Eye to eye stand winners and losers
Hurt by envy, cut by greed
Face to face with their own disillusions
The scars of old romances still on their cheeks
And when blow by blow
The passion dies sweet little death
Just have been lies
Some memories of gone by times would still recall the lies
*
March 26th 1985 Finsbury Park, London
My god is a jealous god. I feel nervous and weird. I need. What do I want? I have decided to leave Mumtaz. That was fucking difficult to write. I’ve told a few people. They are generally supportive. Most don’t want a long conversation, but then I don’t suppose I do either.
Michael Foster coming to the show [Deadlines, Royal Court] tonight. Definitely a change of course in my career. Up up and away.
April 17th 1985 Liverpool
Poor Mumtaz, I have hurt her terribly, but it’s for the best for both of us. She’ll see it one day, not for a while. Meantime I must try to be kind. It’s best happening now rather than later, that’s the main thing. She’s only 31, still young at heart, and so am I. So am I.
Meanwhile Mike Foster is doing the business : interviews with Alan Price & Braham Murray (not a good enough singer), Jane Howell (great part) and Liz England (The Bill – do I want it?) in the last three weeks. Top marks there, even though two of them have been trips down to London from Liverpool.
May 1st 1985 Bow, London
Ten years ago today Saigon fell to the Vietcong. Well, this is me, alone, working on a TV series, homeless.
Pretty disappointed with my first day on The Bill. A bit laddy in atmosphere, people are bored, fairly rushed, it feels that not a lot of care is taken with it – no rehearsals, feels a bit like a cheap video. It’s stupid to feel so bad about it, I want the exposure and the financial security, but shouldn’t I have waited for something better? It might never have come. And besides, in TV terms, is there much better? You have to serve your time. Be patient. Learn about camera. Use it.
Monday July 8th 1985 – Bow, London
How sad that Mumtaz and I both spent yesterday at Battersea Park GLC Festival alone, watching the same bands : Jimmy Somerville, Thomas Mapfumo, Aswad & The Pogues and both wandering around meeting no-one in that huge crowd. I did bump into members of the Birds Of Tin (see My Pop Life #) and then went round to Mumtaz’ afterwards and she had made sandwiches and had a bottle of wine and no one to share them with. I felt so sad for her.
The day before she had told me a great deal, not always looking at me but at an unspecified spot on the table between us. She told me to be honest with myself, not to act in real life, not to become a wanker and do certain things to make myself respectable in the business, just to be myself. She also conceded that she might have allowed me too much power and I conceded in turn that I had not discouraged that a great deal. There was definitely some communication.
I must talk to Kathryn this week, she’s off to New York on Monday for Aunt Dan & Lemon. Mumtaz also accused me of using her, and women generally, to leave her, saying I could never have done it on my own. This could be true, too.
Perhaps I should make an effort now to be single, which probably means turning people down who want to spend the night with me. Well, which definitely means that !
Having said that, those three nights with Rita were wonderful, surprising, I kept looking at her and couldn’t quite believe she was there.
Everyone is looking for the same thing – Love.
CODA
The Bill is shaping up, I’ve got to know the cast a bit now and they’re a good bunch. I still find the working method odd, but it has produced some good things. One relies on one’s instincts a lot, which isn’t always bad. You have to be on the ball on the day, really concentrate.
Monday July 22nd 1985 Bow, London
Wonderful wonderful wonderful week with Rita !!! Life can be fantastically unexpected.
In the wake of the stolen Minx, three cars have moved into pole position as the next R. Brown car : a Vauxhall Cresta PB, a series 1 Hillman Minx and a Vauxhall Wyvern 1953. I cannot decide on this Monday night.
I am also being indecisive about a flat offered to me in Archway Road – small but noisy but with a decent back garden which needs a lot of work… might not get a garden in the ‘next offer’. Affecting the decision is that I now feel much more comfortable here in Bow, especially after Rita stayed last week. On the other hand, next door was broken into today, and they have the same locks as this one. Is this a sign for me to get out?…
Sunday August 4th 1985 Bow, London E3
Rita called it off today, just before the Joint Stock AGM at the Royal Court. I am very upset, sad, confused…
Interrupted by a phone call from yes you guessed it Rita, saying that she loved me and that was why she couldn’t see me, and she had rung up to make me feel better. Initially this made me feel worse, but now I feel better again and I will sleep OK. What am I getting into here…is it a good idea? I want to be happy that’s all, same as anybody else.
To be noted : I have a Vauxhall of great beauty and style. Brill.
I have a flat on Archway Road which will become home in a couple of weeks. On with decorating, gardening, getting a kitten, furnishing,
LIVING ! On….
