29
An exuberance
It may be possible to do without dancing entirely. Instances have been known of young people passing many, many months successively without being at any ball of any description, and no material injury accrue either to body or mind …
JANE AUSTEN, Emma
It was still early 1977 and I was still fourteen but I had stopped singing in the streets. I didn’t cry in the lavatories or drink till I was sick, and I was no longer interested in lovebites or dance routines. The girls with whom I had shared mirrors, loitered at bus stops and danced in line with were strangers. Our separation was subtle, mutual and absolute; one day we met and simply did not recognise each other.
Tina passed me in the school corridor one afternoon. She came towards me looking like herself but as she went by, I saw her differently. The tough bright shell she used to attract or deflect now seemed constricting. She carried herself like someone with nothing to hide, but her expression was becoming that of her mother, a hurt sneer that said many things but above all, ‘What are you looking at? There’s nothing wrong with me.’ I had hoped to learn from Tina how to be a girl, how to grow up, how to bring my life to life, but now there seemed nothing lively about her.
Her feet wobbled on platform-wedge shoes and her pencil skirt reduced her strut to the trot of an overwound toy. Had our dancing been so full of anger? It now strikes me as despair. The clever ones like Tina were among the brightest girls in the year but they were careful not to show it. None of them talked about going to university or even about leaving home, and no one suggested such things to them either.
If Tina had taken any notice of me, she would have seen a skinny girl in big boots and a torn army jacket covered in scribbled quotations. My hair was a mess, my face undefined. Tina would have thought me scruffy and pretentious, and she’d have been right. I knew that I had let her down, not by defecting so much as by never having measured up in the first place. My father recently told me that he had come across a photo of me at fourteen and had thought to send it to my daughter but something in my face made him decide not to. I know what it was – the desperation and failure showed. It was as if some kid had been given a Teenage Girl kit with a picture of Tina on the box, and I was the botched result.
What happened? There was no revelation, no decision. I had stopped dancing, and would not do so again on a disco floor with a group of girls, all trying to look and move alike. There would be no more giggling and shrieking, and things would cease to be mostly either mortifying or hilarious. It was as if some electrified self had been unplugged along with the disco lights.
I was glad of the rest but another kind of dimming occurred at the same time. When I came back to school that autumn for my O-level year, I would find that I had stopped being able to learn. Part of this was wilful – I played truant and refused to work – but something else had happened, a seizing up or slowing down that coincided with the end of dancing.
Recent neuroscience has shown that in puberty there is a surge of grey matter called an ‘exuberance’, an overload of capacity and possibility which enables us to grasp trigonometry in an afternoon or read a Russian novel in a day. It also makes us want to steal a car or save the world or, in my case, drink, cry, scream, sing and dance. And then there is another surge, but this time of myelin which insulates the brain’s electrical signals, ensuring they stick to the right path and increasing their speed. So we think, and act, less wildly but more clearly.
When Cara came back to school, she too was no longer part of the disco gang. Her overdose would have been too much for Tina, too unseemly. Cara’s boyfriend, who was Tina’s cousin, was worried and attentive but could not reach her and drifted away. We were at the end of our exuberance.
While I have no memory of throwing out my high heels and hairspray, I do remember the thoroughness with which I was soon to set about getting rid of my disco and soul records. There were a few I couldn’t bear to throw out so I hid them at the back of a cupboard, with real fear of their being found. I had an extreme but abstract fear of exposure – just like Tina. In my case, it was not about what I looked like but what I listened to. If someone found Marvin Gaye or the Chi-Lites in my room they would discover something terrible about me. But what? And what was I going to listen to now?
30
The white room (2)
Let the unmelting snow
Lie on black fields forever …
OSIP MANDELSTAM, ‘The Staff’
It was a small flat above a shop but the living room – entirely white with a deep white carpet – seemed vast. I remember no details, no chairs or pictures or windows, just this whiteness and softness, and a stereo of such power and clarity that I felt as if the music I listened to at home must be a shrivelled version of itself. Here, that music was lushly rehydrated. We four, two boys and two girls, each sat against a separate wall, relaxed and apart, not drinking but sharing a joint, and I realised that I was in a room with boys and music but nothing was meant to happen.*
Nick played soul – songs I listened to while dancing, flirting, crying, studying or putting on make-up. Even when I was doing nothing I was still not really listening, still thinking about something else. As a rule of thumb, rock was for boys and disco was for girls but soul was a place we might meet. America was still far away and English soul was like English jazz or disco, unconvincing. Soul was Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Eddie Floyd, Teddy Pendergrass, Wilson Pickett, Percy Sledge. In England, these would be the names of priests, gardeners, farmers, teachers and grandparents, but coming from America wiped them of association. What these people looked like, how old they were, their names, meant nothing. Soul was about voice and authenticity, and to us these were real singers and this real music, a serious pleasure.
