Autobiography (13 page)

But spare a thought for those who rock the boat. They challenge your attention, and even in your rage you find you quite like them for poking at you as if you were a dead mule.
Perhaps you are?

Watch Charles Lloyd Pack in
I’m a Stranger
(1952) as Mr Cringle – who talks in order to rescue every moment from utterly sterile boredom. Without any effort whatsoever he is magnificent, and he knows his worth as a cast of confused spectators surround him (and surround him they do) in every scene. As with de Paris, it is only a matter of time waiting for Mr Cringle’s comeuppance, because that’s how society wobbles along – knocking whoever speaks up on the head.

G
EORGE WESTCOTT
:
...
he is a police officer!
MR CRINGLE
:
[
bored
]
...
yes
...
it
leaps
to the eye.

Mr Cringle is a solicitor wrapped in folds of heavy tweed, of funny spectacles, a persistently offending theorist. The dominant in his life is the essayist poetry of each uttered reply. He will not allow himself to be overlooked, and he understands the value of effect more than anyone else. He is, of course, Oscar Tame, living on a planet unworthy of himself, yet rapidly game for a laugh. Everything he says might sound like grammatical malice, but he certainly has a heart even if there is rarely cause for it to be used. He only hurts people’s feelings by being persistently right. Around him, the cast of James Hayter, Patric Doonan and Greta Gynt are frozen in dullness each time Mr Cringle speaks – which is often. Each scene gives center stage to Mr Cringle – mainly because he is interesting, but mostly because he says things that the other characters do not expect to hear. The smile is used to emphasize the most unpopular part of his commentary – almost as if waiting for a punch in the face. The pleasure of
I’m a Stranger
is the intensity of Mr Cringle’s brilliance, because he certainly knows better, and he can rest forever on whatever it is he has just said. Others may have good looks and sexual success, but Mr Cringle’s weapon of words carries enough punch to alter the texture of every life around him, partly because, as a fanatic of himself, he has suffered enough to know better. Absurdly miscast, Patric Doonan has supposedly just landed from his home in Calcutta,
‘I’m a stranger here,’
he says,
‘I don’t really understand the ways of this country,’
and he delivers these lines in a very precise British accent that is eight parts Notting Hill and two parts Derbyshire. He has landed in London to claim his inheritance now that an unknown uncle has usefully expired
. ‘You know how it is with elderly bachelors,’
smiles Mr Cringle,
‘they distribute their wealth between duty and conscience – a passport to a better world no doubt.’

The careful monotony of Inspector Craddock (whom Mr Cringle naturally refers to as Inspector Haddock – if only to be annoying) is, as with all on-screen police figures, utterly insensible, flickering constantly with inefficiency.

‘I’m anxious not to take you out of your depth,’
Mr Cringle slyly smiles at Inspector Craddock, adding,
‘Suspicion is one thing, proof another.’
But we all know the rules of the game, and by the final act of
I’m a Stranger
Mr Cringle is suddenly and inexplicably confused and burned out, as Inspector Craddock – after ninety minutes of inaction – is allowed to win the argument.
Whereas Mr Cringle need only be heard for an audience to be held, the sterile and stupid Inspector Craddock takes the curtain bow because he is the dominant spirit of dull human existence as he moves across the screen like a carpenter in search of a piece of wood. Well, so what? Why make anything at all out of such films? Mr Cringle and de Paris – the colorful and exciting disturbers of the peace – are impossible to miss and impossible to overlook as adventurers on thin ice, exhaling a secret stream of inspiration, having far too exciting a message to deliver, and – even worse:
not
without a sense of humor. The arts translate life into film and literature and music and repeat a deadly poison:
the monotonous in life must be protected at all costs.

But protected from what?

From you and I.

During the soundcheck for the Sex Pistols’ third Manchester gig I begin a conversation with Linder Sterling, who is with the group Buzzcocks. Linder is nine parts sea-creature, and alights with all of the conversational atmospherics of someone steeped in machine-gun artistry.

