That Close

by Suggs

  THE WHO, CAMDEN, CLOTHES AND PUNK

  I arrived back in London from Wales in 1972. The original skinhead thing had mutated into the suedehead look, the hair had got a bit longer and Crombie coats with red hankies and Solatio shoes, loafers with a kind of basket-weave upper were all the go. At the football the boot-boy look was on the rise, feathered haircuts, à la Bowie/Faces, Levi jackets with the sleeves rolled up, and half-mast baggy trousers and DMs, gangs going round in Clockwork Orange gear. Scarves were worn round the wrist or through the belt loop. Proto-glam rock had come over the horizon; Bowie, T-Rex, Slade, Roxy Music, Cockney Rebel.

  In the mid-seventies The Who brought out the album Quadrophenia. I loved it. It followed the story of a West London mod heading for Brighton and eventually doing himself in. The songs were full of all sorts of teenage angst, which I could identify with. It had a gatefold sleeve and inside a booklet of photos of a mod in his Levi 501s and his highly decorated scooter, knocking about the streets of London with his tasty mates. I thought it was a great look.

  I found a Lambretta Li 150 in Exchange & Mart for forty quid in New Cross and bought it from a woman who lived on a council estate. It was cream with royal-blue side panels. I’d never seen anything quite so beautiful. I think it had belonged to her son.

  I worked out how to kick-start it, and it started fine. I’d never ridden one before, and you didn’t need a helmet in them days. I rode it back north on pure instinct, kangaroo-leaping up and down the back streets of South London in first and second gear, with no idea where I was going, until I hit the river, but I got it home.

  In the summer of 1976 The Who played at Charlton football ground and we all went down to see them. I was fifteen, and it was my first gig. We all piled off the train and headed to the ground. When we got there we found out it was two quid to get in, and we only had about 50p between the lot of us. The security were out in force. Gangs of chaps had already been repelled from steaming through the gates; the place was buzzing. The streets were swarming. There was absolutely no way of sneaking through the main gate. We wandered off, out of sight of the security round the entrance.

  The wall around the ground wasn’t actually that high. Probably about seven foot-odd. It looked like with a running jump it might be possible to scramble up, and hopefully over. Some way down the road I had a go.

  Yes! I got some decent purchase on the top of the wall, but just as I was pulling myself up, scrabbling away with my legs, a spanner whanged in the space between my hands. Shit, I let go and dropped back down. The security had manned the wall on the other side and were whacking encroaching fingers with a variety of metal objects. We tried again a bit further down, with the same result. Just before we were about to give up, some way down the wall we spotted a kid clambering up and over, and successfully disappearing into the ground.

  Well, they couldn’t man the whole wall, maybe they’d given up down there. We jogged up to the spot. I jumped up and hung on, no spanner, fingers intact. I scrambled over only to find myself going head-first into a urinal, it was an open-air toilet block.

  I just missed a big fella having a piss as I rolled down onto the floor. A couple of the others followed me over in quick succession. The three of us had barely made it to our feet when four security guards clutching a variety of weapons burst in. I jumped up and in one movement turned towards the urinal, making out I was having a piss. ‘Right, you lot, out!’

  The big fella I nearly knocked over turned and said: ‘Fuck off, they’re with me.’ What a gent. We were in. (If I ever see Roger Daltrey I will repay the two quid.)

  It wasn’t like the festivals of today – food concessions from around the world, showers, portable lavs – it was mostly blokes. Blokes who’d brought their own beer. Watney’s Party Fives and Sevens. Tins that held five or seven pints, and they were proper tins, like giant baked-bean tins. The atmosphere was tense and fights were going off all over the place. What security there was were preoccupied with trying to stop people bunking into the ground from outside its perimeter.

  First up was The Sensational Alex Harvey Band, and sensational they most assuredly were. Alex Harvey burst through a giant brick wall, dressed as a rocker in leather hat and jacket, and sang ‘Framed’.

  We were standing next to a big gang of geezers, including our mate from the bog, who were all wearing blue and white striped shirts and swigging away on their giant tins. Alex threw his hat and jacket into the crowd to reveal a blue and white striped shirt. Our new mates went mad. One of them launched an empty Party Five into the air, and it seemed to fly for ever before a terrible clang cut through the music. That would have hurt.

