him sinking further into the nihilistic Punk lifestyle. And having been blown away by the hairstyle of one of a small gang of Punks he knew by sight from nights out in Dartford, he 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. And if you chose to chose to flaunt such a style in those days, you lived in constant fear of attack or abuse. For 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.
And at the risk of being fanciful, it could be said that to some extent, Britain was a nation still under the sway of the moral values of the pre-war years, so that a cultural war was being fought for the soul of the nation. While the Punks were the avant-garde of a new Britain in a way that would be impossible today. And this may go some way towards explaining the incredible hostility Punks attracted from many ordinary members of the British public.
But David was determined to be part of the revolution. And to this end, he saw local Punk band Sham ’69 in a hall above the Surveyor, a pub in the heart of the Molesey Industrial Estate some 12 miles from the centre of London.
This was shortly before they shot to fame after singer Jimmy Pursey was arrested on the roof of the Vortex Punk club in central London on the 23rd of September 1977.
Sham’s very name had been derived from the legend Walton and Hersham ’69, scrawled on a wall in Molesey’s sister town of Hersham, referring to the year she topped the premier division of the long defunct Athenian amateur football league.
David already knew Pursey by sight, having seen him a year or so earlier miming to Chris Spedding’s “Motorbiking” at the famous Walton Hop, supposedly Britain’s first ever discotheque, which held mime competitions for Hop regulars at the height of its popularity.
Pursey was such a regular, and the same could be said to a degree of David and his brother Dany. And one evening, David and Dany and a friend considered taking part in the competition themselves; having selected “I Can’t Give You Anything” by the Stylistics to mime to; but at the last minute, they changed their minds, as they hadn’t even taken the trouble to rehearse.
While unlike the ditherer David, Pursey made it clear to all who witnessed his performances at the Hop he’d been born to be a star.
And sure enough, for a brief period, he was one of Britain’s leading Punk heroes. While his followers, the Sham Army, consisting of skinheads on both the left and the right of the political spectrum, became almost as famous as him. But after a riot at the Middlesex Polytechnic in North London, the first frenetic phase of Sham’s performing career came to a close. Although they continued having hits until in 1980, when they disbanded…until the inevitable reformation.
But 1977 was Punk’s year zero in the UK, and a far darker one than those immediately preceding it for that very reason.

Around about this time, David was often to be found at the Surveyor on a Sunday night with Dany, and mutual friends.
On one occasion, the usual Disco or Pop gave way to a violent Punk Rock anthem which saw the tiny dance space being invaded by deranged pogo-dancers as if they’d been summoned by some malignant deity. On another, a Ted revivalist who favoured flashy fifties-style clothing, tried to start some trouble with him in the toilet, at which point Vinnie, another Ted who’d befriended him about a year previously when he looked like an extra from a ‘50s High School flick stepped in with the magical words: “He’s a mate!”
Vinnie’s intervention may have saved him 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.
The Teds, or Edwardians as they were initially styled, were widely perceived as folk devils when they’d first emerged in the UK in about 1952, with a look purloined from a small minority of upper class Guards officers who’d adapted the Edwardian fashion in the late 1940s in defiance of post-war austerity.
However, in comparison to the later Punks, they were a model of respectability, and that was especially true of the ‘70s, when a brief revival resulted in battles between Teds and Punks taking place on West London’s Kings Road all throughout ‘77.
They persisted into the ‘80s, only to all but vanish from the face of the globe with the passing of that last great decade of youthful eccentricity.
It may have been that very night that Vinnie the Ted almost imploringly asked him whether he into “this Punk lark”, and David assured him he wasn’t. He may even have added he still loved the fifties, which was true to a degree, but that wasn’t the point. For the fact is he lied to him to look good in his eyes, which was a pretty low thing to do to a friend.
But given the times, young men like David were forced to learn certain survival tactics, such as the ability to flee at the first whiff of trouble.
Yet, by the time of the internet revolution, Punk had become just another exhibit of the Rock and Roll museum, itself just another branch of the vast entertainment industry. And the culture wars of the late ‘70s had long since been quieted, while rebellion had become more or less fully co-opted by the mainstream.
To give Punk its due, that this situation had come about in the first place was at least partly as a result of its utter ferocity. Which is to say of its first serious assault, which targeted a Britain still desperately clinging to the final vestiges of its Judaeo-Christian moral fabric. And while it was rejected by the vast majority of British people – indeed the West as a whole – its influence went on to be little short of cataclysmic.
Yet, declared dead by about ‘79, it returned to the underground, where it set about fertilising one rebel movement after the other throughout the ‘80s. And so, Post-Punk, No Wave, Anarcho-Punk, Industrial and Goth all benefited from its ethos, until finally in the early ‘90s, the Alternative Rock revolution brought it fully back into the mainstream.
Spearheaded by acts as diverse as Alice in Chains, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Smashing Pumpkins and above all, Nirvana, this movement could be said to have been Rock’s final desperate outburst of sedition. And after its passing, Rock finally took its place alongside Classical, Jazz, Folk and World as just another music genre, where once it had been little short of a religion of youth.
While the sheer intensity of Nirvana’s later music continues to startle, it’s been wholly shorn of its iconoclastic power; and it’s available for anyone of any age to access via the simple click of a computer mouse. And the same could be said of the Sex Pistols, whose one-time bassist Sid Vicious has emerged as Punk’s leading icon, and the quintessence of Punk nihilism.
Is this development in some respects a fulfilment of Nietzsche’s philosophy of the transvaluation of all values?
There are those cultural commentators who would insist that this is indeed the case, and that far from being a positive move towards universal tolerance, it’s a tragedy beyond compare, although rather than Nietzsche, it’s the Book of Isaiah they might feel moved to quote from:
“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil.”
But there was a time that such a revaluation met with enormous resistance, and the British public’s outraged reaction to Punk in ’77 was a perfect example of this. As for the Teds, goodness knows they were no angels. But to them there was something uniquely rotten at the heart of Punk, while the Rock and Roll they loved possessed all the purity of a classic art form.
It was at the tail end of this Punk Rock Year Zero that David took Jay to a party in London’s swanky West End. It was the last in a long series of celebrations he’d gone to throughout ’77 mainly as a result of friends from Welbourne reaching the landmark age of 21. It was also one of the last times he ever saw Jay.
Before arriving, Jay and he met up as arranged with future oil magnate Chris, and as soon as the introductions were over, Jay saw fit to offer a solo display of his lethal street fighting skills:
“I’m suitably impressed”, said Chris…and he was, although he was no wimp himself; but Jay was something else, and few would have benefited from crossing him…but they got on like a house on fire that insane night which at one point saw David pouring a full glass of beer over his head. What the beautiful dancer he’d spent most of the evening with thought of a nice guy like David doing a thing like that she didn’t say.
In those days, David knew so many people who’d have done anything for him given half the chance, and yet his one true passion appeared to be the creation of endless drunken scenes, and a party wasn’t a party for him unless he’d caused one, after which he simply moved on.
And indeed in the spring of ’78, he was on the move again…this time to the city of Fuengirola on Spain’s Costa del Sol; and with the intention of helping set up a sailing school with Adam, a young Englishman whom his father had recently befriended in London. But for some reason, the project came to nothing.
However, David stayed on, living first in an apartment Adam had kindly set him up in, then in a little hotel in town; and finally, rent-free with an American friend, Scarlett, one of a handful of US ex-pats resident in Fuengirola in the late 1970s alongside young people from Australia, Britain, Ireland, Germany, South America and other parts of the world.
It was a hedonistic scene, and David wasted little time in becoming part of it. He spent his nights at the Tam Tam night club, where he set about establishing himself as Fuengirola’s very own Tony Manero…in Punk Rock attire.
It was his first year as a full-time Punk, in point of fact, and among the clothes he favoured were a black cap-sleeved wet-look tee-shirt, drainpipe jeans of black or green, worn with black studded belt, festooned with silver chain filched from a Spanish restroom, and kept in place by multiple safety pins, fluorescent pink teddy boy socks, and white shoes with black laces like the ones he’d seen on the cover of an album by London Punk band 999. At one stage, he even wore a safety pin – disinfected by being dipped into a drink – in his left earlobe, but removed this once his lug had started to pulsate.
After a few weeks, he became lead singer for the Tam Tam house band, and would typically wear so much make-up onstage that one occasion, the microphone became smeared in lipstick; but the patrons liked him, and he’d pose and pout and throw his spare frame about for their benefit.
He was always short of money, but could order anything he wanted from the Tam Tam bar, and when he was flat broke, his close friend Laura bought him toasted cheese sandwiches to keep him going.
Laura and he were rarely on the beach, but would sometimes hang out at the famous Campo de Tenis; although David spent a lot of time rehearsing with the band. And in the evening, he was often to be found at Laura’s parents’ house, putting on the slap, and perhaps even painting his nails a gaudy shade of red, before heading along to the Tam Tam to do his gig.
One night her dad, a charismatic former tennis pro, was disturbed by their antics, and upon spying the pair of them, with David possibly wearing more make-up than his own daughter, incredulously asked:
“What is this ****, Laura?”
However, there were those nights they preferred to get away from it all, and for David, it was a special joy to be alone with Laura, while brimful with anticipation, in the demi-light of the Disco, with the evening still in its infancy. And on one incredible occasion as they were making their way through Fuengirola by dark, possibly to or from yet another club, the legend that was racing champion James Hunt called out Laura’s name before emerging from the shadows. They exchanged a few words; and then it seemed he vanished just as suddenly as he’d arrived.

Once David Cristiansen had started at college, he made it pretty clear than the nice clean-cut young man who’d auditioned the previous year had been a curve ball; as he was making no further attempts to conceal his Punk image.
This was compounded by a bizarre hyperactivity that occasionally verged on the downright outrageous, not to say, disruptive. It was as if he was determined to convince the world that he was an artist with a capital “A”, and therefore entitled to incessantly attract attention to himself with aberrant behaviour and clothing.
And among the items he favoured were slim jim ties, drainpipe jeans, florescent Fifties-style socks, and white leather brothel creepers, but the pièce de résistance was a pair of tight plastic snakeskin trousers which he actually only wore the once.
As if all this weren’t enough to cause eyebrows to raise among the authorities, he insisted on wearing make-up even in classes, although to be fair it was subtly applied, except for gigs and parties, when he really piled on the slap…foundation, eye shadow, blusher, lip rouge, the works. Talk about lipstick, powder and paint.
On one occasion, in the course of a class supervised by Den Denaghy, a brilliant bearded professional mime artist who’d been a regular on children’s TV for a time, the compact he usually carried about with him for sporadic touch-ups fell out of an inner pocket of his jacket during an exercise, before hitting the floor with an embarrassing clatter. All eyes went to the compact, and there was a mortifying silence, which the manic Den mercifully broke by retrieving the offending article from the floor, and furiously daubing peoples’ startled faces with glittery blusher.
Still, his days of wearing slap were numbered. It was as early as ’79, in fact, that he developed some kind of allergic reaction to a certain brown eye shadow, which caused his eyes to become so swollen and sore as to verge on the porcine…yet, he’d only worn it a little time before, and suffered no ill-effects.
This was during that first gig, held in the basement of the nearby Lauderdale Tower a few days after his 23rd birthday as part of one of the Folk Nights held occasionally at Silverhill in those days. And he was singing for a band he’d named Narcissus, one of several he was involved in at Silverhill.
And through one of them, The Rockets, he was talent-scouted as lead singer for a guitarist of genius called Don Taylor, who was hoping to form a band himself, and clearly thought David would cut it as a front man. But for some reason, it never came to be.
Don went on to play and write for one of the world’s leading Rock superstars, but at one point he briefly joined a Silverhill-based Jazz-Funk outfit with another then friend of David’s. That band would go on to become one of the most successful Pop 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. David was even invited to an early rehearsal, at a time when they might have done with a front man like himself…but of course, he didn’t go.
Through Narcissus, he found only disgrace and humiliation, and not just the once. Narcissus played a grand total of two gigs, both of them fiascos.
The first time they played together was just prior to the forming of the Rockets, and although it had been a disaster due to his drunken upstaging of the other band members, piano player Perry was sufficiently impressed by him to ask him to front the Rockets.
And it was through the Rockets that he was offered the job of front man for Don’s mooted musical project. However, rather than wait for the call from him, David went on ahead and re-formed Narcissus with original members Simon on guitar and John on percussion.
David piled on the make-up, and Simon and John followed suit, but being relatively untainted by personal vanity, the results were unsettling. Sweet-natured Simon painted his Botticellian features like an ancient pagan warrior, while gentle giant John saw fit to smother his with military-style camouflage. Not surprisingly, their set was accompanied by a riot of heckling which, although far from malicious, ultimately provoked David to irritation, and he ended up tossing his plectrum into the audience with a sarcastic:
“Here’s to all my loving fans!”
This petulant outburst may have caused no end of harm to his 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 his gifts. Rather he was blessed with the seductive charm of the social climber for whom alpha status comes through the subtle exercise of exquisite manners. In this respect, he was 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 all his good work.
David’s final band was the ’50s revivalist act Z Cars, which even won a small fan base for itself, its members being Carl Cool, the front man and chief songwriter who had a tattoo painted onto his shoulder, Robert Fitzroy-Square, the geek with the Buddy Holly horn rims, Dave Dean, the hard man of the band with the Sid Vicious stare, and Little Ricky Ticky, the baby at only 18. Things went wrong for them when they tried to deviate from their usual three-chord doo-wop or Rock with more complex songs, starting with a tightly arranged version of Arthur Crudup’s “That’s All Right Mama”, complete with harmony backing vocals. Sadly though, they weren’t up to the task, and disillusion swiftly set in. By this time, David had left Silverhill anyway, and it just wasn’t the same.
There had been emotional scenes at his farewell party held in the depths of the Barbican Estate’s Lauderdale Tower, and some cried openly at the thought of his leaving.
During the course of the night, a very dear friend of his, Tamsin, told him to contact Harry Creasey, a London-based impresario and agent well-known for offering young actors their very first positions within the entertainment industry.
David was to take her advice, and sauntering cigarette in hand into Harry’s Denmark Street office a few weeks later, he was confronted by a dark slender man of about forty whose outrageously flamboyant manner was compounded by seismic levels of personal charm, but not before he’d made one of his final ever trips to Spain.
Yet, even though the guys from the band had so wanted him to reclaim his place as front man in Fuengirola, he’d chosen to go to La Ribera with his parents instead, and he felt a deep and overwhelming sense of exhaustion as he stretched out under the Costa Calida sun. It was as if he was already unconsciously aware that his acting career was destined to be a non-event.
Yet, shortly afterwards, he took up his very first official acting job as Christian the Chorus Boy – doubling as Joey the Teddy Bear – complete with furry ursine costume – in a pantomime tour of “Sleeping Beauty”, all thanks to the infinite generosity of Harry Creasy, who wanted David to look as good as possible…
“…because he’s pretty, all right?” he explained, and no one was going to dispute that.

Chapter Five

A few weeks after “Sleeping Beauty” had culminated at the Buxton Opera House over Christmas 1979, David Cristiansen appeared in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at both the Bristol and London Old Vics alongside legendary method genius and future Hollywood superstar Daniel Day Lewis, who played Philostrate; and brilliant character actor Nickolas Grace, who made a mesmerising Puck.
However, the cast as a whole was incredibly gifted and charismatic, and shortly before the opening night, David was lucky enough to see a BOV production of one of his favourite ever musicals, Frank Loesser’s “Guys and Dolls”, featuring Clive Wood as Sky and Pete Postlethwaite as Nathan, which provided him with more unalloyed pleasure than any other theatrical production he’d seen up to that point. Even seeing the London premiere of Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd” a few months later failed to top it.
After resuming his role as Mustardeed in the summer, his next acting job came early the following year courtesy of an old family friend, Howell Jones, who just happened to be the Company Stage Manager at the famous Phoenix Theatre on Charing Cross Road at the time.
A production of Petronius’ “Satyricon” was already under way, and they needed an Assistant Stage Manager at the last minute, and Howell suggested David. He’d also be the show’s percussionist, with primal thrumming rhythms opening the show, and featuring throughout.
Also in ’81, David became a kind of part-time member of an initially nameless youth movement whose origins lay in the late 1970s, largely among discontented ex-Punks, but who were eventually dubbed Futurists; and then New Romantics.
Their music of preference included the kind of synthesized Art Rock pioneered by German collectives such as Kraftwerk and Can, as well as the highbrow Glam of David Bowie and Roxy Music. All of these elements went on to inform the music of Spandau Ballet and Visage, who emerged from the original scene at the Blitz Club in Covent Garden, and Ultravox, a former Punk band of some renown whose fortunes revived with the coming of the New Romantics.
The name arose as a result of their impassioned devotion to past eras perceived to be romantic, whether relatively recent ones such as the ‘20s or ‘40s, or more distant historical ones such as the Medieval or Elizabethan. Ruffs, veils, frills, kilts and so on were common among them, but then so were demob suits.
Several of the cult’s more outlandish trendsetters went on to become famous names within the worlds of art and fashion. They stood in some contrast to more harder-edged young dandies such as the Kemp Brothers from working class Islington. Their Spandau Ballet began life as the hippest band in London, famously introduced as such at the Scala cinema by writer and broadcaster Robert Elms in May 1980. In time, though, they mutated into a chart-friendly band with a penchant for soulful Pop songs such as the international smash hit, “True”.
David attended New Romantic nights at Le Kilt and Le Beat Route among other swishy night spots, and was even snapped at one of these by photographer David Bailey, believed to have served as model for the central figure of Antonioni’s enigmatic evocation of sixties London, “Blow Up”. But he was never a true New Romantic so much as a lone fellow traveller keen to experience first hand the last truly original London music and fashion cult before it imploded as all others had done before it.
Despite its florid decadence, it was always far more mainstream than other musical movements which arose in the wake of Punk, such as Post-Punk and Goth.
For this reason, several of its keys acts went on to become part of the New Wave, whose mixture of complex tunes and telegenic Glam image partly inspired the Second British Invasion of the American charts. This occurred thanks largely to a desperate need on the part of the newly arrived Music Television for striking videos, and went on to exert a colossal influence on the development of music and fashion throughout the eighties.
As ’81 wore on, David’s acting career lost momentum, with the result that some kind of family decision was reached to the effect that he should return to his studies with a view to eventually qualifying as a teacher. Thence, he went on to pass interviews for both the University of Exeter, and Leftfield College, London, scraping in with two very average “A” level passes at B and C.
He wanted to stay in London, so as to keep the possibility of picking up some acting work in his spare time, so in the autumn he started a four-year BA degree course in French and Drama mainly at Leftfield – but also partly at the nearby Central School of Speech and Drama – while staying in a small room on campus.
At first, he was so discontented at finding himself a student again at 25 that in an attempt to escape his situation, he auditioned for work as an acting Assistant Stage Manager, but he wasn’t taken on…so he simply resigned himself to his fate.
A short time later, though, while sauntering around at night close by to the Central School, he was ambushed by a group of his fellow drama students who may have seemed to him to incarnate the sheer carefree rapturous vitality and joy of life of youth, and because of them and those like them, he came to love his time at Leftfield, which just happened to coincide with the first half of the last of a triad of decades in the West of unceasing artistic and social change and experimentation.
Indeed, the Playboy philosophy which exploded in the 1960s could be said to have reached its full flowering in the crazy eighties. Even if the vast majority of people whose salad days fell within its boundaries ultimately forged respectable lives following a brief season as outsiders.
As for David…as much as he loved being young in the ‘70s and ‘80s, by the 2010s, he’d come to bitterly regret the shallow narcissism that once caused him to scorn the trappings of status, security and respectability. And he’d find himself pining for it like some cruelly spurned lover.
But then, as he saw it, the flouting of all the elements of a contented life for the sake of a few seasons of joy had been tirelessly promoted in the West for over half a century. Not least through Rock music, the narcissistic art par excellence.
As to the society it had helped to create, it was akin in his eyes to the antedeluvian world, whose workings of the flesh survived the Flood to be disseminated throughout the nations to spell the end of one empire after the other, the Babylonian, the Medo-Persian, the Greek, the Roman…
And the older, wiser David saw himself as having embraced the libertine life for no good reason, having been blessed by every great gift a young man could possibly hope for, including a stable childhood and first-rate education.
Yet, as he’d come to understand it, our most treasured qualities, such as brilliance, beauty, charm and talent – which so often operate together – must be submitted to God, lest they become dangerous, as they so often do. While the gifted, being so visible, are also more susceptible than most to a multitude of temptations. And so all too liable to fall prey to Luciferian pride and Luciferian rebellion… which is why so many are drawn to the power offered by art, and especially music; the writer of the first song Lamech having been in the line of Cain.
Indeed, there are those Christians who believe that the Cainites were the first pagan people, and that they corrupted the Godly line of Seth through a sensual and wicked music not unlike much contemporary Rock.
Of course not all Rock music is flagrantly wicked, far from it. Much of it is melodically lovely. While in terms of its lyrics, its finest songs display the most delicate poetic sensibility.
The fact remains, however, that no art form has been quite so associated as Rock with rebellion, transgression, licentiousness, intoxication and death-worship, nor been so influential as such.
And while the David of the 2010s viewed this truth with the fiery eyes of a modern day Jeremiah, his ’80s counterpart still desperately sought fame as a Rock and Roll star himself; and if not as Rock artist, then actor, or writer.
And as the former saw it, it was surely a good thing he never gained this pagan form of immortality because had he done so, he’d almost certainly have been used for the furtherance of the kingdom of darkness. And once he’d served his purpose, may well have died a solitary premature death as an addict. As has been the fate of so many men and women all too briefly inspirited by the magnetic charisma of the superstar.
And Leftfield in the early ’80s was a seething hotbed of talent and creativity which provided David with almost unlimited opportunities for acting and performance.
Within days, he’d made a close friend of a fellow French and Drama student by the name of Sebastian Stockbridge.
Seb was a slim, good-looking, dark-haired charmer from the north east of England who, despite a solid private school background and rugby player’s powerful wiry frame, dressed like a Rock star with his left ear graced by a pendant earring, and favouring skin-tight jeans worn with black pointed boots. Together, they went on to feature in Brecht and Weill’s’s “The Threepenny Opera”.
David had two small roles, the most fascinating to him being that of petty street thief Filch, as he’d been played by legendary monstre sacré Antonin Artaud in one of two film versions of the play directed by G.W. Pabst in 1931, and Artaud, an example of the avant garde faith in extremis, was one of his most beloved cursed poets.
Through this production he went on to play jive-talking disc jockey Galactic Jack in the musical play “The Tooth of Crime”, its director having been impressed by Seb and himself in “The Threepenny Opera”, and so cast them in the lead role of Hoss, and Galactic Jack, respectively.
It’s no coincidence that its author, Sam Shepard, has gone on record as having been influenced by Artaud in his own work, as the latter’s concept of a Theatre of Cruelty has proved prophetic of much of the theatre of the post-war years, indeed art as a whole, with its emphasis on assailing the senses, and in some cases the sensibilities as well, of the public through every available means.
 
Before long, David was channelling every inch of his will to perform into one play after the other at Leftfield, while any real ambition to succeed as an actor receded far into the background.
When it came to his French studies, in his essay writing he often flaunted an insolent outspokenness perhaps partly influenced by his favourite accursed artists, but also reflecting his own exhibitionistic need to shock. And while some of his tutors may have viewed these efforts with a jaundiced eye, one came to thrill to them and await them with the sort of impatience normally accorded a favourite TV or radio series. This was the wonderful Dr Elizabeth Lang, born in Lancashire in 1924, as the only child of working class parents who went on to gain a place at Oxford University, before becoming a lecturer there, and then at Leftfield.
What an ascent…from humble northern roots to a lectureship at the most hallowed place of learning in history…little wonder she was so fragile, almost febrile as a person, but so kind, so single-minded in her devotion to those who shared her passionate view of art and life:
“Temper your enthusiasm,” she’d tell David, “and the extremes of your reactions. You should have a more conventional frame on which to hang your unconventionality. Don’t push people, you make yourself vulnerable.”
Was she was trying to save him from himself, and from the addiction to self-destruction that so often accompanies extreme distinction, whether of beauty, intelligence or talent…as if it were the lot of some of the most gifted among us to serve as examples of the potentially ruinous nature of privilege when operating in a purely earthly realm?
For David so loved to play the accursed poet…and to scandalise by way of the written and spoken word. How close this carried him to the threshold of a terminally seared conscience it’s impossible to say; but one thing is certain, his compassion would soon suffer, a process that would prove excruciating to him.
That’s not to say he ever fully stopped being a caring person, because he certainly didn’t, and he continued to be repelled to the core by those artistic revolutionaries who advocated actual physical violence. At the same time, he was slavishly devoted towards certain favoured artists who sought the total demolition of the established order, a consequence that inexorably results in increased crime and violence….not that this occurred to him at the time.
This nihilistic love of destruction kept uneasy company with a high and mighty dudgeon towards what he perceived as social injustice, and among its chief targets were dictators on the right wing of the political spectrum – in fact, the political right as a whole – and while he also opposed left-wing oppression, he reserved his real animus for the right.
The 1980s was a decade of protest and riot in the UK, and all through its years of raging discontent, David allied himself with one radical lobby after the other; including Greenpeace, CND, Animal Aid, Amnesty, and the Anti-Apartheid Movement which published one of his characteristically apoplectic letters of protest.
And he marched against the looming nuclear threat in London and Paris, and was a remorseless disseminator of rants, pamphlets, tracts, postcards, and whatever else was at hand as a means of spreading a message of social revolution.
He would ultimately contend that his was the self-righteous fury that is rooted in a false notion of the perfectibility of Man, that fails to recognise that oppression stems from the sin we all share, and that has no real satisfying motive other than its own existence. But at the time, he knew nothing of any of this.
 In the summer, a faction from Leftfield, culled mostly from the Drama department, took Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” to the internationally famous Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and in their production, Shakespeare’s Illyria was transformed into a Hippie paradise, with David playing Feste as a Dylanesque minstrel strumming dirge-like folk songs with a voice like sand and glue.
Most of the Leftfield players’ male contingent couldn’t have deviated more from the politely liberal norm found nightly at the Fringe Club on Chambers Street if they’d tried. Among the wildest were Massimo, a dashing Britalian of passionately held humanitarian convictions, who played Sir Toby Belch, David, the anarchic product of multiple social and educational influences, and Jez, a tough but tender Scouser with slicked back rockabilly hair, who played Malvolio in a mesmerisingly understated manner.
Jez was a fascinating, charismatic guy with a hilariously dark sense of humour who had been in a band in the early ‘80s at the legendary Liverpool Post-Punk club, Eric’s. He and his girlfriend Gill, who’d designed the flowing Hippie costumes, and was also a very dear friend of David’s, never stopped encouraging him nor believing in him:
“I think you should be one of the greats, David,” Jez once told him, “but you’ve given up and that’s sad. When I’m 27, I’d be happy to be like you. In your writing, make sure you’ve got something really unbeatable…then say…’here…!’”
Yet, while he was complimented by many at Leftfield, others betrayed their disquiet with their words, as if he had the power to remind them of the true tragic essence of sed non satiata:
“You give to everyone, but are incapable of giving in particular.”
“I’m afraid…you’re inscrutable. You’re not just blasé, are you?”
“I’m afraid there’s something really troubling you, that you don’t want to tell anyone.”
“There’s a mystery about you…you change.”
“I like it when you really feel something, but then it’s so rare.”
“Don’t go away so long like that, David, it worries me.”
“Disabused.”
“Blind, deaf, indifferent.”
David’s relationship with Leftfield was one of the great passions of his life…and one destined to haunt him for the remainder of his days, as if he knew he’d never know such depths of intimacy again…and be increasingly prey to the torment of fading affect.
Then the following year…his second at Leftfield…he lived in an upper floor apartment in Golders Green with his close friends from the French department, Seb, a former Sedbergh School alumnus, and fellow northerner Stephen, whose alma mater was Sedbergh’s age-old rival, Ampleforth, a Catholic college largely run by Benedictine monks.
Steve was an incredibly gifted pianist and guitarist who despite a misleadingly serious demeanour was a warm, affectionate, witty, eccentric character who endlessly buzzed with the nervous energy of near-genius. He might not have wanted to ape the way his flatmates dressed and behaved, but he was fiercely protective of them despite their social butterfly ways.
And David was determined to live like an aesthete, even if it meant doing so on a shoestring in a cramped little flat in suburban north London, which was hardly the city of dreaming spires; and to this end he organised what he optimistically termed a salon, which although well-attended didn’t survive beyond a single meeting. For as aesthetes, David and co. fell pathetically short of the new Brideshead generation that was thriving at Oxford in the wake of the classic TV series.
But David couldn’t have cared less…for self-doubt simply wasn’t an issue for him in the early eighties and he was a truly happy person; in fact so much so that he may have exaggerated his capacity for depth and melancholia as a means of making himself more interesting to others.
In the final analysis though, what possible reason was there for him to be discontented, given that his first two Leftfield years were fabulous…an unceasing cycle of plays, shows, concerts, discos, parties set in one of the most beautiful and bucolic areas of London?
 
After the second year ended in the summer of 1983, David had a few months to spare before travelling to Paris to work as an English language assistant at a Lycée Technique in the suburb of Bretigny-sur-Orge in Essonne.
This spelled his exile from the old drama clique, and he’d not be joining them in their final year celebrations, and the knowledge of this must surely have affected him. He was, after all, severing himself from a vast network of gifted friends of whom he was deeply fond, and so losing an opportunity of growing as an artist in tandem with like-minded spirits. He could have opted for just a few weeks in France, but did he really want to be deprived of the chance of spending more than six months in the city he’d long worshipped as the only true home of an artist?
Earlier in the year, his close friend Madeleine, a brilliant dynamic woman of North African Jewish ancestry had told him something to the effect that while many were drawn to him, it wasn’t just in consequence of any magnetic attractiveness he might have possessed:
“They sense death in you,” she chillingly opined.
Cognizant as she was of the intellectual worldview of the great psychologist Sigmund Freud, who identified a death drive subsequently dubbed “thanatos”, she may have divined some kind of will to destruction within him…or rather, self-destruction.
As things turned out, she was right in doing so, although this was barely embryonic in the early ’80s, if it existed at all, but he would ultimately attribute its existence to a cocktail of intoxicants, namely, alcohol, the occult, and intellectualism, and to be of the belief that each exerted a terribly negative effect on his development as a human being.
It was not, he would contend, that intellectualism is evil in itself, but that intellectuals are more tempted than most by pride, rebellion and sensuality, and that the same could be said of those blessed with great wealth, great beauty, and great talent. He’d see intellectuals as among the most powerful men and women in history, and the Modern World as having been significantly shaped by the wildly inspired views of men such as Rousseau, Darwin, Nietzsche, and especially Marx and Freud.
To the man he’d become, their theories fanned the flames of a largely bloodless revolution in the 1960s, and rather than fade once the latter had been largely quenched, set about infiltrating the cultural mainstream where they became more extreme than ever. And so to enter the realm of the Post-Modern, while remaining the ultimate consequence of centuries of Modernist influence on the Judaeo-Christian fabric of Western civilisation.
However, David was never a true scholar like Madeleine, so much as someone who was both troubled and fascinated by the idea of hyper-intellectuality. Reading Colin Wilson’s “The Outsider” in the early ’80s, he especially identified with those intellectuals who were tortured by their own excesses of consciousness such as T.E. Lawrence, who wrote of his nature as being “thought-riddled”.
As a child he’d been extrovert to the point of hyperactivity, but by the time of his late adolescence, found himself subject to rival drives of equal intensity, one towards seclusion and introspection, the other, attention and approbation.
In his quest for the latter, he subjected his body, the creation he tendered so lovingly at times, to a ruthless almost derisive work ethic, and to stimulate this, he consumed a variety of intoxicants, not just because he enjoyed doing so, but because they enabled the constant socialising that brought him the affirmation he so craved…what could be termed a narcissistic supply. How else to explain the sheer demented fervour of his endless self-exaltation?
That’s not to say that he wasn’t a loving person, because he was; but precisely what kind of love was it that he spread so generously about himself? One thing it wasn’t was agape, the perfect, selfless love described in 1 Corinthians 13.
He was hardly less heartless towards his mind than his body, treating it as an object of research and experimentation. Little wonder then that he turned to drink as a means of pacifying it, although alcohol still wasn’t a serious problem for him in the early ’80s, when his exhausting daily regimen tended to be fuelled instead by massive quantities of caffeine tablets. That said, Madeleine didn’t like it when he drank to excess, as if she’d already singled him out as someone who’d go on to develop a drink problem. In this as in other things she showed remarkable insight.
“Your friends are too good to you…it makes me sick to see them…you don’t really give…you indulge in conversation, but your mind is always elsewhere, ticking over. You could hurt me, you know…you are a Don Juan, so much. Like him, you have no desires…I think you have deep fears…it’s not that you’re empty…but that there is an omnipresent sadness about you, a fatality…”

In the autumn of 1983, David took residence in a room on the grounds of his allotted Lycée in Brétigny-sur-Orge, a commune in the southern suburbs of Paris some sixteen miles south of the city centre.
It was during those early days in Paris that he became infected by a serious sense of self-disillusion, as a new darkness spread over his mind.
This sea-change marked the onset of a real drink problem that went way beyond the usual student booze-ups into the murky realm of drinking alone by day, and which David would ultimately attribute to a conscience that was starting to become calloused through repeated defilement. His well-being, however, remained relatively unaffected, in fact, for those first few months, he was happy, blissfully happy to be a flâneur in the city which had inspired so many great poets to write classics of the art of urban idling. He wrote of his own experiences, usually late at night, in his room with the help of wine and cigarettes, and while few of these notes survived, some incidents that may once have been committed to paper stayed fresh in his mind.
There was the time he sat opposite a same-sex couple on the Métro when he was still innocent of its labyrinthine complexities. “She” was a slim white girl, dressed from head to toe in denim, who gazed blissfully, with lips coyly pursed, into some wistful middle distance, while her muscular black boyfriend stared straight through him with eyes in which desire and menace seemed to be mixed, until one of them spoke, almost in a whisper:
“Qu’est-ce-que t’en pense?”
He came to recall the night he took the Métro to Montparnasse-Bienvenue, where he slowly sipped a demi-blonde in a brasserie, perhaps of the type immortalised by Brassai in his photographs of the secret life of ’30s Paris. At the same time, a bewhiskered old loup de mer in a naval officer’s cap, his table strewn with empty wine bottles and cigarette butts, repeatedly screeched the name, “Phillippe!” until a pallid impassive bartender with patent leather hair filled the old man’s glass to the brim with a mock-obsequious:
“Voilà, mon Capitaine!!”
And then there was the afternoon when, enacting the role of the social discontent, he joined an anti nuclear march through Paris which ended with a bizarre street cabaret performed by a troupe of neo-hippies whose sheer demented defiance may have filled him with longing for a time when he treated his well-thumbed copy of the Fontana Modern Masters bio of Che Guevara by Andrew Sinclair as some kind of sacred text…
A day spent as a flâneur would often end with a few hours spent in a movie theatre, perhaps in the vast soulless Forum des Halles shopping precinct, and there was a point he started to hate the movies he chose, as he struggled more and more with fits of deep and uncontrollable depression. For the first time in his life, he was starting to feel worse after having seen a film than before, the result perhaps of creeping anhedonia, which is a reduced ability to enjoy activities found pleasurable by the majority.
He grew bored of watching others perform. What joy, he reasoned, was to be found in watching some dismal movie, when there was so much to do in the greatest city in the civilised world?
He’d never really been any kind melancholic up until this point but this situation may have started to change in his first few months in Paris. If his travels failed to produce the desired uplifting effect, he’d fall prey to a despair that was wholly out of proportion to the cause.
As a means of protecting himself, he started squandering his hard-earned cash on endless baubles and fripperies. These wholly pointless trinkets included a gaudy short-sleeved shirt by Yves St Laurent, a retro-style alarm clock with the loudest tick in Christendom, a gold-plated toothbrush which he never actually used, a black and gold cigarette holder and matching slim fit lighter, a portrait drawn of him at the Place de Tertre which made him look like a cherubic 12 year old, and a black vinyl box jacket procured from the Porte de Clignancourt flea market.
Mention must also be made of the many books he bought, such as the three Folio works by Symbolist pioneers, Barbey d’Aurevilly, Villiers de L’Isle Adam and Joséphin Péladan; as well as the second-hand books of poetry by such obscure figures as Trakl and Delève…part of Seguers’ Contemporary Poets collection.
Could the kids who loved to wave and coo at him from all corners of the Lycée have guessed that their precious David who looked like a lost member of Wham or Duran Duran was a secret dark depressive?
Could they ever have known he was a collector of the literary works of late 19th Century decadents…and a social discontent given to recording snarling rants against the callousness of Western society on a cheap cassette tape recorder?
The simple answer is not in a thousand years…for he was leading a double life, perhaps even a multiple one. Little wonder, therefore, that he was starting to drink to try and make sense of what was happening to him, which was something akin to the fracturing of the personality.
It wasn’t long before he tired of the solitary existence of the flâneur, but then becoming more sociable may have simply been the result of being in one place for a significant length of time and nothing more meaningful than that. In fact, he’d already befriended twenty year old Theresa “Tessa” Evans, English assistant in the neighbouring town of St-Genevieve-des-Bois, while they were both attending classes at the Sorbonne intended to prepare them for the year ahead. And they went on to see more and more of each other as their Parisian sojourn proceeded apace.
She’d been a close girlhood chum at convent school of his great Leftfield friend, Ariana Hansen…in fact, one of the first times they met up was with Ariana, when they saw “Gimme Shelter” in some dinky little art house theatre. This being, of course, the documentary of the Rolling Stones 1969 American tour which, culminating in the infamous Free Concert at the Altamont Speedway in northern California, marked the end of the Hippie dream of peace and love.
Another close friend was maths teacher Jules Cendrars, who was the rebellious son of an army officer, and a furious hedonist who worshipped the Rock and Roll lifestyle of Keith Richards and other British bad boy musicians. There was a vision that never left him…of Jules, tall, thin, dark, charismatic, with his head of wiry black hair, dressed in drainpipes and Cuban heeled boots, playing the bass guitar -but brilliantly – at some unearthly hour with friends following a night’s heavy partying before rushing to be with a girl friend as the dawn broke.
His best male friend was metal work teacher Milan Curkovic, the son of Yugoslavian parents from the suburb of Bagneux, whose impassive manner belied the exorbitantly loving and unstable soul of a true poet. He fell in love with Tessa at first sight, and spent the whole night on a train bound for the south of France in a romantic delirium singing the songs of Jacques Brel. He referred to David’s and Tessa’s elegant swan necks as being typical of what he called “le charme anglais”.
So many of the people of Bretigny went out of their way to make David feel welcome and content from the headmaster all the way down to the kids, some of whom staged near-riots in the classroom whenever he appeared. He felt so unworthy of their kindness, of the incredible hospitality that is characteristic of ordinary French people.
However, if he was much loved in the warm-hearted faubourgs, in Paris itself he was at times as much a magnet for menace as approval.
In fact, he was hysterically threatened in the streets of Pigalle only days after arriving in the city; and then verbally assaulted later in the year, this time on an RER train by some kind of madman or derelict who’d taken exception to his earrings and was furiously urging him to go to the Bois de Boulogne. But what he suggested he do there is too obscene to print.
And mention must also be made of the sinister skinhead who called him “une ******* anglaise” for trying on Tessa’s wide-brimmed hat while travelling home by train after a night out with her and Ariana. But as ever, he was mysteriously protected against all the odds.
On a far brighter note, he spent a sizable part of the journey from Paris-Austerlitz to Brétigny with a self-professed “voyou” with chilling shark-like eyes, who nonetheless seemed quite fond of him, as he made no attempt to threaten him. He even gave him his number, telling him that unless he phoned as promised, he was merely what he termed “un anglais ***”.
David left his beloved Brétigny without saying goodbye to so many people that it was painful to think of it afterwards, but frenetic eleventh hour socialising had left him exhausted. However, there was one final get-together, organised by Tessa and a few other friends. Milan was there of course, as well as well as several mutual friends of Tessa’s and his. Sadly though, Jules wasn’t, although he bumped into one of his girl friends, who, her voice dripping with incredulity, asked:
“Où est Jules?”
Seized by guilt for having failed to invite him, David phoned him at home to ask him to make a last minute appearance, but in a muted voice, he told him:
“Nah, I’m in the bath, man, it’s too late…”
It was the last he ever heard of him. As for Milan, he and David were to talk on the phone once the latter had returned to London, but they never saw each other again. On the other hand, Tessa and he stayed friends until the early ‘90s, by which time she’d got married to a fellow church-goer and former Cambridge University alumnus called Peter, who also became a good friend.
His parents stopped by that night to pick him up on their way to La Ribera where they were due to stay for a few weeks before returning to the UK, and after a day or so spent sightseeing, they set off. Soon after arriving, it became clear to David that eight years after Franco’s death, with Spain’s beatific innocence long gone, his beloved pueblo had changed beyond all recognition.
In Murcia, while quietly drinking in a night club with some very dear friends of his from La Ribera’s golden age, he found himself in the surreal position of being visually threatened by a local Punk who clearly objected to the bootlace tie he was wearing which immediately identified him as a hated Rockabilly. As he saw it, such a thing would never have happened ten years before; or perhaps even five.
As for the youth of La Ribera itself, where once they’d been so endearingly naive, now they seemed so worldly and cool that David was in awe of them, as they danced like chickens with their elbows thrust out to the latest New Pop hits from the UK, such as King’s ”Won’t You Hold My Hand Now”, which David endlessly translated for them.

Chapter Six

David Cristiansen returned to Leftfield College in the autumn of 1984, and it may be that it was soon after this that his recent past started haunting him for the first time. After all, was it not only a few years previously he’d known legends of sport and the cinema, mythical figures of the theatre, blue bloods and patricians, and they’d been kind, generous of spirit to this nonentity from the outer suburbs. Now he was nearly 30, with a raft of opportunities behind him, and a future which looked less likely than ever to provide him with the fame he still ached for with all his soul.
At first he lived off-campus, thinking it might be fun to coast during his final year as some kind of enigma freshly returned from Paris. But before long, he desperately missed being part of the social hub of the college, even though this was a virtual impossibility for a forgotten student in his fourth year.
His time as one of Leftfield’s leading prodigies had long passed, and other, younger wunderkinder had come to the fore since his departure for Paris. They included the handsome young blond whom his long-time friend and champion Ariana described as being some kind of new edition of himself, due perhaps to the incredible diversity of his gifts. The first David saw of him, he was playing Gorgibus in Moliere’s “Les Précieuses Ridicules”, a part Ariana had originally earmarked for David, but he turned it down. The young man would ultimately find superstardom as comedian and character actor, and far more besides, while David persisted in the sweet, safe obscurity where he remains to this day.
He read incessantly throughout the year for the sheer pleasure of doing so. For example, while Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh” was a compulsory part of the drama course, there was no need for him to wade through “O’Neill”, the massive two-part biography of the playwright by Arthur and Barbara Gelb, but that didn’t stop him.
He made this descent into the depths of O’Neill’s tortured psyche at a time when he himself was starting to drink during the day at Leftfield. While his first can of extra strong lager would often be opened at breakfast time, he’d wait until lunch to get seriously hammered in the company of close friends. Such as Paul, from “Playing with Fire”, and Adrian, a computer programmer who shared his passion for the dark romanticism of the Doors and Peter Gabriel.
Paul was still trying to persuade him to join forces with him against an indifferent world, he with his writing and David with his acting, but for reasons best known to himself, he wasn’t playing ball. Paul had always sensed something really special in David, which was variously described as energy, intensity, charisma, but for all the praise he received from Paul and others, he didn’t seem to have a very high opinion of himself.
It’s possible that while he possessed the vast ego of the narcissist who requires constant attention and approval, he somehow also suffered from low self-esteem, which might indicate that he was a sufferer from actual Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Whatever the case, he was going through one of his showily perverse phases, affecting a world weariness he simply didn’t have at 30, but which upset and alienated a really good friend. And it wasn’t long before Paul was out of his life forever, leaving him to stew in his precious pseudo-cynicism:
“What an appalling attitude,” he’d told him, and he was right on the money.
His principal final year tutor was his long-time friend and supporter Dr Elizabeth Lang with whom he’d study the works of French Protestant writer Andre Gide.
And while figures of unmitigated depravity are commonplace today in countless novels, plays, films etc., when Gide created his darkest monsters, such as the feral Lafcadio from “Les Caves du Vatican” from 1914, who commits a crime of terrible cruelty simply for the sake of doing so, they still had the power to shock.
Although to be fair there was far more to Gide, the deeply conflicted product of a pious Huguenot Protestant upbringing, than fashionable decadence. For his first work, “Les Cahiers d’André Walter”, was an anatomisation of Christian self-abnegation, based on his troubled love for his devout cousin Madeleine, who went on to be his wife.
And a special favourite of David’s by Gide was the novella “Isabelle”, which appealed to his softer, more romantic side. Written in 1911, it’s the tale of a young student, Gérard Lacase, who stays for a time at a Manor house in Normandy inhabited by two ancient aristocratic families in order to look over their library for research purposes. And while there, becomes bewitched by the portrait of the mysterious “Isabelle”, only to discover that the real-life Isabelle is a hard, embittered young woman entirely distinct from the lovely vision in the portrait.
By the same token, his favourite ever play by O’Neill was another story of hopeless love, “A Moon for the Misbegotten”, written in 1947.
Its leading character is based on Eugene’s tragic yet infinitely romantic elder brother Jamie. And David became fascinated by him; and read all about him in the massive biography by the Gelbs.
Blessed at birth with charm, intellect and beauty, he was one of Father Edward Sorin’s most favoured princes while part of the Minim Department of Notre Dame University, Indiana. And so apparently destined for a glittering future as a Catholic gentleman of exquisite breeding and learning. He was also potentially a very fine writer, although he only left a handful of poems and essays behind, and the owner of a beautiful speaking voice which ensured him work as an actor for a time alongside his father James. His one true legacy, however, is Jamie Tyrone, the brilliant yet tortured charmer who haunts two of his brother’s masterpieces with the infinite sorrow of promise unfulfilled.
David left Leftfield for good in the summer of 1985, and discovered soon afterwards that he had achieved a lower second BA degree in French and Drama.
His first employment was as a deliverer of novelty telegrams, a job which brought him into many potentially hazardous situations, but which for him, was worth the risk, as he was getting well paid to show off and party, two of his favourite occupations at the time…but it was an unusual way of life for a man of thirty.
What he really wanted was the immortality provided by fame, and he didn’t care whether this came through acting, music or literature, or any other means for that matter. But until his big break came, he was content to feed his addiction to attention through the novelty telegrams industry. He evidently had no deep desire to leave anything behind by way of children, nor for any career other than one liable to project him to international renown.
How then did he end up as a PGCE student at Coverton College, Cambridge in the autumn?
The truth is that once again he’d yielded to family pressure to provide himself with the safety net that’s been dear to the hearts of parents of struggling artists since time immemorial, and yet despised by the artists themselves.
For David’s part, he was so unhappy about having to go to Cambridge that just days before he was due to start there, he arranged to audition for a Jazz Funk band, and was all set to sing “The Chinese Way” by Level 42 and another song of its kind. But never made it, because, late, and desperately drunk on the afternoon of his audition, he simply threw in the towel and resigned himself to Cambridge.
From the time he arrived in the beautiful medieval university city, he was made to feel most welcome and wanted by everyone, and he made some wonderful friends at Coverton itself.
These included Donovan Joye, a poet and actor from the little town of Downham Market in Norfolk; Dale Slater, a singer-songwriter of dark genius from Yeovil in Somerset who eventually went on to become part of London’s psychedelic undergroun; and stunning redhead, Clarissa Catto, whose beauty and charm belied the fact that she hailed from Slough, a vast sprawling suburb to the west of London perhaps most famous for having inspired a notorious screed by the poet John Betjeman.
When he made his first appearance at the Cambridge Community College in the tough London overspill area of Arbury where he was due to begin his period of Teaching Practice the following January, the pupils reacted to him as if he was some kind of visiting movie or Rock star. His TP would have been a breeze. Everything was falling into place for him at Cambridge, and he was offered several golden chances to succeed as an actor within its hallowed confines.
Towards the end of the first term, the then president of the Cambridge University Footlights Dramatic Club had gone out of his way to ask David and Donovan to appear in the sole production he was preparing to mark his year-long tenure. He was a Coverton man, and so clearly wanted to give a couple of his fellow students a break after having seen them perform a couple of Donovan’s satirical songs for the club.
This was a privilege almost without measure, given that since its inception Footlights has nurtured the talents of Cecil Beaton, Jonathan Miller, Germaine Greer, David Frost, John Cleese, Peter Cook, Graham Chapman, Eric Idle, Stephen Fry, Emma Thompson, Hugh Lawrie and Sasha Baron Cohen among many others. David could have been added to that list.
As if this opportunity weren’t enough to persuade him to stay put, a young undergraduate, renowned for the high quality of the plays he produced personally asked him to feature in one of his productions during the Lent Term. This after seeing him interpret the part of Tom in Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie” some time before Christmas. Someone then told him that if this young man took an interest in you, you were pretty well made as an actor at Cambridge. What more did he want? For Spielberg himself to be in the audience and discover him?
In his defence, though, he did feel trapped by the course, and was finding it heavy going. In order to pass, you had to spend a full year as a teacher after completion of the basic PGCE. That meant it would be two years before he was free again to call himself an actor and work as such. It just seemed an awfully long time, when in fact it wasn’t at all, and two years after quitting Cambridge he was even further away from his dream than when he’d started off.
The truth is he left Coverton for no good reason, and the decision continued to pain him for the rest of his life, and these words from from Whittier’s “Maud Muller” to tear him to shreds of utter nothingness: “For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: ‘it might have been’”. Still, within a matter of hours of the start of the Lent Term of 1987, he’d vanished, disappeared into the night in the company of a close friend he’d wheedled into helping him out.
 
Once he was free, he set about the task of resuming his career, sporadically commuting to London from a little village just a stone’s throw from the coast near Portsmouth where he was resident at the time, although most days he achieved little.
What’s more, he was hopelessly unsuited for the bands for which he chose to audition, whether the Jazz-Funk outfit from the massive outer London suburb of Croydon, or the Rock ‘n’ Roll revival band from Pompey itself. And mainly because of his ultra-cultured image, which jarred with the toughness of everyday working class life in Britain in the mid 1980s.
And highlighted hair and dinky twin ear studs hardly did him any favours, although he did try and tone down his image, which had become defiantly out of touch with the prevailing youth fashions by the mid 1980s. For he’d latterly favoured such bizarre sartorial items as a gold lame waistcoat, skin tight drainpipes and black suede winkle pickers with side buckles.
Although by ’87, he could sometimes be seen in a trendy outfit of two-tone parka and tight grey corduroy jeans which he adopted in an attempt to better blend in with his surroundings. But he remained a fish out of water; beloved by some, contemned by others, until sometime in the summer he returned to London on a permanent basis to a minor flurry of creative activity.
First, he took part in a rehearsed reading at Notting Hill’s justly reputable Gate Theatre of a Japanese play directed by Ariana. Then, at her behest, he served as MC for a week-long benefit for the Gate called “Captain Kirk’s Midsummer Log” in the persona of one Mr Denmark 1978, a comic monstrosity created for him by Ariana.
Among those appearing on the bill were comedienne, Jo Brand, in her then incarnation of The Sea Monster; comedy satirist Rory Bremner; and Renaissance Man Patrick Marber, initially a stand-up, but best known today as an award-winning playwright and Oscar-nominated screenwriter.
The Denmark character went down so well at the benefit that he wrote an entire show around him based on the premise that winning a Scandinavian male beauty contest in 1979 had altered the balance of his mind.
Thence he’d became convinced of having been at the forefront of pretty well every major cultural development since the dawn of Pop, only to be cravenly ripped off by Sinatra, Elvis, the Beatles, the Stones, Punks, Rappers and so on.
And perhaps in its modest way, it helped to fuel the thriving comedic school of self-delusion which could also be said to include Steve Coogan’s Alan Partridge and Ricky Gervais’ David Brent. But then again perhaps not.
Later in ’87, he started rehearsals for a Catalonian play centring on a mysterious decadent Marquis to be directed by Ariana. And while it’s likely to have been originally set in pre-revolutionary France, Ariana updated it to the late 19th Century…possibly the Paris of Lorrain’s “Monsieur de Phocas”.
And it received some fair reviews…with David being singled out for some praise in the London Times among other periodicals. But rather than capitalise on this modest success, he decided to start work instead as a teacher at the Tellegen School of English in London’s Oxford Street.
He did so at the behest of his closest friend, Huw Owen, the Swansea native who’d served as the model for Robert Fitzroy-Square in their Silverhill band, Z Cars, but who was now working at Tellegen’s. Besides which, he’d already undergone a week’s training with them and been offered a job.
And for David, being a Tellegen teacher was the perfect dream job…providing him with a social life on a plate, as well as enough money to finance the hours he spent each evening in the Champion public house on Wells Street, W.1.
Once the final classes had ended some time after 7.30, student and teacher alike would meet at the Champion to drink and talk and laugh and do as they wished until closing time. And David himself would usually leave around 10.30 to catch the last train home from Waterloo, although, sometimes he’d miss it and have to catch a later one which might see him stranded deep in the Surrey countryside. At other times, there’d be a party to go to, or the Tellegen disco at Jacqueline’s Night Club in nearby Soho.
Most of the teachers socialised with their own kind, while David preferred the company of the students, although this situation was to become modified by 1990, when his friends were being chosen from among both the teaching and student bodies. But at night, it would be almost impossible to extricate him from his circle of favourites from Italy, Japan, Spain, Brazil, Poland, France…fact which proved irksome to his good friends, Stan and Noddy, at a certain stage in his short-lived career at Tellegen’s.
For Stan, a Tellegen teacher and resting actor like David, and Noddy, a young student from the great city of Sao Paolo in Brazil, were trying to organise rehearsals for a band they were supposed to be getting together. But thanks to David’s dilatory attitude, this never happened despite some early promise, as Noddy was a gifted guitarist, and Stan a potentially good front man.
But David continued to discard precious opportunities as if it were so much stinking refuse…little suspecting that he was shoring up the kind of heartbreak that stems from unfulfilled promise, and which caused Jamie Tyrone to quote from Dante Gabriel Rossetti in “A Long Day’s Journey into Night”, while clearly describing himself:
“Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been;
I am also called No-more, Too-late, Farewell;”
As well as the perpetual party lifestyle, he spent his spare cash on clothes, cassettes, books, and of course, rent. That is, during those brief few months he spent as a tenant in Hanwell, West London at the house of a friend of his fathers’ from the London session world, Dai Thomas.
Dai was a small, dark, bearded, always nattily dressed professional fiddler, whose life, lived close to the edge, but with the absolute minimum of effort, incarnated a kind of preternatural Celtic cool that while alarming was yet deeply charismatic.
He also spent several hundreds of pounds being initiated into the art of self-hypnosis by a Harley Street doctor who specialised in hypnotherapy and nutritional medicine. This, in the hope of finding a solution not just to his alcoholism, but the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder to which he was increasingly prey in the late 1980s.
Yet, despite the drinking and the OCD, his primary emotional condition was one of utter exaltation and enraptured joy of life, which was what made it so hard for him to accept that he wouldn’t be returning to Tellegen’s in 1990. But it was his own fault, because he’d left without warning early in the year…and then decided he wanted to return, despite having refused an offer to do so from the school itself some weeks theretofore.
So, reluctantly delivered from a job he genuinely loved, he revived his acting career thanks once again to the influence of his dear friend Ariana.
She suggested he might like to play Feste for a production of “Twelfth Night”, to be staged in the summer at the Jacksons Lane theatre in North London. And so after a successful audition for the director, Sandy Stein, he set about re-learning Feste’s lines, and arranging the songs according to the original primitive melodies.
Yet, if the play itself was pure joy to be involved in, the same can’t be said for the train journeys to and from Highgate for rehearsals. For it was during these lengthy trips across the capital that David started feeling the need to inure himself as never before against what he saw as nocturnal London’s ever-present aura of menace.
It’s likely that years of hard living were finally starting to take their toll on his nervous system. For in addition to alcohol and nicotine, he’d been ingesting industrial strength doses of caffeine for years, initially in tablet form, and then in the shape of the coffee cocktails he liked to swill one after the other before afternoon classes at Tellegen’s.
This may go some way towards explaining the sheer paranoia which ultimately caused him to start drinking on the way to rehearsals, and then for the first time in his life as a professional actor, during rehearsals. However, he promised Sandy he’d not touch a drop for the actual performances, and was as good as his word. Although each performance was succeeded by some serious partying on his part…with most of the cast members joining him in the revels.
And his hyperkinetic performance was well-received, with one beautifully spoken Englishwoman even going so far as to tell him he was the finest Feste she’d ever seen…and what a pity she wasn’t a passing casting director. But then serendipitous incidents of this kind may have happened to other people…but never to poor David Cristiansen.
Later in 1990, he began another PGCE course, this time at the former West London College of Further Education based in East Twickenham, taking up residence in nearby Isleworth.
He began quite promisingly, fitting in well and making good friends, and as might be expected, excelling in drama and physical education. And he was abstinent by day, while on those rare occasions he did drink, it was just a question of a pint or so with lunch.
He’d mentally determined to complete the course, and yet on the verge of his period of teaching practice, found himself to be desperately behind in his preparation. And so he provisionally removed himself in order to decide whether it was worth his staying on or not.
In the event he chose to quit, but rather than return to his parents’ home, he stayed on in Isleworth to rekindle his career as a deliverer of novelty telegrams. At the same time, he continued to work as a walk-on artist, something he’d been doing on and off for over a decade. But specialising as a crime scene photographer for a long-running police series with its HQ in Merton, South London.
He also became half of a musical duo formed with a slim young Mancunian with reddish blond hair and brilliant light green eyes who rejoiced in the name of Maxie Coburg, although his true surname reflected his roots in Northern England. And while working as a singer-songwriter at the time, Max eventually evolved into a bona fide Renaissance Man, and not just as singer and musician, but actor, writer, comedian, performer, impressionist, film maker and esoteric thinker.
They began as buskers in Leicester Square, before settling down for rehearsals in the hope of getting some gigs, their repertoire a mixture of Rock and Roll and Motown classics, as well as a host of originals, mostly written by Max. But with one or two contributions by David.
He wanted to call the band Venus Xtravaganza, but in the end, they settled for Max’s choice of The Unknowns, that is if they ever called anything at all. And unknown is what they remained which for poor David was simply business as usual.

Then, early in ‘91, he spent a few weeks in the beautiful seaside town and major London overspill area of Hastings, in an effort to pass a course in teaching English as a foreign language.
To this end, he worked like a Trojan; but he was struggling terribly, tormented by OCD and its endless demands on his time and energies in the shape of rituals both physical and mental. And while he didn’t drink at all during the day, at night he was sometimes so stoned he was incoherent.
Predictably, perhaps, he was failed, and when he asked the authorities if they might reconsider, he was informed that their decision was final. It was a bit of a let-down for him for sure, but he’d loved his time in Hastings, even while continuing the search for some kind of spiritual solution to his mental troubles which led him to a “church” which was far, far from the kind he’d come ultimately to seek out.
At least part of the reason for his torment may be provided by the following extracts from a letter his mother wrote him during a fascinating but fruitless sojourn:
“…I had a chance to look at your library…I could not believe what I saw. These very strange books, beyond my comprehension, most of them, and I thought what a dissipation of a good mind that thought it right to read such matters…I feel very deeply that you have up to your present state, almost ruined your mind. Your happy, smiling face has left you, your humorous nature, ditto, your spirited state of mind, your cheerful, sunny, exuberant well-being, all gone. Too much thought given to the unhappiness and sad state of others (often those you can not help, in any way)…I’ve said recently that I am convinced that anyone can get oneself into a state of agitation or distress or anxiety by thinking or reading about, or witnessing unpleasant things, and the only thing to do is to, as much as possible, avoid such matters, to not let them get hold in the mind. Your fertile mind has led you astray. Why, and how?”
How many millions of mothers over the course of the centuries have asked this of offspring who’ve been inexplicably drawn to the shadow lands of life only to lose their way back to sanity? Only God knows. Most of course, successfully make the journey back before settling into a normal mode of life, but the danger of becoming lost is always there, especially for those who remain in the shadows far beyond adolescence. Eternal adolescence is arguably one of the prime features of our era, facilitated by its exaltation of youth. And while there are those who’d insist that far fewer young people today are in thrall to the dark glamour of self-destructive genius than in previous Rock eras, the worldview still very much exists.
For David’s part, he came ultimately to view Rock as more than just a simple Pop music derived from various Folk genres, so much as an enormously influential subculture, even a religion, and to contend that those who grew to maturity in the sixties were spiritually affected not just by the music but the cultural changes brought about by the Rock revolution.
He’d insist that from quitting formal education aged 16, he was in thrall to a cult of instant gratification that had been growing progressively more powerful throughout the West since about 1955.
After all, he’d contend, he failed to build a future for himself, in terms of a profession, a family, financial security, and so on, having once viewed all these with an indifference verging on contempt. And it hurt him deeply to realise the extent to which he’d sabotaged his life with such a negative identity, so in his despair, he cast the blame on Rock.
The following summer of 1992, he made another attempt at passing the TEFL course…this time at a college set in one of London’s most beautiful parks. But he was drinking all day every day, and even though he worked hard and gave some good classes, there was not way on earth he was going to pass.
Still, it was a fabulous summer, and much of it he spent in a state of manic hyperactivity. Bliss it was to stride in the warm suburban evening sun to his local station of Hampton Court with the Orb’s eerie “Blue Room” throbbing over and over in his head on his way to yet another long night of ecstatic insensibility. He could have passed out on any one of these wild nights and awoken again in Hell, but that didn’t concern him.
The romantic decadence associated with the eighties was no longer even remotely current, and there was a new spirit as he saw it, a mystic techno-bohemianism which appeared to him to be everywhere in the early nineties.
And he sought to visit as many clubs and venues as he could where it was being celebrated, even though in the event he only ever went to one, Cyber Seed in Covent Garden, which was poorly attended and only lasted a short time.
Later on in this final beautiful lethal summer of intoxication, soon after appearing as Stefano in “The Tempest” at the Conway Hall in Red Lion Square, he set out on yet another PGCE course, this time bearing the suffix “fe” for Further Education.
Its purpose was to train himself and his fellow students to teach pupils in sixth form colleges and other further education establishments. And while its base was the University of New Eltham in the tough outer suburbs of South East London, he divided his time between New Eltham, and Twickenham College in the leafy Royal Borough of Richmond on Thames.
While on top of all this study, there were the gigs with Maxie…the novelty telegrams…and who knows what else…and he loved every second of a frenetic lifestyle lived in total ecstatic defiance of the wholesale ruin of mind, body, soul, spirit…

The period embracing the autumn of 1992 and the first few weeks of winter may well have been the most debauched of David’s entire existence.
He’d get up early, possibly about six, and then prepare himself for the day ahead with a bottle of wine, usually fortified, then he’d keep his units topped up throughout the day with vodka or gin, taking regular swigs from the miniatures he liked to have with him at all times. Some evenings he’d spend in central London, others with his new friends from the college, and they were a close and pretty wild crowd for a while. There were times in town when he couldn’t keep the booze down, so he’d order a king-sized cola from MacDonalds, which he’d then lace with spirits before cautiously sipping from it through a straw.
He was a euphoric drunk and so almost never unpleasant…but he was unpredictable…a true Dionysian who’d cry out on a British Rail train in the middle of the afternoon, causing passengers to flinch with alarm…or perform a wild disjointed Karate kick into thin air on a crowded London street. One afternoon he tore his clothes to shreds after having arrived too late for an audition and a barman who served him later on in the day asked him:
“You bin in a fight then?”
And then there was the shameful night at Waterloo station – or was it Liverpool Street? – that he was so incapacitated by drink that he had to be escorted across the main concourse to his train by one of a colony of rough sleepers that were a feature of mainline stations in those days.
However, all these insane incidents came to a head one night in early 1993 in an Indian restaurant in Hampton Court close to the Surrey-London border. He’d been dining there with two female friends when, suddenly feeling like pure death, he turned to the lady who was next to him and asked:
“Do I look as bad as I feel?”
As soon as she’d told him that indeed he did, he got up from the table, walked a few paces and then collapsed as if stone dead in the middle of the restaurant. He was then carried bodily out into the fresh night air by two or three Indian waiters, one of whom set about shocking some life back into him by flicking ice cold water in his face.
“Don’t give up,” he pleaded, his voice betraying true concern…and in time thanks to him some semblance of life returned, and David was well enough to be driven home.
Yet, within two days he was drinking as heavily as before, continuing to do so virtually around the clock until the weekend. He then spent Saturday evening with his close friend from the restaurant, and at some point in the morning of the 16th, after having drunk solidly all night, he asked her to fill a long glass with neat gin and each sip took him further and further into the desired state of blissful forgetfulness.
He awoke exhilarated, which was normal for him following a lengthy binge. It was his one drying out day of the week, and so he probably spent it writing as well as cleaning up the accumulated chaos of the past week. One thing he definitely did was listen to a radio documentary on the legendary L.A. Rock band the Doors which he’d taped some weeks or perhaps months earlier.
He especially savoured “When the Music’s Over” from what was then one of his favourite albums, “Strange Days” released in the wake of the Summer of Love on his 12th birthday, 7 October 1967. This apocalyptic epic with its unearthly screams and ecstatically discordant guitar solo seemed to him about living in the shadow of death, beckoning death, mocking death, defying death.
He powerfully identified with the Doors’ gifted singer Jim Morrison…who’d been drawn as a very young man to poets of darkly prophetic intensity, such as Blake, Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Artaud. As well as those of the Beat Generation, who were themselves to a degree children of the – largely French – Romantic poètes maudits, whose works have the power to change lives, as they surely did Morrison’s.
His philosophy of life was clearly informed by Blake, who wrote of “the road of excess” leading to “the palace of wisdom”, while his hell raising persona came to a degree from Rimbaud, who extolled the virtues of “a long, immense and systematic derangement of all the senses” as an angel-faced hooligan in the Paris of the early 1870s.
After having spent the day revelling in his own inane notion of himself as a poet on the edge like his heroes, at some point in the early evening he got what he’d been courting for so long…an intimation of early death, when for pretty well the first time in his life alcohol stopped being his beloved elixir and became a mortal enemy, causing his legs to lose sensation and his life force to recede at a furious and terrifying rate.
In a blind panic, he opened a spare bottle of sparkling wine he had about the house even though he’d hoped not to have to drink that day. Once he’d drained it, he felt better for a while, in fact so much so that he took a few snaps of myself lounging around looking haggard and unshaven, with freshly cropped hair.
Soon after this macabre photo session he set off in search of more alcohol. Arriving at a local delicatessen, the Asian shop keeper nervously told him that the off-license wasn’t open for some time yet. There was nothing for him to do but take refuge on a nearby green, where he lay for a while, still dressed in the shabby white cut-offs he’d been wearing earlier. Finally, the offie opened and he was able to buy more booze.
In years to come, one of the last things he remembered doing on Sunday evening was singing hymns in a nearby Methodist church as the tears flowed…tears of remorse, tears of fear, tears of desperation.
He had no further memory of what happened that hellish night, but there were many such nights ahead. At least one of these saw him endlessly pacing up and down corridors and stairs in an attempt to stay conscious and so – as he came to see it – not die…and each time he shut his eyes he could have sworn he saw demonic entities beckoning him into a bottomless black abyss.
He set about ridding his room of artefacts he somehow knew to be offensive to God from the night of the 16th or 17th onwards. Many books were destroyed…books on astrology and numerology and other mystical and occult subjects, books on war and crime and atrocity, and books about artists some call accursed for their kinship with drunkenness and madness and death.
He genuinely came to believe that for all the horrors he underwent, it was during that first night he came to accept Christ as his Saviour, and that had his violent conversion not come about when it did, he might have been lost forever, although whether one agrees with him or not depends on where one stands on the issue of predestination versus free will.
But he’d have surely immersed himself further in the new Bohemianism of the 1990s, which of course was not new at all, simply a revival of the adversary values of the sixties. Far from vanishing around ’73, these values had merely gone back underground, where they set about fertilising new anti-establishment clans such as the Anarcho-Punks and the New Age Travellers who quietly flourished throughout the ’80s.
Around ’92, some kind of amalgam between these tribes and the growing Rave-Dance movement could be said to have taken place. And David was ready to take his place as a zealot of the New Edge; only to be delivered from its seductive grasp by a “Road to Damascus” conversion to Christianity.
However, if he’d been reborn against all the odds, he still had to suffer in the physical, if only briefly.
On the morning of the 17th of January, he somehow made it into New Eltham for classes at the University, but by evening he felt so ill he started swigging from a litre bottle of gin in the hope this would improve his condition. He also phoned Alcoholics Anonymous at his mother’s request, and agreed to give a meeting a shot.
Next day, on the way to Twickenham, he got the feeling that his heart was about to explode, not just once but over and over again. Then, after that morning’s classes, he tried taking a stroll around town but couldn’t feel his legs, and was struggling to stay conscious, so he ended up ordering a double brandy from the pub next door to the Police Station. He was shaking so much the landlord thought he was fresh from an interrogation session.
Later, he was thrown out of another pub for preaching at the top of his voice, and, walking through Twickenham town centre he started making the sign of the cross to passers-by, telling one poor young guy never to take to drink like some kind of walking advert for temperance. The fellow nodded in assent before silently scurrying away.
Back home, in an effort to calm himself down, he dug out an old capsule of Chlomethiazole, a sedative commonly used in treating and controlling the effects of acute alcohol withdrawal, but dangerous, in fact potentially fatal, when used in conjunction with alcohol. He still had some capsules left over from about 1990 when he’d been prescribed them by his then doctor, which meant they’d long gone beyond their expiry date. For a time he felt better and was able to sleep, but soon after waking, felt worse than ever.
Later, at an AA meeting, he kept leaving the room to douse his head in cold water, anything to shock some life back into me, to the dismay of his sponsor Dan who wanted him to stay put, for the purported healing effects of doing so:
“What do you think I come here for,” he asked him, “the free cups of tea?”
Wednesday morning saw him pacing the office of the first available doctor, and it may have been touch and go as to whether he was going to stay on his feet…or overdose on the spot and die on him.
It was he who prescribed him the Valium which caused David to fall into a deep, deep sleep which may have saved his life, and from which he awoke to sense that a frontier had been passed and that he was out of danger at long last.

Chapter Seven

David Cristiansen struggled on with the Post Graduate Certificate in Education throughout the earliest days of 1993.
And he did so while rehearsing for a couple of tiny parts for a play based on the life of James Joyce’s troubled, fascinating daughter, the dancer Lucia Joyce, under the direction of Ariana, which premiered at the Lyric Studio, Hammersmith on the 4th of February 1993.
He also attended occasional drugs and alcohol counselling sessions at a church in Greenwich, South East London with Ellen, a lovely blonde woman of about 45 with a soft and soothing London accent and the gentlest pale blue eyes imaginable. The only time he ever knew her to lose her composure was when he announced over the phone that a matter of hours after deciding of his own volition to stop taking Diazepam, he’d reverted to Chlomethiazole:
“Why’d you do that?” She unceremoniously asked.
However, enough time had passed between his taking the capsule and calling Ellen for him to be out of danger; and she literally laughed with relief at the realisation.
Then, a matter of days after coming to Christ, he received a phone call from a counsellor for an organisation called Contact for Christ based in Selsdon, South London, by the name of Denver Cashe. Perhaps he’d half-heartedly filled in a form of theirs the previous summer while filled with alcoholic anticipation as he slowly approached Waterloo station by British Rail train with the sun setting over the foreboding South London cityscape.
Typically, he tried to put the caller off, but Denver was persistent, and before he knew it he was at the door of David’s parents’ house, a trim, dark, handsome man in late middle age with gently piercing coffee coloured eyes and a luxuriant white moustache. And at his insistence they prayed together.
Some time later David visited him and his wife Rose at his large and elegant house where suburb meets country just beyond the Greater London border. And on that day, David and he made an extensive list of aspects of his pre-Christian life requiring deep repentance, and they prayed over each of these in turn.
In addition, they discussed which church he should be attending, and there was some talk of his joining Denver and Rose at their little family fellowship. But in the end, Denver gave his blessing to Cornerstone Bible Church, now Cornerstone the Church, a large fellowship affiliated to the Word of Faith Movement, and based in the prosperous London suburb of Esher in Surrey, where David would soon be baptised by its pastor.
David had attended his very first service there even before becoming a Christian in late 1992. Drunk at the time, he’d sat next to a beautiful blonde woman of about 55 whom he later discovered to be a successful actress. Apart from an elder from the Jesus Fellowship, who’d laid hands on him at a meeting of theirs in central London, she was his very first Christian mentor. However, he was never to see or speak to her again as he didn’t return to the church for several months, and by the time he did as a new believer, she’d moved to another church. Then they kept on missing each other, and she died in 2001. But David never forgot her.
In the early part of ’94, David set out on the final phase of his PGCE, although he was ultimately to fail the course as a whole.
To their credit, though, his tutors at did offer him the opportunity of retaking just the Teaching Practice component, but he chose to turn them down. And if he was depressed, it can’t have been for long because in September, he successfully auditioned for the lead role of Roote in Harold Pinter’s little known “The Hothouse”. This for a newly formed fringe theatre group called Grip based at the Rose and Crown pub in Kingston, a large suburban area to the south of London.
Written in 1958, “The Hothouse” is eminently Pinteresque, with its almost high poetic verbal virtuosity and inventiveness and dark surreal humour laced with a constant sense of impending violence, although it wasn’t performed until 1980, when it was directed by Pinter himself for London’s Hampstead and Ambassador Theatres.
From the auditions onwards, David gelled with the American director Ben Evans.
Most of the auditions he’d attended up to this point had hinged on the time-honoured method of the actor performing a piece from memory before a panel of interviewers. But Ben insisted his candidates read from the play in small groups, which enabled them to attain a basic feel for their characters; and so feel like they were actually acting rather than coldly reciting. For David, this was the only way to audition.
Once David had been told the lead was his, he devoted himself to Ben’s vision of Roote, the pompous yet deranged director of an unnamed English psychiatric hospital: the Hothouse of the title. Ben demanded of him an interpretation of Roote which was deeply at odds with his usual highly Method-oriented, subtle, intense, introspective and yet somehow also emotionally vehement approach to acting. But Ben’s directorial instincts were spot-on, as his production went on to receive spectacular reviews not just in the local press, but the international listings magazine, “Time Out”, in which David’s performance was described as “flawlessly accurate” and “lit by flashes of black humour”. An amazing triumph for a humble fringe show.
A major agent went out of her way to express her interest in David, and asked him to ensure his details reach her, which he did…but he never heard from her again, possibly due to the shabby condition of his CV at the time. And he didn’t pursue the matter further, which says a lot about his attitude to the push that is essential to success within the acting profession; more so perhaps even than talent.
In his defence one could say that since his recent conversion his priorities had shifted so that he viewed worldly success with less relish than he’d done only a few years before. Also, he badly missed the relaxation alcohol once provided him with following his work onstage; as well as the revels extending deep into the night during which he’d throw his youth and affections about like some kind of maniacal gambler. So, while he still loved acting itself, the process of being an actor had become pure torture.
He’d boxed himself into the position of no longer being able to enjoy social situations as others do, nor to relax.
This may have had something to do with the state of his endorphins, the body’s natural feel-good chemicals. For a theory exists to the effect that these can be permanently depleted by long-term abuse of alcohol and other narcotics.
To further complicate matters, he’d started suffering from deep tormenting spiritual problems for which he’d ultimately seek a solution in the shape of what is known as Deliverance Ministry.
Within a short time of “The Hothouse” reaching the end of its two week run, Grip’s artistic director Richard asked David if he’d like to audition for an upcoming production of Jim Cartwright’s two-handed play, “Two”. Naturally he said yes; and so after a successful audition, found himself playing all the male characters opposite gifted character actress Jean from Liverpool, who played all the female.
By the end of the run the houses were so packed that people were sitting on the side of the stage at the actors’ feet, something David had never experienced before on the London fringe. Yet, he dreaded the end of each performance, which would see him make his excuses as soon as it was possible to do so without causing undue offence.
Release from a torturous dungeon of sobriety came while he was attending some unrelated function at the Rose and Crown a day or so following his final performance in “Two”, when a guy he’d only just met offered to buy him a drink and he asked for a glass of wine. Apart from the time at his parents’ house a few weeks earlier when he took a swig of what he thought was water but which turned out to be vodka or gin, this was the first alcohol to pass his lips since January ’93.
This single glass of wine made him feel amazing, doubly so given the purity of his system. He cycled home that night in a state of total rapture, feeling for the first time in months that he could do anything. Over the next few week his drinking increased, reaching a climax in a pub in Twickenham where he met an old university friend who’d just finished a course at St Mary’s University College in nearby Strawberry Hill, and where he drank and smoked himself into a stupor.
Cycling home afterwards, he took a bend near Hampton Wick and came off his bike, striking his head against a bus shelter. He stayed flat on his back for a while, abject and stinking of drink. He could have sworn he saw a shadowy figure running towards him as he lay there in the dark, but before long he was shakily resuming his journey home.
However, weeks of controlled drinking and one massive binge, possibly combined with the ill effects of a violent blow to the head, resulted in his becoming ill and virtually incapacitated for what might have been as long as a fortnight. Time and again during this awful period he’d awake from a feverish semi-sleep, dizzy, faint and nauseous, with his face a deathly yellowy pale, but each time a single further second of consciousness seemed beyond him, it was as if God breathed life back into him and the terror of dying subsided. All he could do was lie around, waiting, praying for a return to normality…and when this came, he determined never to drink again as long as he lived. But we swiftly forget our sojourns in Hell…

A few months after appearing in Jim Cartwright’s bitter-sweet two-hander “Two”, David performed in one final play at the Rose and Crown theatre, the character-driven comedy “Lovelives”. Written entirely by the cast, it consisted of a series of sketches centring on the disastrous antics of a group of singletons who’d come together at a lonely hearts club in the suburbs. Perhaps then it chimed perfectly with the spirit of British post-war comedy and its characteristic celebration of banality and even failure.
Later in ’95, he undertook two small roles in a production at the Tristan Bates theatre near Leicester Square of the famous Greek tragedy “Iphigeneia in Taurois”, written by Euripides somewhere between 414 and 412 BC. These being Pylades, constant companion of the main character Orestes, and the Messenger, whom he played as a maniacal fool with the kind of “refined” English accent once supposedly affected by policemen and non-commissioned officers. Directed by a close friend of his, the houses were sparse at first, picking up towards the end of the run.
In January ’96, he joined a Christian theatre company based at the Elim Pentecostal church in West Croydon, Surrey. They were known as Street Level, and he went on to serve variously for them as MC, script writer, actor, singer and musician with two other members, married company leader Serena, and 19 year old Rebecca from nearby Sanderstead.
Together, they toured a series of shows around schools in various – usually tough – multicultural areas of South East London, and on the whole, were greeted by the kids with an almost uniform affection. And there was an incredible chemistry between Serena, Rebecca and himself…until things started to go wrong.
Towards the end of the summer, Serena asked David to write a large scale project for the group, suggesting a contemporary version of John Bunyan’s classic Christian allegory “The Pilgrim’s Progress”:
“I’ll put your name in lights,” she promised him.
This he set about doing, and after some weeks of labouring over what turned out to be an unwieldy and often violent epic punctuated by scenes of dark humour that occasionally verged on the Rabelaisian, he started to have second thoughts about carrying on with Street Level.
The play, “Paul Grim’s Progress”, had left him in poor shape spiritually, and he didn’t fancy too many more of the long and costly train journeys that were necessary to get him to Croydon and back. And so he began to withdraw.
And by the time of his final exit from Street Level, he’d already moved from his first spiritual home of Cornerstone to the Thames Vineyard Christian Fellowship, part of the Association of Vineyard Churches founded by John Wimber in the 1970s. This as a result of being told by a phone friend that the Vineyard movement contained members whose spiritual gifts were in the realm of the truly exceptional.
His curiosity aroused, he went along one Sunday evening and had a powerful experience which made me want to stay; and so he did.
As with Cornerstone he joined a Home Fellowship Group where he completed part of the Alpha course, which had been pioneered by Nicky Gumbel of West London’s famous Holy Trinity Brompton.
He visited HTB at some point in the mid ’90s, when it was at the height of the revival movement known as the Toronto Blessing. This being so called because it had been ignited in January 1994 at the Toronto Airport Vineyard Church by St. Louis Vineyard pastor Randy Clark.
Clark had himself received it from South African evangelist Rodney Howard Brown during a service at Rhema Bible Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, then pastored by Kenneth Hagin Jr., father of the Word-Faith movement, one of the major strains of Charismatic Christianity, with a controversial emphasis on “Positive Confession”.
The Anointing spread to the UK in the summer of 1994 where it was eventually dubbed The Toronto Blessing by The Daily Telegraph. Its main centres included HTB, Terry Virgo’s New Frontiers family of churches and Gerald Coates’ Pioneer People.
Pioneer’s centre at the time was a cinema in the Surrey suburb of Esher, which David visited a couple of times, when it was so packed he was forced to stand all throughout the service, a situation which was duplicated when he dropped in at the London HQ of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God one afternoon around about the same time.
Like many Charismatic churches, UCKG upholds the Fivefold ministry, and so believes that the five gifts referred to in Ephesians 4:11, namely Apostle, Prophet, Evangelist, Pastor and Teacher, are still in operation.
But to return to David’s acting career…in the spring of ’98, he started rehearsing for a production of Shakespeare’s infamous Scottish Play, to be staged at Fulham’s Lost Theatre in the summer. And despite the fact that his three cameos – as Lennox, the Doctor, and an Old Man – were praised by cast and audience members alike, to date, it remains his last hurrah as an actor. Quite simply, the passion to perform in front of a live audience that raged within him like a forest fire for more than two decades had long been extinguished, or rather turned to dread.
A few months later and the troubled, turbulent 20th Century gave way to the 21st to the sound of fireworks frantically exploding all throughout David’s neighbourhood of West Molesey. Phoning his father that night to wish him a happy new year he discovered that his mother was desperately ill with flu:
“Some start to the millennium,” he grimly told his dad.
It went on to occur to him that she’d become susceptible to the flu virus partly as a result of stress caused by his recent departure from yet another course; this time an MA in French and Theory of Literature from University College, London, which was one of the most prestigious of its kind in the world. In time though, her incredible Scots-Irish constitution saw her through to a complete recovery.
He’d found the course magnetically compelling on an intellectual level, despite an awareness that writing extensively about Literary Theory might come increasingly to disturb him, and perhaps even challenge his faith, given its emphasis on what is known as Deconstruction, a term coined by French philosopher Jacques Derrida. He withdrew on the advice of several spiritual advisers, but it was a decision that would haunt him for the next ten years of his life.
Subsequent to making it, he started playing guitar for Liberty Christian Centre, a satellite church of London’s Kensington Temple, a large Elim Pentecostal church pastored by Colin Dye based in Notting Hill, West London. Then, shortly after agreeing to be Liberty’s lone musician, he quit his position as a telephone canvasser for an e-commerce company based in Surbiton, Surrey, thus bringing a fairly lengthy period spent as an office worker to an end.
A real change in his professional fortunes came around Christmastime when he was made lead singer for a Jazz band formed by the versatile musician Barrie Guard, an old friend of his father’s. And which was complemented at various times by his dad, a double bass player, a brace of drummers, and David. They went on to cut several demos with glorious arrangements by Barrie, with David crooning “Fly Me to the Moon”, “Moonlight in Vermont”, “The Days of Wine and Roses”, among other standards of the Classic Pop canon.
In early ’01, Liberty’s Pastor Phil decided to dissolve the church, so David made yet another return to Cornerstone. While the following summer, Barrie’s Jazz band folded in the wake of the 2002 Shelton Arts Festival, which was a real shame because they’d finally found the audience they’d been searching for all along, if the enthusiasm with which their performance was greeted was anything to go by.
Within days, David started working from home making appointments for a genial travelling salesman. And he was briefly very successful, until things started tailing off in the autumn; and he was let go. By this time he’d effectively left Cornerstone for good, although he was to make many subsequent sporadic returns.
This sudden exit came in consequence of a desire born of intensive internet research to seek out churches existing beyond the Pentecostal/Charismatic fold. These being Cessationist, which is to say they don’t accept that the more spectacular Gifts of the Holy Spirit such as Tongues and Prophecy are still in operation.
For up until this time, any church that didn’t encourage the speaking in other tongues David had refused to accept as being truly Christian. In fact, before 2003, which was his year of relentless internet research, he’d known next to nothing about the finer points of his faith.
Although he was fairly well versed in the subject of prophecy thanks to having been introduced to the same early in his Christian life by Denver and Rose. And specifically through various magazines and books, such as “Prophecy Today” and the works of Barry R Smith.
He had no clue as to the meaning of Calvinism or Arminianism, Predestination or Foreknowledge, Cessationism or Continuationism and so on…but he didn’t believe that made an iota of difference to the condition of his soul, as people – as he saw it – are saved by faith alone, with true saving faith producing the fruits of repentance.
In a general sense the year 2000 turned out to be something of a turning point for David, not just spiritually, but in terms of his entire personality, which became more inward looking, even by the standards of the previous seven years.
Significantly perhaps, the previous year had been the first since he was about 17 that he faced the world with his hair its natural medium brown after having dyed it for nearly three decades. What prompted this was not a sudden loathing for the vanity of the bottle blond, but the fact that the peroxide-based streaking kits he favoured were causing him to have breathing difficulties.
At first, he missed being blond, but in time he came to prefer his natural colour after years of youthful blond androgyny. The fact is that throughout his twenties and for much of his thirties, he had remained in a state of extended adolescence, blond being after all the natural colour of eternal youth.
In his time, David had elicited a lot of admiration for attempting to take the romantic bohemian rebel existence to its logical conclusion when all around him were conforming at a furious rate. But the price for having done so was high, cruelly high, in terms of social and financial humiliation, leading David to become a veritable Jeremiah, in terms of his opposition to a lifestyle he blamed for ruining his life.
Yet, young people in the 2000s worshipped at the altar of romantic rebellion as they’d always done. But perhaps not to quite the same degree as those of David’s poor generation, who came to maturity to a frenetic Rock soundtrack. And who can say what effect it had on them, this music…tailor-made to inspire a generation scornful of deferred gratification, a generation of hipsters.
To the David of the Christian years, Rock – far from being just another music form – was a total art, involving poetry, theatre, fashion, but even more than that…a way of life with a strong spiritual foundation.
He fell under the influence of various Fundamentalist Christian critics of Rock music for a brief period in 2003, which made him feel inclined to destroy all traces of Rock music in his possession, even though he’d long lost any real taste for Hard Rock by then. However, by the summer, his attitude had mellowed to the extent that he was prepared to write about an hour’s worth of Rock songs in response to a request from his dad for songs for a possible collaboration with the son of a close friend. But these were as far from Hard Rock as it’s possible to be, being influenced by such relatively benign and melodic genres as Folk, Pop and Soul.
Some new, some upgrades of old tunes, they were recorded on a Sony CFS-B21L cassette-corder, and were generally well-received despite their humble origins. And so two of David’s songs were recorded on a friend’s computer using what may have been state of the art technology for 2004, with the resultant demo being sent to a music publishing company for assessment. But when their response was far from encouraging, it was back to the drawing board for David Cristiansen.

