My Pop Life #257 : Bird On The Wire – Leonard Cohen

Bird On The Wire – Leonard Cohen

This post relates to the previous post My Pop Life #256 Mother

*

A few weeks after I’d posted that letter I received a postcard from Mum. I can’t remember what was on the cover, but I’ve still got it, somewhere, in storage. On the back of it she’d written

Dear Ralph, Listen to Bird On A Wire by Leonard Cohen love Mum

So I did. I didn’t know the song because I’ve always had a prejudice against Cohen, who knows where it started, but it was confirmed when the twerp who directed my screenplay feature film New Year’s Day in 1999 (see My Pop Life #226 Exit Music (For A Film)) announced one day that Leonard Cohen was the greatest musical artist ever. “Oh well”, I thought. “Never mind”.

I sought out the song, found it on Youtube, put on the headphones and listened. Jesus H. Christ.

Like a bird on the wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free
Like a worm on a hook
Like a knight from some old fashioned book
I have saved all my ribbons for thee
If I, if I have been unkind
I hope that you can just let it go by
If I, if I have been untrue
I hope you know it was never to you
Like a baby, stillborn
Like a beast with his horn
I have torn everyone who reached out for me
But I swear by this song
And by all that I have done wrong
I will make it all up to thee
I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch
He said to me, “You must not ask for so much.”
And a pretty woman leaning in her darkened door
She cried to me, “Hey, why not ask for more?”

It was so devastatingly on the nose I couldn’t believe it. It was astoundingly eloquent and painful, honest and real. It chimed with me in this way too – that my Mum had chosen to reply to the most honest and painful letter I’d ever written to her with a song. Her Pop Life. I wrote about Mum a few times in here, but My Pop Life #147 Days is probably the most positive. I printed it out and posted it to her about four months ago. Perhaps My Pop Life #112 The Night is the least positive. I didn’t post that to her. Yin & Yang.

I find it almost as difficult writing about my relationship with my mother as it is having that relationship. But not quite. Because here I am.

I remember good motherly moments. In Selmeston I was filling a hot water bottle from the kettle and poured boiling water over my hand, dropped the hottie and rubbed the hand in a classic schoolboy mistake. I was still at primary school. All the skin came off and boy did that hurt. Raw. I remember getting a lot of love that evening from mum – no details in my memory like calendula cream but the hand was certainly bandaged and cocoa was made.

Paul, Andrew & Wendy at the Sand Pit c1967

The entry called Days (see above) concerns positive afternoons at The Sand Pit watching butterflies with Mum, Paul and Andrew, sometimes cousin Wendy was visiting from Portsmouth. An oasis of peace and good memories.

When I decided aged 11 that I no longer wished to attend Sunday School at The Vicarage she accepted it immediately and made no fuss of any kind. Grateful for that !

And more than grateful for the Sunday early evening ritual of Pick Of The Pops on Radio One with Alan Freeman. Without fail. The weekly chart countdown, from 30 to the Number One. We would play along, sing along, cheer for our favourites, sulk through the bad songs. Embedded in my pysche. A love for Pop Music.

Summer 1964, Mum Dad Ralph Paul & Andrew. I’m in the middle.

And then there’s the not-so-motherly moments. These commenced early in 1965 when Mum had a Nervous Breakdown and was admitted to hospital to recover. Her Mum, our Nan, came up from Portsmouth to the East Sussex village to help Dad look after me, seven, and Paul aged five while Andrew, just under one year old, went in the opposite direction to be cared for by Aunty Valerie, Mum’s sister in Pompey. Mum was in Hellingly Hospital for nine months. Mainly blotted out of my memory – but pieces of it remain in My Pop Life #55 Help!

I started to build the walls around my heart that year. After Mum came home it seemed as if normal had vanished forever. Dad was kicked out by Mum, they got divorced when I was eight years old. About eighteen months later (?) Mum had remarried to John Daignault. (Pronounced like the French, ie Dag-Noh his parents were French-Canadian). They fought regularly but also seemed to love each other.

But once we moved away from the village in 1970 (see My Pop Life #84 All Along The Watchtower) things changed. We were all separated for nine months in different families in different locations. When we eventually got rehoused in Hailsham (without John Daignault – Mum would say “Dag-Know-Nothing” lol) things would get seriously weird. By now Mum had been diagnosed as a manic depressive AND a paranoid schizophrenic and any other words that were in vogue at the time, and had been prescribed in-vogue and experimental drugs to match all eventualities. As discussed in Help! she was one of many women who were used as guinea pigs by the medical profession in the 60s & 70s, as depression and its variants were slowly acknowledged. They were in the top cupboard in the kitchen, behind my chair. She would ask for one or another of these tablets regularly – Melleril, Librium, Stellazine – and others, prescribed to see what they would do, all different colours, upper or downers who knew. There would be violent episodes as we grew bigger and mouthier. Second husband John Daignault appeared (again), then disappeared after a fight with Paul and I and another when Mum was pregnant with Rebecca. Her episodes got more and more random, surreal and dangerous. Often I would be ordered to walk to the phone box 500 yards away and call the doctor. I was fourteen years old, and had to grow up fast: “My mother needs some different medication/treatment/hospitalisation” I cannot remember any of the conversations but I do remember it was the thing I wanted to do the least. I dreaded those walks to the phone box. At some point in the 1970s we had a telephone installed in the house. A trim phone. But the violence lurked, the threats, the sobbing fits, the midnight crawls around the carpet, the fights with the swinging arm often containing the poker though it rarely connected. It’s all blurred now. We all adapted in different ways, inside our own heads and our own lives. Paul and I shared a bedroom being two years apart in age, so there was some solidarity there. Andrew had his own bedroom and some privacy but must have been lonely and isolated. Rebecca was just a child.

By the time I got to the sixth form I was spending more and more time away at the Ryle‘s house in Kingston where I played in a band with Conrad . I had four or five surrogate families over this period of school – the Korners also took me in more than once (My Pop Life #64 Fresh Garbage) so did the Lester family in Chiddingly (My Pop Life #245 Double Barrel) and Sheila Smurthwaite took me in twice, once in Ringmer and once in Lewes (Watchtower). I relished all these weeks away from my mother and from Hailsham, I got to spend time with what appeared to be happy people, actual families who functioned relatively normally and spoke to each other with love and affection and support. I am so grateful to all of these families for literally saving my humanity. By then I had built the castle wall around my heart and become a survivor replicant, but Rosemary Ryle, Shirley Korner, Sheila Smurthwaite, and Mrs Lester all managed to find a way behind that wall, and so did their children – all my age – Conrad Ryle, Simon Korner, Pete Smurthwaite who died two years ago sadly, and Simon Lester. We all remained close friends. They stopped me from becoming bitter. From being a criminal. As did my other friends whose houses I did not crash in, but who nevertheless were there for me : Andy Holmes, Andrew Taylor, Shirine Pezeshghi, Pam Norris, Julie Furth.

Did Paul and Andrew have these support families too? Paul often stayed with Gilda in the village in the early days, but once Hailsham happened he fell in with Vince and some other Hailsham people – Richard and others. Andrew was at primary school through most of the 1970s and I’m ashamed to report that I cannot remember whether he developed these emotional supports, these escape families like I did. In this sense, I abandoned him much like Mum and Dad did. And Rebecca. God knows how she made it through with such a great sense of humour, because she is as funny as fuck and a real tonic whatever is going on. Neither of us are really talking to Mum any more because it is still abuse that we receive on the whole. It has taken its toll.

The abuse started when I found these escapes.

When I got home I’d get it from Mum. “Spending time with those people, going to parties, leaving me here” kind of stuff. Guilt tripping me, just being nasty. She did come to see me in a school play when I was 16, and Dad came too, they sat together, they were probably proud as punch. I don’t want to paint a false picture of misery and mental illness. It isn’t that simple. None of us went into care at any point. None of us ended up in prison, or overdosed on heroin. We adapted. We survived.

