Drowning in the Shallow End

by Charlie Mellor

  I was pleased the Bunnymen came across as a little awkward in interviews, less deferential to the music press and not inclined to play the fame game. Their lead singer Ian ‘Mac’ McCulloch, had a big mouth and enjoyed verbally jousting with music critics. He often made himself unpopular by slagging off many of his contemporaries such as Simple Minds and The Cure. As a result of this confrontational and non-compromising stance, not everyone ‘got’ the band. They remained something of an acquired taste. I took particular pleasure from the fact more people hadn’t heard of them, than had. Their musical style – a form of epic melancholy – would go on to shape many of my other musical choices for decades.

  Aside from flicking through the Radio Times in search of Woody Allen films and listening to Bunnymen records; much of my free time was spent looking back at my old life in Ripon. I thought a great deal about my Dad and the times we’d shared; I reflected on the magnificent house we’d all lived in; I even romanticised about my school days. I knew I’d done the right thing ending the unsatisfying affair with Lucy Drew, but sorely missed the company of many of our mutual friends. I also started to wish that I’d taken the trouble to find out more about Pennie Fenton before leaving.

  In an attempt to get me to think more about the future, Mum offered to pay for me to take a short series of driving lessons. As an incentive to pass, it was suggested that if I was successful before my eighteenth birthday, she would buy me an old banger to run about in. How could I say no? Before the year was out I could have the freedom of the road, be nipping back to Ripon whenever I liked and saving the rest of the family a fortune on taxi fares.

  One of Mum’s school colleagues, who’d completed her teacher training in Newcastle alongside rock musician Sting; had recommended her father as a suitable driving instructor. Although close to retirement age, he was regarded as a brilliant tutor - with not one person under his tutelage ever having failed their test. We both agreed he would be the ideal instructor. Mum was impressed by his credentials and I was impressed by his tenuous link to The Police.

  The two of us spent months together. His initial enthusiasm and patience diminished with each fraught encounter. It’s fair to say I didn’t take to driving easily and found the experience stressful from the second I sat behind the wheel, right through to the very last lesson. I developed splitting headaches before every lesson and regularly invented excuses as to why I couldn’t attend. I wasn’t sure why at the time, but the anticipation of driving the humble car absolutely terrified me.

  Every lesson appeared to be as much hard work for him as it was for me. During 1980, I took four driving tests, but wasn’t ready for any of them. Each time I sent the application form to the test centre, it was like submitting a wish list to Santa – an aspirational message which both my instructor and I knew could never be fully achieved. Following the crushing disappointment of hearing that one of his pupils had endured three consecutive ‘fails’ at the hands of various examiners, the once unflappable instructor found himself against the ropes and suggested I might be better off looking for a different driving school. After a two-week cooling down period he recognised he was more humiliated than angry by his first ever failer (and triple failer at that); my instructor graciously informed me that from my third test onwards he wasn’t going to charge me any more money for my lessons. Instead of this being a simple commercial transaction, my inability to pass had now become a matter of professional integrity to him and one way or another he was going to remove ‘the blot on his copy book’. I took the news rather less seriously and was only concerned that we may now miss the deadline for the free second hand car which had been muted.

  Next session he arrived with a brand new Datsun Cherry, which he assured me (aka the blot) would be much easier to control. Amazingly he was right and within a few weeks we both agreed I was ready to send another letter to Santa. Test number four was going to be either make or break. I was getting sick of failing at something I didn’t even want to do and had told myself if I didn’t pass on this attempt; I would stop learning to drive forever.

  The test centre in Harrogate was situated at the bottom of a steep hill. The road approaching it was quite narrow and, as a result, was only one way. We arrived with little time to spare so there were already several cars parked on both sides of the road. Near the top of the hill I found a small opening and in a move which suggested the gods were with me that morning, I effortlessly manoeuvred the car into the confined gap between two other parked vehicles. At the centre reception, I was introduced to my examiner, undertook the reading of the number plate exercise outside and then jumped in the neatly parked and polished Cherry. Still smug from my parallel parking result (and a little disappointed this wouldn’t form part of the evaluation), I totally forgot to heed the explicit advice of my instructor:

  “Remember you must keep your clutch down until you straighten up on the road, because it’s going to be really tight getting out of this space.”