As if disillusioned by constant failure, David decided he wanted to write creatively as of January 2006, although the real motive for his doing so was altogether different. In fact, it was a period of sickness that spurred him towards a serious literary career.
This began with a panic attack in central London, which grew into a flu-like illness, but it wasn’t until he developed a painful condition affecting a singularly delicate section of his tegument that he decided that he’d no further interest in maintaining optimal physical attractiveness, and so felt he had little to lose by writing.
The truth is that soon after becoming a Christian, David had destroyed most of what he’d written up to that point, and then wrote quite happily for a time as a Christian, until it seemed to him as if God was calling a halt to his writing. So, once again, he started destroying any writings he managed to finish…sometimes dumping whole manuscripts into handy dustbins, or dispensing with them one sheet at a time down murky London drains.
Then in about 1998, he more or less gave up altogether…that is, until he felt compelled to break his literary silence as a result of the aforesaid extended bout of sickness. Thence, he started posting articles to the Blogster web site, which went on to form the basis of his memoir, ”Rescue of a Rock and Roll Child”.
In terms of activities of note in the following year of ‘07, he rehearsed an album of popular standards with his father which was finally released in the spring of 2008, although it only went on to sell a handful of copies, the majority remaining firmly ensconced in the box in which they’d arrived from the recording studio, where it had been recorded at Pat Cristiansen’s expense.
Later that year, he completed a first draft of his memoir after a full two years of labour.
Around about the same time, his former mentor Dr Elizabeth Lang died in her adopted village of Woodstock, Oxfordshire. The executor of her will, who was also the publisher of her final book, asked him to read one of the lessons at her funeral and deliver a eulogy in the capacity of a former student. This took place in the parish church of St Martin’s in the beautiful village of Bladon, where Winston Churchill is buried, along with fellow members of the Malborough family.
It was such a sad experience for him to be reunited with Elizabeth in such a way after nearly a quarter of a century, while being unable to communicate with her as he’d have been able to had he thought to make contact…even a handful of years earlier when she was still a published writer. It made him realise how important it is to stay close to friends and family before a time comes when it’s no longer possible to reconcile with them:
“Then it’s too late,” he thought to himself, “they’ve gone, and the world is always so much the poorer for their sudden absence and silence.”
By the beginning of 2011, there were so many versions of his story that David no longer knew which, if any, was the definitive one, and he occasionally teetered on the verge of dejection, as if his image of himself as a writer had been terminally shot to pieces. And he saw himself, and not for the first time, as a loser, in fact not just a loser but a king-size loser, a loser among losers, a loser supreme.
The contemplation that he was the best at what he did afforded him some satisfaction at those times of the day when his status in life meant the most to him, such as in those last few hours before he turned in for the night. But when all’s said and done, this was scant consolation to him.
Yet, is it not so that among those who ultimately come to faith to Him though Jesus Christ are men and women who would be judged failures in the eyes of the world, and yet having lost in life, have yet found a purpose that eludes life’s victors…among whom they may once have been counted?
The answer is of course yes, and the ultimate example of a high achiever who became the ultimate loser once he’d given his life to Christ was the Apostle Paul, the former Saul of Tarsus born into the Tribe of Benjamin who as an impeccably pious high-ranking Pharisee was yet a ferocious persecutor and murderer of Christians.
Yet, as a Christian, he suffered losses that most contemporary Western believers have no experience or even conception of. For while he was mocked and despised for his beliefs, he was also flogged, beaten, stoned, starved and repeatedly imprisoned, before being ultimately put down as if he were a sick and aging dog.
But that is not to say that all Christians come to faith in Christ through a violent Road to Damascus conversion after having undergone some unspeakable loss, far from it, for many – perhaps even most – come gently to faith without having suffered in any dramatic way whatsoever.
Yet the Damascus converts are deeply valuable to the Body of Christ, for they serve as living proof of the fact that anyone can be saved, regardless of their background. And their testimonies are as precious as they are for their very relative rarity
It could be said then that David was foolish to lament all he had lost in terms of opportunities for great wealth and success, for fame, status and glory and all the wondrous things that accompany these, for after all, these are things that one cannot take with us when we quit this earth, and life is short, so terribly short that it is described in the Word of God as a “vapour”.
And while for the most part his still handsome eyes failed to see this truth as if they’d become clouded o’er by the tears he often shed at night for his wasted past, and for the pain he felt when he thought of all he had lost, at other times, it became gloriously, brilliantly clear to him, and he rejoiced as the most fortunate of men.
Yes, he was a loser, and yet yes, he’d gained so much more than he’d lost.
Then in November 2011, a definitive version of “Seven Chapters from a Sad Sack Loser’s Life” saw the light of day. Narrated in the third person, with the character of David Cristiansen doubling as himself, which is to say the author Carl Halling, the names of most of the other characters included were also changed. As were the vast majority of the names of institutions. While dialogue was as David remembered it, as opposed to being reproduced with 100% accuracy. Either that, or it was based on ancient informal diary notes, and then edited for inclusion in his writings.
And by the time it did, he’d finally gained some real confidence within himself as a writer…
“I’m not done yet,” he’d boast to himself, or to anyone else who might listen, and to look at him, you might think he had a point.
Yes, he was a loser, and yet yes, he’d gained so much more than he’d lost.
Yet, it could have all been so different…

Book Four – Where the Halling Valley River Lies

Chapter One – The Heroic Life of Phyllis Mary Pinnock

In the Beautiful Valley of Tamar

My paternal grandmother Phyllis Mary Pinnock grew into a remarkably beautiful young woman with dark hair and green eyes, and an exquisitely sculpted mouth.
She’d been born sometime towards the end of the 19th or beginning of the 20th century, possibly in the Dulwich area of South East London. And given her father had been what is known as a gentleman, which means he forswore all labour, it may have been she was a scion of that part of the upper middle class known as the lower gentry.
And according to my father’s account, her first true love David was a scion of the Wilson Line of Hull which had developed into the largest privately owned shipping firm in the world in the early part of the century.
But like so many young men of that dutiful generation, immortalised in cruelly beautiful poems such as Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth” which speaks to us of “sad shires” decimated by an inexplicable conflict, he died young during the First World War. And she subsequently married an officer in the British army, to whom she bore two children, Peter Bevan and Suzanne, known as Dinny.
When her children were little more than infants, she elected to join her husband as a tea planter in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. And it was on that breathtakingly beautiful island, in a tough and typically isolated environment that she met the two men, tea planters like herself, who were destined to become her second and third husbands.
They were a British engineer by the name of Christopher “Chris” Evans, and my Danish namesake Carl Halling.
Carl had evidently once been a successful businessmen within the linoleum industry before some kind of reversal of fortune found him on the famous tea fields of Ceylon, which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle once described as being “as true a monument to courage as is the lion at Waterloo”.
Mary’s third child, my father, was born Patrick Clancy Halling in Rowella, Tasmania, in the beautiful Tamar Valley, but raised as Carl’s son in the great city of Sydney.
And according to Pat, Carl and Mary eked an existence in various fields of endeavour, including fruit farming, gold prospecting and real estate. While Mary was at some point a primary school teacher, and another, a journalist for the Sydney Telegraph. But it was a hard life according to Pat, especially after Carl contracted the multiple sclerosis that would ultimately kill him.
One blessing being that all three children were exceptionally gifted musically, Patrick as violinist, Peter as cellist and Suzanne as pianist; but of all of them Pat was the greatest prodigy. For while little more than an infant, he won a scholarship to the Sydney Conservatory of Music where he studied with Gerald Walenn, soloing for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra on a single occasion when he was still only eight or nine or ten. And one can only imagine the effect it had on his childish nervous system. However, he reserved his true passion for the water, this love of the sea and ships and specifically sailing being a legacy from Mary, who spent much of her adult life by the sea.
Carl died around about the time of the abdication of King Edward the VIIIth which took place in 1936, soon after which Mary and her family set off for Denmark, Carl having expressed a wish to be buried in his native land. And then all three children stayed behind for some time while their mother went valiantly on to London to look for somewhere to live on a permanent basis.
And it was in London that Pat studied both at the Royal Academy of Music and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, under the tutelage of Rowsby Woof and Max Rostal respectively.
He joined the London Philharmonic Orchestra while still a teenager during the Blitz on London.
And at the same time, he served in the Sea Cadets as a signaller, seeing action as such on the hospital ships of the Thames River Emergency Service, which, formed in 1938, lasted for three years, using converted Thames pleasure steamers as floating ambulances or first aid stations.
 But some years prior to Mary settling back in her native London with her children, she’d evidently received a significant sum of money as an inheritance. And it could conceivably be said that doing so resulted in a reconciliation with her hallowed social class, although this suggests some kind of rupture, which may not actually have happened; at least in a spiritual sense.
But what is true is that she was convinced she was descended from a lost branch of an aristocratic family. For when I was a young man, my father would occasionally speak to me of it as a means of boosting my morale, as if I was born for the life of a scholar and athlete of distinction befitting blue-blooded origins.
And in this one respect, I was akin to the great movie star Montgomery Clift, whose extraordinary beauty and magnetism could be said to constitute the very quintessence of the aristocratic WASP Prince. For despite being born into a fairly humble middle class family, Clift was a scion of the southern aristocracy according to his mother Ethel “Sunny” Clift.
So Monty and his twin sister and elder brother Brooks were raised as if to the manor born, and educated by his mother and private tutors in both Europe and the US, learning to speak French, German and Italian in the process.
But I never fully believed Mary’s story until one day in the 1980s, while my family was being paid a visit by her younger sister Joan, together with her husband, my great uncle Eric, I surreptitiously placed a cassette tape recorder close to the dining table during lunch or supper.
And I did so in the belief that one or another of my parents would quiz her as to the veracity of Mary’s longstanding boast of distant blue blood.
If my memory serves me aright, among the truths she revealed about our family that day was that Joan and Mary’s paternal great grandfather had been a coachman by trade who’d been left an enormous sum of money by a grateful employer. And this act of philanthropy introduced money into the family for the first time.
Another was that her maternal grandmother’s maiden name had been Butler, which allegedly links the family to the Butlers of Ormond, a dynasty of Anglo-Norman nobles named after the Earldom they went on to rule in Munster, Ireland.
And the Butler saga begins in earnest with the Norman Invasions of Ireland, which took place in 1169 on the orders of one Dermot MacMurrough, King of Leinster, one of five kingdoms of pre-Norman Ireland.

The Mystery of Ormonde

But who precisely were these Normans who went on to create one of the most powerful monarchies in Europe and whose territorial conquests would ultimately include not just Ireland, but England, Scotland, Wales, Southern Italy and the island of Sicily?
Unsurprisingly, they are largely Nordic, although believed to have been of mixed Viking, Frankish and Gallo-Roman stock, a mixture which apparently produced an instinct towards elitism and dominance.
And the Norman conquest of England was famously sealed with William the Conqueror’s success at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 AD, which introduced a new aristocracy into the country. Which means that the Normans replaced the Anglo-Saxons as the ruling class of England, while becoming part of a single French-speaking culture with lands on both sides of the channel.
And this explains her fierce rivalry with mainland France, as well as the 1842 poem “Lady Clara Vere de Vere”, in which Tennyson makes the valid point that “Kind hearts are more than coronets, And simple faith than Norman blood.” Which of course inspired the movie “Kind Hearts and Coronets”.
And what the poem was alluding to was the specifically Norman nature of the English aristocracy. But back to the travails of the Emerald Isle…
By the fateful year of 1169, Ireland, a land once given over to the ancient Celtic faith of Druidry and the worship of the Sidhe or Faery Folk, was profoundly Christian, despite a remnant of paganism.
But an invasion had already been authorised as early as 1155 by the first and only English Pope Adrian IV, decision which occasioned centuries of English dominance and Irish misery. While MacMurrough had been forced into exile in 1166 by a coalition of forces led by the High King of Ireland Rory O’Connor, and had fled…allegedly to Bristol first…and then to France.
There are various accounts of what happened next, but it’s certain he asked Henry II, first English King of the Norman House of Plantagenet, for help in regaining his kingdom. And after Henry had pledged his aid, began recruiting allies in Wales, with Richard de Clare, known as Strongbow, foremost among them. So Ireland was earmarked for invasion.
In 1167, he returned to Ireland with a small army of mercenaries, but it wasn’t until ‘69 that a full-scale invasion by the Anglo-Normans and their Welsh and Flemish allies got under way. And while contemporary accounts refer to the invaders as English, they have also been described as Anglo-Norman, Cambro-Norman and Anglo-French. With the Flemish contingent recruited largely from those Flemings who’d arrived in Britain with William the 1st… and had settled in Wales…only to be perceived by the hostile Welsh as English.
And also believed to have taken part was one Theobald Walter, patriarch of the Butlers of Ormond.
Two years afterwards, Henry II set foot in Ireland, the first English King to do so, and so High Kingship was brought to an end, to be replaced by over 750 years of English rule.
Henry was an ancestor of future generations of Butlers, and a grandson of William the Conqueror, which may provide a kinship with the mysterious Merovingian dynasty of Frankish Kings.
And when his son Prince John arrived in Ireland in 1185, it was in the company of the said Theobald Walter, whose father had been Butler of England; and so he was appointed Butler of Ireland and given a portion of land in eastern Munster that would become known as Ormond. Thence the name, the Butlers of Ormond.
Around 1200, he married Maud le Vavasour, purported inspiration for Maid Marian, wife of the mythical outlaw Robin Hood, himself allegedly based on Maud’s second husband Fulk FitzWarin.
And they had one son together, Theobald le Botiller, 2cnd Baron Butler, who, by marrying Margery de Burgh, a descendant of both Dermot McMurrough and the legendary Brian Boru, brought royal Gaelic blood into the Butler bloodline. While their sole and only son…also known as Theobald, took Joan FitzJohn as his spouse; and from their union came eight sons, the second of which, Edmund Butler, married Joan FitzGerald of the ancient FitzGerald dynasty.
It was for their eldest son James that the earldom of Ormonde was created for the first time.
And his appointment came in 1328, only months after his marriage to Lady Eleanor de Bohun, beautiful grand-daughter of Edward the 1st of the House of Plantagenet, known as the Angevins from their origins in Anjou, France.
Dubbed The Hammer of the Scots, Longshanks was that Anglo-Norman king who’d had Scottish noble Sir William Wallace executed in 1305 for having led a resistance during the Wars of Scottish independence.
While among James Butler’s descendants was Anne Boleyn, whose father Thomas, a Butler by matrilineal descent, became Earl of Ormonde in 1528. This having occurred when Piers Ruadh Butler resigned his claim by orders of the king; only to have the earldom restored to him ten years later. Act which heralded the title’s third creation.
And by this time, England had become a Protestant nation, and Anglicanism established in Ireland as the state religion, despite the vast majority of the population being Catholic.
And much to Ireland’s misfortune, the Butlers became involved with some vicious feuding with their long time rivals the FitzGeralds in the late 1500s. And when the so-called Black Earl Sir Thomas Butler vanquished his own mother’s family at the Battle of Affane in 1565, it helped provoke the Desmond Rebellions of 1567-73 and 1579-83, the second of which was bolstered by hundreds of papal troops.
But these were defeated by the Elizabethan Armies and their Irish allies, soon after which the first English Plantations were carried out in a devastated Munster. While the first plantations in Ulster, Ireland’s most purely Gaelic region, remained yet in the future.

Of the Supposed Superiority of Nobility

In 1609 the first Ulster Plantation came into being in the wake of the Nine Years War of 1594-1603, which was largely fought between the Kingdom of England and its Irish allies and an alliance of Gaelic clans led by Hugh O’Neill and Hugh Roe O’Donnell. While the latter would ultimately include
6000 Spanish soldiers sent by Phillip II.
The routing of the Ulster Earls led to the famous Flight of the Earls to Europe, the end of the Gaelic Clan system, and the colonization of Ulster by English and Scottish Protestants.
While the next conflict to involve the Butlers of Ormond was the Irish Rebellion of 1641, which was an uprising not of the Catholic Irish, but the Old English, composed of Catholic gentry who’d become more Irish than the Irish themselves. And while the fifth Earl, James Butler, was placed in charge of English government forces based in Dublin, the Old English were led by his own cousin Richard Butler; with the Catholic rebels prevailing.
But in time it mutated into a war between the native Irish and the newly arrived Protestant settlers from Britain…which resulted in the massacre of thousands of Protestants, the precise number being a matter of much debate.
While a year later, James Butler was involved in yet another conflict in the shape of the English Civil War. And being a Royalist sympathizer, he despatched an estimated 4000 troops to England to fight for King Charles the 1st against the Calvinist Roundheads under the leadership of Oliver Cromwell…only to be made Lord Lieutenant of Ireland by Royal Appointment in 1643 for his pains.
But by 1649, Ireland had become a stronghold of support for the King; with Ormonde in charge both of the Royalist forces and the Irish Confederation of Old English Catholics and native Gaels; and this had the effect of attracting the hostile attentions of Cromwell and his New Model Army.
And when Ormonde attempted to thwart the English Puritan invaders by holding a line of fortified towns across the country, Cromwell defeated them one after the other, beginning in 1649 with the Siege of Drogheda.
While in the summer of 1650, following a long series of humiliating defeats for the Irish, Ormonde, having been deserted by Protestants and Catholics alike, was urged to leave the country by the Catholic clergy, which he promptly did, seeking refuge in Paris with the exiled Charles II.
Yet, on the Restoration of the Stuart Monarchy in 1660, he was showered with honours by the new King of England, Scotland and Ireland; and was made Duke of Ormonde in the peerage of Ireland in the spring of ’61.
But eight year later, he fell from favour as a result, allegedly, of courtly intrigue on the part of Royal favourite James Villiers, the 2cnd Duke of Buckingham. While in 1671, an attempt was made on his life by an Irish adventurer by the name of Thomas Blood; but Ormonde escaped, convinced that Buckingham had put him up to it, although nothing was ever proven.
Then in 1682, he became Duke of Ormonde in the peerage of England, dying four years later in Dorset. While soon after his death, a poem was published that celebrated an essential decency that was never compromised.
One of his sons, the 2cnd Duke of Ormonde, commanded a regiment at the Battle of the Boyne under William of Orange, and took part in the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715. While his own son was the third and final Duke of Ormonde.
However, the Earldom lasted until the end of the 20th Century, becoming dormant in October 1997 with the death of James Butler the 7th Marquess of Ormonde, who had two daughters, but no sons.
And it may be I’m a distant relative of theirs…and if so, also related to many, perhaps even all of the most blue-blooded families not just in Europe but the entire world.
In the end though, the facts of history entirely fail to attest to the natural superiority of nobility, even though the Bible upholds the authority of parents and the instruments of the state. For God has implemented these as a means of controlling Man’s innate depravity, while appealing to his hierarchical instincts and deep-seated desire for order and structure.
But all hierarchies erected by Man in order that one section of society might feel superior to another, whether on the basis of class, race, skin colour or some other false distinction, are antichrist, because all human beings are created equal in the sight of God.
And there is a theory that those blessed by nobility of birth are in fact less likely to turn to Christ than those from backgrounds of brokenness or poverty. While great beauty or wealth or intellectual distinction can fill its possessors with a sense of self-sufficiency which can lead to a refutation of God.
But my beautiful grandmother Phyllis was ever attached to the notion her family boasted blue blood in spite of a life of unending hardship…much of this attributable to sheer ill fortune. For instance, having married Chris Evans soon after the death of her second husband Carl, she lost him in ’49 while they were both out sailing together, the victim of a fatal coronary.
I first met her in the early 1960s when I was still just a small child, by which time she was living on a yacht in the south of France, possibly Nice, or Cannes, a striking figure, slim and tanned, with a magnificent head of the purest white hair. But by about the middle of the decade, she’d moved into her own house, Chartley, named after her former house in Sydney. And situated near the little town of Cambrils in the province of Tarragona on Catalonia’s Costa Brava.
And for several years until about ‘68, our family vacationed with her at Chartley every summer, often with Peter’s family, who lived opposite us in Bedford Park, West London.
Photos of her from around this time reveal a weather beaten woman with wiry white hair, habitually clad in old and even patched trousers; but she could be sweet when her heart was touched.
She was a fantastic spirit, given to what could be called Celtic whimsy, which may have proceeded from Cornish origins, which her maiden name of Pinnock certainly suggested. Although the Anglo-Saxons are hardly less inclined to this quality, for after all, did they not produce such icons of nonsense as Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll?
By the early ‘70s, ill health forced her back to Britain, where she lived until her passing in 1973, sometimes with us, and sometimes in her own little cottage in Berkshire. While her constant companions were two mongrel dogs whom she’d rescued from the beach towards the end of her Spanish sojourn.
These were Charlot, who was sandy-coloured and looked a little like a whippet, and Phillippe, who had long pointed ears like those of an Alsatian.
She was an altogether different person in frail old age, much mellowed and desperately vulnerable, writing desolate poetry for my benefit, or watching old movies with me on TV. Such as the sentimental Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “Carousel” which she initially dismissed as “slush”. But the famous climactic tune of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” has a tendency to touch all but the most stoical of hearts, and Mary’s was not exempt.
For my part, I’d left the room, possibly to weep softly to myself in some secluded part of my parents’ house, only to return to find her in tears. I’ve never forgotten it.
There were times I was able to share some tender moments with her, but looking back, I wish there’d been more, and oh how she’d have welcomed them. But I was young and strong and thoughtless, with little concern for the trials of the elderly, fact which saddens me today.
For does not the Word of God say in Matthew 25:40, “Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me”?
Now I’m almost the same age she was when we first met, and I’ve come to honour the memory of a brilliant tragic woman, and to feel for her in a way I was never capable of during the brief few years of our acquaintance.
A little before her passing, Phillippe vanished under mysterious circumstances into the English countryside. So Charlot came to live with us on his own in ’73; and was subsequently renamed Charlie. He proved a gentle, faithful and loving pet, but with a strong character akin to that of his doting mistress, dying himself in 1983 following a short but valiant battle with declining health.

Chapter Two – Miss Ann Watt Had Stars in Her Eyes

The Scots-Irish Sept of Watt
 
My father Patrick Clancy Halling joined the London Philharmonic 0rchestra while still a teenager during the Blitz on London. And during this time, he served in the Sea Cadets as a signaller, seeing action as such on the hospital ships of the previously mentioned Thames River Emergency Service.
Following his time with the LP0, he played with the London Symphony Orchestra with his cellist brother Peter, before going on to specialize in Chamber music.
His chamber career included eight years with the Hirsch quartet, led by Dublin- born violinist Leonard Hirsch, and the formation of his own Quartet Pro Musica in 1955, with Roger Raphael, Peter Sermon and his brother Peter, while Ernest Scott and Gwynne Edwards joined at a later date. And three years later, this resulted in an extraordinary event taking place in the Recital Room of the Royal Festival Hall.
On the 2cnd of November 1958, the Quartet convened to take part in a reading of TS Eliot’s “Four Quartets” by four giants of the arts including the then poet laureate Cecil Day Lewis, together with his wife the actress Jill Balcon, fellow actress Maxine Audley, and Shakespearean scholar George Rylands. By which time, Lewis’ and Balcon’s son, future Hollywood superstar Daniel Day Lewis, would have been a little over a year and half old. And this was interspersed with a rendition of Bela Bartok’s Sixth Quartet.
He also played with the Virtuoso Ensemble, whose distinctions are believed to have included first UK performances of works by major British 20th Century composers, such as Elizabeth Lutyens, Humphrey Searle, Peter Racine Fricker and Mátyás Seiber.
And among his recordings from the late 1950s currently featured on the internet are “The History of Music in Sound, Vol. VI: The Growth of Instrumental Music (1630-1750)”, on which, with Richard Hadeney on flute, Basil Lam on harpsichord and Terence Weil on cello, he interprets Vitali’s “Trio Sonata in E Minor, Op. 2, No. 3”, Legrenzi’s “La Cornara” and Jenkins’ “Fancy in G Minor”.
In June 1949, he wed my mother, the Canadian singer Miss Ann Watt, who through marriage became Mrs Ann Halling, thereby substituting a Scottish surname for a Danish one.
In Ireland, the Watt surname is exclusive to Ulster, home province of my grandfather James Watt, having been carried there by the Scottish and English planters of the late 1600s. It’s common in the Scottish Lowlands, especially in the counties of Aberdeenshire and Banffshire.
As might be expected it’s affiliated with that of Watson, and both are what is known as septs of the Forbes and Buchanan clans. A sept being a family that traditionally followed a particular chief or clan leader in the Highlands or Lowlands of Scotland, either through being related by marriage or resident on his land, and so helped to make up a larger clan or family.
Kindred septs include those of MacQuat, MacQuattie, MacQuhat, MacQwat, MacRowatt, MacWalter, MacWater, MacWatson, MacWatt, MacWatters, MacWattie, Vatsoun, Vod, Vode, Void, Voud, Voude, Vould, Walter, Walterson, Wasson, Waters, Waterson, Watsone, Watsoun, Wattie, Wattson, Wod, Wode, Wodde, Woid, Woide, Wood, Woyd and Wyatt.
She’d been born Angela Jean Elisabeth Watt on the 13th of November 1915, in the city of Brandon, Manitoba, the youngest by 7 years of the six children of James and Elisabeth Watt from Ulster, Ireland and Glasgow, Scotland respectively, and the only one not to be born in Britain…the others, Annie-Isabella, the eldest born ca. 1897, Robert, James, Elisabeth, who died in infancy, and Catherine having been born in Glasgow, except Cathy, who was born in Ireland.
While still an infant she moved with her family to the Grandview area of East Vancouver.
Grandview’s earliest settlers tended to be shopkeepers, or tradesmen, in shipping or construction work, and largely from the British Isles, such as James Watt himself, a builder by trade, born in the little town of Castlederg in County Tyrone, Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
Grandview underwent massive change following the First World War when Italian, Chinese, and East European immigrants moved in, and still more after World War II with a second wave of Italian immigrants. Today it’s part of the Grandview-Woodland area of East Vancouver.
Ann’s mother was from the great industrial city of Glasgow, having been born there to an Englishman from either Manchester or Liverpool; while her mother was Scottish. This means that my mother is of mixed Lowland Scottish, Ulster-Scots and English ancestry, not that any real difference exists between these three ethnicities.
As to my maternal grandfather…he was almost certainly a descendant of the Planters sent by the English to Ulster in the 1600s, many of them originally inhabitants of the Anglo-Scottish border country and the Lowland region of Scotland.
According to some sources, Lowlanders are distinct from their Highland counterparts, being of Anglo-Saxon rather than Gaelic ancestry, although how true this is I’m not qualified to say. Certainly, the region straddling the Scottish Lowlands and Anglo-Scottish Borderlands, is one traditionally perceived as Sassenach, which is the Gaelic term for Saxon, or person of Anglo-Saxon origin.
Whatever the truth, the sensible view is their bloodline contains a variety of kindred strains including – as well as Anglo-Saxon – Gaelic, Pictish, Norman and so on, depending on the exact region. Moreover, all Caucasian inhabitants of the British Isles – including the independent sovereign nation of Ireland – partake of a fairly homogenous ancestry, which certain experts are claiming to be more Iberian than anything else. In the end, though, are we not all of the same single human race created by God? As a Christian, I can’t believe anything else.
The Ulster Scots emigrated to the US in the 1600s, and their descendants are to be found all throughout the country. But most famously perhaps in those regions which are culturally Southern, which is to say those states situated beneath the Mason-Dixon Line. Indeed most of the original European settlers of the Deep and Upland South are widely believed to have been of British and especially English and Scots-Irish origin. Today, many of them describe themselves as merely “American”, while others continue to claim either English or Scots-Irish ancestry.
 
The Theatre Under the Stars

By the time he’d moved his family to Grandview in the autumn of 1924, my grandfather James Watt had abandoned the severe Presbyterian Calvinism of his Ulster boyhood and youth for the more open – Wesleyan – theology of the Salvation Army. Yet, in keeping with the Army of that time, his approach to Scripture was what would be described as fundamentalist today; and he was accordingly opposed to worldly pleasures such as dancing, the theatre, and movie-going. Alcohol was nothing short of the Devil’s own elixir, while even the drinking of tea and coffee was frowned upon.
Some years after moving to Grandview, James Watt built his family a house in Kitsilano on the city’s West Side, but a reversal of fortune in terms of his business meant that the family was forced to return to Grandview.
Then at the age of 14, Angela joined her friend Marie and Marie’s mother on a car trip just beyond the US-Canadian border into the state of Washington, where she saw her very first movie, a romantic civil war picture entitled “Only the Brave” starring Gary Cooper and Mary Brian. Its effect on her was little short of seismic, as by her own admission it introduced worldly ideas into her psyche for the very first time.
Despite an intensively Christian upbringing, from then on, she became consumed by the glamour of the movies and show business. In other words, she’d allowed the camel’s nose into her life, and it only remained for the rest of the camel to follow.
At high school, she’d been a diligent but not exceptional pupil; and her sole and only sporting distinction consisted of being part of her school track team. While her closest friend, the universally popular Margaret Stone, was an exceptional young sportswoman. However, Angela came into her own in the Glee Club, where presumably she first started using her beautiful singing voice beyond the confines of the Army.
When she was 17, her father became very seriously ill and she was forced to take time off school to do her share of looking after him. She spent long periods of time by his bedside, weeping for a man who when she was still only a little girl had a habit of affectionately flicking the back of her hair and she’d scolded him to make him stop. She was off for so long that Margaret Stone had come calling for her with another friend, concerned by her protracted absence. James Watt died after a short illness, and Angela, utterly heartbroken, wept openly at his funeral.
In her final year at high school, she learned short hand and other tools of the secretarial trade, while working part time at F.W. Woolworth’s on Commercial Drive.
After leaving, she started work answering telephone enquiries on behalf of a laundry business by the name of Pioneer Laundry, where her sister Cathy ran a branch specialising in the washing and starching of men’s collars.
And it was during her time at Pioneer that Angela received her first big break, when one of her co-workers, presumably after discovering Angela had ambitions to sing professionally, suggested she accompany her to a singing engagement at a gentleman’s club in the city.
 Angela promptly took her up on her offer, and as a result of having done so, was tendered details of a singing teacher by the name of Avis Phillips by a member of the club.
 Soon after having made contact with Avis, Angela became her pupil, and ultimately also her friend.
And this association brought her into contact with Avis’ regular accompanist, Phyllis Dylworth, whose uncle just happened to be regional head of the Canadian Broadcasting Company. And it was through this family tie that Angela secured her first professional engagements as a soprano, indeed her entire singing career.
And many of its greatest triumphs took place at the Theatre Under the Stars, one of Vancouver’s most famous musical theatres, which officially opened on August the 6th 1940. And where Miss Ann Watt played the lead in such classic operettas as Oscar Straus’ “The Chocolate Soldier”, “Naughty Marietta” by Victor Herbert, with libretto by Rida Johnson Young, and “The Student Prince” by Sigmund Romberg, with libretto by Dorothy Donnelly.
And for the CBC with full orchestra, she broadcast many popular classics. Such as, to the accompaniment of Percy Harvey and the Golden Strings, two songs by Victor Herbert with the baritone Greg Miller, viz., “A Kiss in the Dark” from “Orange Blossoms”, and “Sweetheart”.
As well as “’Neath the Southern Moon”, another breathtakingly romantic song by Herbert, “Strange Music” from “The Song of Norway”, adapted from Grieg by Wright and Forrest, and “Can’t Help Singing” by Kern and Yarburg from the 1944 movie of the same name.
Such was the of her voice, to say nothing of looks so glamorous she was likened to Betty Grable, she became something of a sweetheart of the Canadian Forces. While her irresistible vivacity and charm caused both audiences and press to fall in love with her not just in Canada but parts of the northern US as well.
Among the Classical songs she broadcast during the North American phase of her career were “Dedication” by Schumann, “The Vain Suit” by Brahms, “Les Filles de Cadiz” by Delibes, “Mandoline” by Debussy, “Before My Window” by Rachmaninov and “Silent Noon” by Vaughan Williams…with all liede rendered in English due to wartime restrictions on the German language.
After the war, she hoped to expand her career either in the US or the UK, but despite a successful audition for the San Francisco Light Opera Company, she ultimately opted for England, once a ticket to sail had become available to her.
She left for Britain laden with letters of recommendation from Avis Phillips, as well as numerous press cuttings from her brilliant Canadian career.
She’d been led to believe that once in London, she’d effectively take the singing world by storm, at Drury Lane and elsewhere. Sadly though, soon after arriving, she failed an audition for the internationally famous Glyndebourne Opera House, home of the annual festival of the same name.
However, she did land a small role in the Ivor Novello musical, “King’s Rhapsody” which opened at the Palace Theatre on the 15th of September 1949, with its author one-time matinee idol Novello in the title role. It ran for 841 performances, surviving Novello who died in 1951.
And she broadcast for the BBC, with “De Fleurs” from Debussy’s “Proses Lyriques”; “Stars in my Eyes”, an unutterably poignant love song by Fritz Kreisler with lyrics by Dorothy Field; and the popular Harry Ralton standard “I Remember the Cornfields”, with lyrics by Martin Mayne, being among the songs she performed for them.
She also appeared in an early television show called “Picture Post”, of which there remains no record. 
Sadly though, it wasn’t long after her arrival in London that she realized her voice was deteriorating – this being especially true of her top notes – possibly as a result of sleeping difficulties; although she was a smoker.
And she had enjoyed a somewhat hedonistic lifestyle at the height of her fame in Vancouver, when she was Miss Ann Watt. And a fairly wealthy young woman at that, with a passionate love of beautiful clothes and shoes.
She went from one singing teacher to the other in the hope that her once near-perfect voice might be restored to her but little came of her efforts; although one of her tutors, who just happened to be the great German soprano Elisabeth Schumann did offer some hope.
Schumann suggested that once her time in England was over, for she was recording her final liede 78s in London with the British pianist Gerald Moore, she accompany her back to New York City, where she’d been resident since 1918.
However, my mother turned her down, perhaps feeling she’d already spent enough money on lessons. And besides, she’d only been married to my father, the London-based musician Patrick Halling, since June 1949, and uprooting would not have been easy.
Pat and Ann spent the next seven years living the vie de bohème in a peaceful post-war London and on the continent, travelling by car or motorcycle, just happy being young and in love in that relatively innocent period between the end of the Second World War and the onset of the Youth Culture of the sixties. After which things would never be quite the same again.

Chapter Three – And So the British Blues Explosion

The Riddle of the British English
 
The first son of Patrick and Ann Halling was born Carl Robert Halling at the tail end of West London’s Goldhawk Road, which is the sole and only part not to bisect the traditionally working class district of Shepherds Bush. And while it’s officially in Hammersmith, it’s far closer to the more bourgeois area of Chiswick.
 My first home was a small workman’s cottage in Notting Hill, but by the time of my brother’s birth on the 2cnd of May 1958, the family had already moved to nearby Bedford Park. Which while also in Chiswick according to its postcode, is nonetheless part of the Southfields ward of another tough part of West London, South Acton. And presumably was then too.
One thing is certain is that it was part of the obsolete Borough of Acton, which was scrapped along with the County of London in 1965 to make way for the Greater London Council, which exists to this day.
 Carl was the name of my paternal grandfather, and Robert that of my mother’s brother Bob, and I came into the world very much as a Briton as opposed to an Englishman. Which is to not to say I don’t consider myself English, because I do; but my origins are British as opposed to strictly English.
By this I mean English, Scottish and Scots-Irish Canadian through my mother, and English and Danish Australian through my dad, with a possible Cornish admixture coming through my paternal grandmother.
For her maiden name of Pinnock is a common one in Cornwall, and therefore of possible Brythonic Celtic origin…the word Brythonic having served as the origin for more modern terms such as Britain and Briton, as well as British.
To explain…there have always been two distinct strains of Celtic people, which is to say, the Brythonic and the Goidelic, or Gaelic. And while the Welsh, Cornish, Manx and Breton peoples are of the Brythonic strain, the Scottish and the Irish are of the Gaelic.
It could be said therefore that I partake of both Gaelic and Brythonic Celtic ancestry. Confused? You should be.
 Whatever the truth, I’m proud of my roots in Ulster and Glasgow, both of which possess long-established proleterian traditions, and the same applies to Wales and the north and midlands of England. The south, on the other hand, is widely seen as an affluent, middle class region, and that’s especially true of the so-called home counties, which are those adjacent to London.
Needless to say, though, poverty does exist in these regions, and even the great metropolis of London contains no less than fourteen of the nation’s most deprived twenty boroughs. Yet it remains one of the most powerful urban centres in the world.
And according to certain authorities, it’s easily the most powerful, being the financial heart of a still existent British empire.
Others would refute this theory out of hand, but it attracts strong support nonetheless. For my part, I view it with a characteristic mix of open-mindedness and scepticism.
 What’s more, while Glasgow is home to a massive urban working class, with clearly defined Catholic and Protestant communities, Scotland’s capital city of Edinburgh has a reputation for great gentility. Yet, in common with other affluent cities throughout a nation of striking extremes of wealth and poverty, she also contains areas of enormous deprivation.
One of these, Leith, is the setting for the controversial novel “Trainspotting”, which was made into a successful movie in 1993.
 I’m also proud of more overtly Anglo-Saxon ancestry coming through my father, who although born in Tasmania and raised by a Danish father in Sydney, New South Wales, is English through his mother Mary. For having established my quintessential British credentials, England is the nation I identify with in spirit.
Indeed if anyone incarnates the riddle of what it is to be both British and English, it’s me. For lest we forget, Britain is less a nation than a sovereign state of four nations, four countries, four peoples…England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Yet, for all this talk of earthly nations, in the end there will only be one state remaining…”another country”, in the words of the famous British hymn, “I Vow to Thee My Country”, in which all distinctions of ethnicity and class will be a thing of the past, and all conflict consigned to the Lake of Fire to burn forever and ever.
 
And so the British Blues Explosion
 
My first school was a kind of nursery school held on a daily basis at the home of one Miss Pierce in Bedford Park.
But as the sixties were about to dawn, I joined the exclusive Lycée Francais Charles de Gaulle in South Kensington, where I was to become bilingual within a matter of months. While it was early in the totemic decade of pop and youth culture that Pat Halling moved into the tough London session music world…where he was to record for film, television and the new popular music that had been recently sired by the Rock and Roll revolution.
And for much of the time he spent within this lucrative sphere, his main role was that of principal violin, or leader or concertmaster, traditionally in charge not just of the string section but the entire orchestra, and so answerable to the conductor alone. But he also served as the fixer contracted to recruit the players for a particular session.
In the meantime, Miss Ann Watt’s musical life was put on hold while she concentrated on being the mother of two small boys, while supporting her husband in his various passions.
For example, she faithfully crewed for him for many years at the Tamesis Sailing Club in Teddington, West London, where he was a member for much of the sixties, winning several racing trophies initially in Firefly number 1588, while his career as a session player thrived.
 According to what Pat has told me, he worked on early sessions for British musical sensations Lulu, Cilla Black and Tom Jones, as well as with superstar producers Tony Hatch and Mickie Most.
Hatch wrote most of Petula Clark’s hit singles of the sixties, some alone, some with his wife Jackie Trent, and she went on to become a major star in the US as part of the so-called British Invasion of the American charts. And the same was true of several acts produced by Most; such as Herman’s Hermits, whose angelic front man Peter Noone ensured his band were briefly almost as popular as the Beatles stateside.
 Pat became close friends with both Most and composer-arranger John Cameron, the two men who helped turn Scottish singer-songwriter Donovan into an international superstar. And among those session musicians who played for Most in the early to mid ’60s were Big Jim Sullivan, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, who also arranged for him.
And guitar virtuoso Page went on to join seminal British Rock band The Yardbirds, which had been initially managed by the impresario Simon Napier Bell, before being taken over by Most’s business partner, Peter Grant.
When the Yardbirds collapsed in 1968, the two remaining members, namely Page and bassist Chris Dreja, set about forming a new band, the New Yardbirds, also to be managed by Grant.
While the super-talented Terry Reid, who was among those constituting what could be termed Page’s first team of potential lead vocalists, turned him down, he yet recommended a 19 year old from the midlands of England by the name of Robert Plant for the job.
Page duly travelled to Birmingham with Dreja and Grant to look the youngster over, and was impressed by what he saw. He then invited Plant to spend a few days with him at his home, the Thames Boathouse, in the beautiful little Berkshire village of Pangbourne for initial discussions related to the band.
And all this took place in the summer of ’68, just months before I joined the Nautical College situated a few miles from the village itself.
So the New Yardbirds were born, but before long they’d mutated into
Led Zeppelin, one of the most successful Rock bands of all time, and second only to the Rolling Stones in terms of legendary darkness and mystery.
 It seems incredible that a force of such seismic power and influence as Led Zep should emerge from the relative innocence of the London Blues and session music scenes of the sixties, but then a similar thing could be said of British Rock as a whole.
So what was it that transformed an interest among young men of largely middle class origin in the bleak brooding music of the Blues into a musical movement that took the world by storm all throughout the ’60s and beyond? That’s not an easy question to answer, but I’m going to give it some sort of a go.
 The Blues themselves may provide something of a solution to the puzzle, for in the shape of the British Blues boom they constituted one of the dominant tendencies within the Pop explosion of the 1960s.
Yet, far from proceeding from the Pop revolution inspired by the Beatles, the British Blues came long before it. In fact, they emerged from the Traditional Jazz revival of the late 1940s, although most Trad devotees decried the Blues as simplistic in comparison to Jazz.
The most beloved and fearful form of the Blues was the Delta Blues, whose spiritual homeland was the Mississippi Delta, a region lying between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers, and stretching all the way from Memphis in the north to Vicksburg in the south.
With lyrics reflecting the sensuality, isolation and anguish of lost souls victimised by life and alienated from God, she found fertile soil in the still repressed United Kingdom of the late 1950s and early sixties. And especially in the affluent south among such passionate young men as Brian Jones from the spa town of Cheltenham in Gloucester; Eric Clapton from Ripley in suburban Surrey; and Jimmy Page from nearby Epsom, also in Surrey.
However, it’s none of these legends, so much as a certain guitarist of Greek and Austrian ancestry by the name of Alexis Korner who’s been called the Founding Father of the British Blues. And justifiably so, for more than anyone, he was the incubator of the British Blues Boom which was one of the great cornerstones of the entire Rock movement.
Korner began his musical career in 1949 as a member of Chris Barber’s Jazz Band, but his love of the kindred but then lesser known music of the Blues led him to form Blues Incorporated in 1961. And he did so with several future Rock superstars, including Jack Bruce, most famous for his tenure with Blues-Rock legends Cream, and Charlie Watts, future sticks man for the Stones, both from a Jazz background. As was Brian Jones; for this was not unusual for the first generation of British Rock artists.
And in addition to those already mentioned, the list of future Rock and Roll stars who were drawn to Korner’s regular Rhythm and Blues night at the Ealing Jazz Club in the early ’60s included Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Ginger Baker, Jimmy Page, Rod Stewart, and Paul Pond.
Pond, a tall, elegant Oxford undergraduate with the chiselled good looks of a Greek god, had been Brian Jones’ first choice as lead vocalist for a projected Blues band, but apparently convinced the Blues had no future, he turned the young Cheltenham Welshman down.
He later resurfaced as Paul Jones, front man for former Jazz outfit Manfred Mann, one of the first generation of British Blues bands to achieve mainstream Pop success. And alongside Jones and Mann were Mikes Vickers and Hugg and bass man Dave Richmond…soon to be replaced by Tom McGuiness, who’d begun his career in the Roosters with Eric Clapton.
While Clapton himself found fame with the Yardbirds which, like the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Who and the Spencer Davis Group surfed the first wave of British Blues and R&B all the way into the Pop charts.
But British Rock was fuelled not just by the Blues, but an effervescent fusion of Rock and Roll, Skiffle, R&B, Doo-Wop, Motown and Tin Pan Alley known as Beat. And Beat emerged principally from the tough industrial midlands and north of England to form part of the great Pop revolution of ’63 to ’64, although it’s doubtful the great record buying public had any notion of the difference between Beat and the Blues.
Yet there were those Pop musicians who clung doggedly to the Blues ethos, despite spectacular chart success. Such as Brian Jones of the Stones; and Eric Clapton, who forsook Pop stardom to seek refuge in Blues purist band Bluesbreakers; whose John Mayall played host to a veritable plethora of future Rock superstars at various stages of his career.
Another vital component of Pop that threatened to subvert Rock’s evolution as an exclusive offshoot of the Blues was melody; which was the very element the Beatles made central to their music. And as the Rock revolution proceeded apace, it came to play as important a part in its music as rhythm.
And this was significantly attributable to the Beatles, who, in thrall to the nascent sounds of Motown, a form of R&B that had been heavily infused with a Pop sensibility, sought to emulate its exquisite romantic tunefulness.
They also imbued their early music with the sentimental sweetness of both Vocal and Latin Jazz and Canzone Napoletana; while all three songwriters were admirers of Classical Music.
Thence the Rock explosion emerged from several incredibly divergent areas to produce a veritable musical Babel. But lest we forget, it did not begin with the Beatles, for even the term Beat was first used in relation to Pop music as early as 1961.
For instance, in “The Big Beat Scene” by British writer Royston Ellis, Beat is used to describe the music of the first British Pop stars to emerge in the wake of Elvis. While the term Rock is used as shorthand for Rock and Roll in the selfsame tome.
In fact, by the time of the Beatles first hit record in 1962, Rock had existed in Britain for at least five years, birthing a host of early superstars. Among these, song and dance men Tommy Steele and Joe Brown had brought a music hall element to the music; while Cliff Richard and the Shadows had preceded the Beatles as the quintessential British guitar band.
In other words, an entire spectrum of British Rock and Pop music had been established even before the Beatles had recorded their first hit record. But this is a truth that history has failed to sufficiently emphasize.

This Thrilling New Art Form
 
The Beatles are seen by some as the inventors of modern guitar Pop. While this is of course untrue, they are without doubt the best known and most successful Pop group in history. It was they who consolidated and perfected British Pop, thereby laying the foundation for the entire Rock revolution.
Yet, while they began very much as a Pop group, in time, having resisted being typecast as mere Pop, they could be said to have birthed a special type of Art Rock founded on a vast variety of genres, including Classical music, Music Hall, Tin Pan Alley, Rock and Roll, Country and Western, Folk, Jazz, Motown, Soul and the Blues. But no less removed from pure Pop than the Blues-based Rock of their chief rivals the Stones.
While this might lead one to conclude that it was largely through their influence that Rock became the ultimate musical smorgasbord, this was only partly true, as I’ve already made clear.
Yet, during their brief few years of existence, they informed the development of Rock to a greater degree than any other group or solo singer. And that includes the Rolling Stones, for while the Stones’ primal proto-Punk went on to constitute the basis of all forms of Hard Rock, even these have benefited from the unrelenting melodic inventiveness of the Beatles.
In addition to those already mentioned, another of its chief sources was the Brill Building Sound, which thrived in that brief period between Elvis’s induction into the US Army and the onset of Beatlemania. And during this era, the music’s initial threat was neutralised by its co-option by teenage idols who, while heavily influenced by Elvis visually, had nowhere near the same devastating effect on the moral establishment.
Brill Building was named after the very building in New York City where many of its songwriters were housed and which since the ’30s had been a centre for Pop music, a term allegedly coined as early as 1926.
Its music could be described as traditional Pop informed by the Rock and Roll revolution; and as such it exerted a massive if largely unsung influence on the evolution of Sixties Rock, with the Beatles covering several Brill Building songs in the early phase of their career.
Yet, while the Beatles remain indelibly associated with modern Pop, by the totemic year of ‘66, they were as much a Rock as a Pop group; and their lyrics had started to acquire a marked intellectual dimension. And this was in no small part attributable to Bob Dylan.
For Dylan was a consciously intellectual figure who, in the fallow years immediately preceding the British Invasion, had mined the ancient American art of Folk Music for inspiration.
By so doing, he’d gained an international reputation as a poet-minstrel in the Protest tradition, and largely thanks to him, Pop had acquired a certain gravitas by the mid 1960s. And one which was strikingly at odds with the innocent and sentimental music of the early Beatles. Yet, the Beatles outgrew the Beat era with ease, while Beat itself was rendered obsolete by the depredations of Rock.
This thrilling new art form developed not just as a result of Dylan’s influence as the first great poet of Rock, but an increasing musical complexity, possibly allied to a greater spiritual darkness. And while the Beatles led the field in terms of the former, the latter could be said to have arisen from a tougher element introduced into the music.
This came courtesy of such Blues-based outfits as the Stones, the Kinks, the Yardbirds, the Pretty Things and the Who, and the term Rock was somehow perfect in describing their powerful primal sound. However, when this moved in to supplant Pop as the critic’s term of choice, it’s impossible to say.
One thing is certain is that as soon as it did, Rock became far more than a mere music form.
In fact I’d go so far as to say it was a way of life from the outset; a philosophy; even a religion, and as such, one of its prime tenets was rebellion against the traditional Judaeo-Christian values of the West. So it’s not surprising its spiritual homelands were Britain and the USA, given these are the nations most associated historically with the rise of Evangelical Christianity.
For despite having been inextricably linked to Pop since its inception, Rock is clearly more than just another form of popular music. And while it possesses very little ability left to shock, its rebel spirit, and the sexual and social upheavals it once spearheaded have altered the fabric of Western society, possibly beyond all hope of recovery.

Chapter Four – Rock and Roll and the Western Soul

The Burgeoning Generation of Love
 
The highpoint of Patrick Halling’s early Pop career was undoubtedly his leadership of the string section for “All You Need Is Love”, transmitted live at the height of the so-called Summer of Love on July 25th 1967.
The programme, entitled “Our World”, was the first satellite broadcast in history, and it secured an audience of 350 million, which was unprecedented at that time. And among those taking part were such legendary figures of the swinging sixties as Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Eric Clapton, Keith Moon, Marianne Faithful and Donovan.
But this was not Pat’s first involvement with the burgeoning Love Generation.
For the previous year of ’66, he’d taken part in the recording of Donovan’s “Museum”, destined to see the light of day on the “Mellow Yellow”
Album, which reached the number 14 position on the Billboard Hot 100. Although it failed to secure a UK release due to contractual complications.
Also involved with the “Mellow Yellow” sessions were close friends Mickie Most, who produced, and John Cameron, who did most of the arrangements, as well as session guitarist Big Jim Sullivan, and future Led Zeppelin members Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones.
A year later, he worked on a project that was as much a concept album as any of the Beatles’ records of the same period, Ken Moule’s superb “Adam’s Rib Suite”, which fused elements of Jazz, Pop and Classical music to recount the history of womankind from Eve to Cleo Laine.
Needless to say though, it was infinitely less successful than any comparable record within the Rock genre, Rock being at the vanguard of popular culture in a way that Jazz had once been, but no longer was. However, by the turn of the decade, a reconciliation between the two alienated factions was well under way, with Jazz-Fusion coming from one camp and the more populist Jazz-Rock from the other.
In ’75, Pat served as leader for Mike Gibbs’ “Only Chrome Waterfall Orchestra”, an unsung classic of British Jazz fusion, which was finally released on CD in 1997. Adam’s Rib followed it on CD exactly ten years later.
By the time of his involvement with “Adam’s Rib”, Pat had already moved into the worlds of film and television. And his early career included solos for the 1960 movie “Exodus”, produced and directed by Otto Preminger, with music by Ernest Gold…as well as for much treasured British sitcom “Steptoe and Son” (1969-’74), whose incidental music was composed by his close friend Ron Grainer.
He also served as concertmaster for the great Johnny Green on Carol Reed’s version of Lionel Bart’s “Oliver” in 1968, and for John Williams on three movies beginning with the musical version of James Hilton’s “Goodbye Mr Chips”.
And going on to include “Jane Eyre” (1970), directed by Delbert Mann, and “Fiddler on the Roof” (1971), by Norman Jewison.
Directed by Herbert Ross in 1969, “Chips” featured a screenplay by no less a luminary of British literature than Terence Rattigan. And as he was the author of such quintessentially English tragedies as “The Browning Version” and “The Winslow Boy”, both centring on the English private school system, he was the perfect choice.
Sadly, though, for all its virtues, including a lovely score by Leslie Bricusse, it was not a critical success, although it was nominated for several major awards, and has gone on to enjoy something of a following on the internet.
Also in ’69, he worked on David Lean’s “Ryan’s Daughter”, a visually beautiful epic set in rural Ireland during the First World War, which was another film that has grown in stature since its initial release. Written by playwright and screenwriter Robert Bolt, with music by Maurice Jarre, it was poorly received by the critics, although today, it’s considered by many to be among Lean’s finest works.
In addition to Williams, Green and Jarre, he’s served as concertmaster for a panoply of major 20th Century musical figures working within the media of film and television, including Dimitri Tiomkin, Nelson Riddle, Georges Delerue, Wilfred Josephs and Christopher Gunning.
But to return the world of Pop, which mutated into Rock, possibly some time towards the end of the late 1960s, while retaining a Pop subsidiary; and became known as such to many of its devotees, presumably as a means of investing it with some respectability as an art form:
As the ‘60s ceded to the ‘70s, Pat’s close friend Mickie Most was poised to enter the second phase of his glittering Pop career, having been briefly involved with the nascent Rock movement through his management of the Jeff Beck Group. And yet, even at that, he’d sought to turn guitar virtuoso Beck into a major Pop star…while apparently remaining impervious to the star quality of his one-time front man, Rod Stewart.
And it fell to business partner Peter Grant to prosper within Rock music, first as co-manager of the Yardbirds with Most; then as sole manager of Led Zeppelin, who went on to become the ultimate Rock band; and second only to the Rolling Stones in terms of legendary darkness and mystery.
And by the time of the Zeppelin’s conquest of America, the face of Western society had been altered almost beyond recognition by the Rock and Roll revolution.
Yet, in all good conscience, responsibility for this transformation can’t be laid exclusively at the feet of Rock.
For, after all, tendencies hostile to the Judaeo-Christian fabric of the West can be traced at least as far back as the Enlightenment of the 16th and 17th Centuries.
Much of the groundwork had already been done in other words, and that’s especially true of the forties and fifties.
It was in these two immediate post-war decades that the Existentialists and the Beats became international icons of revolt, while lesser groups such as the Lettrists of Paris served as scandal-sowing forerunners of the Situationists, believed to have played a major role in fomenting the Paris riots of May ’68.
At the same time, Britain’s first major youth cult surfaced in the shape of the Teddy Boys, and a cinema of youthful discontent flourished as never before. Movies such as Stanley Kramer’s “The Wild One” and Nicholas Ray’s “Rebel Without a Cause” fostered a desire among millions of young Americans to be identified as rebels themselves, reacting against the stifling conformity of Eisenhower era America.
For all that, though, none of these phenomena enjoyed a tithe of the influence of Rock in terms of its effect on the Western soul.

Glam and the Gender Revolution
 
My Pangbourne years coincided with the rise of Rock, which was Pop transmuted into an art form, while somehow including Pop as its less intellectual counterpart. And the music we listened to as self-styled lads had “lad value”; and we called it Underground for its shadowy exclusivity, while at some point it became known as Progressive.
But as I recall…it included both Hard Rock and Soft Rock, and the sophisticated Art Rock of acts and artists as diverse as the Beatles, Frank Zappa and the Doors. And for me, there was no real difference between the experimental Hard Rock of Deep Purple, and the out and out Prog of Yes or Emerson, Lake and Palmer.
For Rock was split into two categories…Underground…and Commercial…a term we tended to spit out like some kind of curse, as this was pure Pop, whose domain was the despised hit parade featured weekly on British TV show Top of the Pops.
The Underground, on the other hand, was composed of acts and artists who made music largely for the growing album market. And there were those among them, such as Led Zeppelin, who never graced the singles chart despite earning fortunes through concerts and album sales. And from about ’69, the Zep constituted one of my prime facilitators into the murky depths of the Underground.
But by the time I quit Pangbourne in 1972, a new Rock revolution was underway in the shape of a heterogeneous mix of Rock and Pop allied to an outrageous androgynous image…and known as Glam.
Glam had begun to infiltrate the British charts as early as ‘71, while making little impact on the US, despite the fact that many of its pioneers were American. While its true roots were to be found in the Blues and early Rock and Roll, more of which later.
But it had been carried into the mainstream by one Marc Bolan, born Mark Feld in 1947 into a Jewish family of working class origins, who had been featured in 1962 in a magazine called “Town”, as one of the Faces, or leading Mods of Stamford Hill in East London.
Although by then he’d moved with his family to a council house in Summerstown in West London.
He went on to achieve major success as one half of the acoustic duo, Tyrannosaurus Rex; the other being multi-instrumentalist Steve Peregrin Took who, like Bolan, was a leading figure of London’s Hippie Underground centred on Ladbroke Grove.
But In 1970, Took was replaced by percussionist Mickey Finn, who shared Bolan’s love of old-time Rock and Roll. And as T. Rex, they had their first top 5 hit in the shape of “Ride a White Swan”.
And by the time of their first number one the following year, T. Rex were a four-piece band, with Bolan the biggest British teen sensation since the Beatles. While the Bolan phenomenon was dubbed T Rextasy by the British press…and all throughout the land, bedroom walls were adorned with Bolan’s fascinating fallen angel’s face.
However, for the true roots of Glam one must return to the very earliest days of Rock and Roll. And specifically to a certain Rhythm and Blues shouter by the name of Little Richard.
As a boy, Richard had attended the New Hope Baptist Church in his native Macon, Georgia, and sung Gospel songs with his family as The Penniman Singers. And aged just 13, he joined Gospel legend Sister Rosetta Tharp onstage in Macon after she heard him singing before the concert. And he had serious ambitions of becoming a full-time minister of the Gospel, while demonstrating extraordinary gifts as a boy preacher.
By 1951, however, the world had begun to beckon, and he won a talent contest in Atlanta that led to a recording contract with RCA Victor, but the four records he subsequently released all flopped. While around about the same time, he came under the sway of an outrageous Rhythm and Blues musician by the name of Esquerita, who shaped his unique piano style.
Esquerita is also believed to have influenced his increasingly flamboyant image, although self-styled King of the Blues Billy Wright, who piled his pomaded hair high on his head and wore eye liner and face powder, was also an influence in this respect.
Real success came for Richard in 1955 with “Tutti Frutti”, which has been cited as the true starting point for the Rock and Roll revolution; but within two years, he’d quit the business and returned to his faith. And as a Christian myself, I can only hope that for all his struggles, the good Reverend Penniman is a saved Christian man, and there is a good deal of evidence he is.
For few Rock stars have been as vocal in their condemnation of Rock and Roll as he has been.
Yet, in his wake, androgyny went on to become one of its major features; and this was true of several of its earliest pioneers. And that includes the single most influential phenomenon in Rock and Roll history with the possible exception of the Beatles, Elvis Presley.
For as masculine as Presley was, he was as much a Glam pioneer as Penniman with his early use of make up, and the flamboyant outfits he’d worn even before he found the fame that proved a mixed blessing to a boy raised in the Pentecostal Assemblies of God.
And the mantle was taken up in the mid to late sixties by such pioneers of Glam as the Kinks, Barrett era Pink Floyd, early Soft Machine, the Rolling Stones and Alice Cooper. But the decade as a whole witnessed an extraordinary explosion of androgyny on the part of the Western male, which served to pave for the way for the ‘70s.
And Glam swept a host of musicians who’d been striving for major success since the early ‘60s to fresh levels of stardom in the UK and elsewhere. Such as David Bowie, Elton John and Rod Stewart. For all three had first appeared on record as part of the British Blues Boom…Bowie and Stewart in ’64, and John in ’65; and despite being idolised at the height of Glam, they continued to be admired as serious album artists.
For there were two major strands of Glam in its hay day of 1971-‘74, one being allied to the consciously artistic tradition of Progressive Rock, the other, to the purest pure Pop. And among those acts and artists affiliated to the former were David Bowie, Roxy Music, Mott the Hoople and the Sensational Alex Harvey Band; while the latter embraced T. Rex, the Sweet, Gary Glitter, Slade and Wizzard. While there were many more who either flirted with the genre from within the confines of Prog, such as the Strawbs, or existed on its fringes, such as Silverhead.
As to stateside Glam; pioneered primarily by Alice Cooper, it went on to include such cult icons as Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, the New York Dolls, Jobriath and Brett Smiley; as well as singer-songwriter, Todd Rundgren, a serious candidate for the most gifted Rock artist of all time. While several major acts were briefly touched by it; such as Aerosmith and Kiss, but it would not be until the 1980s that Glam entered the mainstream in the shape of Glam Metal.
Also among those who leaped on the Glam bandwagon was the band that effectively invented the genre, the Rolling Stones. Although they didn’t adopt its more flagrant trappings until around 1972, the year they released the album which is widely considered to be their masterpiece, “Exile on Main Street”.
Initial sessions took place in the basement of the Villa Nellcôte, a 19th century mansion on the waterfront of Villefranche-sur-Mer in France’s Cote d’Azur, which had been leased to Keith Richards in the summer of ’71. However, several tracks had already been recorded at Mick Jagger’s country estate, as well as at West London’s legendary Olympic Studios.
Originally a theatre, then a film studio, Olympic was converted into a recording studio by the architect Robertson Grant, while his son Keith Grant – a very close friend of Pat Halling’s – completed the acoustics in tandem with Russel Pettinger. It went on to become the virtual nerve centre of the British Rock movement.
Much has been written of the “Exile” sessions, which saw various icons of the counterculture passing through Nellcôte as if to lay blessings on the decadent antics taking place therein, which stand today as the very quintessence of the benighted Rock and Roll lifestyle. While less than a decade had passed since Rock’s true inception at the hands of the clean-cut Beatles, Western society had already been altered almost beyond recognition within that short space of time.
Yet, responsibility for this transformation can’t in all good conscience be laid exclusively at the feet of Rock, given that tendencies inimical to the West’s moral fabric can be traced at least as far back as the Enlightenment of the 16th and 17th Centuries. So, how had society come to be so successfully and swiftly revolutionised by Rock?
Part of the answer lies in its sheer popularity, itself arguably born of its extraordinary eclecticism. Yet, in purely artistic terms, its decline was so rapid that by ‘72, it was already wholly jaded as an art form, even though it remained creatively vibrant for a further decade and a half…but little more, despite sporadic flashes of the old genius.
It’s as if it carried within it the seeds of its own destruction as a result of its reluctance to embrace progression, and persisting returns to the simple rhythms whence it sprang, and worship of those who’ve refused to transcend these. Many would cite the Rolling Stones as foremost amongst these, and yet this has not always been true, far from it.
For all throughout the ‘60s, thanks to the extraordinary musical versatility of founder member Brian Jones, they were among those who sowed the seeds of the Progressive movement to come.
However, once Jones was no longer able to significantly contribute to their music, the Stones made a conscious effort to return to their roots in the Blues, and this process reached an apogee in the shape of “Exile on Main Street” in 1972.
In that selfsame year, Pat Halling was involved with an album that was greeted with little of the ballyhoo of “Exile”. This being “Slides”, by the great Irish actor Richard Harris, who’d launched a Pop career on the back of Jimmy Webb’s 7 minute Pop tour de force, “MacArthur Park”.
In 2005, it was released on CD with “My Boy”, receiving very high ratings from Amazon reviewers both in Britain and the US. 
However, as the ‘70s progressed, Pat became involved with several far more successful projects on the fringes of Glam, more of which later.

Rock and Roll and the Western Soul

When such Glam acts and artists as David Bowie and the Sweet had first appeared on British television in full make up around 1972, there were those unreconstructed British males who were perforce moved to revulsion and rage. Yet by about ’74 Glam could be said to have shed much of its revolutionary potency.
But by the time it had done so, it had effectuated a minor sexual upheaval by making male androgyny more acceptable than ever before. And it did so in defiance of the Bible’s strict delineation of the sexual roles, and prohibition of any form of cross dressing.
And one can only wonder what effect it had on the psychological development of young men such as myself, who’d already been weaned on the ferocious rebel sounds of Rock, only to swoon at the feet of the gorgeous androgynes of Glam.
But while it had entered the mainstream as teeny bop Pop, an avant-garde form persisted in the shape of a nostalgic love affair with Europe’s immediate past. And it was shared by acts and artists as diverse as Bowie and Roxy Music; as well as newcomers Sparks and Cockney Rebel, who were lavished with critical praise in some quarters of the British press. While Roxy were especially indebted to the decadent café and cabaret culture of pre-Rock Europe, when Modernism was at its point of maximum intensity. And the persona Bowie adopted in 1976, and which he enigmatically termed “The Thin White Duke” was the apotheosis of this romantic Europhilia.
But little of this was in evidence in the happy world of Pop which continued to mine the Glam Rock craze for all it was worth, propelling a multitude of entertainers into the charts in the process. Such as one David Cook, a startlingly handsome young cockney Londoner of Irish Traveller extraction who as David Essex became a major star on the fringes of Glam.
But rather than Rock or teeny bop Pop, he did so largely through acting. And it was his own song, “Rock On”, that really put him on the map as a major heart throb in 1974 when it became a major hit on both sides of the Atlantic, due in no small part to its distinctive string arrangement, featuring one Pat Halling as concertmaster.
Its follow-up, “Stardust”, was the title of the hit movie of the same name, a salutary tale of a young Londoner who achieves his dreams of superstardom, only to end up holed up in some Spanish castle as a drug-addicted recluse.
Like its predecessor, it had been produced by New Yorker Jeff Wayne, with whom Pat worked both on “Rock On” and his own “Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds”, widely viewed today as a masterpiece.
That same year of ’74 saw the release of Cilla Black’s “In My Life”, produced by David Mackay, and “The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast” by Rod Edwards and Roger Hand from an original book by William Plomer, both with orchestra led by Pat.
While he was still a close colleague of Mickie Most, who was enjoying the second phase of his glittering Pop career. For as previously stated, he’d been briefly involved with the burgeoning Rock movement in the shape of the Jeff Beck Group, which had been formed in early ‘67.
But in time Most bequeathed the band to his friend and business partner, Peter Grant, and under Grant’s aegis, they went on to enormous success in the US. And by so doing, they anticipated the mega-glory of another Grant-managed band led by a one-time member of the Yardbirds.
I’m referring of course to Led Zeppelin, a band second only to the Rolling Stones in terms of legendary darkness and mystery, if you’ll excuse the leitmotiv.
While Grant went on to take the US by storm with Led Zep, Mickie set about turning RAK, which they’d formed together in 1969, into one the key Pop record labels of the ’70s and home to several classic Glam, Pop and Teeny bop acts.
These included Disco-Poppers Hot Chocolate which had been formed as early as 1969, and former Detroit native Suzi Quatro, both of whom Pat worked with on several occasions with Mickie at the helm; as well as Mud, Arrows, Kenny, Smokie and Racey.
Quatro benefited from the brilliance of songwriters Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman, who also wrote for the Sweet, Mud, Arrows, Smokie and Racey, and for a time was one of the few female stars of the Glam-Glitter genre.
But Pat’s work in the mid 1970s was by no means restricted to the purest pure Pop, far from it.
There was a major movie project in the shape of “The Day of the Jackal”, directed by the great Fred Zinnemann, whom I have always admired enormously.
I was fortunate enough to be introduced to him by Pat. And he was the second of two legends of the cinema I met around about that time, the first having been the great Charles Chaplin, and they were both quite delectably charming to me.
Pat was the concertmaster, serving under the Frenchman Georges Delerue – whom I also met – who both composed and conducted the music.
In terms of recorded music, Pat became caught up in the final stages of the Prog Rock boom when he served as leader for Jethro Tull, for despite himself, he’d been part of the growing Rock movement from the outset.
And notably through his association with the Beatles, who by ’67 were at the forefront of the Rock revolution; although their Rock was ever replete with beautiful Pop melodies.
But the same could be said of Tull, one of the most purely artistic bands of the genre, which yet achieved both commercial and critical success on both sides of the Atlantic. And the first of these projects, “War Child” from 1974 could be said to be the quintessence of Rock as an art form, whose earliest expression was the aforesaid Prog.
For by fusing elements of Classical, Folk and Rock, the Prog phenomenon created a music that at times amounted to high art, as in the case of Tull.
But it was Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention who effectively birthed the genre; although the notion of Rock as art had evolved by degrees in both Britain and America, with both the Beatles and Bob Dylan being especially influential in this respect.
Yet while both Britain and America served as the cradles of Art Rock, Prog was characteristically British, with King Crimson, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Yes, Gentle Giant and Genesis serving as early exemplars. And in keeping with its position within the rebel music of Rock, its lyrics often inclined to a darkness of tone which was characteristic of much of the musical Underground of the late 1960s.
Speaking of which…from about ‘73, Prog set about returning to the Underground whence it emerged. And from there, informing a vast variety of genres, including Glam Rock, Jazz Rock, New Wave, Post-Punk, Alt Rock and Indie…in fact, one might go so far as to say it’s been ubiquitous ever since.
So that as things stand, several of the most successful acts in the world could be said to be Progressive in varying degrees. While at the same time, its arch-enemy Punk languishes on the sidelines as little more than a fashion concept.
But by ’73, pure Prog was already starting to look stale in comparison to the Art Rock of figures such as Todd Rundgren and David Bowie, who were operating as progressives within the Glam Rock genre.
And in that selfsame year, Pat worked on two concept albums that were nowhere nears as commercial as anything by these two innovators, namely “Cosmic Wheels” by Donovan; and Johnny Harris’ “All To Bring You Morning”, for which he led the strings. And which featured no less than three one-time members of Yes, who just happened to be recording next door at the time as Johnny and friends, and were great admirers of his work.
He went on to work on a series of Art Rock projects which while not as successful as international best-sellers by the likes of Tull have received fresh critical acclaim through the internet.
They include “Beginnings” (1975) by Steve Howe, “Octoberon” (1976) by Barclay James Harvest, “Visionary” (1976) and “Perilous Journey” (1977) by Gordon Giltrap, “Donovan” (1977) by Donovan and “Woman in the Wings” (1978) by Steeleye Span lead singer Maddie Prior. While a very early Progressive project of Pat’s was “Definitely What” (1969) by Brian Auger and the Trinity.
But for Pat, involvement in the rebel music of Rock and Roll was ever but a means of earning the amounts of money necessary to support a home and family. While in my case, it was entirely voluntary, and one after the other I immersed myself in its messages of revolt.
Which is not to say that all Rock music is overtly dark or iconoclastic, far from it. For much of it is relatively innocuous, and there is much beauty to be found in all forms of Rock, both musically and lyrically, as I’ve already made clear. Yet from a historical perspective, it could be said that few art forms have been quite so effective in challenging the Judaeo-Christian foundations of Western culture as Rock.
And for a time, it was as if a civil war was being fought for the hearts and minds of the young. And that’s especially true of the ‘60s, where in both Britain and America, the conflict was quite extraordinarily fierce…and this persisted into the ‘70s. With the result that the British Punk insurrection provoked a reaction from ordinary members of the public which would be inconceivable today in a West that has become so utterly inured to outrage.
While by the ‘80s it could be said to have started to wane, as the values of the counterculture started percolating the mainstream. And while this was concurrent with a famous conservative backlash, the latter hardly constituted a wholesale return to traditional values. For these were still in terminal recession, and fighting desperately for their very existence. And the backlash was but an expression of this desperation as I see it.
And to those who disagree, I can only say they have failed to realise just how deeply embedded into our society these values once were.
While today, they are merely the province of a minority, and a relatively powerless one at that. So for the time being, it could be said that the culture wars of the past half century or so have been won…and that Rock and Roll stands tall among its victors.

