Where Did It All Go Right? (45 page)

Alan now shared with a guy called Martin, who may or may not have been gay (he had a moustache – he was). There was a feeling that Alan himself might be gay – he didn’t have a girlfriend in the whole time I knew him.
⁴
This was the early Eighties: dabbling with bisexuality was all the rage. Certainly one or two gay-seeming types started to enter the expanded flat orbit now that it was in a more cosmopolitan (for Northampton) spot. Considering what a default homophobe I had been in my early-to-mid teens I am proud to say that by now, with my horizons stretched, I couldn’t care less about anyone’s sexual preference. I didn’t feel preyed upon and if these slightly camp people were gay or bi, they were also a right good laugh. Plus, there were always plenty of girls around.

Significantly though, none of these girls was my
girlfriend
. I’d briefly been out with Wendy, whom I met through the flat dating agency, back in June, but we seemed to make better friends than a couple and were happier parted and flirtatious than tied-down and anxious. But Mum hadn’t forgiven me for finishing with Wendy, and she was out to get me.

One night I came home from the flat, around 11 p.m., and said this rather provocative thing to Mum and Dad, who were still up, watching telly:

‘God, I think I was one of the only people at the flat tonight who wasn’t gay!’

Light the gay touchpaper and stand well back …

This was Mum’s signal to snap. Even though I had made it clear in my assessment of the evening that I
wasn’t
gay, she took it to mean that I had – as she had long suspected – been sucked into a den of iniquity and could ‘go a bit funny’ at any moment. She genuinely thought I was about to end up BLOODY PERVERTED, and for my own sake – to save my soul – she laid into me.

Mum had sat passively back and watched for five months as I’d become a brainwashed, work-shy bum-slave of Alan and his evil cohorts. Now she was mad as hell and she wasn’t going to take it any more. Can you picture Michael Jackson hanging on to those two trees in the video for ‘Earth Song’? The bit where the wind almost knocks him off his feet and it’s a bit like the end of the world? It was actually a bit like the Collins front room that night, although I don’t think Jacko’s sexuality has ever been in as much doubt as mine was. The combined browbeating I got from Mum and Dad made parents’ evening seem like a soothing damp cloth on my face.

They tried to ban me from visiting Alan’s flat. I wasn’t having any of that. Mum, who always led these assaults from the front, threw at me my poor performance at school (which I couldn’t argue with – they’d read the ‘good stroke of fortune’ report), my stupid auburn hair (now tending to stick upwards with backcombing and spray), my clothes (tending towards old black T-shirts, rolled-up jeans, sailing pumps and no socks to even pull up) and even my approaching driving test (lessons paid for by them). For this ethical, mental and sartorial decline she blamed, among others, Absolute Heroes (‘They’re never going to get you anywhere!’ – or was it just, ‘They’re never going to get anywhere’?), Vorno (for driving me astray), and Alan, the great Satan at the centre of this inferno. To adapt
The Poseidon Adventure
tagline: Hell, backside up.

Mum worked part-time as a secretary at Lings Upper School on the other side of the tracks (or the other side of Weston Favell
Centre
). She
knew
about ex-pupil Alan Martin. What she knew about him she wasn’t prepared to divulge, but it put her on the moral high ground. She seemed to know him better than I did, even though – as they were quick to point out – I spent most of my life at his flat while he tickled my chin and fed me grapes. I knew him to be a voluble, hospitable and generous pillar of the rock community. I saw no marauding shirt-lifter. He was my mate, and the manager of our band.
And
I liked girls.

However, rather than dissuade my parents of my homosexuality while in the dock, I rather cruelly left it up in the air. Like many a musician before and after me, I rather enjoyed this new game of being sexually ambiguous. Was I or wasn’t I? We’ll be right back after these massages.

* * *

Let’s look at the evidence: since meeting Alan, I had fouled up my end-of-year exams and let off a worry-bomb among my schoolteachers; I had stayed out all night a couple of times (although never without Mum and Dad knowing exactly where I was); my hair had become incrementally more auburn and as such effeminate to more conventional eyes; and the band had played half a dozen gigs, most of them at a fairly rough pub in town called the Black Lion.
⁵
During that period I had brought home four girlfriends, although admittedly only about once per girlfriend. But since when had an inability to keep a girlfriend meant latent homosexual tendencies? Perhaps I was just a bit crap at keeping them.