  Instead, fuelled by a profusion of positive omens, I was pumped and ready to get on with it – nothing was going to stop me passing this time. Nothing, it turned out, except for me lifting my foot off the clutch pedal far too soon, which engaged the engine before I’d time to pull out of the impossibly small parking space and straighten up. Hurtling towards the cars parked on the other side of the road, I slammed on the brakes. The instructor who didn’t have a seat belt on at this point (and to be fair, was probably surprised to be even moving), was flung forwards by the sudden jolt, smashed his forehead on the windscreen and had to pick himself up out of the foot well. What a disaster. My fate was surely sealed. Awareness that there was nothing I could do about the inevitable outcome of test number four, helped me to relax. With all the pressure to perform removed I set off like I was applying for the Advanced School of British Motorists. My driving was sublime. While I did receive a cautionary note during the feedback for poor clutch control, there was actually insufficient items to fail me and, miraculously, I passed my test. I’d have to wait longer than expected to feel sufficiently confident to gain any benefit from my new full UK licence holder status, but for now was just pleased to have been awarded it. My long suffering instructor looked equally relieved. His reputation had been tarnished, but not destroyed. Asking if I’d like to drive the car home as a full licence holder I sensibly declined, believing I’d done quite enough driving for a while. I had somehow managed to become a legal road-user, yet remained an unfathomably dreadful driver. As Woody Allen had said in Annie Hall, “Do I drive? Yeah, I got a licence but …I gotta – I gotta problem with driving[3]”.

  This ‘problem’ is a legacy which has plagued me to this day and while I am now more mindful of the responsibilities of driving, it still requires inordinate effort and intense concentration every time I get into a car. The thought of having to drive always makes me feel incredibly tense. Back in 1980 I had still to discover the root cause of this extreme reaction and why I associated cars with a sense of impending danger.

  6. The Primacy Effect

  While I‘d been attempting to satisfy the needs of successive driving examiners, Mum had temporarily plastered over the void in her life by dating a widower called Edward Baxter. Following a subdued eleven week courtship, the two of them announced they were getting married and were planning to live in the South of England. Baxter irritatingly described his home town destination as being situated in ‘Royal – Berkshire’ as if this additional tag would impress us. Royal Berk, I thought to myself. He was a fairly sombre bald bloke, whose defining characteristic was a whopping grey beard which made him look much older than his years. I thought it abnormal the way he smoked Dunhill cigarettes like his life depended on them and disliked the way he seemed to pride himself on his absolute knowledge of many things. Despite my reservations, I did try to give him the benefit of the doubt, pleased that Mum appeared to be a little happier. However it didn’t take long for my sisters and me to conclude that Baxter was an inflexible and excessively controlling man. N
ot in any way an ideal partner for our fragile mother.

  Ignoring the unvoiced concerns of us all, the betrothed couple blithely rushed into their marriage of convenience. This union prompted my sisters to vote with their feet. Flatly refusing to join Mr & Mrs Baxter on other side of the country, Erin and Kirsty leased a tiny one bedroom flat together in Harrogate. With no room at the inn for their brother, and no sign of any spare cash floating around for that elusive second-hand car; I had no choice but to pack my things and travel down south.

  The enforced move did at least provide me with the impetus I needed to return to college and complete my A-levels. Finally recognising I wanted something more, I hung all my hopes on passing a sufficient number of exams to get into university. This lifeline might offer a potential release from the dull ache of Baxter’s house and from the growing number of acrimonious exchanges between the two newlyweds. By working hard and forgetting the situation I found myself in, I believed I could finally gain independence and, if my student grant application was successful, some financial autonomy. I literally couldn’t wait for my exams to begin and was therefore delighted in the spring of 1982 to receive an unconditional offer from a small college in the midlands to study for a degree in social sciences.

