My Pop Life #247 : I Like It ft. Bad Bunny & J. Balvin – Cardi B

I Like It  ft. Bad Bunny & J Balvin – Cardi B

Ya mudé la’ Gucci pa’ dentro de casa, yeh (¡woo!)
Cabrón, a ti no te conocen ni en Plaza (no)
El Diablo me llama pero Jesucristo me abraza (amén)
Guerrero como Eddie, que viva la raza, yeh
Me gustan boricuas, me gustan cubanas
Me gusta el acento de las colombianas (¿qué hubo pues?)
Como mueve el culo la dominicana (¿qué lo que?)
Lo rico que me chingan las venezolanas (¡woo!)

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As 2018 drew to a close I had to choose my top three tunes of the year.  This is of course traditional.  I subscribe to a website called The ‘Spill, a sister to Song-Bar.com a music fan’s site where new albums are reviewed, words defined and a different topic is chosen every week for a playlist.  This will be the result of a mighty collaboration of the contributors. As I write, people from four continents or more are mulling Songs About Letters and sending in The Box Tops’ The Letter, or The Beatles’ PS I Love You.  I threw in The Beach Boys’ Busy Doin’ Nothing from the Friends LP.  Genius song.  One person (Maki this week) will compile two playlists from these hopeful suggestions. There are about 70 regulars, and many more who follow but do not always contribute.  It’s fun and kind of addictive.

But the end-of-year picks are chewed over from about the end of October.  I’ve been doing this properly since 2006, so I’m coming up for a fifteenth anniversary.  I don’t actually know what I’ll pick for 2020.  But this song – Cardi B‘s I Like It – (and Childish Gambino‘s This Is America) were nailed on for 2018 because they were in my top 3 favourite songs of the year.  And the other song was one I played on so…

I just flicked through my 2018 iPhoto reel and flipping heck, a glimpse of life pre-covid full of dates, gigs, visitors, work, travel, sessions, meeting friends for a celefuckingbration. Actually stopped me in my tracks.  I thought, what if I scan the whole of 2018 into my blog?  To remember how we used to live in gentrified Brooklyn?  To offer some background to these two mighty songs?  Can’t hurt surely.

So here goes – remember “normal life” ?

The Before Times

Fort Greene Park, January 2018

2018 started with Cush Jumbo and Sean Griffin and Johanna Frances and Jenny Jules and Ralph Brown in Superfine, DUMBO watching a quaint balloon-bursting burlesque cabaret and drinking cocktails & Guinness.  Cushington was pregnant.  Then in January it snowed a fair bit.  I met Ang Lee in a snowstorm in Tribeca and he offered me a part in his new movie which was nice of him.  Nice of my manager Michael Lazo and casting director Avy Kaufman to set it up too, so I sent them flowers & love.

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Then Lucy Jules came over with Sam Smith for the Grammys and we went to the afterparty somewhere downtown and I chatted to Quincy Jones about one of our projects.  He was busy. Very busy. But there he was, and he was kind to me. Erykah Badu was DJing our dance floor.  People were pretending to be cool but we got drunk and danced a lot.

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Sean Griffin and I went to the boxing one night on 42nd street.  Proper.  Enjoyed it very much.  Now sadly closed.  Sean and Cush both train at Gleason’s Gym in Dumbo (where the first night party for the original Julius Caesar was held in the fall of 2013), and they also sponsor a young pugilist.  He won very convincingly.  We would also frequent the Atlantic Fish Bar for Important Football Matches, sometimes with Henry the dawg. Now also sadly closed.

Johanna, Courtney, Benny, me, Ewan, Mary, Victor

Savannah, Georgia.  Two months of filming. The headline news was that Jenny was off in London doing a play, so I drove down to Georgia with the two cats and all their palaver in the back of the car.  They stayed in the hotel suite with me for the whole time bless their little furry socks.  I shot Gemini Man in February & March 2018 in Savannah, Georgia with Will Smith and Mary Elizabeth Winstead and my old mate Benny Wong.  Ang Lee directing.  Johanna wanted to visit so I asked if she would like to be my Executive Assistant for the shoot.  She was first class.  So was Courtney Young my voice coach.  One night Will Smith bought out a local cinema and took the whole cast and crew to the opening night of Black Panther.  I’ll write about the rest of that experience another time because Gemini Man was a gift of a job.    Then Johanna and I drove all the way back, through snowstorms in the Appalachians another two-day drive through Ashville, North Carolina, western Tennessee and Virginia.

On 24th March I was invited to see Harry Potter Parts One & Two on Broadway by Cush and Sean, who were taking their friends Rose Leslie & Kit Harrington as an early wedding present, when Kit had to drop out.  Since they refused to take money for the tickets (very good central stalls) I refused to take money when I bought them dinner between the two parts.  Afterwards we went backstage and met the cast, the original West End players, including Noma Dumezweni playing Hermione, whom Jen and I had had lunch with when she was rehearsing.  Funny how things turn out –  a few months later Jenny would be taking over that very role.

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Then in April I flew to England to see Jenny whom I missed terribly.  She was doing her beautiful thing at The Donmar in The Way of the World.  She was in a lovely top floor flat in Covent Garden, yards from the theatre but a tragedy overshadowed that production when one of the actors committed suicide just after opening night.  AD Josie Rourke closed them down for the week and provided therapy and food in the space while they collectively and individually worked through their reactions.  Awful.

Another tragedy was in waiting when my ex-girlfriend Mumtaz Keshani emailed to say that she’d been diagnosed with stage 3 cancer.  Jenny and I went to Lincoln’s Inn Fields for lunch then bought some pastries & cakes and took the Piccadilly Line up to Arsenal to see her in Highbury Hill where we had tea and Jenny massaged her back because she was in such pain.  We didn’t stay long because she wasn’t well enough.  It made me weep silently this act of compassion from my wife for my ex-girl.   It was the last time either of us saw her.

 

 

 

It wasn’t all pain and tears.  I had drinks with Susan Kyd (with whom I’d acted in Berkoff’s West) & Sallie Norris (who’d just retired from the NYPD and was now working as security for NBC).  I managed to squeeze in Brentford v QPR with Billy the Bee and daughter Bella, spotted QPR fan Mick Jones outside afterwards, and went to see The Ferryman in the West End with my bestie Paulette Randall drinking vodka & tonic all the while.  Funny how things turn out – a few months later I would be in The Ferryman on Broadway.

I also went down to Brighton for a few hours for Sunday lunch to see some beautiful people who I love and miss. Me and Skye, Tom and Lua Blue, my sister Rebecca with Scarlett holding Lua, Delilah-Rose and her mum Millie.  Fam. Famalam.  Becky came with Lee (no good photo sorry Lee)

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Back in New York dear Mo, Maureen Hibbert had been performing in D.C. in Hamlet with Lorna Brown and they came up for a wee holiday in Brooklyn and they stayed for a few days and we hung out for a bit. Mo read my second draft of a film script I’d just finished.  We live in hope.  She liked it though.  So did I.