Things didn’t get any better as I left home and went to work in Laughton Lodge, a hospital “For The Mentally Subnormal” (oh those 1970s). I was a good nurse. Saved some money and went away to America with Simon Korner for five months in the summer of 1976. An amazing trip (see, for example My Pop Life #235 You’ve Got A Friend), then came back and immediately went up to London for my first year at LSE. I’d successfully escaped. Paul had been kicked out by then and was working in the Tax Office in Eastbourne, living in Pevensey Bay. Andrew was at Hailsham School. Rebecca was at Primary School.

Mumtaz was my girlfriend through college and we would go down to Hailsham to see everyone, sometimes at Christmas. There were always dogs and cats around. I’m not a huge fan of Christmas.

Happy Days : Christmas with Mumtaz, Becky, Andrew with Pusspuss, Me, Paul & Mum with Snoopy.

One Easter we went down and Mum was having a serious breakdown, waking us up in the middle of the night crying, cursing us both for “going to parties and having a good time” and then crawling around on the floor gasping for breath and cursing the doctors. It was an extraordinarily horrible weekend and I don’t think Mumtaz went down again after that. Mum was racist anyway. ( I wrote it as my first play in 1986 and called it Drive Away The Darkness, kind of my version of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Got a reading at The National Theatre and that was that.)

But Paul and I made the error once we’d both returned from our Mexico adventure (see My Pop Life #31 Enough Is Enough) and went down for Christmas. Mum had bought a VCR which will probably date it, and bought a video for us to watch – The Belstone Fox. She then decided that we would be watching it at 10pm on Christmas Day. This clashed with King Of Comedy on C4 (will also help date it if I could be bothered to look it up – the 80s anyway {1984}) which all of us wanted to watch. No. We tried to explain that the VCR meant we could watch The Belstone Fox any time we wanted to, kind of the whole point, but No. We were watching it at 10pm Christmas Day. Voices were raised, drinks were knocked back, things may have been thrown. Paul and I ended up down the pub in the High Street nursing our wounds and Mum went across the green to a neighbour. We never went down on Christmas Day again, and started to hold “Christmas” in mid-December then all do our own thing on the 25th December. What a relief.

Was this the infamous Belstone Fox Christmas? Paul & Mum

The dysfunction continued. I left Mumtaz and started to date Rita Wolf. Mum regularly delivered nasty phone calls mixed with calls where she would talk at me in a stream of consciousness rant for an hour – barely room for an MmnHm then she’d hang up and I’d say to the now dead phone “How are you Ralph?” I suppose it depended on what drugs she was taking, or not. Whenever the four of us would get together (once Becky was old enough to travel independently) – I’m remembering parties in Archway Road N6 where we would try to make sense of it together in a tight group and no one else could get a word in, what did they know of Heather our mother? It became an open therapy session where we would get the latest from Becky and talk about a phone conversation or the new third husband Alan. Alan is a decent man – he treated Becky as his daughter, and still does to this day. Bless him. Andrew went to college and Mum & Becky moved to Polegate into Alan’s house and the story continued. Sometimes it felt good around this period – we all hooked up for birthdays and Alan’s son Mark would be there, we’d talk about hip hop which we were all fans of and by now I was with Jenny and she was witnessing all the nonsense first hand.

Debbie, Mark, Andrew, Becky and 1st husband Peter, Paul and Colin. Mark’s birthday December 1991

Was Mum a victim or a Perp? Had her life conspired in such a way as to give her nervous breakdowns? I always felt dutiful towards Mum even though I didn’t like going home. Always felt sorry for her and used to blame my dad as I said in the letter. But slowly I began to separate the mental illness from the person. She could be remarkably unkind. But took me years to do this separation in my mind because it was excruciatingly difficult, while slowly stitching my relationship with my father back together thanks to his patience & kindness and my own understanding that I liked having a relationship with him, and I didn’t need to stay angry. The middle years I suppose. I was in therapy for a while, I’ve been on anti-depressants for a while, I diagnosed myself as Bipolar, Paul did the same, Andrew reckoned he was Borderline Personality Disorder – confirmed by professionals – the words change but the feelings are what they are. Dysfunctional family alert. Unpredictable behaviour. Individual may need drugs, therapy, love, support and to think before speaking.

Mum and Alan, Mark just offscreen

Without nailing down the dates, Mum divorced Alan just after the time when Jenny and I bought a house in Brighton. She left the Polegate house and found a small cottage in Willingdon, just outside Eastbourne. She lived there with her two dogs – Trish & Jason – and used to walk to the shops and up to the beautiful South Downs once a day and now and again take a bus into town. Becky was in Strood by now with John Coleman 2nd husband and father to Mollie, Ellie and William. Andrew was with Katie in Bournemouth and they had a son – Alexander. I remember these as happy times. I used to drive over from Brighton to Willingdon – a lovely drive along the A27 across the Ouse and Cuckmere valleys – or along the coast through Seaford to Jevington and turn left. The dogs would bark at me, then approach gingerly, then show affection eventually. A bit like Mum. Suspicious and untrustworthy but happy to see me. We would drink tea and smoke cigarettes and listen to music. Sit in the garden. Jenny had had one insult too many though and never accompanied me on these trips. No need. One day Mum had read a newspaper piece on me talking about Withnail & I – my youth in Lewes smoking weed with the hippies and bikerboys & my mates. She was furious (on the phone to Jenny) telling her I’d let the image of Lewes down with my drug-taking stories. I won’t indulge in the grand ironies present here but Jenny simply said she didn’t agree and it was the truth and Heather hung up on her. Jenny called her straight back and told her never to do that again. Mum apologised, they’ve hardly spoken since – Becky’s birthday maybe.

The South Downs from Wilmington nr the A27.

These were my years as number one son. Paul was abroad and Andrew was in Bournemouth. Perhaps they were getting the abuse then – their turn. Probably though it was Rebecca. We were never all in favour at the same time. And I would go mainly for guilt reasons because she was my mum. What did I get back? Some affection, some love maybe, more interest in my cats than in my wife. It is extraordinary that when I try to remember the bad times they hover just out of reach and I feel like I am betraying my own mother even writing this down. I’m not. I’m being true to myself.

There was a narrow staircase going up to the bathroom and two tiny bedrooms – it was like half a cottage really. The rural poor. As her legs and lungs started to get weaker, the stairs became an issue. I know that she would sit down and go up backwards on her bum. The knees couldn’t manage. The walks ‘up the Downs’ had finished. Someone organised a health worker to visit and Mum would be using a commode and sleeping downstairs. Watching TV eating chocolates pottering around. Eventually – and this took forever – she accepted a move to a bungalow – no stairs, accessible bathroom – on an estate in Hailsham. Town Farm where we’d lived in the 1970s. The painted ponies go up and down.

Becky finished her marriage to John and moved down to Hailsham around this time too. Mum became noticeably grumpier too. Perhaps the medications changed. It was never as relaxing or pleasant visiting her in the bungalow. But what am I actually saying? I feel like I can resurrect some kind of timeline without really tapping into the truth here. So frustrating, so opaque and confused.

In general it has been impossible to share my true feelings because – well, they are unacceptable in polite society. For example, I remember I was writing a screenplay for producer Robert Jones in 2002 and we had a meeting in his Soho office chatting away when I said something like “actually I don’t like my mum” and he was so shocked I don’t think he looked at me the same way again. (we did a TV show in 2014 called Babylon which I acted in later on though.) Society and most people rightly place their mothers at the very top of the tree of respect. She bore you in her womb. She birthed you, breast-fed you, taught you to speak and walk and fed and watered you. I get it. And she did all that. But then something happened.

I think Mum is a vulnerable bully. A phrase I created in my 30s. Accurate. Weakness and power. She is a powerful woman, no question about it, she has powers too. But always presented in this wobbly weak-voiced way until the switch. Then vicious, merciless, darkness.

Becky’s 40th. Andrew taking a picture while I do the same. Mum not looking well.

