Easily Distracted

by Steve Coogan

  I went to about three open-air ecumenical services that were held outside the local United Reformed church, in the woods across the road. The local Reformed church, Methodist church and Catholic church would come together for Mass. My dad was very keen on ecumenical services as a way of showing that we might be from different churches, but we’re all friends together.

  My dad is very egalitarian. He made a point of opting out of the private health care that came with his job at IBM. He didn’t think that health care should have anything to do with money – and he’s right.

  In Matthew 6:1, Jesus says: ‘Be careful not to do your acts of righteousness before men, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.’

  Plenty of people in the Catholic Church pay no attention to the Sermon on the Mount. They talk it, but they don’t live it. My parents, like Philomena Lee, mostly live it.

  I wanted to dignify my parents’ simple faith with Philomena. But the Catholic faith is more complicated for me. For a long time I was drawn to the intellectual, left-wing Catholicism favoured by Clare. But when I reached my teens I started to question my faith. I would love to believe in God, but I can’t. I’m not being a nihilist. I just believe we are all mortal. There is no afterlife.

  One of my favourite passages in the Bible is from Genesis 3:19: ‘For you are dust, And to dust you shall return.’

  Being an atheist is OK: I can still appreciate churches.

  As a child, however, it didn’t occur to me to question the existence of God.

  All I thought was that it took a bloody long time to say prayers by our beds each night: ‘Bless Mummy, Daddy, Clare, Martin, David, Kevin, Brendan, my cousins and all my friends. Bless all the people who are sick and dying, all the people who are at war, especially in Vietnam, Cyprus and Northern Ireland …’

  Once I prayed for an Aston Martin at church.

  ‘Dear God, when I grow up, I promise I’ll be really good to people and I’ll try to live a good life, but please, please, in thirty years’ time can I afford to buy an Aston Martin?’

  My mum cites that as the existence of God, because I have a couple of classics now.

  I disagree. God exacts a tsunami on the innocent and gives me two Aston Martins. As divine justice goes, it strikes me as a bit unfair.

  *

  Years later, in 1990, Tony Wilson asked me if I was still Catholic.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘In the Latin American Marxist-affiliated sense.’

  Tony looked at me and said, ‘So am I.’

  Although I no longer believe in God, I will always carry elements of my Catholicism with me. I like the idea of people trying to be decent to each other. I must admit that on some level it’s intellectual posturing because I can be cantankerous, irritable and juvenile. But on a bigger scale, I want to be decent. To be kind, to show compassion.

  *

  I sometimes miss going to church on a Sunday morning and hearing my dad read at Mass. He would go up to the altar in his suit and do two readings before the priest read the Gospel. The readings were done by my father and two or three other pillars of the parish. Good family men leading diligent lives.

  I certainly miss that feeling of Mass ending, when I felt like I’d done my bit for the day. We would go across the road, buy the papers and go home for Sunday lunch. There was a proper structure to my life, the kind that children need to feel secure. Going to church was a ritual that was not only part of a kind of suburban respectability, but also an indelible part of our family life: we all went to church on a Sunday. I would get up every Sunday and do my best to get to 11 a.m. Mass because going to Mass at 6.30 p.m. had the potential to ruin the entire day. I might not have looked forward to Mass, but equally it didn’t occur to me to question my attendance. It was simply the done thing in our parish.

  In 1976, when I was ten, nearly eleven, I started training to be an altar boy with my two primary-school friends, Gerard McBreen, known to all as ‘Ged’, and Brendan Tierney. I was an altar boy until I was sixteen and, for a brief period, I trained young altar boys how to serve. I took my duty pretty seriously, telling them off for wearing trainers instead of regulation black shoes. Everyone knew who I was. I had an identity in the parish as one of the Coogan kids.

  John Richmond, the fashion designer, used to attend my church. He turned up every Sunday looking like David Bowie, accompanied by his mum and dad. He was androgynous, with orange hair, a pierced ear, a leather jacket, red winkle-pickers and studiously sucked-in cheeks. My brother Martin was the same: he turned up at church in a bright red leather biker jacket, crimped hair and mascara.