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But WAIT –  on the night I’d landed at JFK and come home the 24th April 2018 our dear friends Cush and Sean produced a rather  beautiful baby boy called Maximilian Patrick Jumbo-Griffin!!  I’d have to wait a week before I could give him a hug.  Jenny would wait a whole month!

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Went down to Jamaica Bay to try and find the horseshoe crab mating season with Libby and Stefan but we only saw some perished evidence on this beautiful spring day.  Drove home via the storefront churches of East New York and Brownsville.  I usually cycle down to Jamaica Bay, it’s 12 or so miles each way and a wonderful wild spot on the shore.

I need to see nature.  Be in nature.

 

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There was A Nice Drinks with (cousin of Mo) Meisha Brown and Gabrielle Bennett and Tara out on the Lightship pub The Frying Pan on the Hudson.  Special friends of rabbit.

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May 5th.  Cinqo de Mayo. This Is America and I Like It are both released on this auspicious day.  They dominate my year in music.  Childish Gambino hosts Saturday Night Live but I’m on an early night because…

May 6th 7am At the start line for the wonderful 5-Borough Bike Ride with Tony Gerber and Michael Vachon (good people) although this shot is on Queensboro Bridge and cyclists were cussing us for getting in the way.  40 miles with no traffic lights which is becoming something of an institution for me although for the second year running I had to flip out at Commodore Barry Park near us and change clothes because

I had tickets for Mahler’s Das Liede Von Der Erde at the Kennedy Centre matinee with our neighbours Libby, Stefan and Pippa… 

 

…dearie me the bougie life continues with a city visit from Frances Tempest who designed the costumes for A Respectable Trade and my film New Year’s Day and her daughter Nelle whose treat it was for Frances was 70 and they were staying in The Park Lane Hotel on the flipping Park and we went for afternoon tea at The Plaza on the corner of 5th Avenue which is a city landmark.  So lovely to see them both, since they all moved to Hastings from just around the corner in Brighton about 12 years ago.

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Then finally Jenny came home.  It had been a while.  It’s the life we lead so it is. And we went to see Max together.

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The new member’s club Dumbo House had opened by then and we were founder members so we would take folk there for drinks or a buffet lunch.  Like all member’s clubs it quickly became over-run and self-conscious but it is remains a good place to take people and here is dear Meisha, cat sitter, cousin and all round NY famalamadingdong.

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Very soon after that the Shakespeare Sisters were in town with a screening of Julius Caesar  – the very reason we’d moved to New York in 2014, four years earlier.  Phyllida Lloyd, Clare Dunn, Cush Jumbo, Jenny Jules, Harriet Walter and Kate Packenham in Dumbo for a lovely meal after the screening.

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Now the World Cup was drawing near which means Panini Stickers oh yes.   We started looking around New York for venues to watch the World Cup – hopefully matching the teams playing.

We studied Egyptian restaurants in Astoria, next door to Colombian restaurants and cafes.  Watched a Germany game in DSK in Fort Greene with a crowd, great fun.  We watched Nigeria v Croatia (0-2) (see above) with Babs in Buka on Fulton St a few blocks south of us.  Little did we know that Croatia would go all the way to the final.  We watched all three Iran games in Bijans on Hoyt Street after learning that Brighton & Hove Albion were interested in one of their players, Alireza Jahanbakhsh.  They played well, so did he, but they were in a group with Spain and Portugal and Morocco and didn’t qualify for the knockout section.   England did though…

Then around my birthday (Gemini) we had a special visit from dearest Kimberley my niece and her fiancee Kazeem whom I got to know really for the first time as we wandered around Williamsburg looking at properties and talking Marxism.  They asked me if I would perform the duty of celebrant at their wedding in 2019  ie : conduct the wedding service.  Very touching and very moving, I agreed on the spot.

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Then Lucy came back with Sam Smith for some gigs and we went to three of them.  I’ll write about all that at another time but here’s a quick photo of the Barclays Centre gig (we took Johanna & Adepero).  We went to Madison Square Garden two nights running with Meisha & Gabby, darling Loretta Sacco and Babs & Silke.

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Babs and Silke (centre couple) held a party to celebrate their secret private wedding and we were all very happy. Then they decided they were going to move to London. Not quite yet but grrrrrr.

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Then England won a penalty shoot-out with Colombia (watched at home).  Hold The Front Page.  Booked a flight to Samara via Istanbul.  A World Cup date in Russia with England my Lionhearts (See My Pop Life #211 Three Lions) hooking up with Billy The Bee and his crew.  A fundamentally life-changing summer.  They have proper wifi in the Moscow subway you know.  HD.  You can watch a live game down there.

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Then a visit from my oldest best friend Simon Korner who landed the day b4 the World Cup Final (what would we have done if England had beaten Croatia?).. This was just rather wonderful – we went to the Jazz Standard of course to see The Mingus Big Band simply my favourite thing to do in New York, and a compulsory trip for tourists and visitors.  That and the East River Ferry.  Cherished moments.

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Another trip to Dumbo House with our New York family Lynn Nottage and Tony Gerber, with their friends, now ours, Gary Perez and Federica Pietracci. We drank some cocktails and moaned about Trump, like the bougies do.

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Then on August 10th dear Mumtaz died, the same day as her mother had died years earlier. I wept. I can’t remember when I’ve ever felt so sad in my life. The funeral was arranged for Wednesday the 15th. I stood on my stoop in Brooklyn the day before and called Virgin Atlantic to see if I could swap my flight to Los Angeles for one to London, then from there fly direct to LA. On Airmiles. They had one seat available going to London landing on the morning of the funeral. They switched the previous ticket. They charged me about $300. It was like a miracle. I landed in London & drove to Wycombe and Jen’s Mum & Dad, and blessed Dee Jules had driven over from Harlow to let me in. We had a long chat before I changed into a suit and left for Hendon mosque.

Mumtaz’ son Mikey gave a wonderful eulogy, and she was buried in the muslim section of Hendon cemetery. Lewis MacLeod was there, who sadly passed in July this year, and Taj’s oldest friend Martina Ward our lawyer. I left the meal in tears waving goodbye and drove to Terminal Five to fly to Los Angeles.

Stevie K watching Shakespeare in Griffith Park

I stayed with Gwen & Bob in Pasadena. Gwen directed Sanctuary DC in Washington in 1988 and we started Apricot Films together. I caught up with old friends Sheree Folkson and Stevie Kalinich, visited Carol with him in Malibu Colony and had a swim. Saw Sabra Williams in Titus Andronicus in Griffith Park with Stevie K, Suzy Crowley, Tony Armatrading, Alan Boyd & Tracy Landecker. And marvelled at how bad the traffic had become in the 15 years since we lived in LA. 1st world problems kids.

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Back in NY there was a BAFTA screening of the Quincy Jones doc and the genius was actually there. He was mobbed afterward by greybians and I thought I’d leave him alone this time.

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Bear with me dear reader. I know it’s long. A long story, back when things were things. A whole year in words & pictures. Pretty filleted too. Not much football, politics or cat pix, be honest!