Although I whinge & whine about the treatment I got, Becky my sister had it far worse than any of the brothers. She is the closest to her mum, and moved down to Sussex from Kent to be closer to her and got years of aggro & abuse as thanks which became physical eventually. Becky stopped talking to Mum in 2017 and we protected her by filling in, phoning and visiting. Then one day Bex had an argument with her man and walked out of the house into her car and drove round to Mum’s. She still doesn’t know to this day why she did it but as she drew up in the nearest parking space there was smoke pouring out of an open window and she ran into the back door where Mum was sitting. The kitchen was on fire. She somehow dragged Mum outside into the garden under protest and called her friend Jan and the Fire Brigade who were both on the scene within minutes. A neighbour took the dog and Mum was taken to hospital, and eventually into sheltered accommodation since it was felt she could no longer look after herself. What are the chances of that? We all have powers, unacknowledged, unused. Three months later she was back in the bungalow, until it became clear after another fall that she wasn’t physically strong enough to walk herself around the place, even with a zimmer frame. Now she is permanently in a nursing home in Polegate and has lost her independence at the age of 85.

It isn’t going to all fit into one blog and neither should it. I cannot recall the early 2000s when we were in Brighton & LA, and Mum would write stink letters to me, and sometimes I’d reply. It was always feast or famine, you’re not good enough as a son, you should be ashamed of yourself travelling around the world while I live here. She was always sick to the back teeth of someone or other, a doctor, a neighbour, a husband, a daughter. Eventually in 2009 I wrote the letter to Mum which appears in My Pop Life #255 Mother – and I sent or emailed copies to Paul, Andrew and Becky too. They all supported me. I was grateful. Then I got the postcard reply.

I was gobsmacked to be honest. There is something indestructible about my Mum. There was some renewed respect. But it was also a cowardly response, not to write anything meaningful, apologetic or honest. Just “listen to Bird On The Wire“. No, not good enough. And we wouldn’t become close again because I didn’t really trust her anymore. That had started to disappear when I was eight years old I think, but confirmed in those teenage years in Hailsham when twice a year or more Mum would pack a small bag – I would help her often – and call a taxi to go to Amberstone Hospital for a break – a rest. Another mental breakdown. An episode. Call it whatever you like. And the doctors would approve and the social workers would allow me to look after the family and pay the coalman/milkman and other bills and I wouldn’t even miss a day of school. We all had keys. That was when I stopped trusting my Mum. And she’s not stupid by any means, she has some truly sagacious qualities and sees through people before they’ve had a chance to settle. Finds their weakness or vulnerability. And then pokes them with her insight – it is never kind, always cruel. She did it with Amanda Ooms our friend from Sweden who came with me one day to see her. In a way Mum is an empath but not a particularly kind one. She hurts she feels pain, and she wants everyone else to as well. She always feels sorry for old people struggling, for the homeless or the hungry or the gypsies. So I’m amazed at how she falls back on racism time and time again though because three of my four great love affairs have been with people who suffer from racism because of their skin colour and culture. And I don’t forgive that in particular. The reason I stopped speaking to Mum two years ago was when she said – in a phone call from New York to East Sussex, after Jenny’s sister Dee had died at the age of 59 after an operation and we were struggling with the grief –

“You love Jenny and all those black people more than me don’t you?”

The cruelty and the unkindness felt instinctive and also calculated. The mental illness feels like a disability. They’re entangled like a load of useless wire behind the television, but when the picture goes you have to sit down and untangle it all. I have spent my entire adult life untangling those wires. And I decided after the last attempt to to insult me and push me away that I would stay insulted and stay away. Fuck the wires. We haven’t spoken a word since.

What is also tragic though is that she understands all of this, she has both intellectual and emotional intelligence – more than most in fact. And her choice of song reveals that.

“I have torn everyone who reached out to me”

And thus she remains unforgiven.

She has often talked about wanting to live in a cave, not wash, not see anyone except her dog and the birds and insects. I’m not going to help her with that.

She is like a shadow over all of our lives. And an absence too.

*

I saw Leonard Cohen in Brighton in 2013 when he was 79 years old. He did three encores, and 28 songs in all, putting the kids to shame. Bird On A Wire, perhaps his most revered and famous song was number three on the setlist. It pricked me like a sea urchin, shivered my timbers and brought water to my eyes. Also present : Dance Me To The End Of Time, Famous Blue Raincoat, Hallelujah & Chelsea Hotel #2. He did not sing Joni Mitchell’s A Case Of You, supposedly about their affair in the early 1960s, two Canadians in Greenwich Village singing songs and writing poetry to use as lyrics. He was elegant and wise, generous and inspiring. He died in 2016 three years later.

Bird On The Wire is a stunning piece of songwriting. I have tried in my way to be free. Yes we can all relate to that. I have saved all my ribbons for thee. Well no you haven’t. And is that appropriate? I’m your son, not your lover. Quite oppressive if you dig a little deeper, quite possessive. Quite fucking weird. If I have been unkind, I hope you can just let it go by. Well yes I can. I have. I’ve let it all go by. Thank God. If I have ever been untrue I hope you know it was never to you. Simply not true. Abandoned too many times for that to be even half true. Also slightly oppressively incestuous. I have torn everyone who reached out to me. No doubt. No doubt. It’s the most honest line in the song. It’s an appeal for forgiveness – is it? It certainly isn’t an apology. I will make it all up to thee. Way too late for that. In 2009 I was 52. Childhood gone. Romantic. Delusional. And didn’t.

I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch
He said to me, “You must not ask for so much.”
And a pretty woman leaning in her darkened door
She cried to me, “Hey, why not ask for more?”

Amazing lines. The crucible of life’s contradictions. The balance. Do I feel good about myself? Didn’t I do enough? What’s it all about Ralphie ?

I’m out of gas on this topic. Time to publish and be damned. I still don’t like my mum. Forgive me.

Mum always did have good musical taste. So, from Cohen’s Anthem :

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in

*

changed lyrics in this live version from 1979 :

My Pop Life #185 : Between The Wars – Billy Bragg

Between The Wars   –   Billy Bragg

Call up the craftsmen bring me the draughtsmen build me a path from cradle to grave     and I’ll give my consent to any government that does not deny a man a living wage

*

I wrote the piece below in the Spring of 1985 as this song was released. I was 27.

*

Blackpool.  Monday afternoon,  a wet October,  1984

Six actors, a director and a writer meet each other in the lounge of the Pendale Hotel (just off the town map) and plan their assault on the Labour Party Conference :  the largest collection of journalists to be found outside of a Fleet Street pub.  Our mission: to explore their world, their obsessions.  We have (valued possessions) press passes saying ‘Joint Stock’ pinned to our clothing, currently providing simple entry to the Winter Gardens.  We are naive, optimistic, nervous, brave.  We move in.

A fringe meeting upstairs from the bar is getting underway.  Entrance is through a sea of leaflets thrusting at you from Nicaragua to the Kent coalfields.  Inside, a large surreal Spanish galleon of a room is filling up.  TV cameras at the front, lights.  A sense of excitement.  The speakers tonight are Livingstone, Benn & Scargill.  I am looking for journalists.  What do they wear?  How do they talk?  Who do they vote for?  Why are they journalists?  Will they even talk to me?  I see two, identifiable by their press passes, and sit down next to them, a youngish woman and an older bespectacled man.

‘Hello,’  I offer boldly.  ‘Can I talk to you?‘  They look at me.  I launch in.  ‘My name is Ralph Brown and I’m up in Blackpool with Joint Stock Theatre Group and we’re researching a play about journalists and we don’t know what it’s about yet, and can I talk to you?’   They are both from The Sunday Times, covering the conference – she is on the Insight team, he is the local man in Lancashire.

