And if one day I should become A singer with a Spanish bum Who sings for women of great virtue I’d sing to them with a guitar I borrowed from a coffee bar Well, what you don’t know doesn’t hurt you My name would be Antonio And all my bridges I would burn And when I gave them some they’d know I’d expect something in return I’d have to get drunk every night And talk about virility With some old grandmother That might be decked out like a Christmas tree
*
A version of this blog will appear in my forthcoming book Camberwell Carrot Juice. Check back here for details!
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 “actuallyI 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 toBird 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 :
Slipping away I get closer each day I been looking for love to find me
Digging away I will search I will pray I been waiting for truth to blind me
Only perceive and the world will conceive there’s a seat in my heart that binds me
awake in a dream I believe it’s extreme, ruling out that all this is magic…
“If you can meet with triumph and disaster, and treat those two imposters both the same…” said Rudyard Kipling in his incomparable poem “If…“. Well I can’t. I pretend I can, but no, I prefer the triumphs. Is that what they’re called ? Those goals into the top corner. Those victories. Yes, I prefer those imposters to the failures. But people always say wise self-help guru stuff like “you learn more from your failures” or “crisis and opportunity is the same word in Chinese” or even “I get knocked down but I get up again”. You know? I prefer not to get knocked down at all. I feel like my life was built on crises. But still they come.
David Fincher
In 1994 I was living in Los Angeles. It was David Fincher‘s idea. He’d directed Alien 3 in 1991 and suggested that Jenny and I move to California. “Come to LaLa” is actually what he said. In 1992, after we’d got married and shot Undercover Blues in New Orleans which coincided with our honeymoon, (see My Pop Life #158) we rented an apartment in West Hollywood and stayed for three years. David was very disappointed with Alien3 because the studio hadn’t accepted his cut, indeed had hacked the shit out of his cut, and after the glamorous premiere in LA and razzamatazz opening weekend fizz had died down, it was a film which didn’t knock everyone out, neither the public it seemed nor the critics. David took it very badly – personally and professionally. He spent the following two years silently fuming and plotting his revenge, and his next move. We spent a lot of time together, round his apartment which at the time was on Beverley & La Brea with his new wife Donya Fiorentino, and Rachel his PA, her boyfriend Paul Carafotes, and David’s friends Chip & Carol, Ron, James, Marcie, and other friends. We had a handful of friends already there – Anita Lewton from Moving Parts days (early 80s) was in Venice Beach, Suzy Crowley and Tina Jenkins were hanging out too. Others would come through.
Donya Fiorentino
We ate out a lot – on Sunset Strip, on La Brea, at Pane e Vino on Beverley. We went to the movies together. We got drunk. We visited Lake Arrowhead one weekend and played pool and ate mushrooms. We drove to Malibu. Venice. Went to gigs, clubs, parties. We hung out in other words.
I got a gig on the film Wayne’s World 2playing a roadie named Del Preston, and it was rushed out only a few months after it was finished (unusually). David and Donya were round at our place on King’s Road when the LA Times review came out – it was great for me, and David said something along the lines of “I hope you remember me when you collect your Oscar“. He wasn’t joking, he was feeling the pain of not working for two years. Oh the irony ! Then one day some months later we were round his apartment off Beverley and he gave me a script, saying “there’s a great part in this for you Ralphie“. It was a film called Seven.
Awake In A Dream by Eleven
There was an album that we listened to a lot that year called Awake In A Dream, by a group called Eleven, who were from LA. A three-piece band writing intelligent glossy pop/rock with great melodies and unusual chord changes. Their genesis was entwined with another LA band, the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, and then later after Eleven split, Natasha Shneider played bass with Queens Of The Stone Age in their early days before sadly dying of cancer in 2008. The other two band members were Alain Johannes (who also joined QOTSA in 2005) and Jack Irons. Their first LP from which this song comes was released in 1991. Two songs stood out – Learning To Be and Rainbow’s End…
…Here at the rainbow’s end, there is no pot of gold, no matter what you’re told…
which was clearly a song about LA itself. It was a sign. An omen.
Me, Anita Lewton, Jen, Gary Kemp, Donya, David, Annie & Paul McGann
I’d always had a dream of Hollywood, and I’d never chased it, for fear I would fall flat on my face. I’d been turned away from LA in 1989 on a trip across the USA in Auto Driveaway cars (see My Pop Life #147) getting as far as Phoenix on Christmas Eve before turning back to El Paso. I’d always wanted Hollywood to ask me in, even in a small way, and in 1991 they did. I had to shoot some extra Alien3 scenes and Fox paid for Pete Postlethwaite and I to travel to Culver City in LA (for another story). I’d got an agent, got a job, got an apartment, and now a few years later I’d got the massive opportunity that eventually comes around.
