Ramble Book

by Adam Buxton

  Our English teacher at boarding school, Mr Davidson (who played ‘Ziggy Stardust’ in class that time), had invited a few of his more enthusiastic students, including me and Patrick, to a sort of cultural salon in his flat. We sat on cushions as Mr Davidson put on Hunky Dory, smoked cigarettes, drank something grown up and stinky (coffee, Scotch or possibly Coffee-scotch) and talked to us like adults. This worried the little conformist in me who suspected the natural order of things was being violated. Adults, especially teachers, were supposed to be the rulers and children their obedient subjects, so what was the deal with all this hanging out, listening to David Bowie and being allowed to say ‘shit’? Patrick was into it and as he chatted away with Mr Davidson I envied his confidence.

  The only thing I was confident about was that I really liked the song ‘Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes’. Patrick agreed and that provided us with a basis for further dialogue.

  At Westminster Patrick and I were in different houses and his housemates were in every way more colourful than mine. In Patrick’s house they spent their evenings watching TV, playing pool and listening to The Sisters of Mercy, U2, Echo & the Bunnymen and, of course, Bowie. Most people’s idea of a stimulating evening in our house was to sit on a more junior boy and fart on his head.

  Cornballs

  With the exception of Patrick and some of his friends, I hated more or less everyone at Westminster. I missed my co-ed prep school, and especially the company of girls, who had made it so much easier and more fun to talk about important things like the Top 40, feelings and myself.

  Now I was surrounded by dreary, stuck-up boys in black uniforms who seemed to spend most of their time being casually loathsome to one another, but there was someone in my English class who was different. He was tall and haughty, but with a charm so many of the other boys lacked. I asked Patrick who he was. ‘Oh, that’s Joe Cornish,’ he said. ‘He’s really good at English but he’s a smart-arse. You’d get on.’

  * * *

  RAMBLE

  I asked Joe if he was OK with what I’d written about him in this book and this was his only note:

  ‘How many times can you and Louis describe me as “haughty” in books? Do you perhaps mean to say “tall”? Or maybe “generous” or “handsome” or “very imaginative”?’

  * * *

  Patrick was right, and as well as Joe’s smart arse, I admired his sense of humour. Our first conversation happened after an English lesson one morning and took the form of a riff on a Not the Nine O’Clock News sketch about a spymaster who seems to be trying to recruit a secret agent but is in fact just looking for a boyfriend. We didn’t do the boyfriend bit because I didn’t understand that was the joke, and instead we just stood at the window and looked down over Yard as we exchanged enigmatic sentences for a while. It was one of the first times I’d enjoyed myself at Westminster.

  With the formalities out of the way, Joe and I established that we’d both recently discovered Monty Python after watching their sketch film And Now for Something Completely Different on TV. I had taped it and watched it over and over, though much of it went over my head entirely. What did ‘Nudge, nudge, wink, wink’ mean? What was funny about a group of men dressed as old women stealing a telephone box and riding around on motorbikes? What was an ‘accountant’ and who cared if he wanted to be a lion tamer?

  I couldn’t answer any of these questions, but it didn’t matter. I liked the voices, the animations, lines like ‘Miss Spume dreamed her dreamy dreams’ and the general tone of authority being undermined by childishness. I liked quoting Graham Chapman’s Colonel character and saying, ‘Stop that, it’s silly.’

  One day in English class before the teacher arrived Joe reached into his bag and produced the lavishly illustrated book of Monty Python’s new film The Meaning of Life and proceeded to show off the full-colour photographs of the more gory and graphic scenes. There was a man having his guts pulled out by surgeons, a large group of topless women on roller-skates and, most grimly fascinating of all, a hugely fat man emitting torrents of vomit in a smart restaurant before exploding. How could Decline and Fall or even Catcher in the Rye compete with that?

  ‘I can get preview tickets for The Meaning of Life if you want to come and see it,’ said Joe.

  ‘Isn’t it an 18?’ I asked.

  ‘Doesn’t matter. I was on a film-review show for teenagers on Crapital Radio so I can get preview tickets for petty much any fillum.’