  It may well be a truism, but I’ve always found the more you put into something, the more you get out of it. As soon as I stepped out of the taxi and onto the recently tarmacked footpath down to the Nene College campus, I had committed myself to having a full and active student experience. To paraphrase the outrageously upbeat Mari Wilson song from the same year, student life was Just What I Always Wanted. By the time I reached the end of the deceptively long drive and had parked my tatty vinyl suitcase on the steps of the snazzy Central Building, I knew that this was the beginning of something monumental.

  The college was very much a small fish in an Olympic sized higher education pool. Reflecting my inbuilt orientation to ‘aim-low’, I’d deliberately secured a place at one of the tiniest higher education establishments in the country, to study BA Combined Studies - a subject which provided prospective employers with absolutely no indication as to what the three years in academia had all been about. Nene College wasn’t therefore the choice of your average overachiever, as not too many of its alumni ever went into senior government posts, became CEOs of multinational organisations or won prizes for their philanthropic pursuits. As a matter of fact, the only two notable Nene graduates I’ve ever heard about remain just moderately well-known. In a strange twist of fate, both of these former Nene pupils are known for specific achievements which I really do admire. Firstly, Bill Drummond, record producer and one time Echo & the Bunnymen manager and also Andrew Collins, UK broadcaster and Radio Times columnist – coincidently the only band and the only magazine I’ve remained loyal to since my youth. When opting to go to Nene, I was unaware such lofty luminaries had once trodden many of the same concrete steps I was about to stagger over. Indeed, as someone who is able to find symbolic significance in the most inconsequential events, I am glad I didn’t know this at the time, otherwise I may have been even more convinced by the peculiar sensation I’d been harbouring from the second I arrived - namely that fate itself had drawn me to this fine, split-site former teacher training college with new leather sellers training centre added on to it.

  Unaware and therefore undaunted by the calibre of its former students, I approached Nene with a fearless enthusiasm. This was fuelled by fond memories of life at Ripon College; a desire to re-establish myself socially and by a strong sense of relief at having finally departed from the suffocating atmosphere inside Mum’s new house. For what Nene lacked in academic acumen, it more than made up for by being a friendly and welcoming place, one which was as easy to fathom as it was to like. Attending an emergent college which had only a few thousand students meant you instantly felt part of a small community. This was something I’d coveted for years. Unassuming and unassertive, I’d occasionally felt a bit disconnected, so to finally sense I was part of something worthwhile was great. As bewildered and impressionable freshers, we were all in this together – nascent spirits enjoying our first real taste of independence funded by our first pristine student grant cheque. This would be a time of countless inaugural experiences, as we all set sail on a defining adventure, guaranteed to create memories which would reverberate for years to come.

  While many of my contemporaries were using higher education as a way to consolidate what it was they wanted to do; I was still finding out who I was. Nene allowed me to explore the boundaries of acceptable behaviour. It was an unbridled time, one without restriction or limitation, which provided you with the space to find your own balance. As a full time student you could drink to excess, swear without reprisal, mismanage your own finances, form a band, dye your hair, pierce your body, shave your head, dress in whatever you liked and whatever you didn’t. For a while I was unremitting in the pursuit of hedonistic activity, but never lost focus of the reason I’d applied: I was thankful to be in higher education and wanted to get as good a degree as I could. As a result, I invested as much energy in my academic endeavours as I did in the activities which could undermine these scholarly goals.

  Two short days into the thrill of independence, I joined a couple of lads from our hall of residence who’d decided to celebrate their new found liberation from the shackles of parental ties by undressing in the middle of the perfectly presented central lawn and streaking around the college grounds. My limited athletic ability meant that not only was I at the back of the line of gangly white bodies darting self-consciously between the relative cover of the teaching blocks; but also the only person unable to run fast enough to avoid our principal who had spotted our unique interpretation of The Fresher’s Parade. The man who in three years would be responsible for authorising our degrees had just stepped out of an important fundraising event in the main building, flanked by a number of startled benefactors. Unimpressed by our merry jape, he hollered at the top of his voice for us all to stop or face immediate disciplinary action. With nowhere to run to and no energy to run with, I was the single streaker foolish enough to comply with this unambiguous instruction. As I stood with cupped hands barely covering my bantam bashfulness, our honourable principal was at a loss how to deal with the defenceless mite in front of him. Buying time, he waggled his most admonishing finger, for much longer than either of us felt appropriate and then demanded I knuckle down and focus forthwith on my academic studies.

