by Adam Buxton
Over the summer I had watched Damien: Omen II at Tom’s house, in which the adolescent spawn of Satan finally comes to terms with his true identity when he checks his scalp in a bathroom mirror and finds 666: the tattoo of the beast. After another couple of night-time ‘ejaculaccidents’, I went into the bathroom, locked the door and conducted a thorough search of my scalp. I didn’t find any beast tattoos, but that didn’t stop the waves of guilt that would engulf me several times a day and the worry that I could never have a normal life, because I never knew when and where I might suddenly start exploding with jizz.
Science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke came to talk at Westminster Under School one afternoon. Someone asked if he believed in aliens and Clarke replied that there are many more stars in the sky than there are grains of sand on all the beaches of the world, so it’s unlikely that we’re alone in the universe, but I believed I was. You thought I was going to say that Arthur C. Clarke brought me to spontaneous orgasm, didn’t you? I wasn’t that far gone. Jean-Luc Picard? That’s another story.
A few weeks later a boy in my class made a joke about ‘wet dreams’, which as usual I didn’t understand. When he explained and I realised I wasn’t the only little sex pervert in the world, it was the most wonderful and intense feeling of relief I had ever experienced. Apart from that time with June, of course.
Is Everything Going to Be All Right?
When it comes to existential threats these days, we’re spoilt for choice, with everything from environmental catastrophe to sinister clown politicians encouraging us to compete for who can abandon most hope, but when I was 13 the prospects for our extinction seemed less varied and more imminent.
The characterisation of the Eighties as a gaudy pink neon festival of big-haired, good-time materialism was belied by a deeper truth, which was that many people of my generation were just waiting helplessly for a nuclear bomb to drop and for life to turn into the bleakest of horror films.
One drawing I did in 1983 that I was particularly pleased with was of a nuclear mushroom cloud copied from an encyclopaedia. I smudged the pencil the make it look more realistic and at the base of the cloud I wrote the word ‘NO’. Sure, it was angry, hard-hitting work, but I guess that’s just the kind of artist I am. I just couldn’t carry on drawing spaceships in the face of a possible nuclear war.
‘There won’t be a nuclear war,’ counselled my mum, and though her confidence kept my fear at bay, the TV was full of programmes that brought it rushing back.
Nuclear war was such a realistic prospect that the British Government had hired the animation company responsible for a creepy children’s show called Crystal Tipps and Alistair to create a series of EVEN CREEPIER public information films called Protect and Survive, designed to help people prepare if a nuclear attack was imminent. Extracts from the Protect and Survive films and booklets were leaked to the British media and turned up later in one of the TV shows I wish I’d never stumbled across.
A Guide to Armageddon, broadcast in July 1982 as part of the BBC’s popular science ‘strand’ Q.E.D., included hair-frazzling, meat-cooking, panic-inducing demonstrations of what would happen if a nuclear bomb fell on London. The programme featured a young couple doing their best to follow the handy hints in the Protect and Survive booklets but the implication (dramatised a few years later in Raymond Briggs’s ultra-bleak animated film When the Wind Blows, complete with ‘bombastic’ Eighties Bowie soundtrack song) was that preparations such as painting windows white and making a shelter from a door and some mattresses were so pitifully ineffectual you’d be better off with instant vaporisation.
I got the impression from Mum’s Daily Mail that worrying about this sort of stuff was the sole preserve of the lesbians and hippies protesting at RAF Greenham Common, but being confronted with it all on a BBC science programme suggested otherwise. And that was before The Day After.
A big-budget American TV movie, The Day After imagined what would happen in the event of a nuclear strike on the US. SPOILER ALERT: it would be bad. It focused on a group of people from Kansas (including Steve Guttenberg, later to star as Sergeant Mahoney in the more upbeat Police Academy), who, in the run-up to the strike, carry on with their lives hoping the worst won’t happen. When the worst happens, loads of people die quickly, then the ‘survivors’ die slowly. Even Steve Guttenberg has the cheeky smile melted off his face.