  It was as if he was saying, ‘I might have to go to church on a Sunday, but I’m an anarchist for the other six days of the week.’

  Martin and John used to go to youth Mass together. Although the organ was replaced by an electric guitar and a synthesiser and the hymns were more up-tempo, it probably wasn’t nearly rebellious enough for them. And yet they both went.

  I was at the end of my time as an altar boy when Jerry Kidd, the singer in an indie band called Red Guitars, got married in the church. They did a John Peel session and had a minor hit with a song called ‘Good Technology’. I’ve still got a photo somewhere of me in my cassock standing next to Jerry.

  A few years later, in 1984, Red Guitars supported The Smiths at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. The Smiths were sublime onstage. So different, in my mind, from what had come before. Very un-American, very dour, bleak and northern but funny at the same time. You can almost hear the overcast Manchester skies in their music.

  I was invited backstage and was stupidly excited at the prospect of meeting Morrissey, who said hello and bought me a drink. I remember being very aware that I was present at a special time that would be talked about in the years to come.

  *

  I had a one-sided view of religion as I was growing up. Protestantism, as far I was concerned, existed because King Henry VIII wanted to bed as many women as he could. I knew nothing about Martin Luther, the German friar and Catholic priest whose writings inspired the Protestant Reformation. I knew nothing about his protests in Germany in the 1500s. He railed against the idea that you could pay your way into heaven, believing salvation to be a free gift of God’s grace.

  Because I knew so little, I could never work out why anyone would want to be a Protestant. The king who had separated the Church of England from the Catholic Church was a sexually voracious bloke who cut off his lovers’ heads and destroyed all the monasteries. He was a horrible, horrible man. Why would you choose to be in his Church?

  I was naive enough to be convinced that one day we’d all be Catholic again. Nor did my early education exactly promote Protestants. We learned about the Catholics being persecuted, about priest holes in York where priests would have to hide because otherwise they’d be put to death. As far as I was concerned, it was only Catholics who were persecuted. I knew nothing about how it had flipped the other way at various times in history, at least not until I reached secondary school. I only learned about the Spanish Inquisition from Monty Python.

  On my way to St Thomas More RC Primary School in Middleton, I used to walk past the Protestant school and think they were all a little bit evil. They worshipped a fat king with gout, and we deified the man who opposed him. A Man for All Seasons, the 1966 British film based on Robert Bolt’s play of the same name, was all about Thomas More standing up to Henry VIII. My parents loved it, and in 1995 the Vatican listed it among the greatest religious movies of all time, which tells you all you need to know.

  Of course I didn’t know about Thomas More’s pursuit and burning of those who had committed the heretical act of translating the Bible into English.

  I have become, over the years, slightly obsessed with Thomas More. There’s a fascinating book by his adopted daughter, Margaret More Roper. Thomas More could not support Henry VIII’s divorce, or the king’s decision to separate from Rome, and so he was sent to the Tower of London and
beheaded. Roper managed to bribe someone to hand over her father’s head and she kept it, pickled, till her death. With her brother William she wrote Thomas More’s first memoir and in doing so became one of the first women of literature.

  When I was ten, I went on a school trip to London to see Thomas More’s cell in the Tower of London. I was interested in the history, but it was my first trip to London and that probably made more of an impression. It was as though the world had suddenly, briefly, switched from black and white to Technicolor.

  I was catatonic with religious zeal. After all, I’d seen Rolls Royces, Ferraris and Porsches being driven around Trafalgar Square. Previously I’d only seen pictures of them in The Ladybird Book of Motor Cars.

  *

  There was a simplicity to life in the sixties and seventies that I miss. There was a sense of ‘We’ve done it! We’ve got our home, our garden, our healthy family. We are not living on the breadline. We survived the war and we’re happy. We have a job for life.’ I can see why some people are nostalgic for that last hurrah of a uniform equilibrium.

