by Tracey Thorn
Out there, somewhere, things were happening, and there were people in the world like David Bowie, and Annie Nightingale, and Bruce Springsteen. But not here, not now.
Like so many girls before me, I encountered music partly via older boys, seeing the light of rock and roll refracted through their prism, catching the sound waves that bounced off them. Huw was one, and my brother Keith, ten years older than me, was another. Huw knew about Suicide, and Keith had gritty records by The Faces, but when I made the move from pop and disco into new record buying, I started with the romantic end of punk, energetic love songs rather than shouty slogans: the first Undertones album, Elvis Costello’s My Aim is True, The Cure’s Three Imaginary Boys and Buzzcocks’ Another Music in a Different Kitchen. Along with these, and perhaps slightly out of place, sat Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town, which I bought when it came out in 1978.
I’m not certain how I came to buy that record. Possibly because he’d co-written Patti Smith’s ‘Because the Night’, and she was an early heroine. But also possibly because on the cover was a photo of him wearing a leather jacket, looking just punk enough, and very much like a young Al Pacino. On the whole British punks didn’t look like Al Pacino. And although I was a mixed-up girl who spent days listening to the Raincoats and doing my homework inside the wardrobe, that was only half the time. The other half, in truth, I spent gazing at the cover of Darkness on the Edge of Town, in a way that I never gazed at the cover of My Aim Is True.
I also liked the record inside, despite its exotic otherness. On the surface his songs were all about cars and badlands and mean streets and stuff I knew nothing about, but underneath they were all about desperate yearning and thwarted desire, and at sixteen I was full of both of those. Bruce sounded like he’d listened to Lou Reed, and Spector, and The Shangri-Las’ tumultuous street ballads. And above all he fitted into my instinctive love for the romantic underdog. Emotional lyrics about heroic losers. Songs that reached straight for your heart. I fell a little bit in love with Springsteen, and wondered why you never seemed to meet a Real Boy who looked like that or who’d write passionate songs about you. And maybe even have a car.
And then, of course, there was David Bowie, who entered my life not via an underground record shop, or the NME, but by hearing him on Radio One and seeing him on Top of the Pops, and playing Keith’s copy of Ziggy Stardust, which had been lying around the house since I was a child. He embedded himself in my consciousness primarily as a pop artist, a writer of songs so packed full of hooks you were caught on first listen. I loved the Ziggy album because it was strange and yet familiar, and I could sing along with all of it. In 1978, I went to see The Human League at the Nashville and wrote, ‘Plain Characters were on first, morons chucked glasses and crates at them. Human League were fantastic. There was a lot of trouble though. Thought we were gonna get beaten up. I’m convinced David Bowie walked past me – I nearly died of shock.’ It was the closest I’d ever be to him. But like many people, I felt he was always there.
When he died, the one thing I thought wasn’t emphasised enough in all the tributes and obituaries was the simple fact that none of the art/image/gender stuff would have had as much impact without the tunes, such phenomenal tunes. If you’d never heard Bowie, many descriptions make his work sound arch, cool and detached. But he’d been part of the pre-ironic period of pop, not afraid of sincerity, especially in his singing, and through all the tributes and memories, what became clear was that everyone had some personal recollection that encapsulated his meaning for them. My little story is one I’ve told before, in Bedsit Disco Queen, of the day when I was rehearsing in someone’s bedroom with my first band Stern Bops, and on being asked to sing, replied that I couldn’t do it if they were all looking at me. Instead I got into the wardrobe and, once inside the stuffy darkness, out of sight but clutching my microphone, sang ‘Rebel Rebel’. It was my first ever vocal performance.
How hilarious, you might think, how pitiful even, to sing an anthem to rebelliousness while hiding in a closet. How could you take all the defiance and pride of that song, and undermine it with fear? But the more I think about it, the more I realise that this is exactly how inspirational artists work, and why we need them. They don’t inspire the brave (they’re fine already); they inspire the timid.