1994 was a watershed year for me, looking back. After that incredible review in the LA Times I did not work for a whole year. “Kim Basinger is fantastic and Christopher Walken marvellous, but walking away with the whole picture is Ralph Brown as Del Preston” is what it said. It was the kiss of death of course. I was going up for three films per week. Everything that was made in 1994, I auditioned for. Things To Do In Denver When You’re Dead. The Usual Suspects. Crimson Tide. Devil In A Blue Dress. Heat. Jumanji. True Romance. The Quick & The Dead. And many many others lost to the mists of time. Learning lines, forming character, turning up with well-chosen clothing and delivering the scene, over and over and over. Fincher helping me with auditions sometimes (True Romance – offered to Christopher Walken). Meeting after meeting. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. And No. I’d hit the glass ceiling. Dennis Hopper and Christopher Walken were getting the gigs. My gigs. How could I break through that invisible barrier ?
In June the World Cup gave us some welcome respite. We got tickets for all the Rose Bowl games in Pasadena, just by sending off for them – an advert in the LA Times, and a country that wasn’t interested, bar the foreigners, the Latinos, Africans and Europeans. We decided to support Cameroon in an early game v Sweden and met Ashley Joyce (English) and Jeremy Thomas (Welsh, just separated from Drew Barrymore after two months of marriage) who ran The Room a groovy bar just off Hollywood Boulevard. They are still friends of mine.
The Rose Bowl, Pasadena, 1994 World Cup Final
The month that followed was glorious – wall to wall football, no England to disappoint us (we didn’t qualify) – over 100 degree heat for a Colombia v USA game, a July 4th game USA v Brazil in San José, a quarter final in Pasadena Romania v Sweden, a semi-final Brazil v Sweden and tickets to the actual final Brazil v Italy, a 0-0 draw, and Roberto Baggio blasting his penalty over the bar, cue Brazilian Carnivale, and meeting my old friend Stephen Woolley from Scala Cinema days and The Crying Game outside the stadium after the Final – in town doing screenings for test audiences of Interview With A Vampire. “That’s no way to make a film” I said. “Asking the audience which characters they prefer” “When you’re spending 40 million dollars, it’s the only way to make a film” he replied. I was so green, really, so innocent. But I was certainly living life. Learning To Be.
Roberto Baggio has just missed a penalty at the World Cup Final
The best game was Romania 3 Argentina 2 after Maradona had been sent home for drug abuse and Hagi’s sweet left foot sent the East Europeans through to the quarter finals. I think Germany were beaten by Bulgaria, who in turn lost to Italy. Klinsmann was playing, Roger Milla, Alexi Lalas, Stoichkov, Romario. We particularly enjoyed watching games on TV with absurd, nay, surreal commentary from US commentators deciphering a game they scarcely understood: “The ball has crossed the end line” or “great touch by the goal-handler“. Or the Latin American channels with the hyperbole of the gods :
We had a laugh. Then as summer turned to late summer and even later summer (you don’t really get winter in Los Angeles) – our thoughts turned to work and I carried on getting NO from meetings. They’ve gone another way.They loved you but it’s not going to work out this time. Or even worse : silence. The dwindling hope that finally extinguishes. And then David gave me the script for Seven. I read it – and as I’m sure you know dear reader, it was dark and clever. My character was called John Doe. David assured me that he wanted me to play it. It was my gig. This was great news. I hadn’t worked for almost a year and was a) going slightly mental, and b) running out of money. David then called one afternoon and said the producer would like to meet me on Thursday. Would I mind reading? “Course not” I said, “no problem”. I prepared the scenes in my own accent and also in an American accent. I’d had an accent coach since one of the films I’d gone up for (The Ice Cream Story) had insisted on me reading again and again ( I went in 3 times and still didn’t get it). My accent coach told me that my accent was perfect – nailed on. But the director was nervous, and was projecting his nerves onto me. I rationalised bitterly.
Wilshire and Fairfax in LA
So Thursday rolls around and I sit in that old space-age diner Johnie’s just above Wilshire Boulevard on Fairfax while I wait for the meeting across the road. Then I cross Wilshire and go in. David greets me all smiles like an old friend – he is an old friend. Introduces me to the producer who in my memory was Arnie Kopelson. The casting director was there too I think, Billy Hopkins who since Alien3 which he’d cast with Priscilla John had got me in for loads of things, including Speed which is for another post. Maybe he wasn’t. But there were a few people there watching me, and I immediately felt uncomfortable. Like I was on the spot. I suddenly realised that I had to make David look good. We did some small talk then someone suggested we read. There was probably someone there to read the off-lines. I was shit. My accent was terrible. I apologised. David smiled “It’s cool dude, just do your thing” I tried it again. I was shit again. “Just use your own accent Ralphie” said Fincher, “Just do what you do“. He was so kind and supportive. I was in pieces. It was excruciating.