Then Jenny was offered the Public Theater Mobile Unit tour of Lynn Nottage‘s Pulitzer-winning play Sweat.  This tour was aimed at the rustbelt communities in the swing states as we approached the Mid-Term Elections. The states – Pennysylvania, Upper New York, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin & Minnesota are where the story takes place, de-industrialised towns and cities where factories had closed and gone south of the border, examining the ensuing struggle of the workers to keep their jobs, and their friendships. The play dramatises in forensic detail how people’s economic circumstances affects their worldview. Or how capitalism creates racism, which is how I prefer to define it. A fantastic play, a true American masterpiece which will be produced for many years to come.

At almost exactly the same time, Jenny was called to audition for Harry Potter on Broadway. She had a series of meetings at 9am in places like Bushwick, before Sweat rehearsals, to see if she could handle flying, dancing, magic and talking onstage.

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Meanwhile I was cycling around Brooklyn enjoying the fall.

And had a surprise visitor from Tokyo in the shape of Mirei Yamagata, our translator for our last trip there. Really lovely to see Mirei !

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I think my most unhealthy visit of the year was from Benedict Wong who was in town for some ADR on Gemini Man. I went in I think four times in all to do ADR, mainly off-screen lines with slightly different versions of the plot. Benny and I started our tour around lunchtime in local bars having a pint in each then moved onto cocktails at some point in the afternoon, ending up in Dumbo completely steaming and going up to Dumbo House to complete the session. Shocking. “When things get weird“, Benny said, “be like water“.

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Me, Benton Greene, Jenny and Rebecca Hart in Madison, Wisconsin

So that was when I flew to Milwaukee and drove down to Kenosha to see Jenny and Sweat (see My Pop Life #243 The Blacker The Berry) and then followed the wagons across Wisconsin, to a Union Hall in Janesville, a hotel in Madison and then a community centre in Colombus before I drove back to Milwaukee and home.

Through rural lands and small towns, gentle rolling hills and big skies. It was in Wisconsin that Jenny was offered the role of Hermione Grainger in the Broadway production of Harry Potter & The Cursed Child. But she couldn’t tell anyone at all, and signed a Non Disclosure Agreement to that effect. The joy of landing a gig, the pain of keeping your mouth shut – for three whole months. The bougie 1st world problems we have to suffer!

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Back in the filthy fleshpots of the city, we watched our extraordinary friend Nona Hendryx do her thang at Joe’s Pub and drank cocktails in her honour…

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Halloween sitting on a stoop handing out candy in Dean Street with Lynn, Tony and Melkamu their son -pictured left dressed as Dracula. Absolute mayhem for about three hours….

but Tony managed to snap us in a quiet moment…

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Finally saw American Utopia, David Byrne‘s stunning and uplifting re-invention of The Gig down in Flatbush at King’s Theatre. Bought the ticket outside.

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On November 11th we were honoured to be invited by Ms Cushington Jumbo and Mr Sean Patrick Griffin of this parish to be godparents oddparents at the Christening Glistening of Maximilian Patrick along with Ms Phyllida Lloyd of this parish who did supply a silver goblet nay tankard from which we anointed the Child with bubbled wine.

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Remember remember the 5th of November celebrated on the 12th next door with our lovely mad neighbours burning illegal wood and drinking drinks with ratatouille and baked spuds. We burned it down. Jenny makes the ‘devil horn’ sign with her fingers and um…

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Nipped over to England to see Andrew, Rebecca, Mollie, Delilah Rose, Ellie & her new baby boy Archie. Saw Mum too who was in good form, always a relief. So was I, ditto. I stayed in Brighton with Delilah Rose and Millie, and Kerry came round one evening. Famalam. Went to see John Cooper Clark and Johnny Mercer at The Dome with Tim Lewis & Andy Baybutt (See My PopLife #119 Chickentown). Got drunk afterwards. Saw the Brighton Beach Boys doing the Kinks album The Village Green Preservation Society live onstage, great as ever, miss them so much I can’t say anything more. Went and spent an evening with Kim & Kaz in Crystal Palace discussing the forthcoming wedding. Saw all the other famalam and came home to Brooklyn.

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Went to see the tremendous Orbital at Brooklyn Steel on my own and had pizza and beer afterwards with instigator Paul Hartnoll, Brighton drinking buddy.

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Next up Greek at BAM, operatic adaptation of Berkoff’s play, then The Jungle at St Ann’s with our lovely friend Jo McInnes amid an international cast in a rebuilt migrant camp in Calais.

Took Jenny to see Taylor Mac at Town Hall and he came down into the audience and sat on my lap to tell a joke. (He knows Jenny)

Then it was Jenny’s birthday – (and Frank Sinatra’s and Ken Cranham’s) 

Visitors! Although they stayed in Midtown, after I’d advised them not to stay in Midtown. C’mon it’s hellish up there. But people don’t visit New York to hang around in the suburbs do they?  They want hell. Carl Firth and his daughter Anna on a birthday treat. Carl is married to my Dad‘s wife Beryl‘s daughter. Famalam. The night they left I went in to audition for Sam Mendes who was re-casting Jez Butterworth‘s The Ferryman on Broadway.

Was offered The Ferryman the following lunchtime. Auspicious first visit to Carnegie Hall that night to see Handel’s Messiah which my father performed every Christmas with the Huddersfield Choral for 35 years- I never saw him sing it sadly.

And finally the new cast of Harry Potter was announced and we could all stop LYING TO EVERYONE. A week of celebration which turned into

CHRISTMAS

Jenny Jules, Noma Dumezweni, Nomawethu Dumezweni, Jo McInnes, Cush Jumbo, Damien, Lee Ross, Sean Griffin, Ralph Brown with Maxi Pad, Qeiva Dumezweni, Kiki McInnes Ross and Nabil Elouahi (taking the picture you star) gather chez nous in Fort Greene on Christmas Eve Happy Holidays to eat Jamaican food and do secret santa, drink um drinks and sing Fairytale of New York before going to Baptist Church on Lafayette & Washington and thence to the pub.

Christmas Day viewing

Saw Maxi one last time and boy had he grown in the last six months!  What a beauty.  It had been a year of marriages and death and one precious birth – is this why I held him so close to my heart?  Or is it that I don’t have any children of my own?  Or is he just a cutie?

I’ll give Roxy the last word

I didn’t mention so many people whom I care about and who are ever-present in my heart whether I see them or not. Chief missing man is my brother Paul who lives in Shanghai. I think we see each other every two years, quite a long time to wait! And my Dad, and Beryl, missed them too, up there in West Yorkshire.

And of course that’s just the peaks. Saw tons of theatre productions unmentioned and a load of films too, usually BAFTA screenings but not always. You Were Never Really Here was my top film after Roma, then Burning, Capernaum, Shoplifters, Border, Sorry To Bother You and Black Panther.

But it feels like a life lived at speed, racing through cultural signposts, cramming it all in, travelling, watching, drinking, BUSY.  Now we have slowed down so far that some mornings my brain feels like porridge.  Where is my starter motor?

