The father I adored was disintegrating in front of my eyes, but he was still conscious, still my dad: urged on by him, I threw myself into my schoolwork and the 11 plus exam, which for some reason was now especially important to him. If I’d known what would happen as the result of my efforts I would have spent more time doing the things I loved - fishing in the harbour, looking for the reptiles, amphibians and insects which have always fascinated me, playing football and chess with my friends - and less time trying to be the cleverest kid in the county. But I didn’t know, and I put my heart and soul into it for him. One day I was told that my 11 plus results were among the very best in Sussex and I had won a West Sussex County Council scholarship to this mysterious hospital. A few days later it was my father who was taken into hospital, and his condition deteriorated further, to the point where I wasn’t allowed to go and visit him any more: ridiculous, given what I had seen already. On June 26, 1968, our primary school sports day, he died, aged 69. The autopsy revealed a massive brain tumour.
‘It was Poppy’s dying wish, John. He was so happy when he heard you’d won the scholarship. You’ve got to go. It’s a wonderful opportunity, the kind your father and I couldn’t even have dreamed about…’
‘But Mum, I want to stay here with you, and go down the road to school with my friends! I don’t want to go to hospital!’
Mum didn’t want me to go either - it was the last thing in the world she wanted, or so she told me years later. I wish she’d done so at the time! I didn’t need anyone’s charity, or special treatment because I was academically bright. I just wanted to be a normal kid, moving up to secondary school with my friends from my local primary. But my parents were incredibly aspirational, as so many intelligent people from working-class backgrounds were in that generation, and in any case it was her beloved husband’s final wish. If ‘respected’ people ‘in authority’ said something was good, and that their much-loved son would benefit from it, that was that. So off we went to an open day, the week after my father’s funeral. Hospital (full name Christ’s Hospital) was a huge, strange, forbidding estate, twenty miles from home, populated by boys in ridiculous frocks. In the quadrangle, as I later found it was called, there was a pond. I saw a frog and, for a moment, the familiar excitement of the chase took the pain and fear away, but it soon returned.
‘That boy looks very sad’ said another prospective victim’s mother.
‘His father died two weeks ago’ said my mum.
That September, still aged ten, I started as a boarder there: a charitable educational institution in West Sussex set up by the rich to educate the bright sons of the ‘deserving poor’ (how kind!) with my education paid for by a scholarship. I can still remember the day my mother left me there, tears streaming down both our faces. I was obviously still devastated by my father’s death, and by what I had seen happen to him as he was dying, and I was desperate to stay at home in familiar surroundings: this new school was even more alien and unsuitable than I could have imagined. Stupid clothes and traditions, quasi-militaristic conformity, bullying - and despite the reputation which had so dazzled my primary school headmaster, some of the education on offer in my early years there seemed to me to be astonishingly bad. Far too many teachers seemed incompetent timeservers in comparison with the ones I had had at primary school and, even worse, there was a paedophile scandal (a teacher ‘left’ while I was there). I got the impression that quite a few of them would not have lasted five minutes at my local school. I remember being taught English, my favourite subject, by rote.
Most pupils started off there like awestruck little fish out of water. Nearly all of above average intelligence, the majority from London, most from low income and/or single parent backgrounds as mine had become, a few from places like Barnardo’s, a few very damaged indeed. That did very much seem to be the school’s raison d’etre, at least when I was there - to take kids from families in difficult circumstances and try to turn them into grateful conformist Tories. Most seemed to wallow in the narrative about the ‘great opportunity’ which they had been given. Very early on, we were asked to write an English essay about our first impressions: most wrote sycophantic paeans of praise. I poured out my loathing, my homesickness and my contempt. Everyone was shocked. ‘Don’t you realise how fortunate you are…?’
