by Adam Buxton
It wasn’t until our final year at Westminster that Zac became a regular at our social gatherings. Around 1984 he would have been hanging out a lot with Louis.
Joe told me Louis’s father was a famous travel writer. ‘That’s something we have in common then,’ I thought. Next time I saw Dad I told him I was friends with Paul Theroux’s son, but rather than express delight that I was associating with the progeny of another travel-writing superstar, Dad was a little dismissive, mumbling something about him being ‘awfully trendy’ and ‘overrated’.
‘Louis?’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t say he was that trendy’.
Louis was more intelligent than most people in our year, despite having been ‘accelerated’ from the year below, a fact that sometimes made me a little wary of him. Louis and Zac would occasionally embark on impenetrable comedy riffs that once or twice included friendly but quite pointed piss-takes of me and Joe and our creative schemes. We’d get back at Louis by teasing him about his unbroken voice and his emotional immaturity, though in truth he was no more immature than the rest of us, and usually a lot nicer and funnier with it.
Louis shared our enthusiasm for pop culture in all its forms, which offset his more intimidating intellectual tendencies. As well as comedy, music was always an important touchstone for me and Louis, and over the years he introduced me to some of my favourite stuff, such as The Doors, Van Morrison and Bob Dylan, and after we’d left school, Howard Devoto, Can, Pulp and Radiohead.
Anyway, look, I’ve listed the main social tribes in our year for you below. If you were at school with us, you’ll know there was a lot of crossover and you might take issue with some or all of these categories, but tough luck, this is my book and this is what it looked like to me.
THE BRAT PACK
Our gang, which at various times included me, Joe, Ben, Mark and Louis (though Louis was one of those people who could float from group to group and was hard to pin down). Back then I thought of our gang as rather cultured and sensitive, and we certainly could be, when we weren’t being snooty and obnoxious, that is.
DRESS CODE – Being fans of all things American, many of us went through phases that incorporated baseball jackets, Levi 501 jeans and Converse high-top shoes. There were a lot of checked shirts in my wardrobe for a while. I started to develop a slightly more eccentric fashion sense when we got to the sixth form and girls came into the picture. One weekend I went through Dad’s old wardrobe and discovered a shiny black suit jacket that was far too large for me. I put it on and decided it made me look like David Byrne in the Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense, albeit in the wrong aspect ratio. Sometimes I would wear this jacket at school but was frequently told to take it off by teachers who were probably less worried about the jacket being non-regulation, and more worried that I just looked ridiculous. I would also wear my dad’s old collarless dress shirts with the top button always done up.
HAIR – None of our gang ever went for particularly trendy hairdos. That would have meant standing out too much, and standing out would have meant piss-taking, a little of which Joe experienced when he came back after one summer holiday with a blond streak at the front of his floppy fringe. He got a lot of comments, most of which were some version of: ‘Ha-ha! You got a blond streak! Blond-streak ponce!’ Joe insisted that the blond streak was due to the brand of spot cream he used on his forehead accidentally getting into his hair. Though I’m not sure I said so at the time, I thought Joe’s blond streak looked good, and the next time I was home I cautiously combed in some of the hydrogen peroxide my sister used to lighten the hair on her upper lip. The result was a curious orange fringe that I thought made me look a bit like Bowie on the cover of Low. Not everyone agreed. ‘Ha-ha! Orange-fringe ponce!’ was the consensus. I explained that it was the result of some lemon juice that I had accidentally wiped into my hair during a sunny holiday.
MUSIC – David Bowie, Thompson Twins, Thomas Dolby, then later on Prefab Sprout, Orange Juice, The Doors, Roxy Music, Joe Jackson, The Cure, Talking Heads, The Blues Brothers, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, James Brown, Prince, etc.
THE HARD LADS
The Hard Lads (or just the Lads) were embarrassed to be at a posh school and would behave like punky, ruffian ne’er-do-wells being forced to do a strange kind of community service that involved studying Latin and attending prayers in Westminster Abbey. It was easy to spot one of the Lads during prayers because they refused to bow their heads and would sit up and look around defiantly, hoping a teacher would force them to pray so they could make a scene. The rest of us were happy to bow our heads and enjoy a nice little nap. I liked many of the Lads individually, but as a group we didn’t get on. They thought we were annoying drama pricks and we thought they were yobs who were too desperate to be cool.
