Easily Distracted

by Steve Coogan

  I had taken the local girl to the woods over the road from my house and snogged her in the long grass while Brendan snogged the girl’s best friend nearby. We were both thirteen and we felt on top of the world.

  Occasionally, when Mum and Dad went on holiday, my brothers would have a party at the house and everyone would smoke and drink too much. When I was fourteen, a nineteen-year-old girl snogged me for a bet. It was my first proper kiss. Much as I was blushing, I thought I’d gone to heaven.

  From the age of fifteen, I would use the front room to snog girls and have a bit of a grope. There was a tacit understanding that no one would come in. Sometimes I’d go in with a girl and find one of my brothers in there. The disappointment was quite crushing.

  Girls weren’t usually drawn to me, because I lacked confidence. I wasn’t macho or bullish; I hero-worshipped sophisticated guys with cigarettes always on the go. While James Bond was someone to aspire to, John Wayne was crass and slightly vulgar, and Sylvester Stallone was just some meathead boxer who held no appeal at all.

  I met Bernadette Jones, my first proper girlfriend, when we were both in the fifth form at Cardinal Langley. The Jones girls were all gorgeous. At one point Kevin, Brendan and I were all going with a Jones girl of a similar age to each of us. I’d go round to their house and pass a brother in the hallway. Everyone knew the Coogans and the Joneses, both respectable families with six kids apiece.

  The Jones house, in the private housing part of the Langley estate, was another essentially lower-middle-class home with two lounges, a television room and a music room where you could be alone if you were lucky. Bernie was into David Bowie and we listened again and again to Hunky Dory, even though it had come out in 1971. Her love of Bowie impressed me; it made her seem exotic and enigmatic.

  In 1982, when we were still in the fifth form, Bernie and I went to a religious retreat at St Cassian’s Centre in Kintbury, near Newbury – a trip organised by Brother David. It was very happy-clappy; we made the sign of peace and hugged each other, we broke bread and drank beer. Even we sixteen-year-olds. The brothers wore sandals, but with jeans and chunky jumpers instead of dog collars. It was all incredibly liberal; I even asked Brother David about the joy of sex as he was driving us back.

  When I got home, I said to my dad: ‘Some people think that when you die, God is going to have a big list of all the things you did right and all the things you did wrong. That’s nonsense. God is so merciful, he’s not like that at all. He’s not going to be standing at the gates of heaven with a list.’

  Dad said, ‘Well, I’m not sure about that. I certainly think you have to account for your actions.’

  But the brethren at this retreat were really radical. Revolutionary. They said, ‘God loves everyone equally. He loves Myra Hindley as much as he loves the Virgin Mary.’

  For a while, I was swept up in this movement. They called themselves the Charismatics. It was all beer, hugs and tambourines. I remember one service where they all held hands and danced around the altar, singing. Afterwards my mum and dad said, ‘It’s a bit much.’ I blush when I think about it now. I much prefer the mournful, reverberant Gregorian chanting in a cathedral.

  Anyway, Bernie and I sat together at the back of the van, huddled under a coat, kissing and cuddling. It was the best part of the four-day retreat. We didn’t ever have sex though; we were both Catholic and her dad was a headmaster at another local school.

  Bernie and I started going out after I saw her at a concert and we got chatting. It was around the time of Haircut 100, Fun Boy Three, The Human League and Heaven 17, and the fashion for women was big skirts and big baggy jumpers. Nothing figure-hugging. It wasn’t a flattering period, sartorially speaking, and yet she looked so gorgeous, with piercing blue eyes. She was so clever too, with impeccable exam results. I was hypnotised by her. She was completely out of my league.

  I was going out with the most beautiful girl in the school and I was miserable because all I could think about was everyone else being in love with her too. I only went on the religious retreat because I was paranoid about someone copping off with her. I knew I’d lose her at some point and that made me even more miserable.

  It was like walking around with a Ming vase in your arms, and being terrified of dropping it.

  When Bernie dumped me, she immediately went out with one of my best friends. They were inseparable.

  I was devastated. I didn’t know how to deal with it. I felt like my whole world had fallen apart.