It may be unfashionable to say so, but I don’t think I have a homosexual bone in my body. I’ve never
had
a homosexual bone in my body either. When Alan once climbed into bed with me in the middle of the night, I simply got out and slept on the floor. Well, I
was
sleeping in his bed, and he
had
been an over-garrulous
host
in offering to sleep on the settee that night. I think he wanted his bed back. Fair enough.

I quite liked the cachet of seeming on the verge of an alternative lifestyle to my parents. It gave me an air of well-travelled mystery around the house. We went on our annual holiday to Jersey two weeks after the ‘Earth Song’ lecture, and I think Mum and Dad were glad to have me close at hand again and under the same roof for a fortnight. For those two weeks I happily regressed back to being the wide-eyed, brown-haired boy of the year previous. I befriended Lynn, the girl from Manchester whom I later went up to see, and I certainly looked heterosexual from where Mum and Dad were sitting, up on the balcony. (It’s ironic really that the year before, unbeknown to my parents, when I had the Spandau Ballet fringe and the shirts buttoned up one side, some kids at the Merton had shouted ‘Poof!’ at me in the coffee lounge.)

Back in Northampton, for as long as the Lynn thing trickled on, I think Mum and Dad relaxed a little. They certainly refrained from shouting ‘Poof!’ at me on the stairs. Lynn at least kept my mind occupied for a lovelorn few weeks, and although I didn’t stop going to Alan’s flat, it stopped being my second home.

I went back to school and tried in earnest to avert next June’s nightmare (the one Mr Coppock had predicted ‘unless improvements are made’). There was a riotous party round at the flat for Alan’s 20th birthday, starting at 5.20p.m. – and on a Wednesday too – but I spent most evenings at home when we weren’t gigging.

I don’t know if the novelty of Alan’s flat had worn off. He was still Absolute Heroes’ manager (for which he took 0 per cent of our earnings I might add) and we still saw him a lot, but it was around then that pub culture took hold for the first time. This was after all the school year during which upper sixth-formers turned 18.

I spent more time at the Bold Dragoon pub up in Weston Favell village than I had ever done at Alan’s flat, but my parents didn’t seem to mind, even during the week, and even though it involved me drinking Fosters (quite an urbane choice in 1982, by the way). I can only assume they felt that going to the pub was more ‘normal’ than hanging out behind locked doors with home tattooists. What harm could possibly come to me drinking illegally in a village pub
beyond
choking on a domino or falling into the open fire? The Bold became our new hangout, the hard-but-fair landlord getting more and more agitated every time one of our group celebrated his or her 18th in there. ‘Is that the last one?’ he would ask. Yes, we would lie.

Mum and Dad gave me a top-up lecture a month into term, and Mum flew off the handle and said two inflammatory things to me:

‘I wouldn’t be very proud if you got a D at A-level!’

And:

‘I reckon
I
could get an E at A-level!’

I felt affronted by these remarks. Getting any kind of A-level was actually a lot harder than Mum thought, and it’s all very easy to
talk
about getting one at the breakfast table, but not so easy to spend two years doing the essays and the projects and the note-taking. More pressingly, I could well foresee getting a D or an E so I wanted to create an atmosphere in which all passes were good passes.

But through it all they never once grounded me, as American parents say (and do). In fact, I was encouraged to borrow Mum’s Mini Metro in which to drive to the Bold. I suppose it stopped me boozing, which was a good thing, but I’ll never forget Dad taking me to one side that November and having a manly chat:

‘Borrow Mum’s car whenever you like,’ he said. ‘You could use it to give a lift home
to a girl
.’

A girl! Is that not priceless? They were trying to buy back my heterosexuality with petrol. However, I took his advice to heart and drove a new Bold regular called Della back to her house that very night. Nothing came of it – she lived on one of the eastern estates and there was a hole in the kitchen wall where her older brother had punched it during a family row. Della was not for me. But I appreciated Dad’s offer all the same. (It’s significant that Vorno faded from view somewhat once I’d passed my test, but not completely – I wasn’t that mercenary.)