Chapter Five – A Halling is a Halling Wherever He is

Incidents from an Infamous Year Zero

As the ‘70s proceeded apace, both Prog and Glam receded in terms of influence, although they’d experience periodic rebirths. Glam, for example, would be revived in the ’80s through American Glam Metal, and the British Goth and New Romantic movements; and still exists to this day. However, given the extent to which the West has become inured to outrage, its power to shock has been reduced to zero.
By ‘77, it had been supplanted by Punk, a movement which, if it were at all possible, was even more scandalous.
While some years earlier, Soul, a melodic fusion of Gospel and R&B which had made a massive impact on the Pop charts, birthed a mutation known as Disco. And one of its major hallmarks was the liberal use of strings often played in a staccato style.
Thence, Pat was involved in several major projects at the height of the Disco era, including the international hit album “Symphony of Love” (1978) by Miquel Brown, which was produced by British composer Alan Hawkshaw. And another Hawkshaw production, “Again and Again” by Love De-Luxe, from the following year.
Pat also worked with Alec R Costandinos’s groundbreaking “Love and Kisses”, who produced three albums between 1977 and ’79, which were massively successful at the time, yielding several US hit singles and helping to define the Disco sound.
And both Pat and Costandinos had worked with another French Disco pioneer Jean-Marc Cerrone on his hit album, “Love in C Minor” from 1976, produced at a time when Disco had yet to truly enter the mainstream.
 While Pat played on several other Costandinos records, including an acknowledged Disco masterpiece, “Romeo and Juliet” (1978), which has to be lauded for its subject matter. For while Soul in the seventies was as extensive as Rock; and every inch as sublime at its most artistic, Disco had a greater tendency to fixate on the pleasures of the flesh. And so was the ultimate music of the mid 1970s, at a time the values of the permissive society were seeping into the mainstream. Yet at the same time, there were many exceptions, and Disco could be no less artistically exalted than Soul.
He also appeared on “Look Out” and “Ordinary Man” for Bad News Travels Fast, both from ‘79, and Costandinos’ own “Sphinx” from ’77, and “Winds of Change”, also from ’79. As well as Melaphonia’s “Limelight Disco Symphony” from ’78, a Disco tribute to Sir Charles Chaplin, who’d died the previous Christmas Day, produced by Franck Pourcel and Alain Boublil.
 Boublil went on to write the libretto for the musical “Les Miserables” with composer Claude Schonberg, with John Cameron arranging.
And Pat was involved with the London production of “Les Miz” for many years as the leader of the orchestra, one of several highlights of a concert career which has seen him work with Pop legends as diverse as Ella Fitzgerald, Perry Como, Tony Bennett, Tiny Tim, Barry Manilow and Boy George of Culture Club…and tour with Tom Jones and Barrie White.
But it’s his participation in Bing Crosby’s final tour that is perhaps the dearest to his heart, as a personal fan of the Old Groaner’s.
In September ‘77, Bing, his family, and close friend Rosemary Clooney began a concert tour of England that included two weeks at the London Palladium. He recorded an album “Seasons”, and a TV Christmas special with David Bowie and Twiggy, which featured a famous duet with Bowie.
And Pat actually managed to wangle an autograph from Der Bingel during what may have been a final recording session at Maida Vale studios. But the great man had initially objected to Pat helping himself to a piece of his sheet music, before relenting with the words, “he seems like a good man”, and signing the music into the bargain.
His final concert took place at the Brighton Centre on the 12th of October 1977. For two days afterwards, following a round of 18 holes of golf on a course near Madrid, he died from a massive heart attack. And his passing came at the end of a year that had claimed a string of cultural giants including Groucho Marx, Joan Crawford, Maria Callas, Marc Bolan, Elvis Presley and Charlie Chaplin.
And amidst all this tragedy, Punk’s inexorable ascent to international notoriety showed no signs of abating. Yet while the London variant thrived, New York failed to capitalise on its initial promise as Punk’s true spiritual capital.
For lest we forget…Punk’s origins lie in the US among the so-called Garage bands of the 1960s. And their attempts to emulate the rougher acts of the British Invasion, themselves heavily indebted to American Rhythm and Blues. But it was the distinct New York variant of the early ‘70s that exerted the greatest sway on British Punk, and largely through the influence of a young entrepreneur by the name of Malcolm McLaren.
McLaren was born in London as the son of a Scottish father and Jewish mother, and raised by his grandmother, the daughter of a Sephardic-Jewish diamond merchant.
As an art student in the late 1960s, he was drawn to the subversive ideas of the Paris Situationists, believed to have played a part in fomenting the ’68 riots, and were themselves offshoots of the post-war Lettrists.
Formed by the charismatic Isidore Isou in the late 1940s, the Lettrists were very much precursors of the Punks, and one of their number, Jean-Michel Mension, became infamous for scrawling slogans on his trousers as early as 1953.
In 1971, he and his then girlfriend, Vivienne Westwood, opened an outlet specialising in ‘50s style Teddy Boy clothing designed by himself and Vivienne at 430 Kings Road, Chelsea. It exists to this day as “World’s End”, part of Dame Vivienne’s global fashion empire; but in ’71 it first saw the light of day as “Let it Rock”.
Four years later, he became the manager of the disintegrating New York Dolls, who’d created a sensation in the UK at the height of Glam with a combination of exotic image and corrosive three-chord Rock.
He designed some red leather outfits for them in tandem with a new pseudo-Communist image, but it was too late to save them, and they folded soon afterwards. But while in New York, he came across a former Sandford Preparatory student from Lexington, Kentucky, by the name of Richard Hell.
He’d taken his name from a famous prose poem by Arthur Rimbaud, and was at various times a member of several key New York Punk Rock outfits. And McLaren was especially impressed by his unique image of torn tee-shirt and spiky unkempt hair, allegedly inspired by the famous tousle-haired photograph of Rimbaud by Etienne Carjat, and so before long he’d decided to take it back home to London and promote an anglicised version.
Some time afterwards, he renamed his Kings Road boutique “Sex” and set himself up as the manager of a group formed by three denizens of the Hammersmith area of West London, allegedly at the urging of their guitarist, Warwick “Wally” Nightingale. And there is some evidence they were called the Strand, after a song on the second Roxy Music album “For Your Pleasure”.
McLaren agreed to be their manager, but only on the condition that founder member Wally, be ejected from the band; and so he was. Sadly, he died from complications related to substance abuse in 1996.
He was replaced by Johnny Rotten, a young London Irishman born John Lydon in London’s Finsbury Park in 1956. And with Rotten onboard as front man, the band was renamed the Sex Pistols; and so began the most infamous Punk odyssey of them all.
As I’ve hinted earlier, Punk in the UK could be said to have been a final furious stand-off between the old-style Victorian values of the 1950s and the new values that had been ushered in a decade later. But while these had at first seemed to be comparatively benign, by the end of the sixties, they’d curdled into something far darker.
However, no sooner had Punk taken off, than it was slyly supplemented with those very elements it was reacting against; as a generation of musicians sought to fuse the attitude of Punk with the artistry of Prog.
And so the New Wave was born in the shape of a vast variety of acts and artists who while progressive in the truest sense, were content to ride the Punk bandwagon all the way into the Pop charts.
While New Wave threatened to supplant Punk at its crudest, other genres competed with it for the hearts and souls of the sybaritic young. Such as Reggae, which was Punk’s most serious rival as the music of choice for Punks themselves; and Electronica, which had been pioneered all throughout the ‘70s mainly by so-called Kraut Rock acts such as Can, Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream.
But Disco was its true competitor, even though it was still known as Soul for the most part as I recall; but then I was just a rube from the ‘burbs.
One thing is certain is that I was as much a lover of Soul as Punk circa ’77, and dressed more like a Soul Boy for much of that year. In fact, it was only in its final few months I started affecting the more flagrant trappings of Punk; such as spiked and dyed hair and drainpipe jeans.
So for me, ’78 was my own personal Punk Year Zero; and it was in that year, at the very height of Disco, that “Central Heating” by Heatwave, a rare classic of British Soul, was released.
Produced by former teen idol Barry Blue, and with arrangements by John Cameron, with Pat Halling serving as his concertmaster, it was a massive hit on both sides of the Atlantic, ascending to number 10 on the Billboard 200. And yielding two hit singles in the shape of “The Groove Line” by Englishman Rod Temperton and “Mind Blowing Decisions” by American lead vocalist Johnny Wilder Jr.
Temperton went on to write for the best-selling album in musical history, which is Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”, produced by Quincy Jones in 1982.
He also wrote for Quincy on his own hit album “The Dude”, with singer Patti Austin sounding remarkably like Jackson; as well as for Patti herself. While George Benson’s “Love X Love” was blessed with the same kind of stardust that helped turn Michael Jackson into the most famous Rock star on the planet.
 Then towards the end of the ‘70s, Pat played what was possibly his most memorable ever solo for a television program. And this was for the stunning opening and closing theme to BBC’s “Life on Earth”, composed by Edward Williams and conducted by Marcus Dods.
As a solo it was so breathtakingly beautiful that Pat was compared by one devotee of the violin to Jascha Heifetz, whom many believe to have been the greatest violinist of them all. Quite an honour for the boy from the Tamar Valley.

From New Pop to Rap in the Crazy 1980s

The ’80s was a potentially tough decade for session musicians such as Pat Halling as the synthesizer started threatening the world of recorded music as never before. And one of the fruits of this putsch was the so-called New Pop that arose in the wake of Punk.
And New Pop could be said to be a more purely commercial variant of the aforesaid New Wave; itself an offshoot of Punk. Although the term was only ever used in the UK, while the US continued to favour that of New Wave to describe the explosion of British synth-driven bands that invaded the Pop charts on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the ‘80s.
For several New Pop acts took part in the so-called Second British Invasion, which saw British bands dominating the American Pop charts to a degree unknown since the hey day of the Beatles. And this was largely due to a demand on the part of the newly launched MTV music channel for glamorous
videos which enabled British acts such as Culture Club, Duran Duran and Eurythmics to score massive transatlantic hits.
But for many, this resurgence of Pop was a negative development, despite the musicality of many of its proponents, so that it fused the commerciality of Pop with the virtuosity of Rock. And it could certainly be said that such phenomena as Glam, Punk and Goth witnessed a certain taming throughout the ‘80s; so that by the end of the decade, they had been shorn of their ability to shock.
But for all the ballyhoo created by the rise of Electronica, Pat Halling’s career was barely affected.
And in 1980, he worked again for his old friend John Cameron…this time on the movie “The Mirror Crack’d”, based on the Agatha Christie novel, with music by JC, and featuring a roll call of Hollywood legends. Pat even had a small non-speaking cameo in the movie as a World War II bandleader.
And in that same year, he led the orchestra for “Man of the World” by Greek superstar Demis Roussos, which while produced by David Mackay, featured another close friend Barrie Guard as conductor.
He also found time to lead the orchestra for the distinguished composer Wilfrid Joseph’s theme to the 1980 BBC TV series of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice”.
In 1982, he was back with John Cameron for a further star-studded Agatha Christie movie, “Evil Under the Sun”, helmed, as in the case for “Crack’d” by Bond director Guy Hamilton, and produced by Lord Brabourne and Richard Goodwin, who became a close friend.
 For Richard’s wife, Christine Edzard, he served as the soloist for “Biddy” in 1983…working again with Christine, with Richard producing, on Dickens’ “Little Dorrit” in ’88, and two years later on “The Fool”, written by Christine with Oliver Stockman. And all three movies were scored by French composer Michel Sanvoisin.
For Paul McCartney, possibly the most lauded Rock and Roll musician in history, he led the orchestra for the soundtrack to the ’84 movie “Give My Regards to Broad Street”. And while it sold well, the film itself performed poorly at the Box Office; although it benefits from a good deal of affection from contemporary McCartney fans.
A year later, he was concertmaster for his old colleague David Essex on the album version of the musical “Mutiny”, based on “Mutiny on the Bounty” by Nordhoff and Hall. And in that same year, played on three tracks from Jazz musician Barbara Thompson’s album “Heavenly Bodies”.
And then a year after that, he contributed to “To Go Beyond II”, final track from the hugely successful “Enya” album by Irish superstar Enya Brennan. As well as “If” for Hollywood Beyond, featuring singer-songwriter Mark Rogers. And tenor saxophonist Spike Robinson’s “Gershwin Collection”.
In 1988, he and Richard Studt served as orchestra leaders on Elaine Page’s “The Queen Album”, produced by Mike Moran, while in ‘89, he worked with yet another Rock legend, Pete Townsend, serving as leader on his concept album “The Iron Man – The Musical”, based on the novel by Ted Hughes.
Interestingly, Pete’s father Jazz saxophonist Cliff Townsend had been a colleague of Pat’s during their time together on the famous BBC television chat show “Parkinson”, named after host Michael Parkinson.
 Then in 1990, he appeared on John Williams’ album “The Guitar is the Song”, having earlier worked with the great Classical guitarist on “John Williams plays Patrick Gowers and Scarlatti” (1972), and “Portrait of John Williams” (1982).
 But briefly returning to film and TV, television projects on which Pat worked throughout the ’80s include “Hold that Dream” (1986) based on the novel by Barbara Taylor Bradford, with original score by long time friend Barrie Guard, “Tears in the Rain” (1988), from a novel by Pamela Wallace, with music again by Guard, and “The Darling Buds of May” (1992-1993), based on the novel by HE Bates, and with music by Pip Burley and Guard.
His recording career in the ‘90s included work for acts and artists as varied as British Indie band Cud and French singer Dany Brillant (“Nouveau Jour”) from 1999).
And on a larger scale, the ‘90s witnessed the fading of such once provocative cults of Glam, Punk and Goth to make way for the far starker cult of Grunge, as well as the facelessness of Electronic Dance. But the greatest success story of the decade was Rap, which many would contend is not a Rock music genre at all, but an entirely different form of music, as distinct from Rock as Rock once was from Jazz.
While others would insist all offshoots of Rock’s first forefathers that have in some way benefited from the Rock revolution are perforce forms of Rock and Roll. And by forefathers I’m referring primarily to Rhythm and Blues and Country and Western. And I’m inclined to side with this view.

A Halling is a Halling Wherever He is

Moving into the Noughties…and Tiny Tim’s 1968 concert at the Albert Hall finally secured a CD release in 2000 through Rhino Handmade Records as “Tiny Tim Live! At the Royal Albert Hall”. And conducted by Carpenters producer Richard Perry, with Tony Gilbert as leader, and Pat among the first violins, it was revealed as a neglected masterpiece that had remained unreleased for nearly two decades. Yet within two years of its recording, Tim’s legendary appearance at the Isle of Wight Festival would secure a standing ovation from the assembled flower children, with the Beatles and the Stones among them.
And between 2000 and 2002, Pat played violin for a band formed by his good friend Barrie Guard, and featuring his son Carl on vocals.
And together with bass player John Sutton, they recorded a series of demos at Barrie’s home studio in Esher, and even went so far as to record a pilot radio show; but to no avail.  
They gigged sporadically for about a year and a half to limited response, until a final concert at the 2002 Shelton Arts Festival brought them into contact with the kind of intimate cultured audience they should have been aiming for all along…and they all but brought the house down. But dispersed soon afterwards after barely eighteen months together.
 On a brighter note, there’s a fascinating tale attached to singer-songwriter John Dawson Read for whom Pat served as leader on his two classic albums from the ‘70s, namely “A Friend of Mine is Going Blind” from ’75, and “Read On” from a year later.
Sometime around 2005, fellow singer-songwriter Michael Johnson included an MP3 of Read singing the title track of his first album, “A Friend of Mine” on his website, and many Read fans began communicating through the site  as a result. 
His subsequent re-entry into the music world after nearly thirty years of relative inactivity, resulted in a third album, “Now…where were we?” being released that same year.
 Until quite recently, Pat served as leader for the longest running comedy series in television history, Roy Clarke’s “Last of the Summer Wine”. And working alongside Pat was harmonica maestro Jim Hughes, whose playing it was that made Ronnie Hazelhurst’s gently pastoral theme tune so distinctive.  
From about 2005, Pat began work on an album of popular song standards featuring Jim on harmonica, his son Carl on vocals, Judd Procter on guitar, Dave Richmond and John Sutton on bass, and John Dean and Sebastian Guard on drums.
The album was produced by Pat and arranged by John Smith. And largely engineered by sound recordist Tony Philpot, with contributions by Keith Grant of West London’s legendary Olympic Studios. To be finally released in 2007 as “A Taste of Summer Wine” by James Hughes Carl Halling with the London Swingtette.
And as things stand, Pat plays in two quartets, the Leonardo, formed in 1993, and the aforesaid Quartet Pro Musica. And the quartet’s recent projects have included the 2007 world premiere of “A Poet’s Calendar” by long-time friend Derek Wadsworth, with whom Pat first worked in the ‘70s, such as on Alan Price’s “Metropolitan Man” from ‘75
As well as performances of Quartets 1 and 2 by Jazz drummer and composer Tony Kinsey; and a string of concerts organised by Pat’s youngest son, Dane. The first of these taking place at London’s Cadogan Hall in the spring of 2010, and featuring works by Haydn, Debussy and Purcell. To say nothing of the world premiere of “Tara’s Brooch” by faithful colleague John Cameron, which features on a CD of theirs released towards the end of that year.
In addition to his music, Pat continues to be a keen dinghy sailor during the season at his local club, Aquarius Sailing Club, where he races to win every Sunday; and to paint under the handle he once rejected, Clancy.
Also, for several years he’s attended functions organised by PPL, formerly known as Phonographic Performance Limited, a music licensing company which collects and distributes airplay and performance royalties on behalf of record companies and perfomers throughout the UK.
At one of these, the Fair Play 95, which took place on behalf of the Fair Play for Musicians campaign at the Stanhope Hotel in Brussels in April 2009, he played a medley of Tony Hatch’s “Downtown” and the Beatles’ “All You Need is Love”, before inviting flamenco guitarist Manuel Espinosa on to the stage for a short duet.
There seems to be no end to the man’s almost preternatural energy and force of will.
And although there’s no hard and fast evidence that Pat has Scandinavian blood, research related to the Norwegians who emigrated to the American Midwest from about the mid-19th Century onwards reveals that one of the purported characteristics of the Hallings of the Halling Valley in Norway’s Buskerud County is firmness “in thoughts and beliefs”, so that he would “rather break than bend”. This in the words of the Norwegian-American writer Syver Swenson Rodning, who allegedly took first prize in an essay set by a man called Hallingen in 1917 called “A Halling is a Halling wherever he is”, the Hallings themselves settling primarily in Spring Grove, Minnesota, where traces of their dialect and subculture survived into the 1930s.
Perhaps then, alone among the three children born to Phyllis Mary Halling, Patrick is a true Halling with roots deep in the Hallingdal where the Halling Valley River lies.
And what of the music that has dominated his days and nights for so many decades?
The truth is it has never been more accessible thanks to the miracle of sites such as Spotify and You Tube. Sites where one might access a degree of music inconceivable to those of my generation, who as late as the late 1990s could only ever hear as much music as they were able to afford via the medium of the long playing record, Compact Disc or Musicassette.
And of Rock…surely the most revolutionary music form in history, it could be said it has been tamed at long last. And quietly taken its place alongside Classical, Jazz and Folk as just another facet of the massive music industry. But then is that not its final victory?

Book Five – Beachcombings from the Halling Valley Riverbank

Chapter One – Bouzingo and Other Versified Remnants

1. Bouzingo – The Gathering of the Poets

The boy was aged about eighteen,
Pale and pensive,
Weary and frail in appearance.
He could have been
Goethe’s Werther,
Senancour’s Obermann
Or Chateaubriand’s melancholy hero,
Embraced by a generation
And about whom Sainte Beuve said:
“René, c’est moi.”
Tortured by a new mal du siècle,
He sought refuge
In the Club Bouzingo.
Two young poets,
One dark, the other fair,
Drifted past. The first,
Whose black hair
Hung in ringlets over his shoulders,
Wore a small pointed beard,
Black velvet tails,
A white linen shirt
Loosely fastened at the neck
By a thin pink taffeta tie;
The second wore a tight coat
That opened onto a silk crimson waistcoat
And a lace jabot, white trousers
With blue seams,
And a wide-brimmed black hat, and
In one of his hands
He carried a long thin pink-coloured pipe.
They were soon joined
By some of their dandified companions.
The music had stopped playing, and
The poet-leader in cape and gloves,
Dark and pomaded
With a Théophile Gautier moustache,
Took to the stage,
Where he proceeded to declaim
Selections from his subversive verses
To delirious cheers,
As if sedition was imminent;
Only the boy-poet remained silent,
His pale cheeks
Soak’d by the freshest tears.
“Après nous le déluge,”
He said under his breath,
“Our leader preaches revolution
But provides no solution
As to the fate of coming generations,
Should the infant be cast out
With the bath water that is so filthy
In his sight
That, intent on doing right,
Gives no thought to the future,
Nor to what might supplant
The society he claims to despise.”
The boy was aged about eighteen
Pale and pensive
Weary and frail in appearance.
He could have been
Goethe’s Werther,
Senancour’s Obermann
Or Chateaubriand’s melancholy hero,
Embraced by a generation,
And about whom Sainte Beuve said:
“René, c’est moi.”
Tortured by a new mal du siècle,
He sought refuge
From the Club Bouzingo.

2. Oh My My My (Call the FBI)

Couldn’t b’lieve my peepers
When I first saw you
Couldn’t b’lieve the beauty
Of your baby blues
I knew I had to ask you if you’d
Like to dance
I knew I had to take heart and to
Take that chance

First you resisted me you said
You couldn’t leave
Your friends alone
But after our first dance you said
You thought they would be
Ok to find their own way home

Oh my my my
Call the FBI
I think I lost my pride
I think I found my bride

Couldn’t b’lieve I’d ever
Find a girl like you
Couldn’t b’lieve we’d bond
As if by superglue
I knew I had such tender feelings
In my heart
I knew that I could fix it so we’d
Never part

First you resisted me you said
You weren’t ready
To fall in love
But after our first dance you said
You thought you’d give
This crazy swain another chance

Oh my my my
Call the FBI
I think I lost my pride
I think I found my bride

3. Some Romantic Afternoon

Some Romantic Afternoon
I will hear that haunting tune
The one that I would softly croon
By a lagoon

We’d go sailing to Cadiz
For a while it seemed like bliss
Now it alls seems just a myth
Like Brigadoon

Took a boat to southern Spain
Just to see her face again
She had gone forever
Not to return there
I could not control the tears
How they burned my eyes
As I look’d back at those lost years

Some Romantic Afternoon
I will hear that haunting tune
The one that I would softly croon
By a lagoon

4. For More than a Million Dreams

Keep on chipping
Right away at my heart
Because you touched it
Right from the start
If you were to leave me
And then
We were to part
It would really tear me apart

Don’t stop now,
Darling you’re getting to me
Don’t quit now
That you’re ahead
Don’t stop now
You’ve made an impression on me
Now there’s no getting you out of my head.

Keep on tearing
All my defences down
Because I feel that
They’re all going to fall
Keep on keeping up with
All of your charms
Because I feel
I’m going to give you my all

Don’t stop now,
You lit such a fire in me
Don’t quit now
Because that would be cruel
Don’t stop now
Darling, don’t tire of me
I’d feel such a fool and so confused

You’re the one
I have longed for you
For more than a million dreams
You’re the one
I have been strong for you
You don’t know how hard it’s been

Don’t stop now,
Darling you’re getting to me
Don’t quit now
That you’re ahead
Don’t stop now

5. Melancholy Girl

Melancholy Girl,
With your pre-Raphaelite curls
You don’t seem quite of this world
Such a strange and a sad-eyed girl
 
What happened to your smile
How came you to be so full of guile
Your eyes seem to stare for miles
For such a sweet and a tender child
 
There’s someone you’ve got to meet
The truth can set you free
Eternally
Enigmatic babe
The way you live is a shame
Life is more than a game
Freedom’s found in just one name
 
I’d like to show you another way
Where the dark can’t harm you
Night or day
 
Melancholy Girl,
With your pre-Raphaelite curls
You don’t seem quite of this world
Such a strange and a sad-eyed girl

6. My Travels

My travels start
Right here
Deep in my mind
My travels take me just where
I please I don’t have
To leave my warm room

My travels start
Sixteen sun
Beating down
Sinatra’s crooning Jobim
And I’m just dreaming of my
Great romance to come

I don’t need a little ticket
Tells me I can take the train
I don’t even to risk it
There’s no blistering sun
Or driving rain
And it’s here that I remain

My travels end
With a sweet
And peaceful time
I’ve found such sense deep within
No more will I feel
The need to go travelling again.

7. Some Sun Drunk Day He Said
 
Emotions war against sense
And his mind remains
A pot pourri,
And thoughts in his head
When he lies in his bed
Would make Dorian Gray
Appear pristine.
He wishes to moralize
On a corrupt example
Yet from the wicked cup
He hath supped a sample.
 
He appears to think in extremes;
He is beau-laid and realist
Whose inspiration stems from his dreams.
“Life is a beautiful strain for me,”
One sun-drunk day he said,
“But I pray I say what my soul needs to
Before the heavens decide me dead.”
But his mind is a disorderly drawer
Full of confused categorizations;
He has that Scott Fitzgerald illness
For dates, times, rhymes and quotations.
“I have a clear flowing mind
But I cannot foretell
When the clogging black clouds will arrive,
For they will arrive.
Live with the love, then bear the pain
Recurrent like the monsoon rain.”
 
He is afraid of happiness
For the inevitable despair that must follow it;
Afraid of happiness
For its cruel impermanence.
Like Zola, the seasons in life, for him
Are inevitable.
“All artists,” he says, “are at once alike and unique
One day, it’s clear,
The next, hazy, like a beery vision
The fulfilment that they seek.”
Misty dreams of sweet-smelling roses
And swaying streams
Bring him chills and pains in his soul and being;
He lives his life through a melancholy tragedy
And has an ever-yearning mind.

8. Gallant Festivities

It was my evening, that’s
For sure
“It’s your aura…”
For sure –
At last I’m good
At something
“Spot the Equity card…”
“When are you going
To be a superstar?”
Said Sarah
That seemed to be
The question
On everyone’s lips.
At last, at last, at last
I’m good at something…

And so the party…Zoe
called me…I listened…
…To her problems…
References
To my “innocent face”…
Linda said:
“Sally seems Elusive
But is in fact,
Accessible;
You’re the opposite –
You give to everyone
But are incapable
Of giving in particular.”

Madeleine was comparing me
To June Miller…
Descriptions by Nin:
“She does not dare
To be herself…”
Everything I’d always
Wanted to be, I now am…
“…She lives
On the reflections
Of herself in the eyes
Of others…
There is no June
To grasp and know…”

I kept getting up to dance…
Sally said: “I’m afraid…
You’re inscrutable
You’re not just
Blasé,
Are you?”
I spoke
Of the spells of calm
And the hysterical
Reactions
Psychic Exhaustion
Then anxious elation…

9. The Wanderer of Golders Green

I awake each morning
With fresh hope
And tranquility;
I might go for a saunter
Down quiet London backstreets
Soon my aimlessness
Depresses me,
And I realise
I’d been deceiving myself
As to my ability
To relax as others do.

I decided on a Special B
Before the eve.
I bought a lager
At the Bar
And chatted to Gaye.
Then Ray
Bought me another.
I appreciated the fact
That he remembered
The time he,
His gal Chris,
And Rory Downed
An entire Bottle
Of Jack Daniels
In a Paris-bound train.
 
A tanned cat
Bought me a (large) half,
Then another half.
My fatal eyes
Are my downfall.
I drank yet another half…

My head was spinning
When it hit the pillow;
I awoke
With a terrible headache
Around one o’clock.
I prayed it would depart.

I slowly got dressed.
I was as chatty as ever
Before the exam…
French/English translation.
Periodically I put my face
In my hands or groaned
Or sighed –
My stomach
was burning me inside.
 
I finished my paper
In 1 hour and a half.
As I walked out
I caught various eyes
Amanda’s, Trudy’s (quizzical) etc…
I went to bed…
Slept ‘till five…
Read O’Neill until 7ish…
Got dressed
And strolled down
To Golders Green,
In order to relive
A few memories.
I sang to myself –
A few memories
Flashed into my mind,
But not as many
as I’d have liked –
It wasn’t the same.
It wasn’t the same.
 
Singing songs brought
Voluptuous tears.
I snuck into McDonalds
Where I felt At home,
Anonymous, alone.
I bought a few things,
Toothpaste and pick,
Chocolate, yoghurts,
Sweets, cigarettes
And fruit juice.

Took a sentimental journey
Back to Powis Gardens,
Richness
And intensity,
Romantic
And attractive…
Sad, suspicious and strange.
I sat up until 3am,
Reading O’Neill
Or writing (inept) poetry.
Awoke at 10,
But didn’t leave
My room till 12,
Lost my way
To Swiss Cottage,
Lost my happiness.
Oh so conscious
Of my failure
And after a fashion,
Enjoying this knowledge.

Chapter Two – So that it Remain Perpetually Inchoate

Being a somewhat convoluted explanation of how the various strands of “Where the Halling Valley River Lies” came to be concocted.
 
And which we begin with the leading text from Book One, “Leitmotifs from an English Pastorale”, whose nucleus came about some years ago when I attempted to write a piece about the pastoral tradition within English music, before realising I’d set myself a monumental task. But I rambled on regardless, only to lose what I’d written so far when my computer crashed beyond all hope of repair. As for reasons best known to myself, I’d not ensured its continuing existence by way of a duplicate.
 I think I then attempted a re-write with the singer-songwriter Nick Drake as its main feature, which I enhanced with references to various examples of English pastoral music, such as my own personal favourite, “A Lark Ascending” by Vaughan Williams.
 Ultimately it was given the title “From an English Pastorale – For Nick Drake”; but I only ever saw it as a makeweight. That is, until I decided to expand it into “Leitmotifs from an English Pastorale”.
 I can’t even recall why I made the decision to include the leitmotifs or recurring themes, which were of course originally used in music rather than in writing, although ultimately co-opted by literature. But it was a risky one, lest readers think I was inadvertently repeating myself. But then the piece as a whole is pretty “lawless”, which is what the French writer André Gide proposed a novel should be.
 Although “Leitmotifs” is hardly a novel; and Gide’s shorter works were far from lawless.
 It’s based on fact, and predictably so for anyone who’s in any way familiar with what I optimistically like to call my writings. And while partly original, it’s also rooted in a network of autobiographical pieces I’ve been concocting since 2006; having destroyed most of what I’d written up to that point.
 But it’s not a memoir as such, at least, not as I see it, but then in the end, it’s not up to me to say what it is. In fact when all’s said and done, I haven’t the first idea what it is other than something I wrote. But by naming the central figure Runacles, I’m able to distance myself a little from him, so that Runacles is a version of me as opposed to the completed article.
 And so we move on to the quartet of essays that complete Book One, “A Quartet of Essays and a Stray Pastorale”.
 The first of these, “The Coming of the Absaloms” was fashioned from an early section of “The Gambolling Baby Boomer”, first chapter of my memoir “Rescue of a Rock and Roll Child”.  Or should I say memoirs…for it exists as two versions, one being a direct memoir, the other, similarly direct, but with many names changed.
And while “Absalom” has since been enhanced, the similarities still very much remain. While the second was derived from another chapter from “Rescue”, “The Triumph of Decadence”. As to the third, it was based on “The Riddle of the British English”which while still available online has to all intents and purposes been shelved. While the source of the fifth, “From Avant Garde to Global Village”, was “A Final Distant Clarion Cry”, final chapter of the aforesaid “Rescue of a Rock and Roll Child”, more of which later.
 Which brings us to Book Two, “Your Lethal Life and Other Versified Leftovers” which as the name suggests consists exclusively of versified writings.
 And these begin with “It Wasn’t So Long Ago”, a lyric written in 2003 for a song I roughly recorded onto cassette, some years before it was transferred onto CD. And thence onto You Tube…together with “Toilers of the Sea”, “A Song of Summer”, “Stevie B and Me”, “The Ones We Love”, “Like All the Moonstruck Do”, “I Let You Go” and “Time Was I Was”.
 While “Time Travel” was written and recorded in ’99; with “All Through the Ages” emerging perhaps a year later, while never making it onto CD.
 As to “Your Beautiful Lethal Life”, it was written only a matter of weeks ago from an earlier lyric I’d based on a collaboration with a close friend, dating from about twenty years ago…when my own life was both beautiful and lethal.
 “Wicked Cahoots” and “The Woodville Hall Soul Boys” stem from stories written in the late 1970s, while they first saw the light of day in versified form in 2006, before going on to form part of the memoir which came ultimately to be titled “Rescue of a Rock and Roll Child”.
 While “Thoughts of a Forlorn Flâneur”, a relatively new work in its present form, is based partly on a story written in about 1987 and subsequently destroyed, and partly on material written specifically for what became “Rescue”.
 “Spark of Youth Long Gone”, “Some Perverse Will” and “London as the Lieu” all also date from the ‘80s. Indeed “London” first existed in prose form as part of the same story that inspired parts of “Flâneur”. While “Spark” pertained to a different tale entirely, and “Some Perverse Will” existed in versified form from the outset. Although it’s since undergone some modification, like so much of what has ended up being included in “Where the Halling Valley River Lies”.
 Shifting to “Seven Chapters from a Sad Sack Loser’s Life”, its origins also lie in the “Rescue”. For out of the latter came two kindred pieces centring on one David Cristiansen, namely, “The Tormenting”, which is told in the third person with many names changed, and “The Testimony”, which is even more bowlderised than its sister piece, if that’s at all possible.
 And “Sad Sack” is effectively “The Tormenting”, with elements of “The Testimony” added to it. Such as several autobiographical narratives which, deemed ineffectual as shorts, were shelved along with both longer works. While “Rescue” was relegated to what might be called a second team of writings.
Which is where Book Four once existed…that is, until it was recently upgraded and completed. But its evolution was even more labyrinthine than that of “Sad Sack”.
 What is certain is that it first emerged in the wake of “Rescue” as a second memoir, only to vanish from the writing site I’d initially used to store it…having failed to benefit from the safety net of a back-up copy.
 And as a result, I was forced to re-write it; and it emerged in embryonic form as a vast diversity of writings. And some or all of these are still available to read online. Yet, it was ultimately fine-tuned in order that it focus on my father, Patrick Halling, as well as the successive musical and cultural climates in which his career took place. And tendered the name “Where the Halling Valley River Lies”.
While many, perhaps most of the elements pertaining to myself would be destined to end up in “Sad Sack”.
 Which brings us to “Beachcombings from the Halling Valley Riverbank”, of which this finale is an integral part, together with versified pieces not considered of sufficiently high quality to be included in “Lethal Life”, such as the opener, “Bouzingo – The Gathering of the Poets”, whose origins lie in an unfinished tale, possibly dating from around 1979.
And which centres on a club situated in an imaginary small town in Southern Spain, in which fashionable young men and women are wont to nightly congregate as a means of fulfilling their wildest romantic fantasies. Is in other words, entirely fantastical, unlike most of my writings.
 While “Call the FBI”, “Some Romantic Afternoon”, “For More than a Million Dreams”, “Melancholy Girl” and “My Travels” were all originally song lyrics dating from 2003.
 So, where precisely do “Some Sun Drunk Day He Said”, “Gallant Festivities” and “The Wanderer of Golders Green” fit in?
 Well…”Sun Drunk” has the dubious honour of being the only slice of juvenilia contained within the entire book, having been conceived as some kind of poem in about 1976. And as such, it provides a certain insight into the psychological condition of the dandified figure from chapter two of “Seven Chapters from a Sad Sack Loser’s Life”.
 While “Gallant Festivities” and “The Wanderer of Golders Green” were versified for inclusion in what ultimately became the “Rescue”, having been based on notes made in the early 1980s. While like all my autobiographical writings with the exception of the title piece, personal names were changed for the sake of privacy, while it was no less motivated by a spirit of truth and integrity to the best of my ability.
And this short coda finishes things off quite neatly. But that’s not to say “Where the Halling Valley River Lies” has attained its definitive state, because by its very nature, it can be added to ad infinitum. So that it remain perpetually fluid and perpetually inchoate. And in perpetual evolution.

Carl Halling Complete Web Sites 1&2

1. Premiere Web Sites:

Complete Books:

http://www.scribd.com/Carl%20Halling
Published Books:
http://www.feedaread.com/profiles/682/
(Best of) Songs/Music:
http://stayblessed.ning.com/profile/CarlHalling

http://www.youtube.com/carlhalling
CDs:
http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/carlhalling
http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/jhchwtls

Social Networking/Theatrical:
http://theatricalia.com/person/12ar/carl-halling
http://facebook.com/carl.halling
Web Pages:
http://www.blogster.com/carlhalling/carl-halling-complete-web-sites-a

http://www.demandstudios.com/profile-5f281dd5-Carl-Halling/

http://www.ehow.com/contributor/carl_halling/
http://carlhalling.livejournal.com

2. Secondary Web Sites:

http://myspace.com/swingtette

http://myspace.com/wallyseventee

http://myspace.com/wallyseventee

http://www.jango.com/music/Carl+Halling?l=0

http://weloveyoursongs.com/artist/5021/Carl+Halling

http://myspace.com/carlhalling
http://flickr.com/carlhalling

http://secure.starnow.com/carlh14962

http://www.plaxo.com/profile/show/171800091702?pk=965b0aa6a850559e7670a8a68a1c91dca9ca1dac

http://www.linkedin.com/in/carlhalling

http://www.goodreads.com/CarlHalling

http://www.abctales.com/user/carl-halling

http://smashwords.com./profile/view/carlhalling

http://carlrhalling.blog.com/

http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/CarlHalling

https://carlhalling.wordpress.com
http://carlhalling.blogspot.com
http://faithwriters.com/member-profile.php?id=21417
http://booksie.com/carl_halling
http://carlroberthalling.blog.co.uk

http://carlhalling.blog.co.uk
http://www.authonomy.com/writing-community/profile/8fada255-a184-4feb-ad07-45f306726027/carl-halling

http://www.greatwriting.co.uk/viewforum.php?f=7

http://blogs.christiansunite.com/carlhalling
http://www.sermonaudio.com/comments_view.asponlyname=true&keyword=Carl+Halling
http://writing.com/authors/carlhalling
http://mylot.com/carlhalling

http://writers-voice.com/ABCDE/C/Carl_Halling_a_spiritual_narrative_part_one.htm

http://www.churchguides.com/authors.asp?authorid=98833

http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Carl_Halling

http://www.wayn.com/profiles/CarlHalling

http://www.redgage.com/CarlHalling
http://plurk.com/carlhalling
http://surveycentral.org/user/CarlHalling.html
http://www.imdb.com/user/ur1502175/comments
http://member.mibba.com/175625
http://www.authornation.com/index.php?option=com_comprofiler&Itemid=99
http://digg.com/carlhalling
http://www.friendsreunited.co.uk/Profile/5882999/7938B8E9A585D7E37CFBEE3C0BDBE9B3

http://www.zimbio.com/member/CarlrobertHalling
http://www.youwriteon.com/authors/publicprofile.aspx?userid=Carl+Halling
http://twitter.com/carlhalling
http://www.webook.com/member/CarlHalling
http://www.stumbleupon.com/stumbler/CarlHalling
http://oocities.org/wally70uk

http://wattpad.com/user/carlhalling
http://www.greasy.com/carlrhalling

http://en.gravatar.com/carlhalling

http://www.formspring.me/carlhalling

http://ourstory.com/carlhalling

http://www.hi5.com/carlhalling

http://www.entertainee.com/profile/CarlHalling

http://thejethrotullboard.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=viewprofile&user=carlhalling

http://thejethrotullboard.proboards.com/thread/1132/patrick-halling

http://www.justanswer.com/profile.aspx?PF=31271710&FID=107

http://carlhalling.jigsy.com

https://indieauthors.com/members/carl-halling.136/

http://www.authorsden.com/visit/author.asp?id=136832

http://www.webmii.com/Result.aspx?f=Carl&l=Halling&r=intl

http://lifestream.aol.com/carlhalling

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/pdp/profile/A1Z8UECC2UYJM?ie=UTF8&responseType=info&responseCode=ups

http://www.britaine.co.uk/carl-halling-home-page-1-F120AC3011DD24D

http://www.zoominfo.com/p/Carl-Halling/1411977830

http://ukauthors.com/modules.php?name=Your_Account&op=userinfo&uname=Carl_Halling

https://picasaweb.google.com/102645697467744620372

http://www.bookrix.com/-carlhalling/

http://gather.com/author/carlhalling/

http://www.fotolog.com/carlrhalling/

http://cosmofunnel.com/user/26709

http://www.firebirdpoetry.com/search.php?cat=&UserID=1908&Submit.x=31&Submit.y=13

http://www.discogs.com/user/CarlHalling

http://travideos.com/s/Carl%20halling/1

http://storywrite.com/Carl%20Halling

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Carl_Halling

https://www.facebook.com/#!/photo.php?v=10153785512155296&set=vb.736370295&type=2&theater

http://carlhalling.beep.com

http://www.rightfromtheknees.org/author/carlhalling/

www.prayerrequest.com/user/690879-carl-halling/

http://www.greatwriting.co.uk/viewforum.php?f=7

http://www.socialregister.co.uk/carl-halling/

http://www.poetrysoup.com/poem/wicked_cahoots_80242

http://randomthoughts.club/youtube.php?video=Ikaz9LvJlR4

http://www.tobeseen.co.uk/people/carlhalling-2

http://wn.com/exact/Carl_Halling

http://youzeek.com/?source=vmap&sid=YumurhsC6z8&lng=EN

https://picasaweb.google.com/102645697467744620372/CarlHallingPicasaAlbum1?authuser=0&feat=directlink

http://vidstatsx.com/carlhalling/youtube-channel

http://superblinky.com/gambolling-baby-boomers/

http://datab.us/Uploaded%20by%20CarlHalling

http://video.togok.com/video/carl-halling.html

http://mp3low.eu/search/Carl-Halling/

http://beefycow.com/reborn-in-the-nick-of-time-4/

http://www.wowhd.co.uk/CD/carl-halling-breaking-down-that-ancient-wall/dp/40259493

https://myspace.com/187343054

http://collectivefaith.com/CarlHalling/

http://datab.us/MR89r0VrcXA#An

http://www.musictours.biz/music/video/carl+halling

https://music.yandex.ru/artist/3164335

http://www.cduniverse.com/sresult.asp?HT_Search=XARTIST&HT_Search_Info=Carl+Halling

http://carlhalling1.rssing.com/chan-7035554/all_p1.html

http://superitchy.com/the-gambolling-baby-boomer/

http://everettdundalli.wordpress.com/2013/10

http://maximobooth.wordpress.com/2014/07/

http://www.redgage.com/carlhalling/

http://plus.google.com/103867921714859819029/posts/Ua3Taz2c2wn

http://moviespictures.org/biography/Halling,_Carl

http://rippletunes.com/album/Carl-Halling/Breaking-Down-That-Ancient-Wall/918109973/t0

http://rippletunes.com/album/Carl-Halling/The-Old-Ways-Were-Fading-Fast/958910148/t0

http://www.chartsinfrance.net/Carl-Halling/albums-singles.html

http://artistecard.com/carlhalling

http://www.geni.com/people/Carl-Halling/6000000031135485093

http://www.321youtube.com/search?q=carl+halling

http://www.site.co.uk/Carl-Halling

http://www.amazon.co.jp/%E3%83%9F%E3%83%A5%E3%83%BC%E3%82%B8%E3%83%83%E3%82%AF-Carl-Halling/s?ie=UTF8&page=1&rh=n%3A561956%2Cp_32%3ACarl%20Halling

http://www.amazon.it/s/ref=dm_ar_dp_rd?ie=UTF8&field-author=Carl%20Halling&index=digital-music&search-type=ss

http://archive.today/carlrhalling.blog.com

http://www.carlrhalling.blog.com/

https://archive.today/K8l1f

http://cohga.net/picasa/user/102645697467744620372_1.html

http://www.kinopoisk.ru/name/3858271/

http://en.oiktv.com/search/youtube/carl%20halling

http://www.globalmusic.ga/music/video/carl+halling

http://www.ehowenespanol.com/construir-equipo-bingo-roquero-como_279673/

http://whotalking.com/Carl+Halling

http://www.ehow.com.br/fatos-respeito-danca-krump-sobre_226321/

http://youzeek.com/?source=vmap&sid=YumurhsC6z8&lng=EN

http://www.musicme.com/#/Chuck-Love/videos/Amazing-Love—Carl-Halling-%28Chuck-Robey-Song%29-5A447874797A6375343538.html

http://mirrorproject.com/mirror/7233/

http://profileengine.com/people/103208043/daniel.valls.halling#/people/carl.halling/carl.halling

http://bluehost.moodagent.com/libri-1321-4996-everything_to_prove_to_the_world_something/

https://music.yandex.ru/artist/3164335

http://bibleforums.org/list.php/author/51215-Carl-Halling

http://www.kinopoisk.ru/name/3858271/

http://www.winterbourne.freeuk.com/jk.html

http://www.wowhd.co.uk/CD/carl-halling-breaking-down-that-ancient-wall/dp/40259493

http://www.globalmusic.ga/music/video/rupert-brooke-s-the-soldier-carl-halling/iF7FDY_Zdok

http://www.chartsinfrance.net/Carl-Halling/albums-singles.html

http://www.ccmusic.com/music/cd/3969476/carl-halling-breaking-down-that-ancient-wall

http://rippletunes.com/album/Carl-Halling/Breaking-Down-That-Ancient-Wall/918109973/t0

http://mp3lows.in/search/Carl-Halling/

http://profileengine.com/people/83832663/dane.halling#/people/carl.halling/carl.halling

http://play.spotify.com/track/14tZhDlboQmnuViNUX1vjU

http://www.amazon.de/s/ref=ntt_srch_drd_B00NJLZTHG?ie=UTF8&field-keywords=Carl%20Halling&index=digital-music&search-type=ss

http://www.amazon.it/s/ref=dm_ar_dp_rd?ie=UTF8&field-author=Carl%20Halling&index=digital-music&search-type=ss

http://moviesdvdnewreleases.com/all-quiet-on-the-western-front-tv-movie-1979.html

http://www.kudes.ru/node/83457

http://wetpig.com/a-final-distant-clarion-cry/

http://tinyjump.com/the-mystery-of-ormonde/

http://dig.do/bibleforums.org

http://mypoeticside.com/user-5020

https://christianwriters.com/xfa-blogs/carl-halling.5054/

https://www.forwardpoetry.co.uk/profile.php?id=6059*

http://poetrypoem.com/carlhalling

http://www.thebrothersnetwork.net/author/carl-halling

http://www.importcds.com/search?cr=Carl%20Halling%7C1089147&mod=AP
https://deepmp3.ru/carl-halling

Actually posted 22/1/16

Though Are the Wonders of This Brief Life

Introduction

Though Are the Wonders of this Brief Life, formerly The Boy from the Tail End of the Goldhawk Road is, unlike my previous work, very much not a ‘Best Of’ my writings. In fact, it’s little more than a ‘Rest Of’, or collection of leftovers or secondary pieces collated in 2012-’14, beginning with the already much documented memoir, Rescue of a Rock and Roll Child, which was written, approximately, between early 2006 and late 2008. But which has been subject to considerable revision since, such as for inclusion in this collection. While The Spawn of the Swinging Sixties is an abbreviated earlier version of the Rescue, which like the Rescue was recently part of a collection called At the Tail End of the Goldhawk Road, albeit in its entirety. Yet much of the Spawn has been lifted untouched from the original, with its original feel preserved, despite having recently been subject to modification, and a process of reduction. The modification in question having included the addition of supplementary sections culled from other writings of mine, including earlier versions of the memoir. As well as the alteration of names of people (excepting certain family members and, unless their privacy is affected, those I consider to be public figures, one of which has been afforded two names, his own and a pseudonym), and certain places or institutions. Although the spirit and look of the original work have been preserved by omitting references to these. As in the cases of all my autobiographical writings, I’ve aspired to the absolute truth in the composition of both the Rescue and the Spawn; and thence, I receive facts not proceeding from myself in trust. Although needless to say, I can’t avouch for their 100% accuracy. Which may – or may not – bring us to the question: Is Brief Life my final work? Almost certainly not, because there are enough pieces of writing remaining for a third compilation. Although my future as a writer does, it has to be said, look very uncertain indeed.

Book One

Rescue of a Rock and Roll Child

“Rescue of a Rock and Roll Child” is a memoir which I’ve elected to call an experiment in memoir composition in the form of a novella from which so many of my subsequent writings have arisen. And while it’s been largely untouched since its initial “definitive” publication, modifications have been made, including the alteration of many personal and place names in the sacred name of privacy. I’ve tended to avoid the use of personal names, with the exception of deceased persons, as well as family members, and those I consider to be public figures.

Chapter One – The Gambolling Baby Boomer

Birth of a Rock and Roll Child

I was born a Londoner at the tail end of a street to the west of the city called Goldhawk Road, and my first home was a little workman’s cottage in the long-demolished Bulmer Place in Notting Hill. You’ll search in vain for this poky little street in any London map, although you’ll still be able to locate a Bulmer Mews tucked away some yards away from the main road of Notting Hill Gate.
On the day I was born, Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad, radical psychologist RD Laing, controversial war hero Colonel Oliver North, Laurel Canyon songstress Judee Sill, conservative activist Paul Weyrich, and Russian politician Vladimir Putin celebrated their 58th, 28th, 13th, 11th and 3rd birthdays respectively, while Beat poet Amiri Baraka, left-wing revolutionary Ulrike Meinhof, and Falklands War commander Major Julian Thompson all hit 21.
What’s more, it was marked by an event which had a colossal if largely unrecognised influence on the evolution of our culture, one known as the Six Gallery reading, or Six Angels in the same Performance.
On the evening of the 7th of October 1955, about 150 people gathered at San Francisco’s Six Gallery to witness readings of poems by Allen Ginsberg, Phillip Whalen, Phillip Lamantia, Michael McClure and Gary Snyder, all of whom went on to be leading lights of the Beat Generation. As to the future King of the Beats, Jack Kerouac, he attended but didn’t read, preferring to cheerlead instead in a state of ecstatic inebriation. His “On the Road” published two years later, and dealing with his wanderings across America with his muse and friend Neal Cassady, remains Beat’s most famous ever work.
After the Six Gallery reading, the Beat movement, which had existed in embryonic form since about 1944, left the underground to become an international craze. Thence, the Beatnik took his place as a universally recognised icon with his beret, goatee beard, turtle-neck sweater and sandals.
1955 was also the year in which Rock and Roll made its first major impact on the mainstream as a result of record successes by R&B artists such as Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry and Little Richard. However, it’s “The Blackboard Jungle”, which, released on the 20th of March, is widely with igniting the Rock and Roll revolution, indeed late 20th Century teenage rebellion as a whole. It did so by featuring Bill Haley & His Comets’s cover of Sonny Dae and his Knights’ “Rock Around the Clock” over the film’s opening credits. Haley’s version, which was remarkable for its earth-shaking sense of urgency, ensured the world would never be the same after it. Then in August, Sun Records released a long playing record entitled “Elvis Presley, Scotty and Bill”, featuring a young truck driver from the small town of Tupelo, Mississippi. He went on to become Rock’s single most influential figure apart from the Beatles.
On the 30th of September, James Dean died in hospital following a motor accident aged 23 after having made only three films, the greatest of which, Nicholas Ray’s “Rebel Without a Cause” emerged about a month afterwards. It could be said to be the motion picture industry’s defining elegy to the sensitivity and rebelliousness of youth, with Dean its most beautiful and tortured icon ever. As such, his image has never dated, nor been surpassed. The modern cult of youth was born in the mid 1950s.
Many theories exist as to how the staid conformist fifties could have yielded as if by magic to the wild Dionysian sixties, some convincing, others less so. For me, if a little leaven is present in a theory for me it leavens, or spoils, the entire lump, even when much of it may be sound. Far from being a sudden, unexpected event, the post-war cultural revolution has historical roots reaching at least as far back as the so-called Enlightenment, since which time the West has been consistently assailed by tendencies hostile to its Judaeo-Christian moral fabric. That said, its true source was the Serpent’s false promise to Eve that through defiance of the Creator she and Adam could be as gods, knowing good and evil, which is at the heart of all vain, humanistic philosophy.
What happened in the 1960s was simply the culmination of many decades of activity on the part of revolutionaries and avant-gardists, which had been especially intensive since the First World War. Even Rock, a music which the American evangelist John MacArthur once described as having a bombastic atonality and dissonance was foreshadowed at its most experimental by the so-called “emancipation of the dissonant” brought about by Classical composers of various Modernist schools.
Still, for all the change that raged around me in the sixties, my own little world of the leafy suburbs of outer west London was an idyllic one which had hardly changed from the day that I was born when the spirit of Victorian morality was still more or less intact in Britain.
My brother was born two and a half years later, by which time my parents had been able to afford their own house in Bedford Park in what was then the London Borough of Acton. Built by Norman Richard Shaw, Bedford Park was the world’s first Garden Suburb. By the 1880s, it was a Bohemian centre for intellectuals and artistic free-thinkers its residents going on to include most famously the great Anglo-Irish poet WB Yeats. The painter Arthur Pinero was another resident; as was the actress Florence Farr, who like Yeats was deeply involved in mysticism and the occult.
Some time after the dawn of the next century, the area had declined to the extent that bus conductors would allegedly shout out “Poverty Park!” when their vehicles came to a halt at the local stop. However, the foundation, in 1963, of the Bedford Park Society led to the listing of 356 houses by the government, and so, much of the estate becoming part of the Bedford Park Conservation Area. During my boyhood it was still demographically mixed, yet well on the way to becoming completely gentrified.
Future Who front man Roger Daltry had relocated there from inner West London when he was 11 years old in 1955 or ’56. A few years later, he formed a group in the Skiffle – or Jug Band – style called The Detours. Once it had shape-shifted into The Who, its furiously hedonistic music and philosophy would go on to make a permanent impression on the Western psyche and help fuel the British Invasion of America.

Tales of Tasmania and Manitoba

By the time we moved to Bedford Park, My father had been working steadily as a Classical violinist for some years, and so was in a position to ensure that my brother and I enjoy a far more stable childhood than his had ever been.
He’d been born Patrick Clancy Halling in Rowella, Tasmania, and raised in Sydney as the son of a Danish father, Carl Christian Halling, and an English mother, whom we always knew as Mary, although she’d come into the world as Phyllis Mary Pinnock possibly in the Dulwich area of south London sometime around the turn of the 20th Century.
She grew into a lovely young woman, with dark almost black hair, green eyes, high cheekbones and a most delicately sculpted mouth; but with great beauty come great expectations, and also sometimes great sorrows too. They certainly did in the case of Phyllis, who lost the first love of her life in the First World War, who – evidently serving as an airman in what may have been the Royal Flying Corps – was shot down, possibly over France like so many others of his generation. However, she wasn’t fated to remain single for long, for soon after losing her fiancé, she wed one Peter Robinson, an officer in the British Army, and they had two children in quick succession, Peter Bevan, and Suzanne, known as Dinny.
According to Mary’s sister Joan, their maternal grandmother’s maiden name had been Butler, which allegedly links the family to the Butlers of Ormonde, a dynasty of Old English nobles of Norman origin which had dominated the south east of Ireland since the Middle Ages, and so making it a lost or discarded branch. If Joan was right then I’m related by blood to many of the most prominent royal and aristocratic figures in history, perhaps even all of them. These would include her namesake Lady Joan FitzGerald, daughter of James Butler the first Earl of Ormonde, and alleged ancestress of Diana, Princess of Wales. Lady Joan herself was the granddaughter of Edward the 1st of the House of Plantagenet, who was not only the infamous “Hammer of the Scots”, but the king who expelled all the Jews from England. Her mother, Eleanor de Bohun, was descended from Charlemagne, the greatest of all the Carolingian Kings, the Merovingians and Carolingians being two dynasties of Frankish rulers who supposedly upheld the divine right of kings. He may also have been Merovingian through his great-grandmother, Bertrada of Prum.
At some point between Peter’s birth and that of his younger brother Patrick, she travelled with her husband to Ceylon – now Sri Lanka – in order that they might both work as planters on the famous Ceylonese plantations. There she met the aforesaid Carl Halling. What followed next I can’t say for sure but I’ve been led to believe that at some point after becoming pregnant with her third child, Phyllis went to live with Carl on the island of Tasmania. There my father was born in the beautiful Tamar Valley near the capital city of Launceston. By this time, his parents were apparently working as apple pickers.
However, Pat was raised not in Tasmania but the great city of Sydney, New South Wales, which is where poor Carl contracted the terrible wasting disease of multiple sclerosis. After this, Phyllis made some kind of living as a journalist and teacher, variously writing for the Sydney Telegraph, and running her own elementary school. In the meantime, Carl underwent a desperate search for a miracle cure, which at one point led him to an involvement with the mystical Christian Science sect. Sadly, his quest was futile, and he died just before the outbreak of World War II. According to his wishes, he was buried in his native Denmark.
All three children had earlier displayed considerable musical talent, Patrick as violinist, Peter as cellist and Suzanne as pianist. Pat has told me that he was only around nine years old, and a student at the Sydney Conservatorium, when he served on one occasion as soloist for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, a pretty impressive feat for one so young.
Soon after Carl’s burial, Mary set off for London with her three children in order that they might further develop their musical careers. Pat studied at both the Royal Academy of Music and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and joined the London Philharmonic 0rchestra while still a teenager during the Blitz on London, serving in the Sea Cadets as a signaller, and seeing action as such on the hospital ships of the Thames River Emergency Service.
By this time, my mother, the former Miss Ann Watt, was already a highly accomplished and successful singer of both classical and light music, notably with Vancouver’s legendary Theatre Under the Stars.
She’d been born Angela Jean Elisabeth Watt in the city of Brandon, Manitoba on the 13th of November 1915. However, while still an infant she’d moved with her parents and four siblings to the Grandview area of east Vancouver. Grandview’s earliest settlers were usually tradesmen or shopkeepers, in shipping or construction work, and largely of British origin. My own grandfather James Watt, who worked variously as a builder and electrician, had been born in the little town of Castlederg in County Tyrone, Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
Her mother, Elizabeth Hazeldine, was from Glasgow, Scotland, having been born there to an English father from either Liverpool or Manchester, and a Scottish mother. She was the youngest of six siblings, and while she was alone among her immediate family not to have been born in Britain, she was also the only one to seek permanent residency in the mother country.
Within a short time of arriving, she met my father through their shared profession, and they married in the summer of 1948. Seven years later, they decided to have their first child, and so I was born a Londoner, Carl Robert Halling on Friday the 7 October 1955…

A Child’s West London

I was an articulate and sociable kid from the word go, walking, talking early just like my dad before me, but agitated, unable to rest, what they might call hyperactive today.
My first school was a kind of nursery school held locally on a daily basis at the private residence of a lady named Miss Pearson, and then aged 4 years old, I joined the exclusive Lycée Francais Charles de Gaulle, situated in the fabulously opulent West London area of South Kensington, where I was to become bilingual by the age of four or thereabouts.
Almost every race and nationality under the sun was to be found in the Lycée in those days… and among those who went on to be good pals of mine were kids of English, French, Jewish, American, Yugoslavian and Middle Eastern origin.
My father was far from wealthy, but he was determined that my brother and I enjoy the best and richest education imaginable, and we were dressed in lederhosen with our heads shorn like convicts, so that we be distinguished from the common run of British boys with their short back and sides, and to this end, he worked, toiled incessantly to ensure that we did.
At some stage in the early 1960s, I became a problem both at school and home, a disruptive influence in the class, and a trouble-maker in the streets, an eccentric loon full of madcap fun and half-deranged imaginativeness whose unusual physical appearance was enhanced by a striking thinness and enormous long-lashed blue eyes. Less charmingly, I was also the kind of deliberately malicious little hooligan who’d remove a paper from a neighbour’s letter-box, and then mutilate it before re-posting it.
The era’s famous social and sexual revolution was well under way, and yet for all that, seminal Pop groups such as the Searchers and the Dave Clark Five – even the Beatles themselves – were quaint and wholesome figures in a still innocent England. They fitted in well in a nation of Norman Wisdom pictures and the well-spoken presenters of the BBC Home or Light Service, of coppers, tanners and ten bob notes, sweet shops and tuppeny chews.
Beatlemania invaded my world in 1963, and I first announced my own status as a Beatlemaniac at the Lycée in that landmark year. It was the very year, I think, that I took an intense dislike to an American kid called Rick, who later became my friend. I used to attack him for no reason at all other than to assert my superiority over him. One day, he finally flipped and gave me a rabbit punch in the stomach, but he wasn’t punished, perhaps because the teacher had a strong idea I’d started the trouble in the first place.
By the end of the year, a single new group had started threatening the Beatles’ position as my favourite in the world. They were the Rolling Stones; although my initial reaction to what I saw as a rough and sullen performance of Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away” on TV, was one of bitter disappointment. But before long, I’d become utterly entranced by these martyrs to the youth movement, and during a musical discussion I can remember having in about 1965 with some of the new breed of English roses, who may or may not have been flaunting mod girl fringes and kinky boots, I proudly announced my undying fealty. One of the girls was a Fab Four loyalist and had the requisite seraphic smile, while another preferred the Animals, and acted cooler than the rest of us, as if those Geordie bluesmen were somehow superior to mere Pop acts like the Beatles and the Stones.
During this golden era, I divided my time between the Lycée and my West London stomping ground, and from a very young age, took Judo classes at the Budokwai in South Kensington. It was there that one of my teachers, a former British international who’d fought in the first ever World Judo championships in Japan, once despairingly said that he always knew it was Saturday once he’d heard my voice. Some of the other kids knew me as Alley Cat, and it was a pretty apt name for such a feral child
Later, I took classes at the Judokan in Hammersmith, but if I thought I was going to raise Cain there I had another thing coming, given that its owner was a one-time captain of the British international team who’d served as an air gunner with 83 squadron during World War II. He later held Judo classes in Stalag 383.
I went on to study Karate with him, and was still doing so as late as 1973, when I got it into my head that I no longer wished to have anything to do with anything martial, precious blooming aesthete that I was.
For all that, I was rarely happier than on those Wednesday evenings, when I attended the 20th Chiswick Wolf Cub pack and I was less of a menace there than pretty well anywhere else I can think of.
Memories such as the solemnity of my enrolment, and being helped up a tree by an older cub to secure my Athletics badge, stayed with me for many years afterwards, as did the times I won my first star, and my swimming badge, with its peculiar frog symbol, as well as the pomp and the seriousness of a mass meeting I attended, with its different coloured scarves, sweaters and hair, and the tears I shed afterwards, despite the kindness of the older cockney kids who were so eager to help me find my way back home to Chiswick High Road.
There was a point in the mid 1960s when I was dubbed the General by a long-suffering form teacher at the Lycée in consequence of what she presumably perceived as my dominance in the playground with regard to a tight circle of friends, and my tongue-in-cheek superciliousness in the classroom. This typically saw me at the back of the class leaning against the wall pretending to smoke a fat cigar like a Chicago tough guy. One thing is certain is that I was not above organising elaborate playground deceptions.
One of these involved me pretending to banish one of my best friends, Bobby, from whatever activity we had going on at the time. He played along by putting on a superb display of water works, which had the desired effect of arousing the tender mercies of some of the girls. They duly rounded on me for my hard-heartedness, but I refused to budge. Of course it was all a big joke, and Bobby and I had never been closer.
I can remember going around to his house to lounge on his bed, watching “The Baron” or “Adam Adamant”, before staying the night at the central London home he shared with his American father, a gentle melancholy widower who’d been very much in love with his English wife. In ’67, he spent a week with me in the wilds of Wales as part of a course known as the Able Boys. This was a combination of a simple sailing school and what could be termed outward bound activities which involved us living in tents and cooking our own food under the supervision of “mates”. I spent one week there with Bobby, and another with my cousin Rod.
If I was Le Général at the Lycée, back home I saw myself as the leader of the kids whose houses backed onto the dirty alley that ran parallel to our side of the Esmond Road in those days but has almost certainly vanished by now.
One fateful day, I crossed the road to announce a feud with the kids of the clean alley, so-called because unlike ours it was concreted over rather than being just a dirt track. It was to cost me dear. Soon after the feud had thawed I went over to pal around with some of the clean alley kids who I now saw as my allies, but there must have still been some bad blood because before long a scrap was under way and I was getting the worst of it. Finally I agreed to leave, and as I shamefully cycled off, one of the clean alley kids kicked my bike, which squeaked all the way home in unison with great heaving sobs.
If my good mate, local tough Paulie, had been with me on that afternoon in the clean alley, it’s likely I would never have had to suffer as I did. Paulie lived virtually opposite us in Bedford Park, but he was from another dimension altogether. He was a skinny cockney kid with muscles like pure steel who seems to me today to have been born to wage war on the bomb sites of post-war London. For some reason, he became devoted to me; “Carly”, he’d always cry when he wanted my attention, and he’d always be welcome at our house even though this brought my family some opprobrium within the neighbourhood. One of my mother’s closest friends warned her of my association with Paulie as if genuinely concerned I might end up going to the bad, but he was a good kid at heart, and one of my dearest memories from my long gone days as a London alley cat.

Wicked Cahoots

When he made
his first personal appearance
in the dirty alley
on someone else’s rusty bike,
screaming along
in a cloud of dust
it rendered us all
speechless and motionless.
But I was amazed
that despite his grey-faced surliness,
he was very affable with us…
the bully with a naive
and sentimental heart.
He was so happy
to hear that I liked his dad
or that my mum liked him
and he was welcome
to come to tea
with us at five twenty five…
Our “adventures” were spectacular:
chasing after other bikesters,
screaming at the top
of our lungs
into blocks of flats
and then running
as our echoed waves of terror
blended with incoherent threats…
“I’ll call the Police, I’ll…”
Wicked cahoots.

This Glam Rock Nation

In September 1968, while still only 12 years old, I became the youngest cadet at the Nautical College, Pangbourne, a naval college situated near the little Thameside village of Pangbourne in the county of Berkshire. This probably made me the youngest serving officer in the entire Royal Navy at the time.
Founded in 1919, she was still known by her original title, but by 1969 this had been abbreviated to Pangbourne College. However, the boys retained their officer status and spent much of their time in full naval officers’ uniform. What’s more, naval discipline continued to be enforced, with Pangbourne providing the hardships both of a military college and a traditional English boarding school. In 1996, she became fully co-educational.
The Pangbourne I knew had strong links to the Church of England, and so was marked by regular if not daily classes in what was known as Divinity, morning parade ground prayers, evening prayers, and compulsory chapel on Sunday morning. If you missed any of these you would have been seriously punished, although not necessarily with the cane.
I myself was heavily disciplined from my very first term, but I’m indebted to Pangbourne for the values it instilled in me if only unconsciously. They were after all the same values that once made Britain strong and great; and yet, by the time I joined Pangbourne, they were under siege as never before by the so-called counterculture. While failing to fully understand the implications of the cultural revolution of the late 1960s, I passionately celebrated its consequences, and took to my heart many of its icons both artistic and political, and that’s especially true of the Marxist revolutionary leader, Che Guevara.
In 1970, we moved from Bedford Park to a little industrial suburb close to the Surrey-London border. Our own street was quite gentrified, and several of my parents’ closest friends were people from working class districts such as Shepherd’s Bush and Notting Hill who’d made a success of their lives and so moved further out into the western suburban sprawl.
I finally left Pangbourne in the summer of ’72, after a decision had been made involving my poor dad and those directly responsible for me at the college.
1972 could be said to be the year in which the seventies really began as the excitement surrounding the alternative society and its happenings and be-ins and love-ins and free festivals and so on started to fade into recent history. For my part, I couldn’t wait to get to grips with the dismal new decade even if for the first two years, I’d despised the rise of the new commercial chart Pop and its grinning teenybopper icons. I was of the Hard and Progressive school, and so a recent devotee of Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, ELP, and Yes, et al, but I was changing, and for better or worse, this was going to be my era.
In late ’72, I saw former Bubblegum band the Sweet on a long-forgotten teenage programme called “Lift off with Ayesha”, and with all the passion of a former enemy, I became entranced by their hysterical brand of epicene heterosexuality; and especially with high camp bassist Steve Priest, who flirted with out and out cross-dressing as a means of taunting the audience.
Several months later, David Bowie appeared on the chat show Russell Harty Plus in January 1973 with his eyebrows shaved off and sporting a glittering chandelier earring, and my devotion to the strange culture taking over the land making even former skinheads want to grow their hair like the idol of Arsenal Charlie George became total.
So many of the popular songs of the era were like football chants set to a stomping Glam Rock beat. It was the golden age of the long-haired boot boy, and every street seemed to me to be pregnant with menace in this Glam Rock nation, as if the spirit of Weimar Berlin with its unholy mix of violence and decadence had been resurrected in stuffy old England. It was a terrible time to be young; but I of course loved it, lapped it up.
At the same time, I was launched by my dad on an intensive programme of self-improvement.
Through home study and with the help of local private tutors, I set about making up for the fact that I’d left school at 16 with only two GCE – General Certificate of Education – exams to my name, at ordinary level, of course, which is why they were called “O” levels.
I took Karate classes at the Judokan in Hammersmith, and among my fellow students were hard-looking young men – some of them flaunting classic ‘70s feather cuts – who may have been led to the dojo by the prevailing fashion for all things Eastern, such as the films of Bruce Lee, and the “Kung Fu” television series.
There were swimming lessons at the Walton Swimming Pool, where I fell hard for a beautiful elfin girl with a close crop hairstyle which made her look a little like a skinhead girl. I think she beckoned to me once to come and be with her but I just stood there as if frozen to the spot. My heart wasn’t in the swimming though, and this soon became clear to one of the teachers who asked me why I was even bothering to turn up.
I was taught the basics of the Rock guitar solo by a shy middle-aged man whose old-fashioned short back and sides and baggy trousers belied a deep love of the rebel music of Rock and Roll. I probably learned more about music Rock from him than anyone alive or dead, with the possible exception of a Pangbourne friend, whose songs I stole with their simple chord progressions, which went from C to A minor, and then to F and on to G and then back again to C and so on.
In late ’72, I joined the London Division of the Royal Naval Reserve as an Ordinary Seaman, attending classes once a week on HMS President on the Embankment, and not long afterwards, it became clear to me that I’d been singled out for my budding pretty boy looks. I think this came as a bit of a surprise, but I was flattered rather than offended, as if a seed of narcissism had somehow become implanted within me in late adolescence. I can only wonder what effect this had on my healthy development as a normal male human being.
It’s not that I wasn’t aware of being good-looking before ’72, because there had been the occasional comment about my looks on the part of female friends of the family for some years, and I’d even been made aware of being handsome as a very young boy by some of the Lycee girls. However, none of this had ever really registered with me, because I’d always been a typical feisty ruffian of a boy in a lot of ways. Having said that though, I was dreamy and imaginative to an extreme degree, which points to what would today be termed a feminine side, and I’d never gone through a phase of finding girls drippy or whatever. In fact, from as far back as I can remember I’d been prone to falling hopelessly in love with them, especially if they were somehow unattainable to me.
What’s more, I was a born romantic, cherishing a grossly sentimental streak all throughout my teens that placed me somewhat at odds with my peers. While still only about fifteen and pretty thuggish for the most part, I was yet susceptible to notorious tear-jerkers such as “South Pacific”…whose movie version I saw at the flicks at the tender age of 15.
British director John Schlesinger’s screen adaptation of the uber-romantic Thomas Hardy novel, “Far from the Madding Crowd”, was another film that affected me very deeply indeed…too deeply perhaps for an adolescent boy, and it may have been partly responsible for an obsession with lost love and high romantic tragedy that remains with me to this day.
I’d an almost mawkish side to my character even as an adolescent, and this must surely have exerted some kind of influence on the course of my life, but in no way was I a typical delicate sheltered milquetoast, far from it. For this reason, to realise that I was perceived by certain other men as a pretty boy genuinely took me back, and I hadn’t seen it coming, although – and I can’t emphasise this enough – it was a source of fascination to me, not shame.
The cult of androgyny was a powerful force in Britain in the early ‘70s, having been incubated first by Mod and then Flower Child culture, as well as Rock acts such as the Stones, the Kinks, Alice Cooper, T. Rex and David Bowie. Furthermore, it was reinforced in the cinema by several movies featuring angelically beautiful men. And yet, you still took your life into your own hands if you chose to parade around like a Glam Rock star in the mean streets of London or any other major British city – to say nothing of the countryside – and therefore few did.
One of my big heroes as a boy had been all-American actor Steve McQueen, who incarnated an uncompromising tough guy cool. And yet in ’73, many of my new idols were “prettier than most chicks” (as T. Rex kingpin Marc Bolan once described himself). I can only wonder what effect this had on my healthy development as a normal male human being.
I fantasised about fame and adulation as a Rock and Roll or movie star as never before throughout the Glam era, and built an image based on David Bowie, spiking my hair like him, and even peroxiding it at some point. Not surprisingly then, I didn’t fit in at all in my new home town, unlike my brother who was far more suited to the area than me with his strong cockney accent and laddish ways. He wasted little time in becoming part of a local youth scene centred mainly around football, traditional sport of the British working classes.
For my part, I came into my own in Spain, or rather the Mar Menor, a large coastal lake of warm saltwater off Murcia’s Costa Calida in southeastern Spain, where the family had been vacationing since about 1968. I think it was towards the end of my summer ’73 holiday that I finally started to be noticed in a big way by the local youth, most from either Murcia or Madrid, and so la Ribera became vital to me in terms of my becoming a social being among members of both sexes. A large ever-evolving group of us became very close and remained so for four summers running. Spain was such a sweet and friendly nation back then in the relatively innocent early seventies, and the youth of La Ribera as happy and carefree as I imagine southern Californians would have been in the pre-Beatles sixties.
What a time it was, a time of constant, frenetic change when everything seemed to be mine for the knowing and the tasting in the wake of a social revolution that had been all but bloodlessly waged on my behalf only a few years before; but there was a high price to be paid for all that gambolling.

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 called Kevin “Lofty” O’Shea…who called me only a few years ago from his East London home in point of fact. We talked about the time we became trapped by a gang of mangy-looking stray dogs late one night in the French city of la Rochelle in 1975, after having gotten lost on the way back from a wild night spent with locals. That tale is yet to be written.
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 Micky, a tough-talking working class ladies’ man of about 23, who was rumoured to be a permanent year long resident of HMS Thames. He took me under his wing with a certain intimidating affection, once telling me me he’d “make a ruffy tuffy sailor of me yet”, even though we both knew that that I’d never be anything other than the most useless mariner in the civilised world. The other was an older man, possibly in his mid thirties, but just as much of a lad as Mick, even though he boasted the patrician manner of a City of London stockbroker or merchant banker.
To make it clear just how much of a lubber I was, there was one occasion when, during some kind of conference being held below deck, I was asked by an officer what I thought of minesweeping, and I replied it was a gas. On another, after the ship had been prepared for a major manoeuvre, and every hand was in their respective allotted position, I was found wandering about on deck in a daze, only to casually announce I was taking a stroll. Incidents like these made me the object of good-humoured banter onboard the Thames, where I served as a kind of latter-day Billy Budd, but without the seamanship.
Its crew spent its final night in a club in the southern port of Portsmouth , though it might just as easily have been Plymouth. The main event was a hyperactive drag artiste who tried desperately to keep us entertained with cabaret style numbers sung in a high woman’s voice, and bawdy jokes told in a deep manly baritone, but the poor man was way out of his depth, and he was fiercely heckled for his pains. At one point – perhaps in the hope of seeing a friendly face – he turned towards me, and trilled something along the lines of “Ooh…you look pretty, what’s your name?”, at which point some of the sailors bellowed back, “Skin”, as in “a nice bit of skin”, which was some kind of slang term for an attractive youth.
A little while later, the tar with the beard I’d been sitting next to all night asked me to hold the mike for him while he performed Rossini’s “William Tell Overture “on his facial cheeks. Once he’d done so, the MC suavely quipped he’d next be appearing on Thames Television, a joke which had some validity at the time. He ended up passed out on the table in front of him after having collapsed face down with an almighty crash; by no means the only one to suffer such a fate that night.
Back onshore, I resumed my growing passion for all that was louche, bizarre and decadent in music, art and culture.
However, increasingly from 1974 onwards, 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 refined corruption of the golden age of Modernism of ca. 1890-1930, and especially to its leading cities, in terms of their being beacons of revolutionary art, and of e, luxury and dissolution. They included the London of the Yellow Decade, Belle Époque Paris, Jazz Age New York, and most of all Weimar Republic Berlin.
At some point in ‘74, 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, and to build up a new retro wardrobe.
These went on to include a Gatsby style tab collar, which I wore either with striped collegiate tie, or cravat or neck scarf. Over this, I might wear a short-sleeved Fair Isle sweater, a navy blue blazer from Meakers, and a belted fawn raincoat straight out of a forties film noir. My grey flannel trousers from Simpsons of Piccadilly typically flopped over a pair of two-tone correspondent shoes.
There were those cutting edge artists who appeared to share my love affair with the languid cafe and cabaret culture of the continent’s immediate past. Among these were established acts, such as David Bowie and Roxy Music, and newer stars such as Steve Harley of Cockney Rebel, and Ron and Russell Mael from L.A band Sparks, who’d recently come to Britain in search of Glam Rock glory. Some of Roxy’s followers even went so far as to sport the kind of nostalgic apparel favoured by Ferry himself, but they were rare creatures indeed in mid-seventies London.
As for me, I wore my bizarre outdated costumes in arrogant defiance of the continuing ubiquity of shoulder-length hair and flared denim 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 Progressive Rock was a thing of the past. I’d moved on since ’71, towards a far deeper love of darkness and loss of innocence.
There was nothing even remotely dark, however, about the time I fell in love with Dutch beauty Marianna 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 Mediterranean in appearance. It was probably she who approached me, because I was so unconfident around girls in those days that I’d have never made the first move, and in all the time I knew her, I didn’t have the guts to tell her how I felt. 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 cliché 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 have 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. Typically though, I was powerless to act, and simply stood there like a lovesick fool as the train drew away from the station. In time, my infatuation faded, but even to this day certain songs – such as “I Just Don’t Want to be Lonely” by The Main Ingredient, and “Natural High” by Bloodstone – 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.
Later on in the year, and fully recovered from this absurd unspoken passion, I found myself once again in La Ribera in south eastern Spain.
The summer of ’74 was one of the most blissful I ever spent there, and there were a good few of those. Each afternoon, a gang of us would meet up on the jetty facing our apartment on the Mar Menor, which was more or less deserted after lunch. There, we’d listen to Bowie on cassette, or on a portable phonograph, Donny singing “Puppy Love”, and talk and swim and laugh and generally enjoy being young and carefree in a decade of endless possibilities. To some youthful Spanish eyes back in ’74-’76, I must have seemed an almost impossibly exotic figure from what was then the most radical and daring city in Europe, and I played my image up to the hilt. In truth, though, I was barely less sheltered and innocent than they, and how wonderful it was to bask in their soft Mediterranean loveliness for a few brief seasons.
However, there was a change that came over Spain with Franco’s passing, and the birth of the so-called “Movida”, which could be said to be the Spanish equivalent of London’s Swinging Sixties revolution. Perhaps it didn’t happen right away, but 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 undisputed English prince of La Ribera, had long passed.
I returned to London in late summer ’74 with a deep tan and my long hair bleached bright yellow by the sun.
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 former sailor who kept going on about how good looking I was. He even told me that he loved me; but he was no predator, just a sweet lonely old Scotsman who wanted someone to talk to for a few minutes, and I was happy to do that. 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 CPOs warned me not to wander around Hamburg alone, for fear that I might end up being ravaged and dumped in some back alley, or worse. I duly joined up with a group of about three or four other ratings on my first night ashore, and of course we headed straight for the Reeperbahn of Beatle renown. There, in the red light district of St Pauli, sights awaited me I don’t think I’d even suspected existed up until that point. It was all so different from the quiet outer suburbs, where an organised coach trip took us to us to, 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, before a group of breathless giggling schoolgirls asked me to be in some photos with them, and I of course obliged, flattered by their attentions. On the way back to the ship, one of the sailors announced I’d been quite a hit with the Hamburg teenyboppers. Another wryly opined it was due to my appearance, the blond hair and blue eyes of the classic Teuton. Whatever the truth, there was something so touching about those 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 a mere matter of miles away.