  Alex Harvey was brilliant, from his peculiar take on ‘Delilah’ and the incredible ‘Faith Healer’ to his dramatic version of Jacques Brel’s ‘Next’. It was an extraordinary show. Another band came and went before the main act – I think it may have been Little Feat. The drummer bounced his sticks off the drums and into the crowd.

  It was dark as the synthesised pulse of ‘Baba O’Riley’ began ringing round the stadium. Not only was it my first-ever gig, but I was about to witness the world’s first laser show. An announcement had been made, warning us not to get the laser in our eyes.

  As Pete Townshend’s first earth-shattering chords rang out, a single green beam shone from the top of the stage and bounced off mirrors attached to the top of the floodlights. A lone hippy was cheered as he clambered up the stanchion, followed by three security men, towards the laser beams to burn himself a third eye.

  The ’oo were great and Quadrophenia became album of the month at school. I don’t know if it was because of the pictures of the mod on the inner sleeve exactly, or a documentary on mercenaries in Angola that had been on the box, no one can remember, but one lunchtime a few of us went up to a barber’s in Kilburn High Road and got our hair cropped. I remember straight after I went into an Oxfam shop and nicked a pair of straight white trousers and a stripy Ben Sherman shirt.

  It was easy, you just took a load of gear into the changing room and put what you wanted under your own clothes and bowled out. In the middle seventies second-hand clothes shops still had a lot of great gear from those days, what they now call vintage, even antique. Over the next couple of years our little gang got more and more immersed in the gear and music of the sixties. You had to have some bollocks to bowl about in that sort of gear in the mid-seventies. Me and Chalky began to collect old ska and reggae records. We’d write ‘S+G’ on the labels and had an agreement that the first person to get their own pad would inherit our collection. It was me, and every now and then at home when I pull out one of them old 45s with our initials on, it takes me straight back.

  NAUGHTY BOYS

  My new school, Quintin Kynaston Comprehensive, was an amalgam of the local secondary and grammar schools, a huge social experiment. And a huge sprawling place, made up of two glass-clad mini-tower blocks now connected by covered walkways. It was so big you were allowed ten minutes to get between some classes. Ten minutes in which anything could, and often did, happen. You ran the gauntlet every afternoon in that walkway – 1,700 boys from the roughest estates from Kilburn, Maida Vale, north-west London and beyond. We were all squashed into a multi-storey greenhouse which hot-housed trouble.

  It was what they were calling ‘progressive’ and it took the excluded kids from the whole area, so there were some real cases. To get expelled from Quintin I think you actually had to be certifiably insane.

  So there I am, halfway through the first term in 1972 with a slightly Welsh accent and a grammer school blazer. Neither of which lasted very long. During my time in rural Wales my harsh cockney tones had softened, as had the colour of my vocabulary. I’d lost the swing of the quick-fire sarcasm, the machine-gun pace of insult, and the ever-changing slang of a huge cosmopolitan London comprehensive. But it wasn’t long before I was soon back in the swing, fast-tracking my re-uneducation by hanging around with the wrong crowd. Hanging round with the lot I did was also a form o
f self-protection.

  Comprehensive Quintin’s certainly was, especially where language was concerned. Kids of every ability from the top to the very bottom. Every cultural background: West Indian, African, Pakistani, Indian, Chinese, Greek, Turkish and, given the school’s proximity to Kilburn, a huge proportion of second-generation Irish. But only one, yours truly, with a Scottish name and a slightly Welsh accent, which he was gonna lose fast.

  Quintin’s had more than its fair share of tough kids, but I always felt the toughest were the four or five down the front who actually wanted to learn, kids whose parents imagined them becoming professionals – doctors and lawyers. Trying to concentrate was a more than tricky business while doors slammed, fights ensued and kids in balaclavas steamed in, hitting people indiscriminately over the heads with locker doors.