  ‘Who is this guy?’ I swooned. ‘He’s been on the radio! He changed the name of the station from Capital to “Crapital”! He says “fillum” instead of film! He’s going to get me into an 18 with guts, topless women and an exploding vomit man in it! And he’s drawn a Thompson Twins logo on his bag!’

  The Meaning of Life was the first 18-rated film I saw at the cinema. I was 13 years old and it was every bit as confusing and disturbing as Joe’s book had suggested. However, what impressed me most was the music.

  ‘Galaxy Song’, ‘Penis Song (Not the Noël Coward Song)’, ‘Every Sperm Is Sacred’ and ‘Christmas in Heaven’ were all funny, clever, catchy and I had to admit even better than ‘Shaddap You Face’ and one of my favourite songs from earlier in the year, Kenny Everett’s ‘Snot Rap’.

  The Meaning of Life was also my first movie date with Joe and over the next few months we also went along to Twilight Zone: The Movie, Bullshot, Psycho II and another 18-rated film, Videodrome, which made me realise The Meaning of Life hadn’t been that confusing and disturbing after all.

  Missions to the Dark Side

  Outside of Westminster, my other passport to everything my parents (especially Dad) would have disapproved of was my best friend from boarding school, Tom. On a couple of occasions we stayed at his cool divorced Mum’s place in Clapham and, as she wasn’t much in evidence on either occasion (probably hanging out with other cool divorced people), we were left to explore the many mystifyingly adult items strewn about her sitting room, the walls of which were painted a cool, divorced dark blue (the colour of naughtiness).

  Tom pointed out comics that contained swearing on the coffee table (The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers), drug paraphernalia on the mantelpiece (a pack of rolling papers) and at the front of a stack of LPs leaning against the wall, a record with three bare-breasted, mud-covered women on the cover. The ‘Slits’? What does that mean? I couldn’t imagine what music made by The Slits would sound like, but I knew it would almost certainly be bad for me.

  In the safety of Tom’s bedroom, we played Manic Miner on the ZX Spectrum, and when we weren’t listening to Tom’s new discovery, Deep Purple, we listened to the Top 40. We liked Siouxsie and the Banshees’ darkly psychedelic cover of the Beatles’ ‘Dear Prudence’ (which would have made a good theme tune for Tom’s mum’s place), but I preferred ‘All Night Long (All Night)’ by Lionel Richie, which made me think of family holidays in America and transported me to a sunset party on a Hawaiian island where the Minute Maid fruit punch flowed, the young ladies found me irresistible and I had unlimited quarters for Q*bert, Donkey Kong 3 and Pengo at the arcade.

  However, our spiciest cultural explorations took place not in bohemian Clapham but in Barnes, leafy south-west London where Tom’s dad and his second wife lived in an atmosphere far closer to the middle-class cosiness of our house in Earl’s Court, i.e. no swearing, set bed times, pleases and thank-yous, Laura Ashley curtains and no illegal drug paraphernalia or albums by The Slits – at least not left out where impressionable children might find them.

  Nevertheless, a portal to the dark side had opened up in Barnes in the form of a video rental shop on the Upper Richmond Road. During the Easter holidays we cycled down there and Tom, sporting his finest spotted hanky worn as a cravat and with his deepest voice, used his dad’s membership card to rent anything that looked exciting and/or disturbing, preferably rated 18, though some boxes still had the old X certificates on the covers, making them even more alluring.

  Tom was keen to explore titles like Driller Killer, I S
pit on Your Grave and Cannibal Holocaust, films I’d seen mentioned in articles about ‘Video Nasties’ in my mum’s Daily Mail. That was where I’d learned that some of these sicko horror directors had even filmed real acts of violence and murder and included them in what were known as ‘snuff’ films. Though I was certainly interested in blood and maybe a few guts, I definitely wasn’t up for anything that might actually be real. As a result, our first few forays into more adult viewing (undertaken when Tom’s father and stepmother were out) included less overtly horrific titles like the 1979 version of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, Soylent Green, Rollerball and Mad Max before we took a deep breath and dived deeper into Scanners, The Evil Dead, American Werewolf in London and John Carpenter’s The Thing.