  It was January 1984 and it was straight after I’d crashed my car by going through a red light and driving into the side of a bus. I was the loser who crashed his car and was then dumped by his girlfriend. Years later, when I left drama school, I ended up going out with Bernie’s sister, who was equally gorgeous. My brother had been out with her too; it was a bit of a merry-go-round.

  I didn’t lose my virginity till I was nineteen. I met a dancer who I had absolutely nothing in common with. She just had a body that I wanted to have sex with. And, by this point, I very badly wanted to have sex.

  I would try to be witty and she’d look at me blankly: ‘You’re mad, you! You’re mad!’

  She thought I talked in riddles.

  All she could think of saying was, ‘You’re mad. Come on, you can have sex with me now.’

  I’d drive her home. On the way I’d find a dark country lane and we’d have sex. The windows would steam up and, after I’d dropped her off, I had to wind them down to air the car while I drove back to mine. Salad days!

  CHAPTER 29

  BY THE LATE seventies, I was beginning to learn about the popular culture that existed outside the mainstream. I was becoming aware of people who were clever and irreverent. They weren’t just rude and vulgar, but rude and clever. Rude and posh. I was drawn to anything that was arty and mildly subversive.

  I occasionally read one of the copies of the NME, Melody Maker or Sounds that were lying around the house. David and I had a huge crush on Kate Bush; she was so mysterious, beautiful and other-wordly.

  But mostly I listened to my brother Martin’s records. The Beatles, Genesis, Fleetwood Mac, Carole King, David Bowie, T. Rex, Roxy Music, The Adverts, The Damned and The Clash.

  We both thought the music most people liked – Abba, The Bee Gees – was rubbish.

  I was a complete snob, as was evident in the letter I sent my sister Clare, mocking the French teacher’s love of disco.

  I liked Blondie, but they were successful too quickly and, despite being a fantastic pop band, didn’t quite cut it. Debbie Harry, however, was always cool. Every boy had a poster of her on his wall. I also had posters of a Lamborghini, Farrah Fawcett-Majors, as she was then, her husband Lee Majors, and Roger Moore in a safari suit.

  I used my brother’s cassette player to record music off the television. Tony Wilson was the first person to have the Sex Pistols on TV, in his regional show, So It Goes; Joy Division also performed ‘Transmission’ on the show, and I played it over and over, thinking it was really interesting.

  I couldn’t get enough of ‘My Perfect Cousin’, and I liked the fact that The Undertones performed in the same scruffy clothes they hung around in. They were angular and awkward in their anoraks and jeans, back when working-class kids were skinny.

  When I brought home a copy of Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols in 1979, I had to hide it inside a Val Doonican sleeve. I knew my dad would say that the use of ‘bollocks’ was crude and provocative for the sake of it. I could only afford to buy it by going halves with Ged McBreen; we each had it for a week at a time.

  I was almost as geeky about music as I was about comedy. I used to listen to lyrics and sing along. It was a way to escape into my head; I would sit with an album sleeve and study the lyrics. The most interesting bands didn’t have pictures of themselves on their album covers. Being mysterious was part of their allure.

  In the days before the Walkman or the iPod, you didn’t listen to music as you walked down the street. You s
at in a chair and listened. Sometimes the gatefold sleeve would include lyrics; other times you had to guess what they were singing about. I still get a thrill from googling lyrics.

  The local nutcase, who was thin but prone to violent outbursts, would steal records to order from the local record shop. You’d tell him what you wanted and he’d go and steal it for you and sell it to you for a quarter of the price. He stole a red vinyl version of ‘King Rocker’ by Generation X in 1979. And ‘London Calling’ by The Clash. He charged me twenty-five pence for both, which I paid for with my paper-round money.

  He once accused me of looking at him in a funny way, which of course I denied. But not before I was ‘gobbed’ (punched in the mouth so as to make it bleed).

  I was obsessed with punk and then electronic music. Martin, ever the cool big brother, played the electric guitar and dyed his hair. I looked up to Martin and copied him, to the extent that if he bought a jacket, I’d buy the same one.