  In those days there was a sense of a homogenous nation. Three TV channels aimed at the white middle and lower middle classes but nevertheless part of the fabric of the nation. Everyone, regardless of creed and culture, watched Morecambe & Wise at Christmas.

  The notion of family values is sometimes hijacked by the Conservatives; but in a more general, apolitical way, those values should be about philanthropy, extended family and community. People move around so much these days that community and extended families have largely disappeared. We are more restless than our parents, we have more expectations. I’d hazard a guess that there was less unhappiness back then.

  Our suburban existence was very pleasant. It was a kind of utopia. ‘Pleasant Valley Sunday’ by The Monkees reminds me of where I grew up, particularly the line about people in the street being able to hear the local rock group rehearsing their new song.

  Although, as a small boy, I didn’t quite realise that I lived in suburbia. As far as I was concerned, no one lived in the big cities that were full of smoke and traffic. Visualising people living there was beyond me. In fact, no one did live in the city centres: the centre of Manchester in the seventies was unrecognisable compared to its present-day hub of students and affluent young folk.

  Manchester was just under half an hour away on the bus, but my only forays there were to visit Virgin Records and to buy cool music that wasn’t in the charts. If you wanted to order non-chart music, you either bought it directly from Virgin in town or went to the local Boots.

  Half of Middleton was an aspiring suburb and the other half council estate overspill. Both sets of grandparents lived in council houses. While we lived in Alkrington, a part of Middleton, my dad’s parents were in nearby Blackley Hill and my maternal grandparents lived on a council estate in Langley, adjacent to Middleton. Langley overspill estate was part of the post-war building programme that, by the 1970s, had already soured.

  Mum was affectionate about her parents, but she always felt sad, I think, that they had missed part of her childhood. My maternal grandparents’ house was different from my parents’. There were tabloids everywhere, they both smoked and there was often a faint smell of beer on my grandad.

  Langley council estate had Lake District-inspired names such as ‘Windermere Drive’ and ‘Coniston Way’, none of which remotely reflected the densely crowded urban living space.

  Mum was forever defending Langley: ‘The people are lovely. Salt of the earth.’

  I would ask, slightly pushing my luck, why we didn’t live there if it was so lovely.

  She would say, ‘Hmmmm?’ as though she hadn’t heard the question.

  I slowly became very aware of living in a nice part of town. I realised Mum was generous about Langley because she was slightly selfconscious about being materially aspirant. I recently teased my mother by taking her to an upmarket eaterie and saying, ‘It’s nice here, no riff-raff.’

  ‘WE are riff-raff,’ she retorted.

  CHAPTER 19

  IN SEPTEMBER 1972, Mum walked into the bedroom with tears in her eyes.

  ‘They’ve killed them all,’ she said.

  I asked her who had killed whom. She explained that eleven Israeli athletes had been killed by Arab gunmen at the Munich Olympics.

  The same year Watergate was unfolding.

  A peaceful civil rights demonstration through the streets of Londonderry ended with British soldiers shooting dead thirteen civilians. It wasn’t until 2010 that David Cameron finally called the Bloody Sunday killings ‘unjustified and unjustifiable’.

  But more importantly, on 14 October that year, I became the first person in my school to invite girls to my birthday party. Until then, boys had invited boys and girls had invited girls. But on my seventh birthday, I decided to shake the system up. I felt risqué breaking ranks, and I didn’t care if anyone thought I was a sissy for inviting girls.

  I was young, but it felt like an important moment.

  The presents started to pile up: a Look-in annual with a watercolour painting of Ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart on the front; Beano and Dandy annuals; perhaps a comic about the Second World War, because it was still very much in the received consciousness. We were, for example, still playing war games in the playground. Those who were playing the Germans shouted ‘Achtung! Schnell!’ Those playing the English would say a little more tentatively, ‘Who goes there?’ And I’d do a rather too realistic impression of a gun: ‘Duh-duh-duh-duh. Rat-a-tat-tat.’