  American Werewolf and The Thing made an especially deep and long-lasting impression. The Thing was a brilliant counterpoint to E.T.’s alien cutesiness and tapped into four of my biggest fears: isolation, bodily mutation, stomachs that develop giant teeth then bite off people’s hands and detached heads that sprout big spiders’ legs and scuttle away.

  American Werewolf in London, meanwhile, had not only spectacular gore and special effects, but proper humour and, most affectingly of all, Jenny Agutter, whose intelligent, unthreatening prettiness I associated with simpler times back before boarding school, when viewings of The Railway Children were a comforting Christmas staple. Now here she was, all grown up, shagging a werewolf in the shower to the sound of Van Morrison. It could only have been more confusing if Hayley Mills had appeared and started rogering John Noakes with a strap-on while Shep licked his nuts.

  But the box that immediately caught our eye on our first visit to Tom’s local video store was black and on the front, leaking green smoke, was a knobbly, cracked egg.

  Alien Time

  I had nearly seen Alien on a recent family trip to Florida where I found it listed on the hotel’s free cable TV service. Waking up at 3 a.m. with jet lag, I checked that my brother and sister were still asleep, then crept into the dark lounge outside my parents’ room and, ensuring the volume knob was all the way down and breathless with nervous excitement, I turned on the TV and navigated to the channel where the film was about to start.

  My face was inches from the screen as across a shifting star field the vertical, horizontal and diagonal bars of the word ‘ALIEN’ appeared very slowly, one at a time, accompanied by eerie strings and cavernous groans barely audible from the mono speaker. ‘This is silly,’ I thought and switched off the TV before returning to bed, telling myself I was waiting for an opportunity to watch the film properly. The truth was that the title sequence alone, in all its dreadful, empty slowness, was the most chillingly adult thing I had seen up to that point and I knew I couldn’t handle any more.

  A year later, Tom reached up high and plucked the box for Alien from the video-store shelf, then waggled it at me with his raised-eyebrow grin. Then, setting it down on the counter, he drew himself up to the fullest extent of his 5 feet and 11 inches, presented his dad’s membership card and half an hour later he was sliding the cassette into the VCR in his front room.

  The mid-afternoon sun was streaming through the bay windows, so Tom went over to close the curtains. ‘Don’t make it too dark!’ I said, trying my best to sound nonchalant, even though I was about as chalant as it’s possible to be. It was finally happening. I was about to see Alien, albeit on a TV, in the middle of the day and with both of us fully intent on pausing it, replaying certain sections and generally not in any way experiencing the film as it was originally intended to be experienced.

  To this day those first 45 minutes of Alien remain the most completely absorbing and frightening experience I have ever had watching a film. Every one of the first few shots in the quiet, gloomy interior of the Nostromo reminded me that I was a 13-year-old peering into a shadowy adult realm where events way beyond my emotional pay grade were about to unfold. This wasn’t the Millennium Falcon. No lovable dogmen here, no wise-cracking rogues or avuncular laser-sword grandpas; just a little plastic drinking-bird toy to indicate that this wasn’t going on in a galaxy far, far away. This was part of our universe – this was REAL.

  * * *

  RAMBLE

  The plastic drinking-bird toy dipping its beak into a glass in perpetual motion was one of a number of things that encouraged me to think of the world as magical when I was little. Similarly marvellous and inexplicable to me were lava lamps, the glowing stars on the ceiling of my friend Lucy’s bedroom, the brandy glasses that looked full but were actually empty and the waiter in a restaurant in Greece who appeared to be able to disconnect the end of his thumb and slide it along his forefinger with two fingers from his other hand.

  ‘How do you do it?’ I cried.

  ‘It’s magic,’ explained the waiter with a smile.

  ‘It’s not magic,’ said my dad when the waiter had left, but when he couldn’t show me how the trick was done, I was forced to conclude that it absolutely was magic.

  * * *

  When it finally arrived, the Chestburster scene that for so long had squatted malevolently in my imagination was not the ‘crimson shower of flesh and blood’ promised by Alien: The Illustrated Story, but it was certainly shocking and more explicitly gory than anything I’d ever seen, so that was good. And yet, as dead Kane’s arms twitched hammily in the background and Alien Jr looked round the room, I was aware for the first time that I was watching something fake. I mean, I knew it was all fake, I wasn’t fully moronic, but seeing that little yellow fellow with its tiny metal teeth, all I could think about was the person under the table, twisting it left and right.