No, I didn’t. Still grieving for my father, dragged away from my mother, my home, my friends, the sea I loved to fish in and my beloved Brighton & Hove Albion FC. Stuck in a ludicrous uniform. Taught by rote. And, the ultimate insult – on the grounds that I had curly hair (yes, I had hair once, a long, long time ago!) the bullies tried to have a go, led by a particularly obnoxious individual, bigger and older than me. ‘Basil Brush! Basil Brush!’ One day I crept up and hit him as hard as I could. That was that: end of bullying. The pain, the homesickness, the sadness turned to bloody-minded determination: I vowed to myself that no-one, anywhere, under any circumstances, would ever push me around again. And no-one has done, from that day to this.
In honour of my late father’s wishes I was there for over six years. My older self has sometimes reproached my ten/eleven/twelve year old one for having accepted the received wisdoms of my parents and primary school teachers that I had won some kind of incredibly sought after academic ‘prize’ of which I should be proud, for not having simply said ‘No, Mum, I hate it here!’ and refused to go back rather than sticking it out. But I was stubborn, then as now, and my stubbornness manifested itself in stroppy unhappiness – which, once I was a few years older, turned to defiance. I discovered rock music: Marc Bolan and T. Rex (still my second favourite band of all time after The Clash) Mott The Hoople, Bowie, The Velvet Underground and John Cale, to name but a few. And my friend John Lashbrooke and I discovered alcohol. Anything strong and cheap: Gold Label barley wine, VP sherry, the unspeakable ClanDew mix of awful cheap wine and awful cheap whisky, home brew drunk long before it was ready, you name it. No real ale fussiness in those days! Having had violin lessons since primary school I gave them up, to everyone’s horror, and taught myself to play the bass guitar.
Then in my last couple of years there I finally got two really good teachers, Peter Farrar and Tom Jeffers, who not only cemented and developed my instinctive interest in foreign languages but in Peter’s case took me under his wing, becoming a father figure of sorts and helping me to sort out the alienation and frustration I was feeling. I’m still in touch with him today: thanks Peter. And thanks John, too. You helped me a lot. See you soon for some decent beer - no more ClanDew!
But overall the experience was completely wrong for me. Not long ago I was contacted and asked if I would submit something for an exhibition about former pupils ‘now working in the arts’. I told them that everything I have ever done in my life is despite, not because of, my time there. I am aware that things have moved on in terms of the way the place is run (there are girls there for a start) and that most of the kids who go there are still from poor backgrounds and many benefit from the experience. Personally, however, I don’t believe that ‘charity’ based on ‘intelligence’ or ‘need’ is any more of a justification for selective education than parental wealth: I don’t believe in selective education, full stop. They say that school days are the happiest days of your life – well, I guess it’s a testimony both to the nature of my schooldays, and to the happy and fulfilling life I have led since I left, that my first few years at Christ’s Hospital were definitely by far the unhappiest time of mine.
During the short and victorious miners’ strike of 1972 (three day week, power cuts - some readers will be old enough to remember!) I was sure their cause was right. Hearing that pompous git Ted Heath and his upper class cronies whining about the miners ‘holding the country to ransom’ made me very angry. The Tory government sounded just like the kind of mean spirited, authoritarian conformists I was up against at school, and I knew that miners were people who did a very dangerous job, earned low pay, and produced the fuel which was the cornerstone of our daily lives. Giv
en that my mum and I had very little money - just her widow’s pension - I was naturally on the side of the underdog in any case, and roughly at the same time as the miners’ strike there was a terrible murder in a deprived area of Brighton that brought about my earliest attempts to write a directly political poem. Some time not long afterwards I resolved to make my first radical contacts, and wandering down Gloucester Road in Brighton one day in my school holidays, I came across something that proclaimed itself in large letters to be ‘The Brighton Workers’ Bookstore’.