‘We set the agenda for this conference’ he claims, ‘Three weeks ago our front page said Kinnock would be in trouble on three fronts at this conference – the police, the miners, the local authorities.  And that’s the way the conference will go.’  He evidently felt that this was the legitimate role of the paper, but perhaps feeling he had said too much started to move away.  ‘Talk to Ros,’ he said, ‘she’s the expert on the miner’s strike.’  Could I meet him later I asked, at the Imperial Hotel perhaps?  He smiled and nodded and moved off. The woman grabbed my arm. ‘Do you know who that is?’ she whispered.  ‘He’s the one you want to talk to. That’s Michael Jones, political editor of The Sunday Times.’  I was going to have to be a little smarter over the course of the next three weeks.  There was a stirring at the front of the hall.  Scargill was entering – he timed it well, and the room erupted as their hero moved onto the platform. The feeling was quite extraordinary. Suddenly the press became noticeable leaning against walls, slouching in chairs, bored. Even so, notebooks were produced, pens from inside pockets, and attention brightened a little: the studied boredom of their poses couldn’t quite smother the sense of history.

Arthur Scargill, leader of the miner’s union at the Labour Party Conference, 1984

Later, the bar and foyer of the Imperial Hotel provided the true flavour of the conference. The place was full of journalists and politicians, and Joint Stock valiantly camoflauged within.  Peter Hillmore (Observer) peered at my press pass suspiciously, exchanged a sentence with me and decided there were more important people to talk to. Sir Robin Day was decidedly the worse for wear and tottering on the steps with a young woman in black. I cornered Mick Costello, industrial editor of the Morning Star, smoking cigars and hobnobbing happily with capitalist comrades from the Telegraph and the Express. In fact there was an awful lot of hobnobbing going on. I think everyone there was drunk. I met Michael Jones again, he welcomed me with open arms, told me the play didn’t have a hope of understanding “the relationship between me and the office”, confessed to always having had ambitions to being one of the opinion-forming elite, and wished me the very best of luck, young man.  ‘Of course, it’s very different when the Tories are here,’ a wobbling hack confided.  ‘Last year it was wonderful though, Parkinson – you remember?‘ Little did he suspect that the Tories would provide the best story for a decade only ten days later.

       

    It was Scargill’s week, undoubtedly. Adulated by conference, hated and adored by the press, ‘Coal Not Dole’ stickers everywhere and buckets being rattled at every door.  Quite a time.  We all had our adventures.  Simon Curtis followed a Sun reporter for one afternoon hoping to catch some juicy bit or other, and was spotted trying to listen in on a conversation.  I was finally confronted by this man, a stocky Scot, who told me that if my friend didn’t lay off he would receive a crack on the head.  I talked to him.  I was getting quite good at asking the right questions.  He told me how he’d always wanted to be a policeman and had fallen into journalism at a Spencer Davis concert in Glasgow.

The Joint Stock method meant that observation was crucial.  Each morning, we would present, one at a time, a character we had encountered the day before, with close attention to detail: accent, hand movements, figures of speech etc. Sometimes we would write notes. I found it easier and more accurate to rely on memory. If more than one of us had been there, we could present the group with a ‘scene’.  We slowly discovered which questions and lines of conversation gave the best ‘results’, but it was always the unexpected, the surprising, which caught the imagination of the group. It was for me a wonderfully exciting way to work.

Robert Maxwell, Mirror owner in July 1984

My final memory of Blackpool was a Daily Mirror press conference called by Robert Maxwell to present a granny from Essex with a huge cheque for one million pounds for winning Mirror bingo.  The scene was grotesque, and made its way into Deadlines – the play which resulted from this workshop – in all its surreal horror, with myself playing the elephantine Maxwell. I remember the poor woman standing there, with cameras clicking, TV arc lights, microphones and questions, a glass of champagne glued into her hand, a frozen smile on her bewildered face.  She turned to Marge Proops (Mirror Women’s Page) standing next to her and asked if it was all right for her to have a sip. Later, Kathryn Pogson and I spoke to her daughter. ‘ You’re not from The Sun are you? We’ve been told not to answer any questions.’   We explained that we were actors doing research and suddenly the woman recognised Kathryn: ‘You were on TV weren’t you?’  She immediately relaxed and took us into her confidence. ‘They’ve been ever so good. We’ve been to four hotels in four days. We had the phone call saying we’d won, and they just said pack a suitcase. We left the washing in the machine.’  Her son was whimpering. ‘Shut up,‘ said his dad, ‘I’ve bought you loads of things today.’  They had just won a million pounds. Mirror men were gently ushering people to a photocall with the trams. ‘Let’s hope we’ve got more friends than enemies’ was the daughters final thought as Kathryn and I left for the Big Dipper.

The local Sheffield paper : me, Paul Jesson, a journalist, Stephen Wakelam, Tricia Kelly, Alan David

The company left for Sheffield, the heart of the miner’s strike, and spent two days at the local paper – the Morning Telegraph and the Sheffield Star the evening version, who shared the same office, again asking questions and listening.  I suggested to the industrial editor (‘a close friend of Arthur‘ someone whispered) that being a local reporter was something of a luxury, being able to be accurate and honest and truthful. ‘No,‘ he said, ‘I just have to live here.’  It was becoming increasingly difficult to parry the obvious question: “What is the play about?”  We really had no idea, and the people we talked to, especially the journalists, couldn’t accept this.  ‘You’re going to expose us, aren’t you? All the drink and sex.’  And in truth we were beginning to behave more and more like journalists: finding ways of making people talk, being persistent, looking for angles.

The most famous photograph from the 1984-5 miner’s strike 

Director Simon Curtis and I visited some picket lines at Maltby and Silverwood collieries and spent one afternoon talking to two miners who were on strike, one of whom, Jim, became a character in the play.  Throughout the two and a half hour conversation, Simon had been fingering a five pound note in his pocket, preparing to give it to the fund before he left. ‘Do you have a collection?‘ he asked the young miner. ‘Sure, just give it to me, we’ll mek sure it gets t’ reght place.‘  Simon pulled out his note and offered it. They both looked at it.  It was a twenty pound note. (more like a hundred pounds in today’s money). ‘Oh‘ said the miner.  Simon’s eyes glazed over. ‘Oh thanks a lot‘ said the miner. Simon’s fingers released the note, and he smiled weakly.  We drove off, Simon in some shock.

The company then moved to the hustle and bustle of London, Fleet Street, the TV Studios and radio stations.  The journey was important. The people we’d talked to 200 miles north were filtered and made into ‘news’ down here in the capital.  Stephen Wakelam (the writer) was particularly affected by this geographical change, and the play’s sweep covers the quiet of the South Yorkshire countryside to the claustrophobic newsrooms of London.  My favourite place was BBC Newsnight. ‘We’re doing a play about the media’ I offered as an introduction to Howard, sleeveless-jerseyed, Guardian-reading type. He swung round in his typical journalists swing-round chair. ‘Media!’ He glared at me, managing to look totally harmless. ‘Don’t lump us in with the bloody Express, Mirror and Beano.  This is a television news programme.’ 

   Presenter Peter Snow (right) had an SDP poster up in the room where he was working. I desperately wanted to ask him if it was his, but couldn’t find the words. It was very very difficult to ask journalists about their politics. They pretended they didn’t have any. Or they said ‘I’m nosy’ or ‘I’m an observer.’  Others were more approachable, notably those at The Express, where a considerable number of the writers are members of the Labour Party!  I was devastated by this disclosure, although the Express journalists I spoke to found it totally normal : ‘It’s the same at the Mail, the Sun, the Telegraph. You’ve got to earn a living.‘ I suggested the two things might be incompatible. ‘I’ve never written a word against the Labour Party in twelve years on the Express.’  The man seemed proud of this, as if his principles were still intact.  Fiona Millar, one of the few women on the paper had an even worse situation, surrounded by pin-ups, being given the Royal stories or the animal stories because of her gender.  ‘My generation is terribly disappointed in the profession we’ve joined,‘ she told me.  She is in her late twenties, and moved from the local paper to Fleet Street just as it was going down the drain : bingo, tits and circulation wars.  She was consoled by the fact that the Express was ‘a writer’s paper’ rather than a subeditor’s paper.  Subeditors – the back bench – are a strange group of men (invariably) who sift the paras, reorganise the stories, and in many cases rewrite according to the paper’s politics.