Cardi B captured me from minute one.  Brassy, tough, funny.  If you follow her on IG or Twitter you’ll know what I mean.  She is so NY in-your-face ex-stripper-turned rapper but she is the real deal.  She doesn’t talk about things she doesn’t know about.  No bullshit whatsoever.  Funny as fuck.  She talks about her business.  She is Dominican NY, although musically very little merengue or bachata appears in her songs.  She is hip-hop.  But on this track she wanted a more Latinx vibe.  In the end her label boss the prolific Craig Kallman pulled out I Like It Like That by Pete Rodriguez in 1967 a boogaloo hit and reframed it with Cardi plus hot Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny and Colombian cumbia singer J Balvin.   The finished song has a trap meets salsa beat and features two reggaeton stars.  Designed to crush.  

The song had been covered once before in 1994 by The Blackout All Stars who included Tito Nieves, cousin of our friend Edna Benitez, partner of Heidi Griffith, English casting director and good friend.  Threads, connections, always.

We heard it from car radios & in shops all summer.  I’ve spent some of this year going deeper on Latin Music, a catch-all genre that includes anything sung in Spanish, from ranchera to norteño, bolero to son, bomba to plena.  For another post, but much of the best Latin music since the 1960s has originated from New York City, coming out of the Puerto Rican communities of the Upper East Side and the Bronx, or Cuban and Dominican exiles up from the Caribbean, Colombians, Panamanians, Trinis and others.  It is this rising demographic wave which has clearly resulted in Trumpism, (along with the sight and sound of 8 years of a black President) a panic about whiteness becoming the minority, and Amy Coney Barrett is clearly the last gasp brick on top of the collapsing sea wall.

We are seven days away from the election.  We’re in a pandemic.  We’re in a racial fissure.  We’re divided and tired. 

Good luck everyone.  Life will go on, as ever.

My Pop Life #246 : Taxi Driver – Bernard Herrmann

Taxi Driver – Bernard Herrmann

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I was already deeply in love with the cinema on July 5th 1976.  The day after a surreal and wonderful bicentennial Disneyland experience where Simon and I actually saw The Monkees live (see My Pop Life #168 Pleasant Valley Sunday) we are taken into Hollywood by Nick and his sister Caroline to see the film Taxi Driver.  Neither my diary nor my memory tells me the cinema we visited, but the film  left a lasting impression on me, a stunning cinematic vision of New York City written by Paul Schrader and directed by Martin Scorsese with an outstanding lead performance by Robert De Niro.  It also boasts an outstanding score written by Bernard Herrmann – his final piece of work before passing away two days after it was recorded.  Jazzy, brooding, strange and lyrical it is one of the finest film scores I know, and the very first one I bought as an LP later that year.

America in the summer of 1976 – a triplet of stunning Bergman movies Through A Glass Darkly, Winter Light & The Silence in Los Angeles, a Brian de Palma double-bill of Obsession (another Herrmann score) and the far better Stepford Wives at a Cape Cod drive-in,  The Harder They Come my introduction to Jamaica & roots reggae in Santa Monica and All The President’s Men with Redford & Hoffman in, of course, Washington D.C.

I had became obsessed by cinema as a teenager, particularly in the 6th form at school.  Doing 3 A-Levels meant plenty of free periods, and there were some interesting options to fill that free time – all voluntary.  I chose to take Geology O-level and Film Studies, others chose Spanish or Astronomy.  Film Studies was our English teacher Mr Voigt’s domain – a dark-chinned wiry cackler with a magnetic enthusiasm for movies.  He ran the Lewes Film Club (and still does!) and would get each week, in the post, actual reels of film which he would then project for the Film Club members at a special screening.  We would get a little preview of these classics in class, as part of an introduction to the director and how they worked.  If I strain my memory buds I can remember a session on Alfred Hitchcock‘s Psycho and a dissection of the shower scene and the detective Arbogast’s murder, studying a master at work, all soundtracked by Bernard Herrmann, Hitchcock’s go-to composer.  We also studied Georges Franju and his tribute to the silent era Judex,  a class on genre introduced us to The Western with clips from John Ford‘s Stagecoach and My Darling Celementine and the George Stevens film Shane,  Ingmar Bergman‘s wonderful breathtaking Wild Strawberries evocative and stunning, Michaelangelo Antonioni‘s austere simplicity in La Notte and then Luis Buñuel‘s Viridiana with its surreal re-composition by beggars & vagabonds of Da Vinci’s The Last Supper.  He also showed us Buñuel’s shocking first film – a collaboration with Salvador Dali from 1927 – called Un Chien Andalou with featured the razor blade through the eyeball, the surreal and perfect metaphor for cinema.  All classics.  As each year passes it becomes clearer to me what an immensely privileged education I had in Lewes.  Despite my dysfunctional family and days of utter misery, my schooling was carefree and nurturing.  I definitely went from council estate single parent problem teenager to middle-class film enthusiast musician and footballer during those golden years.

Michael Voigt – MPOV – was spotted one Saturday in Brighton with his family in The Golden Egg.  Teenagers are randomly merciless and this became a weird badge of shame for The Mpovian.  But he was a truly great teacher and he showed me how to watch films,  for which I am forever grateful – a wonderful foundation in the subject and I followed up by visiting the Brighton Film Theatre on North Street, just down from the clocktower and long since disappeared, usually on my own but occasionally with a girlfriend and on one memorable occasion with someone else’s girlfriend (they’d separated!)   I remember Lacombe Lucien a tremendous French film directed by Louis Malle with Shirine, and Nick Roeg’s Don’t Look Now which blew me away completely, Fritz The Cat a pornographic cartoon which was unmemorable, Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye which has stayed with me ever since, Jack Nicholson in Hal Ashby’s film The Last Detail sealing his crown as my favourite actor (along with Malcolm McDowell whom I worshipped), Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac severely testing my newfound film snobbery but winning me over with its stark haunting close-ups and extraordinary atmosphere and Woody Allen’s Love & Death making me laugh more than anything I had ever seen,  Picnic At Hanging Rock creating another potent atmosphere which I scarcely understood at the time, makes much more sense now, Coppola’s stunning creation The Conversation starring Gene Hackman, and then Robert Altman’s Nashville, a miraculous piece of work, with overlapping characters and dialogue, little plot if any, and a complete vision which demanded attention.

Inevitably my memory of films from the mid-70s blurs / overlaps (like Nashville) from Brighton into my early years at LSE when I worked at The Other Cinema, tearing tickets (The Battle of Algiers, Tout Va Bien, High School & other Fred Wiseman docs) followed in the same location by the now legendary Scala Cinema before it moved to King’s Cross and Channel Four took the space (The Girl Can’t Help It, Supervixens, Night Of The Living Dead, The Wicker Man, Cabaret, Solaris, The Goalkeeper’s Fear Of The Penalty, Pink Flamingos etc) just down the road from my digs off Charlotte Street.  It was there that I met Dominique Green, Paul Webster, Don McPherson and Stephen Woolley (see My Pop Life #23 Somethin’ Else) all of whom, like me, went on to work in the film industry and who are all dear friends.  Before the internet of course, the only place where you could witness transgression in safety (relatively!) was the cinema, and cinema clubs could skirt the censorship laws and screen stuff with actual sex.  Downstairs at the Scala all-nighter was a rock’n’roll punk poem of transgression where the tribes would meet on amphetamines and indulge their anti-establishment tastes.  I’d already seen the establishment version of soft porn Emmanuelle somewhere in Brighton, the hazy glowing golden skin and languid movements now a cliché in a bottle.