*
*
*
Saturday November 21st, 2020 Brooklyn, NY
Fast forward to today. Those are genuine diary entries from the time when I was 28 years old, turning 29. I have omitted some of the more embarrassing pieces of writing, I am only human you know. My current-day feelings on those months are as follows.
It was gut-wrenchingly difficult leaving Mumtaz. I’d been with her since I was a 19 year old student (see My Pop Life #21 That’s The Way Of The World) and it was my third attempt to leave this relationship behind me. Twice I had been in such a vulnerable place – both physically and emotionally – that I had crept back into that safe secure loving nest and not moved forward at all as a person. This time I packed up the car with all my books and clothes and drove round to Simon Korner‘s flat in Stoke Newington, not far from Blackstock Road where Taj’s attic flat was. Stayed there for two weeks (I think that was the deal we had) then moved into Bob Carlton’s flat in Bow on the 11th floor of a tower block. Bob Carlton was the writer on Return To The Forbidden Planet which I had just done at the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn. He didn’t live in London but kept it on as a place to stay when he visited. It was very generous of him. Meanwhile behind the scenes Ram John Holder, who’d played Prospero in Planet was organising me with a Housing Association flat through his girlfriend who worked for West Hampstead HA. He was most insistent – you have the right to be housed he would say, nobody should be homeless. And that was what transpired in August. Another very generous man. You see how lucky I am?
A few years later my new girlfriend Jenny Jules (whom I would marry) was working with Ram John in Desmonds, the barbershop sitcom where he played Pork Pie and Jenny was his daughter. Funny how things tie up.
Kathryn Pogson is also mentioned above – we were working on Deadlines by Stephen Wakelam for Joint Stock Theatre Company which was directed by Simon Curtis and was touring around the UK after opening at the Royal Court. See My Pop Life #185 Between The Wars. Kathryn and I were having an affair, and I think it was the week that we were at the Sheffield Crucible that one of her ex-boyfriends, Max Stafford-Clark, came up to see the show, and her. He was the Artistic Director of the Royal Court at the time, and he tried to pull droit de seigneur on Kathryn. She asked me if I minded, which was funny. I did of course, I am not that liberal, and I am a typical jealous god type man when it comes to sexual partners. So Max never got his tings and I never worked at the Royal Court again.
Rita Wolf was an unexpected happenstance which turned into three glorious years. She had also worked for Joint Stock, and been directed by Max Stafford-Clark in a play called Borderline which was written by Hanif Kureishi, and which I’d seen. Enjoyed it very much. Joint Stock was an inspirational collective which meant that on paper it had no Artisitic Director (although Max was de facto that person for years) and anyone who had ever worked for the company could be on the various committees and attend the AGM. It was after one of these meetings that Rita and I walked up from the office on Tottenham Court Road to Regent’s Park for lunch near the rose beds and she asked me out, just at that point when I’d decided to be single for a bit and “sort myself out“. The hollow cry of the terminally-coupled male.
Because I am and always was a totally crap single man. I always think of McCartney’s lyric –
suddenly, I’m not half the man I used to be
Oh yesterday came suddenly. Even when I’m the one who leaves.
But Rita came suddenly into my single world too like a vision of beauty.
Rita’s parents were Bengalis from Calcutta – or Kolkata as it is once again known. They lived in Swiss Cottage with Rita’s brother. They were very friendly to me, her father in particular pulling out an Indian drum and singing to me when the spirit caught him. Rita and I did a huge trip to India a few years later as we were breaking apart, neither of us admitting or accepting it out loud. We visited her mother, at that time in Kolkata, an extraordinary city on the river Ganges, but I’ll have to save all that stuff for another time. Rita moved in with me to the Archway Road flat, but my strongest memory of this particular slice of time is the flat in Bow. There we enjoyed each other without interruption, making love multiple times a night which you do when you’re young and horny, and the skin is sweet. We were sharing a life in theatre, music, television, and politics. Rita was separated from her husband who ran the 606 Jazz club in Chelsea and who bequeathed her a surname to reckon with. And we talked and talked. What we liked, what we didn’t like. It was Thatcher glowering over us all back then. Selling shares in previously nationalised industries to create more tories. Rita had gone to Camden School For Girls on Camden Road there, where future friends Catherine Wearing and Emma Thomson went, a good school which encouraged confidence and debate and Rita is well-versed in both.