I’m thinking again about that idea that art flourishes in an unconducive environment, that suburbia is inspiring, surrounding you with ideas and people to reject. For David Bowie, and the Bromley punks, that’s clearly true, but I don’t know whether or not it applies to me, whether it was a spur or a hindrance, whether it inhibited me as much as it prompted. In different surroundings, maybe I’d have been braver, made more noise, pushed a little further? I was naturally shy, but I was also unconfrontational, with none of the innate courage that allows someone to stroll round a quiet suburb dressed like an alien. Those kinds of people are the trailblazers, the ones who light the way. I loved their look, but I wouldn’t have been able to endure the looks. Although, I didn’t know they were suburban; I just assumed they all lived in Soho, or Chelsea, and that David Bowie had fallen to earth from another planet. If I’d known they all went to school in Bromley, might it have helped?
Still, you don’t copy people you’re inspired by. Quite often you can’t; you wouldn’t know where to start. You can only stare, open-mouthed in wonder. And yet still something happens, you hear a voice telling you something; a little tiny spark is lit. And you treasure that spark, and add it to others that you’re finding elsewhere, gathering them around you like a protective halo. Until you have just enough courage to take that song you love to dance to and sing those words you love to sing. Even from inside a wardrobe.
1978
From the middle of the year onwards, my overwhelming emotion was boredom. Frustration intensified. I talked to a school friend about ‘starting our own music paper’, and wrote that ‘work was incredibly dull. Everyone at that supermarket is getting on my nerves. I AM FED UP.’ Next day: ‘I AM STILL FED UP.’ And the mood continued.
26 August 1978 – ‘Work again. I was bored out of my mind.’
5 September – ‘I was so bored at school today. I’ve realised I hate it.’
7 September – ‘School was a bore today.’
11 September – ‘I was bored today at school.’
20 September – ‘School was really dull today.’
18 November – ‘Work was boring and irritating. I didn’t have anywhere to go so I stayed in and had a bath and got bored and depressed. God, this diary’s getting boring. Can’t be bothered to write any more’ – and the entry finished halfway down the page, which was unusual.
22 November – ‘Went to a careers talk, some bloke from St Albans talking about secretarial courses, very dull indeed.’
The boredom grew, and solidified, like an iceberg, threatening to scupper me. It was both real and fake, partly true and partly a punk pose. In order to counter the tedium, we often turned to booze. There were no age checks or ID issues, and not much concern about drinking and driving. It was a rural/suburban thing, the acceptance that everyone went to the pub, as there was nowhere else to go. Nowadays teens buy their own booze and drink it at home or in the park. But we were a different generation. We didn’t buy cheap supermarket vodka and pre-load in our bedrooms before going out. Instead, we went to the same pubs as all the older people, and no one stopped us or asked us or noticed us.
And we drank note-perfect 1970s drinks, strange, vivid syrupy mixtures: gin with undiluted orange squash, lager with lime cordial, vodka with grenadine, the colour and flavour of the rinse-and-spit mouthwash at the dentist’s.
13 May 1977 – ‘Went round to the off-licence and bought some booze to take to the party tomorrow – 4 bottles of Babycham and 2 bottles of Moussec.’
31 October – At a Halloween disco in Potters Bar, ‘All the booze was free, we were drinking straight Martinis.’
We went on pub crawls around the local villages. On one occasion
I recorded three different pubs in three different villages being visited, ‘ got slightly smashed’ (I was still only fifteen), and the following day: ‘Felt really ill all day at work. Slightly hungover to say the least.’
2 June – At the Two Brewers: ‘Had a few gins and got a little drunk.’
22 August – Again, at a party in Hatfield: ‘Drank about half a bottle Martini and half bottle Cinzano and got pissed out of my mind. Was sick at the party. Came home about 12 and was sick again. Collapsed into bed.’
24 September – And again, at the Hope and Anchor in Welham Green: ‘Everyone bought us loads of drinks, I had about 11 Cinzanos!! We were all really smashed. P looked a bit ill, he had to go outside for a walk.’
There was very little in the way of drugs on offer, but we smoked dope; my first time being another example of evasiveness in my diary:
22 September – ‘Huw is leaving home soon and moving to London. Went back to his house for coffee + !!*!??!!*!’ What that means is that I smoked a joint for the first time, but like the day of the completely blank page, I don’t actually say what had happened or describe it in any way. It had been slightly embarrassing. The joint made me feel sick, and made me burp, but I wasn’t going to write that down.