The first film I can remember seeing was The Sound Of Music with Mum and Paul in Eastbourne sometime in the 1960s.  The only other film I remember with Mum was Oliver! and we had the soundtrack LPs to both films at home, and knew every word off by heart.  The first film I went to see on my own was in the fleapit aka The Odeon on Cliffe High Street Lewes,  where I saw a double bill of Zulu and Those Magnificent Man in Their Flying Machines one day, maybe with Pete Smurthwaite. The cinema closed in 1971, partly I’m sure because of people like me referring to it as the fleapit and putting nervous people off from visiting.

The Odeon, Cliffe High Street, Lewes

The 1970s was peak cinema viewing time for me.  There was actually no need for snobbery because the Hollywood mainstream was so potent – Cuckoo’s Nest to A Clockwork Orange to Chinatown, The Godfather part 2, The Outlaw Josey Wales, even Jaws. All directed by young turks blowing old Hollywood away – Spielberg, Scorsese, Coppola, Kubrick. Terribly exciting times.  But I’d developed a taste for the subtitle and an eye for composition and shot.  Foreign films entered the bloodstream.  Woman In The Dunes.  Alexander Nevsky.  Pather Panchali.  Only study greatness…

At school there was a fella in the year above us called Russell Beck who invited some of us to see a short film in one of our free periods.  He’d drawn and painted it all on two pieces of sellotape stuck together and projected it onto the white wall to a groovy song.  It was so inspiring and brilliant.  I started to imagine wipe shots using passing trains to Seaford while waiting on the platform for the Polegate train. It became my most important thing.  Cinema.  Films.  More important than football, than music, than girls.  Well almost.

But I didn’t become a film director.  If I spent time on regrets, which I don’t, it might be on this.  I’d have been a good one I think.  I have made three short films,  inevitably.  One art/nature film called The Murmuration with Andy Baybutt which I talked about in My Pop Life #87  about Debussy, one pop video with Mark Williams and The Crocketts called Host also partly shot on the West Pier in Brighton incidentally, and one drama called The Last Of The Toothpaste which used Bernard Herrmann’s music for Hitchock’s Vertigo as its soundtrack.  It was a good idea without a good ending and thus failed as a piece sadly.  So I never really had a good calling card for my embryo directing career.  My first screenplay New Year’s Day was the closest I got, because before I signed the deal I seriously felt that I should direct it and called the director to tell him.  He was fucking furious and told me that he would develop his own film on the same subject if I did that.  A turning point.  I relented and let him direct it, and I’m still proud of the result despite the extraordinary depths of pain and personal frustration I and Jenny went through on that beknighted project. See My Pop Life #226 Exit Music For A Film and many other posts.  Pick the scars.  Ouch.

My main relationship with film has thus been first as a fan,  second as an actor, third as a writer (I’ve written seven, had one made).  I’ve written a lot about my acting experiences on film sets, particularly Alien 3, The Boat That Rocked, Withnail & I, Impromptu, Sus and Exorcist Dominion, and there are many others to come I hope.  But I haven’t written at all about being a film buff, a film snob or a collector of film music.  This current pandemic finds me and my wife Jenny in Brooklyn watching the Turner Classic Movie channel with enjoyable regularity, catching up with The Searchers, Lawrence Of Arabia, An American In Paris, Rocco & His Brothers, Carmen Jones, The General, Five Easy Pieces, The Red Shoes and Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner?  All introduced with enthusiasm and nuggets of enjoyment by the presenters.  The experience has completely reignited my passion for cinema, reminded me of who I am.

Los Feliz Cinema, Los Angeles

The Phoenix, East Finchley

The Holloway Odeon

I have spent many many hours of my life inside darkened rooms watching films.  I was a member of the National Film Theatre on the South Bank in London (eg Gordon Park’s Leadbelly with dear Beverley Randall, the extraordinary Russian anti-war film Come and See by Elem Klimov, Imamura’s The Ballad Of Narayama) as well as watching films at the London Film Festival each autumn which would only get a limited run/ never get released  – stuff such as Idrissa Ouedraogo’s marvellous Yaaba or Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth, many Indian films over the years.   I’ve been a regular at the Screen On The Green (Hidden Agenda, The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle, Truly, Madly, Deeply) the Everyman in Hampstead (The Exterminating Angel, All About Eve, Yojimbo), the Phoenix in East Finchley (Babette’s Feast, Raise The Red Lantern), the Electric on Portobello Road (WR: Mysteries of the Organism, Babylon, For A Few Dollars More) the Renoir in Bloomsbury (Rue Cases-Negres, Diva, Chocolat), the Lumiere in St Martin’s Lane (The Sheltering Sky, Ran, we walked out of The Cook, The Thief… and Jenny wanted to storm the projector box!) and the Odeon in Holloway Road (Stand By Me, Toy Story, Desperately Seeking Susan).  We would visit the Duke Of York’s, oldest cinema in Britain when we lived in Brighton (Let The Right One In, Cinema Paradiso, City of God) but they never screened my baby New Year’s Day, calling it “too commercial” a lie which still bites me to this day.  It was a local film by a local person, the very definition of arthouse independent cinema … and the premiere was at The Marina multiplex….anyway… calm down…

I’ve been to the Cannes Film Festival three times – notably in 2000 when Jenny, Gwen Wynne and I saw the world premiere of Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon getting a six-minute standing ovation.  I was lucky enough to work with Ang Lee in 2018 down in Savannah, Georgia on Gemini Man.  I didn’t have the nerve to tell him we’d called it Crouch End Tiger, Hendon Dragon.   And then Will Smith bought out a screen at a Savannah multiplex the night Black Panther opened and took the cast & crew to celebrate.  Earlier Jenny had been in Cannes 2004 and seen Chan-Wook Park’s Old Boy, and by 2011 I was working on his English language film Stoker, and happily told him she had been there when he’d won the Grand Prix.  Golden threads.

And Hollywood. Yes we used to live there.  It’s a lot.  I loved it, Jenny hated it.  It is shallow and ambitious and in-your-face rude.  But it is warm and smells delicious and the sky is blue.  Living in Los Angeles in the 1990s I loved the culture of film which is woven into that city’s architecture, industry and culture – a city where films really matter and get discussed both as commerce and art.  Arguments about choosing which film release would get your dollars on an opening weekend, every single week.