The Triumph of Decadence

Sometime in 1975, 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 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 came to be a potent narcotic for me in the mid 1970s. However, 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 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 roughs who I suspect may have gate crashed 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 at the end of the night. Doubtless, they were intent on a touch of the old ultra-violence; but I stood my ground, insisting that despite what they may have thought about me, I was just as straight as they. Apparently convinced of this, they vanished into the departing crowds after muttering a few dark threats, leaving my cherubic face intact.
‘75 again, and my music, swimming and Martial Arts sessions were no more, but the private lessons continued, mainly with a young academic called Mark who lived alone but for several black cats in long time Rock star haven Richmond-on-Thames. He was a quiet slim young man with long darkish curly hair who, as well as being a private tutor, was a successful session musician who went on to play drums for a fairly well-known Contemporary Folk outfit.
Mark, who specialised in the French Symbolist poets, exerted a strong influence on me in terms of my growing passion for European literature and Modernist culture. However, 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 write. As a result of this, I became 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 largely through Mark 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”, conspicuously placed in front of me on his desk, he told me in animated tones that it had inspired the 1972 movie version of the Kander and Ebb musical, “Cabaret”. In fact, while a work of art in its own right written for the screen by Jay Allen, and directed by former dancer Bob Fosse, “Cabaret” had been largely informed by Isherwood’s only other Berlin story, “Goodbye to Berlin”.
Seeing “Cabaret” later on that year was a life-transforming experience for me, one of only a handful brought about by a film, and the beginning of a near-obsessive preoccupation with the Berlin of the Weimar era, which 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, which begs the question, why?
Part of the reason may lie in the fact that more than any other nation of the late 18th and early 19th Century, the blessed cradle of the Reformation had played host to a school of Biblical exegesis known as Higher Criticism, which flagrantly, not to say blasphemously, attacked the authenticity of the Scriptures. What’s more, late 19th century Europe had witnessed a major occult revival which particularly impacted the great cultural centres of Britain, France and Germany.
These two vital factors surely contributed to the terribly debilitated condition of Christianity in Germany in the years leading up to, and including the implementation of, the Third Reich in 1933.
By the onset of the ’20s, crushed by war debt and blighted by urban violence between mutually hostile 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 provocative dancing of Cabaret Queen Anita Berber and so on.
However, Weimar Berlin remains best known for its notorious sexual liberalism, as seen in pictorial and photographic depictions of the cabarets and night clubs in which license and intoxication flourished unabated which still have the power to shock. 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 and 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 to Amsterdam via Edinburgh and St. Malo 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 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 our brief stay in St Malo. He was a small cherubic southerner with long dark hair worn shoulder length like the young Jack Wilde. I got on OK with a few of the others, and some were merely indifferent, but ‘Jack’ was Churchill’s true prince.
He helped me out on one occasion when I desperately needed him to, bless his baby-faced soul. I’d fallen hard for one of the girls, and was wandering around in a mournful daze after having failed to pluck up the courage to ask her for her address, when Jack handed me a piece of paper with it on. It transpired she’d scrawled it down just before leaving us, and I was drunk with relief at the news, 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. Jack saved my hide.
Life on the Churchill was no luxury cruise. There were heavy storms, and on more than one occasion, we were ordered out of our hammocks in the middle of the night to help trim the sails. I never took any part in this, which can hardly have helped my reputation. I did climb the rigging though, just once, before we came into the port of Amsterdam. Dozens of us manned the yard arms, attached to these by our safety belts alone. I was determined to do it, even though the experience terrified me so much my legs shook throughout.
The Dutch capital was marked by the same kind of open sexual licence I’d witnessed only the year before in Hamburg, although it seemed to me to lack the German city’s sinister vibrancy. Then – just as today – the sad De Wallen red-light district was filled to the brim with hundreds of little illuminated one-room apartments, each with a single woman 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. Of course, I completely ignored his advice, and, 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 as part of what is known as the Ocean Youth Club.
We set sail towards the Baltic coast of Denmark by way of Germany’s famous Kiel Canal, and while we were once more supervised by Mates under the command of a Ship’s Captain, the OYC was more like a cruise than a trial by water, utilising modern yachts rather than traditional tall ships. The captain himself 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”, who became a close friend and fellow reveller.
My brother and I were quick to recruit a nice young guy called Cy as our best pal and confidante for the trip. It turned out we’d actually met him some ten years previously while passing through Calpe, Spain, either on our way to or from my grandmother’s home on the Costa Brava. Soon after setting foot on Danish soil we 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.
A less pleasant romantic episode took place towards the end of the trip, which saw me in pursuit of a pretty German girl called Ulrike. 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 Cy, 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 the Kiel Canal.
I wrote to Ulrike, but she never replied, 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 have done any night of the week. Self-sabotage was fast becoming a speciality of mine.
Still later in the summer I sailed with the RNR to La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast of France, and shortly after that I was with the RNR again, this time in the Pool of London, a stretch of the Thames lying between London Bridge and Rotherhithe. In order to reach the ship, I had to board some kind of launch with a group of other seamen, one of whom, a strikingly handsome Leading 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 golden-headed 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 had happened, and she wept the tears of one who instinctively knew what those who loved this man must have been feeling at the time. It was only then that 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?”
It was in this same year of ‘75 that 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, but you couldn’t fault his dedication.
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 to return to the Sultan for an early night. When I got back myself, I was shocked to discover 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 Norma, 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 Norma’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 earlier. 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, Norma 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 raillery, but she 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 pronounced London accents. It was kind of her to say so, but I think her judgement was way off the mark, because with them, what you saw is what you got, and if it wasn’t always pretty, at least it was honest.

Chapter Three – My Future Positively Glittered

Those Landmark Years

For two years, I’d worshipped at the altar of those artists who had either immediately predated the age of Modernism of ca. 1880-1920, or been part of its Banquet Years, and beyond into the Golden Twenties, the Années folles and so on. However, in 1976, a gaudy new era started to influence the way I dressed and acted, and for much of that year, I dressed down in a workmanlike uniform of red windcheater, white tee-shirt and cuffed jeans as worn by Dean in “Rebel Without a Cause”.
Dean had died a week to the day before I was born in late 1955, and the 20th anniversary of his death appeared to exert a strong influence on rising Pop stars such as John Miles and Slik’s Midge Ure. Slik were one of the biggest bands in Britain in 1976, with an image straight out of “Rebel” or a dozen lesser fifties delinquent movies. Sadly for them, though, and for many other bands who’d surfed the Glam Rock wave or emerged in its wake, they would be unjustly sidelined by the Punk uprising.
As entranced as I was the fifties, there were still times when I reverted to the old escapist dandy image I’d adopted in defiance of what I saw as the leaden drabness of post-Hippie Britain, while discovering Modernist giants such as Baudelaire, Wilde, Gide, and Cocteau for the first time.
One of these occasions came during the dying days of a famous long hot summer, 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.
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 days on 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 for a three day Official Visit, but never arrived. On the 20th, she took part in the NATO exercise “Teamwork” some 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. It was during this manoeuvre 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 to what is known as the Tiller Flat, 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 far from 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 back, I can’t help thinking that 1977 was a far darker year than those that came before it, mainly perhaps because it was marked by the violent irruption into the British cultural mainstream of Punk. From its London axis, it spread like a raging plague throughout that landmark year, even infecting the most genteel suburbs with an extreme and often horrifying sartorial eccentricity, which, fused with a defiant DIY ethic and brutal back-to-basics Rock produced something utterly unique even by the standards of the time.
I was assaulted for the first time by the monstrous varieties of dress adopted by the early Punks while strolling along the Kings Road in what I think may have been January, and it would only be a matter of time before I too hoped to astound others the way they’d done me. However, for most of ’77, I dressed in a muted form which first took shape as a pair of cream brogue winklepickers, which I went on to supplement with black slip-ons with gold side buckles, mock- crocodile skin shoes with squared off toes, and a pair of black Chelsea boots, all perilously pointed.
My new look evolved by degrees at the endless series of parties I attended 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 these, I was perhaps closest with future oil magnate Chris, who was still finding his feet in London’s most exalted social circles. These included a friend of Chris’ from the north of England who forged cutting edge images for some of the most powerful trendsetters in Rock music. I joined them a couple of times at Maunkberrys in Jermyn Street; and apart from the Sombrero in High Street Ken, it was the classiest club my eyes had ever seen.
Being the suburban rube I was, I thought the style that dominated London’s club land was somehow Punk-related, but I was way off the mark. It was the antithesis of the middle class hippie look that was still widespread throughout the UK, but deployed for posing, and dancing to the sweetest Soul music, not as a gesture of violent social dissent. It was partly the realm of the Soul Boys, whose love of black dance music was a legacy of the Mods and Skins that preceded them. While the Soul Boys were largely working class hard nuts from various dismal London suburbs, some Soul lovers were in fact not Soul Boys at all, so much as elegant trendies with a penchant for floppy college boy fringes, plaid shirts worn over white tee-shirts, straight leg jeans, and winklepickers.
The Soul Boys also favoured the wedge haircut, which could be worn with streaks of blond or red or even green, brightly-coloured peg-top trousers and winklepickers or plastic beach sandals. Speaking of the wedge, it was taken up at some point in the late 1970s by a faction of Liverpool football fans who’d developed a taste for European designer sportswear while travelling on the continent for away matches. Thence, the Casual subculture was spawned, and its passion for designer labels persists to this day among British working class youth in every small town and shopping mall throughout the land , although the Casuals themselves have long disappeared.

The Restless and the Riotous

By the summer, I was working as a sailing instructor in Palamos on Spain’s Costa Brava, but I was idle and incompetent, and after a few months I got the sack. Yet, I chose to stay on in Palamos, parading around town by day, while spending most of my evenings at the Disco where I discovered Donna Summer’s “Love Trilogy”.
As much as I loved the party life of a Disco kid, what I wanted most of all was fame. I wanted the endless hedonism too, but enjoyed as a successful working actor like golden boys Peter Firth or Gerry Sundquist. The problem was, I wasn’t really cut out for the task. 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 My Space or endless TV talent showcases.
I’d not yet appeared in a single play, except for a handful at Pangbourne, which included no less than three in drag. One of these had me standing onstage for a few brief minutes without uttering a single word. Another was as a maid in a one-act play by Shaw called “Passion, Poison and Petrifaction”, which saw me clomping around in drag in studded military boots, while 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 liaison with my close friend Roman, but the name of the play escapes me. My only male role was as an effeminate psychopath in a little known Agatha Christie one-acter called “The Rats”, and if the praise of the college nurse was anything to go by, it showed real promise. When all’s said and done, though, 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 couldn’t play bar chords. I wasn’t a natural born genius like my cousin Rod. My singing voice was good, though, and already quite versatile. As a would-be writer, I’d filled countless pages with endlessly corrected notes, 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 trip with the RNR came towards the end of the summer. Lofty O’Shea wasn’t sailing with us, but I had other mates to raise Cain with, such as the aristocratic Damon Cates.
He was a tall redheaded young man of about 26 who looked a little like the youthful Edward Fox, with a trace perhaps of Old Etonian actor, Damian Lewis. Like me, he loved music and fashion and the Soul Boy and Punk Rock scenes – I think he was a regular at the Pantiles night club in Bagshot – and we hit it off from our very first meeting back at the President. He later confided in me about his early life which had 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 an inebriate sailor took a serious dislike to me and was clearly keen to do some serious damage to my pretty face, when Damon stood in and caused the sailor to back off. You overestimated his refinement at your peril. I can imagine though that there were those who wondered how he ended up serving as a rating, as they would have done me. I’m thinking especially of some of the young guys from the division that sailed in tandem with us that summer to the port of Ostend in Belgium.
There was a time when, as some of these hard young seamen were gathering in an Ostend street for a scrap with some locals who had offended them, Damon and I made it clear we had no intention of joining in. This prompted one of their number, a waiflike little sailor of about 16 or 17 to turn to us with a look of utter bewilderment on his beardless face and ask, “What’s wrong with youse guys?”, before joining his mates for the impending riot.
Damon 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 would eventually see him being commissioned as an officer in the Royal Navy, which had 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. If military life had never been for me, it’s a part of who I am, and my story would be all the poorer without it.
Even later in the summer I joined the former Merchant Navy College in Greenhithe, Kent, as a trainee Radio Officer.
I formed several close friendships there; but closest of all was with Jayant, a lovable hard nut with a thick London accent who’d been born into nearby Gravesend’s large Asian community. Rough 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 myself at times. As things turned out, I was the one who quit college first, even if he did follow me soon afterwards, which caused him to wonder why I’d taken the moral high ground in the first place. I couldn’t answer.
It was through Jay 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 by the – mainly white and Asian – kids, whose outlandish outfits stood out in such 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 heyday of Punk, whose influence pervaded the Hall together with the Soul Boy look. The Woodville Hall Soul Boys knew how to dance like you wouldn’t believe…anybody would think they were students of Jazz ballet or something, but they were just ordinary working class kids, who became superstars once they took to the dance floor.

The Woodville Hall Soul Boys

Soon after I’d paid
My sixty
0r seventy pence,
I found myself
In what I thought
Was a miniature London.
I saw girls
In chandelier earrings,
In stiletto 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, rhythmic,
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 pirouetted
And posed…
Pirouetted 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 exhilarated; 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 I 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.
The gig took place in a poky hall above a pub in the centre of a large bleak industrial estate, itself surrounded by small drab council 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 I can recall, the usual Disco or Pop gave way to a violent Punk Rock anthem which saw the tiny dance space being invaded by deranged pogo-dancers as if they’d been summoned by some malignant deity. On another, a Ted revivalist, a follower of classic Rock and Roll who favoured flashy fifties-style clothing, tried to start some trouble with me in the toilet. At this point, Frankie, another Ted who’d befriended me about a year previously when I looked like an extra from a ‘50s High School flick 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. There was a time Frankie almost imploringly me 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; but that wasn’t 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, Jay 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 Jay.
Before arriving, Jay and I met up as arranged with Chris, my close friend from Pangbourne, and as soon as the introductions were over, Jay saw fit to impress us with a truly terrifying solo display of his lethal street fighting skills. “I’m suitably impressed”, said Chris, and he looked it too, and he was hardly a wimp himself despite his upper class accent, but Jay was something else again.
We got on like a house on fire that insane night which at one point saw me 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. I’ve got plenty of time to myself to reflect on it all now…and the sheer waste of youth, of life, of love makes me weep.
In the spring of 1978, I arrived in the city of Fuengirola on Spain’s Costa del Sol, with the intention of helping set up a sailing school with a young Englishman whom my father had recently befriended.
It had all been prearranged between them, but as things turned out, the project came to nothing. However, I stayed on, living first in an apartment Adam had kindly set me up in, then in a little hotel in town, and finally, rent-free, with an American friend, Scarlett. She was one of a handful of US ex-pats living in Fuengirola alongside young people from Australia, Britain, Ireland, Germany, South America and other parts of the world.
It was a hedonistic atmosphere, and I wasted little time in becoming part of it. I spent my nights at the Tam Tam night club, where I set about establishing myself as Fuengirola’s very own Tony Manero…in Punk Rock attire.
It was my first year as a Punk, in point of fact, and among the clothes I favoured were a black cap-sleeved wet-look tee-shirt, drainpipe jeans of black or green, worn with black studded belt, festooned with silver chain filched from a Spanish restroom, and kept in place by multiple safety pins, fluorescent pink teddy boy socks, and white shoes with black laces like the ones I’d seen on the cover of a 999 album. At one stage, I even wore a safety pin – disinfected by being dipped into a drink – in my left earlobe, but I removed this once my lug had started to pulsate.
After a few weeks, I became lead singer for the Tam Tam house band, and would typically wear so much make-up onstage that one occasion, the microphone became smeared in lipstick. I was always short of money, but I could order anything I wanted from the bar at the Tam Tam, and when I was flat broke, my close friend Laura bought me toasted cheese sandwiches to keep me going.
We spent very little time on the beach, but were often to be found at Lew Hoad’s famous Campo de Tenis, that is, when I wasn’t rehearsing with the band, and in the evening, I was often to be found at Laura’s parents’ house, putting on the slap, and perhaps even painting my nails a gaudy shade of red, before heading along to the Tam Tam to do my gig.
However, some nights we preferred to get away from it all to another part of town, and I can still recall the thrill of being alone with her in the demi-light of the Disco, while the evening was still young, hopelessly unaware that such moments are rare even in youth, and get steadily rarer as life forges on. On one occasion as we were strolling through town by night, the legend that was racing champion James Hunt called out her name before emerging from the darkness. They exchanged a few words before Hunt vanished back into the night as suddenly as he’d arrived. I could scarcely believe my eyes, but it was that magical a summer
However, 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, even though the guys from the band had so wanted me to reclaim my place as front man…Coco es el unico, as the sticks man once said about me. No, I’d chosen to go with my parents to La Ribera instead, and I felt a deep and overwhelming sense of exhaustion as I stretched out in the Costa Calida sun, but I don’t recall being especially disappointed by the fact that only days earlier I’d been asked to leave the Guildhall, or rather strike out on my own as a performer. 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 searing heat 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 had I said yes instead, but then it would have been a crying shame to have missed out on the Guildhall, even though it all ended in tears. It would take an entire separate volume to list the incredible experiences that arose out of my time at that much lauded place of learning, of which my own dear dad Pat had been an alumnus before me…but I’ll be brief in recounting my own.
What I will say is that I was involved with a string of Rock and Pop bands, and that with one after the other of these I performed at the Folk Nights that were staged on a sporadic basis in the basement of the nearby Lauderdale Tower in the Barbican area of central London.
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 been doing now since 1990.
At one point he briefly joined a Guildhall-based Jazz-Funk outfit with another then friend of mine. That band would go on to become one of the most successful Pop 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. I was even invited to an early rehearsal, at a time when they might have done with a front man like me…but of course, I didn’t go.
Through another of my groups, Narcissus, I found only disgrace and humiliation, not once but twice.
The first time we played together was just prior to the forming of the Rockets, and although it had been a disaster, due to my drunken upstaging of the other band members, at least I got a good gig out of it, thanks to the kindness of Crispian, our piano player. Furthermore, it was through the Rockets that I was offered the gig with Don. However, rather than wait for the call from him, I went on ahead and re-formed the Rockets with original members John on drums, and Simon on guitar, and it was a total fiasco.
I slapped on the make-up, and Simon and John followed suit, but being relatively untainted by personal vanity, the results were unsettling. Sweet-natured Simon painted his Botticellian features like an ancient pagan warrior, while gentle giant John saw fit to smother his with military-style camouflage. Not surprisingly, our set was accompanied by a riot of heckling which although far from malicious, ultimately provoked me to irritation, and I ended up tossing my plectrum into the audience with a sarcastic, “Here’s to all my loving fans!”, or something equally pathetic.
I can’t help thinking that a petulant 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 subtle 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 all his good work.
My final band was the ’50s revivalist act Z Cars, which even won a small fan base for itself. We were Carl Cool, front man and chief songwriter with a tattoo painted onto his shoulder, Robert Fitzroy-Square, the geek with the Buddy Holly horn rims, Dave Dean the hard man of the band with the don’t mess with me stare, and Little Ricky Ticky, the baby at only 18 who could have been a heart throb had things worked out for us, which they didn’t.
Things went wrong for us when one of the key members quit, and we replaced him with a close friend, Rhys, who was a far better musician than any of us. With his help, we tried to deviate from our usual three-chord doo-wop or Rock with more complex songs, starting with a tightly arranged version of Arthur Crudup’s “That’s All Right Mama”, complete with harmony backing vocals. Sadly though, we weren’t up to the task, and disillusion swiftly set in. By this time, I’d left the Guildhall anyway, and it just wasn’t the same.
There had been emotional scenes at my farewell party held in the depths of the Barbican Estate’s Lauderdale Tower, and some had cried openly at the thought of my leaving. During the course of the night, a very dear friend, Tamsin, told me to contact a London-based impresario and agent well-known for offering young actors their very first positions within the entertainment industry. Her own brother had received his first break through this flamboyant and warm-hearted man, and he’d recently caused a stir in a major starring role on TV . I took her advice and sure enough, he offered me my very first paid acting job as Christian the Chorus Boy – doubling as Joey the Teddy Bear -complete with furry ursine costume – in a pantomime tour of “Sleeping Beauty”.
A few weeks after this had culminated at the Buxton Opera House, I was tendered the small part of Mustardseed in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, to be directed by Richard Cottrell at the Bristol Old Vic, at which point, I could have been forgiven for believing that quitting the Guildhall had been the best thing I ever did…but oh…the indescribable bliss of having passed that audition…

Chapter Four – West of the Fields Long Gone

Children of the Brightest Sun

Among those who appeared in the Richard Cottrell production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the Bristol Old Vic in early 1980 were legendary method madman and future Hollywood superstar Daniel Day Lewis, and flamboyant character actor, Nickolas Grace, still best known for playing Anthony Blanche in the 1981 TV production of “Brideshead Revisited”.
Evelyn Waugh is believed to have partly based Blanche on the poet and aesthete Brian Howard, who, despite American parentage, was the ultimate sun child of twenties London.
However, the cast as a whole was incredibly gifted and charismatic, and on what I think was the eve of the first night, I was lucky enough to see a BOV production of one of my favourite ever musicals, Frank Loesser’s “Guys and Dolls” featuring Clive Wood as Sky Masterson and Pete Postlethwaite as Nathan Detroit. I can honestly say it provided me with more unalloyed pleasure than any other show I’ve seen, before or since.
After resuming my role as Mustardeed in the summer at the London Old Vic, my next acting job came early the following year courtesy of an old family friend, Howell Jones.
Howell had been at both RADA and the Royal Academy of Music with my dad, and he just happened to be the Company Stage Manager at the famous Phoenix Theatre in Charing X Road at the time. As I recall, a production of “Satyricon” was already under way and they wanted me as a last minute Assistant Stage Manager, in charge of preparing the cast’s nonexistent costumes. I’d also be the show’s percussionist, and my primal thrumming rhythms would open the show, and punctuate the action throughout, although in time the director kindly offered me a small non-speaking role.
“Satyricon”, one of only two surviving examples of a novel from the early part of the Roman Empire, is believed to have been written during the reign of the emperor Nero by one Petronius, an imperial courtier specialising in fashion, known as an arbiter elegantarium.
According to its testimony, as well as Petronius’ own accounts of Nero’s depravity written shortly before his death in 66AD, imperial Rome’s infamous decadence was already firmly in place long before her final fall in the third century. Not that she ever died in a spiritual sense according to many Christians holding to the pre-millennial view of prophecy. They believe she’ll be fully revived in the last days before the Second Coming, with the Antichrist at her head.
Also in ’81, I became a kind of part-time member of an initially nameless youth movement whose origins lay in the late 1970s, largely among discontented ex-Punks, but who were eventually dubbed Futurists; and then New Romantics. Their music of preference included the kind of synthesized Art Rock pioneered by German collectives such as Kraftwerk and Can, as well as the highbrow Glam of David Bowie and Roxy Music. All of these elements went on to inform the music of Spandau Ballet and Visage, who emerged from the original scene at the Blitz Club in Covent Garden, and Ultravox, a former Punk band of some renown whose fortunes revived with the coming of the New Romantics.
The name arose as a result of their impassioned devotion to past eras perceived to be romantic, whether relatively recent ones such as the ‘20s or ‘40s, or more distant historical ones such as the Medieval or Elizabethan. Ruffs, veils, frills, kilts and so on were common among them, but then so were demob suits.
Several of the cult’s more outlandish trendsetters went on to become famous names within the worlds of art and fashion. They stood in some contrast to more harder-edged young dandies such as the Kemp Brothers from working class Islington. Their Spandau Ballet began life as the hippest band in London, famously introduced as such at the Scala cinema by writer and broadcaster Robert Elms in May 1980. In time, though, they mutated into a chart-friendly band with a penchant for soulful Pop songs such as the international smash hit, “True”.
I attended New Romantic nights at Le Kilt and Le Beat Route among other swishy night spots, and was even snapped at one of these by the legendary London photographer David Bailey, but I was never a true New Romantic so much as a lone fellow traveller keen to experience first hand the last truly original London music and fashion cult before it imploded as all others had done before it.
Yet, despite its florid decadence, it was always far more mainstream than several other musical movements which arose at the same time in the wake of Punk, such as Post-Punk and Goth. For this reason, several of its keys acts went on to become part of the New Wave, whose mixture of complex tunes and telegenic Glam image partly inspired the Second British Invasion of the American charts. This occurred thanks largely to a desperate need on the part of the newly arrived Music Television for striking videos, and went on to exert a colossal influence on the development of music and fashion throughout the eighties.
As ’81 wore on, my acting career lost momentum, with the result that some kind of family decision was reached to the effect that I should return to my studies with a view to eventually qualifying as a teacher. Thence, I went on to pass interviews for both the University of Exeter, and Westfield College, London, scraping in with two very average “A” level passes at B and C.
I wanted to stay in London, so as to keep the possibility of picking up some acting work in my spare time open, so in the autumn I started a four-year BA degree course in French and Drama mainly at Westfield – but also partly at the nearby Central School of Speech and Drama – while staying in a small room on campus.
At first, I was so discontented at finding myself a student again at 25 that in an attempt to escape my situation, I auditioned for work as an acting Assistant Stage Manager, but I wasn’t taken on…so I simply resigned myself to my fate.
A short time later, though, while sauntering around at night close by to the Central School, I was ambushed by a group of my fellow drama students who may have seemed to me to incarnate the sheer carefree rapturous vitality and joy of life of youth, and because of them and those like them, I came to love my time at Westfield, which just happened to coincide with the first half of the last of a triad of decades in the West of unceasing artistic and social change and experimentation…
Indeed, the Playboy philosophy which exploded in the 1960s could be said to have reached its full flowering in the crazy eighties, even if the vast majority of people whose salad days fell within its boundaries ultimately forged respectable lives following a brief season as outsiders.
For my part, though, I profoundly regret the shallow narcissism that once caused me to scorn the trappings of status, security and respectability I now pine for with all the fathomless anguish of a long abandoned lover.
It’s the very selfsame kind of short-sighted sensation-seeking that’s been tirelessly promoted in the West for over half a century now, not least through the medium of Rock culture; and when I think of the society it’s created, I’m reminded of the workings of the flesh that corrupted the antediluvian world, and which survived the Flood to be disseminated throughout the nations to spell the end of one empire after the other, the Babylonian, the Medo-Persian, the Greek, the Roman…
I had no excuse to embrace it myself, having been blessed by every great gift a young man could possibly hope for, but did so anyway, which points to an appalling want of character on my part.
Our most treasured qualities…such as wealth, intelligence, beauty, charm, talent, are uniquely lethal unless submitted in toto to Christ; for the gifted are phenomenally visible…and therefore susceptible to more temptations than most. Thence, they all too likely to fall prey to Luciferian pride and Luciferian rebellion, like David’s favourite son Absalom, who was physically flawless yet morally bankrupt. Little wonder, then, that so many of them are drawn to the power offered by art, and especially music, the writer of the first song Lamech having been in the line of Cain. Indeed, there are those Christians who believe that the Cainites were the first pagan people, and that they corrupted the Godly line of Seth through a sensual and wicked music not unlike much contemporary Rock.
Of course not all Rock music is flagrantly wicked, far from it. Much of it is melodically lovely. While in terms of its lyrics, its finest songs display the most delicate poetic sensibility. The fact remains, however, that no art form has been quite so associated as Rock with rebellion, transgression, licentiousness, intoxication and death-worship, nor been so influential as such.
To think I once desperately sought fame as a Rock and Roll star myself, and if not as Rock artist, then actor, or writer, and it was surely a good thing I never gained this pagan form of immortality because had I done so, I’d almost certainly have been used for the furtherance of the kingdom of darkness. Once I’d served my purpose I may well have died a solitary premature death as an addict, as has been the fate of so many men and women briefly animated by the charismatic superstar spirit before being cruelly discarded by the Enemy of Souls.

Ferocity of an Enfant Terrible

As I mentioned earlier, at first I fiercely resented being at Westfield, perhaps because I viewed being back in full-time education at 26 as a giant step backwards in terms of my acting career, but before long I’d embarked on one of the happiest periods of my entire life.
Westfield in the early ’80s was a hotbed of talent and creativity which provided me with almost unlimited opportunities for acting and performance.
Within days I’d made a close friend of a fellow French and Drama student by the name of Seb. He was a slim, good-looking, dark-haired charmer from the north east of England who, despite a solid private school background and rugby player’s powerful wiry frame, dressed like a Rock star with his left ear graced by a pendant earring and favouring skin-tight jeans worn with black pointed boots, and together we went on to feature in Brecht and Weill’s’s “The Threepenny Opera”. I had two small roles, the most challenging being that of petty street thief Filch, who’d been played by the legendary monstre sacré of the arts, Antonin Artaud, in one of two film versions of the play directed by G.W. Pabst in 1931. I came to be so very proud of this fact because Artaud, an example of the avant garde faith in extremis, was one of my most beloved cursed poets.
Through this production I went on to play jive-talking disc jockey Galactic Jack in the musical play “The Tooth of Crime”, its director having been impressed by myself and Seb in “The Threepenny Opera”, and so cast us as Jack and the lead role of Hoss respectively. Writer Sam Shepard has spoken of being influenced by the aforesaid Artaud in his own work, which is no coincidence, as Artaud’s concept of a Theatre of Cruelty has proved prophetic of much of the theatre of the post-war years, indeed art as a whole, with its emphasis on assailing the senses, and in some cases also the sensibilities, of the public through every available means.
Before long, I was channelling every inch of my will to perform into one play after the other at Westfield, a long vanished college which became my whole world for two glorious years, while any real ambition to succeed as an actor receded far into the background.
When it came to my French studies, in my essay writing I often flaunted an insolent outspokenness perhaps partly influenced by my favourite accursed artists but also reflecting my own exhibitionistic need to shock, and while some of my tutors may have viewed these efforts with a jaundiced eye, one came to thrill to them and await them with the sort of impatience normally accorded a favourite TV or radio series. This was the wonderful Elizabeth (Dr M.), more of whom later.
How close this love of scandalising by way of the written word brought me to a seared conscience I can’t say; but one thing is certain, my compassion started to recede. This didn’t happen right away of course. Yet, even during those first two golden years, some of those who were drawn to me on a deep emotional level betrayed a certain unease with their words, and I was variously described as intense, inscrutable, mysterious, disabused and sad.
So, why didn’t I cross the line beyond which it becomes impossible for a person to respond to the Holy Spirit? After all, from about 1983, I started to decline as a human being. Perhaps it was something to do with the prayers of believing friends and relatives, so that something precious was kept alive within me during those dark years. Certainly, I never fully stopped being a caring person, and I can recall being outraged by those avant gardists who advocated actual cruelty or the harming of innocents. How then did I square this with my adoration of certain favoured artists who thrived on verbal violence and scenes of madness and destruction? The fact is I couldn’t, hypocrite that I was. This love affair with destruction kept company with a savage fury towards what I perceived as social injustice, the chief targets of this high and mighty dudgeon being dictators on the right wing of the political spectrum, indeed the political right as a whole, but when it came to left-wing oppression, I was no less indignant.
The 1980s was a decade of protest and riot in the UK, and all through its years of raging discontent, I allied myself with one radical lobby after the other, including Amnesty International, Animal Aid, Greenpeace, CND and the Anti-Apartheid Movement. I marched against the nuclear threat in London and Paris, lectured for Amnesty while blind drunk to a roomful of middle-aged Rotarians, had a letter published in the newspaper of the AAM, and was a remorseless disseminator of radical rants, tracts, pamphlets and so on.
Mine was the righteous fury that is rooted in a false notion of the perfectibility of Man, and that fails to recognise that oppression stems from the sin we all share, that has no real satisfying motive other than its own existence. In time, it started to turn inwards, and to eat away at the reserves of tenderness that meant so much to me, its malignity enhanced by alcohol and dissolute living, and an addiction to astrology and other occult topics, and scandalous art and philosophy. My soul effectively started to cave in, and while it was ultimately saved from terminal ruin, I don’t think it’s ever fully recovered from the damage I inflicted on it. Such is my own “thorn in the flesh”…
This first remnant from my Westfield diaries, “Some Sad Dark Secret” testifies to some extent to a former tendency to mental vehemence. It was based on notes contained within a single piece of scrap paper which I unearthed some years ago, and probably dating from 1982 or ’83. The first three sections contain words of advice offered me by my sometime mentor Elizabeth, the fourth and fifth, further words offered me by another of my Westfield tutors, and which served to upbraid me for what he saw as a didacticism reminiscent of Rousseau. He was of course referring not to the painter Henri, but the Swiss-born author, philosopher and composer, who was not just one of the chief inspirers of the French Revolution, but through the emphasis he placed on subjectivity in his writings, the great Romantic movement in the arts.
His assertion that Man is born free while being everywhere in chains, which stemmed from his belief in the essential goodness of Man, has assured him a place of honour in the history of Socialism, which is significantly predicated on such a belief. Fused with the mystical and occult tendencies that have been its time-honoured companions, Socialism was effectively my religion at the time. Were I to have survived into middle age still convinced of the perfectibility of Man under certain social conditions, the outcome would almost certainly have been bitter disillusion, because it’s only through the regeneration of the heart that a person can be changed. I learned this truth the hard way.

Some Sad Dark Secret

Dr M. said:
“Temper
Your enthusiasm,
The extremes
Of your
reactions,
You should have
A more
Conventional
Frame
On which to
Hang your
unconventionality.”

The tone of some
Of my work
Is often
A little dubious,
She said.
She thought
That there
Was something
Wrong,
That I’m hiding
Some sad and dark
Secret
From the world.

She told me
Not to rhapsodise,
That it would be
Difficult,
Impossible, perhaps,
For me to
Harness
My dynamism.
“Don’t push People”,
She said.
“You make
Yourself
Vulnerable”.

Dr H. said:
“By the third page,
I felt I’d been
Bulldozed.
I can almost see
Your soapbox.
Like Rousseau,
You’re telling us
What to do.
You seem to
Work yourself
Into such an
Emotional pitch…

And this
Extraordinary
Capacity for lists.

The Westfield Players

In the summer, a faction of us – mostly culled from the Drama department – took Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” to the internationally famous Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and in our production, Shakespeare’s Illyria was transformed into a Hippie paradise, with myself playing Feste as a Dylanesque minstrel strumming dirge-like folk songs with a voice like sand and glue.
Most of the Westfield players’ male contingent couldn’t have deviated more from the politely liberal norm found nightly at the Fringe Club on Chambers Street if they’d tried. Among the wildest were Vinny, a dashing Britalian of passionately held humanitarian convictions who played Sir Toby Belch, myself, the anarchic product of multiple social and educational influences and Jez, a tough but tender Scouser with slicked back rockabilly hair, who played Malvolio in a mesmerisingly understated manner. He was a fascinating, charismatic guy with a hilariously dark sense of humour who I think had been in a band in the early ‘80s at the legendary Liverpool Post-Punk club, Eric’s. He and his girlfriend Gill, who’d designed the flowing Hippie costumes, and was also a very dear friend, never stopped encouraging me nor believing in me.
We were all so close despite sharing a single house, albeit a large one, on what I think was Prince’s Street, and there was barely a cross word spoken for the entire fortnight we were its occupants.
During my second year I lived in an upper floor apartment in Powis Gardens, Golders Green, with my close friends from the French department, Seb, a former Sedbergh School alumnus, and fellow northerner Stephen, whose alma mater was Sedbergh’s age-old rivals, Ampleforth, a Catholic college largely run by Benedictine monks.
Steve was an incredibly gifted pianist and guitarist who despite a misleadingly serious demeanour was a warm, affectionate, witty, eccentric character who endlessly buzzed with the nervous energy of near-genius. He might not have wanted to ape the way his flatmates dressed and behaved, but he was fiercely protective of us despite our social butterfly ways.
Soon after moving in, I decorated the walls of my room with various provocative images including reproductions of Symbolist and Decadent paintings, and icons of popular culture and the avant-garde. I was determined to live like an aesthete, even if it meant doing so on a shoestring in a cramped little flat in suburban north London, and to this end I organised a salon, which although well-attended didn’t survive beyond a single meeting. We were a pretty shoddy imitation of the new Brideshead generation that was thriving in Oxford in the wake of the TV series.
We drove our effusive landlady half-crazy at times through heavy-footedness and other crimes of upper floor thoughtlessness, although I don’t remember her complaining all that much despite the fact that we weren’t averse to drink-fuelled discussions extending well into the night. In common with most of my friends I tended to drink heavily at night, but almost never during the day. The truth is that self-doubt wasn’t an issue for me in the early eighties and I was a truly happy person, in fact so much so that I may have exaggerated my capacity for depth and melancholia as a means of making myself more interesting to others. In the final analysis though, what possible reason was there for me to be discontented, given that my first two Westfield years were fabulous…an unceasing cycle of plays, shows, concerts, discos, parties set in one of the most beautiful and bucolic areas of London?
My second year drama project was centred on the one-act play “Playing with Fire” written by Swedish poète maudit, August Strindberg. I was allotted the task of supplying the music for the production as well as the leading role. This was Knut, a sardonic Bohemian painter forced to endure the adulterous behaviour of a friend Alex who following an invitation to stay with him at the house of his upper middle class parents for a few days, embarks on a torrid affair with his wife Kerstin. Alex was played by budding playwright Paul, while lovable Czech madcap Karel played Knut’s hated bourgeois father. We performed the play a total of three times over the course of a couple of days.
Later in the year, I was asked by Paul to appear in a short play of his, “Wild Life”, in which I played a violent young psychopath. It was just one of a succession of plays or shows I appeared in during that heady second year at Westfield, the others including “Twelfth Night”, with the Edinburgh cast more or less intact, Lorca’s “Blood Wedding”, with me miscast as the fiancé, and a Rice-Lloyd Webber showcase in which I played my former idol Che.
The piece below was adapted from notes I made during this timeframe, with the first verse actually containing references to “Twelfth Night”. It captures the blissful spirit of my first two years at Westfield, a college then in its twilight time prior to being incorporated into Queen Mary on east London’s grim Mile End Road, far, far from the semi-pastoral beauty of Hampstead. It also provides some indication of the unquenchable desire for attention, affection and approval that was typical of me, and the way it affected some of those who cared for me most.

Gallant Festivities

It was my evening, that’s
For sure –
At last I’m good
At something –
27 years old
I may be, but…
“Spot the
Equity card…”
“It’s your aura, Carl…”
“When are you going
To be a superstar?”
Said Sarah
A few days ago –
That seemed to be
The question
On everyone’s lips.
“You got Feste perfectly,
Just how I envisaged it”
“…Not only when
You’re onstage
but off too!”
At last, at last, at last
I’m good at something…

And so the party…Zoe
called me…I listened…
…To her problems…
References
To my “innocent face”…
Linda said:
“Sally seems Elusive
But is in fact,
Accessible;
You’re the opposite –
You give to everyone
But are incapable
Of giving in particular.”
Madeleine was comparing me
To June Miller…
Descriptions by Nin:
“She does not dare
To be herself…”
Everything I’d always
Wanted to be, I now am…
“…She lives
On the reflections
Of herself in the eyes
Of others…
There is no June
To grasp and know…”
I kept getting up to dance…
Sally said: “I’m afraid…
You’re inscrutable
You’re not just
Blasé,
Are you?”
I spoke
Of the spells of calm
And the hysterical
Reactions
Psychic Exhaustion
Then anxious elation…

A Hateful Work Ethic

After the second year ended in the summer of 1983, I had a few months to spare before travelling to Paris to work as an English language assistant in a French secondary school, the Lycee Jean-Paul Timbaud.
This spelled my exile from the old drama clique, and I’d not be joining them in their final year celebrations, and the knowledge of this must surely have affected me. I was, after all, severing myself from a vast network of gifted friends of whom I was deeply fond, and so losing an opportunity of growing as an artist in tandem with like-minded spirits. I could have opted for just a few weeks in France, but did I really want to be deprived of the chance of spending more than six months in the city I’d long worshipped as the only true home of an artist?
Earlier in the year, my close friend Madeleine, a brilliant dynamic woman of North African Jewish ancestry had told me something to the effect that while many were drawn to me, they sensed “la mort” in me. The fact that she was in thrall to the intellectual worldview, and familiar with the works of the great psychologist Freud, who identified a death drive subsequently dubbed thanatos, may have had something to do with this observation.
Precisely what she meant by death I can’t say, but she may have identified some kind of will to destruction – and specifically self-destruction – in me. As things turned out she was right, although this was barely embryonic in the early ’80s if it existed at all. I’d attribute its existence to a cocktail of intoxicants, each one potentially fatal to the human spirit, these being alcohol, astrology and the occult, and intellectualism. All of these exerted a terribly negative effect on my development as a human being in my view.
While intellectualism is not evil in itself, of course, it’s my contention that intellectuals are more tempted than most by pride, rebellion and sensuality. The same could be said of those blessed with great wealth, great beauty, and great talent.
Intellectuals have been among the most powerful men and women in history, and the Modern World has been significantly shaped by the wildly inspired views of geniuses such as Rousseau, Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. Their theories – and especially those of Marx and Freud and their apostles both orthodox and schismatic – fanned the flames of a largely bloodless revolution in the 1960s. While this had been largely quenched by 1972, the philosophies that inspired it, far from fading themselves, set about infiltrating the cultural mainstream where they became more extreme than ever. Thence, they entered the realm of the Post-Modern, while remaining the ultimate consequence of centuries of Modernist influence on the Judaeo-Christian fabric of Western civilisation.
However, I was never a true scholar like Madeleine, so much as someone who was both troubled and fascinated by the idea of hyper-intellectuality. Reading Colin Wilson’s “The Outsider” in the early ’80s, I especially identified with those intellectuals who were tortured by their own excesses of consciousness such as T.E. Lawrence, who wrote of his nature as being “thought-riddled”.
As a child I was extrovert to the point of hyperactivity but by the time of my late adolescence, I found myself becoming subject to rival drives of equal intensity. One of these was towards seclusion and introspection, the other, attention and approbation. It seems this duality is common among sensitive artists and intellectuals, and may help to explain why so many of them have sought some form of escape from the complexities of their inner nature, even to the point of madness.
In my own quest for renown, I subjected my body, the creation I tendered so lovingly at times, to a ruthless almost derisive work ethic. It couldn’t have differed more from the noble impulse first identified by the German social philosopher Max Weber, and which he dubbed the Protestant Work Ethic. For Weber, the latter didn’t so much give birth to Capitalism, which of course it didn’t, as facilitate its growth in those nations in which the Reformation had been most successful. If the work ethic beloved of the Calvinist Pilgrims who forged the first American colonies was intended for the glorification of God, mine was a decadent late variant entirely given over to the promotion of the self.
To this end, I consumed a variety of intoxicants, not just because I enjoyed doing so but because they enabled the constant socialising that brought me the attention, affirmation and approval I so craved…a narcissistic supply perhaps. How else to explain the sheer demented fervour of my endless self-exaltation?
That’s not to say that I wasn’t a loving person, because I was; but precisely what kind of love was it that I spread so generously about me? One thing it wasn’t was agape, the perfect, selfless love described in 1 Corinthians 13. In fact, it was a form so unacceptable to God that it would have seen me damned and in Hell had I actually managed to drink myself to death.
I was hardly less heartless towards my mind than my body, treating it as an object of research and experimentation. Little wonder then that I turned to drink as a means of pacifying it, although alcohol still wasn’t a serious problem for me in the early ’80s, when my exhausting daily regimen tended to be fuelled instead by massive quantities of caffeine tablets. That said, Madeleine didn’t like it when I drank to excess as if she’d already singled me out as someone who’d go on to develop a drink problem. In this as in other things she showed remarkable insight.
The piece below first existed as a series of scrawled notes based on several conversations I enjoyed with Madeleine in 1982 or ’83. One of these resulted from an incident in which I’d made a fool of myself by storming off during a gig after having broken a guitar string. After a period spent apparently wandering aimlessly around Golders Green, I bumped into Madeleine, who’d come looking for me…

She Dear One Who Followed Me

It was she, bless her,
who followed me…
she’d been crying…
she’s too good for me,
that’s for sure…
“Your friends
are too good to you…
it makes me sick
to see them…
you don’t really give…
you indulge in conversation,
but your mind
is always elsewhere,
ticking over.
You could hurt me,
you know…
You are a Don Juan,
so much.
Like him, you have
no desires…
I think you have
deep fears…
There’s something so…so…
in your look.
It’s not that
you’re empty…
but that there is
an omnipresent sadness
about you, a fatality…”

Chapter Five – From Paris to Cambridge Town

From Paris to Golders Green

In the autumn of 1983 I took residence in a room on the grounds of the Lycée Jean-Paul Timbaud in Brétigny-sur-Orge, a commune in the southern suburbs of Paris some sixteen miles south of the city centre.
It was during those early days in Paris that I became infected for what I believe to be the first time in my life by a serious sense of self-disillusion, as a new darkness spread over my mind.
This sea-change marked the onset of a real drink problem that went way beyond the usual student booze-ups into the murky realm of drinking alone by day, and there seems little doubt to me today that at its heart lay a conscience that was starting to become calloused through repeated defilement. My well-being, however, remained relatively unaffected, in fact, for those first few months, I was happy, blissfully happy to be a flâneur in the city which had inspired so many great poets to write classics of the art of urban idling. I wrote of my own experiences, usually late at night, in my room with the help of wine and cigarettes, and while few of these notes have survived, some incidents that may have once been committed to paper are still fresh in my mind.
There was the time I sat opposite a same-sex couple on the Métro when I was still innocent of its labyrinthine complexities. “She” was a slim white girl, dressed from head to toe in denim, who gazed blissfully, with lips coyly pursed, into some wistful middle distance, while her muscular black boyfriend stared straight through me with eyes in which desire and menace seemed to be mixed, until one of them spoke, almost in a whisper, “Qu’est-ce-que t’en pense?”
I recall the night I took the Métro to Montparnasse-Bienvenue, where I slowly sipped a demi-blonde in a brasserie, perhaps of the type immortalised by Brassai in his photographs of the secret life of ’30s Paris. At the same time, a bewhiskered old alcoholic in a naval officer’s cap, his table strewn with empty wine bottles and cigarette butts, repeatedly screeched the name, “Phillippe!” until a pallid impassive bartender with patent leather hair filled the old man’s glass to the brim with a mock-obsequious “Voilà, mon Capitaine!!”
I can also remember the afternoon when, enacting the role of the social discontent, I joined an anti CND march through Paris which ended with a bizarre street cabaret performed by a troupe of neo-hippies whose sheer demented defiance may have filled me with longing for a time when I treated my well-thumbed copy of the Fontana Modern Masters bio of Che Guevara by Andrew Sinclair as some kind of sacred text…
A day spent as a flâneur would often end with a few hours spent in a movie theatre, perhaps in the vast soulless Forum des Halles shopping precinct, and there was a point I started to hate the movies I chose, as I struggled more and more with fits of deep and uncontrollable depression. For the first time in my life, I was starting to feel worse after having seen a film than before, the result perhaps of creeping anhedonia, which is a reduced capacity for pleasure, with respect to activities enjoyed by the majority. I grew bored of watching others perform. What joy I reasoned was there in watching some dismal movie when there was so much to do in the greatest city in the civilised world?
I’d never really been any kind melancholic up until this point but this situation may have started to change in my first few months in Paris. If my travels failed to produce the desired uplifting effect, I’d fall prey to a despair that was wholly out of proportion to the cause.
As a means of protecting myself, I started squandering my hard-earned cash on endless baubles and fripperies. These wholly pointless trinkets included a gaudy short-sleeved shirt by Yves St Laurent, a retro-style alarm clock with the loudest tick in Christendom , a gold-plated toothbrush with I never actually used, a black and gold cigarette holder and matching slim fit lighter, a portrait drawn of me at the Place de Tertre which made me look like a cherubic 12 year old, and a black vinyl box jacket procured from the Porte de Clignancourt flea market.
Mention must also be made of the many books I bought, such as the three Folio works by Symbolist pioneers, Barbey d’Aurevilly, Villiers de L’Isle Adam and Joséphin Péladan; as well as the second-hand books of poetry by such obscure figures as Trakl and Deleve…part of Seguer’s Contemporary Poets collection.
Could the kids who loved to wave and coo at me from all corners of the Lycée have guessed that their precious Carl, the smiling blond Londoner who looked like a lost member of Duran Duran was a secret dark depressive…and a collector of the literary works of late 19th Century decadents…and a social discontent given to recording snarling rants against the callousness of Western society on a cheap cassette tape recorder?
The simple answer is never in a thousand years; for I was leading a double life, perhaps even a multiple one. Little wonder, therefore, that I was starting to drink to try and make sense of what was happening to me, which was something akin to the fracturing of the personality.
It wasn’t long before I tired of the solitary existence of the flâneur, but then becoming more sociable may have simply been the result of being in one place for a significant length of time and nothing more meaningful than that. In fact, I’d befriended twenty year old Theresa, English assistant in the neighbouring town of St Genevieve des Bois, while we were both attending classes at the Sorbonne intended to prepare us for the year ahead; and we went on to see more and more of each other as our Parisian sojourn proceeded apace.
She’d been a close girlhood chum at convent school of my own great Westfield friend, Ariana…in fact, one of the first times we met up was with Astrid, when we saw “Gimme Shelter” at some dinky little art house theatre; this being, of course, the documentary of the Rolling Stones 1969 American tour which, culminating in the Free Concert at the Altamont Speedway in northern California, infamously marked the end of the Hippie dream of peace and love.
Another close friend was Jules, a maths teacher at the LEP who was the rebellious son of an army officer, and a furious hedonist who worshipped the Rock and Roll lifestyle of Keith Richards and other British bad boy musicians. I can see him now, tall, thin, dark, charismatic, with his head of wiry black hair, dressed in drainpipes and Cuban heeled boots, playing the bass guitar – but brilliantly- at some unearthly hour with friends following a night’s heavy partying before rushing to be with a girl friend as the dawn broke.
My best male friend was Milan, another teacher at the LEP. He was the son of Yugoslavian parents from the suburb of Bagneux whose impassive manner belied the exorbitantly loving and unstable soul of a true poet. He fell in love with Theresa at first sight, and spent the whole night on a train bound for the south of France in a romantic delirium singing the songs of Jacques Brel. He referred to our slender swan necks as being typical of what he called “le charme anglais”.
So many of the people of Bretigny went out of their way to make me feel welcome and content from the headmaster all the way down to the kids some of whom staged near-riots in the classroom whenever I appeared. I felt so unworthy of their kindness, of the incredible hospitality that is characteristic of ordinary French people.
However, if I was much loved in the warm-hearted faubourgs, in Paris itself I was at times as much a magnet for menace and hostility as approval. In fact, I was hysterically threatened in Pigalle only days after arriving in the city. I was verbally assaulted again later in the year on a RER train by some kind of madman or derelict who told me to go to the Bois de Boulogne to meet with what he saw as my inevitable violent destiny.
I spent an entire train journey from Paris-Austerlitz to Bretigny with a self-professed “voyou” with chilling shark-like eyes, who nonetheless seemed quite fond of me, as he made no attempt to threaten me. He even gave me his number, telling me that unless I phoned him as promised I was merely what he termed un “anglais c**”.
Mention must also be made of the sinister skinhead who called me “une tapette anglaise” for trying on Theresa’s wide-brimmed hat while travelling home by train after a night out with her and Ariana.
I left Bretigny without saying goodbye to so many people that it’s painful for me to think about it, but frenetic last hour socialising had left me exhausted and demoralised. However, there was one final get-together, organised by Theresa and a few other friends. Milan was there of course, as well as another close friend from the LEP, Jean-Paul, and several mutual friends of myself and Theresa. Sadly though, Jules wasn’t. I bumped into one of his girl friends in the course of the evening, and she was incredulous I hadn’t invited him. Seized by guilt, I phoned him at his home to ask him to make a last minute appearance, but in a muted voice, he told me it was too late for that. It was the last I ever heard of him. I never saw Milan again either, although he did phone me once from Paris. On the other hand, Theresa and I stayed friends until the early ‘90s, by which time she’d got married to a fellow church-goer and former Cambridge University alumnus, whom I liked enormously.
My parents stopped by that night to pick me up on their way to La Ribera where we were due to stay for a few weeks before returning to the UK, and after a day or so spent sightseeing we set off. Soon after arriving it became clear to me that my beloved pueblo had changed beyond all recognition. Eight years after Franco’s death and Spain’s innocence was long gone and Western urban decadence and violence had penetrated even into the deepest provinces.
In Murcia, while quietly drinking in a night club with Marc, a very dear friend of mine from La Ribera’s golden age, his future wife Maria, and other friends, I found myself in the surreal position of being visually threatened by a local Punk who clearly objected to the bootlace tie I was wearing which immediately identified me as a hated Rockabilly. This would never have happened ten years before, or perhaps even five.
As for the youth of La Ribera itself, where once they’d been so endearingly naive, now they seemed so worldly and cool, in fact far more so than me, dancing like chickens with their elbows thrust out to the latest New Pop hits from the UK such as King’s “Won’t You Hold My Hand Now (These Are Heavy Times)”, which I endlessly translated for them. They even put the club kids of La Piscine to shame.
I returned to Westfield in the autumn of 1984, and I can’t help thinking it was soon afterwards that my recent past started haunting me for the first time, but I may be wrong. Perhaps it never occurred to me that only a few years previously I’d known legends of sport and the cinema, mythical figures of the theatre, blue bloods and patricians, and they’d been kind, generous of spirit to this nonentity from the outer suburbs. Now I was nearly 30, with a raft of opportunities behind me, and a future which looked less likely than ever to provide me with the fame I still ached for with all my soul.
At first I lived off-campus, thinking it might be fun to coast during my final year as some kind of enigma freshly returned from Paris; but before long I desperately missed being part of the social hub of the college, even though this was a virtual impossibility for a forgotten student in his fourth year. However, I did eventually move back onto campus to occupy a tiny little room in the Berridge hall of residence in nearby West Hampstead NW9.
Thinking that being in a play might help raise my faded profile, I accepted a small role in Cole Porter’s “Kiss me Kate”, which was being directed by a close friend of mine, but it was all too little too late. My time as one of Westfield’s leading prodigies had long passed, and other, younger golden children had come to the fore since my departure for Paris, such as the kid named Bill whom my long-time friend and champion Ariana described as being some kind of new edition of me, due perhaps to his versatility as musician, actor, comedian and so on. The first I saw of him, he was playing Gorgibus in the original French in a production, directed by Ariana, of Moliere’s “Les Précieuses Ridicules”, a part she’d originally earmarked for me, but I turned it down. To say he went on to greater things would be an understatement.
I read incessantly throughout the year for the sheer pleasure of doing so. For example, while Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh” was a compulsory part of the drama course, there was no need for me to wade through “O’Neill”, the massive two-part biography of the playwright – published in 1962 and 1972 – by Arthur and Barbara Gelb, but that didn’t stop me. In fact it was a joy to do so.
I made this descent into the depths of O’Neill’s tortured psyche at a time when I was starting to drink during the day at Westfield, often getting hammered around lunchtime in the bar in the company of various friends, such as Paul, my friend from “Playing with Fire”, or even earlier thanks to a can or two of extra strong lager. Paul was still trying to persuade me to join forces with him against an indifferent world, he with his writing and me with my acting, but for reasons best known to myself I wasn’t playing ball. He’d always sensed something really special in me, which was variously described as energy, intensity, charisma, but for all the praise I received from Paul and others, I didn’t seem to have a very high opinion of myself. I’m not quite sure why.
I recently watched the testimony of a former violent offender through a website called Transformed Lives, and he described himself as having a big ego and low self esteem before he became a Christian, and this may have been my problem. It’s possible that while I had the vast ego of a narcissist that requires constant attention and approval, I somehow also suffered from low self-esteem…which would indicate actual Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Whatever the truth, I was going through one of my perverse phases, affecting a world weariness which I simply didn’t have at 30, but which upset and alienated a really good friend, something for which I feel utterly ashamed.
It wasn’t long before Paul had left college, and for good this time – he’d already somehow spun out his allotted three years to four – and without taking his degree…leaving me to stew in my stupid pseudo-cynicism.
My principal final year tutor was my beloved Elizabeth, and subject of study, the works of literary genius Andre Gide. I thrilled to the perverseness of Gidian characters such as the urbane Ménalque from “The Immoralist” (1902), who awakens the Nietzschian superman in Michel, the novella’s protagonist, the feral Lafcadio from “The Vatican Cellars” (1914), who commits a crime of terrible cruelty simply for the sake of doing so, and the demonic Passavent, from “The Counterfeiters” (1926), his only novel according to his own definition of the term. While figures of such unmitigated depravity are commonplace today, in countless novels, plays, films, videos etc., when Gide created his monsters, they still had the power to shock. I view them with a different pair of eyes today.
On a lighter note, a special favourite of mine by Gide, who was always a magnificent storyteller, was the novella “Isabelle”, which appealed to my softer, more romantic side. Written in 1911, it’s the tale of a young student Gérard Lacase who stays for a time at a Manor house in Normandy inhabited by two ancient aristocratic families in order to look over their library for research purposes, and while there becomes bewitched by the portrait of the mysterious “Isabelle” only to become disillusioned upon finally meeting her.
By the same token my favourite ever play by O’Neill was another story of hopeless love, “A Moon for the Misbegotten” (1947), although “A Long Day’s Journey into Night” (1956) came a very close second. Both feature Eugene’s tragic yet infinitely romantic elder brother Jamie. I became fascinated by him; and read all about him in the massive O’Neill biography by the Gelbs. Poor Jamie. How richly blessed he’d been at birth with beauty, charm, and intellect. While part of the Minim Department of Notre Dame University, Indiana, he was one of founder Father Edward Sorin’s most favoured princes, destined for a glittering future as a Catholic gentleman of exquisite breeding and learning; and then a prize-winning scholar at Fordham, the exclusive Jesuit university from which he was ultimately expelled for a foolish indiscretion.
He was also potentially a very fine writer, although he only left a handful of poems and essays behind, and the owner of a beautiful speaking voice which ensured him work as an actor for a time alongside his father James. His one true legacy, however, is Jamie Tyrone, the brilliant yet tortured charmer who haunts two of his brother’s masterpieces with the infinite sorrow of promise unfulfilled.
“The Wanderer of Golders Green” was formed from notes made while I was taking my finals in the summer of ’85. It reflects what was a long-standing obsession on my part with romantic weltschmerz – literally world pain – and should not be taken too seriously as such. That said, mention must be made of the intense saturnine melancholy that was making more and more inroads into my naturally sanguine temperament, and at nearly 30 I still wasn’t famous, and may have been drinking as heavily as I was partly as a means of coping with this painful fact. What is certain is that from the age of 27, alcohol became more indispensable to me than ever before.

The Wanderer of Golders Green

I decided on a Special B
Before the eve.
I bought a lager
At the Bar
And chatted to Gaye.
Then Ray
Bought me another.
I appreciated the fact
That he remembered
The time he,
His gal Chris,
And Rory Downed
An entire Bottle
Of Jack Daniels
In a Paris-bound train.
A tanned cat
Bought me a (large) half,
Then another half.
My fatal eyes
Are my downfall.
I drank yet another half…

My head was spinning
When it hit the pillow
I awoke
With a terrible headache
Around one o’clock.
I prayed it would depart.

I slowly got dressed.
I was as chatty as ever
Before the exam…
French/English translation.
Periodically I put my face
In my hands or groaned
Or sighed –
My stomach
was burning me inside.

I finished my paper
In 1 hour and a half.
As I walked out
I caught various eyes
Amanda’s, Trudy’s (quizzical) etc…
I went to bed…
Slept ‘till five…
Read O’Neill until 7ish…
Got dressed
And strolled down
To Golders Green,
In order to relive
A few memories.
I sang to myself –
A few memories
Flashed into my mind,
But not as many
as I’d have liked –
It wasn’t the same.
It wasn’t the same.

Singing songs brought
Voluptuous tears.
I snuck into McDonalds
Where I felt At home,
Anonymous, alone.
I bought a few things,
Toothpaste and pick,
Chocolate, yoghurts,
Sweets, cigarettes
And fruit juice.
Took a sentimental journey
Back to Powis Gardens,
Richness
And intensity,
Romantic
And attractive…
Sad, suspicious and strange.
I sat up until 3am,
Reading O’Neill
Or writing (inept) poetry.
Awoke at 10,
But didn’t leave
My room till 12,
Lost my way
To Swiss Cottage,
Lost my happiness.
Oh so conscious
Of my failure
And after a fashion,
Enjoying this knowledge.

Of All Sad Words of Tongue or Pen

My first employment after leaving Westfield in the summer of 1985 was as a deliverer of novelty telegrams. This often brought me into potentially hazardous situations, but for me the risk was worth it, because I was getting well paid to show off and party, two of my favourite occupations at the time…but it was an unusual way of life for a man of thirty.
What I really wanted was the immortality provided by fame, and I didn’t care whether this came through acting, music or literature, or any other means for that matter, but until my big break came, I was content to feed my addiction to attention through the novelty telegrams industry. I evidently had no deep desire to leave anything behind by way of children, nor for any career other than one liable to project me to international renown. How then did I end up as a PGCE student at Homerton College, Cambridge in the autumn?
The truth is that once again I’d yielded to family pressure to provide myself with the safety net that’s been dear to the hearts of parents of would-be wunderkinds since time immemorial, and despised by the artists themselves: the great English singer-songwriter Nick Drake once told his father it was the one thing he didn’t want. For my part, I was so unhappy about having to go to Cambridge that just days before I was due to start there, I arranged to audition for a Jazz Funk band. I was all set to sing “The Chinese Way” by Level 42 and another song of its kind, but I never made it. Late, and desperately drunk on the afternoon of my audition, I simply threw in the towel and resigned myself to Cambridge. For all I know they may still be waiting for me to this day, relics from an age of tasselled loafers and white socks.
From the time I arrived in the beautiful medieval university city of Cambridge, I was made to feel most welcome and wanted by everyone, and I made some wonderful friends at Homerton itself. They included Donovan, a poet and actor from the little town of Downham Market in Norfolk, Dale, a singer-songwriter of dark genius from Yeovil in Somerset who eventually went on to become part of London’s psychedelic underground, and Clarissa, a stunning red-head whose beauty and charm belied the fact that she hailed from Slough, a vast sprawling suburb to the west of London most famous for having inspired an infamous poem by John Betjeman.
When I made my first appearance at the Manor Community College in the tough London overspill area of Arbury where I was due to begin my period of Teaching Practice the following January, the pupils reacted to me as if I was some kind of visiting movie or Rock star. My TP would’ve been a breeze. Everything was falling into place for me at Cambridge, and I was offered several golden chances to succeed as an actor within its hallowed confines.
Towards the end of the first term, the then president of the  Cambridge University Footlights Dramatic Club had gone out of his way to ask myself and Donovan to appear in the sole production he was preparing to mark his year-long tenure.
He was a Homerton man, and so clearly wanted to give a couple of his fellow students a break after having seen us perform a couple of Donovan’s satirical songs for the club. This was a privilege almost without measure, given that since its inception Footlights has nurtured the talents of Cecil Beaton, Jonathan Miller, Germaine Greer, David Frost, John Cleese, Peter Cook, Graham Chapman, Eric Idle, Stephen Fry, Emma Thompson, Hugh Lawrie and Sasha Baron Cohen among many others. I could have been added to that list.
As if this opportunity weren’t enough to persuade me to stay put, a young undergraduate, renowned for the high quality of the plays he produced personally asked me to feature in one of his productions during the Lent Term after seeing me interpret the part of Tom in Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie” some time before Christmas. Someone told me that if he took an interest in you, you were pretty well made as an actor at Cambridge. What more did I want? For Spielberg himself to be in the audience and discover me? I can actually remember being quite disappointed that he wasn’t a talent scout from outside of the university. That’s how self-deluded I was. I was so obsessed by fame that I could barely wait to get my clammy hands on it, and yet it seems that whenever I was offered a serious chance at achieving it, I bungled it.
In my defence though, I did feel trapped by the course, and was finding it heavy going. In order to pass, you had to spend a full year as a teacher after completion of the basic PGCE. That meant it would be two years before I was free again to call myself an actor and work as such. It just seemed an awfully long time, when in fact it wasn’t at all, and two years after quitting Cambridge I was even further away from my dream than when I’d started off. The truth is I left Homerton for no good reason, and my decision still pains me to this day, although my faith helps me to cope with the anguish the idiocies of my youth have left me with. Without it these words from Whittier’s “Maud Muller” might tear me to shreds of utter nothingness:
For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: ‘it might have been’.
Within a matter of hours of the start of the Lent Term of 1987, I was gone, vanished into the night in the company of a close friend I’d wheedled into helping me out. It wasn’t her fault; she’d originally told me to go to Cambridge, and just get stuck in, but I hadn’t listened.
Once I was free I started to furiously audition, commuting to London from a little village in rural Hampshire  just a stone’s throw the coast near Portsmouth, where I was resident at the time.
It was music rather than acting I was interested in at the time, not that it ever really mattered to me how I became famous, just so long as I did. I auditioned for a series of desperately unsuitable bands, including the Jazz-Funk outfit from Croydon, whose Soul Boy musicians didn’t seem to believe me when I told them I knew one of the guys from Level 42…and the Rock ‘n’ Roll revival band from Pompey itself…but none of them took to me, and I can’t say I blame them. I was usually tanked up to start with, and then there was the question of my image. I think it’s fair to say that highlighted hair, dinky gold ear studs and skin tight jeans didn’t go down all that well in the places I chose to audition.
I returned to London in the summer of 1987 to a minor flurry of creative activity.
First, I took part in a rehearsed reading at Notting Hill’s justly reputable Gate Theatre of a play whose name eludes me, but it was directed by Ariana. Then, at her behest, I served as MC for a week-long benefit for the Gate called “Captain Kirk’s Midsummer Log”. I did so in the persona of one Mr Denmark 1979, a comic monstrosity created for me by Ariana. Among those appearing on the bill were comedienne, Jo Brand, in her then incarnation of The Sea Monster, comedy satirist, Rory Bremner, whom I’d known in both Edinburgh and Paris, and Renaissance Man, Patrick Marber, initially a stand-up comic, but best known today as an award-winning playwright and Oscar-nominated screenwriter.
The Denmark character went down so well at the benefit that I wrote an entire show around him on the premiss that winning a Scandinavian male beauty contest in 1979 had so altered the balance of his mind that he’d since convinced himself he’d been at the forefront of pretty well every major cultural development since the dawn of Pop, only to be cravenly ripped off by Sinatra, Elvis, the Beatles, the Stones, Punks, Rappers and so on. It premiered a few months after the benefit at a new variety venue called Club Shout, again to great success.
1987 was also the year I got seriously involved in walk-on work for television and the cinema, although I wasn’t entirely new to the game. For example, I briefly feature as a side drummer in a Salvation Army band in”A Mirror Crack’d” (1981), based on the Agatha Christie novel. This was at a typical English village fete set in the 1950s, and the scene is graced first by Geraldine Chaplin, and then Elisabeth Taylor. Also, in Charles Jarrott’s “Poor Little Rich Girl” (1987), I can be seen gesticulating in a white suit as twenties crooner Rudy Vallee in a party scene featuring Farrah Fawcett as Betty Hutton and Burl Ives as FW Woolworth. But these were just isolated episodes. From around 1987, I took the work more seriously, first in the sitcom “Life Without George”, and then in long-running police series “The Bill” in which I played a scene of crime photographer for about five years.
Soon after I’d finished my work for “Life Without George” I started rehearsals for Ariana for a play called “The Audition” written by the Catalonian dramatist Rudolf Sirera. with English translation by John London. It was due to have its world premiere at the Gate early in the winter of ’88.
Apparently set by Sirera in pre-revolutionary France, Ariana updated it to the late 19th Century, with a setting reminiscent of  Wilde’s “Dorian Gray” or a Parisian equivalent, perhaps by Lorrain. It involves the kidnapping of an actor Gabriel De Beaumont by an unnamed Marquis, who goes on to sadistically toy with his victim before finally murdering him. It received some good reviews, and I was singled out for some praise by The London Times.
I should have capitalised on this modest success, but Huw, a close friend from the Guildhall now working as a teacher at the Callan School of English in Oxford Street, had earlier urged me to join him there. As I’d already trained with them and been offered a job by the time “The Audition” had got under way, I started work as a teacher soon after it had wrapped. Thus, I entered into one of the most purely blissful period of my entire life, even while my theatrical career suffered.
I could write a whole book on my time at Callan’s alone, indeed on pretty much any of the major episodes of my life, this being merely one version of it, to which multiple layers like so many onion skins could be added to create something approaching an accurate self- portrait guaranteed to make a even the most hard-hearted reader weep.

Chapter Six – Lone Birthday Boy Dancing

Strange Coldness Perplexing

the catholic nurse
all sensitive
caring noticing
everything
what can she think
of my hot/cold torment

always near blowing it
living in the fast lane
so friendly kind
the girls
dewy eyed
wanda abandoned me
bolton is in my hands

and yet my coldness
hurts
the more emotional
they stay
trying to find a reason
for my ice-like suspicion
fish eyes
coldly indifferent eyes
suspect everything that moves

socialising just to be loud
compensate for cold
lack of essential trust
warmth
i love them
despite myself
my desire to love
is unconscious and gigantesque

i never know
when i’m going to miss someone
strange coldness perplexing
i’ve got to work to get devotion
but once i get it
i really get people on my side
there are carl people
who can survive
my shark-like coldness
and there are those
who want something
more personal
i can be very devoted to those
who can stay the course

my soul is aching
for an impartial love of people
i’m at war with myself…

The Joy of a Fool

Being a teacher at the Callan School of English was a dream job for me. It provided me with a social life on a plate, as well as enough money to finance the hours I spent each evening in the Champion public house in Wells Street, where some time after 7.30pm, after the final class had ended, student and teacher alike would meet to drink and talk and laugh and do as they wished until closing time. I’d usually leave at about 10.30 to catch the last train home from Waterloo, although, sometimes I’d miss it and have to catch a later train… in fact, I can swear I spent one night wrapped in newspaper on a station bench deep in the Surrey hinterland, Clandon perhaps, or Guildford . At other times, there’d be a party to go to, or the Callan Disco, held on an occasional basis in Jacqueline’s Night Club in nearby Soho.
Most of the teachers socialised with their own kind, while I preferred the company of the students, although this situation was to become modified by 1990, when my friends were being chosen from among both the teaching and student bodies.
At night, it would be almost impossible to extricate me from my circle of favourites from Italy, Japan, Spain, Brazil, Poland, France…fact which proved irksome to my good friends, Stan and Noddy, at a certain stage in my short-lived Callan career.
Stan, a Callan teacher and resting actor, and Noddy, a young student from the great city of Sao Paolo in Brazil, were trying to organise rehearsals for a band we were supposed to be getting together, but thanks to me, this never happened despite some early promise, as Noddy was a gifted guitarist, and Stan a potentially good front man, fact which speaks volumes about my shallow attitude to endeavour.
As well as the perpetual party lifestyle, I spent my spare cash on clothes, cassettes, books, and of course, rent, that is, during those brief few months I spent as a tenant in Hanwell, West London at the house of a friend of my fathers’ from the London session world, Dai Thomas.
Dai was a small, dark, bearded, always nattily dressed Welsh fiddler, whose life, lived close to the edge, but with the absolute minimum of effort, incarnated a kind of preternatural Celtic cool that was deeply charismatic, yet ultimately tragic. I never knew a man to live so fast, and yet so elegantly, as my dear friend Dai.
I also spent several hundreds of pounds towards the end of my time at Callan’s being initiated into the art of self-hypnosis by a Harley Street doctor who specialised in hypnotherapy and nutritional medicine…this, in the hope of finding a solution not just to my excessive use of alcohol, but the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder to which I was falling more and more prey in the late 1980s.
Yet, despite the drinking and the OCD, I was a genuinely happy person in those days, and any melancholy I affected – in my writings and elsewhere – should be taken with a pinch of salt in the light of the fact that for me, sadness was the ultimate mark of artistic and emotional profundity, and I coveted it with all the passion of one who was by nature essentially high-spirited.
Indeed, it may be that it was this very carefree frivolity of mine, this absence of angst, that prevented me really getting anywhere as an actor.
Looking back, the overwhelming impression I have is of a man whose primary emotional condition was one of utter exaltation and enraptured joy of life, although it included a tendency to veer wildly between the effusive affection I aspired to, and the lapses of affect I dreaded.
This complex state of being, reflected by the piece featured at the start of this chapter, which was recently forged from notes scrawled onto seven sides of an ancient now coverless notebook, possibly late at night circa 1988, following an evening’s carousal and in a state of serene intoxication, was at least partly responsible for my losing my position at Callan’s in the early part of 1990. It was a devastating blow, but I’d asked for it, because I’d quit without warning, and then decided I wanted to return in my own sweet time, despite having earlier refused an offer to do so from the school itself.
I begged for the return of my beloved job…not just in person, but by letter and through poor Huw, but this time, they refused to be swayed and I don’t blame them in the slightest, because up to this point, they’d shown incredible tolerance towards my insultingly slack approach to punctuality and other abuses of what was a very fair system, until finally their patience just snapped.
So…two years spent in the greatest job I ever had ended with the last of a triad of decades marked by persistent frenzied social upheaval and artistic innovation.
Reluctantly delivered from a job I genuinely loved, I briefly revived my acting career thanks once again to the influence of my dear friend Ariana. She suggested I might like to play Feste for a production of “Twelfth Night”, to be staged in the summer at the Jacksons Lane theatre in North London. Somehow she knew the director, Sandy. So, after a successful audition for her, I set about re-learning Feste’s lines, and arranging the songs according to the original primitive melodies. My hyperkinetic performance was well-received, and one well-spoken Englishwoman even went so far as to tell me that I was the finest Feste she’d ever seen. It’s a pity she wasn’t a passing casting director.
Once again, the Fool of Illyria had served me well…and in keeping with the festive spirit of the play, rehearsals and performances were accompanied by some pretty heavy partying by myself and most of the members of the cast, until the inevitable sad dispersal. Yet, if the play itself was pure joy to be involved in, the same can’t be said for travelling to and from Highgate for rehearsals and performances, for it was during these lengthy trips across the capital that I started feeling the need to inure myself as never before against what I saw as nocturnal London’s ever-present aura of menace.
It’s likely that years of hard living were finally starting to take their toll on my nervous system, for in addition to alcohol and nicotine, I’d been taking industrial strength doses of caffeine for years, initially in tablet form, and then in the shape of the coffee cocktails I liked to swill one after the other before afternoon classes at Callan’s. This may go some way towards explaining the sheer paranoia which ultimately caused me to start drinking on the way to rehearsals, and then for the first time in my life as a professional actor, during rehearsals. However, I’d promised Sandy I’d not touch a drop for the actual performances, and was as good as my word.
Later in the year, I began another PGCE course, this time at the West London Institute of Higher Education based in Twickenham, taking up residence in nearby Isleworth.
I began quite promisingly, fitting in well, and making good friends, and as might be expected, I excelled in drama and physical education. I didn’t drink during the day and on those rare occasions I did, it was just a question of a pint or so with lunch. I’d mentally determined to complete the course, but as the following piece testifies, I was a hardly abstinent at night.
It was adapted in 2006 from a letter typed during my West London Institute days to an old Westfield friend Lucinda, now a professional photographer. When it was recovered, having never been finished, nor sent, it was as scrap paper, lost in a sea of miscellaneous mementos.

A Letter Unsent

Dear Lucinda
I haven’t been in touch
for a long time.
Sorry.
The last time
I saw you
was in
St. Christopher’s Place.
It was a lovely evening…
when I knocked
that chair over.
I am sorry.
Since then,
I’ve had not
a few accidents
of that kind.
Just three days ago,
I slipped out
in a garden
at a friend’s house…
and keeled over,
not once,
not twice,
but three times,
like a log…
clonking my nut
so violently
that people heard me
in the sitting room.
What’s more,
I can’t remember
a single sentence
spoken
all evening.
The problem is…

A Thrilling but Lethal Lifestyle

My Teaching Practice was due to take place towards the end of the first term but I was desperately behind in my work, so provisionally removed myself from the course in order to decide whether it was worth my staying on or not. In the event I chose to quit, and met with the head of my course to discuss this, and she was very agreeable, making no effort to dissuade me.
However, rather than return to my parents’ home, I stayed on in Isleworth to rekindle my five-year old career as a deliverer of novelty telegrams, while continuing to work as a walk-on artist for the TV series “The Bill”, based in the south London suburb of Merton, Surrey. I also became half of a musical duo formed with a slim young man from the north of the land with short reddish blond hair and brilliant light green eyes who rejoiced in the name of Maxie Coburg, although his true surname was a sight more Mancunian. I’d met him through an ad he’d put in the Stage newspaper for acts for a variety show he was putting together at the time, before going on to perform as Mr Denmark for him a few times.
We began as buskers in Leicester Square, before settling down for rehearsals in the hope of getting some gigs, our repertoire consisting of early Rock and Roll and Motown classics, as well as a host of originals, most written by Maxie, with one or two contributions by yours truly. I wanted to call the band Venus Xtravaganza, but we settled for Maxie’s choice of The Unknowns, if we were ever called anything at all.
Although he was specialising as a singer-songwriter at the time, Maxie has since developed into a true Renaissance man…actor, comedian, songwriter, performer, writer, film maker and esoteric thinker. We remain close friends to this day.
Then, early in 1991, I took off to the seaside town of Hastings for a month or so to attempt to pass a TEFL course in that beautiful old town that’s since become a major London overspill area. How vividly I recall the thrill of seeing seagulls hovering over central Hastings soon after arriving at the station for my interview, which I passed, but I couldn’t say it went well. I constantly avoided my interviewer’s eyes until she virtually ordered me to look at her, then saying something like: “I said look at me, not stare”. This as if to emphasize her belief that I didn’t stand a snowball’s chance in Hell of passing.
Winter 1991 was arctic in a way I haven’t known an English winter to be since. Not literally of course, but I can remember wearing several coats just in order to be able to bear a cold that apparently doesn’t exist any more in this country. I worked like a Trojan but I was struggling terribly, tormented by OCD and its endless demands on my time and energies in the shape of rituals both physical and mental. I didn’t drink at all during the day, but at night I was sometimes so stoned I was incoherent. Predictably perhaps I was failed. I asked the authorities if they might reconsider, but they made it clear to me that their decision was final.
It was a bit of a let-down for sure, but I’d loved my time in Hastings, even while continuing the search for some kind of spiritual solution to my mental troubles…this leading me to a “church” in Claremont Road which was far from the kind of I’d ultimately to seek out. At least part of the reason for my torment may be provided by the following extracts from a letter my mother wrote me during a fascinating but fruitless sojourn:
“…I had a chance to look at your library…I could not believe what I saw. These very strange books, beyond my comprehension, most of them, and I thought what a dissipation of a good mind that thought it right to read such matters…I feel very deeply that you have up to your present state, almost ruined your mind. Your happy, smiling face has left you, your humorous nature, ditto, your spirited state of mind, your cheerful, sunny, exuberant well-being, all gone. Too much thought given to the unhappiness and sad state of others (often those you can not help, in any way)…I’ve said recently that I am convinced that anyone can get oneself into a state of agitation or distress or anxiety by thinking or reading about, or witnessing unpleasant things, and the only thing to do is to, as much as possible, avoid such matters, to not let them get hold in the mind. Your fertile mind has led you astray. Why, and how?”
How many millions of mothers over the course of the centuries have asked this of offspring who’ve been inexplicably drawn to the shadowlands of life only to lose their way back to sanity? Only God knows. Most of course, successfully make the journey back before settling into a normal mode of life, but the danger of becoming lost is always there, especially for those who remain in the shadows far beyond adolescence. Eternal adolescence is arguably one of the prime features of our era, facilitated by its exaltation of youth. And while there are those who’d insist that far fewer young people today are in thrall to the dark glamour of self-destructive genius than in previous Rock eras, the worldview still very much exists.
Rock, as I see it, has never been just a simple popular music derived from various Folk genres, so much as an enormously influential international subculture of varying artistic and intellectual substance. Some critics have even gone so far as to describe it as a religion, and they have a point, as Rock has possessed a spiritual dimension since its inception, and an intellectual one since about ‘65.
Possibly more than any other artist of the sixties, it’s Bob Dylan who helped invest mere Beat music with genuine artistic credibility.
Since Dylan’s glory days as Pop’s first true poet, there have been many Rock stars who’ve looked to earlier strains of Modernism for lyrical inspiration. In fact, it could be said that Rock has been the main engine of the avant-garde impulse in the West since the late 1960s, with all the nihilism this entails.
Those who – like me – grew to maturity in the said swinging sixties, were unavoidably affected on a deep and perhaps largely subconscious level by the cultural revolution of which Rock was such an essential part. For my part, I contend that from quitting formal education aged 16 to coming to faith some two decades later, I was in thrall to a cult of instant gratification that’s been growing progressively more powerful throughout the west since about 1955.
If what I’m saying is false, then why didn’t I build a future for myself during those years, in terms of a profession, a family, financial security, and so on? The truth is that before quitting the booze for good, I viewed all these with an indifference verging on contempt and it hurts me deeply to realise the extent to which I sabotaged my life with such a negative identity.
The following summer of 1992, I made another attempt at passing the TEFL course, this time at Regent’s College named after the famous north London park.
However, by this time I was drinking all day every day, and the course was a disaster as a result, even though I worked hard and even gave some good classes. I still have some video footage of myself teaching and not for single second would anyone watching it believe that I was out of my head on booze.
It was a fabulous summer, and much of it I spent in a state of manic hyperactivity. Bliss it was to stride in the warm suburban evening sun to my local station with the Orb’s eerie “Blue Room” throbbing over and over in my head on my way to yet another long night of drinking and socialising to the point of ecstatic insensibility. I could have passed out on any one of these wild nights and awoken again in Hell, but that didn’t concern me.
The romantic decadence associated with the eighties was no longer even remotely current, and there was a new spirit as I saw it, a mystic techno-bohemianism which appeared to me to be everywhere in the early nineties. I wanted to visit as many clubs and venues as I could where it was being celebrated, but as things turned out I only ever went to one, Cyber Seed in Covent Garden, which was poorly attended and only lasted a short time. However, had I not become a Christian, wild horses couldn’t have prevented me from further exploration.
Later on in this final beautiful lethal summer of intoxication, soon after appearing as Stefano in “The Tempest” at the Conway Hall in Red Lion Square, I  set out on yet another PGCE course, this time at the University of Greenwich in south east London. Bearing the suffix fe for Further Education its purpose was to train myself and my fellow students to teach pupils in sixth form colleges and other further education establishments. On top of this, there were the gigs with Maxie, the novelty telegrams, and who knows what else, and I loved every second of a frenetic lifestyle which the following piece – almost certainly drafted on 8 October 1992, or perhaps a year earlier – serves to evoke it at its apex…and there’s a twilight mood to it, with the birthday boy performing his Dionysian solo dance in defiance of the wholesale ruin of mind, body and soul he’s so obviously invoking.