Mum admits today that me turning out gay would have been her worst nightmare, although I suspect only because of what the neighbours would say. If I’d got a girl pregnant around this turbulent time I think Dad would have patted me on the back. That’s something I suppose.

* * *

So my brush with gayness had passed without incident. At Christmas I met and fell for Jo – where else but at a week-long Christmas party at Alan’s flat? – and entered my first long-term relationship. But I still looked a fright and would do for quite some time. My hair expanded outwards and skywards through committed back-combing and upside-down blow-drying; it also got auburner; my turn-ups rose higher up my sockless legs, as did the sleeves of my second-hand dress jacket (this was the Eighties). I actually looked more and more effeminate as 1983 wore on,
⁶
but I had a long-term female girlfriend on my arm, so how could Mum and Dad complain? They did, but how could they?

I drove Jo everywhere, which meant I wasn’t getting pissed, and even though they couldn’t have known it for sure, I wasn’t on drugs. I never even saw or smelt a drug in Northampton – not to my knowledge anyway – until much later when a guy called Pete Hepworth
⁷
on my art foundation course at Nene College offered me a puff of his joint on the Racecourse. It made me giggle for half an hour, but I never pestered him for any more. So much for getting hooked.

Don’t forget I had never smoked. I’d come home with my donkey jacket reeking of fags on many occasions but it wasn’t my smoke – and I think Mum actually believed that. She’d given up years before, although she briefly and inexplicably took to having the odd More cigarette on holiday (the kind made of chocolatey brown paper). I called her bluff one year by demanding she give me one. She did. I smoked it reasonably convincingly. It was bloody horrible. No More, thanks.

So despite appearances, I had turned out alright really. I never paid them back for the drum kit, even when Absolute Heroes brought home some door money from the Black Lion, but at least I never threatened to have my ear pierced, not once. It was a good
year
for Mum and Dad, 1983: in June the Tories got back in (low taxes, therefore my allowance was safe!), and in July we moved upmarket into a new house with three toilets in the village (into the cul-de-sac where Craig’s family lived, staggering distance from the Bold).

Simon was about to start a promising career in the army, while I had gained a place at nearby Nene to do my pre-degree foundation year (the first step on the road to legitimate higher education). This despite failing one of my A-levels as predicted by Mr Coppock. Biology. Nightmare. I got an O grade, which is the equivalent of having moved on not a jot in two years of study. (I know. Why didn’t the exam board just come round and slap me in the face? They knew where I drank.) I blame my failure squarely on repeats of the first series of
The Young Ones
, albums by New Order,
⁸
George Clinton
⁹
and Wasted Youth,
¹⁰
the hot weather and the distraction of a general election. (Alright, maybe not the last one, but I could hardly blame Jo – she was studying concurrently for her O-levels. She passed all eight.)

I finished with Jo just before the start of my first term at Nene. I won’t say I packed her in, that’s for kids, but I did end it and for her own good – she was feeling her age, which was two years younger than me, don’t forget. It turned out to be a dry run for the real, final split in October. Alan had by now moved out of his flat and bought a house in Southfields. I don’t believe I ever even went there.

Thus began a clean slate, and the year that Mum and I really fell out.

1.
Keyboard player, Spinal Tap.

2.
Forgotten German diva, very much in the Grace Jones mould, and big at Northampton’s only New Romantic nightclub, Das Bunker. I never went there (it was over-18s only) but Vaughan did – further fuel to the fire of my hero-worship. Alan even DJ’ed there.

3.
Don’t be fooled by the fragrant, rural street names. They’re all like that in the eastern estates. Alan’s subsequent Blackthorn flat was in a street called Great Meadow, Wendy lived in Sidebrook Court, Jo in West Priors Court and so on. It makes Northampton sound like a village in
Morse
.

4.
Alan is now married with two kids and lives in New Zealand. He’s very keen for my mum to know this. ‘You should tell her that I’m now leading a very respectable lifestyle as the manager of a newspaper, I have my own business, I own a house with a harbour view, I no longer drink and I spent three years as a youth worker!’