I didn’t plan to see The Day After when ITV showed it one Saturday night a few weeks before Christmas in 1983 (festive fun for all the family!), but I couldn’t resist checking on it from time to time, looking at it for a few minutes before switching over again when my heart started pounding too hard (much the same way I check Twitter nowadays). By the time the BBC showed their own British nuclear disaster movie, Threads, in 1984, I’d learned my lesson and made sure I was nowhere near a television.
One of the things that made The Day After so chilling was that it was well made and didn’t deliver the usual doses of Hollywood Stupidity Serum that would normally enable audiences to find horror and disaster highly entertaining. Instead, moments of special-FX-heavy destruction were juxtaposed with scenes that felt depressingly real: military men in bunkers, obediently following protocol.
Unlike a lot of children who saw The Day After, I never actually had bad dreams. Instead, the nightmare of nuclear Armageddon suffused my waking life, adding to each happy moment the addendum: ‘but – we’re all going to die horribly, probably quite soon’. My parents continued to brush off my concerns, but the banal fact of expensive nuclear weapons, buttons, bunkers and army men with laminated firing codes in ring binders ensured that I was never able to relax completely.
BOWIE ANNUAL
In my last term at boarding school I won the art prize, which was a book token. I used it to buy David Bowie: An Illustrated Record by Charles Shaar Murray and Roy Carr, and for the next few years this became the roadmap for my journey through Bowieopolis and its sprawling suburbs.
The book was the size of a vinyl LP and filled with critiques of all Bowie’s musical output up to 1981 as well as great illustrations, photographs and full-sized colour reproductions of all Bowie’s album sleeves up to Scary Monsters, but it was badly bound and fell apart after only a few months. That gave me the opportunity to stick my favourite record-cover images and other full-page Bowie pics on my wall at home, and then later in my study at school.
Bowie always looked so cool and strange that I thought having his face on my wall might confer those same qualities on me, but I probably fancied him, too, especially in pictures from the late Seventies, though I didn’t yet appreciate that what I was attracted to was the look of someone who had made himself ill by taking more than the recommended daily amount of cocaine.
I was also unaware that Bowie had once been what certain newspapers liked to call ‘a gender-bender’, a phrase that was tossed about both willy and nilly after Boy George first appeared on Top of the Pops in September 1982. Between wet dreams of old ladies and not being sure if Boy George was a boy or a girl (or something else entirely), I had enough on my sexy plate without worrying about Bowie’s ‘zexuality’. To me, the man who made Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust and Scary Monsters was straightforwardly wholesome, and maybe a psychoanalyst (albeit one who’s only recently started in the profession) would suggest Bowie was a surrogate parent figure for me after all that boarding-school separation trauma. I just know that whenever I heard ‘Kooks’ or the vertiginous chord progressions of ‘Life on Mars’, it was more like being wrapped in a blanket than getting rogered by an alien.
Somehow I had convinced a friend at school not only to lend me their Walkman, but to make a copy of Hunky Dory on one side of a TDK D-C90 with Scary Monsters on the other (though it cut off the last few seconds of ‘It’s No Game (No.2)’ – not a problem, as it’s just wobbly clunking noises). Listening to Hunky Dory on stereo headphones for the first time was like suddenly being able to taste and smell again after a bad cold, especially a minute into the track ‘Quicksa
nd’ when acoustic guitars began gently duelling from the left and right channels. I told my mum to listen and she, too, was impressed by this adventure across the stereo spectrum. ‘But what’s he singing about?’ asked Mum.
I didn’t know the lyrics of ‘Quicksand’ were derived from the 24-year-old Bowie’s flirtations with the writings of occultist Aleister Crowley, nihilistic Nietzschean philosophy, and a load of other possibly unsavoury cobblers. I assumed that lines like ‘Don’t believe in yourself’ and ‘Knowledge comes with death’s release’ were just entertainingly odd Bowie bumper-sticker phrases that didn’t detract from the overall loveliness and optimism of the music.
