by Adam Buxton
Although most of the tracks catered mainly to the Yacht Roxy crowd, ‘Love Is the Drug’, ‘Pyjamarama’ and ‘Virginia Plain’ immediately jumped out as the kind of strange, arty pop that Bowie had encouraged me to appreciate. I also found myself enjoying some of Ferry’s wonky covers, despite (or perhaps thanks to) not being familiar with the originals. I played ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall’ over and over, thought ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ was lovely and ‘These Foolish Things’ was a hoot.
I made sure to bring my cassette of Street Life on the coach that had been hired to take a load of us sixth-formers to a party at our friend Guy Gadney’s house in Cheltenham during summer half-term. I was still pining for Lottie, but she wasn’t going to be at the party and there was an atmosphere of new sexy possibility, so I boarded the coach determined that by the end of the night I would be involved with kissing.
I asked the coach driver if he’d play my Roxy Music cassette and soon we were joining the A40 to the sound of Bryan Ferry warbling, ‘So me and you, just we two, got to search for something new’. By the time ‘These Foolish Things’ came on I had drunk one of six large cans of Foster’s I’d brought with me and was miming to the lyrics along with Patrick and a couple of other pals. Amazingly, a few of the girls laughed and joined in. ‘Wow,’ I thought. ‘I think we might be the coolest, funniest people alive right now! If this coach journey is anything to go by, this is going to be the greatest party of all time, and kissing is definitely on the menu.’
Another can of Foster’s later, I was desperate to urinate, but there was no toilet on the coach and we were on the motorway, so a quick stop wasn’t an option. I’m not someone who can just ignore a full bladder and carry on with my life. All I can think about is when and how the discomfort will end. I asked the driver how much further we had to go and he said about half an hour. I was not going to last half an hour.
Rather than rejoin Patrick and the others at the back of the coach, I found an empty row, took the window seat, leaned forward and began making idle chit-chat with Boring Des McKenzie sat in front. Talking to Des was hard work, but I needed an excuse to lean forward so my long coat would disguise the fact that I was unzipping my flies and positioning myself to access the opening of one of my empty Foster’s cans. As any willy owner who has ever done this knows, it’s a very delicate procedure, fraught with aiming challenges and sharp-metal peril.
When I was confident that receptacle and nozzle were sufficiently well aligned, I began cautiously to proceed with the transfer. Waves of sweet relief washed over me as I tried to look interested in whatever Boring Des McKenzie was burbling on about, but when the can started to grow warm and heavy, my satisfaction turned to anxiety. I knew it must be nearly full, but the transfer was far from complete. I was able to strangle the flow before total catastro-pee, but as we took the exit for Cheltenham, I realised with great sadness that a significant amount of piss had missed the can entirely. There was now a large damp patch on the front of my jeans that would be hard to explain as anything other than a pee-pee accident, and that kind of explaining is low on the list of things you want to do when you’re a teenager hoping to kiss someone at a party.
As the coach pulled up outside Guy’s house, I draped my coat over myself to conceal my shame, then waited for everyone else to get off before I disembarked gingerly, carrying with me the warm beer can filled with my own amber nectar. I poured away the contents beneath the coach, then, determined to find a bathroom in which to deal with the situation ASAP, I made my way into the party.
Inside the bathroom I locked the door, lowered my jeans, sat down on the lavatory, folded several sheets of pink toilet paper and began rubbing away at the wet patch. This succeeded only in creating a collection of tiny pink toilet-paper sausages that I brushed despondently from the damp denim. Feeling the lighter in my jeans pocket, a great idea hit me: why not dry the pee-pee patch using man’s red fire? I would need to apply the heat to the inside of the jean so as to avoid unsightly carbon deposits on the front, and I would need to keep the flame moving so as not to burn a hole, but it should work.
I had begun to take off my jeans when there was a loud knock at the bathroom door. ‘Won’t be long!’ I called out. I had to move fast – there was no time to remove the jeans completely. Still sat on the toilet, I pushed them further down my thighs and spread my knees so as to pull the damp area taut, then clicked a guttering flame into life and carefully introduced it to the inside of the moist denim, but as I did so there was another loud knock and a female voice said, ‘Are you going to be much longer?’ Before I’d had a chance to reply, the hair on my inner thighs caught fire.