Lone Birthday Boy Dancing

Yesterday for my birthday,
I started off
with a bottle of wine…
I took the train
into town…
I had half a bitter
at the Cafe de Piaf
in Waterloo…
I went to work
for a couple of hours or so;
I had a pint after work;
I went for an audition;
after the audition,
I had another pint
and a half;
I had another half,
before meeting my mates,
for my b’day celebrations;
we had a pint together;
we went into
the night club,
where we had champagne
(I had three glasses);
I had a further
glass of vino,
by which time,
I was so gone
that I drew an audience
of about thirty
by performing a solo
dancing spot
in the middle
of the disco floor…
We all piled off to the pub
after that,
where I had another drink
(I can’t remember
what it was)…
I then made my way home,
took the bus from Surbiton,
but ended up
in the wilds of Surrey;
I took another bus home,
and watched some telly
and had something to eat
before crashing out…
I really, really enjoyed
the eve, but today,
I’ve been walking around
like a zomb;
I’ve had only one drink today,
an early morning
restorative effort;
I spent the day working,
then I went to a bookshop,
where, like a monk,
I go for a day’s
drying out session…
Drying out is really awful;
you jump at every shadow;
you feel dizzy,
you notice everything;
very often,
I don’t follow through…

Chapter Seven – Reborn in the Nick of Time

Reborn in the Nick of Time

The period embracing the autumn of 1992 and the first few weeks of winter may well have been the most debauched of my entire existence.
I’d get up early, possibly about six, and then prepare myself for a day ahead with a bottle of wine, usually fortified, then I’d keep my units topped up throughout the day with vodka or gin, taking regular swigs from the miniatures I liked to have with me at all times. Some evenings I’d spend in central London, others with my new friends from the college, and we were a close and pretty wild crowd for a while. There were times in town when I couldn’t keep the booze down, so I’d order a king-sized cola from MacDonalds, which I’d then lace with spirits before cautiously sipping from it through a straw. I was a euphoric drunk and so almost never unpleasant…but I was unpredictable…a true Dionysian who’d cry out on a British Rail train in the middle of the afternoon, causing passengers to flinch with alarm…or perform a wild disjointed Karate kick into thin air on a crowded London street. One afternoon I tore my clothes to shreds after having arrived too late for an audition and a barman who served me later on in the day asked me if I’d been involved in a fight…and then there was the shameful night at Waterloo station – or was it Liverpool Street? – that I had to be escorted across the concourse to my train by one of the drunks who used to sleep rough at mainline stations back then.
However, all these insane incidents came to a head one night in early 1993 in an Indian restaurant in Hampton Court close to the Surrey-London border. I’d been dining there with two female friends when, suddenly feeling like pure death, I asked the one closest to me whether I looked as bad as I felt. She told me I did, so I got up from the table, walked a few paces and then collapsed as if stone dead in the middle of the restaurant. I was then carried bodily out into the fresh night air by two or three Indian waiters, one of whom set about shocking some life back into me by flicking ice cold water in my face. “Don’t give up”, he pleaded, his voice betraying true concern…and in time thanks to him some semblance of life returned, and I was well enough to be driven home.
Yet, within two days I was drinking as heavily as before, continuing to do so virtually around the clock until the weekend. I then spent Saturday evening with my close friend from the restaurant, and at some point in the morning of the 16th after having drunk solidly all night I asked her to fill a long glass with neat gin and each sip took me further and further into the desired state of blissful forgetfulness.
I awoke exhilarated, which was normal for me following a lengthy binge. It was my one drying out day of the week, and so I probably spent it writing as well as cleaning up the accumulated chaos of the past week. One thing I definitely did was listen to a radio documentary on the legendary L.A. Rock band the Doors which I’d taped some weeks or perhaps months earlier. I especially savoured “When the Music’s Over” from what was then one of my favourite albums, “Strange Days” released in the wake of the Summer of Love on my 12th birthday, 7 October 1967. This apocalyptic epic with its unearthly screams and ecstatically discordant guitar solo seemed to me about living in the shadow of death, beckoning death, mocking death, defying death.
I powerfully identified with the Doors’ gifted singer Jim Morrison…who’d been drawn as a very young man to poets of darkly prophetic intensity, such as Blake, Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Artaud, as well as the poets of the Beat Generation, who were themselves children of the – largely French – Romantic poètes maudits, whose works have the power to change lives, as they surely did Morrison’s. His philosophy of life was clearly informed by Blake, who wrote of “the road of excess” leading to “the palace of wisdom”, while his hell raising persona came to a degree from Rimbaud, who extolled the virtues of “a long, immense and systematic derangement of all the senses” as an angel-faced hooligan in the Paris of the early 1870s. What a price he paid…dead at just 27…like Jones, Hendrix, Joplin before him, and so the ’60s dream was revealed as the beguiling chimera it’d been all along.
After having spent the day revelling in my own inane notion of myself as a poet on the edge like my heroes, at some point in the early evening I got what I’d been courting for so long…an intimation of early death, when for pretty well the first time in my life alcohol stopped being my beloved elixir and became a mortal enemy, causing my legs to lose sensation and my life force to recede at a furious and terrifying rate. In a blind panic, I opened a spare bottle of sparkling wine I had about the house even though I’d hoped not to have to drink that day. Once I’d drained it, I felt better for a while, in fact so much so that I took a few snaps of myself lounging around looking haggard and unshaven, with freshly cropped hair.
Soon after this macabre photo session I set off in search of more alcohol. Arriving at a local delicatessen, the Asian shop keeper nervously told me that the off-license wasn’t open for some time yet. There was nothing for me to do but take refuge on a nearby green, where I lay for a while, still dressed I imagine in the shabby white cut-offs I’d been wearing earlier. Finally, the offie opened and I was able to buy more booze. I can’t remember what I bought, but I think it may have been a litre of gin, because that’s what I was guzzling from the next day. One of the last things I remember doing on Sunday evening was singing hymns in a nearby Methodist church as the tears flowed…tears of remorse, tears of fear, tears of desperation.
I’ve no further memory of what happened that hellish night, but there were many such nights ahead. At least one of these saw me endlessly pacing up and down corridors and stairs in an attempt to stay conscious and so – as I saw it – not die…and each time I shut my eyes I could have sworn I saw demonic entities beckoning me into a bottomless black abyss. I set about ridding my house of artefacts I somehow knew to be offensive to God from what I think was the night of the 16th and 17th onwards. Many books were destroyed…books on astrology and numerology and other mystical and occult subjects, books on war and crime and atrocity, and books about artists some call accursed for their kinship with drunkenness and madness and death.
I genuinely believe though that for all the horrors I underwent, it was during that first night that I came to accept Christ as my Saviour. Had my violent conversion not come about when it did, I might have been lost forever, depending of course on where a person stands on the issue of Predestination and Free Will, but I’d have surely immersed myself in the new Bohemianism of the 1990s. The adversary values of the sixties had apparently vanished by about 1973, when in fact they’d simply gone back underground, where they set about fertilising new anti-establishment clans such as the Anarcho-Punks and the New Age Travellers who quietly flourished throughout the ’80s. Around ’92, some kind of amalgam between these tribes and the growing Rave-Dance movement produced yet another great counterculture, and I was ready…ready as I’d never been to take my place as a zealot of the New Edge, only to be delivered from its seductive grasp by a violent “Road to Damascus” conversion to Christianity. However, if I’d been reborn against all the odds, I still had to suffer in the physical, if only briefly.
Many Christians are of the opinion that the longer a person puts off coming to Christ the less likely it becomes of their ever doing so and I’m among them. I also believe that Christians who convert relatively late in life may be required to pay a far higher price for the follies of their pre-Christian existence than more youthful converts, especially if these include alcohol, drugs, fornication, and involvement in the occult. God can and does heal Christians damaged by their pre-conversion sins but He’s not obliged to do so as his Grace is sufficient, so while I was almost certainly already a Christian by the morning of the 17th of January, my ordeal was far from over. I somehow made it into New Eltham that Monday morning for classes at the University, but by evening I felt so ill I started swigging from my litre bottle of gin. I also phoned Alcoholics Anonymous at my mother’s request, and agreed to give a meeting a shot.
Next day, on the way to Richmond College, I got the feeling my heart was about to explode, not just once but over and over again. After classes, I tried walking through Twickenham but I couldn’t feel my legs and was struggling to stay conscious, so I ended up ordering a double brandy from the pub next door to the Police Station. I was shaking so much the landlord thought I was fresh from an interrogation session. Later, I was thrown out of another pub for preaching at the top of my voice, then, walking through Twickenham town centre I started making the sign of the cross to passers-by, telling one poor young guy never to take to drink like some kind of walking advert for temperance and he nodded without saying a word before scurrying away.
Back home, in an effort to calm myself down, I dug out an old capsule of Chlomethiazole, a sedative commonly used in treating and controlling the effects of acute alcohol withdrawal, but dangerous, in fact potentially fatal, when used in conjunction with alcohol. I still had some capsules left over from about 1990 when I’d been prescribed them by my then doctor, which meant they’d long gone beyond their expiry date. For a time I felt better and was able to sleep, but soon after waking I felt worse than ever. Later, at an AA meeting, I kept leaving the room to douse my head in cold water, anything to shock some life back into me, to the dismay of my sponsor Dan who wanted me to stay put, as if doing so would exert a healing effect.
Wednesday morning saw me pacing the office of the first available doctor, who seemed at a loss as to what to do with me, but then it may have been touch and go as to whether I was going to stay on my feet or overdose on the spot and die on him. It was he who prescribed me the Valium which caused me to fall into a deep, deep sleep which may have saved my life, and from which I awoke to sense that a frontier had been passed and that I was out of danger at long last.
The piece below first existed as a series of rough notes scrawled on a piece of scrap paper in the dying days of 1993 and are a pretty accurate account of the incidents I’ve just described.

Oblivion in Recession

The legs started going,
Howlings
In my head.
Thought I’d go
Kept awake with water,
Breathing,
Arrogantly telling myself
I’d stay straight.
Drank gin and wine,
Went out,
Tried to buy more,
Unshaven,
Filthy white shorts,
Lost, rolling on lawn,
Somehow got home.
Monday, waiting for offie,
Looked like death,
Fear in eyes
Of passers-by,
Waiting for drink,
Drink relieved me.
Drank all day,
Collapsed wept
“Don’t Die on Me”.
Next day,
Double brandy
Just about settled me,
Drank some more,
Thought constantly
I’d collapse
Then what?
Fit? Coronary?
Insanity? Worse?
Took a Heminevrin
Paced the house
All night,
Pain in chest,
Weak legs,
Lack of feeling
In extremities,
Visions of darkness.
Drank water
To keep the
Life functions going
Played devotional music,
Dedicated my life
To God,
Prayed constantly,
Renounced evil.
Next day,
Two Valiums
Helped me sleep.
By eve,
I started to feel better.
Suddenly,
All is clearer,
Taste, sounds,
I feel human again.
I made my choice,
And oblivion has receded,
And shall disappear…

Called by Contact for Christ

To reiterate an earlier assertion…there is a widely held belief within Christianity that the sooner a person comes to Christ the better when it comes to their immortal soul. The same could be said for their subsequent relationship with God. There may for example be serious health problems resulting from a former self-destructive lifestyle which could damage their effectiveness as Christian witnesses.
On the other hand, one possible advantage of being a late convert is a testimony with the power to cause those normally sceptical of the transforming power of the born again experience to sit up and take notice. Such as that of this rescued Rock and Roll child…raised in an age in which messages of revolt…and defiance of all forms of authority, society, the family, God himself were being spread by an adversary culture led by Rock music. We drank deeply we children of the sixties from the spiritual darkness that was all around from about ’65 onwards, and it affected us in ways I believe to be unique to us. That darkness has been a thorn in my flesh ever since my first days as a Christian, when I suffered from panic attacks that at one stage could be triggered simply by venturing beyond my front door, and I’ve never been able to fully throw it off.
I struggled on with the PGCE, partly at the University of Greenwich, and partly at Richmond College, Twickenham, while rehearsing for a couple of tiny parts for the play “Simples of the Moon” by Rosalind Scanlon, under the direction of Ariana. Based on the life of James Joyce’s troubled, fascinating daughter the dancer Lucia Joyce, it premiered at the Lyric Studio, Hammersmith on the 4th of February 1993. I also attended occasional drugs and alcohol counselling sessions at a church in Greenwich, south east London with dear Ellen, a lovely blonde woman of about 45 with a soft and soothing London accent and the gentlest pale blue eyes imaginable.
The only time I ever knew her to lose her composure was when I announced over the phone that a matter of hours after deciding of my own volition to stop taking Diazepam, I’d switched to Chlomethiazole…unaware at the time that when it interacts with Valium, it can be fatal. However, enough time had passed between my taking the capsule and calling Ellen for me to be out of acute danger, and I can recall her literally laughing with relief at this realisation.
I owe so much to people like Ellen, and my AA sponsor Dan – who kept tabs on me during my very worst time – and other AA friends like Brian, who had such a soft spot for me because it had only been a short time before we met that he’d been in an even worse state than me. As far as I’m concerned, they’re the salt of the earth. Still, I chose to attend only a handful of meetings before stopping altogether.
One of the reasons for this was that a matter of days after coming to Christ, I received a phone call from Denver Cashe, a counsellor for an organisation called Contact for Christ based in Selsdon, South London. I think he’d got in touch as a result of my having half-heartedly filled in a form that I’d picked up on a train, perhaps the previous summer while filled with alcoholic anticipation as I slowly approached Waterloo station by British Rail train with the sun setting over the foreboding south London cityscape. Knowing me I tried to put him off, but he was persistent and before I knew it he was at the door of my parents’ house, a trim, dark, handsome man in late middle age called Spencer with gently piercing coffee coloured eyes and a luxuriant white moustache, and at his insistence we prayed together.
Some time later I visited him and his wife Rose at his large and elegant house where suburb meets country just beyond the Greater London border. On that day, he and I made an extensive list of aspects of my pre-Christian life he felt required deep repentance, and we prayed over each of these in turn. My continuing use of tobacco was one of the lesser issues addressed, and while it may have been coincidental, soon after I’d taken my last Valium, I stopped enjoying cigarettes, so that a single draw was enough to interfere with my breathing for the rest of the day, and so rob me of a good night’s sleep.
In addition, we discussed which church I should be attending, and there was some talk of my joining he and Rose at their little family fellowship in the suburbs, but in the end, he gave his blessing to Cornerstone Bible Church, where I went on to be baptised by the pastor.
Cornerstone, known today as Cornerstone the Church, is a large fellowship affiliated to the Word of Faith Movement and specifically Rhema Ministries of Johannesburg, South Africa, pastored by Ray McCauley. I’d attended my very first service there even before becoming a Christian in late 1992. Drunk at the time as I recall, I’d sat next to a beautiful blonde woman of about 55 whom I later discovered to be a successful actress who at the height of her career in the sixties had appeared in television cult classics “The Avengers” and “The Prisoner”. Apart from an elder from the Jesus Fellowship, who’d laid hands on me at a meeting of theirs in central London, she was my very first Christian mentor, if only for a very brief period of time. However, I was never to see or speak to her again as I didn’t return to the church for several months, and by the time I did as a new believer, I think she’d moved to another church. We kept on missing each other, and she died in June 2001. I’ve never forgotten her.

Descent into the Hothouse

In the early part of ’94, I set out on the final phase of the PGCE (FE) at the University of Greenwich in New Eltham, South East London. To recap, there’d been two previous attempts at passing this exam, the first taking place in 1986-’87 at Homerton College, Cambridge, and the second, in 1990, at the former West London Institute of Higher Education, based on two campuses in the suburbs of Isleworth and East Twickenham. The third was the only one I actually managed to complete, although not successfully…mainly I think because I didn’t show enough authority in the classroom at Esher College where I did my Teaching Practice. To their credit, my tutors at Greenwich did offer me the opportunity of retaking just the TP component, but I chose to turn them down. Perhaps I was a little put out about being failed after so much time and effort…but if I was, it wasn’t for long because in September I successfully auditioned for a newly formed fringe theatre group called Grip based at the Rose and Crown pub in Kingston for the role of Roote in Harold Pinter’s little known “The Hothouse”.
While perhaps not among Pinter’s greatest plays, “The Hothouse” is a superbly written piece nonetheless, and supremely Pinteresque, with its almost high poetic verbal virtuosity and inventiveness and dark surreal humour laced with a constant sense of impending violence. Written in 1958, it wasn’t performed until 1980, when it was directed by Pinter himself for London’s Hampstead and Ambassador Theatres.
From the auditions onwards, I gelled with the American director Ben Evans because while most of the auditions I’d attended up to this point had hinged on the time-honoured method of the actor performing a piece from memory before a panel of interviewers, Ben had us reading from the play in small groups, which enabled us to attain a basic feel for the character and so feel like we were actually acting rather than coldly reciting. For me, this is the only way to audition.
Once he’d told me the part of Roote was mine, I devoted myself to his vision of Roote, the pompous yet deranged director of an unnamed English psychiatric hospital: the Hothouse of the title. He demanded of me an interpretation of Roote which was deeply at odds with my usual highly Method-oriented, subtle, intense, introspective and yet somehow also emotionally vehement approach to acting, but his directorial instincts were spot-on, as his production went on to receive spectacular reviews not just in the local press, but in the international listings magazine “Time Out” in which my performance was described as “flawlessly accurate” and “lit by flashes of black humour”. An amazing triumph for a humble fringe show.
A major agent went out of her way to express her interest in me, and asked me to ensure my details reach her which I did…but I never heard from her again, possibly due to the shabby condition of my CV at the time; and I didn’t pursue the matter further. Why I didn’t more fully exploit the opportunities offered me by the unexpected success of “The Hothouse” and so go on to the West End superstardom some may have seen as mine for the taking remains something of a mystery.
In my defence I can only say that since my recent conversion my priorities had shifted so that I viewed worldly success with less relish than I’d done only a few years before. Also, I badly missed the relaxation alcohol once provided me with following my work onstage, and the revels extending deep into the night during which I’d throw my youth and affections about me like some kind of maniacal gambler. So, while I still loved acting itself, the process of being an actor had become pure torture. I’d boxed myself into the position of no longer being able to enjoy social situations as others do, nor to relax. This may have been something to do with what the state of my endorphins, the body’s natural feel-good chemicals, there being a theory doing the rounds today that these can be permanently depleted by long-term abuse of alcohol and other narcotics…but I’m in no position to either endorse nor dismiss it myself.
To further complicate matters, towards the end of ’94 I started suffering from deep tormenting spiritual problems for which I’d ultimately seek a solution in the shape of what is known as Deliverance Ministry. This came first through a venerable evangelist called Frank, who laid hands on me after lunch at his home deep in the heart of the Devonshire countryside…but there were further sessions…one of these taking place at night in a beautiful old Anglican church with just myself, the vicar, and the vicar’s wife in attendance.
Within a short time of “The Hothouse” reaching the end of its two week run, Grip’s artistic director, Richard, asked me if I’d like to audition for his upcoming production of Jim Cartwright’s two-handed play “Two”. Naturally I said yes and so after a successful audition, found myself playing all the male characters opposite a brilliant Liverpudlian actress, Jean, who played all the female, and by the end of the run the houses were so packed that people were sitting on the side of the stage at our feet, something I’d never experienced before on the London fringe. Yet, as much as I loved working with Richard and Jean, I dreaded the end of each performance, which would see me make my excuses as soon as it was possible to do so without causing undue offence.
Release from what had become a torturous dungeon of sobriety came while I was attending some unrelated function at the Rose and Crown a day or so following my final performance in “Two”, when a guy I’d only just met offered to buy me a drink and I asked for a glass of wine. Apart from the time at my parents’ house a few weeks earlier when I took a swig of what I thought was water but which turned out to be vodka or gin, this was the first alcohol to pass my lips since January ’93.
This single glass of wine made me feel amazing, doubly so given the purity of my system. I cycled home that night in a state of total rapture, feeling for the first time in months that I could do anything. Over the next few week my drinking increased, reaching a climax in a pub in Twickenham where I met an old university friend who’d just finished a course at St Mary’s University College in nearby Strawberry Hill, and where I drank and smoked myself into a stupor.
Cycling home afterwards, I took a bend near Hampton Wick and came off my bike, striking my head against a bus shelter. I stayed flat on my back for a while abject and stinking of drink -I could’ve sworn I saw a shadowy figure running towards me as I lay there in the dark – but before long I was shakily resuming my journey home. However, weeks of controlled drinking and one massive binge, possibly combined with the ill effects of a violent blow to the head, resulted in my becoming ill and virtually incapacitated for what might have been as long as a fortnight. Time and again during this awful period I’d awake from a feverish semi-sleep, dizzy, faint and nauseous, with my face a deathly yellowy pale, but each time a single further second of consciousness seemed beyond me I felt the Lord breathing life back into me and the terror of dying subsided. All I could do was lie around, waiting, praying for a return to normality…and when this came, I determined never to drink again as long as I lived. But we swiftly forget our sojourns in Hell…

Chapter Eight – A Final Distant Clarion Cry

The Twilight of an Actor

A few months after appearing in Jim Cartwright’s bitter-sweet two-hander “Two”, I performed in one final play at the Rose and Crown theatre, the character-driven comedy “Lovelives”. Written entirely by the cast, it consisted of a series of sketches centring on the disastrous antics of a group of singletons who’d come together at a lonely hearts club in the suburbs. Perhaps then it chimed perfectly with the spirit of British post-war comedy and its characteristic celebration of banality and even failure. A great success at the R&C, it could in my view have been developed into a television play or even series, but sadly, as is all too often the case, a brilliant cast dispersed after the final show.
Later in ’95, I played two small roles in a production at the Tristan Bates theatre near Leicester Square of the famous Greek tragedy “Iphigeneia in Taurois”, written by Euripides somewhere between 414 and 412 BC, these being Pylades, constant companion of the main character Orestes, and the Messenger, who I played as a maniacal fool with the kind of “refined” English accent once supposedly affected by policemen and non-commissioned officers. Directed by a close friend, the houses were sparse at first, picking up towards the end of the run.
A few months later in January ’96, I joined a Christian theatre company based at the Elim Pentecostal church in West Croydon, Surrey called Street Level, going on to serve variously as MC, script writer, actor, singer and musician with two other members, married company leader Serena, and 19 year old Rebecca from nearby Sanderstead.
Together, we toured a series of shows around schools in various – usually tough – multicultural areas of South East London. One of these, “Choices”, was almost entirely written by me, although it had been based on an idea by Serena who also heavily edited it for performance purposes. On the whole, the kids were incredibly receptive to our productions, and we were greeted by them with an almost uniform affection, and there was an incredible chemistry between Serena, Rebecca and myself…and then things started to go wrong.
Towards the end of the summer, Serena asked me to write a large scale project for the group, suggesting a contemporary version of John Bunyan’s classic Christian allegory “The Pilgrim’s Progress”. This I set about doing, and after some weeks of labouring over what turned out to be an unwieldy and often violent epic punctuated by scenes of dark humour that occasionally verged on the coarse, I started to have second thoughts about carrying on with Street Level. The play, “Paul Grim’s Progress”, had left me poor shape spiritually, and I didn’t fancy too many more of the long and costly train journeys that were necessary to get me to Croydon and back. Consequently I began to withdraw, which wasn’t a very kind thing to do because Serena had started to depend on me, especially since Rebecca’s departure at the end of the “Choices” tour. What’s more, she’d taken on the responsibility of new productions, and the training of a fresh crew of young Christian actors.
As things turned out, “Paul Grim’s Progress” was never produced, which is not surprising because although artistically it was a good piece, it was overly dark for a Christian play, with some scenes like something out of a horror movie. In terms of my Christian life, I was still only a little over three years old, and it showed. In time I destroyed all but a few pages of it.
By the time I made my final exit from Street Level, I’d long defected from Cornerstone to the Thames Vineyard Christian Fellowship, part of the Association of Vineyard Churches founded by John Wimber in the 1970s. This was as a result of being told by a phone friend that the Vineyard movement contained members whose spiritual gifts were in the realm of the truly exceptional. My curiosity aroused, I went along one Sunday evening and had a powerful experience which made me want to stay; and so I did.
As with Cornerstone I joined a Home Fellowship group where I completed part of the Alpha course, which had been pioneered by Nicky Gumbel of West London’s famous Holy Trinity Brompton. I’d visited HTB at some point in the mid ’90s, when it was at the height of the revival movement known as the Toronto Blessing. This was so called because it’d been ignited in January 1994 at the Toronto Airport Vineyard Church by St. Louis Vineyard pastor Randy Clark, who’d himself received it from South African evangelist Rodney Howard Brown during a service at Rhema Bible Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, then pastored by Kenneth Hagin Jr., father of the Word of Faith movement. Word Faith being now one of the major strains of Charismatic Christianity, with its emphasis on “Positive Confession”.
The Anointing spread to the UK in the summer of 1994 where it was eventually dubbed The Toronto Blessing by The Daily Telegraph. Its main centres included HTB, Terry Virgo’s New Frontiers family of churches and Gerald Coates’ Pioneer People. Pioneer’s centre at the time was a cinema in the Surrey suburb of Esher, which I visited a couple of times, and which was so packed that I was forced to stand all throughout the service, a situation which was duplicated when I dropped in at the London HQ of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God one afternoon around about the same time. Like many Charismatic churches, UCKG upholds the Fivefold ministry, and so believes that the five gifts referred to in Ephesians 4:11, namely Apostle, Prophet, Evangelist, Pastor and Teacher, are still in operation.
My last hurrah as an actor came in the spring of ’98, when I started rehearsing for a production of Shakespeare’s infamous Scottish Play, to be staged at Fulham’s Lost Theatre in the summer…and despite the fact that my three cameos – as Lennox, the Doctor, and an Old Man – were praised by cast and audience members alike, I’ve not acted since beyond a handful of ill-fated auditions. What’s more, while I’m still open to the possibility of film or TV work, the likelihood of my ever appearing onstage in a play again is virtually nonexistent. Quite simply, the passion to perform in front of a live audience that raged within me like a forest fire for more than two decades has long been extinguished, or rather turned to dread.
Some months after my final performance at the Lost Theatre I wrote the prose piece that eventually turned into “Such a Short Space of Time”. Its creation took place in what I recall as the glorious summer of 1999 which was of course the last of the millennium, and my parents were on vacation at the time, so I was often at the house where I’d spent my adolescence and young manhood, performing a variety of tasks such as watering my mother’s flowers, or just simply soaking up the atmosphere of a place I loved.
Taking cunning advantage of my parents’ absence I transferred some of my old vinyl records onto cassette, something that my own ancient hi-fi was incapable of doing. It was an unsettling experience…to listen to songs that, perhaps in the cases of some of them, I’d not heard for ten or fifteen years, or more, and which evoked with a heartrending intensity a time in my life when I was filled to the brim with sheer youthful joy of life and undiluted hope for the future.
Yet as I did so, it seemed to me that it was only very recently that I’d first heard them, despite the colossal changes that’d taken place since, not just in my own life but those of my entire generation. And so I was confronted at once with the devastating transience of human life, and the effect the passage of time exerts on us all.

Such a Short Space of Time

I love…not just those…
I knew back then,
But those…
Who were young
Back then,
But who’ve since
Come to grief, who…
Having soared so high,
Found the
Consequent descent
Too dreadful to bear,
With my past itself,
Which was only
Yesterday,
No…even less time…
A moment ago,
And when I play
Records from 1975,
Soul records,
Glam records,
Progressive records,
Twenty years melt away
Into nothingness…
What is a twenty-year period?
Little more than
A blink of an eye…
How could
Such a short space
Of time
Cause such devastation?

Dispersals and Beginnings

A few months later and the troubled, turbulent 20th Century gave way to the 21st to the sound of fireworks frantically exploding all throughout my neighbourhood.
Phoning my father that night to wish him a happy new year I discovered that my mother was desperately ill with flu. It’s crossed my mind since that she may have become susceptible to the flu virus partly as a result of stress caused by the fact that I’d latterly quit yet another course; this time an MA in French and Theory of Literature from University College, London, which was one of the most prestigious of its kind in the world. In time though, her incredible Scots-Irish constitution – shared by so many of the early pioneers of the American South and West – saw her through to a complete recovery.
I’d found the course magnetically compelling on an intellectual level, despite an awareness that writing extensively about Literary Theory might come increasingly to disturb me, and perhaps even challenge my faith, given its emphasis on what is known as Deconstruction, a term coined by French philosopher Jacques Derrida. I withdrew on the advice of one or two members of the church I was attending at the time, Liberty Christian Centre, a satellite of the Kensington Temple, another London church which had been receptive to the Anointing as well as the subsequent Brownsville Revival, and part of the Elim Pentecostal movement. It’s a decision that’s haunted me ever since…although its rightness was recently corroborated by an American pastor whose sermons are among the most brilliant I’ve ever heard.
Subsequent to making it I started playing guitar for Liberty at the urging of my friend Martina, Russian wife of Pastor Phil of New York City. She went on to become worship leader, alternating as such with Maria, another close friend, originally from Peru. It was Phil who’d got in touch with me the previous summer through KT about joining a cell group at his home in the Surrey suburbs. This eventually mutated into Liberty, with which I forged very close ties from the outset. Then, shortly after agreeing to be Liberty’s lone musician, I quit my position as a telephone canvasser for an e-commerce company based in Surbiton, Surrey, thus bringing a fairly lengthy period spent as an office worker to an end.
A real change in my professional fortunes came around Christmastime when I was made lead singer for a Jazz band which had earlier been formed by Barrie Guard, an old friend of my father’s going on to be complemented at various times by my dad, double bass player Stu, and myself. We went on to cut several very fine demos arranged by Barrie, but they didn’t result in the interest they deserved, given the talent involved.
In early ’01, Pastor Phil decided to dissolve Liberty, which was a sad event for all of us, so I made yet another return to Cornerstone, to be joined there by Maria and a couple of other friends from the LCC. What’s more, I stayed in close touch with gifted guitarist Rowan. We cut a few demos together of some Christian songs I’d written at the inspiration of a visitor from KT, and may work together again yet. Around about the same time, while working as a door-to-door leafleter, I took a short computer course at my local adult education centre, but nothing came of it in terms of employment.
The following summer, in the wake of the 2002 Shelton Arts Festival, the Jazz band disbanded, which was a real shame because we’d finally found the audience we’d been searching for all along at the festival, evidenced by the passion with which our first performance there was greeted. The day after our final show, I started working from home making appointments for a travelling salesman, and was briefly very successful at it, until things started tailing off in the autumn and I was let go. By this time I’d effectively left Cornerstone for good, although I have returned a few times since. This sudden exit came in consequence of a desire born of intensive internet research to seek out churches existing beyond the Pentecostal/Charismatic fold, these being Cessationist, which is to say they don’t accept that the more spectacular Gifts of the Holy Spirit such as Tongues and Prophecy are still in operation. Up until then, any church that didn’t encourage the speaking in other tongues I’d not recognised as being truly Christian. That is not the case today.
One of my main inspirations during this period of wandering was the Cessationist Sermon Audio website, and I downloaded so many of their sermons that my computer may’ve crashed as a result. I was also inspired by the many online Discernment Ministries, although not all of these were – or are – Cessationist, and among the churches I visited were Bethel Baptist Church (Wimbledon), Christ Church (Teddington) and Duke Street Church, (Richmond), all located in the pleasant and affluent outer suburbs of south west London.
Bethel is an Independent Fundamentalist Baptist church based on the US model and therefore using the King James Version of the Bible only. I went to three – possibly successive – services at Bethel, and fully intended to return for a fourth and so witness the preaching of Sermon Audio favourite David Cloud of Way of Life Ministries, but never did. What happened was that I was held up at Wimbledon British Rail station for over an hour on my final Sunday at Bethel and this may have put me off travelling by train to church, although I was also tiring of the constant new boy status of the inveterate church-hopper.
Christ Church is part of the Free Church of England which separated from the established C of E in 1844 in response to the High Church Anglicanism of the then Bishop of Exeter, Henry Phillpotts. It’s Evangelical, as well as liturgical and Episcopal, and its member churches adhere to the Doctrines of Grace, also known as the five points of Calvinism, namely Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace, and the Perseverance of the Saints. According to Calvinism, those who form part of the Elect have been predestined to final salvation by God, and that no one can come to saving faith through their own free will due to total depravity.
Duke Street is also a Grace (Baptist) church, while Bethel is Free Will. As a result, many Calvinists would describe it as Arminian, after the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius who emphasized free will and individual responsibility when it comes to responding to the Gospel. They would not, however, be entirely accurate in doing so because true Arminians maintain that salvation can be lost, while most IFB fellowships believe in the doctrine of Once Saved Always Saved. In short, they are neither Calvinist nor Arminian, which is an oxymoronic statement to some believers.
For me, all true believers are united by a clear adherence to certain key doctrines forming the basis of the one true faith without which there can be no salvation, even when they may be divided by non-saving inessentials, or secondary truths. For example, while I’m an upholder of baptism by full immersion, I certainly don’t believe adherents of infant baptism to be heretics, at least not automatically. On the other hand, I have a real problem with those who maintain that a person must be baptised in order to be saved, because the Bible makes it clear that we are saved by faith alone. That said, every Christian should be baptised by full immersion because God commands it, and God urges us to keep his commandments. Also, while I believe that Christ’s return will be followed by his establishing a literal thousand year reign on earth, which makes me a pre-millennialist, a person can insist that Christ won’t return until after the millennium, or that the millennium lies in the past, and still be a saved Christian. What are at issue here are justifiable differences in scriptural interpretation.
Before 2003, which was my year of relentless internet research, I’d known next to nothing about the finer points of my faith, although I was fairly well versed in the subject of prophecy thanks to having been introduced to this early in my Christian life by Spencer and Grace, through various magazines and books such as “Prophecy Today” and the works of Barry R Smith. I had no clue as to the meaning of Calvinism or Arminianism, Predestination or Foreknowledge, Cessationism or Continuationism and so on, but that didn’t affect the state of my soul, in fact, no one is either saved or damned by believing one or the other of these distinctions, but by faith alone, with true saving faith producing the fruits of repentance. No Christian has a perfect knowledge of the truth, but I believe there is unity to be found between Evangelicals adhering to the fundamentals of the faith irrespective of what church they choose to worship in, but this can never be achieved at the expense of compromising the pure Word of God.

Until recently when I became a member of Duke Street, I hadn’t been settled within a church since 2001, which points to a deep inner turbulence that I still haven’t managed to understand…although it may be at least partly attributable to the fact that I accepted Christ relatively late. After all, the Bible makes it clear that each person who rejects the sovereignty of the fleshly realm for Christ’s sake will know incessant tribulation and persecution. Perhaps this is especially true of repentant Christians who come to faith following a relatively long period of time within the decadent heart of the world as avid flunkies of the Flesh. However, as comfort these late converts have a true and infinitely worthwhile purpose in life. This was something that constantly escaped me in my youth, for all the fierce, flaming fanaticism of my beliefs and ideals.
In many ways though I’ve been my own worst enemy. One by one I’ve had to slay evil habits left over from my pre-Christian existence. In my early days as a Christian for instance I still entertained a fixation on the occult, albeit from a Christian perspective. Now I can barely stand to look at pages filled with occult information and symbols. Most recently I’ve had to address the matter of my dress, which may not seem very important to some – God looks at the heart after all – but I disagree. For close on a decade I was more or less addicted to designer sportswear, and among the objects of my love affair were shady baseball caps, sweat tops with massive logos, flashy striped trakkie Bs, and chunky branded trainers…and I wore an earring too, having had my ear pierced in 1979. Some Christians associate earrings on men with ancient pagan idolatry, and specifically the notion of being enslaved, and that makes good sense to me. I’ve recently come to realise that if a Christian’s outer appearance fails to reflect a changed life, he may be cheating others of the chance of coming to Christ through him. He will also be cheating himself of respect, and God of potential converts. In short, I think it’s time I started looking like the Christian I profess to be. Perhaps then I might actually start acting like a person worthy of the name.
In a general sense the year 2000 turned out to be something of a turning point for me, not just spiritually, but in terms of my entire personality, which has become more inward looking, even by the standards of the previous seven years. Significantly perhaps, the previous year had been the first since I was about 17 that I faced the world with my hair its natural medium brown after having dyed it for nearly three decades. What prompted this was not a sudden loathing for the vanity of the bottle blond, but the fact that the peroxide-based streaking kits I favoured were causing me to have breathing difficulties. At first I missed being blond, but in time I came to prefer my natural colour after years of youthful blond androgyny. The fact is that throughout my twenties and for much of my thirties I remained in a state of extended adolescence, blond being after all the natural colour of eternal youth.
I’ve elicited a lot of admiration in my time for attempting to take the romantic bohemian rebel existence to its logical conclusion when all around me were conforming at a furious rate, and perhaps still do. But the price for doing so has been high, in terms of social and financial humiliation, for which I’ve no one to blame but myself. If I thought they’d listen I’d tell the young…listen to your parents, not the voices of fashionable rebellion…because they’re trying to protect you from social failure out of knowledge of how painful this is beyond a certain age.
Young people still worship at the altar of romantic rebellion as they’ve done since time immemorial, but perhaps not to the same degree as my own poor generation. We came to maturity to a frenetic Rock soundtrack in the tail-spinning nineteen sixties, and who can say what effect it had on us, this music…tailor-made to inspire a generation scornful of deferred gratification, a generation of hipsters.
However, Rock was far more than another mere music form…being a total art involving poetry, theatre, fashion, but even more than that…a way of life with a strong spiritual foundation. It could be said that its first true ancestor was the great 19th Century artistic and cultural movement known as Romanticism, which reached a climax with Nietzsche who by declaring God’s death, cleared the way for the eventual rule of a Do Your Own Thing philosophy so dear to the heart of Rock and Roll culture. Of course, nothing is new under the sun, but a strong case can be made for Romanticism as having birthed the notion of the artist as tormented genius at the vanguard of social revolution and eternally defiant of middle class restraint and respectability.

The March of the Modern

Tracing the history of the artist as rebel…it was the great English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley who may’ve been the first to give expression to the notion of an artistic avant-garde by asserting that “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”.
Then, in the post-Napoleonic Paris of the early 1830s, a seminal avant garde emerged. They were the Jeunes-France, a band of young Romantic writers allegedly dubbed the Bousingos by the press following a night of riotous boozing on the part of some of their number. Their leading lights, among them a fiery Théophile Gautier decades before he became an establishment darling, cultivated dandified and eccentric personas intended to shock the bourgeoisie, while inclining to political radicalism. Needless to say perhaps, they owed a great debt to the earlier English and German Romantics, as well as previous generations of dandies, such as the Muscadins and Incroyables of the dying days of the Revolution. They were the Rock and Roll bad boys of their day.
The first Bohemian wave eventually produced the Decadents, and the great Symbolist movement in the arts, both of which came into being around 1880, notably in Paris, where the so-called Decadent Spirit was born, whose most infamous fruit could be said to have been the novel “Against the Grain”, an account of the sensation-seeking existence of a reclusive aristocrat Jean des Esseintes by Joris Karl Huysmans.
In general though the 19th Century was assailed by a succession of inspired works from the pens of Romantic rebels, each more ferociously avant-garde than the one coming before, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Jarry and especially Nietzsche, among them. Falling under the latter’s spell since his death in 1900 have been politicians, writers, psychologists, Rock stars, anarchists, and many of the philosophers whose works have formed the basis of the literary Theory that currently dominates Western academia. In short his influence over the development of the modern Western soul has been incalculable, perhaps greater than any other philosopher or artist.
However, the avant-garde spirit truly exploded on an international scale with the Modernist movement in the arts, which was at its level of maximum intensity from about 1890 to 1930. This extraordinary period birthed such masterpieces of innovation as Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” (1913), T.S Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (1922), James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (1922), as well as dozens of revolutionary art movements including Expressionism, Futurism, Dada and Surrealism, as well as Serialism in music, and the ascent of Jazz which together with the moving picture industry formed the bedrock of popular Modernism, or pop culture. Although Jazz was ultimately supplanted by its wayward spawn, Rock and Roll, also a son of the Blues.
One possible definition of Modernism in an artistic sense is the avant-garde removed from its spiritual home of Paris and then transformed into an international movement of cataclysmic power and influence. In terms of the Modern as a cultural phenomenon, on the other hand, some critics trace its roots to the so-called Enlightenment of the 18th Century, which produced great defiance of God on the part of lofty Reason, and so for them, Modernism is a precursor of the avant-garde, rather than a spirit that arose out of it. Others go even further back into the depths of Western history for its origins, to the Renaissance and its revival of Classical Antiquity. What is certain though is that the contemporary West has reached the very limits of the Modern Revolution, and one of the results of its having done so as I see it is the mass acceptance of revolutionary beliefs once seen as the preserve of the avant-garde; especially with regard to traditional Christian morality.
This process could be said to have accelerated to breakneck speed around 1955-‘56, when both the Beat Movement and the new Pop music of Rock ’n’ Roll were starting to make strong inroads into the mainstream. Some ten years after this, there was a further frenetic increase in momentum as Pop began to lose its initial sheen of innocence, and so perhaps evolve into the more diverse music of Rock. This coincided with the growth of the Hippie counterculture.
The eclectic art of Rock went on to run the gamut from the most infantile pop ditties to complex compositions influenced variously by Classical music, Jazz, Folk, and other pre-Rock music forms, and so become an international language disseminating values traditionally seen as morally unconventional as no other artistic movement before it. As a result, certain Rock artists attained through popular consumer culture a degree of influence that previous generations of innovative artists operating within the bounds of high culture could only dream of.

A Final Distant Clarion Cry

I fell under the influence of various Fundamentalist Christian critics of Rock music for a brief period in 2003, which made me feel inclined to destroy all traces of Rock music in my possession, even though I’d long lost any real taste for Hard Rock by then, whether in the shape of Metal, Punk, Goth, Grunge or whatever. However, by the summer of 2003 my attitude had mellowed to the extent that I felt able to write about an hour’s worth of Rock songs in response to a request from my dad for songs for a possible collaboration with the son of a close friend, but these were as far from Hard Rock as it’s possible to be, being influenced by such relatively benign and melodic genres as Folk, Pop and Soul.
The songs, some new, some upgrades of old tunes, were recorded on a Sony CFS-B21L cassette-corder, which I think has been discontinued, and were generally well-received despite having been crudely recorded. Pat even went so far as to suggest that I record them properly in a studio, which was a high compliment indeed, given that unlike me, he’s a trained musician who’s been a professional since the age of 9, where I’m just a primitive with an ear for a catchy tune.
A year or so later a project was mooted by Pat which involved the recording of a popular standards album featuring myself and harmonica genius James Hughes as well as his own London Swingtette. In spring 2008, the CD was finally released with the title “A Taste of Summer Wine”, due to the fact that Jim’s playing had long been featured on the much loved situation comedy “Last of the Summer Wine”, including the theme by Ronnie Hazelhurst, and Pat had served as leader for the show for some time. A year on, and the writing project “Rescue of a Rock and Roll Child” looks set to follow suit after more than three years of labour. It’s the first one I’m pretty well 100% sure won’t end up being shredded or deleted.
As I’ve stated elsewhere, soon after becoming a Christian I destroyed most of what I’d written up until that point, and then wrote quite happily for a time as a Christian, until it seems that God called a halt to my literary activities. It was as if I was being saturated with an almost tangible leaden darkness which took me over to the extent of altering the expression in my eyes.
Once again I started destroying any writings I managed to finish, sometimes dumping whole manuscripts in handy dustbins or one sheet after the other down murky London drains. This went on until about 1998 when I more or less gave up creative writing altogether, which is a good job given that these early Christian writings reflected a continuing preoccupation with subjects that’d held me spellbound prior to my conversion such as mysticism and the occult, which were being glorified through me despite a false warning tone. This I strongly believe. What’s more, some of my writings mixed truth and fiction to produce a pointless and deceptive hybrid.
Finally, in January 2006, I believe God made it clear that I was mature enough to be able to write again, and so I started tentatively publishing pieces at the Blogster website with the first autobiographical one being written sometime around the spring of 2006. As things stand, I’m desperately trying to put the finishing touches to the memoir that evolved out of them, in fact, since 2006, I’ve done very little except write, so there’s really not much to say by way of wrapping things up.
What I will say is that shortly before last Christmas I was accepted as a member at Duke Street Church. Around about the same time, I was informed that Elizabeth, my one-time mentor at Westfield College had died aged 84 in her adopted village of Woodstock, Oxfordshire. The executor of her will, Catherine – also the publisher of her final book -asked me to read one of the lessons at her funeral and deliver a eulogy in the capacity of a former student. This took place in the parish church of St Martin’s in the beautiful village of Bladon, where Winston Churchill is buried, which is significant given that Dr M. was one of the founding members of the Churchill Centre and had written on the great man’s relationship with the Christian faith. His parents and children and other members of his family are also buried in St Martin’s Church, Bladon.
On that day, I discovered that Elizabeth had been born in 1924 as an only child of working class parents in Lancashire, but had gone on to gain a place at Oxford University, before becoming a lecturer there and then at Westfield. What an ascent…from humble northern roots to a lectureship at the most hallowed place of learning in history…little wonder she was so fragile, almost febrile as a person, but so kind, so single-minded in her devotion to those who shared her passionate view of art and life.
It was such a sad experience for me to be reunited with Dr M. after nearly a quarter of a century while being unable to communicate. It made me realise how important it is to stay close to friends and family, because there comes a time when it is no longer possible to reconcile with them. It’s too late; they’ve gone; and the world is always so much the poorer for their sudden absence and silence.
What else have I done since 2006? How have I spent my time? As I mentioned earlier, much of it has been devoted to writing, but I also sporadically seek out work, both artistic and otherwise. I recently acquired a good many friends at the enormously popular Face Book social networking site, most from my Guildhall and Westfield days, which was a source of great joy to me. My reclusive body may have become sluggish through the melancholy brought by age and vicissitude, but I’ve a heart that teems with affection for the friends of my past.
In terms of my online life, every so often I find myself immersed in a labyrinthine search for information related to a subject that has me briefly in its thrall. As a result it requires mental processing through a punishing bout of research and the fervid taking of notes. The most recent topics to beset me were the nature of the giants of Genesis 6:4, and the spread of pagan religion following the destruction of the Tower of Babel when God confused the languages, and I couldn’t wait to be free of them. As a general rule I’m most content when at peace with my faith, and least while lost in an endless quest for cyber-knowledge with one page linking incessantly to the other until information overload becomes a serious threat. From time to time, however, I’m tempted to venture beyond my comfort zone into the mysteries of the Bible and history. It’s hard for the intellectually curious to resist doing this, and according to the Bible, knowledge shall increase (Daniel 12:4) in the time before the Second Coming of Christ, and this may well be via the miraculous medium of the World Wide Web.
There’s really not a whole lot left to add to this particular piece of writing. Some months ago, I started work on a second volume of memoirs, this one being woefully inadequate as a full account of my existence, although quite successful as an undercoat. That said, whether future layers will ever actually be applied to it remains to be seen. It may just be that writing will be sidelined in the same way that music has since 2006, but then that’s highly unlikely. Writing is something I’ve wanted to do since I was about 17, and now that I’m finally able to bare my soul to the world thanks to the miraculous magnificence of the internet, the chances of my lapsing into cyber-obscurity are pretty slim.
In conclusion, for anyone still interested, I’ll be resuming work on my second autobiographical volume as soon as I’m done with the “Rescue”…and I do hope there is…someone who’s persevered this far I mean. After all, it’s not just about me; this is a testimony more than anything else. And one that’s now at an end.

Book Two 

The Spawn of the Swinging Sixties

Introduction

“The Spawn of the Swinging Sixties” is an early version of the memoir “Rescue of a Rock and Roll Child”, from which so many of my subsequent writings have arisen. And while it’s been largely untouched since its initial “definitive” publication in 2007, some minor modifications were made in October-December 2011, including the alteration of many personal and place names in the sacred name of privacy.

Chapter One – Born on the Goldhawk Road

Introduction:

These two pieces set the scene for the entire work to follow, a kind of experiment in memoir writing with a spiritual core. Both deal with my childhood in London in the 1960s. The first was adapted from a Christian testimony dating from 2002, and published at the Blogster.com website on the 1st of February 2006, the second from an unfinished short story penned in the mid to late 1970s about a close friend from Bedford Park where I lived for some thirteen years between ca. 1957 and 1970. Once known as “Poverty Park” despite having been London’s first Garden Suburb, Bedford Park is now a famous conservation area of the Southfields ward of Acton, west London. It was initially published at the Blogster.com website as “Wicked Cahoots” on the 15th of February 2006. Definitive versions of both works were created with further minor variations in July 2007, and then again in December.

Born on the Goldhawk Road

I was born in the autumn of 1955 close to the undistinguished source of West London’s Goldhawk Road and my first home was in Bulmer Place near Notting Hill Gate. My brother was born two and a half years later, by which time my parents had bought their own house in Bedford Park in what was then the London Borough of Acton, and suburban west London was marked by a homespun simplicity back then that we can only dream of today. By ’63, with my brother and I safe in London’s Lycée Francais de Londres, social change was in the air, though in truth it had been for some time, especially in Britain and the USA, at least since the rise of Rock and Roll, and youth culture, whose watershed years were ’55 to ’56, but for all that England in ’63 was still apparently in black and white, and the first shaggy-haired beat groups fitted quite snugly into this innocent time of NormanWisdom pictures, of the well-spoken presenters of the BBC Home Service, Light Service and World Service, of coppers, tanners and ten bob notes, tuck shops and tuppeny chews. I was an articulate child, cheerful and sociable in an idyllic world, although I went on to become a tearaway, both at school and at home, what you might call hyperactive today. Still, I managed to pass my common entrance exam, necessary for entrance into British public, which is to say private, schools, and so become Cadet RNR no. 173, at Pangbourne Nautical College in the September of 1968, officially a serving officer in the Royal Navy aged only 12 years old. In early 1970, we left Chiswick for good and took up residence even deeper in suburbia, where I remain to this day…a suburban dreamer if ever there was one…

Wicked Cahoots

When he made
his first personal appearance
in the dirty alley
on someone else’s rusty bike,
screaming along
in a cloud of dust
it rendered us all
speechless and motionless.
But I was amazed
that despite his grey-faced surliness,
he was very affable with us…
the bully with a naive
and sentimental heart.
He was so happy
to hear that I liked his dad
or that my mum liked him
and he was welcome
to come to tea
with us at five twenty five…
Our “adventures” were spectacular:
chasing after other bikesters,
screaming at the top
of our lungs
into blocks of flats
and then running
as our echoed waves of terror
blended with incoherent threats…
“I’ll call the Police, I’ll…”
Wicked cahoots.

Chapter Two – Snapshots from a Child’s West London

Introduction

“Snapshots”, the second and last of two pieces based on my childhood in the West London of the 1960s, is not so much a story, as fragments taken from spidery writings with which I filled four and a half pages of a school style notebook in what is likely to have been the year of 1977. However, before being published at Blogster.com on the 10th of March 2006, it was comprehensively edited, before being given a new title, and subjected to alterations in punctuation. Certain sentences were composed by linking two or more sentences from the original piece together. Mild grammatical corrections also took place, mild because I didn’t want to alter the original work to the degree of making major ones. So, the first draft was carefully doctored, while retaining the spirit in which it was penned in ’77. Finally, the name of the protagonist was changed from “Kris” to “Carl”. In July 2007, I prepared a first “definitive” version of the piece which involved my making a few additional very minor alterations. Further corrections were made in December.
With regard to the content of the story, I see it as essentially moral in keeping with my Christian faith. The “Carl” character is a likable scallywag, gaining with enviable ease the affection and trust of the older Wolf Cub boys as well as the Cub leaders, of Margaret Jacobs and Mrs O’Keefe, of Niña and many other school friends. And yet, he makes a conscious choice to abuse the trust of others, including a friend from Bedford Park; where they had previously been close, and were thankfully to become so again. He aggressively asserts the superiority of certain Pop groups, and takes part in street fights which result in injury and suffering. Pretentious as it may seem, I like to view him as a symbol for the changing times in mid-sixties Britain, as the old post-war Albion with its sweet shops and bomb shelters, short trousers and Ovalteenies yielded by degrees to a new, less innocent world with a Beat music soundtrack.
All the incidents depicted in the tale definitely took place, although certain mild inaccuracies that my ’77 self may or may not have included have to be taken into account. What’s more, a certain amount of exaggeration crept into my writing in the very last section. For example, “hoodlum” is far too strong a word to use when referring to a few small boys causing mayhem in a quiet west London suburb. At least, I think it is…

Snapshot 1

I remember the 20th Chiswick Wolf Cub pack, how I loved those Wednesday evenings, the games, the pomp and seriousness of the camps, the different coloured scarves, sweaters and hair during the mass meetings, the solemnity of my enrolment, being helped up a tree by an older boy, Baloo, or Kim, or someone, to win my Athletics badge, winning my first star, my two year badge, and my swimming badge with its frog symbol, the kindness of the older boys.
One Saturday afternoon, after a football match during which I dirtied my boots by standing around as a sub in the mud, and my elbow by tripping over a loose shoelace, an older boy offered to take me home. We walked along streets, through subways crammed with rowdies, white or West Indian, in black gym shoes: “Shud up! My friend would cheerfully yell, and they did.
“We go’ a ge’ yer ‘oame, ain’ we mite, ay?”
“Yes. Where exactly are you taking me?” I asked.
“The bus stop at Chiswick ‘Oigh Stree’ is the best plice, oi reck’n.”
“Yes, but not on Chiswick High Street,” I said, starting to sniff.
“You be oroight theah, me lil’ mite.”
I was not convinced. The uncertainty of my ever getting home caused me to start to bawl, and I was still hollering as we mounted the bus. I remember the sudden turning of heads. It must have been quite astonishing, for a peaceful busload of passengers to have their everyday lives suddenly intruded upon by a group of distressed looking wolf cubs, one of whom, the smallest was howling red-faced with anguish for some undetermined reason. After some moments, my friend, his brow furrowed with regret, as if he had done me some terrible wrong, said:
“I’m gonna drop you off where your dad put you on.”
Within seconds, the clouds dispersed, and my damp cheeks beamed. Then, I spied a street I recognised from the bus window, and got up, grinning with all my might:
“This’ll do,” I said.
“Wai’, Carl,” cried my friend, “are you shoa vis is ‘oroigh’?”
“Yup!” I said, walking off the bus. I was still grinning as I spied my friend’s anxious face in the glinting window of the bus as it moved down the street.

Snapshot 2

One Wednesday evening, when Top of the Pops was being broadcast instead of on Thursday, I was rather reluctant to go to Cubs, and was more than usually uncooperative with my father as he tried to help me find my cap, which had disappeared.
Frustrated, he put on his coat and quietly opened the door. I stepped outside into the icy atmosphere wearing only a pair of underpants, and to my horror, he got into his black Citroën and drove off. I darted down Esmond Road crying and shouting. My tearful howling was heard by Margaret, the 19 year old daughter of Mrs Helena Jacobs, the philanthropic Jewish lady whom my mother used to help with the care and entertainment of Thalidomide children. Helena expended so much energy on feeling for others that when my mother tried to get in touch with her in the mid 70s, she seemed too exhausted to be enthusiastic and quite understandably for Mrs O’Keefe her cleaning lady and friend for the main part of her married life had recently been killed in a road accident. I remember that kind and beautiful Irish lady, her charm, happiness and sweetness, she was the salt of the earth. She threatened to “ca-rrown” (crown) me…when I went away to school…if I wrote her not…
Margaret picked me up and carried me back to my house. I immediately put on my uniform as soon as she had gone home, left a note for my Pa, and went myself to Cubs. When Pa arrived to pick me up, the whole ridiculous story was told to Akela, Baloo and Kim, much to my shame.

Snapshot 3

The year was 1963, the year of the Beatles, of singing yeah, yeah in the car, of twisting in the playground, of “I’m a Beatlemaniac, are you?”
That year, I was very prejudiced against an American boy Robert, who later became my friend. I used to attack him for no reason at all, like a dog does, just to assert my superiority. One day, he gave me a rabbit punch in the stomach and I made such a fuss that my little girlfriend Niña wanted to escort me to the safety of our teacher, hugging me, and kissing me intermittently on my forehead, eyes, nose, cheeks. She forced me to see her:
“Carl didn’t do a thing, ” said Niña, “and Robert came up an gave him four rabbit punches in the stomach. ”
But Robert was not penalized, for Mademoiselle knew what a little demon I was, no matter how hurt and innocent I looked, tearful, with my tail between my legs.

Snapshot 4

By the end of ’63, I was frequently involving myself in arguments with people who tried to say that some secondary Beat combo or another was destined to swamp the Beatles. No, I disagreed. Only one new group truly roused my interest, though not immediately for I was disappointed by a rough and sullen performance of “Not Fade Away” on Top of the Pops, having heard so much about the Rolling Stones. Public opinion, however, swayed me, and discussing Pop music at the end of ’64 with some of the new breed of English roses with their mini-skirts, kinky boots and Marianne Faithfull tresses or Twiggy crops, the Rolling Stones were my new favourites. I loved the martyr Mick, bathed in light with surly, ever-defiant lips, surrounded by his frenzied slaves.

Snapshot 5

Bedford Park was a semi-Bohemian, artistic quarter of London on the outskirts of a rough district of the western suburbs, Acton. Therefore, my boyhood surroundings were half Bohemian and half hoodlum. The hoodlum influence was stronger than the artistic, which could account for the frequent street feuds, stone and stick and dirt fights that took place, and the day I stole magazines out of my neighbours’ letterboxes, and mutilated them, before putting them back, and the day I informed my best friend’s mother, from one end of the street to the other that he was a “_______ _______”. Those words caused a long and furious confrontation to take place on the doorstep of our house…frightful day, which I regret…even to this one…

Chapter Three – Those Gambolling Baby Boomers

Introduction

“Those Gambolling Baby Boomers”, the first of a series of seventies-themed pieces, tells how I came to be conditioned by my environment in the early 1970s after leaving Pangbourne College, a public school situated near the little Thameside village of Pangbourne in Berkshire. I’d been a boarder there between about the 9th of September 1968 and the last day of the summer term, 1972. It was first published as “Genesis of a Gentleman” at Blogster.com on the 10th of March 2006. In July 2007, and then again in November and December of that year, it was subject to further minor variations.

The Nautical College, Pangbourne

Pangbourne College was founded in 1917 as Pangbourne Nautical College, originally preparing boys aged ca. 13 to 18 to be officers in the Merchant Navy, and then the Royal Navy.
I joined in September 1968 as Cadet Carl Halling RNR. I was only 12 years old, making me probably the youngest serving officer in the entire Royal Navy at the time. The college was still known by its original title of the Nautical College, but by 1969 this had been abbreviated. However, the boys retained their officer status and spent much of their time in full naval officers’ uniform. What’s more, naval discipline continued to be enforced, with Pangbourne providing the rigours both of a military college and a traditional English boarding school. In 1996, she became fully co-educational.
The Pangbourne I knew was powerfully allied to the Church of England, and so marked by regular if not daily classes in what was known as Divinity, morning parade ground prayers, evening prayers, and compulsory chapel on Sunday morning. And I’d like to go on record as saying that I’m indebted to Pangbourne for the values it instilled in me if only unconsciously. They were after all the same values that once made Britain strong and great; and yet, by the time I joined , they were under siege as never before by the so-called counterculture. While failing to fully understand the implications of the cultural revolution of the late 1960s, I passionately celebrated its consequences, and took to my heart many of its icons both artistic and political, Che Guevara being my personal hero for several years.

This Glam Rock Nation

In the summer of 1972, it was mutually decided between my poor dad and the authorities of Pangbourne that I leave after a year in the fifth form and four years in the college itself.
My parents, brother and I had moved to a tiny little working class village suburb some dozen miles from the centre of London at the turn of the decade, which made me something of a fish out of water. For after all, I was no longer either in West London where I grew up, nor at the boarding school that had been my whole world for four long years and where I’d formed some of the deepest friendships of my life.
1972 could be said to be the year in which the seventies really began as the excitement surrounding the alternative society and its happenings and be-ins and love-ins and festivals and so on started to fade into recent history. As for me, I couldn’t wait to get to grips with the dismal new decade even if for the first two years, I’d despised the rise of the new commercial chart Pop and its teenybop idols such as Marc Bolan and the Sweet. I was of the school of Hard and Progressive Rock…Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Yes and so on. But I was changing. For better or worse, this was going to be my decade. In late ’72, I saw the Sweet, a former Bubblegum outfit I’d once despised on a long-forgotten teenage programme called “Lift off with Ayesha” and was instantly smitten with their new high camp image. In January of the following year, I saw a certain rising Glam superstar on the chat show Russell Harty Plus in January 1973 and my devotion to the strange culture taking over the land making even former skinheads want to look like Charlie George or some other flash dressing hard man total. So many popular songs of the era were like football chants set to a stomping Glam Rock beat. It was the golden age of the long-haired boot boy and every street seemed to me to be pregnant with menace in this Glam Rock nation.
In late ’72 I was launched by my dad on an intensive hothouse programme of self-improvement. I studied various martial arts at the Judokan in Hammersmith, west London. Among my fellow students were shaggy-haired hard cases who may have been influenced by the prevailing fashion for all things eastern, what with the cult of Bruce Lee and so on. Some of them had feather cuts. I also went to swimming classes at a local baths. I had a fierce crush on one of my fellow swimmers, she looked a bit like a Skin girl with her cute short haircut, but my heart wasn’t in the swimming, and one of the teachers told me so, wondering why I was wasting my time even turning up. She had a point. I learned how to play basic Rock guitar from a kindly soft-spoken man who taught Rock guitar from his little house near the Thames in suburban Surrey, and who looked so square with his short back and sides and baggy dad-style trousers; but he loved his Rock and Roll. He taught me the basis of the Rock solo, which involved going up and down the Blues scale in whatever key you chose. I was as lazy as they came, but I probably learned more from that man about the guitar than anyone, with the possible exception of a Pangbourne friend whose songs I stole with their simple chord progressions…C, A minor, F, G and back again to C and so on. And then there was Deep Purple’s “Black Night”, whose simple bluesy riff I’d once played to a pal at Pangbourne, at which point the kid turned to whoever else was present and announced something: “Hey guys, we’ve got a natural here!”
Also through home study and with the help of local private tutors I set about making up for the fact that I’d left school early at 16 with only two GCE (General Certificate of Education) exams to my name; at ordinary level, of course, which is why they were called “O” levels. Then in late ’72 I joined the London Division of the Royal Naval Reserve as an Ordinary Seaman, attending classes once a week on HMS President on the Embankment. At some point soon after this, some of the older ratings, Able Seamen perhaps, or Killicks (Leading Seamen) made some remarks about my looks, implying that I was pretty or something along those lines. I think this may have come as something of a surprise to me as at Pangbourne I’d been no lover of effeminacy to say the least, but I was intrigued rather than offended. The mood of the times was changing at any rate, and it was cool for guys to be androgynous. I had the right look at the right time, and it came to serve me well when it came to attracting female attention.

The Innocence of pre-Movida Spain

The dreamy, introspective aspect of my nature became increasingly marked in 1972-73, and I fantasised about fame and adulation as never before. I was growing into a narcissist. Throughout ’73, I built an image based on the distinctive look of one of my Rock and Roll idols, spiking my hair, and even at some point peroxiding it. At some point I think I even started daubing concealer on a face which had become latterly troubled by acne.
I didn’t fit in in the outer suburbs, unlike my brother. He became part of a local youth scene until about the middle of the decade, wearing the latest youth fashions, getting into Soul music, going to discos and football matches and so on, where I only really had one local mate, Joë, son of a BAFTA-nominated British cinematographer. However, I came into my own in Spain, or rather Santiago de la Ribera on the Mar Menor near Murcia, where the family had been vacationing since about 1968. I think it was towards the end of my summer ’73 holiday that I finally started to be noticed in a big way by the local youth, most from either Murcia or Madrid, and so la Ribera became vital to me in terms of my becoming a social being among members of both sexes. A group of us became very close and remained so for four summers running. Spain was such a sweet and friendly nation back then in the relatively innocent early seventies, and the youth of La Ribera as happy and carefree as I imagine southern Californians would have been in the pre-Beatles sixties. It was really a great time, and probably signalled the start for me of a lifelong love affair with the Spain and the Spanish people, indeed with Latin and continental Europe as a whole.

Those Gambolling Baby Boomers

In the early 1970s, everything seemed to be mine for the knowing, for the experiencing, for the taking. It was a time of constant, frenetic change and to be young back then was exciting beyond belief. As I gorged on the fruits of a revolution that had been all but bloodlessly waged on my behalf I never once considered what would be the fate of succeedent generations of youth. They would have to come to maturity in a world in which a generation of baby-boomers had lately gambolled like so many sensuous fauns. Pity their poor souls.

Chapter Four – An Innocent on the Reeperbahn

Introduction

“An Innocent on the Reeperbahn”, the second piece in a series of seventies-themed writings takes place in 1973 and 1974 in a variety of locations. Among these are London and its suburbs, the French city of Bordeaux, Murcia’s Costa Calida, and the port of Hamburg, current capital of the German province of Schleswig-Holstein. It was first published (at Blogster) on the 26th of March 2006 as “A Dandy in the Land of Blue Denim 1”. A final version was published at FaithWriters in December 2007.

Toilers of the Thames

1973 was the year of my first voyage as an Ordinary Seaman with the RNR onboard the minesweeper HMS Thamesis. Late in the summer it set out for Bordeaux in Gironde in the south west of France. I was just seventeen years old.
During the trip I made my best-ever RNR friend in the shape of a fellow OD Kevin “Lofty” O’Shea. I also became quite friendly with one of the most unlikely pair of cronies I ever came across in the RNR or anywhere else. One half of the partnership was Mickey, a rough, wild but essentially kind-hearted working class loner of about 23 who was rumoured to be a permanent year-long resident of HMS Thames. The other was a far older man, possibly in his mid thirties, but just as riotously extrovert as Mickey. And yet this guy was as posh as they came, with the patrician manner of a City stockbroker or merchant banker. Mickey took me under his wing with a certain intimidating affection: “We’ll make a ruffy tuffy sailor of you yet!” he once told me, even though we both knew that that I’d never be anything other than the most pathetically effete sailor in the civilized world. There was one occasion below deck during some kind 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 nonchalantly announce that I was taking a stroll. Incidents like these made me an object of affectionate banter on the part of Mickey and others.
The crew spent its final night together in a night club in the port of Portsmouth, or perhaps it was Plymouth I really can’t remember. The chief attraction was a limp-wristed drag artiste who tried to keep us entertained by singing cabaret style numbers in a comic falsetto, and bawdy jokes told in a deep rich baritone, but she was ruthlessly heckled for her pains. At one point she turned her attention to me, or rather I think she did. I was trying to hide at the time, it being one of those rare occasions when I was wearing unsightly horn-rimmed spectacles. “Ooh…you look pretty, what’s your name?”, she might have trilled. “Skin!” was what some of the sailors bellowed back, this being a nickname of mine, perhaps as in “a bit of skin” or something. It’s all a bit of a blur to me now. Before too long, the bearded sailor seated next to me had collapsed face down onto the table with a thunderous crash. Only a short while earlier, he’d performed the theme from “William Tell” on his cheeks while I held the mike for him. I’m not certain whether he ever appeared as a musician in public again, but he was certainly a star that night.

A Dandy in the Land of Blue Denim

Back onshore, I resumed my growing passion for louche and shady music, art and culture. Some time in 1974, however, 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 eras and particularly the twenties and thirties. At some point in ’74, 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 Fitz had done. I also built 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 progressed I became more and more entranced by the continental Europe of recent times, and specifically its leading cities, as beacons of revolutionary art; and of style, luxury and dissolution. Certain key eras became very special to me, such as the 1890s, known as the Yellow Decade in England, and the Mauve in the US, Belle Epoque Paris, Jazz Age New York, and 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 attended a concert at west London’s Queen’s Park football stadium in striped boating blazer and white trousers, while surrounded by hirsute relics from the Hippie era. 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…

Take to the Sky with a Natural High

It was while I was sitting Spanish “O” level in June 1974 in central London that I became deeply infatuated with a pretty slim Dutch girl called Marianna. She didn’t look Dutch, in fact, with her tanned complexion and long dark brown hair, she was Meditteranean in physical appearance. And it was probably she who came up to me, because I was so unconfident around girls in those days that I would never have made the first move. Over the course of the next few days, I feel deeper and 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 cliché of that kind.
For a week or thereabouts, 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 have sworn I saw her staring indifferently back at me from an underground train, possibly at South Kensington or Notting Hill Gate, as the doors closed; but typically I was powerless to act, and simply stood there like a lovesick fool as the train drew away. In time of course, my infatuation faded, but even to this day I will listen to certain songs and it’ll all come flooding back to me. They include “I Just Don’t Want to be Lonely” by Philly Soul band the Main Ingredient that lingered in my mind as I sauntered up Kensington High Street in the sun; and “Natural High” by Bloodstone. I’d been a lover of Sweet Soul since the early part of the decade when I first heard “La La La Means I Love You” by the Delphonics and “Betcha by Golly Wow” by the Stylistics, and this type of music went on to soundtrack some of my most romantic experiences of the seventies.
Later on in the summer I found myself once more in Santiago de La Ribera, a little village on what is known as the Mar Menor or little sea, 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 in La Ribera. Every afternoon, we used to congregate on the jetty facing our apartment on the Mar Menor which was largely deserted it being the time of the siesta, that’s myself and my brother, and Spanish friends both male and female, to listen to music and talk and laugh and flirt.
To some youthful Spanish eyes I was an impossibly exotic figure in the mid 1970s, full as I was of stories and songs from what was then as it is now the most culturally vital city in Europe, while the young of Spain were still so endearingly sheltered in those years leading up to the death of Franco. All this was to change with Franco’s passing, at which point the nation set about sophisticating itself to the extent that on 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, so intimidatingly cool had many of them become, dancing their strange jerky dance to the latest dancehall hits from Britain.

An Innocent on the Reeperbahn

I returned to London in late summer ’74 with a deep brown tan and hair bleached gold by the sun, and hanging long over my ears and forehead. While on my way one Tuesday evening to HMS President, moored then as today on the Embankment near Temple station, I created a bit of a stir at Waterloo mainline, which wasn’t the bright tourist-friendly station it is today but a far rougher place with its own barber and pub, attracting not a few souls down on their luck for one reason or another. For a start, I was accosted by a genial Scotsman in late middle age, a former seaman as I recall him telling me, when he wasn’t going on about how good looking I was. He was harmless enough though, a sweet old guy in fact who behaved impeccably and was as far as I could tell just being friendly, so I was more than happy to chat with him for a while. I even went so far as to agree to a meeting with him the same time the following week, which of course I had no intention of keeping.
Within a few days, HMS Thames was on its way to Hamburg, second largest city of Germany and its principle port. Once we’d arrived, one of the NCOs, a Chief Petty Officer I think advised me not to wander alone in the city. I duly fell in 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 bars, as well as strip clubs, sex shops, bordellos and so on.
A day or so later, a coach trip to the suburbs was organised. We ended up in a park where I had my picture taken on a bridge by a reporter for the Surrey Comet. At some point, a group of schoolgirls breathlessly asked me to be in some photographs with them. On the way back to the ship, one of the sailors remarked that I’d been a hit with the Hamburg teenyboppers, while another retorted that it was only because I was so blond and Teutonic…or something of that sort. Whatever the truth, there was something so touching about the young suburban girls’ simple unaffected joy of life, and the way it stood in such stark contrast to the Weimar-like decadence that existed only a few miles away.

Chapter Five – Once in an English Seaside Town

Introduction

This third story in a series of seventies-themed pieces was forged in February-March 2006 from scribblings committed to a notebook in 1978-’79, and concerning events that took place in the summer of 1974. I adapted it word for word, although regarding certain passages, I selected crossed out words or series of words rather than those I’d chosen in the late 1970s and certain sentences were formed by fusing portions of the original sentences together. Moreover, the structure of the story has been altered, and the punctuation changed and greatly improved on; and I edited out words, sentences, whole passages.
To the best of my knowledge, all the events depicted actually occurred; however, given that I was writing in ’78 or ’79 about events that took place some half a decade previously, the original conversations would necessarily have been somewhat different to how they turned out on paper. Furthermore, it may be that a certain amount of exaggeration crept in to my writing in the late 1970s, particularly with respect to the quantities of alcohol I consumed, but then again, these may have been reproduced with some degree of accuracy. I have no recollection whatsoever of the events depicted in the final nineteen lines of the story, and these may have been tacked on for dramatic effect.
The events in the story as a whole take place in “a certain English coastal town”, but I have a strong feeling that it was in Lymington, a port on the Solent in the New Forest district of Hampshire that they actually occurred. Why I changed Lymington to Bosham I cannot say for certain, but it may have been a genuine mistake on my part. Final changes were made in July 2007. I think it’s fair to say that we are dealing with a story in the truest sense, which is to say one based on real events, rather than a genuine fragment from a memoir.
Being the person that I am, it is my desire that this resurrected story of mine possess a strong moral centre. And morally sensitive readers will discern intimations of ultimate disaster in the heavy drinking of the protagonist Carl which given that he is only 18, is necessarily only at its inception. My story however is as much a little slice of history from a simpler age than today’s as anything more serious and one which I hope will prove an entertainment as well as a morality tale. It finishes on an upbeat note, at the beginning of another night of purported pleasure, and yet as I recall I actually ended the night jumping into the filthy oily waters of the town harbour.