As for ‘Ashes to Ashes’ from Scary Monsters, I didn’t have a clue what he was bollocking on about – ‘Do you remember a gather spin, he search another zone?’ – and I couldn’t even tell what instruments were being used to create the song’s alien mood buffet. All I knew was that two minutes in, when it got to the ‘I never done good things, / I never done bad things’ section, my emotional fuel rods would start to jump about uncontrollably and I felt transcendent.
An Illustrated Record also included overviews of music on which Bowie had collaborated, and I was particularly intrigued by the black-and-white image on the cover of an LP by someone called Lou Reed. I did a painting of it and wrote on the bottom ‘Lou Reed Vicious’. Dad came into my room and admired my work. ‘It’s a good picture,’ said Dad, ‘of a very creepy-looking man. What does “Lou Reed Vicious” mean?’
‘He’s called Lou Reed and one of his songs is called “Vicious”,’ I explained.
‘Hmmm. All very sinister,’ replied Pa as he walked out.
The next time I was at WH Smith’s I flicked through the vinyl racks, found a copy of Transformer and studied the back cover for the first time. I liked the look of the fellow in the white T-shirt, tipping his leather cap to the long-legged lady on the left of the image, although it looked as if he had a baguette in his pocket, which I found confusing. Surely the baguette would get all linty and his pocket would be full of crumbs?
* * *
RAMBLE
I’m pretending to be naïve here, of course. I always supposed the man had an unusually large willy, but having just searched for more information about the Transformer back cover, I now know Big Willy Man was Lou Reed’s former road manager and that the bulge in his jeans was actually a banana wrapped in a sock, making my linty baguette joke rather redundant.
* * *
The cassette of Transformer was only £1.99 so I decided to take a chance. I handed over a gift token and 10 minutes later I borrowed my dad’s tape player, settled down at my desk with my drawing stuff in the room I shared with my sister and heard Transformer for the first time.
As far as I was concerned this was an album I had plucked from obscurity, generously taking time out from my busy TV, cake and biscuit schedule to give it a try. It’s not a hard album to like, but I thought myself very sophisticated for instantly appreciating ‘Walk on the Wild Side’, despite a jazzy sound that I associated with old people’s music and lyrics that hinted at something adult and transgressive, though I didn’t really understand what. I assumed that ‘giving head’ probably meant kissing with tongues, but just, like, really deep in someone’s head.
It only took a few listens before I liked every song on Transformer and found them warm and comforting, especially ‘Perfect Day’ and, my favourite, ‘Satellite of Love’, on which I fancied I could hear Bowie’s yelpy voice in the background, making me like it all the more. Even rockier tracks like ‘I’m So Free’ and ‘Vicious’ sounded to me like the rest of the album: bathed in golden light and love.
Twenty years later I would sing Transformer’s opening song ‘Make Up’ to get my baby son to sleep. I briefly considered changing some of the lyrics to suit his gender but decided that he probably wouldn’t be too badly confused by being told he was ‘a slick little girl’. So far, he seems anxiety free in that particular department.
CHAPTER 8
CASTLE BUCKLES WELCOMES NIGEL BUXTON
In preparation for Dad’s arrival at Castle Buckles, I moved all my stuff out of the flat where I had my studio and set up a new workspace in one of the adjoining barns. The physical effort this entailed was nothing compared to the mental trauma of sorting through a lifetime of accumulated crap. I started to make trips with carloads of crap to charity shops and the recycling dump, and each time I marvelled at how easy it was to part with that crap after so many years of careful hoarding. Then Dad’s crap arrived.