  Any repeat of this lewd incident and I would be ejected from the college, “In a flash, young man. In a flash.”

  Skulking off with my head held low and genitals even lower, I returned to the halls and explained to my now fully-dressed accomplices what had happened. Obviously everyone found it hilarious and I was immediately re-christened ‘Flash’, a moniker which would hang heavily for the rest of my days at college. The person most impressed by my new ‘bare-faced rebel’ status was a lad called Billy Farrell. He lived in the room opposite, but up until this time hadn’t spoken a word to anyone. Offering an olive branch to cover my shame, he unexpectedly knocked on my door to introduce himself.

  “Ey, I hear you were caught out by The Suits today,” he said in a rich Scouse drawl. “Don’t let those overpaid bastards get you down mate; at least everyone now knows who you are. I reckon your new name is dead funny. Reminds me of that Queen song – Flash, ahh-ahh you know, from Flash Gordon?”

  “More like Flesh, ahh-ahh, from the dodgy porno flick, Flesh Gordon,” I replied, delighted with the play on words

  “Ha ha, deffo – you know, I once saw that film at mi cousin’s flat. Best part of it was that doctor - what was he called – Flexi… Flexi Jerkoff? You should thank your lucky stars you weren’t given his name – or you really would be in trouble!”

  It turned out Billy was a thoroughly decent bloke who was studying many of the same subjects as me. Within weeks, the two of us became the best of drinking buddies. Brought up in a rough part of Liverpool, he was imp
ossible to miss because of his trademark long curly platinum-blond hair, which resulted in him often being mistaken for a girl from the back. He was a very funny guy, but was perhaps too anarchic for many of our middle class peers. As the student who hated students, he joined the college socialist society on the day he arrived and quickly aligned himself to many of its more radical left wing causes. Billy was obsessed with Karl Marx and frequently quoted entire passages from Das Kapital. He posted political flyers in the kitchen about the miners’ strike, encouraged us to attend national rallies to demonstrate against education cuts and watch any programme which featured left wing entertainers such as Alexi Sayle. He was the most unlikely looking political agitator in the world with his baby face, golden locks and juvenile complexion. Although he had a blatant antipathy for many of our more affluent hall-mates, comrade Billy usually managed to get away with his extremist rantings because everyone recognised that he was quite a vulnerable person. Trips into Northampton with the androgynous leftie were always an event, as he’d insist on wearing his ‘town outfit’ which comprised of a shiny red satin jacket, skin-tight drainpipe trousers and patent leather winkle pickers. We must have looked more like a couple out on a date, rather than two lads in search of the next watering hole.

  As our birthdays were only a day apart, friends had organised a joint celebration in the middle of the autumn term. A number of late night drunken discussions had already revealed that Billy had been through a tough time growing up, and wasn’t the sort to buy (or expect) any presents. Because of this we all made even more of an effort. Remembering he was a fan of flamboyant US super-groups, I ordered a limited edition Journey tee-shirt for him, but was then blown away to discover he’d bought me a twelve-inch edition of Love Will Tear Us Apart by Joy Division. It was a rare recording which I’d scoured every record fair to try and get hold of. On the night of the birthday bash, Billy proudly donned his new Journey garment and watched from the bar as I attempted to replicate Ian Curtis’s angular dance in the centre of the room. We both got spectacularly pissed and spent most of the party insisting the DJ play Joy Division over and over again. Unfortunately for us, this classic record turned out to have quite a prophetic message, as love would indeed tear us apart over the next few months.