Читать книгу I Know This Much: From Soho to Spandau - Gary Kemp - Страница 13

The screaming engine of the silver Lotus Elan pinned me back into the leather seat and shot me down the empty backstreet. It was exhilarating enough to be nearly horizontal in a speeding car but to have a voluptuous, mini skirted blonde driving me, her slim leg pumping the heavy clutch, was beyond my pubescent dreams. What made it sublime was that the woman with a kid glove on the vibrating gearstick was the pulchritudinous star of the Carry On movies, Liz Fraser.

I was making another ‘Saturday Morning’ picture, but this time I was starring in it, and Liz, who was playing the lead villain’s moll, was taking me for a spin in her new toy. Catapulted from my black-and-white telly to full glorious colour in the driving seat next to me, I’m sure she knew to what wonderful places she was also driving this twelve-year-old’s imagination. Hide and Seek followed the rules of most Children’s Film Foundation movies: kids rise above the bumbling inadequacies of authority to help capture a bunch of no-gooders; on the way, they have a bit of slapstick at the adults’ expense and learn some lessons about themselves. I played Chris, a policeman’s son, who finds an absconded borstal boy, Keith, hiding in a basement under the house of Roy Dotrice’s grubby Mr Grimes. We soon stumble upon a heist that, with the licence of cinematic coincidence, involves Keith’s father, who’s also the gang’s leader (played by the swarthy Terence Morgan), and his henchmen, Johnny Shannon, Alan Lake and Robin Askwith. The denouement is played out over classic CFF territory—the bomb site. With cameos from AlfredMarks, Bernard Spear and Graham Stark, as well as the delicious Liz, it had a cast list equal to any of the major British comedy productions of the time.

What thrilled me even more was that I had to take six weeks off school to make it. Of course, I had a tutor, but what kid wouldn’t rather be here, although in saying that, Deptford was not in my comfort zone. The local lads gave us as much trouble as they could without gaining the attention of the police. It was common for me to have to dodge the odd flying milk bottle during filming, and a bunch of fey film types are never great at standing up to that sort of thing. It was usually left to one of the female chaperones to defuse the wrath that our presence instilled in the local gangs. A few cakes off the buffet would also help. Noticeably, it was always quiet when Johnny Shannon was around. Johnny, bald and heavyset, was a fighter turned actor and had notably played the arch villain, Harry Flowers, in Nic Roeg’s Performance. Johnny was a friend of the Krays and someone that would come back into my life during my preparation for The Krays. But at this moment I’m a skinny kid with a bad haircut courtesy of the assistant director, who was given the job of chopping it after the producer felt my ‘feathercut’ too trendy for Deptford. I cried bitter tears when I later saw it in the mirror above our fireplace at home. Dad could have done a better job with his K-Tel special.

Alan Lake and the young Robin Askwith soon became the set’s bad boys, and though they teased me in a good-natured way throughout the filming, they took me under their mutual wing. A stalwart of British television, Alan was famously married to Britain’s answer to Marilyn Monroe—Diana Dors. Sadly, five months after Diana died of cancer in 1984, Alan, laden with grief, would unburden himself by unloading a gun into his head.

To a boy of my background one of the added bonuses of making films was money. In those days the authorities felt they needed some promises before trusting what might be devious working-class parents with cash that belonged to a child. And so my mother and I, dressed in our best, went along to County Hall to see a haughty representative from the Inner London Education Authority for an interview and a large dose of condescension. Over a pair of reading glasses my mother was scanned for honesty, and made to understand that a third of the money had to be put away until I was sixteen. Flinching under the wagging finger of authority, my deeply moral mother must have been appalled by the suspicion laid upon her. I’d already been earning my own money working Saturdays at a local greengrocer’s, my father insisting that I put a third of it towards the housekeeping, as he felt that it would give me a sense of financial responsibility. But with this additional sum, I knew what I wanted to do—go electric. As soon as I got the money from the film, I took my old cheese-cutter back to Holloway Road and exchanged guitar and earnings for an amplifier and an Epiphone electric guitar in cherry red. The acting was starting to feed the music, but the music I wanted to play was from outer space.

One Thursday night, while watching Top of the Pops on a friend’s colour TV, we both agreed that we’d seen the future and it had white nail varnish and orange hair. T.Rex had made way for Slade, but here was someone to make them all look like piffling nonentities, a troubadour to welcome in my sexual awakenings. AMephistophelean messenger for the Space Age, expounding a manifesto that was almost spiritual in its meaninglessness, he spoke his words through a grinning confidence that had me signing up to whatever he was selling for the rest of my life. Pointing his long finger down the barrel of the lens he sang: ‘I had to phone someone so I picked on you,’ and I felt that he had. And oh, but oh, when that guitar solo clawed and choked its way out of the Gold Top Les Paul, brandished like a musical laser gun, the Starman Bowie threw his arm around his golden-suited buddy and I wanted to go to that planet. For a generation, a benchmark was being drawn as to how pop music should look—not the boy next door, nor the corkscrew-haired changeling, not even the hyper-lad of the Faces, but a theatre of glittering aspiration that one could only ever dream of entering. I walked home through the decrepit streets of Islington and planned my future. If we can sparkle he may land tonight…But it would be a few more years before touchdown.