DRESS CODE – This depended on whether you were more a Goth Lad or a Rockabilly Lad. The Goth Lads tended to favour winkle-pickers with long tapered tips, buckles and straps. Rockabilly Lads preferred suede brothel-creepers with rubber soles so thick they were basically platforms. Drainpipe trousers, taken in neatly by their mums or badly by themselves, were mandatory for all Lads, as were skinny ties, shirts untucked and long overcoats purchased at Kensington or Camden Market. Their book bags were covered with the logos of favourite bands, carefully painted on with white Tipp-Ex correcting fluid (OK, maybe it was just one guy who did this, but he did it really well and the other Lads should have copied him).
HAIR – Crew cut or flat top for the Rockabilly Lads, Jesus and Mary Chain/John Cooper Clarke birds’ nest for the Goth Lads. One of the more non-conformist Lads shaved his head at the sides and left his hair long and floppy on the top and at the back, like an off-duty Mohawk.
MUSIC – The Lads all listened to John Peel’s Radio 1 show and loved all the pasty-faced indie bands Peel championed (many of whom I ended up liking a lot, too): The Psychedelic Furs, The Smiths, The Gun Club, The Pogues, The Cramps, Xmal Deutschland, The Sisters of Mercy, Bauhaus, Alien Sex Fiend, The Birthday Party, Echo & the Bunnymen, etc. I also remember a few Lads joining an expedition to see U2 on their Unforgettable Fire tour, though they may have been excommunicated afterwards.
SPORTS GUYS
Westminster wasn’t a very sporty school (one of the reasons my parents thought it might suit me), but there were a few impressive physical specimens who regularly represented the school in Sports of Privilege: Rowing, Rugby, Fives, Golden Pog, Sprinto, Yippee Hoops and Super Larkabout (I made some of those up).
DRESS CODE – Sports Guys tended to stick to the regular school uniform, but it just seemed to fit them better than the rest of us.
HAIR – Short, practical. Some of them even knew about conditioner.
MUSIC – AC/DC, Bon Jovi, U2. Big, fun, uncomplicated songs for big, fun, uncomplicated boys.
SCHOLARS
Scholars were students who had done so well in their entrance exam that their fees were reduced by as much as 50 per cent. For that reason, Scholars often came from less wealthy backgrounds than some of the other students, and that probably contributed to them seeming unusual and interesting. The Pogues’ lead singer Shane MacGowan got a literature scholarship to Westminster in 1971 but was expelled after a couple of years for drug possession. Sixteen years later, when I was in the sixth form, MacGowan was the hero of every Hard Lad in the school.
DRESS CODE – I recall the Scholars wearing ill-fitting suits, but that might have been just one guy. Let’s call him Mungo.
HAIR – Dandruff. Again, might have just been Mungo. I’m sure there were many Scholars at Westminster who knew about Timotei.
MUSIC – Queen, Genesis, avant-garde jazz, Gregorian chanting, Steve Reich, The Flying Pickets. I’m guessing here, to be honest, though I’d say Queen is a good bet.
HIPPIES
Louis would often hang around with the Hippies. Despite an affected flaky demeanour and a fondness for referring to everyone as ‘man’ (which rubbed off on Louis, then me and Joe, and afflicts us to this day), the Hippies
were usually sharp and could be withering if crossed.
DRESS CODE – Hippies wore their uniforms loose, jackets open, shirts untucked, ties askew or round the head like bandanas when hanging around Yard at the end of the day.
HAIR – Loads. But not lank and greasy like Neil the Hippy from The Young Ones. The hair of Westminster Hippies was luxuriant and lovely. Think young Kate Bush.
MUSIC – As with the Lads, music was important to the Hippies and they liked a lot of classic stuff: Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, Van Morrison, Woody Guthrie, Janis Joplin, Lonnie Donegan, Joni Mitchel, etc. Not Queen.