On another date, I was slightly less evasive, writing, ‘Got absolutely stoned and went back to Huw’s for coffee. He showed me all his art stuff and gave me some photos.’ Mum always misused the word ‘stoned’ to mean ‘drunk’, so I may have thought this was safe enough to write. But this makes me laugh: I drank booze, and occasionally took drugs, but I didn’t drink coffee.
28 May – ‘Went back to Huw’s for coffee. Well, I had orange squash!!’ That strange note of unsophistication continued even when I first got to university. When we’d gather in someone’s student flat for late-night coffee, I’d have a glass of milk, and sometimes they would take the piss out of the way I pronounced milk in my Hatfield accent, with a ‘w’ sound where the ‘l’ should be.
Along with the occasional joint, we took stimulating cough tablets containing ephedrine, or our mothers’ sleeping tablets or tranquillisers. At school on October the 3rd, ‘Had my polio booster. They asked me if I took any tablets or anything (!!*!!) so I just said Piritons. Ho ho.’
24 November – At a party in Brookmans Park, I took speed tablets, ‘didn’t sleep a wink all night’. The next day, ‘ didn’t go to work cos I felt so sick and ill and tired’. None of this could cure the boredom. It took the edge off slightly, but it wasn’t enough. And whatever we drank or took, we’d jump in a car afterwards to get home, and there’d be crashes.
10 August 1977 – ‘JL drove his car into a lamp post – NB and AG were in it – they’re alright though.’
21 November 1979 – ‘Huw crashed his car a few weeks ago – it’s a write-off and he’s got 3 broken ribs.’
One evening in 1978 a group of us went to a disco, then to the pub, and then, ‘on the way home we went to see the crash down Bluebridge Rd’. What perfect suburban entertainment, to go and look at the wreckage as the highlight of a Saturday night. The car had been full of people we knew and had crashed the night before. ‘There were nine people in the car including P and A. It skidded and turned over. A gashed all his leg and P went back to the Waters’s house to clean up etc.’
Nine people in that car. It must have seemed like fun until it wasn’t.
1978
On September the 26th I turned sixteen, still two years away from being legal in pubs. Debbie bought me Patti Smith’s Horses, someone else lent me Lou Reed’s Transformer. ‘I don’t feel any different than when I was 15. Oh well. 16 sounds better though.’
Gigs and sex, gigs and violence.
30 September – It was Ultravox at St Albans City Hall, and I got off with a boy called Steve: ‘We all went outside, me and Steve went behind the Civic. WHT! Really randy. He has got 3 earrings in one ear. They walked us home. Sat in the precinct for a while.’
11 October – I went to see Siouxsie and the Banshees, ‘ Bloke claiming to be from Melody Maker wanted to take my pic. Slapped my bum too.’ I didn’t seem to mind. But on November the 6th, we went to see Buzzcocks and Subway Sect at Hemel Hempstead, and afterwards: ‘Went to the Chinese with Jon and Russell. Got molested by gang of morons. Really frightening. Morons followed us home. Russell cried.’
And through it all I carried on lying to myself via the medium of my diary.
1 December – I went to a disco in St Albans. The boy I’d arranged to meet there ignored me and went off with someone else. ‘I got so depressed cos no one seemed to like me. Everyone had gone off and left me. M came back and cheered me up. He was lovely. Told me he loved me and kissed me. I cheered up. Later on M mauled me (I don’t mind!) The other M kissed me goodbye. Still a bit depressed though.’ The boy who’d ignored me phoned me up next day to apologise, so I met up with him again, but I could tell he wasn’t really interested, and so next day:
3 December – ‘I’ve decided I don’t like him any more. He’s really rather boring. I mean, he’s a nice enough bloke, but nothing outstanding. So that’s that as far as I’m concerned.’ I found out next day he was going to a party with someone else. ‘I’m relieved cos I don’t like him any more, but still a bit narked that he’ll be there.’ This, of course, wasn’t true. I DID like him. Secrets and lies. Secrets and lies.
Anyway, I went to the party, he was there, and so I got off with his friend instead. ‘M got pissed and was thrown out so I stayed outside with him. Had to keep walking round the car park with him to sober him up. D was disapproving cos I was stoned again.’