Phil Daniels was a wiry King’s Cross kid whose twisted smile revealed a cynicism that belied his young years. Small, dark and feral, he seemed more cultured than others, and having just added himself to Anna’s swelling number, I was drawn to him. He also had an electric guitar.

Phil and I started to meet up and make music with Peter Hugo Daly, another one of Anna’s new recruits, but a patchouli-scented one from the other side of the Essex Road. When Peter’s keyboard was in charge we’d play strung-out jams based on Pink Floyd tracks; if it were Phil’s guitar it would be the Faces; and if it were my Epiphone taking the lead, anything from Ziggy. We rehearsed in Duncan Terrace at the house of a middle-class kid called Miles Landesman, brother of the future writer Cosmo, and his place was a revelation to me. Although his parents Jay and Fran Landesman owned their own home, I was shocked at how strangely out of joint everything was: old rugs thrown about on rough planks; photographs, old paintings and revolutionary posters hanging on scuffed walls; an odd frying pan that they called a ‘wok’, unwashed among half-empty bottles of wine—the first I’d ever seen—in a spacious pine kitchen that smelt sweetly foreign and tantalisingly decadent. Even the rice, left cold in a large pot, looked dirty and brown, not the starched, white stuff I’d seen before in a Chinese takeaway. Obscure, dog-eared books were scattered on shelves and tables, while a tennis racket lay discarded on the stairs, waiting for another summer. But what shocked me the most was that the sofa and chairs in the living room didn’t match! And yet his family were so at ease within this shabby chaos, it was as if nothing mattered or belonged to them enough to care about. The truth was everything belonged to them, unlike in my own house, where Wilson the cat was the only thing not on hire purchase.

I sat in their living room and tasted my first ‘real’ coffee and thought how horrified my mother would have been by the lack of curtains or nets on the windows. Without nets, she’d once told me, people will think we are poverty stricken. In her mind their absence inferred some kind of moral collapse. I started to become upset with my own home—why didn’t we read newspapers that had more words than photographs? Why didn’t we have books everywhere? Why were we not discussing theatre, politics and macrobiotic diets? Regardless of the spoonfuls of love I was being fed at home, my newly formed taste for garlic pÂtÉ and roasted coffee beans was turning me into a bitter young snob.

My father had been struggling at work, both physically and mentally, and the result was turning into depression and a potential breakdown. He would come home and sit slumped in his chair, complaining of pains and dizziness, and we had lost the do-it-yourself man we loved. My worried mother felt he should go to our local GP, a trip full of fear at the best of times for my father. He’d grown up with no National Health system and when, after the war, he finally saw a doctor, it was a man with an upper-class accent and a university education—an absolute alien, as far as my father was concerned. Dad would sit like a child, not asking any questions, convinced that the professional was ‘looking down his nose’ at him. Nevertheless, he took my mother’s advice and made the visit. The doctor, who was not quite as disdainful as Dad had imagined, sympathetically recommended a change of job, and so for a while he considered leaving the print and working for the Post Office. He even toyed with the idea of leaving London and we spent one day visiting the sixties-imagined future that is Hemel Hempstead. We stood in the middle of the toy-town and imagined our future there and, luckily for this story, promptly returned home.

And then they made him redundant; a real blow for a breadwinner with little savings. It was a dreadful time for him, but after searching he managed to find work as a guillotine operator for a print firm in Old Street. My father recovered his spirit, we stayed as Londoners, and almost as a symbol of regaining his old self, he built me something. A dulcimer is a beautiful four-stringed folk instrument played on the lap. He painted it orange and black and I hung it on my wall, proud of my growing collection and my skilled father.

Although my aspirations flourished, the band with Phil didn’t. We didn’t even bother to give it a name, let alone play a gig, and we soon drifted apart. Three years later we reunited for an Anna Scher television programme. Written by Charles Verrall, YouMust Be Joking! was a children’s sketch show for Thames TV that featured many of the Anna Scher kids. A teeny-band called Flintlock supplied the music, but on the first show Charles asked Phil and me if we would play a song. Somewhere in the basement of a television studio lies a tape of the boy who would eventually star in the movie Quadrophenia and his mate, sitting on stools, strumming acoustic guitars and singing America’s ‘A Horse With No Name’. Why we didn’t do something cooler I have no idea! Probably too much time spent inMiles’s mother’s pine kitchen soaking up Joni Mitchell et al. Hopefully the tape will never be found.