Balls to the Wall
Some people in our year didn’t really fit into any group except maybe the ‘Rich’ group. Joe introduced me to a friend of his called Omar who, with his well-cut black suit, immaculate black hair, black briefcase and aviator sunglasses, resembled a member of the secret service transporting classified documents, but was actually the son of a rich Middle Eastern family. He thought the music Joe and I liked was lame. Omar preferred heavy metal and claimed to have attended a gig by a German band called Accept at which he stood so close to a speaker that his ears began to bleed. He said he loved it. It was hard to tell if he was bullshitting with those aviator shades on.
Omar saw me admiring an ad for some Sony B-10s – desktop speakers that could plug into a tape player – and said he would buy me a pair for my birthday. It was strange, because we weren’t really best buddies and the speakers were expensive – a more lavish gift than I could expect from my parents – but I coveted those B-10s and decided to accept Omar’s kind offer. It took longer than it should have done for me to realise that this effectively turned our friendship into a weird contract under which it was in my interest to remain in Omar’s good graces.
Over the following weeks, if I did something to annoy Omar or disagreed with him in any way, he would shake his head and say, ‘Shame about those B-10s,’ whereupon I would capitulate. I began to suspect the price I was paying for this free gift was too high and that the deal didn’t reflect well on either me or Omar. The next time he threatened to withdraw his offer, I told him I didn’t care, and that even if he had bought me the B-10s I would have just stuck them up his arse, which would have been difficult and painful, but better than turning our relationship into a tawdry financial arrangement (at least, that’s what I was thinking – in reality I probably just mumbled something inaudible).
We didn’t hang out so much after that. Then, on my birthday, Omar handed me a card. Inside it said, ‘Hope your B-10s make your ears bleed.’ When I went back to my study, the speakers were sat on my desk. They seemed incredibly powerful (though a small Bluetooth speaker would outperform them today). The first thing I played on them was Omar’s cassette of Balls to the Wall by Accept, a jolly, Spinal Tap-like fusion of hard rock and some Gregorian chanting. I turned it up very loud until the house master stuck his head round the door and asked what the hell was going on. I said I was learning a confusing lesson about greed, friendship and power dynamics (again, paraphrasing).
Machine Gun Etiquette
I looked forward to English lessons because there was always a chance that the teacher would announce that we were taking a break from King Lear or To the Lighthouse or Philip Larkin and instead were going to spend the lesson drinking Earl Grey tea and talking about our worst fears, or lying in the sun on College Green and reading poems to each other or making up advertising slogans that could be used if fellow class members were being sold as products.
One day Mr Field (who along with Mr Stewart was one of the English teachers I liked best) announced that in the next lesson we would be required to deliver a talk about music. Rather than talk about music I was genuinely passionate about, I decided it would be more fun to take the piss, so at the next lesson I turned up ‘in character’ as one of the Hard Lads, reasoning that the Lads regularly made hurtful comments about Thomas Dolby and the Thompson Twins, so now they would feel the sting of my satire sword.
I messed up my hair to make it as birds’ nesty as possible, used safety pins to turn my school trousers into drainpipes and, in order to approximate the pointy winkle-picker style of footwear that many of the Hard Lads favoured, I taped long black paper cones to both of my shoes.
Then I set my Sanyo tape player on the teacher’s desk and pressed play. I had borrowed my friend Patrick’s cassette of Machine Gun Etiquette by The Damned, and as ‘Love Song’ played I delivered my talk about how the length of my winkle-pickers was making it hard to manoeuvre in tight spaces, how a family of mice were living in my hair and how I liked whatever music John Peel told me to like.
In stand-up gig terms, I CRUSHED, but with no high-ranking members of the Lads in the room, the stakes were low. Also, Machine Gun Etiquette was probably the kind of album the Lads had grown out of, but I had recently fallen in love with it and just wanted people to hear how good ‘Love Song’ was, or ‘I Just Can’t Be Happy Today’, or the tumbling, disintegrating, reintegrating and exploding ‘Anti-Pope’, a song that has supercharged many happy moments since I stood there with my paper winkle-pickers, taking the piss out of a gang that part of me wished I could join.
Dune
The 20th of December 1984 was Joe’s sixteenth birthday and we celebrated in style, taking the Northern Line up to the Empire Leicester Square to see David Lynch’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi novel Dune.