The Egyptian Theatre, Hollywood Boulevard

I was there on Oscar night 1993 when Neil Jordan & Stephen Woolley & Stephen Rea & Jaye Davidson came back from the ceremony with Neil’s statue for Best Screenplay for The Crying Game (we had six nominations) and I got to hold the damn thing in my sweaty drunken hands and marvel.   Over our years there we patronised the New Beverley Cinema (owned by Quentin Tarantino since 2014) which shows arthouse classics and overheard Robert Forster, the lovely actor from Jackie Brown coming out from a screening of a Charlie Chaplin film I think in 2002 saying “Sure I’ll read it, but I can’t get a picture financed you should know that“.  He’d had a Best Supporting Actor nomination five years earlier.  The shine wears off.  We went to the Nuart, the Vista, the Arclight and the magnificent Egyptian Theater on Hollywood Boulevard which has handprints in the concrete outside and stars embedded in the sidewalk.  It’s all around and just out of reach.

Here in New York we have the Film Forum in Tribeca/West Village which has been screening independent programmes since 1970 and where we go to see films by Visconti or Ozu or Buñuel, Chimes At Midnight or the ‘recent’ Aretha Franklin pic from 1972  Amazing Grace ram-packed with church elders visiting from Jersey.

We have the Metrograph on the Lower East Side which also screens classics – when I read that they were showing my favourite Andrei Tarkovsky film Andrei Rublev I booked two tickets and treated my buddy Tony Gerber whereupon he returned the favour and took me to Lina Wertmuller’s highly original Seven Beauties at the same screen with his wife Lynn and daughter Ruby.  It is a genuine pleasure in normal times to make a date and see a movie and I miss it a great deal.   As a member of BAFTA NY  we get invited to screenings, often with Q&A sessions with the director or actors involved especially in the awards season and we’ve been to literally scores of these over the last six years.  (The Revenant, Secret Life Of Pets, Queen of Katwe, Hidden Figures, You Were Never Really Here).  Catching up is then done via DVD screeners which get mailed to members so that we can vote for best film best actress and so on.  Roma is my favourite film of the last few years, an absolute treasure of film-making from Alfonso Cuarón from beginning to end, head and shoulders above what anyone else is currently doing, but I have to mention Stephen Woolley’s production of Lone Scherfig’s Their Finest – a film about film-making in the Second World War.  It is the finest thing he has done I feel and I told him so.

Taxi Driver so took me that I went to that shop on Brewer Street – it’s probably gone now – where they sell posters and other memorabilia amid the strip clubs and dodgy geezers appropriately enough, and bought the magnificent blue poster of De Niro walking down a Lower East Side street in 1975, a classic New York City image.  I had it in my bedroom for a couple of years before someone stole it when I had a party.   Later, as a hopeful monster I was offered a recall audition for a small part in Gangs of New York but I was ambitious then for more than three lines so I said no and missed my chance to rub shoulders with Marty.  He’s one of the great directors no doubt, even though his vision is narrow and repetitive he knows how to make a movie.  He remembers the Taxi Driver shoot :

“For instance, the tracking shot over the murder scene at the end, which was shot in a real apartment building: We had to go through the ceiling to get it. It took three months to cut through the ceiling, and 20 minutes to shoot the shot.”

The evocative wee small hours saxophone on the soundtrack was played by jazz musician Tom Scott, leader of the band LA Express, who weirdly enough get mentioned in my America ’76 diary on the following page from the Taxi Driver entry “shall we go and see LA Express or Barry Lyndon?”  We did neither.  The album also has  De Niro’s monologues over Herrmann’s score including the iconic scene where he is talking to himself in the mirror, stuff he improvised and which doesn’t appear in Schrader’s extraordinary screenplay.  I was lucky enough to get cast in one of Paul Schrader’s films ie one he directed (Exorcist Dominion which was shot in Morocco in 2002) but I never asked him about Taxi Driver.  I don’t think I wanted to be a fanboy because of my Bowie experience (My Pop Life #54 Art Decade) but really sometimes I should just ask the damn question.

Bernard Herrmann conducting

Paul Schrader, Martin Scorsese & Robert De Niro on the set of Taxi Driver

you talkin’ to me?

 all photographs by Steve Schapiro

Taxi Driver is a film about loneliness, alienation and feeling small.  It is about an inarticulate unconnected man who becomes aware of his own lack of agency and resolves to do something about it.  New York City has an air of menace and danger, and is full of people hustling, using other people.  It doesn’t make sense.  It is Babylon.  Travis Bickle becomes an avenging angel, a dark purifying psychopath who dreams of doing something, being somebody, and the film is a terrifying prophecy of the future of our culture.  Within four years John Lennon had been shot dead on his own doorstep in New York.  Now we get school shootings and other horrific empty nihilistic spasms of violence as a matter of course.  It’s a scary film, a red flag and a vision of hell.  But it is where we live, still, in 2020.

Bernard Herrmann scored Citizen Kane, North By Northwest, Psycho, Vertigo, Fahrenheit 451 and The Devil and Daniel Webster for which he won an Oscar.   And many others of course.  He is one of an armful of composers (did I mention Ennio Morricone?) who can change the image you’re watching because of what you are hearing.  His work always elevates the artform into greatness.

Film – and theatre, and television – all help us to understand who we are as individuals, and as societies.  They help us to understand other cultures too if we are curious.  Artists are curious because that is how we are made.  The offensive remarks of the British chancellor this week suggesting that artists should all retrain thanks to the pandemic are to be utterly condemned for the ignorant arrogant philistinism that they are.  He should be forced to spend a month without art, without culture, without entertainment of any kind.  We are always the first to feel the recessions, and the last to get back to work.  We choose to create because – and I speak for myself – I do not feel good when I am not creating.  Film was my chosen medium of creativity but I have dabbled in other arenas.  It is what makes my heart beat.

Oh my favourite films you now ask, rather belatedly?  Well, today, they are:

Casablanca  –   Michael Curtiz

Andrei Rublev   –   Andrei Tarkovsky

O Lucky Man   –   Lindsay Anderson

Roma   –   Alfonso Cuarón

Once Upon A Time In The West   –   Sergei Leone

The Seven Samurai   –   Akira Kurosawa

The New World   –   Terrence Malick

The Exterminating Angel   –   Luis Buñuel

The Conversation   –   Francis Ford Coppola

Lawrence Of Arabia   –   David Lean

The Holy Innocents   –   Mario Camus

Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid   –   Carl Reiner

*

I note that cinema chains are adapting to the pandemic by opening from Thursday to Sunday only, or by closing completely, some are trying to get folk to buy tickets for online screenings.  I hope and pray that when we are through this powerfully challenging covid moment, and we will be, that cinema will still be here to uplift us and encourage our natural empathy.

Opening Theme :

God’s Lonely Man :

After Herrmann died, David Blume arranged some of the themes in a more lounge style, and this version while smooth and harmless is also very evocative.  Not sure if Bernard would have approved, and it doesn’t appear in the film

My Pop Life #245 : Double Barrel – Dave & Ansel Collins

Double Barrel – Dave & Ansel Collins

I am the magnificent  W   O   O   O

*

This blog is stretching my memory to breaking point.  A few weeks ago (September 2020) I was trying to recall one of the surrogate family experiences I had as a teenager, sheltering at a friend’s house while mum had a rest, or became homeless, or in this particular case, had a termination.  I’d spent a few weeks – maybe just a week I can’t remember – with Simon Lester’s family in Chiddingly in deepest Sussex in this instance and had vivid memories of learning to drive a battered car in the field behind the house.