To everyone’s surprise Hide and Seek was released with the flourish of a royal premiere. The film was shown at the ABC cinema on Shaftesbury Avenue one Saturday morning in October 1972 in the presence of Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Kent and an invited audience. It was the twenty-first anniversary of the Children’s Film Foundation and Hide and Seek had been chosen for this prestigious birthday celebration.

Since making the film I had worked with my brother Martin in a small cameo role for the BBC’s children’s storytelling programme Jackanory. Playing two Arsenal supporters returning from a match and bumping into a friend (played by Stephen Brassett), it was hardly a stretch for us, but it was Martin’s first role. Martin was a shy boy—he’d blush if he met a friend in the street—but after a few weeks under Anna’s encouraging tutelage, his confidence grew, and it was now obvious that this relaxed ten-year-old’s cheeky on-screen grin and ice-blue eyes were designed for attraction. I would have to work a little harder from now on.

My parents brought him along to the Hide and Seek premiere and they watched proudly as I stood in the line-up and shook the slight royal hand, the duchess a pale vision of creams and peroxide. Anna and Charles were there and so was a BBC camera crew for Film ’72, the Barry Norman review programme. It was an enjoyable thrill, but the best screening of the film was a few weeks later in Deptford at a genuine Saturday Morning Pictures. The CFF invited its young cast down to present the film to an audience of local kids—thankfully not the ones who’d tried to bottle us. High on Jublees, they screamed, shouted and laughed in all the right places. Surprisingly, this time the manager didn’t walk down the aisle and threaten to throw us all out.

Watching the film now, there’s something wonderfully honest about the boy on screen: the accent is dated, yet true to his class, and the reactions are unselfconscious. It’s a glimpse at myself before the advent of aspiration and self-design.

A week after the premiere I stayed up late and watched Film ’72 and an interviewer asking me if I planned to be an actor when I grew up. I was inspired by the story my father had told about having to leave school at fourteen and not being able to study for the job he really desired, and so my answer was for him: ‘No. Not really. I want to be a journalist.’

It was a lie. I’d already set my sights on music.

Thirty years later, the wide-eyed Bowie boy from Islington would make an unexpected return. Working in Dublin, I spend an evening with Joe Elliott of Def Leppard. We end up in one of those drink-fuelled discussions where the aural highlights of your life end up scattered across the living-room floor while you claim that your growing pains had the greatest musical accompaniment of any generation. Being the same age, we concur on most things, and it’s Bolan, Bowie and Bryan that litter the place, along with some crumbs of Humble Pie. Joe claims triumphantly to have experienced various rock epiphanies in the early seventies and shows me some of the evidence: a framed layout of ticket stubs from Sheffield City Hall, circa ’71-75. Thinking fast, I manage to trump his yellowing memorabilia and brandish a dreamlike experience I had one October evening in 1973 at the Marquee Club in Soho.

Since that cathartic ‘Starman’ I’d devoured everything Bowie: weeping tears through the heartbreaking passion of ‘Time’; crushing my feet into orange platform heels and even trying to reason out the ridiculous whimsy of ‘Laughing Gnome’. I’d worn a white scoop-neck T-shirt that had tiny blue stars and long flared sleeves, and in a pair of loons from Oxford Street I’d felt David holding my hand as I sashayed uptown and went glam.

So it was with great patience that I’d queued for hours in a wet Wardour Street to see what was billed as The 1980 Floor Show. Bowie was to present songs from Pin-Ups and announce the writing of a musical soon to be released called 1984, and all this was to be filmed by NBC for American television. With guest artists such as Marianne Faithfull— dueting dressed as a nun—and mime artists from Lindsay Kemp’s school, it would become legendary among Bowie aficionados. In bangles and baggies I rushed to the front of the stage and pressed into a mass of boys with painted faces and girls wearing baby-blue eyeshadow and antique fox stoles. The previous July, at the Hammersmith Odeon, we’d all shed tears as Bowie retired Ziggy and said farewell to the Spiders from Mars, but now, just for this show, the Spiders were back, Ziggy had risen from the grave, and I would watch the Pallas Athena of rock stalk the stage in heels. At some magical moment during the night he reached down, looked into my eyes and accepted one of my bangles as a gift. In return, he handed me the map of my future.

Sadly for Joe, he hadn’t been there, but he’s got it on a bootleg VHS and within moments of me mentioning it, we’re watching the entire event on telly. Through the fractured twists and rolls of his distorted, multi-copied tape, I witness a moment from my past at twenty-four frames a second and it is glorious; a cabaret of decadence that had taught me how to dream. I remember it all as it reels before me. But then, as I watch Bowie lean into the crowd below, I feel weak, for there I am, right where I remember, just in front of the boots of Mick Ronson—a fair-haired boy, just turned fourteen, thrusting his bright face up into the temptation of glitter, lights and flesh; gorging on the glamour of it all.

I sit forward in my chair, open mouthed. Suddenly I can draw a line between then and everything I had done since.

‘That’s me, Joe! That’s me!’ I shout.

But then some white noise fills the screen, and I’m gone.