The Sun was more difficult.  We trooped up to the office and were told to wait by the door.  We huddled there, feeling like intruders. A nervous face told us about The Sun glancing over his shoulder now and again. One of us was escorted to the toilet and back. We were not allowed to talk to any journalists.  The face we were talking to had a plastic smile which it kept putting on to reassure us, and only succeeded in totally unnerving us. ‘We are a family newspaper. We never print anything unless it’s checked. We write for an average reading age of eight.‘ He did, however, tell us the name of the cabinet minister whom the whole of Fleet Street knew was fucking small boys. And somehow, this one rather sordid point was a believable oasis in the desert of his insincerity.

And so to the Tories.  We took it in turns to visit the Tory Conference in Brighton (only had two press passes) and Tricia Kelly and I found ourselves on the train down just hours after an IRA bomb had wrecked the Grand Hotel.  There was security everywhere. The atmosphere inside the conference hall was extraordinary. Resilience, survivors. Thatcher got an emotional standing ovation just for being there. Tricia and I felt like enemies of the people in the midst of the mob, protected by the legitimate neutrality of our press passes. It meant we didn’t have to applaud. We could look cool and detached and professional. This was a relief. Thatcher was finally introduced as ‘a great statesman’ and she spoke for the whole hall about Tebbit’s bravery, property, owners and earners, and got a massive, absurd standing ovation at the end. Tricia made our way to the door and stopped to watch this display of political football hooliganism.  We were ushered out by a rather embarrassed man, as if this was a private Tory moment not to be witnessed by the unfaithful.

Grand Hotel, Brighton, the morning after an IRA bomb, October 1984

   We moved out onto the beach.  The Grand Hotel had a huge hole knocked out of it, the beach was roped off, police were everywhere. Earlier, I had tried to have a few words with the Observer, one of our contacts.  ‘Haven’t got time,‘ he said, rushing away. ‘Best story for twenty-five years.‘  There were journalists everywhere.  Every paper and TV station had quintupled its Brighton staff. By now, we Joint Stockers were behaving like journalists ourselves, moving towards huddles of people instinctively for titbits trading information, becoming strangely distanced from the event. The process was not dissimilar : the workshop, the story.

I remember the feeling standing on Brighton beach, so clearly. An exhilarating sense of history. It was all happening around me: the strike, the conferences, the bomb. I felt at the centre of the universe.

*

Jenny Stoller, Tricia Kelly and Amelda Brown in Caryl Churchill’s ‘Fen’

*

Summer 2017 – Brooklyn

The piece above was the last chapter in The Joint Stock Book, published by Methuen in 1997 and reprinted here for information. I do not claim copyright.  I think the book is now out of print.  Subtitled The Making Of A Theatre Collective, the book is a tribute to the working method of Joint Stock, a unique theatre collective in the UK as I was starting out in the 1980s.  It started around 1974 and had built a formidable reputation for itself as a producing house for new, often devised work.   The company operated as a self-managing collective with only one permanent member of staff, the administrator, everyone else was invited to meetings and made decisions, on a collective level.  I met a lot of very good people over the three years that I was involved with Joint Stock, including my next girlfriend, Rita Wolf, who had been in Borderline written by Hanif Kureishi and was thus on the collective.  The book contains contributions from members of the collective about the work of the company, ranging from Max Stafford-Clark to Roger Lloyd-Pack to Bill Gaskill to Caryl Churchill to Kenny Ireland to Danny Boyle to Miriam Margoyles to Pauline Melville.  It remains for me the finest way to create a play, both as an actor and as a writer.  I was lucky enough to do both – the play Sanctuary came two years later in 1987 – Deadlines premiered in Sheffield in February 1995 before touring the UK.  Both plays were written about and for a community : journalists and homeless youth.  Later in 1985 Jane Thornton wrote Amid The Standing Corn about the miner’s wives for Joint Stock.  She is from Yorkshire where my dad lives now (married to a Barnsley lass, dear Beryl) and Jane is also married to a Yorkshireman John Godber who is instrumental in my working life (A Clockwork Orange, Up’n’Under).  A strain of decency and pride running through the county.  I think the most rewarding part of both Deadlines and Sanctuary for me were the nights when the community came to see the play they’d helped create.  When the journalists at the Sheffield Star came to the Crucible Theatre, sitting alongside striking miners and their familes.   When the homeless familes and charities like Centrepoint London came to The Drill Hall for a benefit one night to see themselves represented onstage.  The highest form of emotion.  Lucky to have experienced it twice.  To think that Thatcher had called the National Union of Mineworkers ‘the enemy within‘ still makes me enraged to a level which frightens me to this day.  Turbulent times.  A historic defeat.  La lotta continua.  Here’s Billy.

My Pop Life #175 : One Better Day – Madness

One Better Day   –   Madness

Further down, a photo booth, a million plastic bags
And an old woman filling out a million baggage tags
But when she gets thrown out, three bags at a time
She spies the old chap in the road to share her bags with
She has bags of time
Surrounded by his past, on a short white line
He sits while cars pass either side, takes his time
Trying to remember one better day
A while ago when people stopped to hear him say
Walking round you sometimes hear the sunshine
Beating down in time with the rhythm of your shoes

Was there ever a more disappointing year for pop music than 1984?  Looking back at the album releases and the top singles I am staggered by the unifying theme – great artists releasing substandard material, and very few inspirational youngsters filling the huge gap. Exception and the big album of the year was Purple Rain by Prince, while Frankie Goes To Hollywood dominated the UK radio and singles charts but I bought very little current music in 1984.  I was filling gaps, discovering genres, crate-digging, conducting archeological excavations and sometimes realising that people I’d scorned as a teenager were actually pretty good.  The albums I did buy from 1984, in 1984 :

Goodbye Cruel World  –  Elvis Costello & The Attractions

The Pearl  –  Harold Budd & Brian Eno

Mister Heartbreak  –  Laurie Anderson

Diamond Life  –  Sade

Best of ‘The Poet’ Trilogy  –  Bobby Womack

Keep Moving  –  Madness

Not as many as usual.  Later I would buy Prince, The Bangles, Luther Vandross, Dr John, Franco & TPOK Jazz, Van Dyke Parks, Gilberto Gil, The Judds, Prefab Sprout, Youssou N’Dour, The Style Council, Steve Reich, Run DMC and Pat Metheny, but even with those additions I think you can see how thin on the ground 1984 was musically.  Springsteen made Born In The USA the title track of which became a republican anthem (he didn’t sing it live this year 2016).  Perhaps the date was casting shade.  1984.  Throughout my life we’d all lived under the spectre of George Orwell‘s chilling and prescient novel.   That collection of numbers, that date had loomed like the monolith in 2001 A Space Odyssey – the other magical sentient date..in The Future.  It always presaged doom, totalitarianism, a jackboot stamping on a human face into infinity.  Now we were here and…well, life went on, like it does.  Like it did in 2001.  And like it will next year.

The big singles were Relax, Two Tribes, The Power Of Love, When Doves Cry, Purple Rain, the others were What’s Love Got To Do With It, I Feel For You, Ghostbusters, Any Love, It’s A Miracle, Careless Whisper, Smalltown Boy, Solid, Like A Virgin, I Just Called To Say I Love You, Hello, Take A Look At Me Now, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, Do They Know It’s Christmas.

I liked very little of it.  Disappointing : Bowie with Blue Jean, Stevie Wonder (sigh), Elvis Costello’s worst LP to date, ditto McCartney, ditto Paul Weller.