  He sometimes sent me to buy a record if he couldn’t be bothered.

  ‘Stephen, do me a favour. Go down to Boots and buy me “Hong Kong Garden” by Siouxsie and the Banshees.’

  I remember standing in the lounge putting the needle on the edge of the 7 inch and hearing ‘Hong Kong Garden’ for the first time. I still get goosebumps when I hear the oriental-sounding electronic xylophone kick-starting the song. It’s one of the most remarkable intros to a song I’ve ever heard.

  In the seventies and eighties, people were desperate to have some kind of identity. You were a mod or a rocker, into ska or northern soul. It was far more tribal than it is now. People from different tribes didn’t really mix. You couldn’t like heavy rock and punk, or disco and punk. Which is why I could never accept Brendan Tierney’s offer to become a heavy rocker.

  I liked punk because it challenged the status quo. I thought I was clever and different and edgy because I played Never Mind the Bollocks at top volume, singing along to ‘Bodies’ with wild abandon. I would have been mortified if they’d heard me.

  *

  My brother Martin could play electric guitar really well. He had a huge record collection and was already forming a band in the sixth form. As lead singer and songwriter of The Mock Turtles, he would later have a top 20 hit with ‘Can You Dig It’. But he was a rock god years before he went on Top of the Pops. He was always one step ahead.

  Throughout the seventies, he was really into guitar-based music. And then, at some point in 1978, he made an announcement: ‘Guitars are dead. Rock music is dead. It’s all about synthesisers now. The future of music is going to be electronic.’

  He started going to a new wave night at a club called Pips in Manchester. He told me about one regular who had dyed ginger hedgehog hair, glittery eye shadow and a lightning bolt drawn across his face, a look that was undermined by a broad Yorkshire accent. He was known as Ziggy Arkwright.

  It became clear that the ten-minute drum and guitar solo of rockers was self-indulgent and tired. Also on the shitlist were Marshall amps, favoured by rockers. Significantly, Buzzcocks used HH amps because their high-end tinniness was the antithesis of the Marshall sound.

  The X-Ray Spex song ‘Germfree Adolescents’ perfectly encapsulates that era. It was androgynous, nuanced and provocative, while rock had become Neanderthal and smelly. Most rockers were spotty and didn’t have girlfriends.

  I was still listening to Never Mind the Bollocks, and Martin would shake his head. ‘That’s so out of date, Stephen.’

  He was listening to ‘Warm Leatherette’ by The Normal – nihilistic, emotionless, industrial music. And to John Foxx, the original lead singer in Ultravox.

  It was the soundtrack to a bleak, faceless existence, anticipating a depressing, robotic future.

  Martin was, of course, right about the music: soon I too was listening to Kraftwerk, The Human League and Jean Michel Jarre.

  I even grew my hair longer on one side than the other and crimped it in honour of The Human League’s Phil Oakey. I wore eyeliner, foundation and blusher. A double-breasted shirt, black stretch denim jeans and winkle-pickers. I thought I looked like the enigma of all enigmas.

  It’s strange how very close that look is to total twat.

  I started writing really awful lyrics, asked two girls at school to be backing singers, and found a bass player and a drummer. I played the DX7 keyboard and did lead vocals. We looked like a provincial Human League, which meant we looked like The Human League.

  Astonishingly, I won the school music competition one year with that band.

  As I adopted this snobbish attitude towards popular culture, so I had this idea about nothing commercial having any value. In 1978, when I was twelve, I refused to go to the cinema to see Grease, even though all my friends went. As I wrote to Clare, I loftily considered it ‘commercial rubbish’. If lots of people liked something then it must be dreadful.

  I didn’t – and don’t – understand the fuss about the Star Wars films either. Still less, their devotees. I wish they’d fuck off to a faraway galaxy long, long ago (I’ve deliberately muddled the words, I want to annoy them). What a colossal waste of time.

  I already knew that culture slightly hidden from view, or underground – in other words, something you had to find for yourself – had to be better.