Sometimes I think that eternity blinks paying no due respect to logic
I’ve thought about this moment many times, and I don’t know why I didn’t seize it. His dream must have seemed so close that he could scarcely fail to grasp it. He could not know that it was already behind him…wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald…The Great Gatsby’s final paragraph.
I didn’t get the job. Kevin Spacey did. He smashed it. He took a few jobs off me that year. It was his year. And the following year certainly was too. We ended 1994 with one BBC job in Italy and nothing in Hollywood, broke. We decided to move back to England, but not before I’d written a movie called New Year’s Day which would eventually get made in 1999 (see My Pop Life #75) and which is about – ouch – The Importance Of Disappointment.
..Give me your hand we are part of this plan we can force all this chaos to rhyme…
At some point during the post-production for Seven or Se7en as it was then written, David and Donya separated. This was painful for everyone, and Jenny and I attempted our usual even-handed response to these painful events and stayed in touch with both parties. David didn’t like that, or perhaps Donya used us against him in an argument. In any event I have hardly seen him since 1995. No bad feeling, just the end of an era.
Donya’s photograph of my wife Jenny Jules, 1994
It was an incredible opportunity in retrospect. If I’d been cast in that role, it would certainly have changed my career. I absolutely under-anticipated the stress of that meeting, thinking in my foolishness that David holding the door open would be perhaps enough to swing it for me. It was a harsh lesson. Many times I have played it over in my mind, re-entered the room, better prepared, psyched-up, played the scene properly like I’d planned it. (Spacey played it exactly as I’d rehearsed it in the finished movie). But I didn’t get it. Even today, writing this, it bites me. It was a gift horse and I gave it a thorough dental examination. Oh well. I’m still here. Some things are just not meant to be. No regrets. Learning To Be.
Like all hinge moments one cannot eventually regret the way it went. If I’d been cast in Seven we would have stayed in LA. Or at least I would. First and biggest problem. We wouldn’t have bought a house in Brighton. Tom, Millie and Lucy wouldn’t have moved down. Scarlett and Tom wouldn’t have met. Skye wouldn’t have been born. I wouldn’t have played in The Brighton Beach Boys. And on and on. You cannot unmake a moment, even in your wishes. And thus, once again, writing out one of my haunted moments in a blog post has allowed to me to understand the wound and clarify the misty darkness which surrounds it a little bit more. And it becomes not a defeat but just another chapter in My Pop Life.
Look in the eyes of the water that falls Hiding behind every flower and rock Why do we dance on the wheel and forget Life is a child that will never regret Learning to be, be, be Stepping away, I get closer each day I’ve been looking for love to find me Digging away, I will search I will pray I’ve been waiting for truth to blind me
Learning To Be :
and Rainbow’s End – it’s not a great quality video, but it’s all there is :
I immediately smile when I hear the first few phrases of this and I don’t stop smiling until it’s finished. What a truly tremendous piece of music. Dance music, pop music, classical music, whatever. Music. It is a waltz, which means it is in 3/4 time. When you play or dance a waltz you count 1,2,3 – 1,2,3. Actually that’s the easy part. As a self-taught pianist I’ve always struggled with beats in a bar. Where’s the four ?? You count three, four times. Anyway, you count 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3. And don’t step on her toes. Very important.
Der Donau near Vienna
The Danube is Europe’s 2nd-longest longest river (after the Volga in Russia) and runs from the Black Forest in Germany (where is is called der Donau) all the way through Austria, Slovakia, Hungary (called the Duna as it runs through Budapest rather beautifully), Croatia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova and Ukraine where it deltas into the Black Sea. It is (tragically today in late June 2016) the longest river in the EU.
Johann Strauss II
Johann Strauss II was Austrian and grew up by der schönen blauen Donau in Vienna. Photos of him suggest he was a biker, but this is a modern interposition because the motorbike had yet to be invented properly. He also resemble a rocker, greased back hair and mutton chops. He was clearly a dude. He was as near as you got to a pop star for the 1850s/60s. If you were a musician in the 19th Century you tended to gravitate to Vienna, much as New Orleans was a musical magnet in the first half of the 20th Century.