I moved all my books and clothes from Simon Korner’s place into the Bow flat but none of my music came with me for I had left it all in Finsbury Park and Mumtaz wasn’t in the mood to let me have any of it. At all. I’d built a glass display case in her attic flat for all of the LPs, based on the kind of thing you’d see in a department store, my pride and joy, and all of my picture-sleeve singles from the punk era, all of my soul singles, all of my pop stuff from the late 60s and 70s – including the first single I ever bought (see My Pop Life #201 The Banner Man) – these treasures were in boxes and cases. And perhaps they still are because I haven’t seen them since. I tried but was told that there was a price to pay for leaving her and that was my music collection. And the record player, amp and speakers.
There were no CDs around yet, no internet, no mp3s, no streaming. There were LPs, 45s, a few 78s and cassettes. Remember those? Apparently they’re cool again. Whatever. See My Pop Life #42 African Children. So in the Bow flat up there on the 11th floor my music was whatever cassettes I had grabbed into a plastic bag that day I’d left, and any I’d bought since. And my favourite cassette that summer was A Secret Wish by Propaganda from whence this track comes. Mainly for this track Duel and previous single Dr Mabüse. Sure I think I had Fulfillingness First Finale and some other stuff to play which I loved, but not much and this was new. My latest noise. There’s another version of this song called Jewel which is more art-noise, less pop on the LP. And a Blake-inspired Dream Within A Dream.
Propaganda are a German band formed in Düsseldorf in 1982 from the ashes of pioneering industrial metal/electronic band Die Krupps, led by Ralf Dörper. It is hard now to over-estimate the influence of German music on the 1970s and 80s with the benefit of hindsight, particularly Kraftwerk and Neu! also from Düsseldorf and Kluster/Cluster/Harmonia and Tangerine Dream from Berlin. It would be trite but possibly true to suggest that Kraftwerk’s Autobahn was the most influential song of the 1970s given the musicians who claim that it influenced their own direction and choice of sounds – Bowie, Brian Eno (he preferred Kluster of course), Depeche Mode, Gary Numan, Public Image Ltd, Cabaret Voltaire, The Fall, OMD, Ultravox, The Pet Shop Boys, Yazoo, Soft Cell, Human League, Spandau Ballet, all techno and house music and of course Propaganda themselves and anyone who ever used a synthesiser or a drum machine. The music was a rejection of America in part and there is little blues influence in there, mainly more industrial noises from the likes of Stockhausen or music concrete, or in the case of intellectuals Can, tape machines & jazz and minimalism.
Propaganda were signed by new record label Zung Tuum Tung in the UK thanks to John Peel and (possibly) Paul Morley’s ear to the ground. Their album A Secret Wish was produced by Stephen Lipson overseen by all-round musical genius Trevor Horn who had his first big hit with Video Killed The Radio Star (with Geoff Downes in Buggles) in 1979.
Horn then bought a Fairlight computer in 1980 (one of four in the UK), produced million sellers Mirror Mirror and Give Me Back My Heart for Dollar, Owner Of A Lonely Heart and others for prog band Yes, the Lexicon of Love LP for ABC, formed the band Art Of Noise with Anne Dudley, produced Buffalo Gals & Double Dutch for Malcolm McClaren, then signed Frankie Goes To Hollywood to ZTT a record label he ran with his wife Jill Sinclair and iconoclastic situationist NME journalist Paul Morley, then produced Relax and Two Tribes. Stories abound of his domineering way in the studio, but the results were hits, and who’s going to argue with hits? Relax became the 4th-largest selling single ever in the UK. Trevor Horn is one of the people who shaped the 1980s in the UK and beyond, of that there is no doubt.
When I look down his cv though, I realise that I was never a fan of his sound – neither Buggles nor Frankie, not Yes, nyet Dollar, not particularly ABC nitto McLaren. This song yes, and I always enjoyed Art Of Noise, who are occasionally great. What does that tell us about me? That yes I am an intellectual pop snob a man who claims to love pop music but actually is full of disdain for it. Whoa hang on. Easy on the self-hate captain.
Not disdain. But in all honesty the UK 80s music scene wasn’t my thing, the New Romantics and the synth pop. I liked Spandau Ballet and Soft Cell, I liked Culture Club and I like Lynx and Imagination. But Duran Duran, Ultravox, Depeche Mode, Cocteau Twins, Human League, etc etc didn’t do it for me. In the 1980s I started to take my ears elsewhere, to Africa, to the Caribbean, to hip hop, to Ireland, to Germany, to jazz. To Kate Bush.
We will also give kudos to Katherine Hamnett who designed the T-shirts and Anton Corbijn who did the sleeve art. Jean Michel Goude anyone? Later in 1985, just to rub it in, Grace Jones‘ Slave To The Rhythm was released on Island Records, produced by Trevor Horn. I wonder what happened to him? After he produced Seal‘s Kiss From A Rose for example? LOL. Now that I do love.