Some thirty-five years later, that conversation continues. Born in central Liverpool, Linder is an alcohol-free mangle of Jean Genet, Yoko Ono, Norma Winstone and Margaret Atwood. Pens, pencils, pens, pencils. She lives like an owl in a turret at 35 Mayfield Road in Whalley Range, unable to be reached by anyone but the most persistent. On the day of our first meeting, Linder is romantically paired with Howard Devoto – who sings for Buzzcocks and who looks like a harshly visionary 1960s schoolteacher. Buzzcocks are a close
, genial unit, and Linder’s sleeve-art
will wrap their presentations perfectly. Like Marina swimming away from Troy Tempest and towards Phones, a small
gesture from Linder means so much. My conversation cripples itself with the usual
‘Me, of all people,’
full heart and empty hands, and I tell Linder that I had seen her at the Sex Pistols nights at the Lesser Free Trade Hall. Linder and Buzzcocks are all older than me, and I am thrilled to at last exchange with a group of genuinely artistic people. Linder sits on a table, her body curved like a question mark. Fagin, who sings for the Sex Pistols, leaps in.

‘
Is this a rough part of Manchester, then?’
he asks, looking away.

‘Yes,’
says Howard,
‘round here people walk about in their underpants,’
and everyone laughs. And it is true. The Electric Circus is surrounded by condemned yet fully inhabited 1930s council traps, from where mutant dwellers of the most hunchbacked and club-footed type swarm out in order to make fun of the pop kids who line up outside the Electric Circus. Manchester’s most pickled poor live in these surrounds – non-human sewer-rats with missing eyes; the loudly insane with indecipherable speech patterns; the mad poor of Manchester’s armpit. Dickens himself would be lost for words. These Collyhurst locals are like savage asylum escapees, and I tremble like a leaf in a storm. I am 17 and I am here to meet ex-Dolls Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan, who now play as the boringly named Heartbreakers, and I approach them knowing that my heart might at very least stop. They allow me to take photographs, but their unsmiling shrugs render conversation unwelcome. The outer reality shakes the inner life awake. Johnny and Jerry mean nothing after all. The Clash also stand about, waiting to do their soundcheck, but their sound is so turbulent and chaotic that it’s difficult to see how a soundcheck might help them. They are dressed in clannish school uniforms, and they look cruel next to the potting-shed pottiness of Buzzcocks. This night of December 9th 1976 is the start of a drawn-out process of easing myself away; no more soundchecks – unless they were my own.

‘
Are you still ill?’
asks Linder, as we meet our weekly meet at Kendals rooftop restaurant, and while a song is born, so too is a lifelong friendship fortified and not weakened by time. The lonely orgasm of Megsons, and the indefatigable plans and plotting over something sticky at the Meng And Ecker café. Linder had begun to release records with her band Ludus, singing of a reality that no one had thus far wished for. In the exploding Manchester scene, she was the only female, and although she fought with fire and sword to render the unreceptive receptive, she is overlooked. The music scene of Manchester is a dark thread of maleness. The Fall have a keyboard player who is female, the Distractions have a bass player who is female, but Linder walks the line alone as the hunter of non-permitted dreams.

I respond to a card stuck on the wall at Virgin Records, and a paper trail leads me to Billy Duffy, a guitarist who lived with his mother in Wythenshawe. I no longer wanted to watch others do what I felt sure I could do so much better, so I present myself to Billy as ‘a singer’. Could I now tell reality what to do? Should versus could? Would I continue to take no responsibility for my own life? Is the safe way the only way? Billy was well turned out and had a voluptuously statuesque girlfriend named Karen Concannon. He was also an impressive guitarist, and he looked at me and listened to me with bemused interest. Inside my head a tape looped and looped itself around and around, and it repeatedly told me that I would not be good enough when the time came. It unfolds, and then it happens, and when it does, it seems like it had always been there
...
just waiting. From Wythenshawe, back to Stretford, back to Wythenshawe, on dark nights of self-creation, each slab of construction happened quickly, although Billy and I will never be drunken co-confessors. Billy pulls in some random musicians, and I am there at his urging – suddenly in rehearsal rooms loaded with amps and wires and headphones, and the clock strikes. Merging forces meet, and I, too deep to be rescued, sing. Against the command of everyone I had ever known, I sing! My mouth meets the microphone and the tremolo quaver eats the room with acceptable pitch and
...
I am removed from the lifelong definition of others, and their opinions matter no more. I am singing the truth by myself, which might also be the truth of others
...
and give me a whole life
...
let the voice speak up for once and for all
...