All of his family were musicians, and his father, Johann Strauss I, was a popular composer and the leader of an orchestra. Dad didn’t want number one son to become a musician and whipped him when he discovered the secret violin lessons he was taking (with a member of his own orchestra). Undeterred, number one son eventually held his first concert for music he had written at Dommayer Casino in Vienna in 1844 after many other venues, fearful of Dad’s influence, shied away from hosting young Johann. So enraged was Dad that he never played the Dommayer again.
Johann Strauss I
In 1848 revolution swept through Europe and father and son found themselves on opposite sides of the struggle, father siding with the Habsburg Royal Family and writing his most famous piece the Radetsky March the same year and son being arrested for playing the revolutionary anthem La Marseillaise in public. The following year Strauss senior died and Johann the younger merged their two orchestras. The waltz was then the most popular dance in Europe thanks to Johann Strauss I and his contemporary Joseph Lanner, and Johann Jr extended the form and took it into the stratosphere becoming probably the most successful composer of dance music in the 19th Century, touring Europe with his orchestra to great acclaim. An Der Schönen Blauen Danube was written in 1866, and premiered in Vienna, Paris and New York in 1867. It was a sensation. It still is. One of the world’s most popular pieces of music, but that’s never frightened me. When I was younger I preferred the cool of undiscovered, unpopular music. My ears led me here though. Bless my ears.
I feel like this piece of music has been in my head forever. I cannot remember when I purchased the vinyl LP, early 80s in London no doubt, but it was already familiar to me. From 2001, A Space Odyssey of course, as the space station docks with the thingummybob. Beautiful moment in film, thanks Stanley Kubrick. It is, it must be confessed, a tune. The night I danced to it in ?1991? lingers lovingly in the memory since we had all been partying at the Archway Road flat since Saturday evening, and it was now Sunday morning. The party was over but many people were still present, still drunk, still happy. It was late summer I believe, Jenny and I had invited the gang round – why or who or what I cannot recall but – among those present were : Jo Martin, Michael Rose, Roger Griffith, Jo Melville, Michael Buffong, Paulette, Beverley, Paul my brother, Colin, Michael too? Pedro ? Richard (Lady G?), Saffron Myers, Julian Danquah and….hmmm here it gets hazy. If you were there please let me know ! In any event it was around five or six in the morning when we’d played all the Michael Jackson, Earth Wind & Fire, Marley, house music, Sly Stone and ska records in the collection and we needed a party closer. I rustled around in the box and found the LP.
This is pre-CD by the way ! The response to those opening phrases was magical. We each took a partner and waltzed gently around the front room, pretending we knew what we were doing, pretty sure I partnered with Saffron letting the alcohol lead our steps, slowly at first then with increasing vigour and abandon as the music swelled, swirling merrily around the carpet and onto the furniture, swapping partners, spinning, smiling, spinning. We laughed we fell over we span and span around and around. Exhilaration and satisfied exhaustion followed and we collapsed in a pile smiling. Time for a coffee. Happy days. Happy happy music.
The piece is performed every New Year’s Day in Vienna by the Vienna Philharmonic and beamed live around the world. Here is the result from 2010.
and here is the wonderful Daniel Bahrenboim in 2014 :
I got nothing to lose, much to gain, on my brain I got a capitalist migraine
I gotta get paid tonight, you motherfuckin right…
…go to school ? I ain’t goin’ for it – kiss my ass, bust the cap on the Moet !
*
Deep in 1991. I’ve finished shooting Alien 3 in Pinewood. The Gulf War is over. Jenny and I are living in Archway Road, and we’ve holidayed in Positano (My Pop Life #29). The Channel Tunnel is almost completed. Tottenham Hotspur have won the FA Cup and Paul Gasgoigne has ruptured his cruciate ligament. People are going to prison over the Poll Tax, including Labour MPs. To come : Jenny will play Mediyah in Pecong at the Tricycle Theatre, and I will film The Crying Game in Hoxton. Musically we were at a crossroads – Nirvana released Smells Like Teen Spirit which blew my head off, Massive Attack released Unfinished Sympathy which put it back on, Jenny was hugging Optimistic by Sounds Of Blackness, and we were both digging Seal, Prince and Lenny Kravitz. Hip hop was at a true crossroads with Gangsta Rap bidding to take over the commercial end of the scene from more ‘conscious’ hip hop acts from the old skool. Huge sales for Tupac, Biggie and others followed OG Ice T and his role in the film New Jack City which came out in England in August 1991.