Patting out the flames, I hastily hoisted up my pee-pee jeans and flushed the toilet. The bathroom smelt of burnt hair as I threw open the door, making sure not to make eye contact with the girl behind it, and marched as quickly as possible to the darkest corner of the room, only to find it occupied by Boring Des McKenzie. Feeling we had bonded on the coach, Des unveiled his party piece: a recitation of Chapter 1 from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams, which he claimed to have memorised, insisting on starting again every time he made a mistake (which was often). There was no kissing for me that night.
Crosseyed and Painful
As a day boy, Joe was allocated a boarder’s study that he could use as a base during school hours. The lucky boarder who played host to Joe (and everyone else who Joe invited to hang out during so-called ‘private study’ periods) was Paul Dales. A gifted musician and tech enthusiast, Paul always had some classic album playing through his expensive NAD amplifier and asked that visitors refrain from tampering with the configuration of his EQ sliders. We’d seen Tom Cruise’s character Joel in the film Risky Business being asked the same thing by his dad, so being the impressionable arseholes we were, we did exactly what The Cruiser had done and jammed Paul’s equaliser sliders up to the max whenever we got the opportunity. ‘Sometimes you just gotta say what the fuck,’ we said, quoting Risky Business. Paul sighed wearily.
Paul listened to music that I wasn’t yet equipped to appreciate: Weather Report, Herbie Hancock and Miles Davis, as well as stuff that just sounded daft to me: Frank Zappa and early Genesis – full of madly complicated instrumentals played very fast at strange time signatures, occasionally pausing for some unfunny word bollocks. ‘Not nearly as good as the Thompson Twins,’ I thought. Then one day I went to hang out in Paul’s study and he was playing an album that sounded even better than the Thompson Twins.
The songs were sparse and choppy, the singer odd and interesting. He sang in a strained high-pitched voice about his loved ones driving to the building where he worked and suggesting they should park before coming up to see him ‘working, working’. The singer said he would put down what he was doing because his friends were important. The strange formality of the lyrics made me laugh.
I realised this was the same guy who had done a song I remembered from boarding school, a song that had been in the charts when Patrick got angry with me for not caring that John Lennon had been shot: ‘Same as it ever was, same as it ever was,’ it said. I looked at the cover of the cassette Paul was playing and saw that it was called THE NAME OF THIS BAND IS TALKING HEADS. All caps. Mmmm. Pleasing.
Paul let me make a copy of the cassette and I liked it more every time I played it, even though the music was less straightforwardly poppy than most of what I tended to listen to, and despite the fact that it was a live album. I didn’t get the point of live albums. The few that I’d heard always seemed much worse than the original studio recordings, but THE NAME OF THIS BAND … was different. It was tight, sparse and solid, and I was beginning to realise that was how I liked my music (and, yes, my turds, too).
Once I was sure Talking Heads and I were getting on sufficiently well, I started buying their albums, beginning with 77 (that had the ‘working, working’ song on it: ‘Don’t Worry About the Government’), then More Songs About Buildings and Food and Fear of Music. Scanning th
e inlays of those last two, I noticed they had been produced by Brian Eno and I thought I could hear what he added to songs like ‘With Our Love’ and ‘Air’: a weird mood somewhere between exhilaration and menace that I also heard on some of the stuff Eno did with Bowie – on ‘Red Sails’ or ‘Sons of the Silent Age’, for example (my editor’s going to tell me to lose this stuff because it’s too boringly muso. I won’t argue if he does, so if it’s still in it’s his fault).
Paul had put together a few short-lived bands at school. One of them, The Generators, had played in the big main hall (known as ‘Up School’) a couple of years previously, with Joe singing ‘What Presence?!’ by Orange Juice. Paul’s new band had just changed its name from Quadrant to Shady People and it included Patrick on guitar (Joe had quit by then due to creative differences).