Propaganda were excited that they had been signed to ZTT. The whole German music thing was a bit of a cognoscenti flex to be fair, and still is, cool band names to drop, whether as a musician influenced by or just a consumer who knows more than thou. It’s sweet to think that Propaganda felt that way about Trevor Horn, but then there’s cool, and there’s hits.
Meanwhile I’d got a new agent, Michael Foster who is still a dear friend (not an agent anymore) and he had set me up on The Bill, a show in its second series for Thames Television. [note for American and other readers – the Old Bill is a nickname for the Metropolitan Police Force]. The Bill was a police procedural drama, shot in verité style on video with no rehearsal and long takes – there was a police officer in every scene, it was fly-on-the-wall style rough and ready reality drama of the kind we see all over town these days, and thus a pioneer in the kind careful hands of Peter Cregeen the producer. I was cast to play PC Pete Muswell, a cocky old-school racist wanker and general bully boy. What overlaps were there with me? LOL. He was a character I believed in having had run-ins with the police, and witnessed Brixton and Finsbury Park policing at first hand. Muswell was also a character I never saw on British TV. A racist copper.
A black actor Ronny Cush was cast to play PC Abe Lyttleton who Muswell hilariously called Snowflake. We may cringe now, but at the time this was revolutionary stuff. It was rare to find a racist character on TV – Love Thy Neighbour (see My Pop Life #184 Mystery Band) and Til Death Us Do Part being stand-out exceptions. But a policeman ? Mate. This was after the Brixton & Wood Green & Toxteth uprisings of 1981 don’t forget, and Dixon of Dock Green was old skool propaganda. I am still very proud of being part of an effort to make TV policing more reflective of reality – we were post-watershed, we swore, there was nudity, racism and boring chit-chat. We were mimicking reality. Or pretending to.
We shot the programme at Artichoke Hill in Wapping. The newly redeveloped East End of London. The following year, 1986, the print unions for next-doors News International (Murdoch plc) went on strike and the resulting pickets made it very difficult for Artichoke Hill to continue as Sun Hill, the fictional Police Station in The Bill, partly because so many actors wandering around in uniform were being mistaken for the real old Bill.
But that was after my time. I used to drive there in my Hillman Minx series One with the bench seat and the stick shift gear in the steering wheel column. Then that car got nicked one night outside the King’s Cross Snooker Hall where I used to go on Saturday nights with various characters and I bought a Vauxhall Wyvern as marked in the diary above, a proper wanker’s look-at-me style car. You only live once, I felt, so might as well be a wanker.
I don’t know what I was trying to prove. Or to whom. It was all happening thick & fast and I was surfing it as best I could. Shedding one skin and growing another, skidding round town flashing the cash and buying stuff I looked like a ponce in. For example, the tartan suit which I wore to Birds of Tin rehearsals (see My Pop Life #149 Little By Little ). There are other sartorial errors of judgement. But what is youth for if not sartorial errors of judgement?
Shout out to Mark Wingett who became a proper mate. PC Carver. And Trudie Goodwin who is a dear dear lady. PC Ackland. The legend that is Eric Richard, Sgt Bob Cryer who turned up in Dunkirk recently. A very special man. John Salthouse was extremely kind to me and hated all the palaver around being an actor. He’d played football for Crystal Palace before joining us max factors. He hadn’t bargained with being famous. Neither had I – but that’s for another post, when the damned thing actually came out on the Television. Colin Blumenau who played Taffy. Robert Hudson who played ‘Yorkie’ and who I’ll always associate with Hull Truck Theatre Company & John Godber. Chris Walker also from Yorkshire lovely lad, I’d work with him later in Ivanhoe. Nula Conwell bless her playing PC Viv Martella, Jon Iles playing DC Mike Dashwood, Ashley Gunstock who joined the Green Party like me decades later…and lovely Peter Ellis pictured below in sheepskin, the kind of cosy Super who didn’t actually exist. Anywhere. But writer Geoff McQueen got a lot of things right to be fair.
Then there’s Jenny Tate who designed the costumes and who I really liked and Chris Dingley who operated the camera on his shoulder all damn day long, and make up ladies Gillian Wakeford and Lisa Cavilli Green (who knitted me an amazing harlequin jumper in green and claret) and whom I L O V E D because I’d decided early doors to have a scar on my face so I had to be there early to get that applied and then sit in a chair on wrap when everyone else was running to the pub to get it removed. But I liked that scar because very simply, it meant that PC Muswell wasn’t me.
Who was I ? No idea. I look back at my diary from the time and he doesn’t know either. All I know is, I was doing my best, blundering through relationships, work, pop music & politics and I guess I still am, 35 years later. Thanks for reading. Here’s Propaganda :
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