I was already serious about music, by which I mean I did not have to think about whether or not to listen to it. It was part of the day’s machine. Despite this, at fourteen I had rarely concentrated as I did that night in the white room over the shop, for once not using music in order to feel things. The song I remember from that evening is not in the end Otis Redding or Wilson Pickett, not even real soul, but Earth Wind & Fire’s ‘That’s the Way of the World’, a ballad so shrewdly orchestrated that it can balance one teetering hyperbole on top of another. I am still not tired of listening to it and think this has to do with its expanse. In that room it went on for ever, not in terms of time but space. It filled the white room with space so that I was further and further away from everyone else and deeper into the blank realm of pure happiness. As soon as the music ended and someone spoke, I would have to step back outside.
* Years later, I saw Jim Cartwright’s play, Road, in which two men ask two women back to a flat where they hand out bottles of wine and put on Otis Redding’s ‘Try a Little Tenderness’. The women, the audience, wait for the inevitable moves to be made but nothing happens. The four sit, as we did, apart and in silence.
31
Towards music
The conversation drifted, as it always did, towards music.
JONATHAN COE, The Rotters’ Club
We walked into the English countryside winter’s night because someone had told someone who’d told one of us that in a house at the end of a lane or past a farm or beyond a wood was a party. No one would give us a lift and none of us could drive, so we set out as the crow flies across the fields. In absolute darkness we stumbled over ploughed and frozen earth, slipping from ridge to rut, laughing and falling and calling to one another because we could not see beyond ourselves.
Released from the etiquette of disco, I had relaxed. I stopped giggling, stopped crying and started to pay attention to boys I didn’t find attractive but interesting. As for music, I sat down and started listening. The interesting boys did not sing along, they discussed; or they said nothing but would smile and nod because they knew. They weren’t dancers or footballers and could neither flirt nor drive. None of these boys had cars but they had stereos, record c
ollections, amplifiers and instruments. Their tastes were a mixture of hippy, heavy metal and esoteric, which included a little punk. They dressed quietly, even negligently; what mattered to them was talk. They had never been any good at football or fighting and so communicated through arias from Monty Python and Derek and Clive. Someone only had to mutter an opening phrase and a dozen boys would launch into the Parrot Sketch or the Lumberjack Song. In that dingy school, that dull town, during those endless afternoons, they got laughs every time. They would discover that being clever and funny worked with girls, only it couldn’t yet because they were still bludgeoned by their own chemistry.
We gave up dancing, the boys stopped repeating themselves and everyone calmed down. In those last years of school, we formed an acerbic but tolerant gang. The parties we went to were smaller and the music quieter. People sat around and talked, smoked and listened to Bob Dylan or ‘Stairway to Heaven’.
We talked about Devo, Blondie and the Damned. Punk had taken hold in London and Liverpool. Soon we would start buying the records and going to see the bands but first there was a lull, as if we had to get used to the idea.
Luke had been a fat boy but always cool. He never tried too hard, and was funnier than anyone else. On sunny afternoons, his end of his parents’ bungalow was a fug of smoke and pounding rock. I don’t think he ever drew his curtains – at least I don’t remember a window. His mother would bring us trays of tea and cake as if Luke were entertaining in a front parlour instead of slumped on his bedroom floor rolling joints on the cover of Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti.
Over the next few years Luke and I spent hours in that room. We talked about love and death and the world and other people, but always while listening to music. We were so companionable that each would forget the other was there and behave as if listening alone: I’d sway and sing along while Luke, a drummer, tapped and slapped out rhythms as another boy might play air guitar. (Why did girls never play air guitar? Did we sing along because singing was what girls did or was it that girls only sang because they didn’t play air guitar? These are not questions I asked myself at the time. I was pushing away such complications.)
Luke was passionate about what he liked, scornful of what he didn’t, and open to everything except jazz and soul. I had thought of music as being the same as style: you were a type and you stuck to it. You couldn’t be devoted to heavy metal but also enjoy punk, only Luke did and so we would follow Led Zeppelin with Blondie, and I would relax and admit that I actually liked Joe Cocker’s ‘With a Little Help From My Friends’ live at Woodstock and could we put it on – only it really started to drag and here was The Cars’ ‘My Best Friend’s Girl’ … Luke showed me that loving music didn’t have to mean wanting the same song all the time, or believing it perfect, and that what you loved didn’t have to add up, let alone define you.
Why leave this in order to go to a party? It would be like all parties: a boy lying on the grass next to a pool of vomit, a girl crying on the stairs. The house would be bleary and smoky and too dark because all the candles had burnt down hours ago. Couples would have installed themselves on cushions and sofas, and would writhe ritually in the shadows. There might be boys and girls sitting together talking and listening to music, and while Luke and I were like them, we refused any affinity. We would go straight to the kitchen and requisition whatever bottles or cans we found. We set up in a corner near the stereo and, where we could, took over the music. We liked to sneer at the party and rarely stayed long. When we decided to go we would return to the kitchen, grab another bottle each and begin the walk home.
Why did we search out these parties when all we would do was continue the conversations of his room? Perhaps we had to take our idea of ourselves out into the world, or prove our independence. Had it been worth it? Somehow it had.