  *

  Rejecting the mainstream and singing ‘Bodies’ loudly, albeit when my parents were out, was my way of quietly rebelling. I wasn’t a naughty kid, just a normal teenager kicking gently against the establishment.

  Mum and Dad weren’t hard to rebel against. There was a fantastic headline in the Onion, the satirical online news magazine, in 2000: ‘Parents’ record collection deemed hilarious’. My parents’ collection was truly atrocious.

  As Martin perfectly recalls, ‘They loved the snide versions of legitimate music.’

  They weren’t into Crosby, Stills and Nash, they were into The Seekers. They weren’t into Joni Mitchell, they were into Mary Hopkin and Judy Collins. Cliff Richard was Elvis without the rudeness, the sneer and the sexuality. Elvis himself was vulgar, unrefined and dangerous, but Mum quite liked ‘Summer Holiday’. And Nana Mouskouri.

  They liked all the artists who had guest spots on Morecambe & Wise. Anything that had an unashamed, middle-of-the-road feel.

  I asked Mum once, when I was growing up, if Dad had ever liked any kind of pop music. She said he thought The Beatles had some good tunes. That was it.

  My parents didn’t understand Martin. It was OK for him to introduce me to bands such as T. Rex and Roxy Music, the slightly artier, androgynous side of glam rock. Coming home with his ears pierced and hair dyed blond at the front was not OK.

  By this time he was at college in Manchester and working in a clothes shop on a Saturday. One time Dad told him not to come home again with ‘that hair’.

  I heard Dad’s raised voice from my bedroom. I stood in the hallway and leaned over the banisters so I could hear exactly what was being said.

  My brother, aged seventeen, was crying his eyes out as Dad shouted, ‘What’s wrong with you? You look like a girl!’

  ‘I’m just expressing myself!’ he yelled through the tears.

  It must have been hard for Dad to understand. He worked hard to maintain a respectable home, and there was his son wearing an earring and eyeliner and bleaching his hair blond, like he was a woman.

  *

  I found ways of rebelling that were more unusual. When I was eleven or twelve, my sister bought me a movie make-up set from her first trip to America. It was the wax skin and bloody glycerine used to create fake wounds.

  I went to the post office to collect the family allowance with two vampiric puncture wounds on my neck.

  ‘I think you’ve cut yourself,’ said the postmistress.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ I replied, with a Village of the Damned stare. I collected the ten pounds and returned home, flapping my arms like the wings of a bat.

  On another occasion I fashioned a wax, skin-coloured crater between my ey
es, which I filled with small pieces of tissue doused in the glycerine blood, creating a perfect bullet wound. My sister’s blue eyeshadow helped create that dead look.

  I draped myself over the sofa in the living room, eyes open and vacant … waiting. Eventually my dad walked in.

  ‘Stephen?’

  I tried to play dead, but bottled it. Instead I continued to maintain the lifeless stare as I replied, ‘Yes?’

  He stared at me for an instant.

  Then he said, ‘You’re warped,’ and left the room.

  Dad, being an engineer, was very particular about things. He didn’t like two-seaters: they were driven by selfish people who could only give one person a lift. He would shake his head at people who drove into their driveways forwards. They knew that they’d have to reverse onto the road at some point, which was dangerous.

  There were also rules regarding the phone. We all had to answer with these carefully scripted words: ‘Middleton, 1234. Who’s speaking, please?’

  We weren’t allowed to just say ‘hello’.

  Dad would criticise cops in television dramas who answered the phone by just saying ‘hello’. He thought they were slapdash and unprofessional, which was only compounded by their frequent failure to lock their car doors.

  Can you imagine John Thaw in The Sweeney answering the phone by saying, ‘Hello, Flying Squad, 1, 2, 1, 2. My name is Jack Regan, how may I be of assistance?’

  I thought it was a mildly aggressive way to answer the phone. When I first left home at eighteen, I thoroughly enjoyed picking up the phone and saying ‘hello’.

  It’s an extension of how cross Dad used to get whenever he saw a cop on a TV drama walking away from his car without locking it. Later, when I could drive, I used to really like not locking my car.

  CHAPTER 30