Wesley Snipes in New Jack City (1991)
The scene I’d witnessed in Washington D.C. whilst working on my hip-hop play Sanctuary in 1989 (see My Pop Life 33) was now writ large on the screen with Wesley Snipes in the lead role, Ice-T playing a cop and providing much of the soundtrack. I’d get to work with Wesley a few hundred years later in Bulgaria on The Shooter – he’s a solid decent-enough guy. By then (2004) he was about to go to prison for non-payment of tax. He still had a loyal and very cool entourage of eleven people. All of whom depended on Wesley continuing to make movies…
New Jack City was written by Thomas Lee Wright and directed by Mario Van Peebles, who also appeared himself. We heard about it months before it came out, one of the most anticipated films of 1991. A hip hop crack gang movie inhabiting the same space as my newest play “The House That Crack Built” which had just been commissioned and then rejected by the BBC (see My Pop Life 61). It concerned a young man whose father was absent and whose family was about to be evicted from their apartment-above-a-diner in Washington DC. He decides to sell crack to help his mum which initially works well, but when she becomes addicted and his ambitions make him enemies who are armed and vicious it all goes horribly wrong. A cliche perhaps, but somewhat inspired by my own adolescence. Of course all the characters in the play were black. This was what I had found in DC. Crack was a new drug, a crystallisation of cocaine and tremendously powerful. One hit will send you into space. Users feel powerful and indestructible. Horrible shit is what it is. Any illegal drug will be the province of gangsters and underground big business. In a way the black community in the USA were having their “mafia moment” like the Italians, Irish, and English had done before them. Their piece of the pie. America being built on slavery and criminal activity, genocide and gang-war, this is all perfectly normal. New Jack City had Ice-T playing a New York cop going undercover into Wesley Snipes crack-dealing gang, who were in their turn facing off with another gang for turf and profits. Pawns in a divide and rule game?
Russell Wong, Mario Van Peebles, Judd Nelson, Ice-T
So familiar, but with black faces, pretty new. Judd Nelson is the only white character, We also meet Bill Nunn, a young Chris Rock, and Allen Payne with Michael Michelle and Russell Wong being stereotypical black woman and asian (techy) man. It’s Hollywood folks. But we were all completely thrilled by this new genre becoming so mainstream so quickly. The result of New Jack Swing – the soul beat of the early 90s – with Blackstreet, Guy and Teddy Riley, singers like Bobby Brown and Keith Sweat – colliding with the new genre of hip-hop and producing stuff like Ice-T’s album OGand Heavy D and The Boyz (see My Pop Life #33) – it was an exciting moment. Jenny and I completely loved – and still love – the track New Jack Hustler. It is right up there with the very best moments in hip-hop culture, a monster song.
New Jack Hustler perfectly encapsulates the paradox of black capitalism (like all capitalism it starts with a hustle) empowering the self while spreading fear through the neighbourhood, being a big man while murdering brothers (niggas – of course). Ice-T’s brilliant rap is both a boast and a warning, his self-awareness of the ghetto contradiction makes this a truly exemplary piece of work. And it isn’t without humour too, the imaginary impressionable kid gazing up at Ice-T’s gold chains & guns asking “how can I be down?” gets this answer :
What’s up? You say you wanna be down? Ease back, or muthafucka get beat down Out my face, fool I’m the illest Bulletproof, I die harder than Bruce Willis
Got my crew in effect, I bought ’em new Jags So much cash, gotta keep it in Hefty bags All I think about is keys and Gs Imagine that, me workin’ at Mickey D’s
One of the highlights of the major hip-hop doc ‘The Art Of Rap‘ is the moment when Peruvian-American rapper Immortal Technique raps those very lines at Ice-T as they stand on the New York sidewalk, to both of their amusement. My old compadre Andy Baybutt shot and directed that film after making a deal with Ice-T that it would be called “An Ice-T film, directed by Ice-T” but c’mon, Andy made it. Ice chose the characters and conducted the interviews. He would open his address book and say “come to the corner in 15 minutes, we’re shooting a rap movie” and they’d just shoot the result. It’s a superb film about how these guys actually put a rap together, and although Missy Elliott should be there, and two or three others, the cast is everyone who matters (and who’s still alive) in the history of rap.