I went inside, and sure enough, there were loads of books. Books by Karl Marx (I’d heard of him!) Lenin (him too) Stalin (him too, but wasn’t he supposed to be a bit nasty?) Mao (ah, the Little Red Book, I knew about that) and some bloke called Enver Hoxha (who?) A large pamphlet proudly proclaimed ‘Albania – The Only Socialist Country In Europe!’ I’d never heard of Albania, and certainly wasn’t aware that it was in Europe. I knew a song called ‘The Misty Coast of Albany’ by Tyrannosaurus Rex, but given Marc Bolan’s hippy-bollocks lyrical bent I doubted very much that there was any likelihood of a connection with revolutionary Marxism. Characteristically, even at that early age, I took the bull by the horns. ‘Where’s Albania?’ I asked the bloke in charge. ‘And why is it the only socialist country in Europe? What about Russia and places like that?’
When I walked into that shop I had never heard the word ‘revisionist’ before. By the time I left, some two hours later, clutching a handful of pamphlets and copies of The Worker (Weekly Paper of the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist)) I had heard the word ‘revisionist’ many, many times. More times than I would ever have believed possible. I now knew that Albania stood alone as a beacon of socialism in Europe, and that it was allied to the People’s Republic of China. Even if I still didn’t know where it was. And I knew that the Soviet Union and its allies were revisionists. Even if – despite listening very hard, and concentrating very hard too – I had, if I am honest, still very little idea what ‘revisionist’ meant. But I knew it wasn’t a nice thing to be.
I went home and got out a map. Soon I knew exactly where Albania was. At the age of fourteen and three quarters, I started to read about Comrade Enver Hoxha, how he led the Albanian communist partisans to victory against the Nazis, and about his battles with the Yugoslav revisionist plotters (if you were a revisionist you were always a plotter - it went with the territory). I started listening to Radio Tirana. And I began to understand the importance of efficient tractor production, something that really hadn’t occurred to me before.
At school I distributed some leaflets and jammed on the bass guitar with a few friends, but for the most part I kept my developing political, lyrical and musical ideas to myself: my attempts to communicate them fell mostly on deaf ears. I concentrated on my A levels and then with a leap and a song in my heart (‘Children Of The Revolution’ by T. Rex, to be precise) it was over. By this time my mum had remarried: my stepfather and I didn’t see eye to eye at all and I knew that it was time to get away from home, to find my first proper band and to start to try and change the world.
Although 1975 wasn’t quite 1968 in student radical terms, there were still plenty of options. Most people choose their place of further education by looking at the various prospectuses. I studied newspaper reports of riots, sit-ins and demonstrations and decided to go to the one with the stroppiest, bolshiest, most left wing student population, the one most reviled in the right wing press at the time: Kent University. I worked in a clothing warehouse for a bit (flares, wide lapels and bell bottoms, it was 1975, remember) and then went to Canterbury, just before my 18th birthday. On a full grant, which in those days was easily enough to live on. I know that sounds incredible to anyone under 30 reading this, but it’s true.
For the first time since my father died, I was free.
I loved university. Of course, the ‘student radical’ is a justifiably easy target (less easy now than it was, since it is an endangered species) and I do wonder just how many of the wild-eyed revolutionaries of Kent University circa 1977 are now pillars of their local Conservative Association: I certainly meet very few of my erstwhile fellow activists at political events or gigs these days. But I learnt a lot, very quickly. For the first time I encountered the rigours of serious ideological debate, and soon realised that my hardline pro-Albanian Stalinism put me, erm, rather out on a limb: I took my (ice) pick of the alternatives, did a 180 degree turn and joined the Trots in the Socialist Workers’ Party. If Comrade Enver Hoxha had known about this act of apostasy I would, of course, have been shot, but fortunately his influence didn’t extend to Darwin College bar at Kent Uni. I was studying two of my favourite subjects – politics and French – and, for a while at least, managed to do a reasonable amount of work in between the debates, demos and drinking sessions – and of course the music.