  Towards the end of the film I even found myself becoming mildly impatient, first at the number of steps required for Ripley to initiate the Nostromo self-destruct sequence, then with all the sirens, countdowns, strobe lighting and random blasts of smoke as she ran about trying to save the fucking cat. As for the moment when Ripley decides to cancel the self-destruct sequence only to be foiled by the infuriatingly slow action of those hydraulic cylinders, just thinking about it makes me itchy.

  But we’d done it. We’d seen Alien, and before Tom had to return the cassette to the video shop we watched it twice more, freeze-framing the goriest scenes, saying ‘H.R. Giger’ a lot (we knew about the Swiss designer of the Alien creature from one of Tom’s mum’s nutty coffee-table books) and admiring Sigourney Weaver’s very clean and extremely small underwear in slow-motion.

  * * *

  RAMBLE

  God, I love Alien. I think I’ve watched it every year since that first viewing with Tom, on video, TV, DVD and Blu-ray, and waded through every second of related documentary material thereon, even those utterly pointless ‘stills galleries’. My dad would have considered that a colossal waste of time. But what if I visited the same art gallery every month to admire a particular Velázquez painting and filled my shelves with books about him? Would that be better? Was it being infected by post-modernist theory at art school that makes me think Alien and Velázquez represent a comparable level of artistic achievement? Does anyone worry about this kind of thing any more? Should they?

  * * *

  BOWIE ANNUAL

  My younger sister Clare got into Bowie around the same time I did, but her appreciation of his work was often less superficial than mine. As we weren’t yet getting regular allowances, we relied on parents, relatives and Santa for our music purchases and for Christmas 1983 Clare had asked for Aladdin Sane and Diamond Dogs, albums that I’d avoided because I thought the red bouffant hairdo Bowie sported on both covers made him look like Cilla Black (‘How nice does he look on the cover?’ was the chief criterion for my Bowie album purchases for longer than it should have been – that’s why the last of the Seventies albums I bought was Lodger).

  I was also wary of Aladdin Sane because I’d been scandalised by the song ‘Time’ that I’d heard one evening at school as Patrick and his friends played pool in their house common room. At the line ‘Time, he flexes like a w
hore /Falls wanking to the floor’, I’d leapt up from the tatty sofa and demanded to know what I’d just heard. Patrick repeated the lyric, laughing at what he assumed was my parody of prudish conservatism, but, genuinely outraged, I huffed off to bed, announcing that if this was the kind of filthy nonsense Bowie had tucked away on the rest of his albums, I wasn’t interested.

  The next day, when I had calmed down a bit, one of Patrick’s friends – Dan Jeffries – suggested I try some of Bowie’s earlier stuff and, using Patrick’s tape-to-tape boombox, I copied Dan’s cassette of Another Face, a compilation featuring a wonky selection of novelty songs, rhythm and blues and Anthony Newley rip-offs that the young Bowie had hoped would make him famous.

  Dan told me to listen to ‘The London Boys’, an atmospheric snapshot of the lows and highs of leaving home for the Big City and falling in with the wrong crowd. It’s considered an early classic, with Bowie making his voice sound tired and feeble to evoke hangovers and bedsit squalor, but I just thought it was dreary and depressing. And as for ‘Please Mr Gravedigger’, a monologue about a child murderer plotting to eliminate a witness set to sound effects of church bells, rain and thunder, I soon became adept at hitting the fast-forward button before the first bell pealed, releasing it for the much more up-tempo and goofy ‘Join the Gang’, which takes the piss out of Swinging London winningly.

  I couldn’t decide if Another Face was the weirdest album I had heard up to that point or just the most rubbish. The songs on Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust were confident and perfectly formed, and compared with them everything on Another Face was like, well, a laughing gnome. But perhaps because it felt like a strange old boarded-up house in the scrubland of Bowie’s career that only Dan Jeffries and I knew about, I kept returning to it, and soon I was fond of every crumbly corner (except the one with ‘Please Mr Gravedigger’ in it).