Ice-T is an interesting dude. Born Tracy Marrow on the East Coast, he moved to LA after both parents died. He got his name from being able to recite chunks of black-pimp-turned novelist Iceberg Slim for his schoolmates in Crenshaw High. Seriously interested in heavy metal he co-founded Body Count a hard rock band in 1991 and their track Cop Killer was hugely controversial. He’s done reality TV, straight acting, married a swimsuit model ‘Coco Marie‘ and put her on his LP covers, appeared as a regular in Law & Order and run a record label. I still think this song is his finest hour. The deceptively smart lyrics contain their own commentary on the ghetto and the way out :
Is this a nightmare? Or the American dream? …Pregnant teens, children’s screams Life is weighed on the scales of a triple beam You don’t come here much, and ya better not Wrong move (Bang) Ambulance cot
I gotta get more money than you got So what, if some muthafucka gets shot? That’s how the game is played Another brother slayed, the wound is deep But they’re givin’ us a band-aid My education’s low but I got long dough Raised like a pit bull, my heart pumps nitro
Sleep on silk, lie like a politician My Uzi’s my best friend, cold as a mortician Lock me up, it’s genocidal catastrophe There’ll be another one after me – a hustler
D.J. Aladdin
All mixed by genius turntablist and producer D.J. Aladdin who combines samples from the ubiquitous James Brown (Blues & Pants provides the horn rise), Sly & The Family Stone (the magnificently cracked-out drum sample – my heart pumps nitro – with a break from You Can Make It If You Try), while the guitar twang is sampled from Bobbi Humphrey‘s Jasper Country Man. The whole piece is like a gangsta manifesto, but dressed up as a cautionary tale and it was the point where I stopped buying hip-hop. Rappers took the ironies in this song and flattened them out into macho posturing. A whole generation of kids grew up on guns, hoes, cars, gangs and death and were convinced that they were all cool. Capitalism won as it usually seems to.
Conspiracy theorists would have you believe that just as the black community started to get organised and angry, spearheaded by figures like Public Enemy, Ice-T and KRS-One, the ghettos were suddenly flooded with cheap weapons and crack cocaine. The next 15 years were all about black-on-black crime and prison, major labels reaping the big profits.
Ice-T could see it coming.
Ice-T pointing his fingers at you pretending he has a gun
My dear friend Dona Croll posted a video of Howlin’ Wolf onto my Facebook page this morning and there was no turning back. I have known Dona since the 1980s, I’m sure she won’t mind me telling you, but from where and when we met I cannot say. Perhaps she was in the cast for the London’s Burning pilot when I met actor Gary MacDonald. I was playing a policeman. Most of the cast were black, but not all. We decided to have a kickabout one lunchtime. Of course, being in uniform meant I got kicked about all over the park. Fair enough.
But in the small bubble of British acting Dona and I would cross paths regularly at Tricycle Theatre first nights, anything that Paulette Randall was doing, maybe at auditions. When I wrote The House That Crack Built for the BBC in 1989 (see My Pop Life #61), Dona was my first choice for the rapping crack-addicted Mom and she was brilliant. I know she reads this blog so this one is partly for you dear Dona, and partly for my brer Eamonn Walker, Eamonn Roderique, E. When I saw the clip of Wolf I immediately thought of Eamonn, because a) they favour and b) Eamonn played Howlin’ Wolf in a film called Cadillac Records in 2008.
Cadillac Records was the story of Chess Records lightly disguised. It’s a good film but while being not entirely satisfying like most biopics and most music films, it nevertheless has a clutch of wonderful performances both of the thespian and musical variety, and Eamonn is quite sensational. He inhabited that role like he does all his roles. Wolf was a big growler who played a mean blues harp, so E had to learn the instrument before the shoot. Adrien Brody played Polish immigrant Leonard Chess who started Chess Records by selling blues and ‘race’ records out of the back of his Cadillac with his brother Phil in 1950 on the South Side of Chicago. It grew to become the most important record label in the history of the blues, releasing crucial work from Chuck Berry, played by Mos Def in the film, Muddy Waters (Jeffrey Wright), Little Walter (Colombus Short), Willie Dixon (Cedric The Entertainer), Etta James (Beyoncé Knowles) and Howlin’ Wolf (Eamonn Walker) among many others.
But Wait – Eamonn worked with Beyoncé !!! She was very good as Etta James I thought, but I am unashamedly biased. I love Beyoncé. A lot. Anyway, moving back to Howlin’ Wolf.
Chester Burnett was a giant of a man from Mississippi who physically dominated any room he was in at 6’3”, and who adopted his name Howlin Wolf from his grandfather. He learned guitar from Charley Patton during the 1930s, harmonica from Sonny Boy Williamson II in the 1940s, and songs from the likes of Robert Johnson, Leroy Carr and Son House. He moved steadily north, first to Arkansas, then later to Memphis where he recorded some sides for Sam Phillips and finally, unusually, driving his own car and with $4000 in his pocket, he went to Chicago. Somehow avoiding all the classic blues temptations that he was singing about – liquor, gambling, loose women of a variety of types, he hired a regular band to accompany him, including Hubert Sumlin who moved up from Memphis. Unusually for a bandleader, Burnett paid his musicians on time, and also offered benefits such as health insurance, he therefore had the pick of the best in Chicago for years. Smokestack Lightning was released in March 1956 and made the Billboard R&B charts, it is now considered a classic. Howlin Wolf had learned it back in the 30s as a variation on a train blues played by Charlie Patton and others, sitting at dawn watching the trains sparking through their chimneys at night “Shinin’, just like gold”. It is a massively evocative three minutes of the blues with growls, yodels, harmonica wails and a wonderful circular bluesy guitar riff from Mr Sumlin which stays on E (appropriately enough) – just one chord for the whole song. “Girl don’t you hear me cryin?” Eamonn plays and sings it on the Soundtrack to Cadillac Records. I couldn’t be more proud.