Bizarrely, it was thanks to Comrade Enver that I found my first proper band. The main Kent branch of the Albania-adorers wasn’t based at the university at all, but in my mum’s old hometown of Gravesend, some miles away, and there I met party member Tony Stevens, a really good songwriter who needed a bass player. I leapt at the chance. He and his band were all at least ten years older than me, and his songs were sharp, intelligent and highly political (very unusual then) in a theatrical, mid-Seventies kind of way. When I arrived the band was called Cadre Dorne (a bit oblique unless you were a card carrying activist) and after a bit of discussion it was changed to English Disease - at the time, that’s what industrial disputes were called in the likes of the Daily Telegraph. Pretty soon I was a fully-fledged member (bass, fiddle, mandolin) contributing some musical and lyrical ideas of my own. The fact that it wasn’t ‘a student band’ but was full of grown-ups with proper jobs made me feel really good, and Tony didn’t even throw me out when I announced that I was ditching Comrade Stalin and crossing over to the receiving end of the ice pick, as it were. I felt completely in my element.
And then everything changed.
Punk happened.
People who weren’t born then, and people who were too old to care, won’t understand how we felt. Seventies mullet headed disco kids (‘Look at the state of that!’) and long-haired, kaftan-smothered prog rock fans (‘That’s not proper music – it’s only got three chords…’) didn’t. For me, who had grown up with the likes of T. Rex, Mott The Hoople and the Velvet Underground, punk rock was musically the most logical thing in the world, and lyrically everything I had been waiting for. Like thousands of others, it inspired me, and when I saw Joe Strummer and the Clash for the first time, at London’s Rainbow Theatre on May 9th 1977, my whole world changed - simple as that. Twenty-six years later, shortly after his tragically early death in 2002, I wrote this song in tribute.
Thanks, Joe. I never did meet you: I could have done, many times, but back then I didn’t want to be just another pissed punk burbling admiration in your direction, I preferred to admire from afar. That makes me very sad now.
COMANDANTE JOE
I guess in quite a lot of ways I grew up just like you
A bolshy kid who didn’t think the way they told him to
You kicked over the statues, a roots rock rebel star
Who knew that punk was more than just the sound of a guitar
And I’ll always remember that night at the Rainbow
When you wrote a soundtrack for my life,
Comandante Joe.
So many bands back then were like too many bands today
A bunch of blokes who made a noise with bugger all to say
The Clash were always out in front, you put the rest to shame
Your words were calls to action, your music was a flame
You were our common Dante, and you raised an inferno
And you wrote a soundtrack for my life,
Comandante Joe.
Reggae in the Palais
Midnight till six!
Rockin’ Reds in Brockwell Park!
Sten guns in Knightsbridge!
; Up and down the Westway
In and out the lights!
Clash City Rockers!
Know Your Rights!
I guess in quite a lot of ways I grew up just like you
A bolshy kid who didn’t think the way they told him to
Like you I always knew that words and music held the key
As you did for so many, you showed the way to me.
Although I never met you, I’m so sad to see you go
‘Cos you wrote a soundtrack for my life,
Comandante Joe.
(For Joe Strummer, 1952-2002)
As ever, the university circuit was one of the first places you could see the new punk bands (in the wonderfully exciting ‘get up there and do it’ atmosphere of the early days, a band would form one week, get a record deal and a music press feature a week later and be on tour within the month) and I got on to our Student Union Entertainments Committee at Kent University and helped with the shows.
A very early Damned gig, supporting Eddie & the Hot Rods. 999, with ex Clash drummer Terry Chimes (aka Tory Crimes). The Damned, back again, supported by The Adverts – years later, singer TV Smith would become a great friend. The Stranglers and The Jam, still more or less unknown, promoted by Kent Students’ Union at Canterbury Odeon. One-minute wonders like Tanya Hyde And The Tormentors. The Tom Robinson Band – many times: we followed them round South East England for a while. My mates and I would turn up at their gigs, get rat-arsed, pogo furiously and shout ‘The National Front is a Nazi Front! Smash the National Front!’ over and over again, which really pissed Tom off. ‘Shut up, John! Start your own band!’
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