  I met Patrick Brown an old school mate recently, he was doing security at a gig we were doing in Minehead. He was big even back then, and he had brothers; he’d enjoyed his time at school. Not that he didn’t have the odd moment. We were reminiscing, and I recalled a fight between a pupil and the PE teacher. It happened in the gym, which for some reason had windows at ground level, so we were all lying on the ground trying to see what was going on. All we could see were feet flying up and down. It was the days of Bruce Lee and kung fu fighting. It turned out the protagonist was Patrick. The teacher had called him a spear-chucker, Patrick invited him into the gym and as he put it, ‘ironed him out’.

  The headmaster, Mr Phillips, was an amiable/forward-thinking/enlightened/balding man from Manchester. He would patrol the vast boundaries of the school perimeter in the afternoon, hanging out the side door of the school minibus, which was driven by the deputy head, shouting forlornly into a squeaking loudhailer: ‘Get back into schzzzool, I can see you boyzzzzzzzz’, as pockets of kids drained over the school fence and into the surrounding streets.

  It was chaotic at the best of times, anarchy in the UK all right, there was this song on the radio at the time, something about ‘Teacher, leave them kids alone’. At our school I used to think it was more like ‘Kids, leave the poor bloody teachers alone’. We drove the woodwork teacher Mr Pringle so mad he used to chase us round the classroom with a huge metal ruler, like a madman with a machete in the jungle. When we got hold of it and snapped it in the vice, he went berserk. The thing was, his name wasn’t even Mr Pringle – we just called him that to drive him mad. Which it did.

  Our science lab had a brass door handle, and five minutes before class it would be heated by half a dozen Bic lighters so that when the teacher came to open the door – sizzling flesh, etc. Teachers were having nervous breakdowns left, right and centre, and only the really thick-skinned survived. Witless supply teachers would be thrown through the school gates like meat to the lions.

  But the last day of term always took the proverbial Rich Tea biscuit. Even the kids who’d been expelled turned up, often wearing crash helmets and clutching bottles of cider. They came to observe the only true school tradition in this relatively modern establishment, the all-inclusive end-of-term scrap with the slightly posher St George’s down the road.

  We gathered throughout the day under the eaves of the purpose-built loitering area, so favoured by your sixties architect. It was the only day I ever remember seeing a full contingent at school. God knows how, as half of them hadn’t been there for any of the other 364 days of the year. How they even remembered where it was, never mind when the last day of term fell … no mobile phones, no Facebook, no Blackberry messages, hundreds of us all just turned up on instinct. Like some great natural wonder, salmon swimming upriver to spawn, birds migrating east in the winter, or whatever. The last time I took part in this piece of traditional school history, I’d spent the morning in geography watching a film. It was about the production of rubber somewhere in the Commonwealth. It seemed like the most laborious task in the world, really made you wonder why they bothered. Young men were chopping away at rubber trees in the baking heat, cutting grooves that ran the entire length of the trunk.

  About a week later a teaspoon of the white sap would run down the groove into a tin cup tied at the bottom. There was barely enough for a jolly-bag, never mind a mackintosh. It was warm and dark in the classroom and I drifted off. I dreamt I was made of rubber and was bouncing down the road. I woke to see tyres being put on a car on a production line in Birmingham. The lights flickered on and we filed out. It was lunchtime. We trooped over Finchley Road to the grocer’s. The school dinners were diabolical, mince, just mince, every day – a grey sludge of minced meat of some description, the occasional diced carrot and sometimes a topping of either potato or pastry. You’d honestly rather starve than eat that stuff. We were given a lunch token every day, which with any luck you’d sell for a few pence to one of the greedy beggars who actually enjoyed that swill, so’s they could get two helpings.

  Outside the shop Fred Moynihan and his crew were taking the piss out of Frank, one of the school’s glue-sniffers. Frank was swaying wildly from side to side, with a half-puffed crisp packet in one hand, his livid spotty face staring skyward and dribble coming out of the corner of his mouth. It wasn’t a great look.

  ‘What you seeing, Frank?’ Fred leered, laughing. Frank tried to fix his lolling head, his eyes wild and rolling. ‘Wha?’ He couldn’t focus. Fred kicked him. ‘I said, what you seeing, you ugly spotty wally?’