I contacted Simon to see how much he remembered, in particular about when it occurred.  I sent him a blurry Polaroid of him at school in the hope that it would jog his memory.

Simon Lester at Lewes Priory with Jenny Yewlett – but when?

I also sent the picture to Simon Korner because he has specialised in his writing in remembering this intense period of our schooldays.  Controversy ensued.  I thought it was around 1973, last year of Middle School because of the fence.  (Wrong – Middle School was 3rd & 4th years) Simon K. thought that the fence was where we smoked in Upper School – 5th, 6th forms.  And Jenny T. didn’t arrive at the school until the 5th year apparently.  So why were we smoking in Middle school?  It went on.  Simon Lester and I have another mutual friend, John Hawkins who was imaginatively nicknamed Billy at school and who was a regular at the Goldstone Ground on Saturdays along with Sherlock, Crod, Simon Lester and I.  It was a football ground in Hove where Brighton & Hove Albion played.   Last time I saw John was at an away game at Bolton Wanderers when we had some pints and watched legend Bobby Zamora’s first game for us for 12 years.  It was 2-2 final score.   John lives up that way, in Lancashire, and I was working in Liverpool.  Turns out that John has a better memory than all of us and confirmed that it was indeed the Middle School fence.  See the picture below of me on the same day

This doesn’t show the tunnel in the background that ran from Middle School to Upper School past the Chapel.  But you can just see Mountfield Road behind that.  All very fascinating I’m sure if you’re not from Lewes Priory in the 1970s.  So the photo appeared to be from 1973 – I was right about the date.  Maybe the School Festival.  But but but.  I asked my sister Rebecca what she could tell me about this mysterious sanctuary moment of mine – and why did I do that? She would have been one year old at the time.  But amazingly enough, she remembers a conversation that she’d had with Mum (whom I wasn’t talking to this summer otherwise I might have asked her) when Mum said that yes, a year before Becky was born she’d had a termination.  We did the sums.  Becky was born in April 1972 so my moment driving around the field with Simon Lester was perhaps spring 1971.  That did seem very early.  I’d be thirteen years old.

Meanwhile Simon Lester was asking his sisters Katie and Gill if they could remember anything, and blow me down, Katie remembers their mum picking me up from Hailsham and finding the house really hard to find.  We had just been rehoused on this new-build council estate on the freshly-dug outskirts of Hailsham after spending nine months apart, discussed in various posts such as My Pop Life #84 All Along The Watchtower.  I was 13 years old, Paul was eleven, Andrew six.  We’d all been in different locations for most of 1970, and moved into Salternes Drive, later called Town Farm Estate, and known as Sin City to all the locals in the early weeks of 1971.  I cannot be more precise than that because I suspect time fogs the memory, and trauma sometimes wipes it completely.  At some point in the spring of 1971 I’d taken a record into my Music class – discussed in My Pop Life #141 Jig-A-Jig which takes place largely in the pre-fab classroom just behind that fence.

And at some other indiscernible point that spring, Simon Lester’s mum had somehow found her way to our new house and picked me up with my schoolbag and some spare clothes and taken me back to Chiddingly.

532 Salternes Drive, Hailsham in 1973

Simon Lester’s sister Katie reckoned it was 1971, before their father left.  Simon’s version of this detail would mean that he would drive to work in Hove every morning where he was a dentist, and drop Simon and I off in Lewes High Street to walk to school.  Before the bypass was built.  Sounds about right.  Simon’s mother was very kind to me – that I do remember very clearly.  She asked me what I wanted to eat one day and I said “a peanut butter sandwich please” because that was my favourite, and she then asked me how I would like the peanut butter on the bread, separated alongside the butter or all mushed together, an extraordinary detail which has stuck with me to this day.  How shall I make your sandwich.  I don’t think anyone had asked me that before or indeed since.  Very special lady.  When she showed me “my” bedroom and I thanked her she then said that if she found any of my clothes on the floor while I was at school, she would wash them, so if I didn’t want something washed not to leave it on the floor.  It was the only rule I can remember, also because I hadn’t come across it before !!  A kind way of encouraging tidyness.

The Lester’s house in Chiddingly

I had my own bedroom which was amazing because I shared with Paul at home.  Incidentally I do not remember where Paul or Andrew went during this period, it is one of the shadier corners of our family history, by which I mean “not remembered” rather than shameful.  Abortion shouldn’t be shameful at all, it is part of the human story.  But it was whispered about at the time as I recall, and discussed as termination, the word I’ve used in this blog.  This episode as a teenager was the closest I’ve ever been to an abortion, as far as I know, none of my girlfriends or friends ever talked to me about it, if indeed any of them experienced it.  I’d imagine some of them did.   But there’s no moral high ground in bringing unwanted children onto this planet.  I certainly knew the reason why I was at Simon Lester’s house at the time, although he didn’t.  It all felt reasonably normal to be honest.  I vaguely remember watching TV with the family, 1971 style, it would have been It’s A Knockout!, The Golden Shot, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Blue Peter and Banana Splits.  Grandstand on Saturday.  The Big Match on Sunday.  Simon and I would have kicked a ball around his garden too because we both played football for the school team – Simon had a better touch than me, a more cultured right foot I should say, more accurate, capable of stroking the ball wherever he wanted it to go.  Football is where we’d bonded, and it was in 1971 that I went to my first Brighton & Hove Albion game, but I cannot recall the opposition I’m afraid.  Maybe Bury?  I remember the Brighton team which included brothers John & Kit Napier, John Templeman, Eddie Spearrit, Alan Duffy, Norman Gall, Peter O’Sullivan, Willie Irvine, Nobby Lawton, because after that first visit I was hooked.  We used to go after we’d played on a Saturday morning, you could just pay on the turnstile and then stand behind the goal in the North Stand Shoreham Road, singing songs, strolling down the Shoreham Roooooaad… to see Pat Saward’s Aces, bouncing up and down on the stone terraces, waves of bodies plunging forward during moments of excitement then heaving back to more or less your original spot as the moment passed.  Extraordinarily exciting.  Cameraderie.  Togetherness.  Family.  Playing at home.  I was an instant convert to Saturday afternoon football, and am still addicted now some fifty years later.  The anticipation, the scarf tied around your wrist, in later years the replica shirt, the pub, the singing, the laughing, the fear of opposition fans, the hatred of the referee, the wit, the profound primal eruption of triumph when the ball hits the back of the net, the staggering gutless mortification as we concede.  Football has taught me many things – loyalty, defeat, acumen, singing pour encourager les autres, grace in victory.  Thirteen was a good age to start finding some of that.