I had watched Shady People rehearsing once or twice in the music centre and I’d entertained Paul and Patrick by grabbing a mic and singing Freddie Mercury’s falsetto parts from ‘Under Pressure’. I thought it would be great to be in a band, but learning to play an instrument seemed too much like hard work, so I was pleased when Paul suggested I provide guest vocals for an upcoming gig. I would be singing lead on Shady People’s cover of the Talking Heads track ‘Crosseyed and Painless’. A couple of weeks before the gig, Paul gave me a VHS of their concert film Stop Making Sense and I got to work learning the lyrics.
I bought Remain in Light, the album that has ‘Crosseyed and Painless’ on it, but other than ‘Once in a Lifetime’ (the ‘same as it ever was’ song), I didn’t like it as much as the more conventionally structured songs on their earlier albums. Remain in Light was more like dance music and I wasn’t so keen on dance music. That was the preserve of sexy, unselfconscious people, not little hairy hobbit men. I would have preferred to sing ‘The Big Country’ or ‘Pulled Up’, but ‘Crosseyed and Painless’, being more of a rap, was probably better suited to my limited vocal talents.
By the day of the show I had worked myself up into a dangerous pitch of excited anticipation and mortal terror. When lessons were over I went up to my study and changed into my show clothes: a pair of Chelsea boots I’d borrowed from Patrick, my skinniest black jeans, a blue collarless shirt (with top button done up) and, to cap it all off, a big-shouldered white jacket that I had bought in Camden over the summer. It was intended as a nod to David Byrne’s big square suit from Stop Making Sense, but what it said loudest was, ‘I just stole this from a waiter.’
My poster for the ill-fated 1986 Shady People gig at which I sang guest vocals. Sort of.
Patrick came into my study with a couple of the coolest girls from our year, Lottie’s friend Julia, who was going out with Patrick, and Saskia, who only went out with boys from the year above. The guy in the study next door to mine saw them arriving and looked impressed. I flashed him a look that said, ‘Yup, you’d better believe it,’ and closed my door. Patrick had drafted in the girls to sing backing vocals at the gig, but they were as nervous as I was because they’d heard rumours that high-ranking members of the Lads were planning to come and disrupt the show. Patrick told us not to worry as he was friendly with some of the Lads and, anyway, he had a bottle of wine. We passed it round and within 10 minutes it was empty, whereupon we tottered off to the music centre.
Gigs like these were unusual at the school and the room was packed with curious onlookers from the years below sitting on the floor. I quickly scanned the room and there, leaning against the back wall in a line of statement haircuts and sarcastic grins, were about five core members of the Lads. Shady People started playing their set of unfashionably funky covers and clunky originals and, feeling queasy, I crouched to one side and waited for my guest spot, hands thrust deep into my big white jacket pockets, hoping that no one would snap their fingers and ask me for the bill.
Then I was up, and as I made my way to the microphone a few of the Lads began to chant, ‘Talking Heads! Talking Heads!’ while laughing to make it clear that they did not, in fact, appreciate Talking Heads. I glanced at Patrick. He looked stressed. Paul counted us in and the band started playing a ragged ‘Crosseyed and Painless’ as the Lads laughed and pointed.
In a film, this would be the moment where my character looked around the room as the din of the music and the hoots of derision faded beneath a loud, reverberating heartbeat. Then my character would find something in himself and rise to the occasion, delivering a performance that would leave the Lads nodding with reluctant respect.
But this being reality, it’s the moment I fucked it.
I got through the ‘Facts are simple and facts are straight …’ rap, doing my best to ignore the Lads nodding, stroking their chins and cackling, then I caught Patrick’s eye and with an exchange of cringing glances, we agreed to bail.
Stumbling my way through the audience to the door of the music centre, I looked back briefly to see Paul prodding away funkily at his synth and looking incredulous as he watched us leave. My response was to shrug, then grin at the Lads in spineless solidarity. Out in Yard we laughed. I went up to my study to change out of my waiter’s jacket and we went to the pub. Rock and Roll.
In a long list of shameful behaviour from my Westminster days, that gig and the way we treated Paul is not at the very top, but it’s certainly up there.
Despite the Shady People débâcle, my enthusiasm for anything related to Talking Heads continued to grow, though it took another few years for me to properly appreciate Remain in Light and to stop squirming with regret whenever I heard ‘Crosseyed and Painless’.