And then Haircut 100 split up. ( Joke. )

And then Jerry Dammers and Special AKA released Free Nelson Mandela. (Not Joke)

Flying the flag for musical growth, and one step beyond their previous work The Rise and Fall (1982) was the Madness LP Keep Moving, in particular the song One Better Day, which haunts me even now and can move me to tears.  I’d loved the band since their first single The Prince,  multi-cultural British ska birthed in Camden Town via Jamaica. In those early days their skinhead fans and their whiteness made me feel a little uncomfortable at some of the gigs, although the majority of fans were not skins.  Then, aware of this stain on their pop life, the Madness videos started to include black people and the band rose above it all – for example Embarrassment is about a girl who’s going to have a baby with her black boyfriend.  The other groups who’d come up on the ska-revival Two-Tone wave The Specials, The Beat and The Selecter were all multi-racial anyway, but by 1984 they’d all split up.  Madness were on Stiff Records and this was their last LP with the maverick punk label.  It was their finest record to date – I’d bought them all, and they’d just got better and better.  So had The Undertones, but they’d stopped, so had The Jam and they’d split, so had Elvis Costello and he’d gone a bit over-produced, his songs weren’t to his impossibly high standard.   I’d also bought the collected videos of Madness which we watched endlessly, because they were so full of joy and nuttiness. I’m not sure there are a better collection of videos in pop history.  They made me want to be in the band.  Playing the saxophone.  Doing slightly robotic dancing.  Having a laugh with a gang.  

I’ve always wanted to be in a gang, but never really surrendered to it.  I don’t surrender very easily.  I’ve been in some gangs, but always felt like an outsider in there.  Either a council-estate kid in a middle class environment as a teenager, or an educated kid in a working-class environment.  Or an actor in a football team.  Or an actor in a band.  Or just a weirdo who doesn’t fit in enough.  Must be a choice.  I resist surrender.  Because I do not seek oblivion I will never be an alcoholic or a junkie.  I’m scared of oblivion, of disappearing.  Most of the music I like is controlled.  It’s not messy, it’s not people losing control.  It’s beautiful, melodic, harmonic, sweet.  But I wanted to be in Madness so much.  They influenced the band I was in, Birds Of Tin, but not enough. See My Pop Life #149.

Mike Barson was the musical genius on the piano, but his influence infused every musician, from bass player Mark Bedford (who later guested on Robert Wyatt’s cover of Costello’s Shipbuilding) to gimmick side monkey Chas Smash who went from rude boy dancer to trumpet player, from Chris Foreman on guitar and songwriting to Lee Thompson on saxophone (who I wished I was), from Woody on the kit to Suggs on the lead vocals.  They were tight, musical, lyrically interesting and wonderfully arranged pop songs,  vignettes of British life from Baggy Trousers to Embarrassment, My Girl to House Of Fun. They were probably my favourite band in the early 80s – them and Costello and Talking Heads.

Sloane Square, Chelsea

But if 1984 was a meagre year musically for me,  theatrically it was promising.   Armed with a law degree 😉 – I’d been to Edinburgh three times, got my Equity Card,  played the Donmar in Steven Berkoff’s WEST.    Then in early 84 I’d worked at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs with Danny Boyle (directing an incredible play called Panic! by Alan Brown).   It was an extraordinary piece of work which ran for all of two and half weeks as I recall.  Worthy of a post of its own.   Then in the late summer the 3rd director in the building a brilliant young Simon Curtis invited me to be part of his first production which was to be a play for Joint Stock Theatre Company called Deadlines.  I was thrilled, and it turned out to be one of my most satisfying and rewarding theatrical adventures.  Simon was extremely encouraging, open, intelligent and funny.  I ended up playing six parts and getting a new agent out of it : Michael Foster.   Also cast : Kathryn Pogson, Paul Jesson, Shirin Taylor, Tricia Kelly, Paul Mooney.   Writer :  Stephen Wakelam.  Play : unwritten.

A young Simon Curtis in 1985, one year after Deadlines

Joint Stock was a unique theatre company.  Formed by Max Stafford-Clark and others in the early 1970s, it had become a collective in 1974 while they produced David Hare’s play about China ‘Fanshen‘, co-directed by Max and Bill Gaskell.  This meant that every member who had ever worked for the company could attend company meetings and AGMs and vote.  In practice people deferred to Max and Caryl Churchill, both of whom were enthusiastic enough to actually attend meetings.  There was an administrator, but no Artistic Director – each big decision eg – what play shall we do next ? directed by who ? written by who ? was decided on a collective vote.  Some were already plays, but more often the show would be devised by the company.

This is now a forgotten way of life.  All of those Arts Council-funded theatre companies have gone :  7:84, Shared Experience, Joint Stock, Paines Plough.  Slashed by Thatcher’s reduction of the State.  1984 was the year of the miner’s strike, Coal Not Dole stickers, and the rise of cardboard city in Waterloo as new regulations on signing on created a new wave of homelessness, particularly of those between 16 and 20.  Suddenly there were people sleeping in shop doorways in London on The Strand.  Then there was an IRA bomb at the Tory Party conference in Brighton at The Grand Hotel.

*

one of the greatest band shots of all time: the cover of ‘7’ the 3rd Madness LP

Keep Moving was Mike Barson’s last album with Madness, and he left the band once they recorded a couple of videos – Michael Caine and One Better Day, which was their last for Stiff Records, and funded by the band themselves including Barson, seen playing the vibraphone, who flew in from Amsterdam for the shoot.

Arlington house, address: no fixed abode
An old man in a three-piece suit sits in the road
He stares across the water, he sees right through the lock
But on and up like outstretched hands
His mumbled words, his fumbled words, mock

Arlington House is behind Camden High Street.  It housed – and still houses among it’s more commercial premises – homeless men, and has since 1905.  It was the last of the Victorian workhouses, built by politician and philanthropist Lord Rowton in the 1890s to house London’s working poor.

Camden Lock

I used to shop for music shoes and clothes in Camden Town, whether in Dingwalls (‘The Lock’ in the lyrics) or the Record and Tape Exchange on the High St, or one of the many independent stores in that square mile of post-punk grubbiness.  Over the years I’ve been to many gigs in Camden Palace (Culture Club), The Electric Ballroom (The Vibrators) or Dingwalls (X-Ray Spex).  The Dublin Castle.   More recently at the re-opened Roundhouse or the Jazz Cafe.

When I started acting in Moving Parts Theatre Company in 1981 two of the company’s founders – Ruth MacKenzie and Rachel Feldberg – lived in Oval Road just behind Arlington House with the young director Roger Michell who would later go on to direct The Buddha Of Suburbia, Notting Hill and many other successful films.  I would see him years and years later at Michael Foster’s 50th birthday party and he hailed me “Haven’t you done well !”  I looked behind me.  No, he meant me. I smiled.  “Me?  What about you !!” I realised that seen from the outside, my journey looks good and fine, but what about the invisible thrashing through the undergrowth with a blunt machete to reach a small ledge of safety that no one ever sees ?  Eh ?!?  WHAT ABOUT THAT?

Gentrified many times Camden still retains its scruffy down-at-heel ambience, partly due to scruffy down-at-heel junkies, and partly due to people who want to look scruffy and down-at-heel.  But there have always been homeless people there – see Waterloo, see Soho, see Bayswater. And having been homeless myself for a period of time as a teenager (see My Pop Life #84 All Along The Watchtower) I always felt moved by this song, describing a couple walking the streets of NW1.  Street people.  Nowhere to store their stuff, carrying it all around.  Nowhere to wash apart from the hostel, who close their doors at 8am.  I would be interviewing some of these people for my first play Sanctuary in 2 years’ time, using The Joint Stock Method.  And later, some of them would be invited to The Drill Hall to see the play.

The woman in the video is Betty Bright – Sugg’s wife.  Graham McPherson – Suggs – who wrote the song with Mark ‘Bedders’ Bedford – looks impossibly young in the video, but wears the kind of clothes that I used to try and find, and still do to be fair.  Checks.  Tartans. Doc Martens.  There’s a DM shop on Kentish Town Road next to Camden tube which makes an appearance in The Sun & The Rain video.  I had a pair of red patent leather DMs.  In fact I still have them.  I owe some of my so-called style to Madness Suggs chic, (some to Bryan Ferry chic, some to rock’n’roll and some to Laurel & Hardy).