‘Make a joyful noise unto the Lord
...
’

It works! A chest voice of light baritone, and all is ours. Billy wants to call the band the Politicians, or Hearts Go Bop, and my only suggestion is T-Shirt (after a recent LP by Loudon Wainwright) or Stupid Youth, and on and on. A Wythenshawe band called the Nosebleeds have broken up, and Billy enlists their rhythm section for a wrangled spot at Manchester University where a cast of thousands will play, and we are ready with our five songs – but no name. Astonishingly, the night is reviewed in print by Paul Morley for the
New Musical Express.
The band is listed as the Nosebleeds, and I am lumbered with this miscued name in private sufferance forevermore.

The hall had been packed, and with my dark green nylon shirt from the Antique Market I am fired from a canon. It was probably nothing, but it felt like the world. What is this strange, strange feeling as the crowd instantly applauds loudly? It is sexual release – mine, not theirs. Billy plays well, and I sing forcefully in tune, applause booms and I am home. History had trapped me for a long time, and now it must let me go. But my time with Billy is already over. He has been lassoed into joining the excellent Theatre of Hate who are ready for
Top of the Pops
, and rather than bury my face in the mud I am happy for him. And history takes the strangest of turns. I return to the have-nots, with more reason to cry than anyone else on earth, but Billy has left me with a parting suggestion. He tells me of a boy called Johnny Marr, who also lives in Wythenshawe and who
‘is a much better guitarist than me’.
The suggestion is thoughtful, but I am not the type to tap on people’s windows. Luckily, Johnny Marr
was
the type to tap on people’s windows, and Billy had also turned Johnny to face my direction.

The shift of the 1980s had already begun to sound like the end of everything – politically infuriating and musically wretched. The
New Musical Express
continued as a lifeline of gifted writers, but it was difficult to be tempted by the squalid sounds smiling blandly from pop television, who appeared to be signaling a message to those of the Punk era:
Well, you’ve had your bit of fun, now let’s get back to flash cash.
When my old friend Simon Topping appeared on the cover of the
NME
, I died a thousand deaths of sorrow and lay down in the woods to die. Linder and I attended the opening night of the Hacienda Club, which was initially for the secret agony of the secret public, but soon stuffed coaches from Blackburn and Bolton would pull up outside, unloading disfigured disco dancers and goblinesque pork-pie chubbos with carroty-red curls smelling of pickled pig who claimed the Hacienda as their own public toilet. Making their northern debut, Culture Club stand onstage as the audience visibly back off.

‘C’mon, Manchester,’
says singer Boy George,
‘I thought you were supposed to be hip?’
No, we’re just automaton snobs with an excess of intolerance – you really
must
forgive us. A few months later Culture Club are number 1 in the singles chart, and, yes, it seems to be
that easy.
Manchester’s imagination teems with musical groups crawling out of the literal and the metaphorical darkness. There are new sounds all around, and Linder and I forsake the sculptured mask of the Hacienda for the Beach Club and other dimly lit dumps somewhere behind Shudehill. Teenaged kids with dyed grey hair floodtide the city center, wrapped in heavy overcoats and Lowry gloom. Intoxicated by sunless Hulme – which is now rid of its hard and simple families – art students have made off with all of the cramped cold-water maisonettes. Of his band A Certain Ratio, Simon Topping tells me: ‘
We’re doing a cover of
Frankenstein
by t
he New York Dolls.’
I ask Jesus
exactly
how I am expected to take such news. Having spent so long outside the palace gates, I somehow cannot believe it. I had served as a thematic thread for Simon as he pieced his band together, and I had placed the ad for a drummer for Simon that had produced Donald Johnson, who would become A Certain Ratio’s savior. My affection for Simon remained solid, but Major Domo I wasn’t. I collected the cash for A Certain Ratio’s first-ever gig at the Band On the Wall, but couldn’t for the life of me understand why. Heart on backwards, I began to suffer daily panic attacks. My mother is alarmed as my heart seems to be stuck in my throat. I endure the common slipway of prescribed antidepressants when I am really only reacting quite naturally to my humiliating surroundings – plus lack of air. I travel in the van with A Certain Ratio to Liverpool for their debut at Eric’s, and although the band look terrific, nothing that isn’t my own seems to work for me. Dispassionate and obviously mad, Margaret Thatcher is presiding over political England, raging war on the needy and praising the highborn. She creates more social unrest throughout England than has ever been known – major cities ablaze everywhere as Thatcher turns the police onto the British people. Every public address by Thatcher is a swamp of tormented revenge and madness, with never once a gesture of understanding or kindness. Thatcher is tagged the Iron Lady for being in possession of pigheadedness, perverseness and inflexibility – negatives for the rest of us, yet somehow she is delighted with the tag. Neither iron, nor a lady, Thatcher is a philosophical axe-woman with no understanding of personal error. Power-mad, Thatcher destroys the miners with relish, a damned and unhappy soul smiling victoriously when, under her peace-by-force military instructions, an Argentinian ship full of young teenage soldiers is blown up even though it poses no threat whatsoever to British troops. The
Belgrano
is outside of the Malvinas Exclusion Zone and sailing away from the islands, and Thatcher cannot defend her actions when cross-examined on television by a member of the public.