Once in an English Seaside Town

The remainder of 1974 was a bizarre and frantic segment of Carl’s life. In July, his father made yet another effort to tame him, by sending him on a yachting course in a certain English coastal town. The owner of the yacht was an Old Pangbournian, who also ran a sailing school. Carl stayed at a guest house owned by Mrs C-C, one of those wonderful elderly widows that inhabit our so English sailing towns all along the south coast, always charming but slightly aloof, immaculately spoken, calm, kind and considerate. There he met Gilles, a Belgian boy of about twenty years, Mr Watts and his teenage son Dylan. None of these four were on the same course, but they nevertheless became very close. Dylan liked to listen to the older boy’s theories on music, fashion and life: “Hey Carl, do you think if I put brilliantine in my hair, I’d look like Ferry. Now Ferry is totally smooth.”
First day Carl discovered who was on his course: there was Corin, aged 28, who was cool, tall, dark and moustachio’d, wearing large and dark-framed spectacles, viewing Carl’s whimsicality with considerable suspicion; but sociable; Roger, a genial old boy of about sixty; Bob and Pat, a thoroughly agreeable married couple; and the Captain. That evening, Carl and Corin, who had struggled from alleged want to the position of an urban executive, had dinner together. Mr Watson and Alan were dining in the same restaurant:
Carl made them laugh, dressed in blazer, flannels and white shoes with hair elegantly brilliantined, stuffing pieces of bread into his pockets like an impoverished student. He also made the Captain laugh the next day:
“Take the helm, Carl,” the skipper ordered, “steer 350.”
“Mmm…this is nice,” Carl cooed, “what a lovely day, I like this.”
“Oooh, you thing,” the Skipper joked, for which Carl booted him up the backside, which made the Skipper titter with delighted disbelief. GOOD
Next day, Carl lost his temper with Corin, who had goaded him for wrongly plotting a course. The Captain’s pupils, after an initial briefing, were expected to discover how to navigate for themselves:
“Oh shut up,” Carl bitched, “let’s see you do better!”
“Ooh, you thing!” the Captain interjected, with even more glee than before.
That evening, Carl organised an informal get-together between the sailing and the yachting people. Present were Carl, Corin, Gilles, Dylan, and four or five other sailing men, including Daryl, the course whizz-kid.
“He comes alive in the evening this boy,” said Corin, “summoned by an alcoholic deity.”
“I’m not an alcoholic, Corin…” Carl replied.
“You drink three pints to to my one,” Corin countered, “so you’ve certainly got potential.”
“Nonsense, as I was saying, Daryl, how long have you had long hair?”
“What…long hair? What’s that got to do with anything…is my hair long…I don’t know anything about that.”
“Do you realise twenty years ago with your hair as it is, although it’s only just surpassing the ears, you would have been hounded, persecuted, beaten, for being a deviant, a freak, are you trying to ignore that?
“And you would have been accepted?”
“Oh yes,” said Carl, “knife edge pressed flannels, blue blazer, white V neck pullover, open neck shirt and cravat, a bit sporty, I suppose, but utterly acceptable.”
“How safe!”
“Safe? That’s something I never am, safe.”
“Well, quite frankly, I think you look ridiculous”
At this statement, Carl burst into laughter. His laughter was like no other, shrill, unearthly, it violently assaulted the quiet clientele of the soft-carpeted yacht club, a laugh that seemed to emit from the hideous depths themselves.
Daryl, fighting to contain gleeful hysteria and thus conserve respectability, had gone a redder shade of tomato, and Corin quivering with laughter hid his face in mock-shame:
“I disown him,” he gibbered, “he’s insane, insane.”
Gradually the hilarity subsided:
“How do you get those bracelets on your wrist?” Corin queried.
“Easily, Carl boasted, exhibiting his arms, I have very slender, graceful wrists.”
“Let me see…” Corin whispered, and Carl gave him a bracelet. Soon that bracelet was being passed around the entire group, each member attempting, often with great difficulty to put the bracelet on their own wrist. Presently, the bracelet was back in Carl’s possession, and with horror, he observed that it had been mutilated.
“My bracelet, he cried, how could you all! I entrusted it to you and you’ve twisted and bent it.”
The group stared at Carl, not knowing whether to look sincerely sorry or merely laugh at his distress, and settled for a nervous cross between the two. After a moment spent in this atmosphere, Gilles dispersed it by requesting to see the injured bracelet:
“Let me see eet, he said, I weel try to feex eet.”
Carl handed him the bracelet. Everyone was hushed as the Belgian contemplated it, touched it, turned it round, rattled it, and finally, with considerable calm, placed it on the floor. He scratched his head, as if trying to settle on a decision, which resulted in his extracting his shoe. Carl, trying to preserve his cool, took a cigarette from his case, a cigarette which, once lit, fell from his slim white hand as a crack like a tree struck by lightning echoed throughout the thunderstruck clubhouse. Carl’s eyes were suddenly attracted from the fallen fag to Gilles, who was raising his right arm, at the end of which was one shoe, profuse with studs, and bringing it to the ground with all his strength at regular intervals. It took Carl some time before he knew what the reason was for all the secretive sniggering that went on around him: his bracelet was the victim of these vicious shoe attacks which were supposed to be rather brutally persuading it to revert to its original shape.
“Oh come on, it’s not funny,” he moaned, reaching out to take the bracelet which a grinning Jules held out for him. He stared woefully at the shattered remains but oddly enough, the bracelet had not disintegrated, in fact, had not altered from its original, slightly misshapen state.
“Eet ees all right, Carle,” Gilles suddenly chuckled, “I was eeting ze floor wiz my shoe, not your brezlet.”
Carl looked at Gilles, looked at his bracelet, looked at the other lads, then his eyes started to sparkle, his throat to gurgle, and then it all escaped:
“Hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi…”
“I’m not with him!”
“We’ll get thrown out!”
“He’s insane…in-sane!”
As the stunned salts recovered from Carl’s falsetto assault of high-pitched shrieks, he told them:
“Come on, drink up, lads, let’s go where the action is, let’s go and find a party or something!”
“No, it’s not worth it,” said Daryl, “we’re having a good time here. You’re a real laugh   Carl, just as long as you don’t go too far. We might as well stay”
“Not me. I’m getting outa here. Need a change of atmosphere. Who’s coming?”
“Yeah…might as well,” Corin volunteered
“Me too,” the boy from Belgium followed suit.
As the ink-black of night seeped through the crystal-like clarity of day and dyed it a dark colour, another day died away…
“Lonely, isn’t it?” Carl suggested.
The others agreed. They headed along the main road. Carl did his manic laugh to each car that roared by often standing right in its path of travel.
“That Belgian girl in your group is nice, Gilles, isn’t she?”
“Oh yes,” said Gilles, “eef only ‘er farzer weren’t wiz ‘er all ze time.”
“Hey, who’s going for a walk ’round Bosham town?”
Corin and Gilles volunteered, and the trio turned a corner. The girls were blonde, standing in a sea of darkness. Female company was exactly what Carl and Gilles needed. The Dutch courage of numbers gave vent to a number of groundless verbal coquetteries, mainly coming from Carl. The two girls followed this trail of littered pleasantries to the water’s edge and then persevered onto a pier. Carl followed them, an unlit cigarette in his left hand.
“Can I have a light, please?” he said, looking intently at one then the other of the two young ladies; one was slim and petite, the other was tall and thin, wearing shoulder-length blonde hair. “Well, shall I stay here or go and join my friends?”
“Stay here,” mumbled the smaller of the two sweet Cockney sparrows almost inaudibly.
“Pardon?” said Carl and both girls answered by smiling coyly. There was a minute’s pause.
“Well, I’ll see ya then,” Carl finally said.
“Yeah…”
As the trio moved down the street, the two girls followed.
“Why don’t you turn around?” Corin suddenly said.
“Why?” said Carl.
“They like you”
“Really?”
“Course they do. If you can’t see that, you’re more short-sighted than I thought you were.”
At this, Carl turned around.
“There’s a predatory look in your eyes, girls,” he said.
“Yer wha’?”
“Oh, not to worry. Wha’s yer names?”
“My name’s Julie,” said the waiflike one, “and this is Sue…what’s yours, baby?”
“Why do you call me baby?”
“Cos you look like one,” they both answered.
“I happen to be all of eighteen years old!” Carl said with mock indignation.
“Are you eighteen?” Sue asked.
“Tha’s right, why, don’ I look it?”
“We fought you was abaht twen’y…”
“Really? Well I’m eighteen and my name’s Carl”
“Wha’s your name?” Sue asked Gilles.
“My nem is Gilles…”
“Where are you from?” Sue asked Carl.
“London. Why?”
“You sahnd Ameri’an or somefing.”
“Well, I am half-Canadian.”
“Oh, that would explain it,” Julie resolved.
“Why,” Carl went on, “where do you girls come from?”
“We come from London as well, south.”
“What are you doing down ‘ere?”
“We’re spendin’ a few days on ‘er dad’s boat,” Sue said, pointing at Julie.
“Has your dad got a boat?” Carl said, with vague suprise.
“A yacht! Not just any old boat. Don’ come from any old family, I don’.”
“She’s a cute one, she is…” said Carl.
The three males once again continued on their path and the two females once again followed, this time, more clamorously, in fact took to kicking a can at them to make their point.
“I weesh Corin were not ‘ere,” Gilles whispered into Carl’s ear.
“Why?”
“His presence is disconcerting them.”
As soon as Gilles had finished talking, the two girls turned a corner:
“See ya, then!” they shouted.
“Bye, girls!”
“Bye, Carl darling!”
“I wonder where zey went?” said Jules
“I shouldn’t worry about it, you’ve got your Belgian girl”
“Ave I?”
Came the second to last day and a trip for both the yacht and the dinghy party to the Isle of Wight. Carl was determined to get to know some of the girls on the course a little better. He asked Dylan what he thought about some of the female monitors:
“How about Janet, for example?”
“She’s too old for me. Why she was ten years in the WRNS.”
“She’s always nice to me.”
“Sally’s a pretty girl.”
Yes, Carl liked Sally and determined to talk to her on this little excursion. Lunch was in a Yarmouth public house where slender men in double-breasted reefer jackets, flannels and sailing shoes would go between sails. Some wore white trousers, some wore R.A.F moustaches and some even wore bow ties; their ladies dressed in slacks, large navy-blue pull-overs and silk scarves. In the evening, they would all be in full evening wear.
Back in port again, cutting across a nearby lawn, he met the natural and rosy-cheeked Sally:
“Hello,” She said with a smile that brought beauty to a face which was free of glamourising paint.
“Hello,” Carl answered, where are you going?”
“Back to my room.”
“Oh…hey, apparently there’s a get-together tonight, you know, a few drinks, a bit of dancing, a lot of laughs, are you going?”
“I don’t know, I…”
“Oh, go on. I’m going…”
Sally looked at Carl, dressed in sweater and brown cords and sneakers, his yellow-brown hair ruffled, and thought: what a sweet chap.
“Well…okay, she said, I suppose I’ll go…uh…this is where I turn off.”
“Oh. Well…”
“See you tonight then.”
“Yes, bye…hey wait! Do you know my name?”
“Yes, of course I do, Carl, bye!”
“Bye, Sally!”
Back at the guest house, the clock struck five and Carl was all-a-spruce, taking tea with Mrs C-C, who would have been deeply outraged if anyone suggested that Carl was anything but a kind, courteous and thoroughly likable young man, who had but one fault, forgetfulness. She was supposed to charge for each packed lunch forgotten, but never did in Carl’s case, even if he was the only one who ever forgot his lunch. It must be said, however, that it was difficult not to be thoroughly likable in the presence of this distinguished and attractive woman.
Carl, Gilles and Corin set out together for the dance. On the way, they stopped in a pub.
“Half of bitter!” Corin ordered.
“Half a shandy!” Gilles ordered ordered.
“Double scotch!” Carl ordered and then ten minutes later, “double scotch!”
“Nothing for me!” Said Corin.
“Alf o’ shandy!” Gilles ordered.
“Pint of bitter!” Carl ordered ten minutes later.
“Come on Carl, let’s go,” Corin said.
“We mus’ go,” Gilles said.
“Drink up, Corin ordered, we don’t want you in a disordered state before the dance, do we?”
Carl swallowed his pint and the three departed. Arriving at the lieu reserved for the evening’s festivities, they sat down at a communal table. Carl’s blue spotted eyeballs slid from side to side in an effort to register Sally’s exact position. They found her, sitting next to a slim, smart but casually dressed young man with light blonde collar length hair and beard. He got up and approached the pair.
“Hello, Sally,” he said, with a slightly reproachful look in his eyes.
“Hello,” she said, slightly taken aback, especially as he was no longer the sweet, tousle headed gamin of that afternoon but a world-weary and rakish looking youth.
“Do you want a drink?” he asked.
“Er, no thanks, she said, but I will have one later on.”
“Okay then,” the disappointed youth said, and he turned around and made his way to the bar.
“Double scotch!” He ordered, and then ten minutes later, “double scotch!”
Sally appeared to be less and less able to back away from her admirer’s nose, leading the way below two amorously lit little eyes and above two cooing lips. Carl took a large slug of the weighty liquid that lay in his glass thereby emptying it. Then, he decided to step in and putting the glass down made straight for the couple.
“Oh hello, Carl,” Sally said, suddenly looking up with a smile whose sun-like radiance quickly darkened as soon as the youth’s apparent drunkenness dawned on her. Tapped on the shoulder and led away by Daryl, he was taken, across the room and seated next to the Captain at a long table populated entirely by the latter’s set.
“Hello, Carl, the Captain said, you look a bit excited…fancy a drink?”
“Yes. Pint of bitter, please.”
“Pint of water? Right.”
Mainly for the benefit of Daryl, who was sitting opposite him, Carl filled the room with his manic laugh, which was greeted by looks of intimidated derision.
“No, Carl, said Daryl, you’re just not funny this evening.”
“Not funny? If I ain’t even funny, then what am I?”
Carl got up, rather slowly, and walked, just as slowly and wordlessly to the door, opened it, then stepped into the warm summer’s night…where there were no dreams of romance just around the corner of one lonely sea town street. Tonight everyone had abandoned him. Tonight there was nothing.
“Carl!” A boyish voice was heard, “Carl, it’s me!”
Carl’s sad eyes looked behind him to be faced by a soul-cheering sight. He suddenly felt warm all over.
“Dylan, it’s you.”
“Where ya going, Carl?”
“Dylan, it’s not where am I going, it’s where are we going.”
“Sorry.”
“Listen, brother, you and me is gonna find a party even if it takes all night!”
“Well, I…I…I better ask my old man first. I think he’s expecting me back at around eleven.”
“Tha’s fine, jus’ fine. Le’s go’n find daddy!”

Chapter Six – The Sweetness of Wrens

A Surrey Idyll

1975 was the year I resumed my studies at an official place of learning, namely Brooklands Technical College as it was known then. Some time later, it was renamed Brooklands College. Then as now it’s to be found on the semi-rural fringes of Weybridge, a beautiful outer suburb of south west London. I enjoyed a full and perfectly idyllic social life there for nearly two years. Like Spain, it was an Edenic playground for me, in which I learned to be a social being after four years of boarding school followed by a further two years or so of leading a semi-reclusive existence.
At Brooklands, I was able to perfect the persona of a wildly eccentric good time guy, a ceaseless and absurdly successful attention-seeker. Come disco night and there were friends of both sexes who would actually wait for my arrival in order that the festivities might truly begin, and once they did, anything could happen. However, those who tried to get to know to know me on a truly intimate level were confronted with a desperately timid and diffident individual. I hated being so shy, even if discretion and reserve ultimately became part of my formidable array of social skills. Then there was the other me, the anarchist, who seemed to resent the simpering courtier his airs and graces, and to delight in sabotaging his efforts at self-improvement with a strident: “Don’t get above yourself, ‘burb boy!”

In the Bleak Mid 1970s

1975, and my self-defence, guitar and swimming classes had long dried up, but I persisted with the private tuition, notably with a taciturn but charismatic guy called Mark from Richmond in Surrey. A successful musician as well as a teacher, he exerted a strong influence on me in terms of my already passionate interest in European literature. Mark had a special love for French Symbolist poetry, but it was Spanish literature we studied together…Quevedo, Machado, Lorca, and others. He was also an early encourager of my writing, a passion of mine in the mid bleak mid 1970s that was ultimately to career out of control so that I was unable to finish project after project. I clearly suffered from a chronic case of cacoethes scribendi. That means the irresistible urge to write.
’75 was also a predictably maritime year for me, and no sooner had one ocean voyage finished than it seemed that I was setting sail again. The first of these was destination Amsterdam via Edinburgh and northern France on the square rigger TS Sir Winston Churchill of the Sail Training Association. Among my shipmates were my 17 year old brother; several young men from Scotland and the north of England; a couple of youthful naval ratings, perhaps more; a handful of “mates” who’d been given authority over the rank and file of deck hands; and the ship’s captain, who also happened to be an Old Pangbournian like myself. It was an all-male crew, and I was initially quite well-liked, but little by little my popularity died. However, there was a southern lad with dark shoulder length hair a little like the young Jack Wild…he liked me after we’d bonded over an attempt at romancing two girls during a brief stay in France and stayed loyal, bless him. I’d come on a bit strong and spoiled everything with Françoise, the one I liked. I was desperate for her address, and I think he eventually got it for me. I was elated…walking on air.
The Churchill was a tough experience…which saw us being roused out of our hammocks in the middle of the night on more than one occasion to help trim the sails (or something), but character-shaping. However, I only climbed the rigging on a single occasion, and that was just before we entered the port of Amsterdam…
As for Edinburgh, I remember being warned by one of the more easy-going lads not to go strutting about the city in a striped college-style blazer with jeans tucked into long white socks. Unfortunately, these were the only clothes I had with me. This was before our first or second stay in the city, I can’t remember. The kid was right to warn me, because while Edinburgh may be one of the most beautiful and cultured capitals in Europe, it can still be a pretty tough town. I refused to listen of course, and was duly rewarded with a pretty hairy situation which took place in an inner city pub. It wasn’t the sort of place to go lording about with a English accent in a flash boating blazer. Soon after setting foot in the place in broad daylight, a hard young Scotsman with long reddish curly hair wearing what I remember to have been a menacing grin asked me if I was from Oxford. It was probably touch and go for a while, but somehow he ended up leaving me alone. He may even have liked me, or admired my nerve.

In the Waters of the Kiel Canal

Within a few short weeks of our returning to London by train from Edinburgh, my brother and I were onboard ship again, this time a yacht taking us to the Baltic coast of Denmark via Germany’s famous Kiel Canal as part of the Ocean Youth Club, and once more we were supervised by “mates”, or the equivalent. We wasted little time in recruiting a pleasant young guy from Gloucestershire called Cy as our closest friend and crony. Soon after setting foot on Danish soil all three of us sought out the company of two classically Scandinavian blondes. This caused the Captain, who was a real character, to have a go at us with tongue firmly in cheek about selfishly keeping our dates to ourselves. Little could he have known how innocent our efforts at romance had in fact been.
A rather less than sweet and innocent incident took place towards the end of the trip, which saw me in pursuit of a pretty German girl, Ulrike. I liked her so very much, and she clearly liked me, and yet I’d senselessly dumped her for the sake of a night of drunken idiocy with my brother and Cy. Suddenly, overtaken by the 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 Ulrike, 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 have done any night of the week. Self-sabotage was fast becoming a speciality of mine.

The Sweetness of Wrens

It was later in the year I think that I took my friend Norma, one of the London Division Wrens but originally from the north of England, to a dinner dance at London’s Walford Hilton Hotel. At some point we were joined there by a couple of Norma’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 two who were; and several who weren’t. What united them was that they behaved with special protectiveness towards me. Early in the evening, Norma became furious when a group of older seamen started teasing me from their table. But it was all a big joke to me; and I didn’t see it as in any way malicious or threatening.
It was only a matter of weeks after returning from the OYC trip to the Baltic that I sailed with the RNR to La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast of France,and 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, an incredibly good-looking blond sailor of about 30 I knew only by sight, had taken unofficial charge. Once we were all safely aboard, it was the turn of our 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 truly ferocious current, had dragged him beneath the river’s surface and he was lost. Soon after returning to London, I told my mother what happened, and as she broke down in tears the tragedy of the incident was brought home to me for the first time.  Thinking back on it, a line from that beautiful song “How Men Are” by Aztec Camera, which was a British hit in 1988, comes to mind: “Why should it take the tears of a woman to see how men are?” If I’m not mistaken, I ran into the bathroom soon after and sobbed my heart out myself.

A Gosport Discomaniac

Still in ’75…yes, my life was actually pretty full back then…I attempted to pass what is known as the AIB or Admiralty Interview Board in the hope of becoming a Supply and Secretariat officer in the Royal Navy. This entailed me 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 potentiality as a naval officer.
On one occasion early on in the long weekend shortly before one assignment or another, I was looking in the mirror, putting the final touches to my dress, at which point one of the guys I was sharing a dorm with reminded me that I was at an AIB not a fashion parade. Something like that anyway. Not the sort of man I wanted coming with me to the disco that night to get to know some Gosport girls. In the event two of my fellow interviewees were up the task. I asked one of them what he was expecting out of the night, and he told me whatever he could get or something, but he really didn’t seem to keen. I know now that he was uncomfortable being out so late and understandably anxious to return to base. As things turned out I was left alone at the club dancing with a soft-spoken local girl called Shirlee. A little later I accompanied her along a busy main leading back to Sultan, with several cars sounding their horns as I kissed her good night, only to discover that the 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, and I can vaguely remember passing through an officer’s mess soon afterwards and briefly engaging in some genial conversation with its occupants. Their actual opinion of me of course they kept 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. But then again, not necessarily…

Chapter Seven – My Future Positively Glittered

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

Summer’s End

1976 was the year in which I came increasingly under the influence of the decade of Brando, Presley and Dean which at the time was less in tune with my tastes than the stylish 1920s but I was keen for change and was a massive James Dean fan. So by degrees throughout the year, I replaced my old foppish wardrobe with the classic “Rebel” uniform of red windcheater, white tee-shirt, straight leg jeans, and loafers.
On occasion, however, I reverted to my old image such as the time towards the end of the legendary long hot summer of ’76 that I wore top hat and tails and reddened nails to a party hosted by a friend from Brooklands. This took place in September. I know this to be an absolute certainty because I should have been at sea at the time, on the minesweeper HMS Fittleton. 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 while engaged in a replenishment at Sea exercise. It resulted in the loss of twelve men most of whom I knew personally, given that only weeks earlier I’d spent a few days on Fittleton with more or less exactly the same crew.
For some reason I decided I didn’t want to be onboard for this particular trip and so pleaded sickness. It was a decision I was ultimately to regret rather than celebrate despite the fact that had I taken part in the RAS manoeuvre, I’d almost certainly have been assigned Tiller Flat duty, as had been the case on several previous occasions during exercises of this kind. This would have put me below deck, rendering escape difficult although not impossible. In other words, I may or may not have survived the accident.
An impression I can recall having at the time at the time with regard to those who didn’t survive was that they were all natural-born gentlemen. I knew three of them quite well, and they were men of marked generosity of spirit and sweetness of disposition. That is not to say that the survivors weren’t, far from it…many of them were good friends of mine. My point is that there was a deep gentleness about those who didn’t make it, according to how I saw them at the time. It broke my heart to think of what happened to them.

Global Village Soul Boys

It may just be my imagination but 1977 was a far darker year than those that came before it. It was after all marked by the rise of Punk, a musical and cultural movement which could be said to have fatally disabled Rock’s uneven progress as an art form by virtue of its DIY ethic, underpinned by a mood of raw rebellious fury. These elements combined with an extreme and often grotesque sartorial eccentricity to produce something utterly unique, and it spread like a raging inferno, deep into suburbia from its London axis, and so to other major British and international cities.
If by the end of the year I’d been caught up in Punk like thousands of others in the grip of the sense of inferiority being a suburbanite brings, at first I was relatively unmoved by it all. I preferred the trendy London Soul look, whose key elements were floppy college boy wedge, straight leg jeans or slacks, winklepicker shoes or boots, and baggy shirt worn with small collar archly upturned often over a plain white tee-shirt.
Having recently renewed friendly relations with my old Pangbourne buddies, I began attending a lengthy series of parties in various part of fashionable west and central London as one after the other of them hit 21. Of them all, I was perhaps closest with Chris who shared my passion for the London party life and clubs filled to the brim with the fashionable and the beautiful.
Together we set about attuning our tired old images to what we saw as the coolest look of the day. Shortly after the start of the year, I’d purchased my first pair of winklepickers which was an essential acquisition for any self-respecting trendy. They were cream-coloured lace-ups if I’m not mistaken. I went on to acquire something of a collection of them for myself, including black shoes with sidebuckle, imitation crocodile skin shoes with squared off toes, and black Chelsea-style boots, all painfully pointed. By the spring of ’78 or thereabouts I think I’d junked the lot as a means of sparing my poor feet.
This trendy London look might have been confused by some with Punk. For certainly like Punk it was adopted in reaction to the once ubiquitous hippie look, but it was married to a love of Soul music rather than primitive three-chord Rock. It was common among working class Soul Boys, although I was not to discover this until later in the year when I started hanging out at the Woodville Hall in Gravesend, Kent, while at Merchant Navy college in nearby Greenhithe. Through one of the guys at college I found out about the Global Village night club under the Arches near Charing Cross. The Global in ’77 was something of a magnet for working class kids from various London suburbs who favoured the Soul Boy look which then consisted of such elements as the wedge haircut, often streaked with a variety of tints, brightly coloured peg-top trousers, and winklepickers, or beach sandals.
When the Soul Boy wedge was married to a passion for European designer sports clothing, it mutated into the so-called Casual style which exploded in the late ’70s and early ’80s on the football terraces, first allegedly in Liverpool, and then nationally, going on to influence a passion for casual sporting attire on the part of the youth of Britain and beyond that persists to this day. For the greater part of ’77, it was the Soul Boy look I aspired to rather than that of Punk, although I started to flirt with Punk once I’d become aware of the monstrous vagaries of attire that were regularly on display on Chelsea’s Kings Road and elsewhere in the early part of the year.
By the summer, I was starting to as much resemble a Punk as a Soul Boy, squandering my youth like a profligate in night clubs and bars in Palamos on Spain’s Costa Brava, while working by day as a sailing instructor. After a few months I lost my job, but stayed on in Palamos for a time on a caravan site to engage in a constant almost Sisyphian round of alcohol-fuelled festivities.
As much as I loved the party life, what I wanted most of all was to enjoy it as a successful working actor like golden boys Peter Firth and Gerry Sundquist, both of whom found fame on the stage before branching out into movies and TV; although Firth had began his acting life as a child star.

Hardly a Wunderkind

In ’77 I was still ill-equipped for my ambitions, given that few if any actors become truly successful on the strength of their looks alone, which is surely why there are so many more pulchritudinous male models than actors. I had not yet appeared in a single play, except a handful at Pangbourne which had provoked more hilarity than praise. My roles there consisted of two elderly women, a beauty with Mia Farrow hair conducting some kind of illicit liaison as I recall, and a posturing psychopath called Alec, this in “The Rats”, a little known Agatha Christie one act play. In short, I was hardly a National Youth Theatre wonder kid. I had written a few songs, but my guitar playing was yet threadbare and weak, even though I already had a good baritone singing voice. Still there was precious little proof to date of any real ability or success of any kind. My future positively glittered before me.

An Evanescent Friendship

I underwent my final RNR voyage, destination Ostend in Belgium, towards the end of the summer of 1977. My best RNR pal Lofty was sadly not onboard, but other friends were, among them, Damon, a tall and elegant red-haired man a little in appearance as I recall like the charismatic British actor Edward Fox, with a trace perhaps of Damian Lewis. If Lofty was of the type of the warm, bluff working class Londoner, then Damon, who was probably about 26, was every inch the gentleman cavalier, and entirely aristocratic in manner, although far from cold or reserved.
His family background was almost inconceivably tragic, and his soft and courtly manners masked a troubled inner life which he kept almost entirely to himself, as well as considerable physical courage: I remember a time when for some reason a drunken sailor started threatening me in a bar, and Damon placed himself between me and my would-be attacker, with the result that he saved me from a possible battering.
I can imagine that back in ’77 there must have been those who wondered why two such apparently educated sorts as Damon and I chose to serve as Ordinary Seamen. I’m thinking in particular of some of the young guys of a certain RNR Division liaising with us to and from the port of Ostend in Flanders, Belgium. There was one incident I can recall quite clearly now when some of these feisty kids were grouping in an Ostend street intent on defending their honour for some wrong committed against them by some local youths. Damon and I made it clear that we had no intention of taking part, with the result that one of their number, a waiflike young salt of about 16 or 17, previously a pal of ours, turned to look at us with a look of sheer uncomprehending contempt on his beardless face and uttered: “What’s wrong with youse guys?”, before dashing headlong into the melee.  He was of course, implying that we were deficient in courage and manliness, but as I’ve already stated, Damon was the least cowardly of men. Moreover, according to what I observed and what he himself told me, he was more than averagely successful with the opposite sex. Yet, for his own reasons he chose conceal his extreme personal toughness beneath a display of aristocratic refinement and reserve. While I was no less robustly heterosexual than he, I did not share the inner fortitude which would eventually see him assuming the uniform and calling of a naval officer. It had of course been his destiny all along. But not mine. My tenure with the London Division, RNR came to an end in late 1977 with an incredibly positive character report. However, I would never wear a military uniform again.

Chapter Eight – Gilded Youth at the Guildhall School

Introduction

An initial draft of “Gilded Youth” was published at the Blogster.com website on the 1st of July 2006, since which time it’s undergone considerable modification. The inclusion of the second versified section of “Woodville Hall” first published separately and in longer form at Blogster on the 18th of February ’06, is a fairly recent development. It had been based on the bare essentials of an autobiographical short story written in 1978 or ’79.
A definitive version of “Gilded Youth” was published at the FaithWriters.com website in December 2007.

The Woodville Hall escapists

In late 1977 I joined the former Merchant Navy School in Kent as a trainee Radio Officer. I formed several close friendships there; but closest of all was with Jayant, a lovable hard nut of about 18 with a thick London accent who’d been born into nearby Gravesend’s large Asian community. Jay certainly knew how to handle himself, but he was loyal and soft-hearted towards those he liked and trusted, and for a time we were inseparable.
It was through Jay I think that I started going to discos at Gravesend’s Woodville Hall, depicted in the piece below. There young Punk and Soul Kids would meet every week or so in late ’77 dressed in escapist fashions which stood out in such bizarre contrast with the drabness of their surroundings. English suburban life in those days didn’t include such modern day distractions as mobile phones, DVD players and the world wide web, and was dismally uninspiring as a result. Little wonder therefore that it gave birth to Punk and other outlandish youth cults, most of which are still in existence to some degree to this day.
I used to nag Jay to be nicer, not that he wasn’t…he was one of the kindest guys I’ve ever known…but he had a habit of talking tough which intimidated some people. As things turned out, I was the one who quit college first, even if he did follow me not long afterwards, which caused Jay to wonder I’d been such a prig in the first place. I didn’t have an answer…

Soon after I’d paid
My sixty
or 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
or bleach blonde,
With flashes of
red, Purple
or 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
of short-haired youths…
Smoother, more elegant,
less menacing
than the previous ones.
These well-dressed
street boys
Wore well-pressed pegs
of red or blue…
they pirouetted and posed…

West Suburban Story

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 exhilarated; but that didn’t stop me sinking further into the nihilistic Punk lifestyle. Having been bewitched by the hairstyle of one of a small gang of Punks I knew by sight from nights out in Dartford in late ’77, I decided to imitate it a few weeks later. It was predictably spiked, with a kind of a halo of bright blond taking in the front of the head, both sides, and a strip at the nape of the neck. I have part of a photograph of myself wearing this style with a long Soul Boy fringe at the front, before I eventually had it cut into spikes. By the spring of 1978, I’d shorn it all off into a skinhead.
It was genuinely dangerous being a Punk in 77-78 and you lived in constant fear of attack or abuse if you chose to dress like one. After all, Punk’s culture of insolence and outrage was extreme even by the standards of previous British youth cults such as the Teds, the Rockers, the Mods, the Greasers, the Skins, the Suedeheads and the Smoothies. 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 extraordinary hostility Punks attracted.
Close by to where I shared a house with my parents in the furthermost reachers of south west London where suburbia meets countryside I saw Hersham Punk band Sham ’69 shortly before they became nationally famous. I already knew their lead singer Jimmy Pursey by sight; at least I think it was him I saw miming to Chris Spedding’s “Motorbiking” at the disco one night. This gig took place in a poky hall above a pub in the centre of a large bleak industrial estate, itself surrounded by drab housing estates and endless rows of council houses.
I was often there on a Sunday in the late 70s, usually with friends, looking for romance, or just dancing to my beloved Soul. On one occasion that I remember, the Soul gave way to Punk which saw the tiny dance space being invaded by deranged pogo-dancers. I just stood back and watched. I was still a Soul Boy at heart.
On another, a Ted revivalist, a follower of classic Rock and Roll who favoured flashy fifties-style clothing, tried to start some trouble with me in the toilet. At this point, another Ted who’d befriended me about a year before when I dressed like an extra from “The Blackboard Jungle” stepped in with the magical words: “He’s a mate!”. His intervention may have saved me from a hiding that night because Teds had a loathing of Punks informed by their essential conservatism. To them, Punks probably seemed to have no respect for anything. Later, or it may have been before I can’t remember, he asked me whether I was really into “this Punk lark” or whatever he called it, and I assured him I wasn’t. I may even have added that I still loved the fifties, which was actually the truth to an extent, not that that was the point. The fact is that I lied to him to look good in his eyes, which was a pretty low thing to do to a friend.
On New Years Eve, I took Jay to a party in swanky west central London. It was one of the last, perhaps even the very last, in a long series of parties I’d gone to throughout ’77 thanks to my old Welbourne buddies, so many of whom were now based in and around the capital.
Before arriving at the host’s house or apartment, Jay and I met up as agreed with budding oil magnate Chris, an especially close friend from my days as Cadet C.R. Halling 173. Introductions over, Jay saw fit to impress Chris with a terrifying solo display of his lethal street fighting skills. “I’m suitably impressed”, said Chris, and he was; and Chris was no sissy. We all got on well that insane night which saw me pouring a full glass of beer over my head at one point in circumstances I’d rather keep to myself. What the beautiful student of dance I’d spent most of the evening with thought of a nice guy like me doing a thing like that she didn’t say.

The Costa del Punk

In the spring of 1978, I arrived in the famous Costa del Sol town of Fuengirola near Marbella, with the intention of helping to set up a sailing school with a young English guy of about 30 I knew only very slightly. He kindly put me up in an apartment, but as things turned out the project came to nothing. However, I stayed on in Fuengirola, living first in a hotel, and then rent-free thanks to a friend I made in town in her own apartment.
Shortly after that, I was offered the position of front man in a Hard Rock band playing nightly at the Tam Tam night club. I became something of a town character, Coco the Punk as I was known, one of only two Punks in Fuengirola, most of the kids who became my close friends being still in thrall to the Hippie sixties. ’78 was my first year as a full-time Punk in fact, and among the objects of my excess were a black wet-look tee-shirt with cropped sleeves, drainpipe jeans of black or green, worn with black studded belt festooned with silver chain kept in place by safety pins, 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. I removed it once it had started to cause my whole ear to throb.
For the most part, it was a summer of love and leisure, of endless lotus eating mostly spent in the town itself, but also at the legendary Campo del Tenis, or nearby Mijas…and even on one occasion each as I remember it, in Marbella, Torremolinos, Puerto Banus. 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 a very dear friend. One night the charismatic British racing driver James Hunt called to her from out of the darkness of a balmy Andalusian night, before vanishing as suddenly as he’d arrived. Yes, it was that incredible a summer.
I returned to London in September 1978 to take my place at the Guildhall, but by the following summer, I was back in Spain; not to Fuengirola though, despite the fact that my friends from the band had wanted me to carry on with them as lead singer throughout ’79. I feel bad to this day at having let them down so badly; we were so close as a band. There was something about the Spanish character that resonated with me; I can’t say exactly what, but I always got on so well with the Spanish.
In my wisdom I’d chosen instead to go to La Ribera, the little former fishing village in the south eastern province of Murcia.
I felt a deep and overwhelming sense of exhaustion as I stretched out on the wooden balneario overlooking the Mar Menor, but I don’t recall being especially disappointed by the knowledge that I wouldn’t be returning to the Guildhall for the autumn term of 1979. It may have been just the Costa Calida sun that made me feel so burned out.

Farewell Lauderdale Tower

Just before quitting Fuengirola the previous summer of ’78 I’d been approached with an offer of singing in the Canary Islands, but I’d turned it down. Who knows where it might have led; but then had I travelled to the Canaries with the band, I wouldn’t have gone to the Guildhall through which so many incredible experiences came. It would take an entire separate volume to list them all.
What I will say is I was involved with an almost unbroken succession of Rock and Pop bands. Through one of them, Rockets, I was offered the position of lead singer for a guitar player of genius who’s played with one of the world’s leading Rock superstars since 1990. Through another, Narcissus, which I formed with my mates Simon and John, I found only disgrace when our bizarre image resulted in a cacophony of heckling. For the most part, I was the sweetest and most mannerly of guys of guys, but I had a nasty habit of shooting myself in the foot at the worst possible moments, or shooting my mouth off, one of the two. It was as almost as if I was returning to type, the suburban loser, waster, clown…position, after all, from which it’s impossible to fall.
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; while Robert Fitzroy-Square was the boy next door with the Buddy Holly glasses, who provided most of the comedy, Dave Dean, the punk kid with the don’t mess with me stare, and Little Ricky Ticky, the baby of the band at only 18.
There were emotional scenes at my farewell party held in the depths of the Barbican Estate’s Lauderdale Tower and many cried openly because I was leaving. During the evening, a close friend Tasmin told me to contact the impresario Harry Creasey, well-known for offering young actors their very first positions within the entertainment industry.
True to form, he gave me my very first paid job in the business a matter of months afterwards. So just before Christmas, I was doubling as Christian the Chorus Boy and Joey the Teddy Bear complete with furry costume in the pantomime “Sleeping Beauty” that began its run in Ealing in west London, culminating at the Buxton Opera House in Derbyshire. Then early on in the new year, I played Mustardseed in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the Bristol Old Vic…maybe leaving Guildhall had been the right thing to do after all.
From the Vic era, I offer the following relic from an unfinished tale which I went on to edit and versify. I rescued it last year from a battered notebook I was in the habit of scribbling in during spare moments offstage while dressed in my costume and covered in blue body make-up and silver glitter. While doing so, some of this glitter was transferred from the pages with which they were stained more than twenty six years ago onto my hands. It was an eerie experience.

Along Whiteladies Road

I remember the grey
slithers
of rain,
The jocular driver
As I boarded the bus
At Temple Meads,
And the friendly lady
Who told me
When we had arrived
At the city centre.
I remember
the little pub
on King Street,
With its quiet
Maritime atmosphere
And the first readthrough.
I remember tramping
Along Park Street,
Whiteladies Road
And Blackboy Hill,
My arms and hands
Aching from my bags
To the little cottage
Where I had decided to stay
And relax
In beween rehearsals,
Reading, writing,
Listening to music.
I remember my landlady,
Tall, timid and beautiful…

Chapter Ten – West of the Fields Long Gone

“West of the Fields Long Gone” has been composed of pieces from formerly published writings, including “Ice Spoke of the Spells of Calm” mark one, which was first published at the Blogster.com website on the 25th January 2007. “First Night of the Dream” and “The End of the Century Young” were taken from this piece. “Like Some New Romantic” was originally part of an early draft of “West of the Fields Long Gone” published at Blogster on August 20th 2006. All sections were subjected to considerable modification before being published in definitive form at the Faithwriters.com website in August/December ’07.
It takes up where the previous story, “Gilded Youth at the Guildhall School” left off, which is to say my arrival in Bristol in south west England to appear in Richard Cottrell production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the city’s Old Vic theatre in the winter of 1980. Moving into ’81, it goes into some details about my tenuous links with the New Romantic movement, and ends with my becoming an aging student at the University of London.

First Night of the Dream

My time in the city of Bristol as an actor with the Bristol Old Vic theatre company in early 1980 was restless and unsettled. Initially, I stayed in an elegant little dwelling in the affluent Clifton area to the west of the city centre. Then, a friend from the Vic who also happened to be the wardrobe assistant, generously asked me if I’d like to stay with her for a while. I said yes, but it wasn’t long before I’d relocated to a boarding house, also in leafy Clifton I think. There I stayed until it was time for me to return to London.
Appearing alongside me in Richard Cottrell’s production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” among other members of an incredibly gifted generation of actors at the Vic were Daniel Day Lewis, future Oscar-winning character actor of legendary perfectionist genius; and the brilliant Nickolas Grace, perhaps best known for his screen portrayals of flamboyant dandies both real and fictional; such as Anthony Blanche in the 1981 television version of Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited”, directed by Charles Sturridge and Michael Lynsey-Hogg. And prior to the first night, I’d been fortunate enough to witness a BOV production of one of my favourite ever musicals, Frank Loesser’s “Guys and Dolls”, with Clive Wood as Sky Masterson, and another future screen legend Pete Postethwaite as Nathan Detroit, and which I can quite honestly say provided me with more pleasure than any other theatre production I’ve seen before or since.
The “Dream” was greatly praised; and there was even some talk of its going on to become as renowned as the 1971 production by Peter Brook, whom I actually met in 1979. So much so that it relocated to the London Old Vic in the summer, where it was no less successful than at Bristol.

Like Some New Romantic

1981 was the year in which I was most active as an enthusiast of the New Romantic movement which had been originated in the late 1970s largely among discontented ex-punks who were reacting to Punk’s increasingly drab uniformity. The New Romantics embraced a hyper-nostalgic devotion to diverse ages past which they interpreted as romantic, whether recent times such as the twenties or forties, after the fashion of such pioneers of the movement as Bryan Ferry, and Ron Mael of Sparks, a startlingly inventive avant-pop outfit of American origin, or more distant historical epochs, which inspired such accessories as ruffs, veils, frills, kilts and so on. Its soundtrack was not guitar rock, but an electronic dance music influenced by German art rock collectives such as Kraftwerk and Can, as well as electro-disco pioneer Giorgio Moroder. To some degree, it set the tone, musically speaking for the entire decade, after having been brought into the pop charts by acts as diverse as Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran and Ultravox. By the end of ’81, the movement was no longer cutting edge as I recall it, partly perhaps because of the scarcity of bands clearly identifiable as New Romantic. That said, it went on to exert an immense influence on the development of music and fashion throughout the eighties, not just in London but other cities throughout Britain, Europe, and beyond. I attended New Romantic club nights at Le Kilt and Le Beat Route among others, and was even snapped at one of these by the legendary London photographer David Bailey, but I was never a true new romantic, so much as afellow traveller keen to experience first hand the final truly provocative London music and fashion cult before it imploded as all others had done before it.
As ’81 progressed, my acting career faltered, and so a family decision was reached to the effect that I should become a mature student at the age of 25. Accordingly, I passed interviews for both the University of Exeter, and the University of London and specifically, Westfield College, situated on the Finchley Road in Hampstead, north London.
To cut a long story short, I opted for Westfield; and so in the autumn of that year found myself embarking on a Bachelor of Arts degree in French and Drama mainly at Westfield, but also partly at the nearby Central School of Speech and Drama, while resident in a small room on campus.
My dissatisfaction with my situation was initially so strong that at one point in an attempt to escape it I auditioned for work as an assistant stage manager, or acting ASM, for my old friend and agent Harry Creasey. However, I was not successful. Soon after this fiasco, while ambling at night in what I think was the Swiss Cottage area close by to the Central School, I was ambushed by a group of my fellow drama students, who were clearly thrilled to see me. It felt wonderful to be accepted so unconditionally by them. Perhaps they appeared to my jaded 26 year old eyes to incarnate the sheer carefree rapturous vitality and joy of life of youth.
Before long I settled down at Westfield, in fact came to love my time there, coinciding as it did with the first half of the crazy eighties…last of a triad of decades in the West of unceasing artistic and societal change and experimentation. For me the very early ’80s was a time of ceaseless exhilarated hedonism, the poisons fuelling me back then being not primarily, or even significantly, narcotic. Rather they constituted a furious desire for strong sensation within a diversity of fields, the intellectual, the social and the amatory among them, reinforced by industrial strength doses of self-obsession. Furthermore, from around the turn of the eighties or earlier, I began to be motivated by an adoration of early death, as well as those artists who, both gifted beyond measure and exquisite of face and form had gone in search of it. It was my desire to be ultimately numbered among such bedevilled individuals myself, to know such blissful delinquency…
The piece below has its origins I believe in that time, and the “artistic torment” it conveys should be taken with a colossal pinch of salt. The truth is that I was a genuinely joyful and carefree spirit back then, in fact perhaps too much so, with the result being that I felt moved to seek out the kind of mysterious intensity I felt I sorely lacked and so coveted. It’s a cliche I know…but we should all be careful for what we wish for, for when it comes to us as so very often does, it tends to do so at quite a price, oh such a price…

Some Perverse Will

I’m a restless man
I am never
Still
I’m always spurred on
By some perverse
Will
The grass is never
Green
No peace here
To find
Some demon
Of motion’s
At work within my
Mind
No bed is too soft
That I won’t
Abandon
It’s sweet calm
And comfort
For a softer
One
I’m a restless man
I am never
Still
I’m always spurred on
By some perverse
Will.

Chapter Ten – Ice Spoke of the Spells of Calm

A Westfield Narrative 1

“Ice Spoke of the Spells of Calm” is the second in a four-part series of writings inspired by my time at Westfield College. It was created out of modified versions of three previously published pieces: “Ice Spoke” itself, “West of the Fields Long Gone”, and “She Dear One who Followed Me”, which first saw the light of day at Blogster.com on the 10th of August 2006. From “Ice Spoke” I lifted “A Westfield Narrative 2” and “Nice Guy on the Sidelines”, while “A Night in Scorpio’s” and “One of the Greats” were taken from “West of the Fields”, having first served as its introduction and main body respectively. “She Dear One who Followed Me” and its intro, now known as “A Westfield Narrative 3”, have been reproduced in their entirety. The definitive “Ice Spoke” was published at Faithwriters.com in August/December 2007.

A Night at Scorpio’s

Thanks to the large quantity of notes I committed to paper while at Leftfield, this long vanished college can live again through writings I’ve painstakingly forged out of them, such as the poetic piece below. It was based on several conversations I had with Jez, a great Westfield friend. He was a tough-talking kid with a rocker’s quiff from Liverpool who I think had been around during the Punk days at Eric’s, but whose heart was pure gold. I’m sure these talks took place late one night in late 1982 in Scorpio’s, a Greek restaurant opposite the college on the Finchley Road following a performance at college of Lorca’s “Blood Wedding” in which I’d played the part of the Novio, or bridegroom.
The previous summer Jez had played Malvolio in a production of Shakespeare’s “Twelth Night” at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the play’s action having been transplanted to an Arcadian swinging sixties.
And while Jez interpreted Malvolio as a brooding relic from the previous decade, I as Feste was perfectly of my time as a wandering minstrel in flowing hippie clothes. When we re-performed it at the college the following winter term we were like returning heroes, at least that’s how it seemed to me. I was young then…that’s my excuse anyway…

I think you should be
One of the greats,
Carl, but you’ve
Given up and that’s sad…
You drink too much,
You think, ____ it
And you go out and get _____,
When I’m 27 I’d be happy
To be like you…
In your writing,
Make sure you’ve got
Something really
Unbeatable…
Then say…’Here, you _______!’
You’ve got the spark of genius
At sixteen, you knew
You were a genius,
At nineteen, you thought
You were a failure
& now you think…
What’s genius anyway?

A Westfield Narrative 2

The piece featured below begun as diary notes written on spare scraps of paper, only to be shelved for more than two decades. They refer to a single evening at Westfield, almost certainly taking place in 1983, but perhaps ’82. It gives some indication of my social hypersensitivity and unceasing need for attention, affection and approval within a social setting, and the way it affected those who cared for me.

Nice Guy on the Sidelines

Those sad faces
My soul was
in knots
I couldn’t speak!
I felt like the nice guy
On the sidelines,
Gentle
but strong…
I spoke
Of the spells of calm
And the hysterical
Reactions
Psychic
Exhaustion
Then anxious
Elation
I’d only approached
The latter
By my third
And Gill said
Your eyes are
Sparkling
You must be
Happy…
Sally said: “I’m afraid…
You’re inscrutable
You’re not just
Blasé,
Are you?”
I spoke
Of the spells of calm
And the hysterical
Reactions
Psychic
Exhaustion
Then anxious
Elation.

A Westfield Narrative 3

On and off throughout the 1980s, I catalogued my days through notebooks, cassette tapes, odd scraps of paper, and so on. Some of these rough diary entries produced “She Dear One Who Followed Me” which is featured below. It first existed as a series of scrawled notes based on conversations I’d had in 1982 or ’83 with a very dear friend, Madeleine.
One of these resulted from an incident in which I’d made a fool of myself by storming off during a gig featuring myself and fellow singer-guitarist Denny after I’d caused something of a scene by breaking a string.
The first section begins with “It was she”, and ends with “you could hurt me, you know”. making use of extracts from several separate conversations, all of which were also edited; while the second, taken from a single edited conversation begins with “You are a Don Juan” and ends with “there’s something so…so…your look”. The final section, also taken from a single conversation, was reproduced word for word. Portions of the piece were translated from the original French, Madeleine’s native tongue. As a whole, it provides something of an insight into how my friend saw me in those days…as a far more complex individual than my good time guy image might have suggested. She was not alone in doing this.

She Dear One Who Followed Me

It was she, bless her,
who followed me…
she’d been crying…
she’s too good for me,
that’s for sure…
“Your friends
are too good to you…
it makes me sick
to see them…
you don’t really give…
you indulge in conversation,
but your mind
is always elsewhere,
ticking over.
You could hurt me,
you know…
You are a Don Juan,
so much.
Like him, you have
no desires…
I think you have
deep fears…
There’s something so…so…
your look.
It’s not that
you’re empty…
but that there is
an omnipresent sadness

Chapter Eleven – The Wanderer of Golders Green

Introduction

A definitive version of “The Wanderer of Golders Green”, formerly “Tales from a College that Disappeared” as earlier published in rudimentary form at Faith Writers on the 22cnd of April 2007, was re-published there in December 2007.

An Eighties Narrative 1

The two “tales” that follow have been compiled using my usual creative methods exhaustively described elsewhere. They are intended to provide a stark contrast between my state of being during the first half of my time at Westfield College, London, where I studied for a BA degree in French and Drama between 1981 and ’85, and that during my final year. The first tale, “Gallant Festivities” was based on two pages of informal journal notes dating from 1982-’83. Itself consisting of two sections, the first refers to revels enjoyed in the wake of a performance at the college of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” in which I’d played Feste the Fool, while the second was collaged out of an assortment of diary entries from ‘83. Some of these were made in response to another night of revelry following the showing of a play, this time of Lorca’s “Blood Wedding”, already mentioned in the previous chapter. Both I hope successfully evoke the feverish merrymaking that marked my golden years at Westfield.
I like to see my first two Westfield years as symbolic of an entire decade given over to frenzied excess, with disaster looming just beyond the horizon. In a general sense this came in the shape of Black Monday, the stock market crash of Monday the 19th of October 1987. This could be said to have put paid to the spirit of the eighties just as effectively as the Great Crash of 1929 had spelled the end of the “greatest, gaudiest spree in history”. As to myself in particular, it took form as the collapse of my health and the end of my ability to drink alcohol with impunity. This however would not occur until well into the far dowdier decade to come.

Gallant Festivities (1982/3)

It was my evening,
That’s for sure –
At last I’m good
At something –
27 years old
I may be, but…
“I’ve heard all
about you…”
“I have to meet
That guy…”
“Spot the
Equity card…”
“It’s your aura, Carl…”
I even signed
One of Fred’s friends’
Programmes –
“When are you going
To be a superstar?”
Said Sara
A few days ago –
That seemed to be
The question
On everyone’s lips.
“You got Feste perfectly,
Just how I
envisaged it”
“…Not only when
You’re onstage
but off too!”
At last, at last, at last
I’m good at something…
And so the party…
I danced first with P.,
“…Don’t go away…”
Zoe called me…
I listened…
…To her problems…
References
To my “innocent face”…
Linda said:
“Sally seems Elusive
But is in fact,
Accessible;
You’re the opposite –
You give to everyone
But are incapable
Of giving in particular.”
Madeleine was comparing me
To June Miller…
Descriptions by Nin:
“She does not dare
To be herself…”
Everything I’d always
Wanted to be,
I now am…
“…She lives
On the reflections
Of herself…”
Partly of truth,
“…In the eyes
Of others…”
“…So long, Carl…”
“There is no June
To grasp and know…”
…Partly of myth.
I get kept getting up to dance…

An Eighties Narrative 2

For the duration of my second year at Westfield I lived in an upper floor apartment in Powis Gardens, Golders Green, with my two close friends, Steve and Sebastian, French students both; and from the East Riding of Yorkshire and County Durham respectively.
Soon after moving in, I decorated the walls of my room and the lounge (which doubled as Steve’s bedroom) with various provocative images including reproductions of Symbolist and Decadent paintings, and icons of popular culture and the avant garde. We all three went on to organise a “salon” which while well attended only ran to a single meeting, a desperate attempt at aping Oxford-style decadence in the upstairs apartment of a tiny little dwelling in suburban north London. With the best will in the world, we were not part of the Brideshead Generation.
In common with most of my friends, I drank and smoked pretty heavily at night night, but never during the day. Looking back, self-doubt was not a serious problem for me any more than was depression. In fact, my first two Westfield years were a neverending round of plays, shows, concerts, discos, parties set against the background of one of the most beautiful and bucolic suburbs of north London. Sadly, however, the summer term of 1983 was an anticlimax. The reason for this was that I had decided to work for a full academic year as an English language assistant in a French secondary school following the vacation. Therefore I would not be seeing my friends at Westfield again, that is in the capacity of fellow student, nor joining them in their final year celebrations. There was an alternative, in the shape of a few weeks abroad, but accepting this would have deprived me of the chance of spending more than six months in Paris, a city I’d long pined for. So, in the autumn of ’83, I took lodgings on the grounds of the Lycee JP Timbaud in Bretigny-sur-Orge, a commune in the southern suburbs situated some sixteen miles south of the city centre, and remained there until the following May.

Paris What a City

I was hardly innocent by the time I first set foot in Bretigny. I’m almost certain, however, that at some point not too long after my arrival I felt a sense of self-disillusion, I can’t say why for certain. Perhaps I felt I’d let people down, people who’d loved and trusted me because of the way I looked, with such an “innocent face”. At the same time, paradoxially perhaps, I’d barely been vainer than in ‘84, to such a degree that some of the Lycée kids affectionately dubbed me Aldo Maccione for my absurd affected swagger. Aldo was a comic actor who habitually referred to “la classe”, a kind of caricature of Latin machismo. Yet there seems little doubt to me today that that my conscience had long started to scream out in protest and pain…

…my paris begins with those early days as as a conscious flâneur i recall the couple seated opposite me on the métro when i was still innocent of its labyrinthine complexity slim pretty white girl clad head to toe in denim smiling wistfully while her muscular black beau stared through me with fathomless orbs and one of them spoke almost in a whisper “qu’est-ce-que t’en pense” and it dawned on me yes the slender young parisienne with the distant desirous eyes was no less male than me dismal movies in the forum des halles and beyond being screamed at in pigalle and then howled at again by some kind of madman or derelict who told me to go to the bois de boulogne to meet what he saw as my destiny menaced by a sinister skinhead for trying on tessa’s wide-brimmed hat and then making my way alone to my room in in the insanely driving rain getting soused in les halles with jane who’d just seen dillon as rusty james and was walking in a daze jane again with trudy at the cave de la huchette jazz cellar the cafe de flore with milan who asked for a menu for me and then disappeared back to bretigny cash squandered on a gold tootbrush two tone shoes from close by to the place d’italie portrait sketched at the place de tertre paperback books by symbolist poets such as villiers de l’isle adam but second hand volumes by trakl and ernest delève and a leather jacket from the marché de puces of the porte de clignancourt wandering the city alone or with adrienne or milan or steve or simon or ariana or amanda (i still miss her) losing rory’s address scrawled on a page of musset’s confessions d’un enfant du siecle walking the length and breadth of the rue st denis what a city as Juliette once wrote me…so thrillingly lovely…so thrillingly lovely…

An Eighties Narrative 3

It may be true to say that much of the wistfulness displayed by the final piece, “The Wanderer of Golders Green” formed from notes committed to paper in 1985, and largely centring on an evening I spent sauntering in a mournful daze through the titular north London suburb, was born of a long-established infatuation with Bohemian melancholy, and that my characteristic joy of life was still very firmly in place in ’85. Yet, as I remember it, this same natural exaltation was being compromised as never before by a tendency to unbelievably intense depressive attacks. Furthermore, it is unquestionable that I was seeking more and more comfort through a far deadlier Bohemian favourite than mere affected discontent, alcohol.
I don’t think it’s too fanciful to suggest that I’d lost something between bidding farewell to the Westfield I’d known in ’81 to ’83, and returning to my Land of Lost Content in the autumn of ‘84, something hard to define perhaps, but something precious nonetheless.

The Wanderer of Golders Green (1985)

I awake each morning
With fresh hope
And tranquility
I might go for a saunter
Down quiet London backstreets
Soon my aimlessness
Depresses me,
And I realise
I’d been deceiving myself
As to my ability
To relax as others do.
After my Special B.,
I bought a lager
At the Bar
And chatted to Gaye.
Then Ray
Bought me another.
I appreciated the fact
That he remembered
The time he,
His gal Chris,
And Rory Downed
An entire Bottle
Of Jack Daniels
In a Paris-bound train.
I awoke around one.
I slowly got dressed.
Chatty as ever
Before the exam:
French/English translation.
Periodically I put
My face in my hands
Or groaned or sighed.
I finished my paper
In 1 hour and a half.
As I walked out
I caught various eyes
Amanda’s, Trudy’s (quizzical) etc…
I went to bed…
Slept ‘till five…
Read O’Neill until 7ish…
Got dressed
And strolled down
To Golders Green,
In order to relive
A few memories.
Singing songs
Brought voluptuous tears.
I snuck into McDonalds
Where I felt At home,
Anonymous, alone.
I bought a few things,
Toothpaste and pick,
Chocolate, yoghurts,
Sweets, cigarettes
And fruit juice.
Took a sentimental journey
Back to Powis Gardens,
Richness
And intensity,
Romantic
And attractive…
Sad, suspicious and strange.
I sat up until 3am,
Reading O’Neill
Or writing (inept) poetry.
Awoke at 10,
But didn’t leave
My room till 12,
Lost my way
To Swiss Cottage,
Lost my happiness.
Oh so conscious
Of my failure
And after a fashion,
Enjoying this knowledge.

Outro: A Paris Flaneur

“A Paris Flâneur” was extracted just a little over a year ago from a passage from a projected novel, perhaps written sometime in the mid to late 1980s, but then largely destroyed. This passage, based on my actual experiences as an urban wanderer in Paris in the years 1983-’84, was edited and versified before being published at blogster.com website on the 2006 as “A Paris Flâneur”. Further very minor alterations took place in July/December 2007.

I took the Metro
To Montparnasse-Bienvenue,
Where I slowly sipped
A demi-blonde
In one of those brasseries
Immortalised by Brassai.
Bewhiskered old toper
In a naval officer’s cap,
His table bestrewn
With empty wine bottles
And cigarette butts,
Repeatedly screeched the name
“Phillippe” until such a time
As a pallid, impassive bartender
With patent leather hair,
Filled the old man’s glass to the brim,
With a mock-obsequious
“Voilà, mon Capitaine!”
I cut into the Rue de Bac,
Traversed the Pont Royal,
Briefly beheld
Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois,
With its gothic tower,
Constructed only latterly,
In order that
The 6th Century church
Might complement
The style of the remainder
Of the 1er arrondissement
Before steering for the
Place de Chatelet,
And onwards…les Halles!

Chapter Twelve – Of All Sad Words of Tongue or Pen

“Of All Sad Words” made its debut at the Blogster.com website on the 25th January 2007. It consisted of an introduction, the main body of the work, formerly untitled but now “Some Sad Dark Secret”, and an epilogue. Before a definitive version was published at the Faithwriters website in September 2007, it was quite heavily edited, while not having been significantly altered in spirit. Further minor alterations took place in early December.

Galvanising Mentors

“Some Sad and Dark Secret”, was forged using creative methods scrupulously described elesewhere. It was based on notes contained within a single piece of scrap paper which I recently unearthed, and probably dating from 1982 or ’83, during which I was a French and Drama student at Westfield College. The first three sections contain words of advice imparted to me by Dr Elizabeth Lang, who was my principle tutor during my final year at Westfield, and under whose galvanising direction I studied as my main subject the controversial and often disturbing writings of André Gide. Throughout the year, she tirelessly encouraged my intellectual and literary inclinations, determined that I should go on to become a professional academic. She also believed that I had the makings of a successful writer, informing me at one point that if creative writing is of a sufficiently sensational nature, it is guaranteed to be read by a ravenously curious public, and so to be financially successful, or something similar. The fourth and fifth sections have as their basis words once spoken to me by another of my Westfield tutors, Dr Hardy. They refer to my former desire to shock by the affectation of an almost hysterical vehemence of tone in my writings, as well as the endless inclusion of ranting lists.

Some Sad Dark Secret

Dr Lang said:
“Temper
Your enthusiasm,
The extremes
Of your
reactions,
You should have
A more
Conventional
Frame
On which to
Hang your
unconventionality.”
The tone of some
Of my work
Is often
A little dubious,
She said.
She thought
That there
Was something
Wrong,
That I’m hiding
Some sad and dark
Secret
From the world.
She told me
Not to rhapsodise,
That it would be
Difficult,
Impossible, perhaps,
For me to
Harness
My dynamism.
“Don’t push People”,
She said.
“You make
Yourself
Vulnerable”.
Dr Hardy said:
“By the third page,
I felt I’d been
Bulldozed.
I can almost see
Your soapbox.
Like Rousseau,
You’re telling us
What to do.
You seem to
Work yourself
Into such an
emotional pitch…
And this
Extraordinary
Capacity for lists.

A Spider Across the Skies

The first employment I undertook after leaving Westfield was as a wandering deliverer of novelty telegrams. It may be that I gave no serious thought to the future, because I didn’t seriously intend having one. My life’s work was apparently the pursuit of immortality through acting, music or literature, or ideally all three, while tasting as many earthly fruits, strong sensations, and limit-experiences as I was able to in the interim. I had no deep desire to leave anything behind by way of progeny, nor for any career other than one liable to project me to international fame. That said, in keeping with my then passionately felt liberal-left convictions, I did vaguely entertain the thought of an alternative career in one or other of the caring professions.
I struggle to adequately explain why I was quite so reckless with the many gifts heredity and good fortune had bestowed upon me, as I’m such a different person today, and one who honours and cherishes everything that contributes to the well-being of the individual in society, from the family onwards. It may be that I was in the grip of a condition of which sudden inexplicable recklessness was a primary symptom, because it would be inaccurate to state that I was unvaryingly reckless. In fact, I was capable of great diligence, especially when it came to my acting career, only for the recklessness to return.   What is certain is that whatever I was in thrall to has been significantly tamed by my faith, offering me the chance to revisit my younger days with an eye rendered mournful and wise by bitter regret, as well as the gift of hope for the future, which my folly almost deprived me of permanently. God’s offered me a second act, during which I might go some way towards repairing some of the damage I caused during the first, so that one day those terrible words contained in “Maud Muller” by the American Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892) might not burn themselves too savagely into my soul:
“For of all sad words of tongue or pen
The saddest are these: ‘it might have been!’”

Chapter Thirteen – A Cambridge Lamentation

Introduction

“A Cambridge Lamentation” centres on my brief stay at Homerton, a teaching training college contained within the University of Cambridge, with its campus at Hills Road just outside the city centre. First published at the Faithwriters.com website in August 2007 in “definitive” form, it is a fusion of two previously published works. These are “Shreds of Nothingness” as published at the Blogster.com website but now consisting of “In Such a State as This” and “A Cambridge Narrative” 1 & 2; and “Final Flight from Hills Road”, formerly “A Cantabrian Lament”, this first published in rudimentary form at Blogster on the 10th of June 2006. In December 2007, a final definitive version of “A Cambridge Lamentation” was published at Faith Writers.

A Cambridge Narrative 1

“In Such a State as This” was adapted either from a page of diary notes, or an unfinished and unsent letter, written just before Christmas 1986 at Homerton. I created it by extracting selected sentences from the original script, and then joining them together, before subjecting the result to thorough editing and versification. It conveys the pathological restlessness, romantic and otherwise, to which I was subject in the mid 1980s, and which resulted in my quitting Homerton after a single term. However, quite why I was so determined to put a final flight from Hills Road into practice remains a quandary to me more than two decades later. After all, I had every reason to relish my time there, given that I’d been made to feel most welcome and appreciated, not just by my tutors and fellow students, but others, including a student director, renowned throughout the university for the high quality of his theatrical productions, who singled me out to feature in a play he intended putting on during the Lent Term. He did so after seeing me interpret the leading role of Tom in Tennessee Williams’“The Glass Menagerie” soon after the end of the Michaelmas Term. Furthermore, the then president of the world famous Cambridge University Footlights Dramatic Club had gone out of his way to ask myself and a friend to appear in a Footlights production he was preparing as part of his year-long presidency. I threw it all away, as if life’s precious opportunities constituted an inexhaustible supply, which of course they don’t, as I know all too well today.

In Such a State as This

In such
a state as this
I could fall
In love
With anyone.
The night
before last
I went
to the ball
Couples
filing out
I wanted to be
one half
of ev’ry one
But I didn’t want
to lose her.
I’ve done
little today
Except mope
Dolefully around
I’ll get over
how
I feel now,
And very soon.
Gradually
I’ll freeze again,
Even assuming
An extra layer
of snow.
I have
I have
I have
To get out of here…

A Cambridge Narrative 2

It will be obvious to any half-way sensible reader of the following piece that had I remained at Cambridge for the brief three terms required of me by the dictates of my course, which included teaching practise at the Manor Community College in Arbury, a London overspill area north of the River Cam, I would have been primed for success in an area in which I excelled, namely comedic character acting with a satirical edge. Not only that, but I would have passed my Post Graduate Certificate in Education through Cambridge University, as part of a course intended to produce something of a pedagogic elite. As if all this weren’t enought to keep me at Homerton, when I made my first appearance at the Manor, the pupils reacted to me as if I was some kind of visiting movie or Rock star. Why in the name of precious reason itself was I so determined to put such a blatant act of self-sabotage into practise? As a Christian, my faith helps me to withstand the pain of not knowing why, and yet knowing all too well what I lost. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that without it I would find my memories almost too painful to bear. My faith protects me from the full furious ferocity of my follies past, and without it, I would be at their mercy, and they would rend me to shreds of utter nothingness.
Unless I’m mistaken, “Final Flight from Hills Road” was forged from the same source material as “In Such a State as This” before being subjected to a similar editing process, and then published at the Blogster.com website on the 10th of June 2006.

Final Flight from Hills Road

Homerton’s always a little lonely
at the weekends…
no noise and life,
I like solitude,
but not in places
where’s there’s recently been
a lot of people.
Reclusiveness protects you
from nostalgia,
and you can be as nostalgic
in relation
to what happened half an hour ago
as half a century ago,
in fact more so.
I met Tessa and Pete at 11.30 am,
and they took me out to lunch.
We went to Evensong
at Kings,
and it was beautiful;
the choral music, haunting.
I went to the PGCE
Xmas party. I danced,
and generally lived it up.
I went to bed sad though.
Discos exacerbate
my sense of solitude.
My capacity
for social warmth,
excessive social dependance
and romantic zeal
can be practically
deranging;
it’s no wonder
I feel the need
to escape.
I feel trapped here,
there’s no outlet for my talents.

Chapter Fourteen – Strange Coldness Perplexing

A definitive version of “Strange Coldness Perplexing” was first published at FaithWriters on the 31st of March 2007. It has remained more or less untouched since.

My Hot/Cold Torment

the catholic nurse
all sensitive
caring noticing
everything
what can she think
of my hot/cold torment
always near blowing it
living in the fast lane
so friendly kind
the girls
dewy eyed
wanda abandoned me
bolton is in my hands
and yet my coldness
hurts
the more emotional
they stay
trying to find a reason
for my ice-like suspicion
fish eyes
coldly indifferent eyes
suspect everything that moves
socialising just to be loud
compensate for cold
lack of essential trust
warmth
i love them
despite myself
my desire to love
is unconscious and gigantesque
i never know
when i’m going to miss someone
strange coldness perplexing
i’ve got to work to get devotion
but once i get it
i really get people on my side
there are carl people
who can survive
my shark-like coldness
and there are those
who want something
more personal
i can be very devoted to those
who can stay the course
my soul is aching
for an impartial love of people
i’m at war with myself…

A Cult of Nowness

The fragment above was forged using notes scrawled onto seven sides of an ancient now coverless notebook, possibly late at night following an evening’s carousal and in a state of serene intoxication. The original notes were based on experiences I underwent while serving as a teacher in a highly successful central London school of English, which I did between the spring or summer of ‘88 and the summer of 1990.
It gives some indication of my emotional condition at the time, including a tendency as I see it to wildly veer between the conscious effusive affectionateness I aspired to, and sudden irrational involuntary lapses of affect. It also bespeaks the intense devotion I manifested towards my favourite students and which was reciprocated by them with interest.
All punctuation has been removed and extracts from the notes have been tacked together not randomly as in the so-called cut up technique but selectively and all but sequentially.
It was written towards the end of the 1980s, a decade which I see as the last in a triad of decades marked in the West by frenzied persistent social upheaval and artistic innovation, the latter taking place in particular within two late modern forms of creative expression in the shape of the cinema and Rock music.
For me the last-named, and I am not alone in believing this, is more than just a simple type of popular music derived from Rythym and Blues, Country music and so on. Rather it is an immensely influential international subculture of varying artistic and intellectual substance, much of it depictable as pure “Pop”, which could be used as an abbreviation of popular rock. Some cultural critics have even gone so far as to describe it as a religion.
What is certain is that Rock has possessed an intellectual dimension since the 1960s, and many would single the one-time Protest poet Bob Dylan out as the person who more than any other helped to invest mere Pop music with genuine artistic and intellectual substance. From Dylan onwards there have been Rock artists who’ve looked to past movements within the sphere of artistic modernism for inspiration, such as Romanticism, Symbolism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Beat, Situationism, and so on, as well as the zeitgeists which birthed them. In my opinion this was especially true of certain pioneers of the music of the 1970s and early ‘80s.
It could be said that Rock has been the principle repository of the avant garde impulse in the West since the late sixties, with its attendant rebelliousness and negativity. However, it would be false to insist that it has been uniformly negative, when much of it has been positive and uplifting, as well as artistically exalted. Still the fact remains that Rock has helped to disseminate a culture of instant gratification throughout the Western World in the last fifty years thereby significantly contributing to the alteration of its moral fabric. Those who like myself were born in the mid 1950s, and so grew up in the sixties, were of necessity affected on a deep and perhaps largely subliminal level by the post-war socio-cultural revolution of which rock was such an essential component. Some were more profoundly and negatively impacted than others, and I would consider myself among them. I maintain that from quitting formal education aged 16 to coming to faith some two decades thereafter, I was in thrall to a cult of “nowness” or instantaneity that has been growing progressively more powerful throughout the west since about 1955.
If this were not so, why would I not have countenanced a future for myself during those years? I mean in terms of establishing myself within a solid profession, starting a family, planning for middle age and beyond, and so on? Retrospect informs me that prior to my decision to forswear alcohol, I viewed these concerns with an indifference bordering on contempt and it hurts me deeply to realise the extent to which I sabotaged my life through such a worldview. Sometimes it seems to me that the only way I can deal with such bitter knowledge is to see myself as a social and professional misfit simply by default.
As an illustration of how psychologically and spiritually lost I was in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, permit me to quote from a letter from my mother written to me in what I surmise to have been the winter of 1991:
“…I had a chance to look at your library…I could not believe what I saw. These very strange books, beyond my comprehension, most of them, and I thought what a dissipation of a good mind that thought it right to read such matters…I feel very deeply that you have up to your present state, almost ruined your mind. Your happy, smiling face has left you, your humourous nature, ditto, your spirited state of mind, your cheerful, sunny, exuberant well-being, all gone. Too much thought given to the unhappiness and sad state of others (often those you can not help, in any way)…I’ve said recently that I am convinced that anyone can get oneself into a state of agitation or distress or anxiety by thinking or reading about, or witnessing unpleasant things, and the only thing to do is to, as much as possible, avoid such matters, to not let them get hold in the mind. Your fertile mind has led you astray. Why, and how?”
How many millions of mothers over the course of the centuries have asked this of offspring who’ve been inexplicably drawn to the shadowlands of life only to lose their way back to sanity? Only God knows. Most of course, succesfully make the journey back before settling into a normal mode of life, but the danger of becoming lost is always there, especially for those who remain in the shadows far beyond adolescence. Eternal adolescence is arguably one of the prime features of our era, facilitated by its exaltation of youth .
I recently read of a legendary Rock artist from the late seventies and early eighties born like me in the mid 1950s and about whom someone very close to him described as being obsessed by human suffering, both mental and physical despite being well into his twenties. His worldview, which also incorporated a preoccupation with the dark glamour of self-destructive genius, I see as remarkably akin to mine at the time I penned the words contained in the first paragraph of this piece, or when my mother wrote her impassioned letter to me, portions of which I quoted in the previous paragraph.
I was a puer eternus in my mid-thirties at the time, in thrall to the avant garde and its age-old love affair with antagonism and nihilism. It had already wreaked serious psychological damage, and physical and spiritual annihilation would surely have followed had I not been violently wrenched from its Svengali-like influence in time. This of course is precisely what occurred, thanks to the mercy of God. There are those who would insist that far fewer young people in the late ‘00s are enthralled by the time-honoured avant gardist exaltation of self-destructive genius than in previous Rock eras. How true this is it is difficult to say, but what is certain is that the worldview still exists, and may be set to explode once again, as it has done periodically since the late ‘60s by which time the golden age of youth and Pop and had started to reveal a far more solemn visage with Hard Rock as its new soundtrack.
A year or so back, an angel-faced young Rock idol announced with apparent wistful regret that he’d destroyed beautiful things that were his for the keeping. Again I was reminded of the person I was a decade and a half ago, the eternal youth who romanticised self-destruction. He couldn’t be more different from today’s Carl, who treasures and honours the things he loves, which are to a significant extent the simple things that nurture and sustain the individual and society…

My Hot/Cold Torment (reprise)

…the catholic nurse all sensitive caring noticing everything what can she think of my hot/cold torment always near blowing it living in the fast lane so friendly kind the girls dewy eyed wanda abandoned me bolton is in my hands and yet my coldness hurts the more emotional they stay trying to find a reason for my ice-like suspicion fish eyes coldly indifferent eyes suspect everything that moves socialising just to be loud compensate for cold lack of essential trust warmth i love them despite myself my desire to love is unconscious and gigantesque I never know when I’m going to miss someone strange coldness perplexing I’ve got to work to get devotion but once I get it I really get people on my side there are carl people who can survive my shark-like coldness and there are those who want something more personal I can be very devoted to those who can stay the course my soul is aching for an impartial love of people I’m at war with myself the catholic nurse all sensitive caring…

Chapter Fifteen – Lone Birthday Boy Dancing

The Petrified Fool

In early 1990, I lost my position as a teacher of English as a foreign language in an Oxford Street language school where I’d spent almost two years, the concluding two of a decade somewhat redolent of the ’20s and ’60s in terms of its glamour and profligacy. It was a job I loved, for the social life it handed me on a plate, as well as sufficient money to finance the innumerous hours I spent each evening in the Champion public house in Wells Street where teacher and student alike would congregate some time after 7.30pm, and to spend on alcohol, tobacco, clothes, books, music and so on, as well as the occasional ill-fated attempt at reviving my career as actor and entertainer.
I pleaded for my job with some of the senior teachers, in person, through a friend, even by letter, but they refused to be swayed by my entreaties and given that I’d taken repeated advantage of their extraordinarily long-suffering attitude to my cavalier attitude to punctuality, they were more than justified in doing so.
Freed from the shackles of a teaching job which I loved, I briefly revived my acting career by playing Feste the Jester in a production of Shakespeare’s “Twelth Night” at the Jacksons Lane theatre in Highgate, north London. I also wrote most of the music for Feste’s songs, and received praise for this, as well as for my acting. In keeping with the spirit of the play its run was followed and to a lesser extent accompanied by ferocious bouts of revelry on the part of a very close cast.
As the final decade of the 20th Century dawned, I was finding my public image as much a source of terror as exhileration, and possibly to a greater extent than had ever been the case. This may have been due to an imminent health crisis. However, such was my abiding need to be noticed that I stubbornly refused to moderate my image although to be fair it was tame in comparison to what it had once been, and the recently departed 1980s had been a decade notorious for male sartorial vanity, in London of course, but also in other major Western cities. Instead, I began to anaesthetize myself as never before against what I saw as London’s foreboding aura, which may or may not have been more intense than a decade previously. For after all, I’d been attracting a degree of hostile attention for my flamboyant image since the early 1970s. What’s more, years of dissolute living, and the diverse intoxicants I’d been ingesting since my early twenties or earlier including vast quantities of caffeine in both liquid and solid form, were starting to take their toll on my nervous system. There was also my addiction to the dark side of life and especially the arts to take into account. All these served to create a terribly fractured personality in the grip not just of growing alcoholism but chronic Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

A Pair of PGCEs 1

In early autumn 1990, I began a course known as the PGCE or Post Graduate Certificate in Education at a school of higher education in the pleasant outer suburb of Twickenham, becoming resident in nearby Isleworth. I began quite promisingly as I saw it even though my heart was not really in the course but I genuinely saw the benefits of succesfully completing it, and as might be expected, excelled in drama and physical education.
I rarely drank during the day, but at night I was sometimes so drunk I was incoherent. The following piece of verse testifies to this sad truth. It was adapted (edited, reassembled) in 2006
From a letter typed to a friend in about 1990, concerning a series of accidents I’d recently suffered. However, it was never finished, nor sent. When it was recovered it was as a piece of scrap paper, a remnant from a long lost past.

A Letter Unsent
Dear…

I haven’t been in touch
for a long time.
Sorry.
The last time
I saw you
was in
St. Christopher’s Place.
It was a lovely evening…
when I knocked
that chair over.
I am sorry.
Since then,
I’ve had not
a few accidents
of that kind.
Just three days ago,
I slipped out
in a garden
at a friend’s house…
and keeled over,
not once,
not twice,
but three times,
like a log…
clonking my nut
so violently
that people heard me
in the sitting room.
What’s more,
I can’t remember
a single sentence
spoken
all evening.
The problem is…

A Pair of PGCEs 2

Towards the end of my first term in Twickenham, I found myself in the situation of being far less prepared by far than my fellow students for the forthcoming Teaching Practice period, and so removed myself from the course on a temporary basis in order to set about deciding whether I wanted to carry on or not. In the event I decided not to, but remained in Isleworth in order to rekindle my five-year old career as a deliverer of novelty telegrams. I also continued to work as a walk-on artist for the TV series “The Bill”, based in the London suburb of Merton, Surrey. Still in Isleworth, I became half of a musical partnership formed with my very dear friend Maxie Coburg from Manchester, whom I’d met through the Stage newspaper when he was looking for acts for a movable club he was getting together at the time. We remain close to this day.
By the middle of January 1993, I was attending yet another PGCE course, my third in fact, this one bearing the suffix fe, meaning further education, and based in Eltham, south east London. Additionally, I was still working as a sporadic deliverer of novelty telegrams, as well as rehearsing for the play “Simples of the Moon” by Rosalind Scanlon, based on the life of James Joyce’s daughter Lucia, in which I had two small parts thanks to the director Ariana, a close friend of mine since university days. As if all this weren’t enough, I continuing working with Maxie on our musical act which so far had yielded the occasional gig in a pub or restaurant, some home recording, some busking, and countless hours of socialising and partying that typically extended far into the small hours.
The following piece serves to evoke this exciting but dangerous period of my existence. It was compiled in the spring of 2006, using, as raw material, a few hastily scrawled notes commemorating a birthday recently celebrated in the early ’90s and possibly dating from the 8th of October 1992 or ’91 or even earlier, I cannot be certain. What is certain is that it has been reproduced word for word, although slightly edited, and of course subject to free versification. It is no tale of a carefree man about town, far from it, for there is a twilight mood to the piece, with the birthday boy performing his fatuous solo dance in spite of the disaster he’s so obviously courting.

Lone Dance of the Birthday Boy

Yesterday for my birthday,
I started off
with a bottle of wine…
I took the train
into town…
I had half a bitter
at the Cafe de Piaf
in Waterloo…
I went to work
for a couple of hours or so;
I had a pint after work;
I went for an audition;
after the audition,
I had another pint
and a half;
I had another half,
before meeting my mates,
for my b’day celebrations;
we had a pint together;
we went into
the night club,
where we had champagne
(I had three glasses);
I had a further
glass of vino,
by which time,
I was so gone
that I drew an audience
of about thirty
by performing a solo
dancing spot
in the middle
of the disco floor…
We all piled off to the pub
after that,
where I had another drink
(I can’t remember
what it was)…
I then made my way home,
took the bus from Surbiton,
but ended up
in the wilds of Surrey;
I took another bus home,
and watched some telly
and had something to eat
before crashing out…
I really, really enjoyed
the eve, but today,
I’ve been walking around
like a zomb;
I’ve had only one drink today,
an early morning
restorative effort;
I spent the day working,
then I went to a bookshop,
where, like a monk,
I go for a day’s
drying out session…
Drying out is really awful;
you jump at every shadow;
you feel dizzy,
you notice everything;
very often,
I don’t follow through…

Outro: The Reveller’s Reckoning

Introduction

In 2006, “The Reveller’s Reckoning”, based on events that took place on Sunday the 16th of January 1993 was adapted from an autobiographical work or rather works with various titles dating from the mid 1990s, edited, reassembled, versified. The original work, which has now vanished, was written and destroyed, re-written and re-destroyed innumerous times before being finally salvaged for the Blogster.com website, where it was published as “Remnants from Writings Destroyed 1” on the 10th of March 2006. In July 2007, it was subject to further alterations before being retitled.

The Reveller’s Reckoning

It was late in the afternoon
Of The 16th of January 1993
That my whole
Intoxicated universe
Finally exploded.
With etiolated face…
Tremulous hands, Broken at last
After so many years
Of semi-Icaran hubris.
And yet it had all been
So unexpected;
Because although
I’d felt dreamy and disconnected
Earlier in the day,
As if I was no longer
Quite of this earth,
I was in good spirits, even euphoric,
So there was no reason at all
For me to start fearing
that I wasn’t entirely indestructible,
let alone suspect
That I was destined
For an out and out “crack up”…
And the most fearful ordeal so far
Of my stormy, chaotic,
Almost inchoate existence…

Chapter Sixteen – Oblivion in Recession

Introduction

The following piece has its origins in rambling notes I made towards the end of January 1993, and which referred to incidents which began on the 16th of that month and lasted for several days, coming in the wake of a peripatetic week of near-constant intoxication, during which I nonetheless managed to work and socialise in some measure. I believe with all my heart that it is a faithful account of the incidents in question, already touched on in the coda of the preceding piece, accidental inaccuracies notwithstanding.
When I set about preparing it for the eyes of the world through a process of aestheticization and versification, the punctuation was significantly altered, with commas inserted in the place of semi-colons and so on. It was also heavily edited, with words, indeed whole passages ommitted from the original draft, and other sections removed and then reinserted in areas of the script where I felt they better belonged. The piece was published in rudimentary form at the Blogster.com website on the 31st August 2006, while its “first” definitive version was prepared in August 2007. A final one was published in December.