32
Twelve copies of the same original
All the candour of youth was there, as well as all youth’s passionate purity. One felt that he had kept himself unspotted from the world.
OSCAR WILDE, The Picture of Dorian Gray
I took for granted that I had a room of my own, and that I could do with it what I wanted. It had a sloping ceiling and two windows at floor level overlooking the village green. People made jokes about being able to see in as they went past on the bus so I went up into the attic, found some darker, heavier curtains and kept them shut.
Most of the time I was at home I spent in my room – listening to music, reading, and either avoiding or interrogating myself. The room filled up with my father’s Russian novels and American poetry, with disco clothes and then jumble-sale clothes, mouldering coffee cups and newspapers. I had a full-length mirror which stood in for the rest of the world. I would dance and sing in front of it, but rarely considered my reflection. I ignored my body as much as I could and concentrated on surfaces. All my attention went into clothes, hair and make-up.
The walls of my room became the place where I asserted myself. In the first year in Essex, when I was eleven, I painted grotesque versions of cartoon animals behind my bed. Cold, I bashed through the plasterboard covering the fireplace to discover there was no longer a hearth. I put up posters of the Bay City Rollers, as did my sister. When we fought, she cut off my favourite Roller’s head. The putting-up and ripping-down of pop stars began to happen more and more frequently as I accelerated through adolescence.
When we were thirteen, Janey had briefly turned me and Cara into fans of Elton John because her father worked for his record label (which I found astounding even though I didn’t really know what a record label was) and so she had all his albums. We didn’t know how to go out and find pop stars and here one was. Her room was covered in pictures of him and then one day in a collective shift and without discussion, we found that we all three had moved on.
‘Elton’s crap.’
‘Yeah.’
‘So why’s he all over your room?’
‘Dunno.’
‘Let’s take him down.’
‘Yeah.’
And we did, pulling and tearing and shredding until we couldn’t see him any more. Her bare walls were shocking. What would she put up next? I don’t know because taking down those posters was the last thing I remember doing in Janey’s room. It was as if tracks had been switched and we would meet less, talk less, move apart.
The official pin-ups of teen magazines were as consistent as eighteenth-century portraiture.* David Essex, David Cassidy, even David Bowie looked pretty much alike from the other side of my room. Their enlarged immobilised faces were like tepid wax or drying plaster. They had a suggestion of life and warmth but the more you looked, the less they looked back. They peered wistfully past you or, if gazing directly into the lens, would lower their head and look up with a doggish gaze. Bands stood around like eighteenth-century families, conscious of their position in the group and not sure what to do with their hands. In some shots they were lined up like football teams, and duly folded their arms and demonstrated inexhaustible grins. They were usually placed in front of a vague pastel background or outdoors among, and sometimes in, trees. We were rarely given them as we wanted to see them – playing music.
After the pin-ups, I became more interested in gravitas. I put up a copy of ‘Desiderata’ (‘Go placidly amid the noise and haste …’) not because I liked what it said but because I liked the smoky late-night design, purple and black with louche flared type. I tried out a poster of one of the album covers drawn by Roger Dean for Yes. I never listened to Yes, but people talked about Roger Dean. My poster was a cartoon of the edge of the world, and returned me to my childhood curiosity about finding myself in such a place.
Punk did not lend itself to pin-ups. If a band posed for a picture, they stuck their tongues out and put their fingers up. The New Musical Express was my source of imagery by then, and it was monochrome newsprint. I started cutting things out and glueing them on to a wall, making a collage. Bands were disarranged, the unknown and the famous indistinguishable. I ha
d no names for most of those I included. The wall was a random collection of images thrown together and allowed to expand until it filled up the available space, somewhat like the music.
The last posters I put up, just a few months before I left home, came with the second Pop Group album, For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder? They featured images of famine, torture and murder alongside such statements as ‘Nixon and Kissinger should be tried for war crimes’ and ‘Just heard that President Carter is threatening military intervention. American aircraft carriers are heading for Iran.’ There were details of British police brutality on one side and Abba and the Beatles on the other, captioned ‘Escapism is not freedom’. If I had liked the record more, I might have taken more notice of what the posters said.
* ‘At a distance one would take a dozen of their portraits for twelve copies of the same original … they all have the same neck, the same arms, the same colouring and the same attitude’ – J. B. le Blanc, Letters on the English and French Nations, 1747.
33
Silver Jubilee
Here, where the Sommer is so little seene …
SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT, ‘To the Queene, entertain’d at night by the Countesse of Anglesey’
In June 1977, the Queen celebrated twenty-five years on the throne and I was arguing with my mother about the Union Jack. The village was going to have a street party right outside our house and in doing her bit, she wanted to hang flags from the windows: not sandcastle pennants but duvet covers. I was mortified, but as she actively disapproved of embarrassment she didn’t listen until I came up with this: ‘It’s fascist. It belongs to the National Front now.’ This surprised and interested her. The duvet covers were hung, I went out for the day but she listened thoughtfully to my news.
The Importance of Music to Girls Page 9