Eamonn Walker is my brother from another mother. It was gradual, and yet somehow immediate like all the best friendships. We met when he played opposite my soon-to-be wife Jenny Jules in Pecong at the Trike in 1991, Paulette’s Randall‘s production of Steve Carter‘s Caribbean update of Medea, which Jenny won an award for because she was extraordinary. The battling men – Victor Romero-Evans and EamonnWalker do so in rhyme. American actress Pat Bowie played Granny Root, massively talented Jo Martin (recently an incarnation of Doctor Who) and Cecilia Noble the other women, Beejaye Joseph and Jax Williams the eye-candy dancers. It was a great great production. Eamonn used to come and see Jenny and I on Sundays after seeing his twins Deke & Jahdine who were in Enfield with their mum Chris. We were in Archway Road and thus on the way home to Sandra Kane his partner, and young boy Kane Walker (now in his 20s). We became close family and have remained so ever since. We played football together for the Hoxton Pirates for a few seasons on Hackney Marshes and all over South London on Sunday mornings until I broke my nose during a game – a loud crack, a violent searing pain and suddenly I was lying in a large pool of blood. E was one of the first people in England to have a mobile phone – he’s a techno geek – and he had it behind him in a pouch at the back of the goal – he was the Pirates goalie, and he called the ambulance. Eamonn was plucked from the ranks by Lynda LaPlante and seeded in New York were he sprouted the leaves and branches of prison drama Oz followed by much much more besides, films, TV series, he has had a really strong profile in America for years, a profile that he simply, oddly does not have in the UK. So many black British actors have made the same journey over the last 20 years and had success, some of them becoming English stars too like Idris Elba. Others, like Eamonn, (ranked number 11 in a US poll of “favourite British actors”) are never even mentioned in UK media articles about black actor’s success in Hollywood. Like a massive blind spot in the media, and partly in the UK business. We carry on.
In 2011 through 2012 we lived together in Hollywood, just off Mulholland Drive in the hills above Universal with a balcony view that stretched from the Woodland Hills to the Hollywood sign and beyond. It was good to spend time. I would walk Runyon Canyon every day, from the top down and back up. From that base camp E scored another Dick Wolf project: NBC’s Chicago Fire which is now in its fifth series and has him living in Chicago 10 months of every year but scoring his pension. He deserves every cent. Eamonn, Dona : this is for you, I love you both.
Jeffrey Wright, Eamonn Walker, Adrien Brody
This could be the longest thread ever because of links that go in every direction – into the movie The Boat That Rocked, the band Birds Of Tin, my friendship with Simon Korner,Andy Oliver, all of Eamonn’s family, Jenny’s Mum and Dad and on and on.
But perhaps I will mention that when we adopted the beautiful Devon Rex boycat from Jason & Tash in February 2008 (just after my god-daughter Delilah Rose was born) we decided to call him Chester, after Howlin Wolf. This beautiful animal was very special, very wise, very funny, very cuddly. We later bought Chester a companion, a Cornish Rex and named her Mimi. Chester had a heart condition which we discovered when he was two, an a-rhythmical heartbeat. He would live only another two years and passed away aged four while I was working in Tennessee on a film in the fall of 2011. RIP Chester. The greatest cat.
…the young become the old and mysteries do unfold cause that the way of time nothing and no one goes unchanged…
Jenny – my wife – absolutely loved this first LP from Oleta Adams with the hit single “Get Here (If You Can)” and the dancefloor groove “The Rhythm Of Life“. Very good. This was the classic song hidden in the depths of the LP, written by Bernard Ighner. Covered by many others.
The early 90s. Not kids anymore, getting on with being grown-up. Jenny and I decided to get married in 1990, and a giant discussion emerged which would last for several years. I exaggerate only slightly. The big questions were when? and where?