  There was probably a football colouring-in book with the faces of both Manchester United and City players to colour in. We supported United as a family and therefore City were the enemy; we punished their players by drawing lipstick, eyelashes and earrings on them. I’m not remotely interested in football, but I made Paul Calf a City fan in the early nineties because at that time they were by far the less successful team in Manchester. I wanted him to be cursed by supporting the local team that never won.

  I wasn’t generally expected to share my presents with my siblings. My brothers, especially David, made Second World War planes with Airfix kits (Dogfight Doubles were a cheap way of getting two planes for the price of one: Spitfire versus Messerschmitt, Mosquito versus Me 262) and dangled them from cotton tacked to the bedroom ceiling. Even today I can spot and name the silhouette of any fighter plane from that era in the sky.

  We played pass the parcel, musical statues, musical chairs, and ate white bread sandwiches, Ritz crackers, crisps, jelly and trifle.

  I liked being around girls, even at seven. I liked talking to them. I was too young to know how to flirt with them; they were just good company. Two of the girls I invited were super-smart and both ended up going to Oxford. I could tell they were unusually clever, even at primary school; I quite liked the fact that they were much brighter than me.

  I also invited Brendan Tierney, who remains a close friend. The Tierneys were conservative, with a small ‘c’, and I had endless arguments with Brendan about politics and ideology. He was strong like an ox, but never struck me with a blow when we fought. I would hurl my fists at him and he would just grab me in a bear hug and squeeze me so hard that I couldn’t move.

  Mum and Dad gave us various quaint options on birthdays. We could have a party at the house or we could go to Blackpool and drive up and down the Golden Mile, looking at the Illuminations from the car. Staggering though it may seem now, it was exciting to see trams covered in light bulbs to look like a steam train or a rocket.

  We didn’t even get out of the car except to buy fish and chips. We were all crammed into the Morris Oxford Estate, no doubt illegally. It was like a slave ship.

  Another option was the pictures. I thought sitting in silence in a darkened cinema was the most exciting thing in the world. There was a cinema in Middleton called the Fleapit. For a long time I thought that was its name; I didn’t realise it was a generic term for cinemas with flea-infested velvet seats.

  When
Dad was young he used to go to the local cinema every Saturday morning to watch films like Flash Gordon. In the post-war years there were beautiful old cinemas on every street corner, but as I was growing up they were being demolished. Television was taking over.

  Still, it was an occasional family treat for us to go to the cinema on a Saturday morning. Dad took me to see two Jacques Tati films – Mon Oncle and Mr Hulot’s Holiday – at an art-house cinema in Hulme called the Aaben. He thought he’d take me to see some ‘proper comedy’ as I appeared to like it.

  He loved science fiction, so he took us to an 11 a.m. screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey years after it had come out; there was no other way of seeing it in the days before VHS players. I found it an odd, disturbing film. I didn’t quite understand it, but Britain seemed smaller afterwards and I felt as though I’d been on a strange journey.

  My dad was unusual in that he was religious and believed in science. He thought science would answer all our problems; as old-fashioned as he was about many issues, he generally considered progress a good thing.

  He particularly liked Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke because they paid proper lip service to logic. George Lucas, on the other hand, was bollocks.

  *

  Most of all, though, I was obsessed with Bond films, where the sun shone and everyone looked beautiful. They were uniquely immersive. I’d step out of the cinema after watching gorgeous people on expensive speedboats in the Everglades in Florida into a slightly damp, overcast former cotton-mill town.

  In 1974 Mum took me to see a James Bond double bill for my birthday. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service starred George Lazenby and Live and Let Die was Roger Moore’s first outing as 007. It was the kind of magical experience that stays with you long into adulthood. I still remember the blue-white light of the Swiss Alps flooding into the cinema during On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and John Barry’s score filling the theatre.