It turned up in Norfolk a week before he did, and it filled one medium-sized farm shed. I knew he was planning to finish writing his autobiography while he was with us, so I made it my priority to turn the living-room space in the flat into a study where he could work. With his permission I sanded down and re-varnished the beaten-up writing desk he’d ‘liberated’ 30 years earlier from his office at the Telegraph, I put up shelves and filled them with his books and hung up his old pictures. ‘I’m an amazing son,’ I thought.
He’s going to love this and we’re going to have a moving and cathartic time together.
Once the flat was in order, I went back into the shed and continued searching through the rest of Dad’s boxes, looking out for anything else he might need when he arrived. But unless he was planning on reading back letters from old girlfriends, checking menus from every restaurant he’d ever visited or taking one last look at his expenses claims, there was nothing there that anyone would ever be needing again.
It crossed my mind that in the course of looking through all this stuff I might come across evidence of outrageous secrets or scandals from Dad’s life that would redefine our relationship, but no. The letters were polite, the people in the photographs were fully clothed and everything seemed boringly above board. Instead, it was the more mundane souvenirs of Dad’s life that proved the most unsettling.
A couple of boxes contained bulging manilla envelopes into which Dad had begun to sort documents and souvenirs he considered particularly significant. I picked out one labelled ‘FINANCIAL CRISIS’ and found it stuffed with letters to bank managers, school bursars and friends. It told the story of Dad’s struggles to stay afloat throughout the Eighties and on into the Nineties as school fees sank him deeper into debt. It was some dank Death of a Salesman shit.
I pulled out a letter from the end of the Eighties explaining that, due to modernisation at the Sunday Telegraph, my dad was to be let go. Looking at the date, I recalled that I’d been with Joe Cornish and Louis Theroux doing David Bowie impressions in New York at the time, having flown over on a ticket Dad wangled with his travel-editor connections. I’d phoned home one evening and he’d told me the news. ‘I’m afraid it’s the end of an era, old boy,’ he’d said, ‘so make the most of it out there.’
Then a letter from a few years later when I would have been at art school. Dad was still trying anything he could to keep my brother David at Haileybury, and he and Mum were sleeping in separate rooms, barely speaking to each other. The letter was from his former employers at the Telegraph, refusing to wipe out a debt from a previous loan. I think if I got a similar letter, I’d burn it, but Dad had kept it safe.
22nd February 1991
Dear Nigel,
I have read your fairly chilling letter of 20th February.
When I organised an ex gratia payment of £8,200 upon your retirement in May two years ago, there were those who counselled that this be used to diminish your debt to the company. I resisted them, and it would seem I was wrong to do so.
The arguments that you deploy about not being very well paid, etc., were the arguments that you put to the previous management in the letter you sent to [Mr Madeupname] seeking the loan. Since the loan was forthcoming, it could be said that it worked once; but I think it a bit optimistic to expect that it can be rehearsed again to wipe out the debt, most particularly in the light of the very considerable enhancements that were made to your salary in the years that you serv
ed the Sunday Telegraph under new management.
Looking at the figures you quote in your letter, I think a bank manager would say that you are seeking to achieve a lifestyle which is beyond your means. That you are paying for private education is laudable in so far as we all wish to do the best by our children, but frankly it would seem folly looking at your figures.
To that extent, you are asking the Daily Telegraph to expunge the debt currently standing at £14,500 in order to maintain a standard of living which you cannot afford.
I do believe that the company has behaved honourably and generously towards you since this loan was first advanced, and this was extended to what amounted as a gift upon your retirement.
While I sympathise greatly with your dire financial position, I cannot recommend to the Telegraph that they write off debt for a loan which was extended in good faith and on very favourable terms.
Yours sincerely,
Jimmy Namachangé, Executive Editor
Further down the stack of correspondence were copies of letters Dad had sent to wealthy friends and acquaintances asking if they might lend him some money and outlining elaborate schemes for repaying them. One of the people he had written to in 1991 was David Cornwell, a friend from his university days at Oxford, better known as the spy thriller author John le Carré.