The chorus is unbearably sweet, given the subject :

She’s trying to remember one better day
A while ago when people stopped to hear her say

‘Walking round you sometimes hear the sunshine
Beating down in time with the rhythm of your shoes
The feeling of arriving when you’ve nothing left to lose…’

My Pop Life #90 : Didi – Cheb Khaled

Didi   –   Khaled
…la zhar la memoon la aargoob zine

didi, didi, didi, didi, zin di wah….

I’m just fated to have bad luck,

take, take, take, take this beautiful girl away…

This song is such a dear favourite of the amazing woman that I married, as were the last two songs I posted (Silencio in My Pop Life #88 and Some Folks Lives Roll Easy in My Pop Life #89) that I am seriously considering calling this section My Pop Wife.   It’s dance music for the world, and was a huge hit across the Mediterranean and far beyond in 1992, the year of our marriage, and the ripple carried through to 1993, getting as far as India.  Didi was used in a Bollywood film, and performed by Khaled at the 2010 World Cup opening ceremony.  It is his best-known song and I have proof of its dance-floor credentials from personal experience.

I first came across Cheb Khaled (as he was known in 1984) when I bought his LP Hada Raykoum – it was raw and thrilling, the sound of raï music from Algeria.  At that time I was living in Finsbury Park with my muslim Pakistani girlfriend Mumtaz.  We went to see Khaled at the Royal Festival Hall where he had the whole venue up and out of their seats – he and his band were electrifying.  Khaled was born in Oran in 1960 and became well-known as a teenager through his cassette tapes.  He is an amazing singer.  Raï music was frowned upon for many years in Algeria, being considered a bastardization of traditional islamic music.

Cheikha Remitti (3rd left)

Raï started out as a cross between Sephardic Jewish, Spanish, French and Arabic music in Oran, a vulgar street music which rejected conservative islamic values and definitions of what could and couldn’t be heard.  The first and still most influential star of the genre was the legendary Cheikha Remitti who popularised the bawdy and earthy songs which had previously only been heard behind closed doors at weddings and other events.  The association of ‘fallen women’ with the music kept raï music unrespectable, and she was banned from TV and radio by the first independent Government of Algeria in 1962 (because she’d sung in French-controlled areas during the revolution), and yet the working-class poor adored her and Khaled no doubt would have heard her as he grew up.

She died, still performing and recording at the age of 83, in 2006.

Pop raï was born in the 1960s when music and instruments from other cultures, (including Jamaica) started being adopted, and the moniker Cheb (chief) was used for the popular performers to distinguish them from the previous generation.  Cheb Mami for example also had a huge following in France among the Algerian diaspora.  Cheb Khaled though rose head and shoulders above the pack, and when World Music was promoted in the UK by the likes of Earthworks and Peter Gabriel’s WOMAD in the early 1980s, raï was among the new styles and sounds that we hungrily consumed.

Hada Raykoum was my first raï purchase in 1984, a stunning slice of Maghreb soul with accordion and drums of various kinds (I don’t know what they are called I’m afraid, please feel free to add details below!) providing the backing for Cheb Khaled’s aching emotional voice.  He would drop the prefix “Cheb” later and by 1992 when his breakthrough LP “Khaled” was released, (produced by Don Was), he was called simply “Khaled”.   The new sound had bass guitar and synthesisers, but still retained the Algerian raï flavour.  It was a massive crossover hit.

*

In 2001 the film I’d written “New Year’s Day” – the most scarring experience of my professional life (see My Pop Life #75,) – had its UK Premiere in Brighton, my home town.   It was probably November.  In the Marina cinema.   Although I haven’t told you, dear reader, about exactly why it was the most scarring experience of my professional life, for now all you need to know is that Jenny and I nearly got divorced during the making of the film.   Now revealed in My Pop Life #226 Exit Music For A Film and the following two posts, 227 and 228.  We both fell out badly, and finally, with the director of the film, (why should I name him?) who nevertheless turned up all smiles to the Premiere.

Before we went in the local paper was taking pictures of the famous people (jeez) who’d swung by : Richard E. Grant and Kevin Rowland, Mark Williams and maybe me.   Then I saw Bobby Zamora at the sweets counter and went a little mental.   “Bobby” I said, “Hi !” ( I should add that we knew each other a bit thanks to the small world of Brighton and Hove Albion – the football team I supported and which he played for in 2001.  Played for?  He was our star centre-forward ! )   I burbled at him unnecessarily about my premiere, and he smiled and offered congratulations.  “Why don’t you come in and see the film?”  I asked like a burbling twerp.  “No thanks” he said.  “I’m going to see blahblahblah”.  My crest probably fell, but not for long.   Oh well.   Back in Screen 1, the premiere was chock full of friends old and new, including people who were, in disguise, portrayed in the film.   I made a little speech which was emotional (the film is very much a testimony of sorts) and thanked Danny Perkins and Will Clarke from Optimum who were distributing the movie, and then we watched it.   It was good.   Mainly.   Afterwards we crammed into taxis and perhaps a double decker bus which took us down to the PARTY which was in the Zap Club.  As it was still called in those days.

And we had already decided who was DJ-ing, and prime position was taken by my pop wife, Jenny Jules.  And yes it was November because not two months earlier the Twin Towers had been destroyed in New York by two piloted planes, not to mention the Pentagon, and we all knew the world would change forever and yes – the anti-islamic feeling which we all take for granted now in 2015 was just starting to surface.  We knew it would.  And Jenny played this song Didi by Khaled at the height of the party.  And we danced to those muslim rhythms and those arabic words.  And shortly afterwards, one of our friends Naima, a Moroccan lady with two beautiful daughters and an English husband Steve who had converted to Islam to marry her, went up to Jenny and hugged her tight.  “Thank you for playing that” she said, “you don’t know what the last two months have been like”.

My Pop Life #60 : Theme From “Shaft” – Isaac Hayes

Theme From ‘Shaft’   –   Isaac Hayes

“…who’s the black private dick that’s a sex machine to all the chicks ?  Shaft !  Damn right

Who is the man that would risk his neck for his brother man?  Shaft !  Can you dig it?

Who’s the cat that walk about when there’s danger all about ?  Shaft !  Right on…”

I first met Paulette Randall in the spring of 1984, at some rehearsal rooms in north London – I think – where she was Assistant Director to Danny Boyle, directing a play by Alan Brown for the Theatre Upstairs at the Royal Court called PANIC!    The first read-through took us around five hours, and it had been even longer than that.  The rehearsal period was short, and concentrated on making the play shorter.  The play was mental.  There were scenes between pets that spoke (they had mini-speakers inside them).  David Fielder played Pan, with hairy legs and a giant cock and balls, and he was castrated on Polaroid halfway through the second half.  The set was a house on a clifftop about to fall into the sea.  the family were from all over Britain – Dad was Welsh (Alan David), Mum was Geordie (Val McClane), oldest son was scouse (Ken Sharrock RIP), his wife was home counties (Marion Bailey), second son was cockney (me) and daughter was west country (Harriet Bagnall).   I believe we ate the brains of the indian newsagent for dinner, listened to Parsifal and Beethoven and waited for the apocalypse.   Danny marshalled all of this joy with charm and humour assisted by Paulette.  I liked Paulette very much and we started to hang out together.   I met her sister Beverley shortly afterwards, perhaps once the play had opened in a wine bar on Sloane Square.   Little did I know at the time that I had entered a very special world.