Collapse in an Indian Restaurant

“The peripatetic week of near-constant intoxication” referred to in the introduction had itself been ushered in by a late-night collapse in an Indian restaurant in an outer suburb of south west London, the consequence of many days of nonstop drinking. I’d been contentedly dining with two female companions when I suddenly felt like pure death. I’d then asked one of my friends whether I looked as bad as I felt. Once she’d replied in the affirmative, I got up from the table, walked a few paces headed for who knows where before collapsing as if stone dead onto the restaurant floor. I was taken outside into the fresh Surrey air by two or three Indian waiters. One of them then set about attempting to shock some life back into my prone body by repeatedly flicking ice cold water in my face, while urging me not to give up or something of that sort. This presumably because in the first instance I’d been relatively unresponsive to his efforts. Finally I made a miraculous recovery and was driven home by one of my dining companions.
Within a couple of days, my drinking had resumed its inexorable course towards disaster, ultimately leading to the events depicted in “Oblivion in Recession”. They marked the end of a period in my life marked by a furious thirst for intoxicating liquor, which could have despatched me to oblivion at any time. The Bible makes it manifestly clear that a confirmed drunkard can go to sleep on any night of any day of any week, and never awake again in this world. But thanks to God, these same incidents were sufficiently terrifying to me that I felt compelled to reach out to Him to help me through them. At some stage as I recall I made a promise to the Lord that if He allowed me to survive them I would belong to Him forever. There have, however, been several relapses of drinking since 93, in the shape of short-lived binges, and a single period of several weeks during which I unsuccessfully attempted a full-blooded return to my old ways. Ultimately, I became unable to drink even a single glass of wine without feeling extremely ill. Thence, as things stand, I am a hundred per cent sober.
Coming to a state of teetotalism has not been easy for me, any more than has my walk with God in general, and I have had to pay for the way I behaved prior to becoming a Christian, and in a variety of ways I intend to write about but not during this piece. God saved my soul, and the sufferings I have undergone since coming to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ are as nothing compared to what would have awaited me had I perished on one or other of the days during which the action of “Oblivion in Recession” takes place…and of which I had a distinct intimation if I’m not mistaken. It is a fate that I would not wish on anyone, no, not a single soul.

Oblivion in Recession

The legs started going,
Howlings
In my head.
Thought I’d go
Kept awake with water,
Breathing,
Arrogantly telling myself
I’d stay straight.
Drank gin and wine,
Went out,
Tried to buy more,
Unshaven,
Filthy white shorts,
Lost, rolling on lawn,
Somehow got home.
Monday, waiting for offie,
Looked like death,
Fear in eyes
Of passers-by,
Waiting for drink,
Drink relieved me.
Drank all day,
Collapsed, wept
“Don’t Die on Me…”
Next day,
Double brandy
Just about settled me,
Drank some more,
Thought constantly
I’d collapse
Then what?
Fit? Coronary?
Insanity? Worse?
Took an H.
Paced the house
All night,
Pain in chest,
Weak legs,
Lack of feeling
In extremities,
Visions of darkness.
Drank water
To keep the
Life functions going
Played devotional music,
Dedicated my life
To God,
Prayed constantly,
Renounced evil.
Next day,
Two valiums
Helped me sleep.
By eve,
I started to feel better.
Suddenly,
All is clearer,
Taste, sounds,
I feel human again.
I made my choice,
And oblivion has receded,
And shall disappear…

Birth of the New Bohemians

Had my health crisis not occurred, I might have wholly immersed myself in the Bohemian, neo-Hippie culture of the 1990s, which could be said to have been invigorated by the Rave/Dance youth movement, although in truth it had never gone away, so much as kept a relatively low profile since the early ‘70s, before going on to form subcultures which exist to this day.
The hip counterculture which had risen to prominence in the UK in the late 1960s ran out of steam before the middle of the seventies, so that by ’76 or ’77, “Hippie” was a term of abuse among some Punks. By the early 1990s, however, it appeared to me to be back with a vengeance, and around ’92, I’d fallen for it with it with all the passion of one who had had a surfeit of the all too slick 1980s. I was ready to take my attitude of extreme revolt to a further stage of development, and the climate of the times as the century’s end approached seemed to me to be perfect for doing so, and yet had I succeeded, I may have lost not just my life but my eternal soul, leaving a trail of unholy mayhem behind me.  Thankfully, God had other plans for me, and I set about divesting myself of the elements of which my pre-Christian existence had been characterised. From the outset, I began dispensing of books I deemed to be of a negative spiritual influence, while others I salvaged, either to be jettisoned at a later date, or kept indefinitely. At times over the course of the years I took things too far, with the consequence that there were books, or music albums, presenting little if any spiritual threat to me as I see it today which I unceremoniously discarded nonetheless, even going so far as to subsequently repurchase some of these. It took me some years to get the balance right.
In addition to books and albums, I set about pruning the writings I’d collected, mainly short stories and projected novels. Again in this, I went too far at times, dumping irreplacable writings, when portions of them at least could have been preserved and recycled.
I continued writing after becoming a Christian, but from about the middle of the nineties, found it increasingly arduous to do so, and so started destroying most of what I wrote, believing at the time that through my writing I was glorifying the darkness of my pre-Christian past rather than God. By about 1998, I had almost altogether ceased writing, and didn’t seriously take up the pen again, give or take the odd literary scrap that survived my regular Savonarolan purges, until the winter of 2006 when I started contributing articles to the Blogster.com website.
I also destroyed hours and hours of diary-like recordings that I had committed to cassette tape since the early 1980s or earlier and which teemed with gross narcissism and decadent sensuality, as well as occasional bitter outbursts of a startling vehemence, so that I no longer recognised them as proceeding from the person of Carl Halling, as well as innumerous musings committed to paper which I deemed ungodly and more often than not with good reason. Were I to have died, I didn’t wish to leave anything behind that was of an overtly evil nature.
My efforts were not in vain. By the mid 1990s, Christians of my aquaintance could not have been blamed for being of the belief that what I seemed to be was what I had always been, especially given that what I appeared to be, namely a quiet individual erring a little too enthusiastically on the side of earnest self-denial, was not too far from what I was in actuality, my former gift for deception having largely failed me, not that I wanted to be deceptive, far from it, nor to do anything liable to wound the Saviour to whom I owed so much. Of course, I feared God, but I also honoured Him, and so wanted to do good things for Him.

Chapter Seventeen – Beyond the Borderlands

Introduction

A first version of “Beyond the Borderlands” was published at Blogster.com website on the 5th of September 2006. A year and two months later, the definitive version was published at Faithwriters.com.

Another Close Call

While delivered from the worst effects of alcohol abuse, I still briefly continued to pay for it beyond my coming to faith in the shape of panic attacks which could strike at any time after leaving the sanctuary of my home. Thankfully, these only lasted a short period of time at their most debilitating, although I suffered on and off from them from several months, and they have recurred at rare occasions since. I controlled my panic syndrome with the help of the anxiolytic drug Diazepam whose most famous brand name is Valium, and which induced relaxation of body and mind, but to nowhere near the same degree as alcohol had done.
In the early days of my sobriety, I continued with my Post Graduate Certificate in Education partly in Eltham and partly in the leafy west London suburb of Richmond, Surrey. I did so while rehearsing for the play “Simples of the Moon” by Rosalind Scanlon, based on the life of James Joyce’s troubled daughter Lucia. It premiered at the Lyric Studio, Hammersmith on the 4th of February 1993.
At the same time, I regularly attended drugs and alcohol counselling sessions in Greenwich, my counsellor Ellen being a warm, down to earth woman with a London accent and gentle pale blue eyes. She was also detached and unflappable, as befitted her calling. In fact, the only time she lost her cool was when I announced to her over the phone that a matter of hours after deciding of my own volition to stop taking diazepam, I’d defected to the powerful sedative Chlormethiazole. I’d used Chlormethiazole, or Heminevrin to use its trade name, on prescription for a week or so in the early 1990s as a means of controlling my drinking. What I was not aware of at the time was that when used in conjunction with Valium, or indeed alcohol, it can be fatal. However, a sufficient number of hours had lapsed between my ingesting a single capsule of the drug and calling Ellen for my imminent death not to be an issue. I can recall her literally laughing with relief at this realisation.

Prayers of Repentance

As well as Ellen I owe a great debt to the friends I briefly made through Alcoholics Anonymous, and particularly my sponsor Dan. During my worst days, he faithfully monitored my painful progress towards health and sobriety on the phone, which was a great comfort to me. Still, I chose to attend only a handful of meetings before stopping altogether. The reason I did this was a matter of days after coming to faith, I received a phone call from a man called Denver Cashe working for Contact for Christ, based in Croydon, Surrey.
I think Denver had got in touch as a result of my having half-heartedly filled in a form that I’d picked up on a train…perhaps the previous summer, while approaching Waterloo station with the sun setting over the foreboding south London cityscape, filled with alcoholic anticipation. I’m sure I tried to put him off, but he turned up at my parents’ house nonetheless…a trim, dark, handsome man in late middle age with gently penetrating coffee coloured eyes and a luxuriant moustache. At his insistence, we prayed together, and he effectively became my spiritual mentor for the next two years.
Some time after our initial meeting I visited him and his wife Rose at their large and elegant house in that part of Surrey where suburb meets country, some distance beyond the Greater London border. Surrey is the wealthiest county in the UK, which is not to say that there is no depravation, because there certainly is, in Surrey-in-London of course, but also in parts of Surrey proper. This is especially true of urban areas such as Staines, Woking, Redhill, Addlestone and Camberley. The latter for example has a large London overspill estate on its outskirts known as the Old Dean. Denver’s large and elegant house, however, was in a safe and affluent part of the county, and we prayed together there over areas of my pre-Christian existence that he felt required deep repentance, after having made an extensive list of these. My continuing use of diazepam and my longstanding addiction to cigarettes were two of the areas addressed, and while it may have been coincidental, soon after gradually cutting my diazepam intake down to zero, I altogether lost a taste for tobacco. Admittedly, I continued smoking on and off for some four years after quitting valium, but I never really enjoyed a cigarette again. In fact, even as early as 1994, a single draw of a cigarette was enough to inhibit my breathing for the rest of the day, and rob me of a good night’s sleep.
By September 1994, I’d been happily established within Cornerstone Bible Church, a Charismatic Evangelical church affiliated to the Word Faith movement for over a year. My panic attacks had ceased, and I was celibate, non-smoking, teetotal, and wholly committed to being worthy of the name Christian, to the walk to which I had been called by God. If in late 1992 I was growing impatient with what remained of my conscience, and how the latter inhibited my demented hedonistic lifestyle, within less than two years I had been transformed not just beyond all recognition but all belief, that is, without taking into account the miraculous changes that God can bring to bear on the life of one such as I, because God alone can bring about such miracles.

Chapter Eighteen – The Trials of a Teetotaller

Introduction

“The Trials of a Teetotaller” was originally published as “Release, Relapse and Restoration” at the Blogster.com on the 9th of November 2006. In December 2007, a definitive version was published at Faithwriters.com.

A Teacher’s Release

In the early part of 1994, I embarked upon the final stages of the Post Graduate Certificate of Education, FE, or Further Education, that I’d been working on since the autumn of ’92, and whose passing would have permitted me to teach French in further education establishments throughout the UK. As extensively detailed elsewhere, its progress however had been significantly hampered by my alcohol and prescription drug problems, which resulted in my postponing Teaching Practise, scheduled to have been completed in 1993, until the following year.
My own history includes three unsuccessful attempts at the PGCE. The first, mentioned in “A Cambridge Lament”, took place at Homerton College, Cambridge, the second at the former West London Institute of Higher Education (1990), and the last at the University of Greenwich (1992-1994). I quit both Homerton and the West London Institute immediately prior to TP. With regard to Homerton, TP had been due to begin in a secondary school in a deprived inner city area of Cambridge where I had received a near-hysterical reception from the kids. There was a time when I would have gladly attempted to live up to this incredibly positive first impression, but at 30, I was already in thrall to the deep jadedness and self-suspicion of a man calloused by knowledge and experience despite an eerily youthful countenance.
My second attempt would have taken place in Hounslow, west London, close by to the West London Institute itself. This was based on two campuses in the suburbs of Isleworth, where I briefly shared a house, and east Twickenham. Both formed part of the University of London prior to the Institute’s merging with Brunel University. The Twickenham campus where I did most of my studying was recently sold off to property developers.
I finally completed a full TP early in 1994 at Esher College, a higher education school in the little village suburb of Thames Ditton, but had neglected to demonstrate sufficient authority in the classroom or something of the sort, according to the report I was given at my request. This understandably went on to jeopardise my final mark. As a result, despite my having passed every one of the requisite exams except the TP component, I failed the course as a whole. To be fair, my Greenwich tutors offered me the opportunity of retaking the section of the course I botched, but I chose to turn them down.

Flashes of Black Humour

The exact duration of the mood of disappointment to which I was undoubtedly subject, if only fleetingly, as a result of bungling a course which had cost me so much not just in financial terms but by way of time and effort I cannot say for certain. What is sure, however, is that within a short period of time of being informed of my fail, I successfully auditioned for a newly formed fringe theatre group known as Grip, based at the Rose and Crown public house in Kingston, Surrey. I did so for the main part of Roote in a relatively obscure play by Harold Pinter, the monumentally successful London-born dramatist, screenwriter, director, actor and poet. “The Hothouse” is perhaps not among Pinter’s greatest plays, but it is a superb piece nonetheless, and supremely Pinteresque, with its almost high poetic verbal virtuosity and inventiveness and dark surreal humour laced with a constant sense of impending violence. Penned in 1958, it was not performed until 1980, when it was directed by Pinter himself for London’s Hampstead and Ambassador Theatres.
From the auditions onwards, I established a strong connection with the easy-going American director, Ben Evans. Ben was very much an actor’s director, which I would define as one who delights in establishing close relationships with actors, out of a deep respect and affection for their art. As soon he informed me that the part was mine, I was genuinely excited about the prospect of working with him in interpreting Roote, the director of an unnamed government psychiatric hospital, the “Hothouse” of the title. My success rate when it came to auditions for the London fringe theatre had always been low, perhaps because so many of those I’d attended had involved me reciting pieces I’d memorised before what seemed to me to be an offputtingly impassive panel of observers, which was why I felt so grateful to Ben. As an auditioner, he differed from the common run insofar as he had us reading in small groups from the play while inter-reacting with fellow auditionees. This system enables the actors involved to attain a basic feel for whichever character they might be interpreting at any given time, in other words to actually act for an audition.
Ben demanded from me an interpretation of Roote which was distinctly at variance with my usual highly Method-oriented, subtle, intense, introspective and yet somehow also emotionally hyper-vehement approach to acting, but his directorial instincts were immaculate. The pompous and eccentric windbag with the potential for sudden arbitrary brutality which he coaxed out of me was arguably the most successful role of my uneven career. It received glowing reviews not just in the local press, but also the London version of the celebrated international listings magazine “Time Out”, in which Kate Stratton described my performance as “flawlessly accurate” and “lit by flashes of black humour”, adding that the production faltered whenever I left the stage. This review created a real aura of excitement about the production, and especially its lead actor who for all the world looked set to capitalize on this unexpected success and become something of a West End star or something of that sort. One agent went out of her way to ask me to ensure my details reached her, And yet, having attempted to do just that, I never heard from her again. To this day I am uncertain precisely why, but it may have been something to do with my CV, which had been pretty shoddily produced if the truth be known.

Trials of a Teetotaller, Qualms of an Actor

Although I was nearly 40 years old at the time of “The Hothouse”, I feel safe in saying that I barely looked more than 25, 30 at the very most, and so possibly struck others as an ingenous young man at the start of a brilliant career, rather than one with some decade and a half of experience under his tightly knotted belt. Still, despite the aura of carefree youthfulness I projected, I was suffering within, sorely missing the escape alcohol once offered me, and the revels extending deep into the night that once used to follow my acting perfomances, and during which I’d throw my youth and affections about like some kind of maniacal delinquent gambler squandering his life’s savings at the poker table in the face of imminent insolvency. Years later, on the other hand, I had to make do with a sickly sweet soft drink to facilitate the socialising process in the vain hope that it would serve as a mild euphoriant. To further complicate matters, I started being subject during the run of “The Hothouse” to heavy spiritual problems related to my thought life, possibly connected to my pre-Christian existence which after all had only recently ceased to be. Within a year I would actively seek refuge in what is known in Pentecostal-Charismatic Christian circles as Healing Ministry, in consequence of these and other torments.
My faith didn’t violently clash with the contents of “The Hothouse”, although its unremitting sombreness of tone certainly caused me some qualms. Still, I had a high regard for the work’s artistic merits, and its unsavoury elements didn’t provoke revulsion in me, unlike certain plays I considered in the mid 1990s. I mention this to make it clear that fame as an actor, indeed as an artist or entertainer in general, was no longer the obsession it had once been for me. With regard to this, a person very close to me told me back in the late ’80s or early ’90s that it is possible to want something too much, perhaps implying that my thirst for renown or notoriety prior to my becoming a Christian was of such a pathological degree of intensity that it ultimately set about devouring me. Whether such a theory has any real basis in truth I cannot say. What is certain is that since coming to faith, my priorities had drastically shifted, and I viewed worldly acclaim with a far more dubious eye than before. Perhaps that’s why I failed to take fuller advantage of a late-flowering opportunity for success within my chosen craft than I should have done. Although I was pretty calm about this at the time, I now realise that if an opportunity carries within it the potential for future professional and social status, it should be unhesitatingly seized upon. To do otherwise is to risk a legacy of shame and remorse.

My First Relapse

Within a short time of “The Hothouse” reaching the end of its two week run, Grip’s easy-going artistic director Richard asked me if I’d like to audition for his forthcoming production of “Two” by the playwright Jim Cartwright, best known for the play and film “Little Voice”, to be directed by Richard, and produced by his fiancée Michelle. “Two”, as the name suggests, is a two-handed play in which all the male characters are played by one actor, and all the female by another.
I of course answered in the affirmative and auditioned succesfully, with the result that I found myself playing opposite virtuoso character actress Jean from Liverpool for a fortnight…and by the end of the run the houses were so packed that people were sitting on the side of the stage at my feet. In other words, the production was an unqualified success, gaining uniformly enthusiastic reviews, although sadly only in the local press. Still, while working alongside Richard, Jean and Michelle on “Two” was an unalloyed pleasure, I dreaded the end of each performance, seeking only to distance myself from the audiences who came nightly to see me do what I did best as soon as it was possible to do so without giving any great offence.
Sweet release from a prison of sobriety presented itself while I was attending some unrelated function at the Rose and Crown some days following “Two”’s final performance. What happened was a guy I was casually chatting to offered to buy me a drink, at which point rather than the soft drink I normally opted for, I hazarded a single glass of wine. It was the first alcohol to pass my lips since January 1993, that is, without taking into account an incident at my parents’ house when I took a large gulp of what I thought was water but which turned out to be vodka, or gin. Far from having an adverse effect, however, the wine made me feel wonderful, its intoxicating properties doubtless enhanced by the purity of my system . Cycling home that night I felt perfectly blissful, emancipated at long last, or so I thought, from the torturous shackles of sobriety.
From this single glass of red wine, my drinking escalated by degrees over the next few weeks, only to culminate in an evening in a Twickenham pub with an old university friend during which I boozed and smoked with all my old ardour. Cycling home afterwards, I came off my bike as I passed a bus shelter near Hampton Wick in Kingston, and dashed my head against it before falling flat on my back. I deserved to die there where I lay, and might have done had it not been for the mercy of God. He picked me up from the ground where I lay, abject and stinking of drink, and soon I was shakily resumed my journey home. However, weeks of controlled drinking, as well as one massive binge, possibly combined with the adverse effects of violently smashing my head against a bus shelter, resulted in my becoming ill and incapacitated for what might have been as long as as a fortnight. As I remember, there were times during this awful period When I’d awake in a frantic state, sickly pale and in a deathly faint, close to blacking out, fearful of death, but each time I felt God came to my rescue just when my situation seemed hopeless. All I could do was lie around, waiting, praying to get better, until I eventually made a return to full health, but it took a long, long time.

Chapter Nineteen – The Twilight of an Actor

Introduction

In the first place “The Twilight of an Actor” existed as nothing more than the poem “Such a Short Space of Time”. In the winter of ’06, I took out certain key portions of an unfinished autobiographical story penned almost certainly in early summer 1999 with the intention of transforming it into a workable piece of writing. This was the original “Short Space”, and it was intended to evoke the sense of longing and melancholia with which I was afflicted as the decade, century and millenium were all three coming to an unquiet close. It was published at Blogster.com on the 19th of February 2006. I decided to flesh it out with some background information in the summer, and so the additional prose section of “From Lovelives to the Lost Theatre” came into being. In December 2007, a definitive version of the piece as a whole was published at Faithwriters.com, and then again with further very minor variations at Blog.co.uk.

From Lovelives to the Lost Theatre

Following my performance as the landlord, as well as all the other male characters, in Jim Cartwright’s bitter-sweet two-handed play “Two”, which I touched on in some detail in “The Trials of a Teetotaller”, I performed in one final production at the Rose and Crown theatre, the character-driven comedy “Lovelives”.
Written by the cast, “Lovelives” consisted of a series of sketches centring on the desperate antics of a group of singletons attending a suburban lonely hearts club. Perhaps then it chimed perfectly with the spirit of British post-war comedy and its characteristic celebration of banality and even failure. A great success at the R&C, “Lovelives” could have been developed into a television play or even series, but sadly, as is all too often the case, a brilliant cast dispersed after the final show.
In late September ’95, at the Tristan Bates theatre in central London, I played two parts in a production of Euripides’ “Iphigeneia in Taurois”, directed by a longtime friend who also translated it. These were Pylades, boon companion of one of the main characters, Orestes, and the Messenger.
From January 1996 until the following summer, I served variously as actor, MC, script writer, singer and musician for Street Level, a Christian theatre company based at the Elim Pentecostal church in West Croydon, Surrey. A group of three, we toured several shows around schools in the Croydon/Norwood/Crystal Palace area of south London. One of these, “Choices”, was almost entirely written by me, although it had been based on an idea by the company leader Serena, who also heavily edited it for performance purposes. The kids were astonishingly receptive to our productions, and we were greeted by them with almost uniform enthusiasm and affection.
Towards the end of the summer, Serena asked me to write a large scale project for Street Level. She suggested a contemporary version of John Bunyan’s classic allegorical Christian novel “The Pilgim’s Progress”. I duly spent several weeks labouring over the project until it had evolved into an unwieldy epic voyage to the end of the night punctuated by scenes of the blackest humour. Soon after handing it to Serena, weary of the long early morning train journeys to West Croydon station via Wimbledon, I left Street Level. Quite understandably, my version of “The Pilgrim’s Progress” was never produced. I came ultimately to destroy all but a few pages of it, because although artistically it had its merits, spiritually speaking it was grossly immature. I don’t have any regrets about my decision.
By early 1997 I’d vanished into the anonymity of office life, remaining there on and off for over three years. However, there was one final acting hurrah from me in the shape of the series of cameos I contributed to a production of the so-called “Scottish Play” at the Lost Theatre in Fulham in 1998. Despite these being praised by cast and audience members alike, I’ve barely acted since for a variety of reasons. While I’m still very much open to the possibility of film or television work, the likelihood of my appearing on stage in a play again is remote indeed because simply, the passion to perform in front of a live audience that once raged inside me to the degree that renown became a serious possibility more than once in my career has long been quieted.
Some months after appearing as Lennox, as well as other minor characters, in the “Scottish Play” at the Lost Theatre in the onetime working class west London suburb of Fulham, I wrote the piece featured below, “Such a Short Space of Time”. As I stated in the introduction, in the first instance it was not a poem but part of an unfinished short story. My parents were on vacation during the period which inspired the piece, which is to say early in the summer of 1999. Hence, I spent alot of time at their house performing various tasks such as watering my mother’s flowers. As well as this, I took sneaky advantage of their absence to transfer some of my old LPs onto cassette, something that my own music system is incapable of doing, unlike theirs. It was an unsettling experience…to listen to songs that, perhaps in the cases of some of them, I had not heard for ten years, or even fifteen, or more, and which evoked with a heartrending intensity a time when I was filled to the brim with sheer youthful joy of life and undiluted hope for the future. Yet as I did so, it seemed to me that it was only very recently that I’d heard them for the first time, despite the colossal changes brought about not just in my own life, but the lives of all those of my generation since I’d actually done so. Hence, I was confonted at once with the devastating transience of human life, and the devastating effect the passage of time has on all human life…

Such a Short Space of Time

I love…not just those…
I knew back then,
But those…
Who were young
Back then,
But who’ve since
Come to grief, who…
Having soared so high,
Found the
Consequent descent
Too dreadful to bear,
With my past itself,
Which was only
Yesterday,
No…even less time…
A moment ago,
And when I play
Records from 1975,
Soul records,
Glam records,
Progressive records,
Twenty years melt away
Into nothingness…
What is a twenty-year period?
Little more than
A blink of an eye…
How could
Such a short space
Of time
Cause such devastation?

Chapter Twenty – A Final Distant Clarion Cry

Introduction

“A Final Distant Clarion Cry” consists of diverse unrelated writings which I painstakingly knitted together to make a suitably grand finale to my as yet untitled experiment in spiritual memoir composition. The kernel of the work was “Apologia for a Cyber Church”, a piece written specifically for a friendon. Substantial portions of the apologia are still to be found within “The Perils of Church Hopping”. To the apologia I added a prose section from the former “Some Perverse Will”, originally published at the Blogster.com website on Christmas Day 2006, while the poetic soul of the piece was incorporated into another story. Also grafted onto “Final Cry”, and specifically “Waves of Bohemia” and “The March of the Modern”, were extracts from “The Redemption of a Rebel Artist”, initially published at Blogster on the 14th of September 2006. “Fireworks Frantically Exploding”, “The Dispersal of Clouds”, “The Wilderness Decade”, “The Summing Up”, and “Not by a Long Chalk” were all written specifically for “Final Cry”, which was first published as a whole at FaithWriters.com on the 13th of November 2007, and then again in December.

Part One

Fireworks Frantically Exploding

The troubled, turbulent 20th Century having ceded to the 21st to the sound of fireworks frantically exploding all throughout my neighbourhood, I discovered through a phone call to my father that my mother was desperately ill with flu. It was a harrowing start to the new century, but once again God poured blessings on my family, and she made a complete recovery. It’s crossed my mind since that she may have become susceptible to the flu virus partly as a result of stress caused by the fact that I’d latterly quit yet another course; this time an MA in French and Theory of Literature from University College, London, which was one of the most prestigious of its kind in the world.
I found the course fascinating, despite aspects of it that disturbed me, and which were likely to become increasingly so had I persisted with it. However, leaving the course on spiritual grounds as was indeed the case was a painful experience for me as I felt certain I was headed for a first class degree.
As if in consolation, I was appointed chief musician of the worship band of the Liberty Christian Centre, suburban satellite church of London’s Kensington Temple which I’d sporadically attended for a few months during the previous summer. Liberty’s Pastor Phil got in touch with me the previous summer through KT about joining a cell group at his home in the Surrey suburbs. This eventually mutated into Liberty, with which I forged very close ties from the outset, going on to serve in the Worship Group until well into 2001.
Once Liberty had come to a close in early ‘01, I returned to my first spiritual home of Cornerstone Bible Church, a fellowship affiliated to the Word of Faith Movement and specifically to Rhema Ministries of Johannesburg, South Africa. Before defecting to the Riverside Vineyard Christian Fellowship, I’d gone to Cornerstone for about two years from early 1993, in fact, had attended my very first service there even before becoming a Christian in ‘92. Drunk at the time as I recall, I’d sat next to a beautiful blonde woman of about 55 whom I later discovered to be a successful actress who at the height of her career in the sixties had appeared in television cult classics “The Avengers” and “The Prisoner”. Apart from an elder from the Jesus Fellowship, who’d laid hands on me at a meeting of theirs in central London, she was my very first spiritual mentor. However, I was never to see or speak to her again as I didn’t return to the church for several months, and by the time I did as a newly born again believer, she’d moved to another church. She subsequently came back to Cornerstone, but we kept on missing each other. Tragically, she went to be with the Lord in 2001.

The Dispersal of Clouds

Within a few months of having made the decision to abandon the MA at UCL I’d also quit my position as telecanvasser for an e-commerce company based in Surbiton, Surrey, thereby bringing a fairly lengthy period as an on/off office worker to an end. Since then I’ve worked only casually, rarely remaining in one menial employment or another for any length of time. However, if my job life has been in slow decline since the onset of the 2000s, my musical life has flourished.
By the end of ‘00, I was the lead singer for a band formed in that year by composer-musician Barrie Guard, who most recently worked with Indie Rock artist Lupen Crook. While after much prompting from members of Liberty and KT, I finally wrote a series of Christian songs in 2001 which I hoped would be played by Liberty’s worship group, but sadly, the church folded in that year, much to the sorrow of all concerned, as we’d become very close as a fellowship.
I subsequently made a brief return to Cornerstone, before quitting once again in late ’02. I did so in consequence of a renewed desire to seek out churches lying beyond the Pentecostal/Charismatic family, this time born of internet research. By this time, disillusioned by nearly two years of sporadic gigging, the band too had called it a day. We disbanded in the wake of the 2002 Shelton Arts Festival held in St Mary’s Church near the village of Shelton, Norfolk, which was a real shame in my view, because those who attended the festival were the audience we’d been searching for all along, evidenced by the passion with which they greeted our final performance.

The Perils of Church-Hopping

To return to my Walk with God, among the churches I visited after leaving Cornerstone for a second time in the autumn of 2002 were Wimbledon’s Bethel Baptist Church, pastored by Bible teacher and writer Jack Moorman. Bethel is what is known as an Independent Fundamentalist Baptist church, based on the US model, and therefore KJV only, which is to say using the King James Version of the Bible alone. I was quite happy there, that is, until one Sunday evening when my train home was severely delayed, and I found myself stranded at Wimbledon station for over an hour in consequence. Despite this, I fully intended to return the following Sunday to see a friend of Bethel’s gracious pastor David Cloud of Way of Life Ministries, preach at the church, but for some reason never did.
I also attended Christ Church, Teddington, a Free Church of England fellowship whose rector, with whom I’ve had several long and interesting conversations is a tall striking man with the magnetizing voice and presence of a classical stage actor. The Free Church of England separated from the established C of E in 1844 in response to the High Church Anglicanism of the then Bishop of Exeter, Henry Phillpotts. It is resolutely Evangelical, as well as liturgical and Episcopal.
By the end of the year, my quest having reached a satisfactory conclusion, I’d begun to make a tentative return to the Pentecostal-Charismatic nation.
Given the restlessness I’ve just described, many might be forgiven for suggesting that my walk with God has not been an easy one, particularly since about 2000, and I’d be forced to agree with them. This may be at least partly attributable to the fact that I came to faith relatively late. The Bible warns that each person who rejects the sovereignty of the fleshly realm for Jesus’s sake will undergo much tribulation and persecution. Perhaps this is especially true of repentant Christians who accept Christ following a relatively long period of time within the decadent heart of the world as avid flunkies of the Flesh.  However, as comfort these late converts possess a true and infinitely worthwhile purpose in life. This was something that ever eluded me in my youth, for all the fierce, flaming fanaticism I lent my ideals, whether artistic, intellectual, political or whatever and yet which amounted in the end to precisely nothing.

Part Two

The Wilderness Decade

As I might have already made clear, the new decade turned out to be something of a turning point for me, not just on the spiritual, artistic and vocational levels, but in terms of my entire personality, which has become more inward looking, even by the standards of the previous seven years, more of which later.
My entire presentation of self has changed since 2000. Sartorially it has become less soft, and reassuring, and closer to self-protective armour than the peacock feathers of a dandy. Significantly, the previous year had been the first since about ’73 that I faced the world with my hair its natural medium brown, after having used bleach for close on to three decades. What prompted this was not a sudden loathing for the vanity of the bottle blond, but the increasingly violent effects the peroxide-based highlighting kits I favoured were having on my breathing. While I hated being a brunet at first, in time I came to relish the dignity darker hair lent my appearance, rendering it far more masculin.
The truth is that throughout my twenties and for most of my thirties, I saw the soul of the true artist as one wholly unbound by conventional notions of sexuality. In consequence, for most of my pre-Christian life, I took no real responsibility as a man in the purest sense of the word, which is to say as leader, provider, protector, and so on. Instead, I opted for a variety of marginalised male personas, punk agitator, insurrectionary artist, doomed poet, hellraising libertine, man of learning and so on and so on and so on ad nauseum. I’ve jettisoned them all.
Images such as these have great appeal in the eyes of the young and disempowered, as do those veterans of outlaw lifestyles who’ve been burned out by taking them to their limit with only their cool to console them, but cool is a poor substitute for peace of mind. More often than not they prove ruinous to a person’s healthy social and professional development, which is so vital to their well-being in the long run, to say nothing of their physical and psychological health. Still, they continue to be promoted as desirable through the media and that is especially true of Rock music, although needless to say perhaps not to the same degree as when I was a boy growing up to a frenetic Rock soundtrack in the earthshaking sixties. Out of the music and attitude of the first proselytizers of sixties Hard and Heavy Rock the entire Rock religion was constructed.

Waves of Bohemia

The tenets of the Rock’n’Roll belief system, with its exaltation of rebellion and excess of every kind, were hardly new in the ’60s. Indeed, they can be traced back to Man’s initial attempts at attaining spiritual ecstasy beyond the will of God. However, in terms of the Modern World, it could be said that the true ancestor of Rock culture was the great 19th Century artistic and cultural movement known as Romanticism. From the latter, the very notion of the Artist as tormented genius on the cutting edge of social revolution and eternally pitted against middle class respectability is widely believed to have emerged. If Rock culture is not the ultimate outcome of this persisting myth then what is?
It was the great English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley who might have first given expression to the notion of an avant garde by asserting that “Poets are the unaknowledged legislators of the world”. Then, in the post-Napoleonic Paris of the early 1830s, a seminal artistic avant garde if ever there was one was born. They were the Jeunes-France, a band of turbulent young late Romantic writers allegedly dubbed the Bousingos by the press following a night of riotous boozing on the part of some of their number. Their leading lights, among them a fiery Théophile Gautier decades before he became an establishment darling, cultivated dandified and eccentric personas intended to shock the bourgeoisie, while inclining to political radicalism. Needless to say perhaps, they owed a colossal debt to the earlier English and German Romantics, as well as previous generations of dandies such as the Muscadins and Incroyables of the late revolutionary years.

The March of the Modern

The first wave of Bohemian avant gardism ultimately produced the Decadents, and the great Symbolist movement in the arts, both of which came into being ca. 1880. However, the spirit of the avant garde could be said to have trumphed as never before through the Modernist movement which was at its level of maximum intensity from about 1890 to 1930. This extraordinary period birthed such hyper-innovative masterpieces as Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” (1913), T.S Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (1922) and James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (1922), as well as dozens of revolutionary art movements including Expressionism, Futurism, Dada and Surrealism.
One possible definition of Modernism in an artistic sense is the avant garde removed from its true spiritual home of Paris, (via Germany and England) and then transformed into an international artistic and cultural movement of immense power and influence. Some thinkers trace the roots of the Modern to the so-called Enlightenment of the 18th Century, which produced great defiance of God on the part of lofty Reason, and so for them, Modernism is a precursor of the avant garde, rather than a spirit that arose out of it, while others go even further back into the depths of Western history, to the Renaissance and its revival of Classical Antiquity.
What is certain is that the Western world of today is one that stands at the very climax of the Modern Revolution; and one of its keynotes as I see it is the mass acceptance of iconoclastic beliefs once seen as the preserve of the avant garde, especially with regard to traditional Christian morality. This process could be said to have accelerated around 1955-‘56, when both the Beat Movement and the new Pop music of Rock ’n’ Roll were starting to make strong inroads into the mainstream. Some ten years after this, there was a further increase in momentum as Pop began to lose its initial sheen of innocence, and so perhaps evolve into the more diverse music of Rock. This eclectic art went on to run the gamut from the most infantile pop ditties to complex compositions owing a considerable debt to Classical, Jazz and other non-popular music forms, and so become an international language disseminating values traditionally seen as morally unconventional as no other artistic movement before it. As a result, certain Rock artists attained through popular consumer culture a degree of influence that previous generations of innovative artists operating within high culture could only dream of.

Part Three

A Taste of Summer Wine

Given the facts outlined above, it’s hardly surprising that Rock Music is a time-honoured bete noir of old-school evangelicals, and the internet duly teems with fulminations against it of varying degrees of insight. In 2003, a totemic year for me marked by a passion for doctrinal purity, I briefly declared myself its fiercest enemy, and set about destroying my massive collection of cassette albums. However, by the summer my attitude had softened to the degree that I was able to complete about an hour’s worth of adult oriented Rock songs. Inspired by various melodic genres including Soul and Soft Rock, they ultimately defied classification. They were generally well-received, with a small minority declaring themselves to be devoted fans, even though they had been only very roughly recorded on an old-fashioned Sony CFS-B21L cassette-corder. Two of the songs went on to be more professionally recorded at the home of a close friend of my father’s from South Africa.
In the wake of this project, my father Pat began to plan the recording of an album of popular standards featuring myself and the harmonica virtuoso Jim Hughes. In the summer of 2007, the master was finally created, and the title of “A Taste of Summer Wine” awarded it in honour of the situation comedy “Last of the Summer Wine”. This was due to the fact that Jim’s playing had long been featured on “Summer Wine”, as scored by Ronnie Hazelhurst, who sadly died in late ’07.
This final section of this experiment in memoir composition sees me anticipating the eventual commercial release of “A Taste of Summer Wine”, as well as the final editing of the first large-scale literary project with which I can say that I’m perfectly content. The fact is that within a short time of giving my life to Christ, I began to experience extreme difficulties when it came to writing creatively, as if the Lord was preventing me from expressing myself on a literary level. The outcome was that I eventually gave up writing altogether, although I kept on periodically attempting to do so, only to end up destroying the results. Precisely why it was that I became so burdened by a kind of forbidding leaden heaviness each time I tried to write for about ten years from the mid 1990s I can’t say for certain, but I have my theories. To begin with, my work back then reflected a continuing preoccupation with subjects that had held me spellbound prior to become a born again Christian. I glorified these despite a false admonitory tone which served as a cover for my true motives. Furthermore, some of my writings mixed truth and fiction to produce an unsatisfactory hybrid. God requires that all those who take the name of Christian adhere to absolute truth to the very best of their ability. Others contained passages manifesting a dangerous degree of disrespect for the holy things of God; and I thank the Lord he allowed me the opportunity of decimating these. Finally, in January 2006, God made it clear to me that I was sufficiently mature on a spiritual level to be able to write again.

The Summing-Up

There are those who might look at me and see an individual who treated some of the most precious gifts a person can be blessed with during the prime of their young life with a nonchalance so utterly cavalier as amount to blatant contempt. In terms of natural endowment, these would include the kind of intelligence that produced an articulate speaker at just two years old, as well as health so robust that all serious childhood sicknesses were kept at bay until I was 13, when I caught meningitis following a spell as a foreign exchange student in St Malo off the Brittany coast. As if these weren’t sufficient, my father procured for me one the most sumptuous educations hard-earned money can buy. By my early twenties anyone who knew me then would be forgiven for believing that if anyone was destined for ultimate celebrity it was me, “le futur celebre”, as I was described in a reproachful letter in late ‘77 by a former friend from France…or something similar.
These theoretical critics of mine might make mention of the fact that for all my lavish good fortune, I’ve finished up in a small lower floor flat in a housing estate on the edge of Greater London, a lost soul haunted by the past, and tormented in the present by unfathomable regret. That is far, far from the way I view my situation. Some people in this city don’t even have a roof over their head. As for my being a lost soul, nothing could be further from the truth. While I won’t deny that I’m inclined to the occasional remorseful mood, the fact remains that my soul has been salvaged not lost which means that one day all my tears will be wiped away for all eternity. At least, that is my hope.
I’m not the most social of beings I’ll admit, and yet paradoxically perhaps, I love to wander among crowds of people, gaining great comfort from doing so. The truth is that for one reason or another, I’m relatively incapable of pretending to be anyone other than myself in a social setting. This in marked contrast to the myself of thirty years ago who was a dangerously gifted social enchanter. That said, I consider myself to be a person of far greater integrity today by the Grace of God. At the same time, I’ve never been more aware of the necessity of my reliance on God, nor of the truth that He’ll never leave me nor forsake me. When all’s said and done, therefore, I’m a deeply blessed man for all my superficial so-called woes. I have my faith, I have my family, and together they mean more, infinitely more to me than fame, wealth, and social status ever could. I’m not saying these latter wouldn’t enhance my life because of course they would, but they’d serve as a bonus, nothing more, because my heart’s desire has already been fulfilled. As for my supposed melancholia, this particular thorn in the flesh has been afflicting Christians for centuries. To cite some examples for the sceptical…Martin Luther suffered for much of his life from a tendency towards dejection of spirits which he attributed to a variety of causes including spiritual oppression in the realm of the mind, founder of the Quaker movement George Fox was a “man of sorrows” by his own admission in the early days of his walk with God, poet and hymnodist William Cowper was a lifelong depressive who endlessly doubted his own eternal salvation, Prince of Preachers Charles Spurgeon was prone to inexplicable anguish accompanied by lengthy bouts of solitary weeping and so on and so on. What though are the tears and trials of this brief life when compared to the fathomless joy that awaits the true Believer in Heaven?

Dear Friend I Salute You

Now that I’ve put the finishing touches to the very first large scale writing project of mine of which I’m pretty well 100% certain I’ll not end up destroying, is it time for me to abandon creative writing altogether, in favour of music, an art I’m far more suited to than writing, or even acting, which is the one art I’ve never really had to work at, with the possible exception of singing? In reply, may I say that I’ve already started working out a second, more detailed autobiographical volume in my head. However, whether it ever gets written or not remains to be seen. So, for all intents and purposes, my literary career is at a close…for the time being anyway. If these writings have touched a single living soul, and there is some evidence they may have done, then my work has been worthwhile. For anyone still reading…thank you for your patience, dear friend, I salute you.

Book Three

The Testimony of a Rock and Roll Child and Other Christian Writings

One  The Testimony of a Rock and Roll Child

Introduction

Many Christians are of the opinion that the longer a person puts off coming to Christ the less likely it becomes of their ever doing so and I’m among them. I also believe that Christians who convert relatively late in life may be required to pay a far higher price for the follies of their pre-Christian existence than more youthful converts, especially if these include alcohol, drugs, fornication, and involvement in the occult. God can and does heal Christians damaged by their pre-conversion sins but He’s not obliged to do so as his Grace is sufficient.

A Violent Road to Damascus Conversion

The period embracing the autumn of 1992 and the first few weeks of winter ’93 may well have been the most debauched of my entire existence.
As I recall, there’d be mornings I’d get up early, possibly about six, and then prepare myself for a day ahead with a bottle of wine, usually fortified. Then I’d keep my units topped up with spirits, vodka, gin or whatever, taking regular swigs from the miniatures I liked to have with me at all times. Some evenings I’d spend in central London, others with my new friends from the suburban university where I’drecently become a student, and we were a close and pretty wild crowd for a while. There were times in town when I couldn’t keep the booze down, so I’d order a king-sized cola from McDonald’s, which I’d then lace with spirits before cautiously sipping from it through a straw. I was a euphoric drunk and so almost never unpleasant…but I was unpredictable…a true Dionysian who’d cry out on a British Rail train in the middle of the afternoon, causing passengers to flinch with alarm…or perform a wild disjointed Karate kick into thin air on a crowded London street. One afternoon I savagely tore at my trousers after having arrived too late for an audition and a barman who served me later on in the day asked me if I’d been involved in a fight…and then there was the shameful night at Waterloo station (or was it Liverpool Street?) that I had to be escorted across the concourse to my train by one of the rough sleepers who used to frequent mainline stations back then, bless his restless soul.
However, all these insane incidents came to a head one night in early 1993 in an Indian restaurant in Hampton Court close to the Surrey-London border. I’d been dining there with two female friends when, suddenly feeling like pure death, I asked the one closest to me whether I looked as bad as I felt. She told me I did, so I got up from the table, walked a few paces and then collapsed as if stone dead in the middle of the restaurant. I was then carried bodily out into the fresh night air by two or three Indian waiters, one of whom set about shocking some life back into me by flicking ice cold water in my face. “Don’t give up,” he pleaded, his voice betraying true concern…and in time thanks to him some semblance of life returned, and I was well enough to be driven home.
Yet, within two days I was drinking as heavily as before, continuing to do so virtually around the clock until the weekend. I then spent Saturday evening with my close friend from the restaurant. And at some point in what I believe to have been the morning of the 17th of January 1993, I asked her to fill a long glass with neat gin and each sip took me further and further into the desired state of blissful forgetfulness.
I awoke elated as I recall, which was normal for me following a lengthy binge. I’d reserved Sunday for drying out, and so probably spent it writing as well as cleaning up the accumulated chaos of the past week. One thing I definitely did was listen to a radio documentary on the legendary L.A. Rock band the Doors which I’d taped some weeks or perhaps months earlier. I especially savoured When the Music’s Over from what was then one of my favourite albums, Strange Days, released in the wake of the Summer of Love on my 12th birthday, 7 October 1967. This apocalyptic epic with its unearthly screams and ecstatically discordant guitar solo seemed to me about living in the shadow of death, beckoning death, mocking death, defying death.
I powerfully identified with the Doors’ gifted singer Jim Morrison, who’d been drawn as a very young man to poet-thinkers of a peculiar intensity, such as Blake, Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Artaud, whose works have the power to change lives, as they surely did Morrison’s. As well as the writers of the Beat Generation, themselves to some degree children of so-called poètes maudits such as Rimbaud. His philosophy of life was clearly informed by Blake, who wrote of “the road of excess” leading to “the palace of wisdom,” while his hell raising persona came to a degree from Rimbaud, who extolled the virtues of “a long, immense and systematic derangement of all the senses” as an angel-faced hooligan in the Paris of the early 1870s. What a price he paid…dead at just 27…like Jones, Hendrix, Joplin before him, and so the ’60s dream was revealed as the beguiling chimera it’d been all along.
After having spent the day revelling in my own inane notion of myself as a poet on the edge like my heroes, at some point in the early evening I got what I’d been courting for so long…an intimation of early death, when for pretty well the first time in my life alcohol stopped being my beloved elixir and became a mortal enemy, as my life force seemed to recede at a furious and terrifying rate. In a blind panic, I opened a spare bottle of sparkling wine I had about the house even though I’d hoped not to have to drink that day. Once I’d drained it, I felt better for a while, in fact so much so that I took a few snaps of myself lounging around looking haggard and unshaven, with freshly cropped hair.
Soon after this macabre photo session I set off in search of more alcohol. Arriving at a local delicatessen, the soft-spoken Asian shop keeper nervously told me that the off-license wasn’t open for some time yet. There was nothing for me to do but take refuge on a nearby green, where I lay for a while, still dressed I imagine in the shabby white cut-offs I’d been wearing earlier. Finally, the offie opened and I was able to buy more booze. I can’t remember what I bought, but I think it may have been a litre of gin, because that’s what I was guzzling from the next day. One of the last things I remember doing on Sunday evening was singing hymns in a nearby Methodist church as the tears flowed.
I’ve no further memory of what happened that hellish night, but there were many such nights ahead. At least one of these saw me endlessly pacing up and down corridors and stairs in an attempt to stay conscious and so – as I saw it – not die…and each time I shut my eyes I could have sworn I saw demonic entities beckoning me into a bottomless black abyss. I set about ridding my house of artefacts I somehow knew to be offensive to God from what I think was the night of the 17th/18th onwards.
Many books were destroyed…books on astrology and numerology and other mystical and occult subjects, books on war and crime and atrocity, and books about artists some call accursed for their kinship with drunkenness and madness and death.
I genuinely believe though that for all the horrors I underwent, it was during that first night that I came to accept Christ as my Saviour. Had my violent conversion not come about when it did, I might have been lost forever, depending of course on where a person stands on the issue of Predestination and Free Will, but I’d have surely immersed myself in the new Bohemianism of the 1990s. The adversary values of the sixties had apparently vanished by about 1973, when in fact they’d simply gone back underground, where they set about fertilising new anti-establishment clans such as the Anarcho-Punks and the New Age Travellers who quietly flourished throughout the ’80s. Around ’92, some kind of amalgam between these tribes and the growing Rave-Dance movement could be said to have produced yet another great counterculture, and I was ready…ready as I’d never been to take my place as a zealot of this New Edge, only to be delivered from its seductive grasp by a violent “Road to Damascus” conversion to Christianity. However, if I’d been reborn against all the odds, I still had to suffer in the physical, if only briefly.
Many Christians are of the opinion that the longer a person puts off coming to Christ the less likely it becomes of their ever doing so and I’m among them. I also believe that Christians who convert relatively late in life may be required to pay a far higher price for the follies of their pre-Christian existence than more youthful converts, especially if these include alcohol, drugs, fornication, and involvement in the occult. God can and does heal Christians damaged by their pre-conversion sins but He’s not obliged to do so as his Grace is sufficient, so while I was almost certainly already a Christian by the morning of the 18th, my ordeal was far from over. I somehow made it into New Eltham that Monday morning for classes at the university; but by evening I felt so ill I started swigging from my litre bottle of gin. I also phoned Alcoholics Anonymous at my mother’s request, and agreed to give a meeting a shot.
Next day, on the way to Twickenham, I got the feeling my heart was about to explode, not just once but over and over again. Afterwards, I tried walking through the town centre, but my legs felt strangely detached from me; and I was struggling to stay conscious, so I ended up ordering a double brandy from the pub next door to the Police Station. I was shaking so much the landlord thought I was fresh from an interrogation session. Later, I was thrown out of another pub for preaching at the top of my voice, then, walking through Twickenham town centre I started making the sign of the cross to passers-by, telling one poor young guy never to take to drink like some kind of walking advert for temperance and he nodded without saying a word before scurrying away.
Back home, in an effort to calm myself down, I dug out an old capsule of Chlomethiazole, a sedative commonly used in treating and controlling the effects of acute alcohol withdrawal, but dangerous, in fact potentially fatal, when used in conjunction with alcohol. I still had some capsules left over from about 1990 when I’d been prescribed them by my then doctor, which meant they’d long gone beyond their expiry date. For a time I felt better and was able to sleep, but soon after waking I felt worse than ever. Later, at an AA meeting, I kept leaving the room to douse my head in cold water, anything to shock some life back into me, to the dismay of my sponsor who wanted me to stay put, as if doing so would exert a healing effect.
Wednesday morning saw me pacing the office of the first available doctor, and it may have been touch and go as to whether I was going to stay on my feet or overdose on the spot and die on him. It was he who prescribed me the Valium which caused me to fall into a deep, deep sleep which may have saved my life, and from which I awoke to sense that a frontier had been passed and that I was out of danger at long last.
To reiterate an earlier assertion…there is a widely held belief within Christianity that the sooner a person comes to Christ the better when it comes to their immortal soul. The same could be said for their subsequent relationship with God. There may for example be serious health problems resulting from a former self-destructive lifestyle which could damage their effectiveness as Christian witnesses.
On the other hand, one possible advantage of being a late convert is a testimony with the power to cause those normally sceptical of the transforming power of the born again experience to sit up and take notice. Such as that of a rescued Rock and Roll child…raised in an age in which messages of revolt…and defiance of all forms of authority, society, the family, God himself were being spread by an adversary culture led by Rock music. We drank deeply we children of the sixties from the spiritual darkness that was all around from about ’65 onwards, and it affected us in ways I believe to be unique to us. That darkness has been a thorn in my flesh ever since my first days as a Christian, when I suffered from panic attacks that at one stage could be triggered simply by venturing beyond my front door, and I’ve never been able to fully throw it off.
I struggled on with the course, partly in Twickenham, partly in New Eltham, while Attending occasional drugs and alcohol counselling sessions at a church in nearbyGreenwich with a lovely blonde woman of about 45 with a soft and soothing London accent and the gentlest pale blue eyes imaginable.
The only time I ever knew her to lose her composure was when I announced over the phone that a matter of hours after deciding of my own volition to stop taking Diazepam, I’d switched to Chlomethiazole…unaware at the time that when it interacts with Valium, it can be fatal. However, enough time had passed between my taking the capsule and calling her for me to be out of acute danger, and I can recall her literally laughing with relief at this realisation.
Towards the end of ’94 I started suffering from deep tormenting spiritual problems for which I’d ultimately seek a solution in the shape of what is known as Deliverance Ministry. This came first through a venerable evangelist who laid hands on me after lunch at his home deep in the heart of the Devonshire countryside…but there were further sessions…one of these taking place at night in a beautiful old Anglican church with just myself, the vicar, and the vicar’s wife in attendance.
Also, I badly missed the relaxation alcohol once provided me with following my work on stage, and the revels extending deep into the night during which I’d throw my youth and affections about me like some kind of maniacal gambler. I’d boxed myself into the position of no longer being able to enjoy social situations as others do, nor to relax. This may have been something to do with what the state of my endorphins, the body’s natural feel-good chemicals, there being a theory doing the rounds today that these can be permanently depleted by long-term abuse of alcohol and other narcotics…but I’m in no position to either endorse nor dismiss it myself.
Release from what had become a torturous dungeon of sobriety came when a guy I’d only just met offered to buy me a drink and I asked for a glass of wine. Apart from the time at my parents’ house a few weeks earlier when I took a swig of what I thought was water but which turned out to be vodka or gin, this was the first alcohol to pass my lips since January ’93.
This single glass of wine made me feel amazing, doubly so given the purity of my system. I cycled home that night in a state of total rapture, feeling for the first time in months that I could do anything. Over the next few week my drinking increased, reaching a climax in a pub in Twickenham where I met an old university friend who’d just completed a course at a college in nearby Strawberry Hill, and where I drank and smoked myself into a stupor.
Cycling home afterwards, I took a bend near Hampton Wick and came off my bike, striking my head against a bus shelter. I stayed flat on my back for a while abject and stinking of drink – I could’ve sworn I saw a shadowy figure running towards me as I lay there in the dark – but before long I was shakily resuming my journey home. However, weeks of controlled drinking and one massive binge, possibly combined with the ill effects of a violent blow to the head, resulted in my becoming ill and virtually incapacitated for what might have been as long as a fortnight. Time and again during this awful period I can recall awakening from a feverish semi-sleep, as if a single further second of consciousness was beyond me; and yet each time I did, it’s as if the Lord breathed life back into me…and the faintness and terror of dying subsided. All I could do was lie around, waiting, praying for a return to normality…and when this came, I determined never to drink again as long as I lived. And despite further lesser relapses, I’m now a hundred per cent sober.

Conclusion

Many might be forgiven for suggesting that my walk with God has not been an easy one, and I’d be forced to agree with them. This may be at least partly attributable to the fact that I came to faith relatively late. The Bible warns that each person who rejects the sovereignty of the fleshly realm for Jesus’ sake will undergo much tribulation and persecution. Perhaps this is especially true of repentant Christians who accept Christ following a relatively long period of time within the decadent heart of the world as avid flunkies of the Flesh. However, as comfort these late converts possess a true and infinitely worthwhile purpose in life. This was something that ever eluded me in my youth, for all the fierce, flaming fanaticism I lent my ideals, whether artistic, intellectual, political or whatever and yet which amounted in the end to precisely nothing.
There are those who might look at me and see an individual who treated some of the most precious gifts a person can be blessed with during the prime of their young life with a nonchalance so utterly cavalier as amount to blatant contempt. In terms of natural endowment, these would include the kind of intelligence that produced an articulate speaker at just two years old, as well as health so robust that all serious childhood sicknesses were kept at bay until I was 13, when I caught meningitis following a spell as a foreign exchange student in St Malo off the Brittany coast.
These theoretical critics of mine might make mention of the fact that for all my lavish good fortune, I’ve finished up haunted by the past, and tormented in the present by unfathomable regret. That is far, far from the way I view my situation. While I won’t deny that I’m inclined to the occasional remorseful mood, the fact remains that my soul has been salvaged not lost which means that one day all my tears will be wiped away for all eternity. At least, that is my hope.
As for my supposed melancholia, this particular thorn in the flesh has been afflicting Christians for centuries. To cite some examples for the sceptical…Martin Luther suffered for much of his life from a tendency towards dejection of spirits which he attributed to a variety of causes including spiritual oppression in the realm of the mind, founder of the Quaker movement George Fox was a “man of sorrows” by his own admission in the early days of his walk with God, poet and hymnodist William Cowper was a lifelong depressive who endlessly doubted his own eternal salvation, Prince of Preachers Charles Spurgeon was prone to inexplicable anguish accompanied by lengthy bouts of solitary weeping and so on and so on. What though are the tears and trials of this brief life when compared to the fathomless joy that awaits the true Believer in Heaven?

Two  Apologia for a Cyberchurch

Introduction

On the 30th of July 2007, after having completed Apologia for a Cyberchurch at the behest of a Christian friend, and earmarked it as the penultimate chapter of my memoir, I published it in its “definitive” form at the FaithWriters website. And then again in refashioned and truly definitive form in 2013-’14.

1.

Anyone who has read my writings thus far will be more than adequately aware of my condition prior to becoming a Christian in January 1993, so I’m not going to go into any further details about it during this brief defence of the cyberchurch phenomenon. Suffice to say that at least partly as a result of it, my walk with God has not been an easy one. But then, is it not so that while coming to faith in Christ produces the salvation of the soul, it doesn’t by any means necessarily also ensure perfect freedom from the consequences of sins committed prior to spiritual rebirth? It is entirely up to God how much or even whether He heals.
I held online discussions in 2007 with a Christian friend from the U.S. as to the possible nature of the psychological conditions alluded to above. I do feel confident in saying, however, that depression is involved. By this I don’t mean life-threatening despair so much as the long-term, low-grade depression of which chronic lack of normal energy and joy of life (anhedonia) are common symptoms. That said, a diagnosis of unipolar, or major, depression might be premature, as I’m also subject to spells of elated hyper-creativity, although these do not extend to garrulous sociability. On the contrary, I tend to social avoidance. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder was also mentioned. Among the symptoms of PTSD as I understand it are a reduced interest in the everyday pleasurable activities most people take for granted, anxiety, irritability, hypervigilance, insomnia and emotional detachment.
It goes without saying that I’m hardly the one and only Christian ever to have struggled with some kind of Pauline thorn in the flesh, whether mental, physical or spiritual, or a combination of these. If I might paraphrase Rock and Roll pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis of Faraday, Louisiana, we born again believers have chosen a pretty hard road to hoe. Whatever one’s opinion of Jerry Lee, he is 100% correct in his assessment of the Christian walk. In the light of all these facts, can any of us in the Body of Christ honestly refuse to admit that membership of an internet church might be spiritually beneficial to many a believer?
I hope I haven’t given the impression so far in this apologia that I never attend church in person nor have any intention of ever doing so again, because nothing could be further from the truth. However, I’m not in close fellowship at the present time, which is to say part of a cell or prayer group. In the past, however, I’ve attended several, and within a variety of churches.
These include Cornerstone, a Charismatic church affiliated to the Word of Faith movement and based in suburban Surrey, which was the very first church I visited on a regular basis, doing so for about two years from 1993. They also include the Riverside Vineyard Christian Fellowship to which I defected from Cornerstone, remaining there for over a year before returning to my first church.
At some point in ’97 I started going to morning services at Kingston Baptist Church in south west London. This was in consequence of a short-lived desire on my part to distance myself from the Pentecostal-Charismatic fold. In ’99, however, after having spent some months cycling each Sunday to the 2.30pm service at Kensington Temple, an Elim Pentecostal church in Notting Hill, a Kingston-based KT cell group under the leadership of Pastor Phil of New York City beckoned and I answered the call. Late in the summer of that year, this mutated into the satellite church Liberty Christian Centre with which I forged very close ties, serving in the worship group from its inception in early 2000 until well into the following year. The church folded in ’01, at which point I returned to Cornerstone and still another cell group, remaining there until the end of ’02.
I left in consequence of a renewed desire to seek out churches existent beyond the Pentecostal/Charismatic family of churches. Among these were Bethel Baptist Church in Wimbledon, SW19. Bethel is an Independent Fundamentalist Baptist church based on the U.S. model, and therefore KJV only, which is to say utilizing the King James Version of the Bible alone. It operates under the gracious leadership of the American pastor, writer and passionate defender of the Authorised Version (A.V. 1611) of the Bible, Dr Jack Moorman. I was happy at Bethel until one Sunday following the evening service, my train home was severely delayed and I found myself stranded at Wimbledon station for over an hour in consequence. Despite this, I fully intended to return the following Sunday to see Jack’s friend Bro. David Cloud preach at the church, but for some reason never did, and I’ve stayed away ever since. In addition to Bethel, other traditionally Evangelical churches I attended more than once throughout 2003 were Hook Evangelical Church, Surbiton, and Christ Church, Teddington, a Free Church of England fellowship whose rector is a passionately Biblical man with the magnetizing voice of a Shakespearean actor.
By the end of 2003, I’d begun to make a tentative return to the Pentecostal-Charismatic nation, and since then, I’ve attended churches both within and beyond its boundaries, among them St Stephens, East Twickenham, a massive Evangelical Anglican church, which I found to be incredibly compassionate; and yet, despite a brief period in a home group, I’ve not been back to the church itself since last summer. Increasingly this year I’ve been frequenting Duke Street Church, a large Baptist church affiliated to the Evangelical Alliance in nearby Richmond, whose minister is a much respected preacher of the Word of God, his sermons appearing weekly on Premier, London’s Christian radio station.
Typing the words internet church in a browser will result in the search engine in use yielding dozens of virtual churches of every conceivable kind. This fact speaks to me of the very strong likelihood that God is using the internet as never before to reach out to those brothers and sisters in the Lord who for one reason or another struggle to attend church on a regular basis, or for that matter those who attend regularly, and yet might find a degree of spiritual encouragement in a virtual church that an actual one is failing to provide them with.
There may be those Christians who will disagree with all or much I have written so far, and yet for the life of me I cannot understand why. After all, is the internet not the single most powerful and momentous means of communication in history? Of course it is, and therefore I believe that as Christians, we have a responsibility to make as much use of the world wide web as is humanly possible to communicate the Message of the Gospel, and with a fervour befitting the fact that the time is short. As things stand, I am on the verge of compiling my pieces into an experimental memoir with a strong Christian message. Serving God via the medium of the world wide web gets more exciting and more challenging by the day.

2.

It was in 1999 that the emergence of the internet church was accurately predicted by the Christian sociologist George Barna of the well-known Barna Group at a time when many of us were still computer-free. For my part, I didn’t come online until 2001, and my online life didn’t really begin until AOL became my Internet Service Provider towards the end of that year.
Since that time, the net has grown progressively more prominent in the lives of Christians worldwide to the extent that it now quite literally teems with Christian websites, web logs, articles, audio sermons, videos, songs and, of course, cyberchurches of every conceivable hue and kind. Yet, Christians themselves haven’t to any degree forsaken traditional church-going for internet worship, which is surely a good thing, as the Bible speaks in Hebrews 10: 25 of the vital importance of “Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another: and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching.” Therefore, unique circumstances notwithstanding, the cyberchurch phenomenon should arguably never be used to replace actual physical Sunday church attendance…only to enhance it.
Yet, Christ himself says in Matthew 18:20, “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” Are gatherings of Believers that take place on the internet going to be any less blessed by God by dint of being virtual? It strikes me that this would be very much not the case.
Typing the words internet church into a browser will provide a person with a seemingly endless list of virtual churches of every conceivable kind. Does this not point to the strong likelihood that God is using the internet as never before to reach believers who for one reason or another are unable to attend church on a regular basis? I’d say yes. On the other hand, there may be others who do attend regularly and yet who might benefit from the extra spiritual nourishment provided by a web-based fellowship. The internet as a whole is arguably the single most powerful and momentous means of mass communication in history.
Therefore I believe as Christians we have a sacred responsibility to make as much use of the web as possible to communicate the message of the Gospel while there’s still time.

Three  In Defence of Bible-Based Conservatism

Conservatism doesn’t make any sense, does it? Not unless it’s compassionate it doesn’t, no, and for me this means Biblical. Personally I know little of the roots of Conservatism and its many forms, but I have read of a type that has been variously described as Classical and compassionate. But it’s “tough” on the surface in its uncompromising exaltation of faith, tradition, family, nation and region, which would make it controversial in the eyes of its critics. Which are of course many.
Yet, compassionate Conservatism has also been likened to Classical Liberalism in the latter’s purported affiliation with the Wesleyan-Holiness Social Gospel of active care for the most vulnerable members of society. And in keeping with its Biblical roots, this must include “the stranger among us.”
And its equally uncompromising belief in Non-interventionism, which is still another feature of Classical Conservatism according to some of its adherents, could be said to be “soft” at the centre, which is to say, “meek and humble of heart.” And if it truly aspires to be Biblical, it must be these things, for the Bible commands all professing Christians to seek Holiness: 1 Peter 1: 16: “Because it is written, Be ye holy, for I am holy.”
One possible root of Conservative Non-interventionism as I see it is God’s deliberate dispersal of the nations in the Book of Genesis in the wake of Man’s first attempt at a united One-World empire known as Babylon, and presided over by Nimrod, who is described as “a mighty hunter before the Lord.”
Could it thence be that certain Conservatives honour God’s decision to disseminate the nations, in the belief it’s in Man’s interest to operate not in unity, but as a series of sovereign nations…for power to be decentralised? This one certainly does. But again, I know little of politics and the history of Conservatism, nor its different varieties.
But as I see it, the truest Conservatism accommodates Man’s connate competitive and hierarchical instincts though the most successful economic system in human history, Capitalism, while recognising that without a strong moral underpinning, this degenerates into the pernicious doctrine of the Survival of the Fittest, which should be anathema to all Biblical Conservatives.

Four  We Western Christians

Right now, we Western Christians could do worse than look beyond the West for inspiration, to the great continents of Asia, Africa, South America…where Biblical Christianity is thriving, often under the most adverse conditions, and take heart from our brothers and sisters in these lands, and pray that our own tragic civilisation can return to the kind of Biblical fervour they possess, and which once moved God to favour us so abundantly…to favour us so abundantly…

Book Four

The Boy from the Tail End of the Goldhawk Road

I was born Carl Robert Halling at the tail end of the Goldhawk Road which runs through Shepherds Bush in west London and which in the mid 1960s served as one of the great centres of the Mod movement, whose dandified
acolytes were infamous for their vanity and hedonism.
I was raised in nearby Bedford Park, a comparatively genteel district close to
the largely working class area of South Acton.
My first school was the Lycee Francais du Kensington du Sud, and by the time I was 4 years old I was already bilingual.
I wasted little time at the Lycee
in establishing a reputation as a troublemaker, a popular one admittedly, but a troublemaker nonetheless, constantly in trouble.
I was popular, that much is certain, not just with girls but boys too and blessed with a vivid imagination but I was a near impossible pupil which caused my poor mother a good deal of heartache, and on at least one occasion she drove me home in tears.
I seemed born to controversy, being impatient, disobedient, mischievous, remorselessly attention-seeking,
a true imp of a child, on which the full force of the innate depravity of Man appeared to have landed.
At the same time, I was friendly, sincere and open, a good friend, and well-liked.
My Judo teacher at the Budokan in Hammersmith once told someone no doubt with a sickly feeling in the pit of his stomach that whenever he heard me he always knew it was Saturday.
I was no less a trial in the quaint little back streets of suburban west London.
My roughness could hardly have been helped by the popular music of the times.
By the time it came for me to leave the Lycee my scholastic standing had improved a little, and after some months spent at Davies Preparatory School, I received the most glittering school report of my entire young life; and was actually declared an excellent pupil.

No Golden Honour

Golden in the class
Honour certificate
No problem
But mademoiselle
Was to cry
Something changed,
Who knows when?
Something changed,
Even I don’t know why.

Tiny Capricious
Impish

Tiny, capricious, impish,
Perfect imitations of head prefects,
Nearly got caned for it,
Get your hands out of your pockets!

Cackles of laughter before grace,
Up before the head prefects,
Endearment to the seniors,
Friend of all the tough guys,

The most popular bloke in the third form,
Constantly in trouble,
Ingenious smile on an angel’s face,
Tiny, capricious, impish.

Tiny, capricious, impish,
Perfect imitations of head prefects,
Nearly got caned for it,
Get your hands out of your pockets!

Refugees from the Underground

In ’67 the Hippie phenomenon entered the mainstream to became an international obsession…and it was in that very year I harried my mother into making me a psychedelic paisley shirt which I went on to wear with a peaked Dylan cap and possibly also purple corduroy jeans.
By the end of the decade though, the relative innocence of my infatuation with the Hippie dandies I witnessed each Thursday night on Top of the Pops and other frothy Pop programmes had mutated into a passion for actual social revolution, whose apologists I read about and viewed with awe.
As for the commercial chart Pop of the early ’70s…it was the music from a world I no longer even barely acknowledged as existing.
Strangely enough though, it was a world that produced several hits in 1970 by a band known as CCS which had been masterminded by Pat Halling’s close friends Mickey Most and John Cameron, and fronted by no less a figure than Alexis Korner, including the top 5 smash, Tap Turns on the Water.
It also produced Glam Rock, a heterogeneous mixture of Pop and Rock allied to an outrageous androgynous image, which started to infiltrate the British charts for the first time around 1971.
The Glam Rock era of ca. 1971-’73 was to some extent a revival of the sartorial flashiness – and musical simplicity – of early Rock and Roll…and one which swept a host of gifted young musicians who’d been striving for major success since the early 1960s to fresh levels of stardom in the UK and elsewhere.
Yet, despite the Pop star status they enjoyed in the UK, several of these were viewed as serious album artists as well as TV idols.
They included – in addition to the aforesaid Marc Bolan – David Bowie, Rod Stewart and Elton John, all of whom had been previously involved in some form or another with Art, or Progressive Rock…refugees from the Underground in other words.
Thanks in some measure to their efforts, Pop underwent something of a rehabilitation in Britain from about 1971 or ’72, and they strutted around on TV in flashy attire and stack-heeled boots, while assailing the Pop charts with intelligent and imaginative singles in the Glam genre which harked back to the golden age of the mid-sixties.
For my part, though, I remained indurate, viewing the effeminate antics of T.Rex and the Sweet with all the horror of a typical macho adolescent male. But that was soon to change.

She’d Loved Me
Without Doubt

She’d loved me without doubt
An unusually beautiful person
Both in nature and appearance
With tender slightly slanting
Green eyes
She’d loved me without doubt.

Gautier, Borel, O’Neddy, Baudelaire

I first read of the of the French Romantic extremists of the 1830s, such as Theophile Gautier, Petrus Borel, Gerard de Nerval and Philothee O’Neddy, who could be said to have constituted the very first artistic avant-garde of the Modern Age, in Enid Starkie’s classic biography of Baudelaire, a book which I eventually dispensed with as I did a once treasured copy of Les Fleurs du Mal…they were not alone.

I was a Decorative Dandy and Gallant

I was a decorative dandy and gallant, swathed in delusive charm, and the more I was flattered and complimented, the more peacockish I became.
I was deeply in thrall to the feminine, which may have been why in my own person, I sought to duplicate those qualities I found most irresistible in the fair.
This as I see it is the very essence of heterosexual dandyism, of which I was an acolyte.

You Knew New Wave

You knew you were part of the ’80s when you knew that Punk was no longer at the vanguard when it came to epater le bourgeois, and you were scouting around for something to replace it.

Perhaps you became a Rockabilly Rebel for a time, inspired by some contemporary Hepcat act such as the Stray Cats, who fused classic Rockabilly with a New Wave attitude, or you embraced the Mod Revival pioneered by Franc Roddam’s film version of the Who’s concept album Quadrophenia, although as I recall, that had all but faded by the onset of the new decade.

You knew you were part of the ’80s when you knew that Punk was no longer at the vanguard when it came to epater le bourgeois, and you were scouting around for something to replace it.

However, seminal New Wave band the Jam continued to fly the flag for the Mod Revival until 1982, when chief songwriter Paul Weller formed The Style Council, who would not have been seen as New Wave in the UK, although they would have done in the US, but what precisely does it mean?

You knew you were part of the ’80s when you knew that Punk was no longer at the vanguard when it came to epater le bourgeois, and you were scouting around for something to replace it.

Well in Britain, it was used to describe a form of music which while flaunting a Punk Rock attitude was marked by a relative virtuosity perhaps intended to ensure its longevity.

You knew you were part of the ’80s when you knew that Punk was no longer at the vanguard when it came to epater le bourgeois, and you were scouting around for something to replace it.

And given that such New Wave acts and artists as Paul Weller, Elvis Costello, Joe Jackson, XTC and the Police enjoy classic status, it was a canny development.

You knew you were part of the ’80s when you knew that Punk was no longer at the vanguard when it came to epater le bourgeois, and you were scouting around for something to replace it.

Oh how electric with rebellion I was…but then rebellion was omnipresent throughout Britain in the ’80s, fuelled by Post-Punk, Goth, Indie and so on.

You knew you were part of the ’80s when you knew that Punk was no longer at the vanguard when it came to epater le bourgeois, and you were scouting around for something to replace it.

A degree of nonconformism is of course natural to the young of every age, but since around ’55, rebellion has grown at such a furious rate in Britain that language and behaviour that would have have been widely perceived as iniquitous only a few decades ago now leaves most people indifferent.

You knew you were part of the ’80s when you knew that Punk was no longer at the vanguard when it came to epater le bourgeois, and you were scouting around for something to replace it.

You knew you were part of the ’80s when you knew that Punk was no longer at the vanguard when it came to epater le bourgeois, and you were scouting around for something to replace it.

That Wins Oscars

Yours was the sort of
Performance
That wins Oscars,

You were frightening, sinister,
You put everything into it
I took a step back,

You get better every time
How good can you get?
I’m proud to know you,

People love you,
You should hear the way
They talk about you.

Compulsively Strange Compulsively She

She is strange
And exciting
Compulsively ironic
And yet there’s fear in her eyes

She seems to be frightened
Of her man of mystery
Or is she still being ironic?
Compulsively strange and compulsively she.

I Cherished a Grim Obsession

I cherished a grim obsession with a hyper-intellectuality so at odds with my actual effervescent personality as to verge on the grotesque, and affected a largely fictitious sense of desolation which was only dispelled once I came to know Christ, at which point I acquired true and total purpose for the very first time.

Chances Are

If you knew him long enough, chances are
he’d tell you so to his face, and chances are few would feel moved to correct him. But he was no child prodigy, was in fact if anything the antithesis. Yet, his childhood was, on the surface of things, one masterminded to foster a high achiever nonpareil, and while the latter
never came to pass, a genius ultimately emerged. And If you knew him long enough, chances are
he’d tell you so to his face. As if to compensate. As if to compensate.

The Renewal of the Mind

The fact is that within a short time of giving my life to Christ, I began to experience extreme difficulties when it came to writing creatively, as if the Lord was preventing me from expressing myself on a literary level.

The outcome was that I eventually gave up writing altogether, although I kept on periodically attempting to do so, only to end up destroying the results.

Precisely why it was that I became so burdened by a kind of forbidding leaden heaviness each time I tried to write for about ten years from the mid 1990s I can’t say for certain, but I have my theories.

To begin with, my work back then reflected a continuing preoccupation with subjects that had held me spellbound prior to become a born again Christian.

I glorified these despite a false admonitory tone which served as a cover for my true motives.

Furthermore, some of my writings mixed truth and fiction to produce an unsatisfactory hybrid.

God requires that all those who take the name of Christian adhere to absolute truth to the very best of their ability.

Others contained passages manifesting a dangerous degree of disrespect for the holy things of God; and I thank the Lord he allowed me the opportunity of decimating these.

Finally, in January 2006, God made it clear to me that I was sufficiently mature on a spiritual level to be able to write again.

I’ve come a long way from being the kind of man who once composed an essay so savagely misanthropic that one horrified individual he’d paid to read it referred to as a “didactic screed”.

And if ever proof positive were needed of the transforming work of the Lord Jesus Christ in a sinner’s life, it was the difference between how I used to write, and how I write today, and how this reflects the renewal of the mind.

Book Five

Essays Musical and Literary

One Classically English – A Brief Homage to Nick Drake

The much-loved singer-songwriter Nick Drake was not so much handsome as beautiful in what could be called a classically English, soft, wistful, romantic, Shelleyan fashion, with seemingly perfect skin, full lips and a head of cascading curls.
And in some of his many photos, he bears an uncanny resemblance to the former Doors front man Jim Morrison; and like Morrison, he was a poet as much as a musician. But the likeness ends there, for while Morrison was able to conquer his natural shyness and become a wildly charismatic showman, Drake never mastered the art of Rock performance.
However, blessed with a precocious musical genius, he secured a recording contract with the Island label while still only twenty years old and at Cambridge University.
On the surface of things, he was destined for a long and happy life, but unlike his near-double, was unable to translate his enormous gifts into commercial success. And he became very seriously depressed as a result, dying mysteriously at the age of just 26, after having released only three albums in his lifetime.
Looking back from the vantage point of the early 2010s, one can’t help thinking that in any era other than that ushered in by the Rock revolution, Drake would have pursued a career more suited to his background and temperament. As opposed to one which, while ensuring his immortality, clearly caused him an inestimable amount of pain.
And he came to maturity in a Britain whose young were in active rebellion against the Judeo-Christian value system on which the nation had been founded. So was perforce affected by the spiritual chaos of the times, which propelled him towards the endless night of worldly philosophy, deadly for a mind as litmus-paper sensitive as his.
For despite the fact that the vast majority of those who pass through the British public school system go on to lead full and successful lives entirely free from melancholy, social advantage can clearly be a heavy burden to bear for some. Such as Nick Drake who sang so devastatingly of “falling so far on a silver spoon” in the dark pastorale, Parasite.