We lived on Archway Road at that point, the middle section which runs from suicide bridge up to Highgate tube station & Jackson’s Lane. London N6. Since Jenny’s family are Catholics, and mine are do-what-you-want, we arranged a meeting with the priest at St Joseph’s on Highgate Hill, Holy Joe’s – a large and rather formidable catholic church perched next to Waterlow Park, where we could hold some kind of reception. Father Patrick, a white-haired kindly Irishman spoke to us about the arrangement. We book the church for one year later – June 1991 would be ideal. We’ll have to do some evening classes ‘in marriage’, which we’re quite happy to do, and we’ll be expected to attend Mass on a Sunday morning about once a month. Or Jenny will at least. It all seems jovial and easy and we shake on it and walk up to Highgate Village for a celebratory drink. There are some nice pubs in Highgate, notably The Flask, but for some reason we walked back down Jacksons Lane to The Black Lion on the upper reaches of Archway Road near the woods. We had a few, and had a fight, about what I simply cannot remember but it was a serious fight because the following day we walked round to the church and asked to cancel the wedding.
Luckily we hadn’t announced the date, or got any cards printed up or booked the hall/cake/car/band. So the wedding was off then. We weren’t off, but the wedding was. We were secretly relieved, and disappointed at the same time. But underneath all the bickering and hesitation, we clearly agreed on one crucial thing – the wedding mattered, and it had to be right. For entirely different reasons I’m sure. My reasons? Both of my parents had, at that point, been married three times – each – and I’d attended the various ceremonies with siblings Paul, Andrew & Rebecca. There’s one particularly grim photograph of us boys at the Brighton Registry Office marriage of our Dad (whom we called ‘John Brown’ after the divorce from my mum) to Lynne Brewer, his girlfriend and former pupil.
everything must change
Andrew (10) has a fringe and a smile rather plastered onto his face, Paul and I have groovy teardrop collar shirts – I guess it’s 1974 (correct – Ed) – and truly miserable glum faces. That was my dad’s 2nd wedding. His third, to wonderful Beryl, was a happier affair, and lasts to this day I’m happy to witness. My mum’s three marriages were a) to my dad, b) to JD (Rebecca’s dad), and c) to Alan which worked for a while, but only for a while. So marriage for the younger me was a bit of a joke to be honest. Fraught with issues to say the least. The fight in the pub was a sign that I wasn’t ready to be married – perhaps, as I’d always claimed, I didn’t really want to be married. That’s how I grew up, all my 20s “I’m never getting married“. Beware of what you say in your 20s. You may be mistaken. I sure was. But neither of us were ready to get married in 1990 – even in a year’s time. When we cancelled the wedding we didn’t cancel each other. We got closer, eventually. But these moments of certainty are so fleeting, the moments of doubt so pervasive. That’s partly what marriage is, a pegging out of cloth in the wind, pinning down one area of doubt at least, making a shelter in the woods that will be there at the end of day.
Things were changing – aren’t things always changing ? Mandela is released from prison, Poll Tax riots in Trafalgar Square, the Soviet Union melting like a globally-warmed iceberg, Saddam invades Kuwait. And at some point that autumn I am offered the role of Aaron – ’85’ – in Alien 3 by David Fincher. It meant that we could afford to get married – at some point in the future. When we were ready…
Oleta Adams singing Woman in Chains with Tears for Fears 1989
As for Oleta Adams, she was “discovered” by Kurt Smith & Roland Orzabal and invited to join Tears For Fears as singer and pianist, and she appears on the Seeds Of Love LP. Her own debut Circle Of One, from where Everything Must Change comes, was released a year later, produced by Orzabal, who also co-wrote Rhythm of Life. I’ll confess that we didn’t keep up with Ms Adams who has released six further LPs, but she still performs from time to time with TFF to sing Woman In Chains.
Johann Strauss II
All of his family were musicians, and his father, Johann Strauss I, was a popular composer and the leader of an orchestra. Dad didn’t want number one son to become a musician and whipped him when he discovered the secret violin lessons he was taking (with a member of his own orchestra). Undeterred, number one son eventually held his first concert for music he had written at Dommayer Casino in Vienna in 1844 after many other venues, fearful of Dad’s influence, shied away from hosting young Johann. So enraged was Dad that he never played the Dommayer again.
Smokestack Lightning was released in March 1956 and made the Billboard R&B charts, it is now considered a classic. Howlin Wolf had learned it back in the 30s as a variation on a train blues played by Charlie Patton and others, sitting at dawn watching the trains sparking through their chimneys at night “Shinin’, just like gold”. It is a massively evocative three minutes of the blues with growls, yodels, harmonica wails and a wonderful circular bluesy guitar riff from Mr Sumlin which stays on E (appropriately enough) – just one chord for the whole song. “Girl don’t you hear me cryin?” Eamonn plays and sings it on the Soundtrack to Cadillac Records. I couldn’t be more proud.
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