Beverley and Paulette were brought up in Brixton and Clapham by their Jamaican parents during the 60s/70s.  They were the first black people I’d actually made friends with.  Or who had made friends with me.  I’d studied with, worked with, but never really hung out.   At some point that summer of 84, waiting for the apocalypse, I ended up on Clapham Common near to where P lived, and still does, on William Bonney Estate.  She introduced me to her friend David Lawrence, a postman with an absurd streak and a wry sense of humour.  I can’t remember what we were drinking but it could have been a bottle of whisky.  We sat on a bench in the wee small hours laughing.  Laughing hard.  I remember little about what made us laugh so much.    In fact was Beverley there too ?  I wonder – she worked at Coutts the bank at the time on the Strand.   Lost to drink now – except for two distinct moments.  At one point around 3am we stopped talking and just sang.  One of the highlights of the night was “Ruby Don’t Take Your Love To Town” by Kenny Rogers, a performance that David can actually conjure up on command like a performing seal, and so, to be fair , can I.    This never fails to bring the house down when David does it, unless he does it twice…or three times…then he will be cussed.   Of course, we all knew all the words.  The other song was Shaft by Isaac Hayes, in particular the lines quoted above which I knew off by heart, and performed as if in an Isaac Hayes cover band..

“…they say this cat Shaft is a bad mother – ‘shut your mouth!’

but I’m talking ’bout Shaft  –  ‘then we can dig it’

He’s a complicated man, but no one understands him but his woman

John Shaft !”

… almost made Paulette wet herself.  I guess you had to be there.

For many years we would gather at Paulette’s flat, usually on a Saturday night, call it Club 61 and drink and smoke until we fell over, playing loud music and shouting at each other.  A clan of regulars would congregate – and I’m cutting forward now to the 90s when I was with Jenny – including Eugene McCaffrey, Nicky, Randall cousins Janet & Donna, Pat, cousins Jackie & Debbie, Sharon Henry, Elaine McKenzie, Michael Whiting, cousin Atlee, many others, whoever Paulette was working with at the time, people would arrive at all hours, drink would be drunk, people would dance, Paulette would DJ, people would shout more.   It was funny.  It was great.  It was release.  It was family.  With the exception of Simon Korner, soul brother from school, Paulette has remained my best friend.   She would go on to direct Sanctuary, the play I wrote for Joint Stock, she would witness my wedding, I was one of the first people she called when Danny Boyle asked her to help him to direct the Opening Ceremony of the London Olympic Games.   She and Beverley are chalk and cheese but inseparable and equal.  They were living together when we met, peas in a pod.  It’s a long story.  Theme From Shaft was one of our early bonding moments.  How powerful a song can be.

Isaac Hayes joined Stax Records in 1963 as a session musician, started filling in for Booker T on keys when he was away at Indiana University and in1965 wrote Sam & Dave’s first hit : I Take What I Want with partner David Porter.  Porter/Hayes would write and produce a string of brilliant soul singles for Sam and Dave almost unmatched in the 1960s for the consistent level of genius.  His 1969 solo LP Hot Buttered Soul was Stax Records bestseller of that year, and was followed up by 2 more in the same vein before he was asked to write the music for Gordon Park’s black detective movie hero Shaft, played by actor Richard Roundtree in 1971.   The resulting single was a new level of symphonic soul which was very much of its time – the Temptations and Stylistics were on similar ground as was the whole Philadelphia Sound.  The wah-wah guitar shape is simply iconic, the piano dark and dramatic, the arrangement tight and superb, it changes shape adds instruments, textures before the break and those words “who’s the black private dick that’s a sex machine to all the chicks?”  I mean, by then – 2.30 into the song (a record length intro) we actually want to know, this is the genius of the song.  Shaft !   It’s got a bit of Pearl and Dean, funked out of its tiny mind and forced to groove.  It’s a Theme, more than a song.  It’s a moment in musical culture.  It’s an extra-ordinary tune.

Bev and Miss P – I love you x

Theme From Shaft :

the actual film credits – slightly faster music and re-recorded, or mixed differently :

My Pop Life #50 : Breakin’ Down (Sugar Samba) – Julia & Company

Breakin’ Down  (Sugar Samba)   –   Julia & Company

…I’m telling you this, you can’t resist you gotta get up and dance, breakin’ it down…

It’s hard to remember just how dominant dance music was in 1984 – punk and new wave had been and gone, leaving Elvis Costello and Paul Weller to re-invent themselves with each LP (they both did dance LPs around this time) 2-tone had sealed the deal, and the disco underground of the 1970s was now mainstream chart music.  Bestriding the world like a colossus was Michael Jackson, who was burned filming a Pepsi Commercial in January just before the release of his ground-breaking and game-changing video film for Thriller, the final single from that record-breaking album.   Number one in Britain for weeks were Frankie Goes To Hollywood with “Relax“, a genuine british dance hit record which the BBC refused to play presumably because it references orgasm.   Their 2nd single Two Tribes would also reach number 1 in April.  In the previous year, when I’d been at the Donmar Warehouse for five months (!) in Steven Berkoff’s WEST, even David Bowie had gone disco with Nile Rogers and Let’s Dance.

And this surge of popularity gave many smaller acts their chance in the spotlight: Sharon Redd, The Pointer Sisters, and Washington D.C. resident Julia Nixon who produced a stunning 45rpm 7-inch single called Breakin’ Down (Sugar Samba) first on a local label District of Columbia then later on London Records – the one which I bought in a picture sleeve.  It is a major groove and will, under almost any conditions, make people dance…

    Knowing nothing about this group until recently when I learned that Julia Nixon had replaced Jennifer Holiday in Dreamgirls on Broadway, and that after this cracking single in 1984 and the follow-up I’m So Happy, she finally released her first solo LP in 2007 some 23 years later.

Now, I’ve been an actor for some 33 years myself, and I consider myself lucky to have lived for the bulk of my working life doing what I am capable of, and what I enjoy.  To be precise : what I enjoy is the actual act of acting.  The business of show less so, because of revelations like this : a clearly great singer (listen to the song) with a hit single who has had to wait for over 30 years to get one miserable solo LP released.  She is clearly a better singer than the majority of chart acts, but pop music is merciless with talent, as is the TV and Film industry.  I’ve thought about this many times, why does person a) get work and person b) doesn’t ?

I’m not pretending to know the answers to this but certain things are clear.  Talent isn’t enough to succeed.  There are other elements at work :  luck, connections, and the greasing of the wheels.  Whether someone wants to have sex with you or not.  Whether they think that you’ll make them some money.   In the acting industry the disappointment of rejection becomes your regular companion;  if you took every defeat on the chin you’d never get up.  Some don’t.  In the music industry again the rejections may or may not fuel the fires of creativity, or someone younger and sexier might just jump into the gap.  Good actors often decide that the lack of control they feel doing screen work can only be balanced by regular stage work, where the actor is king.  Screen work generally is paid 10 times stage work.  Good musicians will often be happier with regular paid session work, playing on other people’s hit songs, or writing other people’s hit songs (secret corn!) than sitting at home trying to plot an assault on the charts under their own name.   And in both industries there are filters at work;  gatekeepers, paid to streamline the flow of artists into the hallowed name positions.

Julia Nixon has carried on acting and singing, and still earns her living from doing it.  She was recently nominated for a Helen Hayes Award in ‘Caroline, or Change‘ in Washington D.C.

I was at the beginning of my working life when I heard this song, which I still love today, if I ever DJ for a brief nostalgic hour at a party or some such this record is Always In The Box along with Kid Creole & The Coconuts and TLC.   I didn’t really have a plan in 1984, no strategy, no idea what I was doing frankly.   Following my nose.  No one ever sat me down and explained the industry to me.   People just don’t do that.   I wouldn’t have listened anyway.   Young people don’t listen – they surge, they feel, they deal with it.   The endless thought process dealing with “how it all works” is like trying to understand the dawn of time, or how dogs can smell cancer, or the endless mystery of why people are racist.   Why does the river flow into the sea?  Why is the sky blue ? (oxygen molecules)  Why can’t I bend my left leg in the same way as my right?  Does it matter?

We all get our moment in the sun.  This is a superb song.  Smooth, funky, sexy.  I give you the seven-inch :

London Records re-mixed the 12-inch version :

the original District Of Columbia 12-inch single :