I can’t tell now, looking back from this distance, whether I was having fun or not. I sound pretty fed up, partly putting on a brave face and partly getting out of my head whenever I could. Which probably was fun, at least some of the time. And there was still Christmas to enjoy. ‘ Got up about 8.30 and opened presents. I got a pair of shoes, Penetration LP, talc, perfume, earrings. Christmas dinner was lovely. Turkey, loads of booze. Watched a bit of The Sound of Music, it was hilarious. Saw Battle for the Planet of the Apes, and Morecambe and Wise. Played cards. Kept eating nearly all day (and drinking!!).’
The year ended with me sitting at home. There was thick snow, Debbie went off to a disco in Brent, ‘I didn’t have anywhere to go so I had to sit at home on New Year’s Eve and watch TV. God, how depressing. Part 2 of The Old Grey Whistle Test with Patti Smith, the Tubes, Vibrators, Blondie, Magazine, Elvis Costello. Said hello to 79 and went to bed.’
I’m not the only person to have grown up stifled and bored in suburbia; it’s almost the law. The diary entries, this monotonous litany of having nothing to do, are a relentless howl of frustrated energy. Brookmans Park was stultifying, frozen in time. In the world at large, things changed a lot during the 1960s and ’70s, but in the heart of the Green Belt nothing seemed to move. Stranded in the past, it wrestled with the present, and hated the future. And there I was, stuck with it.
Now, when I read the history of the place, and look at the statistics, I can see what had happened. The original plan for Brookmans Park was for it to increase ultimately to a population of 7,500, but in fact it never got above 3,530. The population of the parish of North Mymms, which includes Brookmans Park and the neighbouring villages of Welham Green and Bell Bar, had grown steadily for 200 years, then came to a sudden and complete halt. In 1801 the parish population was 838. By 1931 it had grown to 3,015, and by 1951 it was 5,526, and by 1961 – 12,522. And there it stopped. In 1971 the population was still only 12,405, and ten years later, still the same. I was born in 1962, the exact moment when the place stopped growing. From that point there was no building, no expansion, no immigration, no emigration. No change.
The creation of the Green Belt resulted in a pushing up of house prices, and as time went by Brookmans Park became increasingly anachronistic and uncharacteristic. Fifty-nine per cent of the houses now are detached, which is double the national average. Twenty-one per cent of the houses ha
ve 5+ bedrooms, which is FOUR TIMES the national average. The place is an exclusive garden village rather than a suburb, with an older population than England as a whole, and a higher percentage of married couples. A recent survey of residents asked the question ‘Main place of work?’ and the answers, in order, were – 1. Retired. 2. London 3. Home.
One other factor that inhibited the development of Brookmans Park was the presence of its most significant building, and one we all drove past regularly without paying it any attention: the Transmitting Station, which sits on the A1000 between Potters Bar and Hatfield, or the Great North Road as we called it. Built in 1929 it was a ground-breaking twin transmitter, able to broadcast two radio programmes at the same time. Before this, only one programme at a time could be transmitted, and reception was often poor, or non-existent, beyond a radius of about three miles. The Brookmans Park station, ironically, was known as the London station, and was part of a plan to extend coverage across the country, beginning with London and the Home Counties.
The site – set 440 feet above sea level, one of the highest points in Hertfordshire (in the Domesday Reloaded documents, it is described as being ‘the highest point of land between York and Russia’), and only fifteen miles from central London – was bought by the BBC from the Brookmans Park Estate for £10,000, during the slump in housing sales at the end of the 1920s. After the purchase, the BBC then insisted that any further lots sold by the Estate imposed restrictions on the buyer, preventing the use of machinery or apparatus that could interfere with the Broadcasting Station. This covenant, along with the Green Belt restrictions of 1947, further prevented Brookmans Park developing as anything other than a residential village. There could be a wireless shop, and a hairdresser, but no heavy industry.
Given how disparaging I’ve been about the blandness of all the local buildings, it’s also salutary to note that, because of the absence of much in the way of planning restrictions at the time, the designers and builders of the station were allowed to do more or less what they liked. BBC engineer P.P. Eckersley, a key player in the Regional Scheme that extended coverage, wrote in 1941: ‘A high-power wireless station is such a lovely thing. The process is silent, there is no gas or smell or fussy reciprocation, no sound except a purposeful humming. One is conscious of power contained and controlled. I felt that the building should be fitting to performance.’