To give the impression of winning every argument, Thatcher simply drowns out her opponent with a loud, doomsday drone. When a ban on ivory goods is proposed throughout Europe in order to save thousands of African elephants that are being hacked to death, Thatcher’s egotistical greed will not allow her to support the ban. When animal protectionists call upon Thatcher to halt the barbaric transportation of calves from England to the European mainland, where, newly wrenched from their mothers, the calves will then be chopped up or locked in veal crates, Thatcher refuses to consider compassionate change, and her demonic influence throws further shadows across the now lost soul of England.

Nannie’s lair at 45 Milton Close continues as the family headquarters, as all gather daily to report the depth of changes in their lives. Rita is now manager at Chelsea Girl in Piccadilly and can often be spotted chasing shoplifters through Piccadilly Gardens. Jackie will marry at 25, and deliver Sam and Johnny unto the world; Rita will marry and produce Alex and Joseph at Roebuck Lane in Sale; Dorothy and Liam have begat Fiona and are now orderly and happy at 25 Bramley Avenue in Stretford; Jeane has Tracie, Susan and Elizabeth, and in New Jersey, Pat’s progeny are Noeleen, Anthony and Brian, whilst in Colorado Mary will add Patrick to Matthew and Erin – and lo, the world expands. This is the swelling population of the family, the harmony and meter tangled and torn only when my own end-of-the-family-line sadness rises for hushed debate. The male family members have all disqualified me from any inclusion, with no halfway meetings of man-to-man concern. I am adrift. At 21, penniless in a world of plausible excuses, I am alone with my goals. These are difficult years, and if anything loving lay ahead I was already paying a large enough price. At my lowest in these years of signing on, I do not fit in anywhere with the family philosophy, and these days set the tempo of the times – even for the days when the sun re-enters the room. Travestied or not, you must just get through it. I tag along with Anna for a while. She lives on Stamford Street in Old Trafford, is Polish, and wears only authentically Victorian clothes. With seven pounds to my name I suggest to her that we move in together. Wisely, she refuses.

Johnny Marr was born in Ardwick in a Victorian dwelling not dissimilar to my own. Blocked in by dye works and engineering works, timber yards and iron foundries, the Ardwick of the Avis Bunnage era was an area of seasoned street fighters such as the Little Forty Gang, whose dapper style was well known when there was nothing nice to rest the eye on. Johnny was also of Irish parents, who would eventually inch their way south of the city center (for north is not the road that anyone ever travels). In 1982, Johnny appears at Kings Road immaculately be-quiffed and almost carried away by his own zest to make meaningful music. He reminds me of Tom Bell in
Payroll
, an early 1960s film set in Newcastle yet minus one single Geordie accent. Johnny despairs of things as they are and wants to change them, even if, beneath the grit and growl, his favorite group of all-time is Pentangle.