On the Tube Joe filled me in on the industry gossip about the film, gleaned from his many movie mags. In those days most ordinary people didn’t know all that much about films, other than who was in them and maybe who had directed them, but as we discovered in the Nineties when Quentin Tarantino became a household name, the previous decade had incubated a new breed of film nerd, able to get enthused as much by mainstream shlock as by foreign classics and extreme left-field weirdness.
Joe’s shoulder bag might contain not only the latest issue of Hollywood industry mag Variety, but also the horror-and-splatter magazine Fangoria, as well as high-brow French film digest Cahiers du Cinéma, which J-Corn would refer to now and then in a comedy French accent intended to cover up the fact that he actually did consider himself a deep-level cineaste.
Joe’s pre-screening briefings were often better than the film itself, and Dune was no exception.
The scuttlebutt was bad. Clashes over editing. Confusing story. Shit special effects. Sting. Lynch was so unhappy with the studio’s interference that some versions of the film (there were several floating around) were credited to Alan Smithee, which Joe explained was the name they use ‘for films that are so shit, no one wants the director credit’. But it’s David Lynch, we reasoned. How bad could it really be?
It turned out the answer was: quite bad. Scene after scene featured a succession of queasy-looking actors reciting daft names in big rooms, interspersed with blue-screen effects that looked as if someone had put them together on a phone app in 2007 and faxed them back to 1984.
Nevertheless, there were a handful of Lynchy moments that managed to break through the cobblers and linger disturbingly in the memory, especially the scenes featuring the grotesque Baron Harkonnen. Apart from the Baron’s own antics, which included floating over to a young man, removing a plug from his heart and drinking him like a strawberry milkshake, there were the Baron’s cronies: the superbly crazy, giant-eyebrowed Piter De Vries, and the Baron’s doctor, syringing his master’s pustules and reciting, ‘Put the pick in there, Pete. Turn it round real neat.’
After about an hour I looked over at Joe to make an amusing comment about Sting’s pants, only to find Cornballs fast asleep. I reached back into my box of Fruit Pastilles and thought about Christmas, which was only four days away. Exactly one year later, on Joe’s seventeenth birthday, his parents let him have a party at their house in Stockwell, and I spent most of the evening throwing up, having drunk too many vodka and oranges. On balance, I think I preferred the trip to see Dune.
* * *
RAMBLE
In 2013 I watched Jodorowsky’s Dune, a documentary about the efforts of Chilean-French director Alejandro Jodorowsky to bring Dune to the screen nearly a decade before David Lynch did. It’s a great doc about bad timing and missed opportunities that suggests Jodorowsky’s version of Dune might have been visually extraordinary, but probably not much more coherent than Lynch’s effort.
Towards the end of the documentary Jodorowsky talks candidly about the envy he felt on discovering that Lynch, whom he greatly admired, was to be the director that would finally bring Dune to the screen. Jodorowsky then describes seeing Lynch’s version after being dragged to the cinema by his son in an effort to force his father to confront his toxic regret.
The director spent the first few minutes doubled up in his seat with self-reproach, only to find with each passing minute of Lynch’s version that he was feeling lighter and happier, because it was so totally rubbish. By the end of the film Jodorowsky was euphoric, drunk on schadenfreude, which I believe tells you much of what needs to be known about most artists.
* * *
BOWIE ANNUAL
I’d always avoided Bowie’s 1977 album Low because I wasn’t familiar with any of the song titles, but I liked the orange floppy hairdo he had on the cover so I decided to give it a go.
I hated it.
I found the first side harsh and ugly, especially the drums, which sounded like bricks being lobbed into a metal bin. Some songs, like ‘Breaking Glass’, appeared to have been designed to repel the listener by interrupting the boring melody with loud, atonal electronic alert sounds.
Side two of Low didn’t even have proper songs, just long, slow instrumentals, some with faux-operatic warbling in a made-up language. These, I decided, were not just bad, but so rotten and pompous they were quite funny. And yet in those days the mood-altering experience of exploring a new album, even a rotten and pompous one, was enough to keep me coming back.