Two The British Blues Explosion

What was it that transformed an interest among young men of largely middle class origin in the bleak brooding music of the Blues into a musical movement that took the world by storm all throughout the ’60s and beyond? That’s not an easy question to answer, but I’m going to give it some sort of a go.
The Blues themselves may provide something of a solution to the puzzle, for in the shape of the British Blues boom they constituted one of the dominant tendencies within the Pop explosion of the 1960s.
Yet, far from proceeding from the Pop revolution inspired by the Beatles, the British Blues came long before it. In fact, they emerged from the Traditional Jazz revival of the late 1940s, although most Trad devotees decried the Blues as simplistic in comparison to Jazz.
The most beloved and fearful form of the Blues was the Delta Blues, whose spiritual homeland was the Mississippi Delta, a region lying between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers, and stretching all the way from Memphis in the north to Vicksburg in the south.
With lyrics reflecting the sensuality, isolation and anguish of lost souls victimised by life and alienated from God, she found fertile soil in the still repressed United Kingdom of the late 1950s and early sixties. And especially in the affluent south among such passionate young men as Brian Jones from the spa town of Cheltenham in Gloucester; Eric Clapton from Ripley in suburban Surrey; and Jimmy Page from nearby Epsom, also in Surrey.
However, it’s none of these legends, so much as a certain guitarist of Greek and Austrian ancestry by the name of Alexis Korner who’s been called the Founding Father of the British Blues. And justifiably so, for more than anyone, he was the incubator of the British Blues Boom which was one of the great cornerstones of the entire Rock movement.
Korner began his musical career in 1949 as a member of Chris Barber’s Jazz Band, but his love of the kindred but then lesser known music of the Blues led him to form Blues Incorporated in 1961. And he did so with several future Rock superstars, including Jack Bruce, most famous for his tenure with Blues-Rock legends Cream, and Charlie Watts, future sticks man for the Stones, both from a Jazz background. As was Brian Jones; for this was not unusual for the first generation of British Rock artists.
And in addition to those already mentioned, the list of future Rock and Roll stars who were drawn to Korner’s regular Rhythm and Blues night at the Ealing Jazz Club in the early ’60s included Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Ginger Baker, Jimmy Page, Rod Stewart, and Paul Pond.
Pond, a tall, elegant Oxford undergraduate with the chiselled good looks of a Greek god, had been Brian Jones’ first choice as lead vocalist for a projected Blues band, but apparently convinced the Blues had no future, he turned the young Cheltenham Welshman down.
He later resurfaced as Paul Jones, front man for former Jazz outfit Manfred Mann, one of the first generation of British Blues bands to achieve mainstream Pop success. And alongside Jones and Mann were Mikes Vickers and Hugg, and bass man Dave Richmond…soon to be replaced by Tom McGuiness, who’d begun his career in the Roosters with Eric Clapton.
While Clapton himself found fame with the Yardbirds who, like the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Who and the Spencer Davis Group surfed the first wave of British Blues and R&B all the way into the Pop charts.
But British Rock was fuelled not just by the Blues, but an effervescent fusion of Rock and Roll, Skiffle, R&B, Doo-Wop, Motown and Tin Pan Alley known as Beat. And Beat emerged principally from the tough industrial North and Midlands of England to form part of the great Pop revolution of ’63 to ’64, although it’s doubtful the great record buying public had any notion of the difference between Beat and the Blues.
Yet there were those Pop musicians who clung doggedly to the Blues ethos, despite spectacular chart success. Such as Brian Jones of the Stones; and Eric Clapton, who forsook Pop stardom to seek refuge in Blues purist band Bluesbreakers…whose leader John Mayall played host to a veritable plethora of future Rock superstars at various stages of his career.
The term Rock was somehow perfect in describing the powerful primal sound of such Blues-based outfits as the Stones, the Kinks, the Yardbirds, the Pretty Things and the Who, although when this moved in to supplant Pop as the critic’s term of choice, it’s impossible to say.
One thing is certain is that as soon as it did, Rock became far more than a mere music form. In fact one might go so far as to say it was a way of life from the outset; a philosophy; even a religion, and as such, one of its prime tenets was rebellion against the traditional Judeo-Christian values of the West. So it’s not surprising its spiritual homelands were Britain and the USA, given these are the nations most associated historically with the rise of Evangelical Christianity.
For despite having been inextricably linked to Pop since its inception, Rock is clearly more than just another form of popular music. And while it possesses very little ability left to shock, its rebel spirit, and the sexual and social upheavals it once spearheaded have altered the fabric of Western society, possibly beyond all hope of recovery.

Three The Blues, Chicago, and the Genesis of Rock

7 million black people emigrated from the South to the North, Midwest and West during the period 1910 to 1970 known as the Great Migration. In terms of their music, their most famous port of call was surely the great Midwestern city of Chicago, where the Chicago Blues was born in the 1940s, this being a version of the original Country Blues enhanced by new developments in amplification. It went on to significantly inform the development of Rock and Roll, which was equally influenced by Country music, and most especially the variant known as Rockabilly.
The most influential Rock phenomenon of all time, the Beatles, were not overly influenced by the Chicago Blues, unlike their closest rivals the Rolling Stones.
They looked to Rock and Roll, and other more recent and commercial trends in Popular music, such as the music which eventually became known as Soul – and which was plausibly a fusion of Rhythm and Blues and Traditional Pop with elements of Gospel – for inspiration. As such they were the chief architects of Pop Music which went on to form the basis of Pop Culture and the entire Swinging Sixties scene. In this respect they differed from the prime movers of the British Blues Boom, who largely ignored Rock and Roll in favour of the Blues, and specifically the Delta and Chicago Blues. Out of this British Blues Boom, Rock was born although it would not be called this until well into the sixties.
Many of these Blues groups jumped onto the Pop bandwagon created by the Beatles to form part of the British Invasion of the US Pop charts. They included the Rolling Stones, the Animals and the Who. In time, they all became known as Rock groups, whether British or American, although Pop survived as an alternative generic description. Today, however, Pop is viewed rather as a strain within Rock or a sub-genre, or as a different form of music altogether.
From the grafting of anti-establishment values onto a music that seemed like little more than noise to many members of the older generation, a massively successful commercial phenomenon with millions of followers worldwide came into being. Its effect on the fabric of the Christian West cannot be underestimated.

Four Linton (The Weaker Heathcliff)

The Gothic tendency within literature pre-existed the great Romantic movement in the arts and literature, pre-eminently in the shape of the Gothic Novel. And the latter introduced a type of brooding anti-hero, such as Montoni from Ann Radcliff’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), who would go on to be identified as Byronic after the great English poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824).
But the Byronic hero could be said to have attained its literary apogee in the shape of a brace of anti-heroes featuring in the works of two literary sisters born to an Anglican minister in the county of Yorkshire towards the beginning of the 19th Century, Emily and Charlotte Bronte.
These being Rochester, from Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, and Heathcliff, from Emily’sWuthering Heights, both novels being first published in 1847. The latter, perhaps the most celebrated Gothic Romantic novel in literary history, has as one of its central features the introduction of the aforesaid Heathcliff into the prosperous Earnshaw family of Wuthering Heights, a farmhouse situated on the Moors of Yorkshire.
This occurs in consequence of a trip made by the master of the house to the city of Liverpool, where he encounters a homeless Romany boy whom he decides to adopt as his own son, despite the fact that he already has a son, Hindley, as well as a daughter Catherine.
And while Hindley goes on to experience deep resentment of his adoptive brother, his sister comes to care for him, and it’s this powerful attachment that ultimately blossoms into the all-consuming love between Cathy and Heathcliff that is the novel’s central theme.
In young adulthood, Heathcliff is the quintessential Romantic hero, in so far as he is fatally dark and handsome, and motivated by a nature so passionate that it threatens to destroy everything it comes into contact with including its possessor. And one rendered especially dangerous by virtue of Cathy’s status-seeking marriage to his love rival, Edgar Linton, and his own new-found prosperity.
Following Cathy’s death, the remainder of the novel depicts his ruinous effect on all forced to co-exist with him, including his sickly and ineffectual son, Linton. And one can’t help thinking that the latter’s short life in some way incarnates the tragedy of sons born to strong and successful men, and how they so often spend their lives in restless and troubled pursuit of not just their father’s approval, but their power.
Linton is the unfortunate offspring of the marriage between Heathcliff and Isabella, sister of Edgar Linton, whom Heathcliff weds merely as a means of taking his revenge on his detested brother in law.
And Linton inherits none of his father’s swarthiness and manifest manliness, being very much a Linton in appearance, blond and blue-eyed, but unlike his uncle he is something of a milksop, with a spoiled and peevish nature. But contrary to what might be expected for one so fragile, he enjoys the sufferings of the weak and powerless.
One might be tempted to see in this cruelty the revenge of one excluded from societal power by virtue of lack of manly character.
Indeed, Wuthering Heights as a whole has been described as a meditation on the nature of power, with certain characters representing its purest form by dint of advantages of birth and gender fused with lofty character; while others enjoy only relative power. And among these might be included Cathy and Heathcliff, who, despite being strong alpha figures, are excluded from true power by dint of gender and lowly origins respectively, a fact which ultimately secures their shared ruination through Cathy’s marriage to Edgar Linton, a man for whom she feels only limited passion.
Linton Heathcliff, on the other hand, is very much an omega male, petrified of his powerful father, who ultimately forces him into marrying Cathy’s daughter with Edgar Linton, also called Cathy, soon after which he dies, never having truly lived in effect. Yet he is an intriguing character despite his pathetic failure to make his mark in the world, and one can’t help thinking that had he been born into an environment more suited to his fragile and sensitive nature, he might have amounted to something in the end. Perhaps the coming century’s end would have been more congenial, and he’d have thrived as a poet in the aesthetic tradition.

Book Six

The Gloaming of a Golden Era and Other Literary 

Leftovers in the Form of a Finale

One  Hans Robert’s Upper Lip

Hans Robert’s upper lip curled under the effects of supercilious pride as the sun rained down onto the parade ground. His gloved hands worked a crisp, competent beat onto the red side-drum.
He was the picture of military splendour.
The peak of his officer’s cap reflected the sun’s stray rays with polished efficiency, and the reds, blacks and radiant whites of his appearance cast an aesthetic picture.
The march past was aristocratic, pompous.

The drum major was tall and adequately smart, but Mike Stone could quite plausibly have attracted much feminine attention due to his nice-boy personality, youthful to the point of being callow:
“Robert,” he screamed, “come here!”
Hans sauntered over to his caller with a haughty half-smile on his face.
Hans Robert’s upper lip curled under the effects of supercilious pride
as the sun rained down onto the parade ground.

Two  Sweetness, Cruelty and Pride

Sweetness and pain, sunshine and rain,
What’s the good of falling in love?
A heady brew, and it sends you insane,
What’s the good of falling in love?
One minute you’re up, the next you’re down,
What’s the good of falling in love?
Emotions tuned as a Stradivarius violin,
What’s the good of falling in love?
Cruelty and pride, love’s a stormy old ride,
What’s the good of falling in love?
Me, I’m getting out,
Come back, can’t you hear your heart?
What’s the good of falling in love?

Three  Of all Human Qualities

One of the noblest
Of all human qualities
Is that of gratitude,

And should any of us
in the West stop for a second
(A single second should be sufficient)

To consider just how blessed
We are in comparison
To so very many of the peoples

Of this tragic, broken planet
Who want for our luxuries
and our manifold freedoms,

Then perhaps, just perhaps,
We might feel a little
Thankfulness stir within our hearts.

Four  My Life Story

my life story
is littered
with the ghosts
of golden
opportunities gone

Five  The Gloaming of a Golden Era

Introduction

As in the cases of all my autobiographical writings, names of people have been changed, or modified, to the best of my ability in the name of privacy, while dialogue is approximate.

The Gloaming of a Golden Era

In the summer of 1979, Mark was, at the wonderful age of 23, a golden-headed extrovert. He was also almost textbook pretty in the manner of the modern Pop or movie idol, with long-lashed eyes of the deepest blue and cupid’s bow lips so finely wrought that many a woman might muse they were wasted on a man.
It had been in the early ’70s that Mark and his brother Jim started to be noticed by the local youth of Santiago de la Ribera, a beautiful former fishing village by the Mar Menor on Murcia’s Costa Calida where the family had been vacationing every year since the late 1960s, so that a large ever-evolving group attained a closeness of quite extraordinary intensity that lasted for several summers running until it was fatally compromised by Mark’s absence.
This occurred in consequence of his having been persuaded by his family to work as a sailing teacher in Palamos on the Costa Brava; and while he lost his job after only a few weeks, he’d already established strong emotional ties with the town, and so stayed on until the end of the summer.
A similar thing occurred the following year when he was despatched to the Andalusian town of Fuengirola with the purpose of setting up a sailing school. And while this plan fell through, he somehow fell into the position of lead singer for a four-piece band playing nightly at a local night club.
He stayed loyal to the band even once the original guitarist had been replaced by a gifted young Frenchman, but due to loss of strong leadership, things were never the same after his departure. And when it finally became clear to him the band had run out of steam, he made the trek to La Ribera to find her magical ambience yet intact, and his presence much anticipated.
But he himself had changed, not least in his style of dressing, which was coarser than in previous years, having been influenced by the London Punk movement, and he was prone to prima donna outbursts exacerbated by months of hard living, which may have alienated more than he realised at the time.
One thing is certain is that by the time he arrived in La Ribera a year after that, his network of friends had entirely dispersed but for a handful of die-hards, while the town itself seemed somehow different in his eyes. In fact, for want of a better word, it had become Westernised, so that every bar was chockfull of Pop music played at ear-splitting volume, while its youthful patrons seemed to Mark to be infinitely more sophisticated than they’d been only a handful of years theretofore.
The upshot was that La Ribera was no longer a place he could stroll through as if it were his personal principality knowing full well that sooner or later someone would be hailing him from a nearby window, street corner or roaring mobylette, situation which he viewed with a terrible sadness born of guilt.
For he was used to being the centre of attention, a state he achieved with ease either through his looks, or a flamboyant, furiously social personality which could at times verge on the obnoxious, and which had ensured him a lifetime of clashes with authority. And he’d already prematurely quit an astonishingly lengthy series of institutions for someone of such tender years. Indeed, there was something almost feverish, one might say pathological, about his incessant need for attention, which typically extended to his attire which at times betokened out and out exhibitionism. Yet, stronger personalities had the power to intimidate him with ease, and he was painfully aware of his lack of substance.
But then, perhaps he wasn’t so shallow after all. For there was an ineffable tenderness to him that was enormously appealing to women, while alienating more conventionally masculine males, the majority of his friends being arty mavericks such as himself. And he could be quite extraordinarily sentimental…a true romantic in the classic sense of the word.
Yet any profundity on Mark’s part had yet to manifest itself to any degree, although it could be said it was divined by the hyper-receptive.
Within a few days of Mark’s arrival in La Ribera, a large party arrived at the Alaska discotheque on the edge of town. This included Mark and Jim and best Spanish friend Fred, an ethnic Frenchman raised in Spain, similar to Mark in so far as he was blond and strikingly good-looking, and therefore enormously popular with the fair sex. Yet while he was also extrovert, he was more socialised than Mark, who had a lifelong history of unaccountable perverseness and provocation of authority. But Fred was deeply and genuinely fond of the Europhile Englishman, and vice versa.
Mark hit the dance floor to be surrounded by fellow dancers as he always was. For it was as if there was an aura of the constant possibility of impending excitement about him, and one that would ultimately yield him the fame he so clearly desired as many saw it; and they clearly wanted to bask in it, in the hope perhaps that some of it would rub off on them.
Yet it wouldn’t be too long before he found the burden of his mysterious magnetic enchantment too heavy to bear, as if it were in danger of crushing him; in fact, perhaps this was already the case. At the same time, he wouldn’t have traded it for the world, and he clung to it greedily, gloating as his party swelled, to be supplanted by Fred and his brother Armand, and other old friends of his from the golden days of La Ribera.
Such as Toto, a perpetually smiling Madrileno who’d been close to Mark and Jim for at least five years; and gentle Isabel, also from Madrid, and so placid that in company she barely uttered a word, preferring to look on with her enormous dark brown eyes, while occasionally flashing a shyly mysterious smile.
Soon after the party had returned to La Ribera, Mark suggested that rather than bring the night to a close, a small group of them hold an impromptu gathering on one of the wooden bathing facilities projecting out into the Mar Menor known as balnearios.
When they agreed, Mark went briefly back to his apartment to retrieve a cassette tape recorder complete with pre-recorded cassettes, and his old acoustic guitar after which he, Fred, Toto and Isabel set out for the balneario.
And passing amorous couples and several clustered groups of rowdy revellers, they soon settled under Costa Calida skies with the music of Frank Sinatra singing songs of Tom Jobim, which Mark’s parents purchased on cassette specially for what may have been their first ever holiday to La Ribera in the summer of 1969.
“Joue la guitare, Bowie,” said Fred, deploying such a nickname by virtue of Mark’s apparent favouring of David Bowie. Although he also resembled Sting of the internationally successful New Wave band the Police, and there was one instance of a kid repeatedly calling to him in the back streets of La Ribera, “Oye, Sting, Sting, Sting, Sting, Sting, Sting, Sting”, although entirely without menace. For in those days, the youth of Spain were remarkable for their sweetness of disposition and almost total lack of aggression.
“Qu’est-ce que tu veux que je joue?” Mark replied.
“I don’t know,” said Fred, “something romantic perhaps?”
Toto passed him his guitar, and he set about entertaining his small audience with rudimentary guitar skills which in those days extended to a host of rockers, and one or two simple love ballads such as Francis Lai’s theme to A Man and a Woman. But people seemed to like it when he played, because he had a fine singing voice a little reminiscent of Frank Sinatra’s.
In time, the party elected to return to their respective apartments, so Mark collected his paraphernalia before joining his friends in the short walk back to The beach. But no sooner had he done so than he fell into a large crack in the balneario, which caused his guitar to come crashing down with a loud discordant twang, and his tape recorder to follow suit, with several cassettes littering about his prostrate person.
Luckily he was unhurt, but his new imitation leather jeans were badly torn, and Sinatra sounded as he’d had one too many straight bourbons when played back on Mark’s freshly injured cassette player, although the cassette itself was perfect; and would remain so thereafter, a testament to fine workmanship.
Mark’s friends helped him out of the gaping fissure that had caused his humiliating plight while Mark himself burst into incredulous laughter at his ill fortune, which caused their concerned expressions to dissolve into smiles of relief. And before long, they were bidding each other goodbye for the night before setting off for their respective sanctuaries.
Much of the remainder of his vacation was spent in a chaos of activity with his family and friends, and once it was over, he returned to London to seek work as an actor, finding a degree of success as such until a fallow period two years later saw him return to La Ribera. And this despite the fact that there was little for him there that remained, but it was as if he was trying to make up for having forsaken his beloved town at the height of her golden age.
But after one further visit two years after that, and then a final one at the end of the ’80s, the La Ribera era was definitively put to sleep. And by this time, its participants had already long settled into adult life, in terms of professions, families, children and so on. But Mark never did.
Instead, he continued to extenuate his gilded youth until it came crashing down around him…came crashing down around him…as his guitar had done on the balneario all those summers ago.

Six  I Was Sad Today Because…

I was sad today; because you begged me to think of your good points, and I never told you any. Rest assured there are many, very many, and I was thinking about them today as I was on my bike. I would have liked to have told you them there and then. I tell you so much about my past; and quite a lot of it is conflictive; which makes it confusing even to me. It is all so contradictory, as if several Carls were struggling for supremacy. My behaviour could be pretty wild,  but much of the time, there was a pretty normal Carl; oh don’t get me wrong I was always an eccentric attention-seeker and born entertainer; but I really do genuinely struggle to make sense of me in the past. I really do genuinely struggle to make sense of me in the past.

 

Actually posted: 14/1/12 – Revised 21/1/16 – Revised 23/1/16 as “Though Are the Wonders of This brief Life”, in keeping with the official volume.

Patrick Halling’s Musical Voyage

Patrick Halling’s Musical Voyage 1

Unless I’m mistaken it was in the totemic decade of the 1960s – which witnessed an unprecedented explosion of pop and youth culture – that Pat moved into the session world where he was to record for film, television and above all popular music.

In the meantime, my mother’s musical life was put on hold while she concentrated on being the mother of two small boys, and supporting her husband in his various passions, which included dinghy racing on the Thames and elsewhere. Despite her strong aversion to sailing, she crewed for him for many years…specifically at the Tamesis Sailing Club in Teddington, West London where he was a member for much of the sixties, winning several racing trophies initially in a Firefly (number 1588), while his career as a session player thrived.

According to what he’s told me, he worked on early sessions for British musical sensations Lulu, Cilla Black and Tom Jones, as well as with superstar producers Tony Hatch and Mickie Most. Hatch wrote most of Petula Clark’s hit singles of the sixties, some alone, some with his wife Jackie Trent, and she went on to become a major star in the US as part of the so-called British Invasion of the American charts, as did several acts produced by Most, including Herman’s Hermits whose angelic front man Peter Noone ensured that his band were briefly almost as popular as the Beatles stateside.

Pat became close to both Most and composer-arranger John Cameron, who together helped Scottish singer-songwriter Donovan achieve a string of international hit records once he’d moved away from his early Folk-Protest style towards something far more Pop-oriented, starting with the psychedelic “Sunshine Superman” (1966), which was a massive stateside smash, and the first produced by Most.

Among those session musicians who played for Most in the ’60s were Big Jim Sullivan, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, who also arranged for him. Page went on to join seminal British Rock band The Yardbirds, which had been managed first by Simon Napier Bell, then by Most’s business partner Peter Grant. When the Yardbirds collapsed in 1968, the two remaining members Page and bassist Chris Dreja set about forming a new band, also to be managed by Grant. Page’s first choice as vocalist Terry Reid turned the job down, but he recommended a young 19 year old singer from the Midlands of England known as Robert Plant. Page duly travelled to Birmingham with Dreja and Grant to look the youngster over, and was impressed by what he saw. He then invited Plant to spend a few days with him at his home, the Thames Boathouse, in the beautiful little Berkshire village of Pangbourne for initial discussions related to the band…all this taking place in the summer of ’68, just months before I joined the Nautical College situated a few miles from the village itself. So, the nucleus of the New Yardbirds came into being.

Shortly afterwards, a friend of Plant’s, fellow Midlander John Bonham came onboard as drummer, and an old session buddy of Page’s, John Paul Jones replaced Chris Dreja as the band’s bass player, as Dreja wished to leave the music scene to concentrate on a new career as a photographer. Jones supplemented this role by helping Page with the arrangements, and performing keyboard duties. The New Yardbirds were now ready to fulfill their contractual tour of Scandinavia, which they began in September 1968.

With their first album – recorded at West London’s Olympic Studios – not yet released, they made their debut as Led Zeppelin at the University of Surrey on October 15, 1968. This was followed by a U.S. concert debut on December 26, 1968, and so Led Zeppelin went on to become the most famous Hard Rock band of them all equalled only by the Stones in terms of legendary darkness and mystery.
It seems incredible that a force of such seismic power and influence as Led Zep should emerge from the relative innocence of the London Blues and session music scenes of the sixties. But then a similar thing could be said of British Rock as a whole. What was it that transformed an interest among young men of largely middle class origins in the bleak brooding music of the Blues into a musical movement which took America and the world at large by storm in the late ’60s and early ’70s? That’s not an easy question to answer, but I’m going to give it some sort of a go.

The Blues themselves may provide something of a solution to the puzzle, because they are believed to have begun life as a secularised version of the black Gospel music of the American south, with lyrics reflecting the sensuality, isolation and anguish of lost souls victimised by life and alienated from God, and they found fertile soil in the still repressed United Kingdom of the late 1950s and early sixties, and especially in the affluent south among men such as Brian Jones from the genteel spa town of Cheltenham in Gloucester, Eric Clapton from Surbiton – via Ripley –  in Surrey, and Jimmy Page from nearby Epsom, also in Surrey.

But the British Rock explosion was not just fuelled by the Blues. By the early ’60s, an effervescent fusion of Rock and Roll, Skiffle, R&B, Doo-Wop, Soul and even traditional Classic Pop had emerged from several British cities most notably the tough industrial towns of Liverpool and Birmingham, before going on to take the UK charts by storm. It was the sound of Beat, and no band encapsulated it quite like the Beatles. That said, to further confuse matters, the term Beat – or rather Big Beat – had been used to describe a music genre as early as 1961 by the writer Royston Ellis, a close friend of John Lennon’s due to their shared appreciation of the Beat poets. In Ellis’s book “The Big Beat Scene”, the term Beat is used to describe the music of the first British Pop stars to emerge in the wake of the Rock revolution, such as Billy Fury, Joe Brown, Marty Wilde et al, as well as a host of lesser known ones…but then Rock is also used as an abbreviation for Rock and Roll in the same book.

The Beatles are seen by some as the inventors of modern guitar Pop. While this is debatable, they are without doubt the best known and most successful Pop group in history. Yet they themselves resisted being typecast as mere Pop, and could be said to have ultimately promoted a type of Rock with Pop elements which was yet no less removed from pure Pop than the Blues-based Rock of their chief rivals the Rolling Stones.

The overwhelming melodiousness of their classic period of 1964-’69 was founded on a vast variety of musical genres including Classical and Folk, Classic Pop, Country and Western, Rock and Roll, Soul and Motown, and even the Blues, leading one to conclude that largely through the Beatles, Rock became the ultimate musical smorgasbord, a veritable Babel of musical styles. During their brief few years of existence, they informed the development of Rock  to a greater degree than any other group or solo singer, and that includes the Rolling Stones, whose early style was far more rooted in the Delta and Chicago Blues than that of the Beatles, which was lighter, or Poppier. The Stones’ uncompromisingly primal rhythmic proto-Rock went on to form the basis of Hard Rock and Heavy Metal, and yet even these have to a greater or lesser extent benefited from the unrelenting melodic inventiveness of the Beatles, although the same could not be said of Punk, which is Rock stripped to its most essential ingredients.

That’s not to say, however, that the Beatles introduced melody into Rock and Roll, because it already existed by the time they had their first hit single in 1962. One of its chief sources was what has become known as the Brill Building Sound, named after the very building in New York City where many of its songwriters were housed and which had been a Pop music centre since the ’30s, the term Pop music having been coined – allegedly – as early as 1926. Brill Building Pop could be described as traditional Pop informed by the Rock and Roll revolution, and so partaking of Rock rhythms as much as the sophisticated song writing techniques of Classic – pre-Rock – Pop.

There was a somewhat notorious interregnum period of Popular Music between the decline of the first wave of Rock and the onset of Beatlemania and it lasted from about 1958, the year of Elvis Presley’s induction into the US Army, and around 1963 when the Beatles started to go global. Much has been made of the fact that the music’s initial threat was neutralised during this brief era, and that this process coincided with the first wave of teenage idols – both in the US and UK – who while heavily influenced by Elvis visually, had nowhere near the same devastating effect on the moral establishment.

It’s my contention that in spite of the bad press it’s received over the years, the first wave of Pop to arise in the wake of the Rock and Roll revolution was infinitely more fertile and diverse than it’s been given credit for, and that’s especially true of the Brill Building Sound, whose melodic and lyrical sophistication harked back to the golden age of the Great American Songbook. It’s sheer wholesomeness has attracted much hostility, but it should be remembered that for the first two years or so of its existence, the music of the Beatles was pretty wholesome too, and I can’t help thinking it’s a shame it didn’t remain that way; even though many – perhaps most – of their finest songs were written after 1965.

Its chief songwriters included Goffin and King, who wrote hits for the Shirelles, the Crystals, the Drifters, Bobby Vee, Gene Pitney and others in the immediate pre-Beatles era. They certainly influenced the Beatles, who covered one of their songs, “Chains”, which was soulfully sung by John Lennon. Carole King of course went on to become a superstar in her own right during the singer-songwriter era of the late 1960s, one of the most obvious examples of a survivor from the Brill Building era. Another was Burt Bacharach, who with lyricist Hal David went on to even greater glory in the ’60s at the height of Beatlemania. Despite reversals, he continues to be recognised as one of the greatest popular songwriters of all time. Other Brill building teams included Leiber & Stoller, Sedaka & Greenfield, Mann & Weil and Barry & Greenwich. As well as writing songs for major acts from Elvis Presley to the first great girl groups, their work facilitated the pioneering production techniques of Phil Spector, and influenced much of the Pop that was to dominate the ’60s, including the Beatles themselves.

Yet, while the Beatles remain indelibly associated with modern Pop, by about 1966, they were as much a Rock as a Pop group and this had less to do with their music than their lyrics. These had started to acquire an intellectual dimension by that totemic year, which was significantly attributable to the influence of Bob Dylan. Pop as a whole in fact had acquired a gravitas at odds with the innocent and sentimental music of the early Beatles and other bands within the outdated Beat genre as a result not just of Dylan’s influence as the first great poet of Rock, but an increasing melodic complexity on one hand, and an increasing spiritual darkness on the other. This latter was at least partly founded as I see it on the growing influence of the Blues, which led ultimately to the British Blues movement of the late 1960s. The term Rock was somehow perfect in describing the way out new music that arose out of it, although when this moved in to supplant Pop as its main name it’s impossible to say. One thing is certain…as soon as it did, Rock became far more than a mere music form. I’d go so far as to say that it was a way of life of life almost from the outset, a philosophy, even a religion one of whose prime components was rebellion against the traditional Christian moral values of the West.

Could this be the reason – or at least one of the reasons – why the US and Britain came to be its spiritual homelands, given that these are the nations most associated historically with the rise of Evangelical Christianity? Perhaps so. Whatever the truth, Rock is clearly more than just another form of Pop. Yet, in the modern sense of the word, Pop is intrinsically tied to Rock, or rather was…until about 20 years ago, when the latter started to decline as the leading voice of youthful rebellion, to be slowly replaced as such by other forms of popular music such as Hip Hop, Contemporary R&B, and Electronic Dance Music.

Today, Rock no longer represents the dark side of popular music, being just one of its many faces, just another branch of the entertainment industry. After nearly half a century of waging war against a world view rooted in the Bible, Rock has very little ability left to shock…although some may still be offended by its persisting lyrical darkness. Yet, the damage has been done: Western society has been irrevocably altered by Rock Music and the socio-sexual revolution it led.

Had it not been for this devastating youthquake, Pop might never have moved beyond the kind of novelty song Tin Pan Alley was producing at such a furious rate in the early 1950s, such as Bob Merrill’s wonderful “She Wears Red Feathers”; but would that have been such a bad thing, when you consider Rock’s ultimately disastrous legacy, the result of over a half a century of “letting it all hang out”? I don’t think so.

But to return to Pat, whose contribution to the growing Rock movement was ever both innocent and involuntary:
For the legendary Beatles producer George Martin, he led the string section that was filmed live for “All you Need is Love”, written specially for the “Our World” program which secured an international audience of 350 million people at the height of the so-called Summer of Love on July 25th 1967. It was the first satellite broadcast in history, and one of the most famous pieces of film ever made. Also taking part were Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Donovan and Marianne Faithful.

A year later, he worked on a project that was as much a concept album as any of the Beatles records of the same period, Ken Moule’s superb “Adam’s Rib Suite”, which fused elements of Jazz, Pop and Classical music to recount the history of womankind from Eve to Cleo Laine. Needless to say though, it was infinitely less successful than any comparable record within the Rock genre, Rock being at the cutting edge of popular culture in a way that Jazz had once been, but no longer was.

However, by the turn of the decade, a reconciliation between the two alienated factions was well under way, with Jazz-Fusion coming from one camp and the more populist Jazz-Rock from the other. In ’75, Pat served as leader for Mike Gibbs’ “Only Chrome Waterfall Orchestra”, an unsung classic of British Jazz fusion which was finally released on CD in 1997. Adam’s Rib followed it on CD exactly ten years later.

By the time of his involvement with “Adam’s Rib”, Pat had already moved into the worlds of film and television, and his early TV career included solos for the much-loved British sitcom “Steptoe and Son” (1962-1974), penned by one-time Tony Hancock writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, with music, including the well known theme tune, by the Australian composer Ron Grainer.
When it came to his early film career, he served as concertmaster for the great Johnny Green on Carol Reed’s version of Lionel Bart’s “Oliver” (1968), arguably the greatest film musical of recent times, and for John Williams on “Fiddler on the Roof” (1971), another film masterpiece based on a stage musical, this time directed by Norman Jewison. In addition to Williams, he’s served as concertmaster for several other major 20th Century musical figures, Dimitri Tiomkin, Nelson Riddle, Maurice Jarre, Georges Delerue and Wilfred Josephs among them.
He worked with Williams again on the musical version of James Hilton’s “Goodbye Mr Chips” (1969), directed by Herbert Ross, and featuring wonderful performances by Peter O’Toole as Chips and Petula Clark as his wife Katherine. The screenplay was fashioned by one of the 20th Century’s leading playwrights, Terence Rattigan, while Leslie Bricusse provided both the music and lyrics for the songs, some of which are enchanting despite what certain critics have said about them. David Lindup, father of Level 42’s Mike, whom Pat had first met while they were both working for British Jazz legend John Dankworth was one of the orchestrators on the project, under the masterful musical direction of John Williams. Sadly for all its virtues, “Chips” was not a critical success, although it was nominated for several major awards and enjoys a passionate following today, notably on the internet.

Also in ’69, Pat worked on another film which has since grown in stature, David Lean’s penultimate movie “Ryan’s Daughter”, written by playwright and screenwriter Robert Bolt and with music by French composer Maurice Jarre. Like “Chips”, “Ryan’s Daughter” was poorly received by the critics, although it was a moderate box office success, and is considered by many today to be a worthy addition to Lean’s peerless body of work.

Patrick Halling’s Musical Voyage 2

As the sixties gave way to the ’70s, Mickie Most entered the second phase of his glittering Pop career, although he was briefly involved with highly successful Hard Rock band the Jeff Beck Group which had been formed in early 1967. Beck had signed a personal management contract with Most who apparently wanted to turn him into a solo star, even though his backing band included one Rod Stewart on lead vocals. The Jeff Beck Group having failed to produce any hit singles, Most’s business partner Peter Grant eventually took over their management, arranging a six week tour of the US in early ’68. They went on to take America by storm, anticipating the success of another Grant-led band, Led Zeppelin.

While Grant went on to Rock mega-glory with Zep, Mickie set about turning RAK – which they’d founded together in 1969 – into one the key Pop record labels of the ’70s and home to several classic Glam, Pop and Teenybop acts such as the soulful Hot Chocolate and former Detroit rocker Suzi Quatro – with whom Pat worked on several occasions with Mickie at the helm – as well as Mud, Arrows, Kenny, Smokie and Racey.

Talking about Pop, in the early 1970s, John Cameron became an unlikely member of a successful Pop act himself as part of CCS, a band he put together with Mickie for RAK, and featuring the Blues guitarist Alexis Korner as band leader, but with Danish musician Peter Thorup doing most of the vocals.
Alexis Korner has been called the Founding Father of British Blues, and with good reason because possibly more than anyone he was the incubator of the ’60s Blues Boom which was one of the great cornerstones of the entire Rock movement. Some of the bands who were swept to stardom in its wake went on to be part of the celebrated British Invasion of the US charts which could be said to have transformed the American cultural landscape.

Born in Paris of Austrian and Greek ancestry, Korner began his musical career in 1949 as a member of Chris Barber’s Jazz Band, but his love of the then lesser known music of the Blues led to his forming the band Blues Incorporated in 1961 with singer Long John Baldry, harmonica player Cyril Davies, guitarist Jack Bruce, saxophonist Dick Heckstall-Smith and drummer Charlie Watts.
The list of musicians who were drawn to Korner’s regular Rythym and Blues night at the Ealing Jazz Club in the early ’60s included future members of the Rolling Stones, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Brian Jones, as well as Rod “The Mod” Stewart, and spectacularly handsome Oxford undergraduate Paul Jones. Paul had apparently been Brian Jones’ first choice as vocalist for his band the Rollin’ Stones, which he put together in 1962 with piano player Ian Stewart from Cheam in Surrey who’d been recruited from an ad in Jazz News, but he turned him down, only to resurface at a later date as front man for another Blues-based band which achieved mainstream Pop success, Manfred Mann.

A mere nine years after their formation, with poor Brian Jones no longer living, the Stones started work on the album which is widely considered to be their masterpiece, “Exile on Main Street”. These first sessions took place in the basement of the Villa Nellcôte, a 19th century mansion on the waterfront of Villefranche-sur-Mer in France’s Cote d’Azur, which had been leased to Keith Richards in the summer of ’71, although several tracks had already been recorded at West London’s Olympic Studios, as well as at Mick Jagger’s country estate, Stargroves near Newbury in Berkshire. Much has been written of the ultra-decadence surrounding the “Exile” sessions, which saw various icons of the counterculture passing through Nellcote as if there to bestow their blessings on the proceedings. They could be said to be the quintessence of the Rock and Roll lifestyle following a mere decade of Rock culture, which had yet already altered Western society as a whole almost beyond recognition. However, blame for this transformation can’t in all good conscience be laid exclusively at the feet of Rock. That would be absurd.

It seems pretty clear to me that the cultural revolution of the 1960s didn’t just appear out of nowhere, and that tendencies inimical to the Judaeo-Christian moral fabric of our civilisation can be traced at least as far back as the Enlightenment of the 16th and 17th Centuries, which could be said to be the starting point of the Modern Age. Much of the groundwork had already been done in other words, and that’s especially true of the two immediate post-war decades, in which the Existentialists and the Beats became international icons of revolt, with lesser groups like the Lettrists of Paris acting as scandal-sowing forerunners of the ’60s Situationists…Britain’s first major youth cult surfaced in the shape of the Edwardians who later became known as Teddy Boys or Teds…a cinema of youthful discontent flourished as never before creating a desire among many young people to be identified as wild ones and rebels without a cause…and Rock and Roll – perhaps already jaded as an art form by 1972…the year the Stones’ “Exile on Main Street” finally saw the light of day – took over the world, with Elvis Presley as its first true superstar.

That same year saw Pat work on an infinitely more humble musical project, Richard Harris’ “Slides” which, while a success on the Billboard charts at the time has since been sadly overlooked, although it was released on CD with another Harris album “My Boy” in 2005, receiving very high ratings from Amazon reviewers both in Britain and the US.

A year later, Pat worked on the first of two pictures helmed by the great Fred Zinnemann, whom he was kind enough to introduce me to – and on the set of “Julia” (1979) unless I’m mistaken – and he was utterly enchanting. This was “The Day of the Jackal”, based on the novel by Frederick Forsyth, and with music this time by Georges Delerue, whom I also met with Pat. Although not a commercial success, it’s now seen as a classic British thriller in the tradition of Carol Reed’s “The Third Man”, and Edward Fox’s mesmerising performance as the elegant ruthless Jackal helped turn him into a major star.

Patrick Halling’s Musical Voyage 3

By the start of the 1970s, for a teenager like myself and many of my friends, Rock and Roll music had divided into two categories. One we knew as Commercial, a word we tended to spit out like some kind of curse, the other, Underground, or some other term reflective of its shadowy exclusivity. While the former was effectively pure Pop, whose domain was the Hit Parade or Pop charts weekly featured on the British TV program Top of the Pops, the latter consisted of groups who made music largely for the growing album market…and there were those Rock acts such as Led Zeppelin who never graced the singles chart despite earning fortunes through concerts and album sales. Within album Rock many strains co-existed as I recall, including Hard or Heavy Rock, Soft Rock of the type of Joni Mitchell and Crosby, Stills and Nash, and the Art or Progressive Rock pioneered by the Beatles, Frank Zappa, Pink Floyd, the Doors and others.
Despite himself Pat was part of it from the outset, notably through his association with the Beatles, who by ’67 were at the forefront of the Rock revolution, having arguably left much of their Pop career behind them once they’d retired from touring, although their Rock was ever replete with beautiful Pop melodies.

However, it was Jethro Tull, a British band that achieved both commercial and critical success on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond, that marked the height of his relationship with the new Art Rock phenomenon. Working with front man – as well as singer, flautist and composer – Ian Anderson, and conductor, arranger and keyboard player David Palmer, Pat served as leader for two Tull albums, which is to say, “Warchild” from 1974, and “Minstrel in the Gallery” from a year later, both recognised today as undisputed masterpieces of the Progressive genre.
During the Prog Rock boom which was at its height from about 1969 to 1975, Pat played on several albums which while not successful in the mould of best sellers by Tull, Pink Floyd, Genesis, Yes and others, have nonetheless received fresh critical acclaim through the internet, some of this verging on the adulatory.

They include “Definitely What” (1968) by Brian Auger and the Trinity, “Cosmic Wheels” (1973) by Donovan, “Beginnings” (1975) by Yes guitarist Steve Howe, “Octoberon” by Symphonic Rock pioneers Barclay James Harvest, and two by Gordon Giltrap, “Visionary” from ’76 and “Perilous Journey” from the following year. Giltrap, I feel safe in asserting, is one of the most outlandishly gifted guitarists -acoustic or otherwise – in the history of recorded music.

For composer-producer-arranger-conductor Johnny Harris, who has worked in various capacities with some of the greatest names in entertainment of the last half century including Michael Jackson, Sammy Davis Jnr., Barbra Streisand, Liza Minnelli, Diana Ross, Dionne Warwick, Johnny Mathis and Tom Jones, Pat led the strings on “All To Bring You Morning” (1973), his second solo album, which featured no less than three one-time members of Prog Rock legends Yes, namely the aforesaid Steve Howe, vocalist/composer Jon Anderson, and drummer Alan White, who just happened to be recording next door at the time as Johnny and friends and were great admirers of his work. It achieved a CD release in 2008.
For his very close friend Derek Wadsworth he played on “Metropolitan Man” (1974) by Alan Price, the former keyboardist for British Invasion band the Animals. They scored an international mega-hit in 1964 with their version of the traditional Folk song “The House of the Rising Sun” produced by Mickie Most, who masterminded the first two years of their career, during which they became Pop sensations in the US almost on a par with the Beatles and the Stones. Alan Price left in 1965 to form his own Alan Price Set, which, with songs such as the classic “House that Jack Built” from ’67, combined musical virtuosity with lashings of commercial appeal, a gift that was one of the hallmarks of classic sixties Pop, but which had perhaps declined somewhat by the turn of the ultimate Pop decade.

In the early ’70s though, the Glam-Glitter genre took off in Britain, taking the Pop charts by storm in the process. Among those artists who became superstars through Glam, a heterogeneous mixture of Pop and Rock whose purveyors flaunted an outrageous androgynous image were Marc Bolan, David Bowie, Rod Stewart and Elton John, all of whom had been striving for Rock and Roll success for years.

Bolan is widely credited with inventing Glam, although it had been foreshadowed in the ’60s by the Stones and others, but its true pioneer was arguably Little Richard, known today as the Reverend Richard Penniman.

Among the first generation of Rock stars he was the most overtly androgynous, although it’s been said he took much of his image from a little known Rock shouter named Esquerita, who was believed to have been even wilder than Richard….if that were at all possible. A product of the southern Bible Belt like Richard, Esquerita died young at only 49 years old from an AIDS-related illness after a life of relative obscurity.

As a child Richard had attended Pentecostal churches in his native Georgia, and seriously considered becoming a preacher of the Gospel; but it was also in these churches that he developed the musical gifts that were to lead to his ultimately embracing the music which he has gone on record as declaring to be incompatible with the Christian life. In fact, few Rock stars have been quite so vocal in their denunciation of the spiritual dangers of Rock music as Little Richard Penniman. For a time, however, he was the most outrageous of the early Rock idols, and many of Rock’s most dynamic performers – Mick Jagger, Rod Stewart and David Bowie among them – have cited him as a seminal influence.

The Glam Rock era of 1971-’73 was to some extent a revival of the sartorial flashiness – and musical simplicity – of early Rock and Roll…and one which swept a host of gifted young musicians who’d been striving for major success since the early 1960s to fresh levels of stardom in the UK and elsewhere. Yet, despite the Pop star status they enjoyed in the UK, several of these were viewed as serious album artists as well as TV idols, among them Rod Stewart, David Bowie and Elton John, and significantly all three remain international Rock icons to this day. On the other hand, other Glam acts were viewed largely as singles bands during a golden age for the British Pop charts…and one that seriously advantaged a certain East End boy of part Irish Traveller extraction by the name of David Cook.

As David Essex, he became a star on the fringes of Glam, not through Rock nor teeny bop Pop, but largely through acting both onstage and in the movies. It was his own song, “Rock On” a massive hit on both sides of the Atlantic in 1974 that really put him on the map as a major heart throb…together with the ’73 movie “That’ll be the Day”, directed by Claude Watham, in which he plays a young tearaway in a bleak pre-Beatles Britain who yearns for Rock and Roll stardom, and ultimately leaves his young family to pursue it. In the follow-up, “Stardust” (1974) – also the name of Essex’s third British hit single – he achieves his dream…but ends up living as a wasted recluse in a vast castle in Spain.

Both “Rock On” and “Stardust” were produced by New Yorker Jeff Wayne. Pat worked with him not just on “Rock On”, but his own “Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds” which has achieved classic status since its release in 1978.

Towards the middle of the ’70s, Soul music, a popular genre which had evolved out of Gospel and R&B birthed a mutation known as Disco, one of whose hallmarks was the liberal use of strings often played in a staccato style. In consequence, Pat was involved in several major Disco projects, including the band “Love and Kisses” formed by Alec R Costandinos, which produced three albums between 1977 and ’79. While these have been obscured by Giorgio Moroder’s groundbreaking work with Donna Summer, they were massively successful at the time, yielding several US hit singles and helping to define the Disco sound. Both Pat and Costandinos had earlier worked with another French Disco pioneer Jean-Marc Cerrone on his hit album, “Love in C Minor” from 1976.
Pat played on several other Costandinos records, including an acknowledged Disco masterpiece “Romeo and Juliet” (1978) which unlike many of the classic works of the Disco era was not flagrantly risqué in the lyrical department. He also worked on the album “Limelight Disco Symphony” (1978) by Melophonia which was a Disco tribute produced by Franck Pourcel and Alain Boublil to Sir Charles Chaplin, who’d died on Christmas Day ’77. Some years previously, Pat had worked with him on sessions which involved some of his classic films being set to new musical arrangements, and he’d introduced me to him, and he was charming; in fact it was one of the most memorable events of my life.

Boublil went on to write the libretto for the musical “Les Miserables” with composer Claude Schonberg, and it was John Cameron who arranged it for them. Pat was involved with the London production of “Les Miz” for many years as the leader of the orchestra, one of several highlights of a theatrical career which has involved his working with such legends as Ella Fitzgerald, Perry Como, Tony Bennett, Tiny Tim, Barry Manilow and Boy George of Culture Club, and touring with Tom Jones, Barrie White and others. But it’s his participation in Bing Crosby’s final tour of London in September 1977 that is perhaps the most memorable of all. In that same month, Bing, his family, and his close friend Rosemary Clooney began a concert tour of England that included two weeks at the London Palladium. He recorded an album “Seasons”, and a TV Christmas special with David Bowie and Twiggy in the UK. His duet with Bowie on “Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy” was listed in Britain’s TV Guide as one of the 25 most memorable musical moments of 20th Century television. After the tour Pat actually managed to wangle an autograph from Bing during a last recording session at Maida Vale studios. Der Bingle had initially objected to Pat helping himself to a piece of his sheet music, before relenting with the words, “he seems like a good man“, and autographing the music into the bargain. He died some days afterwards on October 14th, following a round of 18 holes of golf near Madrid where he and his Spanish golfing partner had just defeated their opponents, towards the end of a year which had seen the deaths of a string of cultural giants including – in addition to Bing – Charlie Chaplin, Groucho Marx, Joan Crawford, Maria Callas and Elvis Presley.
Speaking of John Cameron…he was one of the men responsible for a rare classic of British Soul, “Central Heating” (1978) by London-based Funk outfit Heatwave. John served as producer on the sessions, with Pat as his concermaster, while the songs were mainly written by keyboardist Rod Temperton. Temperton was the white Englishman who went on to write several of the most memorable numbers from the best-selling long player in musical history, Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” from 1982, which was produced by Quincy Jones, as well as for Quincy’s own album “The Dude”, for Patti Austin, George Benson, Anita Baker and others. Three Heatwave songs, all written by Temperton and produced by Cameron were millions sellers in the US, these being “Boogie Nights”, “The Groove Line” and the lovely ballad, “Always and Forever”, sung straight from the heart by tragic former US serviceman Johnny Wilder Jr, who had one of Soul’s greatest and most underrated voices.
At the end of the ’70s, Pat played what was possibly his most memorable ever solo for a television program and that was for the stunning opening and closing theme to BBC’s “Life on Earth” (1979), composed by Edward Williams and conducted by Marcus Dods. This 13-part documentary series by British naturalist David Attenborough – whom I met very briefly at a social function with his wife in the late 1970s, most probably ’79 – is widely considered to be one of the greatest ever made; but for some people- and as a Christian I include myself among them- it was controversial, given its foundation in the Theory of Evolution.

Patrick Halling’s Musical Voyage 4

The ’80s was a difficult decade for session musicians like Pat as the synthesizer started making stronger inroads than had previously been the case into the world of recorded music, and that’s especially true of the so-called New Pop that arose in Britain in the wake of Punk. Several New Pop acts took part in the so-called Second British Invasion, which saw British bands dominating the American Pop charts to a degree unknown since the first one led by the Beatles. This was significantly due to a demand on the part of the newly launched MTV music channel for colourful videos of which there was a shortage in the US at the time, and it enabled several – largely synth-driven – British bands such as the Human League, Depeche Mode, Duran Duran, Culture Club and Eurythmics to score massive transatlantic hits.

Despite the inexorable rise of electronic Pop, Pat’s career proceeded apace during the ’80s. In 1980, he worked once again for his close friend John Cameron, this time on “The Mirror Crack’d” based on the Agatha Christie novel, with music by JC, and featuring a roll call of Hollywood legends including Elisabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, Tony Curtis, and Kim Novak, with Angela Lansbury as Miss Marple. Pat even had a small non-speaking cameo in the movie as a World War II bandleader, a walk-on admittedly but a featured one. He worked with Cameron again on a further star-studded Christie movie, “Evil Under the Sun”. Both were helmed by Bond director Guy Hamilton, and produced by John Brabourne, and Richard Goodwin, who became a friend of Pat’s, and they were to work together several more times in the ’80s and ’90s.

For Richard’s wife writer/director Christine Edzard, he was the violin soloist for “Biddy” (1983), working again with Christine – with Richard producing – on “Little Dorrit” (1988), based on the Dickens novel, and “The Fool” (1990), which was written by Christine with Oliver Stockman. All three movies were scored by French composer Michel Sanvoisin. Incidentally on “Little Dorrit”, based on the novel by Charles Dickens, Pat is credited either as soloist or song performer, duty he shared with his beloved friend, Catalan cellist Francisco Gabarro, known as Gabby, as well as the celebrated clarinettist Jack Brymer.

For Beatles legend Paul McCartney he led the orchestra for the soundtrack to the movie “Give My Regards to Broad Street” (1984), which sold well, including as it did reworked versions of six Beatles classics including “Eleanor Rigby”, although the film itself performed poorly at the Box Office. Since ’84, its reputation has barely improved, although on the US and British versions of Amazon it benefits from a good deal of affection on the part of everyday net users, a testament to the enormous good will MacCartney continues to generate on a worldwide basis.

Three years later, he worked with another Pop superstar of Irish ancestry, Enya Brennan – although unlike Macca she was actually born on the Emerald Isle – on “To Go Beyond II”, final track of the highly successful “Enya” album to be precise. The album was later remastered and renamed “The Celts”, for use by the BBC for the 1992 TV series of the same name.
Other television projects on which Pat worked in the ’80s include “Hold that Dream” (1986) based on the novel by Barbara Taylor Bradford, with original score by long time friend Barrie Guard, “Tears in the Rain” (1988), from a novel by Pamela Wallace, with music again by Guard, and “The Darling Buds of May” (1992-1993), based on the novel by HE Bates, and with music by Pip Burley and Guard.
In 1989, he worked with a yet another Rock legend, Pete Townsend, serving as leader on the concept album “The Iron Man – The Musical”, based on the novel by Ted Hughes. Townsend was of course the guiding spirit of the Who, whose contribution to the so-called British Invasion of the US by English bands, led by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, was little short of earth-shaking…as even more than the Stones they provided the basis for much of the Hard and Heavy Rock to follow. Interestingly, Pete’s father Jazz saxophonist Cliff Townsend had been a colleague of Pat’s during their time together on the BBC 1 program Parkinson, named after British chat show master Michael Parkinson.
In 1990, he appeared on John Williams’ album “The Guitar is the Song”, having earlier worked with the great Classical guitarist on “John Williams plays Patrick Gowers and Scarlatti” (1972), and specifically on Gowers’ “Chamber Concerto for Guitar”, as well as “Portrait of John Williams” (1982), on which he served as leader of the String Orchestra for Vivaldi’s Concerto in D major, and “Cavatina” by Stanley Myers, known by many as the theme to “The Deerhunter”.

Moving into the so-called Noughties…between 2000 and 2002, Pat played violin for Nuages, a band specialising in Swing, Vocal Jazz and Classic Easy Listening formed by his good friend Barrie Guard, and featuring myself on vocals. We laid down a series of superb demos – beautifully arranged by Barrie – at his home studio in the outer suburbs of London, and even went so far as to record a pilot radio show but to no avail.  We gigged sporadically for about a year and a half, and response to our music was polite at best, until a final concert at the 2002 Shelton Arts Festival brought us into contact with the kind of intimate cultured audience we perhaps should have been aiming for all along…and we all but brought the house down. Sadly though, for a variety of reasons Nuages dispersed soon afterwards.
On a brighter note, there’s a fascinating tale attached to singer-songwriter John Dawson Read for whom Pat served as leader on his two ’70s albums, “A Friend of Mine is Going Blind” (1975) and “Read On” (1976). Sometime around 2005, fellow singer-songwriter Michael Johnson included an MP3 of Read singing the title track of his first album, “A Friend of Mine” on his website, and many Read fans began communicating through the site in consequence. His subsequent re-entry into the music world after nearly thirty years of relative – although not complete – inactivity, resulted in a third album, “Now…Where were we?” being released that same year.
Until quite recently, Pat served as leader – under the headship of conductor and composer Ronnie Hazelhurst – for the BBC comedy series that is the longest running in television history, Roy Clarke’s “Last of the Summer Wine”. Working alongside Pat on the series was harmonica maestro Jim Hughes, whose playing it is that makes Ronnie’s gently pastoral theme tune so distinctive.  With Jim’s help, Pat began work on an album of popular song standards – featuring myself on vocals – some time in the mid Noughties, possibly 2006. Eventually given the title  “A Taste of Summer Wine” thanks to the generosity of Ronnie Hazelhurst, it’s credited to James Hughes Carl Halling with the London Swingtette, the latter consisting of, in addition to Pat’s own Quartet Pro Musica, Judd Procter on guitar, Manfred Mann founder member Dave Richmond, and John Sutton, on bass, and John Dean and Sebastian Guard on drums. The album was engineered by sound recordist Tony Philpot, and Keith Grant – formerly of West London’s legendary Olympic Studios – and finally released in 2007. Olympic became one of the great recording centres of British Hard Rock after it had been bought by Keith and Cliff Barnes in 1966, with the Stones, the Who, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin and Queen all recording there, as well as the Beatles, The Small Faces, Procul Harum, Traffic, Hawkwind and others.
Other recent projects of Pat’s have included the world premiere of the string quartet “A Poet’s Calendar” by long-time friend Derek Wadsworth, which took place at the Riverhouse Barn studio in Walton on Thames, Surrey, on the 10th March 2007, with Pat leading his own revived Quartet Pro Musica, and the first live performances of Quartets 1 and 2 by Jazz drummer and composer Tony Kinsey. As things stand, Pat plays in two quartets, the previously mentioned Pro Musica, and the Leonardo, formed in 1993.
Despite having worked as a professional musician for more than half a century, Pat is still a force within the music industry, and has recently spoken on television and elsewhere on his work with the Beatles. He also paints now under the quaint monicker of Clancy, the middle name he once rejected. Furthermore, he’s still winning up to two races every Sunday for his local sailing club. There seems to be no end to the man’s almost preternatural energy and force of will. Although there’s no hard and fast evidence that Pat has Scandinavian blood, research related to the Norwegians who emigrated to the American Midwest – and particularly Minnesota -from about the mid-19th Century onwards, reveals that one of the characteristics of the inhabitants of the Halling Valley known as Hallings and speaking a dialect known as Halling is firmness “in thoughts and beliefs”, so that he would “rather break than bend”. This in the words of the Norwegian-American writer Syver Swenson Rodning, who in 1917 took first prize in an essay set by a man called Hallingen called “A Halling is a Halling wherever he is”. The Hallings themselves settled primarily in Spring Grove, Minnesota, with traces of their subculture surviving into the 1930s. Perhaps then, alone among the three children born to Phyllis Mary Halling, Patrick is a true Halling with roots deep in the Hallingdal in Norway’s Buskerud County where the Halling Valley River lies. Edited 7/10/15

The Riddle of the British English

Photo by Peter Kingsford

The Riddle of the British English

In June 1949, my mother the former singer Miss Ann Watt became Mrs Ann Halling through her marriage to my father Patrick Clancy Halling, thereby substituting a Scottish surname for a Danish one.

 In Ireland, the Watt surname is exclusive to Ulster, home province of my grandfather James Watt, having been carried there by the Scottish and English planters of the late 1600s. It’s common in the Scottish Lowlands, especially in the counties of Aberdeenshire and Banffshire. Lowlanders are altogether distinct from their Highland counterparts, being widely considered to be of Anglo-Saxon rather than Celtic ancestry, although how accurate such a perception is I’m unable to say. What is certain is that many of those descended from the original British colonial settlers in the American south are of Ulster and Lowland Scottish ancestry.

 As might be expected the Watt surname is affiliated with that of Watson, and both are what is known as septs of the Forbes and Buchanan Clans, a sept being a family that followed a certain chief or Clan leader, either through being related by marriage or resident on his land, thereby making up a larger clan or family. Kindred septs include those of MacQuat, MacQuattie, MacQuhat, MacQwat, MacRowatt, MacWalter, MacWater, MacWatson, MacWatt, MacWatters, MacWattie, Vatsoun, Vod, Vode, Void, Voud, Voude, Vould, Walter, Walterson, Wasson, Waters, Waterson, Watson, Watsone, Watsoun, Wattie, Wattson, Wod, Wode, Wodde, Woid, Woide, Wood, Woyd and Wyatt and Watt.

 I came into the world a little over six years later as Carl Robert Halling, Carl being the name of my paternal grandfather, and Robert that of my mother’s brother Bob, and very much as a Briton as opposed to an Englishman…which is to not to say that I don’t consider myself English, because I do. But my origins are British as opposed to strictly English…which is to say Scots-Irish, Scottish and English Canadian through my mother, and Danish Australian and English Australian through my dad, with a possible Cornish admixture coming through my paternal grandmother. Her maiden name had been Pinnock, a  common one in England’s poorest county, and therefore of possible Brythonic Celtic origin.

 Like the Welsh and Manx of Britain, and the Bretons of France, the Cornish are of the Brythonic family of Celtic peoples, while the Scottish and the Irish are of the Gaelic. It could be therefore that I partake of both Gaelic and Brythonic Celtic ancestry.

 Whatever the truth, I’m proud of my roots in Ulster and Glasgow, both of which possess – I think it’s fair to say – long-established working class traditions. The same applies to Wales and the north and midlands of England, while the south and especially the south east of England are widely seen as affluent, middle class regions, although needless to say, variations exist within all regions of the country. For example, the aforesaid Cornwall in the south west is, as I’ve already stated, England’s poorest county, and the great metropolis of London, which is Europe’s financial centre and still one of the most powerful cities in the world, contains no less than fourteen of the nation’s most deprived twenty boroughs. 

 What’s more, while Glasgow is home to a massive working class with clearly defined Catholic and Protestant communities, Scotland’s capital Edinburgh, known as the Athens of the North, has a reputation for great gentility. Yet, in common with other affluent cities throughout a nation of striking extremes of wealth and poverty, Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol and so on, Edinburgh contains areas of considerable deprivation…Wester Hailes, Broomhouse, Clermiston, Muirhouse, Pilton, Granton, Leith, Niddrie and Craigmillar being especially affected in this respect.

 I’m also proud of a more bourgeois English ancestry which comes through my father, who although born in the Tasmanian hinterland in Rowella and raised by a Danish father, is English through his mother Mary, a brilliant woman who once ran her own school in Sydney and wrote for the Sydney Telegraph. Her own father was apparently what is known as a gentleman, which means he was independently wealthy, and therefore arguably part of the lower gentry. Yet, by leaving her first husband – an army officer by the name of Peter Robinson – for a Dane with no steady profession from what I can gather, she effectively cut herself off from her class and country, act which ultimately forced her out to work to support her young family, and with Carl desperately sick with the Multiple Sclerosis that would ultimately kill him.

 Yet, while I’m proud to be British, England is the country of my birth and the one I identify with in spirit despite the fact that I’m more British than English as such…indeed if anyone incarnates the riddle of what it is to be British, a citizen of a nation consisting of four nations and yet existing as one, it’s me. For all that though, in the words of the famous hymn…there’s another country, in which all distinctions of ethnicity and class will be a thing of the past, and whose citizens will be of one race alone, the human race, the only one created by God.

The Playing Fields of Pangbourne

My first school was a kind of nursery school held on a daily basis at the home of one Miss Pierce in Bedford Park, in the Southfields ward of South Acton, then as now one of the poorest areas of West London with its vast South Acton Estate, although Bedford Park was demographically mixed and relatively affluent. It’s now one of the capital’s most exclusive suburbs.

 My brother was born in Bethnal Green, East London on the 2cnd May 1958, and as he’s the only member of my immediate family who’s never been professionally involved with the arts or entertainment, I shan’t be mentioning him by name in order to maintain his privacy.

 Aged 4 years old, I joined the exclusive Lycée Francais Charles de Gaulle, situated in the fabulously opulent West London area of South Kensington, where I was to become bilingual by the age of four or thereabouts. My father was far from wealthy, but he was determined that my brother and I enjoy the best and richest education imaginable, and we were dressed in lederhosen as small boys with our heads shorn like convicts so that we be distinguished from the common run of British boys, with their short back and sides, and to this end, he worked, toiled incessantly in the tough London session world to ensure that we did. He himself favoured radically bohemian items of clothing such as faded canvas trousers covered in multi-coloured patches, and could therefore cut a striking figure among certain other Lycée dads. Almost every race and nationality under the sun was to be found in the Lycée in those days… and among those who went on to be good pals of mine were kids of English, French, Jewish, American, Yugoslavian and Middle Eastern origin.

 I left the Lycée in what must have been the summer of 1968 – or perhaps earlier – before spending a few months at a crammer called Davies Preparatory School so as to become sufficiently up to scratch academically to pass what is known as the Common Entrance Examination.

 Taking the CE is a necessity for all British boys and girls seeking entrance into private fee-paying schools, including those known as public schools, which are the traditional secondary places of learning for the British governing and professional classes…the ruling elite in other words. The vast majority of those who go on to public schools begin their academic careers in preparatory or prep schools, and so for the most part leave home at around eight years old.

 The school my father hoped I’d manage to get into was the Nautical College, Pangbourne, although I think his first choice had been either HMS Conway or Worcester, also known as the Incorporated Thames Nautical Training College. However, naval colleges and training schools were fading fast in the late 1960s, Conway being on its last legs as a so-called stone frigate on the south coast of Anglesey, and Worcester having recently been incorporated into the Merchant Navy College at Greenhithe, Kent.

 Somehow though, I managed to pass the CE, and so at still only twelve years old became Cadet Carl Robert Halling 173, who was for a few months the youngest in the college, and an official serving officer in Britain’s Royal Naval Reserve. Pangbourne’s regime was tough in ’68, even by the standards of British public schools which had historically trained boys for service on behalf of the Empire, and its headmaster – a serving officer in the Royal Navy for what I think was a quarter of a century – was known as the Captain Superintendent.

 I was what was known as a stroppy moosh, stroppy meaning insolent, and moosh a neophyte or new boy, as distinct from a doggie, which was the Pangbournian equivalent of the traditional public school fag, or personal servant in the so-called fagging system. In my first term, I was deemed as so transcendentally incompetent that none of the seniors, or older boys would even consider me as their doggie…and yet when it came to my stroppiness, this came ultimately to work in my favour, when I became a virtual mascot of some of the hardest and coolest boys in college.

 I idolised these lads and happily clowned for them like some kind of court minion, and they protected me in return, instilling me with a sense of invincibility which can’t have had any kind of positive effect on the development of my character, which wasn’t too strong to begin with. I’d go so far as to say that I wasn’t born with natural backbone as perhaps some are, but that doesn’t mean to say that those who lack moral fibre can’t go on to develop it, nor that those who don’t are not capable of losing it, because they certainly are. Am I wrong to suggest that thanks to the New Covenant established by Christ, natural born sons and daughters of Cain can go on to become the noblest of men and women, while natural born scions of Abel can degenerate into the most unspeakable monsters? Perhaps so…but one thing I am right about…I’ve struggled to develop character in a way my parents never did, and I’m still struggling. If anyone ever needed Christ it’s me.

 By my second year, all the social standing I’d worked so hard to acquire had evaporated, as I was required to remain behind in the third form, while all my friends went on to the fourth, a reversal which exerted a devastating effect on my morale. Insecure and disaffected, I started throwing my weight around among my new classmates, until two of them came down so hard on me that I was cured of trying to act the lout with them at least. We eventually became very close friends, but I don’t think they ever fully forgave me for trying it on with them, not that they ever let on about it. Actually, I jest…of course they did.

 From the outset, I desperately wanted to distinguish myself at Pangbourne…and especially at sports, beginning with the great ruffianly game for gentlemen of Rugby Football…and oh with what longing I gazed at the sight of rugger colours on the blue blazers or striped Paravicinis of those who’d earned them on the playing fields of Pangbourne. At Pangbourne, colours were – and presumably still are – awarded during one or other of the main sporting seasons of rugger, hockey, cricket and rowing and for such subsidiary sports as swimming, boxing, sailing, fencing and so on, to one showing distinction within a particular team or rowing eight or whatever, and are a long-standing tradition within British private schools and universities. Sad to say, none ever came my way.

 The fact is that, raised as I was in the western suburbs of London in the sixties with its alleys, greens, parks, sweet shops and narrow streets lined by terraced or semi-detached houses, I was wholly ignorant of the secrets of the hallowed sports of Britain’s gilded elite…so ignorant in fact that by my third term, I’d got it in my head that I wanted to be a rowing coxswain, due to some crazy dream of mine of one day ending up in the 1st VIII. As things turned out, I ended up in the conspicuous yet humiliating position of coxing only lesser crews…except for on those rare occasions when a better man was unavailable. We were pretty thin on the ground we coxes.

The Genesis of the Beat Generation

It would be false to assert that Pangbourne was exclusively composed of the sons of the British privileged, because it wasn’t…and neither was it a narrowly Anglo-Saxon institution, because during my time I knew American, West Indian, Middle Eastern and South African cadets as well as British ones, and several of these were close friends. What’s more, it was supplemented in the autumn of ’68 by cadets from the recently dismantled TS Mercury, founded in 1885 by a wealthy businessman and keen yachtsman Charles Hoare for the rescue of London slum boys who would then be trained for service in the Royal and Merchant Navies. Until as recently as the previous July, she’d been moored on the River Hamble near Southampton. Its regime made that of Pangbourne resemble a holiday camp in comparison. For example, there’d been no heating onboard even in winter, and the boys were forced to sleep in hammocks. Nonetheless, I was friendly with several of them, and most were not too tough, although the truth is that a degree of resilience was necessary in those days at Pangbourne, even after ’69, when despite being renamed Pangbourne College, she changed little.

 As much as I struggled in the arena of sporting activities, my true failure came in the classroom where I had little if any interest in what the master was trying to teach me in any given subject except French, English and Physical Education. Terminally bored, I was constantly in trouble for one misdemeanour or another, and my grades were rarely anything other than appalling during the entire four year period I was at Pangbourne. In fact in pretty well every subject except French, I tended to be bottom of the form, term after term, year after year, and if not bottom then very near it.

 It’s my contention that I was a slow developer suffering from mild learning difficulties, and certainly there were those teachers at Pangbourne who found my behaviour medically worrying with good reason. On one occasion, I went for an eye test in the village, only to return to college without having taken it, before announcing that I’d forgotten why I’d gone into town in the first place. As for my hygiene, it was so minimal that at one point the bottoms of my feet were literally as black as soot, as if someone had painted them.

 But it would be false to say I was an unqualified rebel. In fact, I never stopped longing to be recognised as being good at something, anything…even going so far at one point as to become a member the college boxing team. As such I suffered punch-drunkenness at Eton at the hands – or should I say fists – of an elegant young adonis with a classic Eton flop who later commented on an especially cruel blow he’d inflicted on me with a certain degree of remorse, which was decent of him. But how deceptively graceful he was, this flower of Eton…king of all public schools.

 However, in around 1969, some time after having seen a TV programme about young revolutionaries who idolised Che Guevara, I became a Che acolyte myself, and one of the few genuine accolades I ever received while at college came in consequence of a short story I wrote about a young man who becomes involved with Che in his revolutionary activities in South America. Even the headmaster commended me for my work.         

 Following on from my infatuation with Che, I came to fancy myself as a full-blown Communist, covering various items with the hammer and sickle, including at various times, a school notebook, and my own hand, which provoked an older far larger boy into accusing me of being a bloody Red bastard – or something similar – before playfully setting about me in a spirit of mock-outrage…but he wasn’t going to deter me from my chosen path: I’d fallen hard for the hard Left and that was that. 

 My time at Pangbourne coincided with the counterculture being at its point of maximum intensity, which is to say between the infamous year of rioting and street fighting of 1968, and that, four years later, when the sixties really and truly came to a final close and which was defined in Britain at least by the artifice and decadence of Glam. 

 One afternoon around the turbulent turn of the decade, I found myself longing to join the Hippie throngs I saw flocking to the Reading Rock Festival one afternoon from the window of a college coach in all their ragged multicoloured glory. Rebellion was everywhere in a desperately imperilled West, and Pangbourne was not exempt, in fact, many of us dreamed of a world of Bohemian freedom lying only just beyond the confines of our college, and intensely close friendships were forged smoking cigarettes in secret wooded places where the Cadet Officers couldn’t find us. We were united by a love of Rock music and the floating hair and  defiantly androgynous clothes of our heroes…Hendrix, Morrison, Jagger, Page and so on.

 Needless to say, the Counterculture of the 1960s and early ’70s didn’t just spring out of nowhere, being merely the latest in a long line of Bohemias reaching at least as far back as Romanticism, which many consider to be the wellspring of Modern Bohemianism.

 Its most immediate predecessors though included the Existentialists and Lettrists of ’40s and ’50s Paris, and most especially the Beats of America, who’d exploded into the mainstream around 1955, but whose origins lie in New York City at the height of World War II. Few today are aware of the existence of Isidore Isou’s scandalous Lettrists, but the Beats continue to enjoy an exceptionally high profile. This may be as a result of Paris ceding her time-honoured role as the world epicentre of the avant garde to New York City in the late 1940s, which was the age of the proto-Beat, aka the Hipster.

 It had been earlier in the decade – around 1943 in fact – that a disparate group of would-be poets and authors of Bohemian inclination had coalesced around an angelically handsome and intellectually brilliant young Columbia University undergraduate from a socially prominent St Louis family by the name of Lucien Carr. The first to gravitate towards Carr was a fellow Columbia student from a middle class socialist family from nearby New Jersey by the name of Allen Ginsberg.

 Through Carr, the bookish-looking Ginsberg was introduced to Arthur Rimbaud, the quintessential post-Romantic bad boy poet whose terrible yet beautiful visionary verse and frenzied rebellious rage has exerted an influence on the development of the adversary culture of the post-Romantic West that is second to none or close to it. Rimbaud went on to significantly inform the evolution of Ginsberg’s own poetic vision.

 Also through Carr – and perhaps even more importantly in terms of his artistic career – he met the boyfriend of another of Carr’s Columbia friends, future Beat biographer Edie Parker. This was Jack Kerouac, a recent Columbia drop-out with movie star good looks from a working class French Canadian family from Lowell, Masachusetts. After having gained a Football scholarship to Columbia, things had gone wrong for the gifted athlete, when he cracked his tibia, and then repeatedly clashed with coach Lou Little, the upshot being that he quit his Football career in his sophomore year, and ended up drifting in New York City, where he met the two men with whom he went on to form the nucleus of the Beat Generation – both through Carr – namely the aforesaid Ginsberg, and a friend of Carr’s from St Louis, the patrician William S Burroughs.

 In 1957, Kerouac emerged as the movement’s undisputed leader with the publication of his second novel “On the Road”, a fictionalised account of the cross-country wanderings he undertook between 1947 and 1950. The character who, early on, emerges as the work’s epic hero is Dean Moriarty, based on Kerouac’s closest friend, Neil Cassady.

 Cassady, who bore a striking resemblance to the film icon Paul Newman, was the working class son of an alcoholic whose early life had included the loss of his mother, a childhood on skid row, a spell in reform school, and eleven months imprisonment for theft. Little wonder, therefore, that he served as muse to Kerouac who – from such a stable loving background himself – was the genius behind Beat’s defining work, while Cassady provided the inspiration as the Beat par excellence. 

 Oddly perhaps, Carr himself never went on to write anything of note, preferring to father a family and pursue a long career with the venerable news agency United Press International. It fell to his son Caleb, author of The Alienist, The Angel of Darkness, Casing the Promised Land, Killing Time and the Italian Secretary among other works to be the novelist of the family…but his place in literary history is secure. As Allen Ginsberg once put it, “Lou was the glue”,  which is to say of what was probably the most significant and influential avant garde movement of the 20th Century.

Pastorale (for Pangbourne College)

1964 was the year that Beat started to shift imperceptibly into the Hippie movement. It was in ’64 in fact, that Colorado farmer’s son and former Stanford University student Ken Kesey – author of the best-selling “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1962) – set off on his legendary cross-country trip from California to New York on a psychedelic school bus he named Furthur, with one Neil Cassady doing most of the driving. He did so in the company of a band of counterculture pioneers, writers, artists, students &c., known as the Merrie Pranksters.

 Once in the Big Apple, they met up with the New York Beats including Jack Kerouac who, deeply patriotic and a devout Catholic at heart, was allegedly repelled by the Pranksters’ outlandish dress and appearance, and took no part in the coming psychedelic revolution, unlike Allen Ginsberg, who embraced it wholeheartedly. 

 The first of the infamous Acid Tests occurred a short time later in 1965, and during these LSD-fuelled events, there’d be slide and/or light shows and experiments with cutting edge sound technology, and bands such as the Warlocks – later the Grateful Dead – or Kesey’s own Psychedelic Symphonette would regale the crowds with proto-psychedelic Rock, and so on…all of which served to usher in the Hippie era.

 However, it wouldn’t be until ’67 that the Hippie phenomenon entered the mainstream to became an international obsession…and it was in that very totemic year I think that I harried my mother into making me a psychedelic paisley shirt which I went on to wear with a peaked Dylan cap and possibly also purple corduroy jeans.

 By the end of the decade though, the relative innocence of my infatuation with the Hippie dandies I witnessed each Thursday night on Top of the Pops and other frothy Pop programmes had mutated into a passion for actual social revolution, whose apologists I read about and revered. Today what I revere are the very old-fashioned phenomena the revolutionists of the sixties set themselves against.

 Yet, even at Pangbourne, there was a part that never stopped wanting to be accepted by the system…never stopped hoping that one day, favour would look kindly on Cadet CR Halling 173, and he’d be promoted to Cadet Officer, and given a star to wear on the right sleeve of his navy blue pullover, but it just wasn’t to be. In fact, I ran away once…just the once, in order to avoid being punished for something stupid I did. It was a completely irrational thing to do as it was the last day of term, but I just panicked and bolted, and on kept running…until I ended up trekking through a muddy field in the heart of the Berkshire countryside before just giving up and sitting by the side of the road…

 After a time though, the college chaplain, who just happened to be driving by, offered me a lift back to college…but by the time we arrived, my poor mother, who’d been in a frantic state all afternoon after having driven to Pangbourne to take me back home for the holidays only to find I’d vanished, had already left for home. This would have been in ’71, or perhaps ’72, I can’t recall.

 Certain pieces of – specifically pastoral, and quintessentially English – music have the power to evoke this strange and sudden rush of blood to the head for me. Not so much Vaughan Williams’ “A Lark Ascending”, which bespeaks a passion for the Arcadian soul of England that verges on the ecstatic, nor any kindred work by Delius, Ireland, Finzi, Grainger, as much as I love these composers.

 For some reason though, pieces within the Rock realm have more power to transport me back to the day of my mysterious and sudden flight into the heart of the English countryside than any within the Classical. I’m thinking especially of Moving by Supergrass, which wails out the anguish of an aimless wanderer in a way that so reminds me of my own attack of blind panic of nearly 40 years ago…which saw me moving, keep on moving till I didn’t know what was sane. The same applies to certain songs by another supremely English band of provincial middle class English origin, Coldplay, which  suggest a deep mournfulness beneath the picture perfect image of English privilege.

 Any argument in favour of a tragic element within the gilded world of English privilege would be powerfully reinforced by playing the music of the much-loved singer-songwriter Nick Drake. Many of his impeccably crafted songs – contained within the mere three albums he recorded between 1969 and ’72, together with out-takes and four final songs – convey the same kind of chronic tortured restlessness evinced by Supergrass’ Moving…songs such as River Man from the first album, Five Leaves Left, and Things Behind the Sun and Parasite from the third, Pink Moon.

 He was born in 1949 into an upper middle family based in Rangoon, Burma, where his father had been working as an engineer for the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation since the early ’30s, and after an idyllic upbringing in the English countryside, was educated at Malborough and Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. As if the foregoing weren’t sufficient to ensure his happiness, he was not so much handsome as beautiful in a classically English, one might say, Byronic way, and blessed with charm, intelligence, and a precocious musical genius which ensured him a recording contract with the prestigious Island label when he was just 20 years old and still at Cambridge.

 He subsequently dropped out, and set out to make his mark as a Rock musician. Sadly though, he was unable to translate his enormous gifts into commercial success, and became very seriously depressed in consequence of this and other issues, including possibly his own deeply shy and inhibited personality.

 I can’t help thinking that in any era other than that ushered in by the Rock and Roll revolution, Nick Drake would have pursued a career more suited to his background than that which ensured his immortality, but broke his fragile English heart, and thence a perfectly conventional existence. However, he came to maturity in a Britain whose young were in active rebellion against the traditional Judaeo-Christian values on which the nation had long been founded, although he himself doesn’t appear to have been especially rebellious, despite the long hair and passion for Rock music that was more or less ubiquitous among young men of his generation.

 That said, he was unavoidably affected by the spiritual chaos of the age, which propelled him – as it did many of his contemporaries – towards the endless night of worldly philosophy, deadly for a mind as touch-paper sensitive as his in my opinion, and which must surely have played its part in the mental deterioration which resulted in his spending his final few months of life as a recluse at his parents’ home in Tamworth-in-Arden, Staffordshire, where, wrongly convinced he’d failed at everything, he died aged only 26 in 1974. 

 Since his death, his small but perfect life’s work has inspired some of the most successful Rock artists of all time on both sides of the Atlantic, including – in addition to the aforesaid Coldplay – Paul Weller, Elvis Costello, Michael Stipe of REM, Elliot Smith, Badly Drawn Boy and Norah Jones.

 Listening to him, I become aware of a colossal compassion within myself for the privileged classes of Britain, a somewhat unusual receptacle for the milk of human kindness some might say…but they are no less in need of salvation than any other social group. They are after all one with whom a somewhat distant connection exists in my own case through my paternal grandmother, whose flight from a gilded cage of upper middle class convention resulted in my branch of the family being cast out into a kind of social exile. At least, that’s how I see it.

 By sending my brother and I to Pangbourne, my father was perhaps attempting to reverse this exile for our sakes, yet I remain desperately declassé, although not through personal choice…it’s just turned out that way…and it’s tough at times. That said, I feel an enormous spiritual kinship with the everyday people of my adopted home town on the Surrey-London border, as much as I feel for the privileged…because social advantage can clearly be a cruel and heavy burden to bear for some, like poor Nick Drake who once sang so hauntingly of falling so far on a silver spoon.…

 But let us not go too far…the vast majority of those who’ve passed through the public school system since its inception before going on to university and a successful professional career have been perfectly normal and far from melancholy. As for myself, if I possess a single quality that might termed noble, such as patience, or self-mastery or consideration of the needs of other people, then I am significantly indebted for such a blessing to my education. Within this sphere, I would place parental discipline, and the four years I spent at Pangbourne…whose authorities extended me a fair and decent report after my departure, commenting on my resilience, and the fact that I was universally well-liked. They also gave me a good send-off in the college magazine, mentioning my time in the Boxing and Swimming teams, and my tenure as 2cnd Drum in the college band. God bless you for that, Pangbourne, beloved old friend and sparring partner…and long may you thrive in your sanctuary deep in the Arcadian heart of the English countryside…