We played Reading and Aston Villa on successive days at home over Easter – extraordinary really – in front of sell-out crowds of 35,000 – in the Third Division !  Our PE teacher Tony Alexander (whom we all loved) was a Villa fan, and managed the school football team. We ragged each other but happily both teams went up that season and my lifelong love of Brighton & Hove Albion was sealed: win, lose or draw, sunshine or rain, in sickness and in health, til death us do part. The other lads at football were essentially the ones from the school team – Conrad Ryle (Crod), Andy Holmes (Sherlock), Martin Cooper (Coops), plus John Hawkins (Billy) and Simon Lester who never had a nickname plus me snap.  We’d lose each other in the mayhem of the North Stand and rediscover each other amid the bouncing bodies.

Knock Knock  –  Who’s there?

Ivor

Ivor Who?

I’ve a knock kneed chicken and a bow-legged hen

We ain’t lost a fight since we don’t know when

We don’t give a widdle and we don’t give a wank

WE ARE THE BRIGHTON 

NORTH STAND

Lalalalalalalalala Lalalalalalala lalalalalalalaaaa

WE ARE THE BRIGHTON

NORTH STAND

I can’t pin down the date exactly and photos from this era seem non-existent but was it around this time when I flirted with the skinhead look?  It was certainly fashionable by then thanks to the rude boy culture imported from Jamaica – the ska beat, pork-pie hats, sta-prest trousers, button-down collars, braces and boots.  Short hair obviously, but not shaved.  More Suedehead to be honest, the name of a book which was passed round too.   Kind of sex and violence and fashion YA stuff.  I saved up for my first Ben Sherman shirt, precious status symbol of the early 70s.  White socks were cheaper.  Braces too.  Didn’t own a Fred Perry til I was in my 20s.  It was about being smart rather than scruffy and grew out of mod culture, Tamla Motown, bluebeat.  A year or so later I was wearing make-up and blouses as glam rock took over, proving that for me it was another uniform, I was a pop tart, a dedicated follower of whatever took my fancy that year.

A truly awful song called Johnny Reggae pins the era down to 1971 – that was a Jonathon King cash-in turd, but at the other end of the scale was the real deal – Jamaican ska and reggae.  Reggae was a new word (Do The Reggay by The Maytals was released in 1968).  The music had slowed down from the choppy ska beat by the late sixties when rocksteady ruled the Jamaican charts and made an impression on the UK.  Desmond Dekker had charted in 1967 with 007 (Shanty Town) then made number one with Israelites (See My Pop Life #102) in 1969 when the Kingston sounds really tickled the UK charts with some classic stuff : The Liquidator, Long Shot Kick De Bucket, Return of Django and yes Skinhead Moonstomp the latter from a local act Symarip (Pyramids backwards!! almost!!!).  And being the UK, it was the fashion as much as the sounds – totally against the hippie look as the 1960s spun to their disillusioned finish with Altamont, Vietnam and the student uprisings forming a TV backdrop to heroin, cynicism about selling out and the break-up of The Beatles.  1970 brought us Young Gifted & Black (written by Nina Simone) by Bob & Marcia who would also hit with Pied Piper and The Maytals released Pressure Drop. Then in 1971 the Year of Our Lord brought us, and me, the mighty Double Barrel by Dave & Ansel Collins.

I. Am the magnificent.  I’m beg for the sheck of a so bose, most turmeric, story, sound of soul!

Thus begins the mightiest number one hit of 1971….

I am W O O O.  And I’m certain here again. OW!

Good god.  Too much I like it!  Huh? 

I still have no idea what the lyrics are.  The mystery of it is powerful to be honest, like a mantra chanted for secret power.  Where did I hear it?  On the radio of course, it reached number one in March 1971 and Radio One played it regularly.  It was a revelation.  It still sounds immense.  Dave did the vocals, with Ansel (spelled Ansil on the single) on the keyboards. After one LP and another hit single called Monkey Spanner (the heavy heavy monster sound!) they split up.

Oh yes, and the car in the field.  The highlight of this era perhaps (although the football and the reggae are gonna run it close).  There it was in the field behind the house in Chiddingly – a battered old motor car.  Simon, perhaps 14 by now (I was young for my school year) had the key, and he would drive round in circles mainly – big circles I mean – around the field.  Then he taught me how to do it.  How to turn the key, depress the clutch, rev the engine, release the handbrake and whoooosh power speed thrills.  We devised a kind of Escape From Alcatraz scene which involved us running to the car which had two open doors then jumpin in and each having two jobs, Simon turned the key and did the clutch, I released the handbrake and maybe pulled the choke out, so we could achieve lift-off in seconds flat.

The house is bang centre behind the white tree, the field is the great swoop of green to the right

I didn’t stay at the Lester’s house for very long but that became a vivid memory burned through me.  A few years later Simon left school and started work, and on weekends would go to the Arlington Speedway track near Hailsham and drive in Stock Car Races with his souped up and painted old banger.  Not sure if it was the same car.  Stock Car racing is like racing around a dirt track 30 laps (?) with no rules. Simon would skid and drive his Stock Car around the track, bashing into the other drivers, backending them, sideswiping them, skidding through the dirt and exhaust smoke in his reinforced old banger.  I went a couple of times to watch, and it was of course completely thrilling.  Cars deliberately driving into each other to gain an advantage in a race.  Yup.  I should stress this is completely separate from NASCAR or any American style car racing.  This was more down and dirty for one.  More local.  There’s some footage of this fabulous phenomenon here:

We lost touch after I moved to London, but we would see each other now and again at Brighton games, and we have kept the lines of communication open.  I was back in England in late summer 2019 to fix up the house, and went to see the Albion twice, meeting friends in The Swan in Falmer – Crod, Sherlock and Simon Lester along with my sister and her boyfriend Lee another huge Albion fan.  Now old geezers reminiscing about the days gone by, survivors of cancer and other scares, still friends drinking Harvey’s finest on the way to the game.

Andy Holmes, Simon Lester, Ralph Brown, Conrad Ryle 2019 The Swan

I wasn’t very reflexive at 13 – I didn’t think about what kind of person Simon Lester was for example, he was just there, a companion, easy-going, enjoyed a chuckle.  In retrospect now I see him as shy, gentle, bright and very kind with none of the edge that I imagine I had.  But back in those days I was still growing, as was he.   I’m hugely grateful for his help in piecing this memory together.  

So from the age of ten to 18 I had at least six surrogate Parenting experiences that I can recall.   Philip and Mya in Brighton aged 10, Sheila Smurthwaite in Ringmer aged 11, then again in Lewes aged 13, Mrs Lester in Chiddingly aged 13, Mrs Korner in Lewes aged 14/15, Mrs Ryle in Kingston ages 16/17/18.   Then I was grown up and found my own way, went back many times to the Ryles and the Korners over the years.   All have now sadly passed.  I’m forever grateful to all of these generous beautiful big-hearted people for if not for thee and thine, I would certainly have spent some years in foster care or worse.  They made my physical and psychic survival possible.  The rest was up to me. 

the original single:

The Top of The Pops appearance with Dave extemporising because he is the magnificent