America Is Waiting
As an A-level Spanish student I got to attend a three-week course in the Spanish city of Salamanca at the end of the summer holidays in 1986. I didn’t learn much Spanish, but I loved exploring the bars and clubs of Salamanca with a group of friends that included Guy (of the Cheltenham pee-pee-patch party) and Theodora, a student from New York who invited me out to stay at her parents’ place in Bayonne, New Jersey, during the Christmas holidays.
When I arrived in New York, Theodora kindly came to pick me up from JFK airport, but it wasn’t long before we realised that the magical party chemistry we had shared in Spain had remained in Spain. After an awkward couple of days, Theodora mysteriously discovered she had prior family commitments and said regretfully that I had to find other lodgings. So I called Chad.
Chad was an American exchange student who had arrived at Westminster earlier in the year and had quickly become part of our gang. He was like an older brother, more worldly and physically mature than we were. He listened to grown-up music like Led Zeppelin and Little Feat, had a cryptic tattoo on his leg and planned to go into business making cannabis-infused beer. But, best of all, he was funny and American, like Bill Murray.
Chad said I could stay with him at his parents’ place, a brownstone on East 93rd. However, as with Theodora, my friendship with Chad had been forged on neutral territory, and now on his home turf, surrounded by his family and friends, the relationship at first seemed less easy-going.
We went to a drinks party in an uptown apartment block that had marble floors and a doorman. The living room looked like a posh hotel suite and was filled with smart preppy types chatting and drinking champagne.
Graceland by Paul Simon was playing. Chad introduced me to a couple of the less preppy and more approachable people, but I was nervy and looked odd in skinny black jeans, scuffed Chelsea boots and my shabby over-sized black suit jacket. It wasn’t long before I was perched on the arm of a Regency sofa smoking cigarettes on my own, missing Joe and thinking what a wanker Paul Simon was.
The next night we stayed in and had takeaway with Chad’s dad who suggested we rent a film. Chad and his dad wanted to watch something classic, Dirty Harry or Bullitt, but I suggested Dark Star, confidently predicting that they were going to love it. By the time Pinback was battling the inflatable beach-ball alien, Chad’s dad was asleep, Chad was smiling politely and I was feeling out of sync with the world.
Chad was off doin
g other things during the daytime, so I explored New York on my own. Each morning I took the Subway to Brooklyn and spent a few hours tagging and buying rare hip-hop records, then in the afternoon I’d skateboard to a few galleries before getting some food in Chinatown and catching something challenging at the theatre. Oh, hang on … sorry, I was thinking of someone more interesting. What I actually did on every one of the five days I was in New York in 1986 was walk down to Tower Records in Greenwich Village – New York was in the grip of a long crime wave at the time and I decided walking was safer than taking the Subway.
I liked walking around the city, my big overcoat pulled tight around me, stopping now and then to stick another cassette in my Walkman. I listened to Echo and the Bunnymen’s greatest hits album, Strange Days by The Doors, I’m the Man by Joe Jackson, True Stories by Talking Heads and the soundtrack to a film I’d seen recently on TV: Midnight Cowboy. As I walked, I sucked in my cheeks and tried to affect the gaunt inscrutability I admired in David Byrne, but when I caught sight of my reflection in the windows of delis, dry-cleaners and department stores the little fellow peering back at me looked less like the Talking Heads lead singer and more like a plump Ratso Rizzo.
At Tower, I gazed at the giant handmade displays the art department had created for various new acts, then searched in vain for Talking Heads albums I didn’t already own. Looking under ‘B’ for Byrne, I found My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, a collaboration with Brian Eno that I bought and listened to as I trudged back to East 93rd.
It contained what sounded to me like ominous ethnic robot music overlaid with recordings of people chanting, delivering monologues and ranting on radio phone-ins. It was very good, and the following day I bought The Catherine Wheel, an album of music composed by David Byrne for a theatre project by dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp (a name that surely predisposed her to being either a dancer and choreographer or an ornery gold prospector with an idiosyncratic mule). The Catherine Wheel sounded like the midway point between Remain in Light and … Bush of Ghosts, i.e. polyrhythmical, experimentalocious and samplerific.