  ‘Wha, man, there’s fuckin’ elephants, tons of ’em, flying.’ Frank was quite obviously hallucinating and didn’t have a clue where he was. Fred kicked him again. ‘Ow.’

  ‘Here, leave him alone, Fred,’ I said. Fred turned to me – he was big, he played rugby. ‘Mind your own business, you flea-bitten tramp.’ Life at Quintin’s was nothing if it not volatile and unpredictable. I went into the shop and ordered my lunch from the set menu of cheese roll and a bottle of milk. We all then converged on the wall of the flats opposite, eating our rolls.

  Pigeons swooped down after the crumbs. One landed at my feet and I squirted some milk at it through my teeth and it flapped off. Fred marched across the street. ‘What you do that for? Poor pigeon never done nothing to you,’ and he punched me. I ducked but he caught me on my forehead. He was wearing a big sovereign ring which left a perfect indentation smack bang in the middle of my forehead, and for the rest of the day I wore Fred’s royal seal.

  A glue-sniffer-hating pigeon-lover – like I say, life at school was volatile and unpredictable. You only had to say the wrong thing at the wrong time to the wrong person to find yourself flat on your arse. Only problem was, you never knew what the wrong or right thing was where psychos were concerned. It was all just part of the rich tapestry of school life. Ironically, some afternoons I’d bunk off only to hang about at Chalky’s school, Hampstead Comprehensive. A slightly less volatile institution.

  As Fred walked away I half-heartedly booted him up the arse. Whoops! He turned round, glared at me, and time stood still before he started lashing out wildly. ‘Fight! Fight!’ The cry went across the street immediately.

  I spent the next twenty minutes dancing round a parking meter, having milk thrown at me by the baying crowd, trying to avoid Fred’s kicks and punches. Fortunately Fred was employing what he thought was the most dangerous weapon in his arsenal, his ‘donkey kick’, which basically involved him turning round and lashing out backwards like a wild horse. This was enormously destructive if the target was static and unsuspecting, what with them rugby player’s legs of his an’ all, but not so effective with an agile one dodging around behind a parking meter. The donkey kicks were slowing but one hit the meter and nearly took the top off. The ground shook. The meaninglessness of these things meant they would fade as quickly as they flared. Fred got bored and drifted off.

  A line of teachers dolefully trudged across the playground heading for the pub. The feedback from Mr Phillips’s loudhailer filled the playground from the top-floor window as he tested the batteries. ‘Testing … Bzzz … tezzzding … one … tzzzz.’ Sending out a sign
al that he knew, we knew, would be received but not understood.

  Football had been banned in the playground, and all we’d been told was that it was something to do with inclusiveness. Me, my mate Terry and some of the others were playing twos up the wall, which involved standing at a predetermined distance and lobbing twopence coins at a wall – the one that landed nearest to the wall took the lot. That and the other lunchtime sport, blowing smoke rings, something we spent hours practising. Legend had it that if you went to the offices of Peter Stuyvesant and managed successfully to blow one smoke ring through another, you’d be given a free supply of fags for life.

  Terry was a bright kid but, like me and the rest of our little gang, bored by a lack of respect for authority that had left us all some way behind academically. One lunchtime, Terry had been sitting with his trilby on in the dinner hall (he was the first to turn up to school in the full Ivy League look) when Mr Phillips came up to him and said, ‘Terry, you’re going to have to take that hat off.’ He said ‘Why, sir? I’m Irish and it’s religious, sir.’ Mr Phillips said, ‘Don’t be stupid, Terry, take the hat off.’ Terry said, ‘Look, sir. Over there there’s a Sikh with a turban on, over there there’s a Rasta with a tam.’ Mr Phillips said, ‘Come to my office after lunch, Terry.’ Terry flicked the peak of his hat and said, ‘Not now blue eyes.’

  The world-weary deputy head broke ranks from the pub pilgrimage and headed our way. Terry dropped his fag and casually stood on the pile of coins. ‘Listen, boys, just a quiet word in your shell-likes.’ He was well meaning, but always sounded like he was rehearsing for a later, more important, conversation. ‘This inter-school thing. It’s got to stop.’