Читать книгу To Be Someone - Ian Stone - Страница 6

It’s late 1979. I’m sixteen years old and I’m on the top deck of a 253 crawling along Green Lanes on the way to the Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park in North London. I love this venue. I’ve seen The Jam here more than once. But tonight, I’m going to see Sham 69, a punk, pub rock band who’ve somehow captured the imagination of a certain sort of disaffected male youth. Namely white, violent and often racist. And also, for reasons I could not articulate at the time, me. This doesn’t concern me as much as it perhaps should.

The truth is I don’t even like Sham 69 that much. Jeremy Goldman, a friend from the year below me at school, had managed to get a couple of tickets and asked me if I wanted to come along. Aside from listening to my parents shout at each other, which I can hear any evening of the week, I’ve got nothing else on so I say yes.

I’ve just left Pete Bernstein’s house in Clapton. I’ve been there most of the afternoon. It’s a school day but we had Maths and double Religious Education, presumably because the school considered made-up stories from two thousand years ago twice as important as Maths, so we made an executive decision to bunk off and listen to records. At some point, his mum came in from work. She didn’t seem in the least bit surprised or annoyed that we weren’t at school. She just made us a sandwich and left us to it.

The bus moves slowly towards Manor House. It’s an oppressively warm Friday evening. The top deck smells of cigarettes. It always does. I look out of the window to my left. We’re passing a council estate. A young guy is strolling down the street towards four other guys sitting on a wall. I see that they’ve spotted him. One of them stands on the wall and as he passes, kicks him hard in the face. He goes down. The four boys run away laughing. I look around the bus. No one else has seen what happened. The bus moves slowly along. I keep looking at the young guy. He slowly gets up. There’s some blood and he wipes it with his sleeve. The bus goes round the corner at the junction and he’s gone.

I get off the bus at Finsbury Park under the bridge on the Seven Sisters Road. It’s a lively part of London, at least compared to West Hendon where I live. I’ve been coming to the Arsenal stadium just up the road since I was seven so I know it well. On match days it’s dangerous enough but tonight is off the scale. There are skinheads everywhere. People are tense. I keep my head down and make eye contact with no one. I think that I can’t believe my mother let me go to this. And then I remember that I didn’t tell her, at least not in detail.

‘I’m going out after school.’

‘What time will you be back?’

‘Late.’

I slammed the door before she had a chance to say anything else. She didn’t need to know any more than that. Because if I’d said, ‘I’m going with another Jewish boy to watch a band that have a violent, racist skinhead following and it’s more than likely that it will kick off’, she might have been reluctant to let me go. I’d have gone anyway but who needs the argument.

I can see the Rainbow on the other side of the road. It’s the best music venue in London. Everyone has played there: The Who, Michael Jackson, David Bowie. Jimi Hendrix burned his guitar there. I could of course walk fifty yards up the road and cross at the traffic lights but I’m sixteen years old so I run straight out into the road. An articulated lorry is coming the other way and I realise that I might not make it. I turn back towards the kerb and I’m hit by a car. There’s a screech of brakes but he can’t stop in time. I bounce onto the bonnet and then roll off. I sit up and check myself. There doesn’t appear to be any lasting damage. A small crowd has gathered. They look concerned. The man who was driving gets out of the car. He looks at the car first to see if there’s any damage. Then he looks at me.

‘What the fuck do you think you were doing?’ he says. I was expecting a touch more sympathy from the man who has hit me in his car.

‘Sorry,’ I say.

‘Are you OK?’ he says realising that his paintwork is fine but I might not be.

‘I think so,’ I say using all my years of medical training. I don’t think there’s any major head trauma. Although trying to cross the road at Finsbury Park when I wasn’t at traffic lights suggests that I already had one.

He helps me to the side of the road.

‘That was an incredibly stupid thing to do.’

‘I know. Sorry.’

He gets back in his car, drives off and the crowd dissipates. I check myself again. My leg is throbbing and I’m a bit shaken up but other than that, I seem fine. I decide to go to the gig. I limp up to the traffic lights and cross when it’s safe to do so. I see Jeremy Goldman waiting for me outside the venue. I limp towards him.

‘You alright?’ he says.

‘No. I just got hit by a car.’

‘Shit.’

‘I’m alright,’ I reassure him. He looks doubtful.

‘Have you got the tickets?’ I ask him.

‘Yeah, it’s a bit early though. Let’s hang about for a bit.’

We hang about for a bit, it’s what teenagers do. It’s tense. There are thousands of skinheads milling about. They all look extremely angry and aggressive. It’s their default position. There are a lot of Nazi salutes. It occurs to me that I’ve never been in a place with so many people doing Nazi salutes although to be fair, boys who attend a Jewish school tend to move in very different social circles. I’m getting some funny looks. I become very aware of my nose and the fact that only thirty-five years before this, actual Nazis would’ve been doing much more than giving funny looks to people like me. I stare at the floor to make myself less conspicuous.

There are a lot of violent conversations.

‘. . . beat up this bloke the other day’.

‘So I said to him, “Fuck off you cunt!”’

‘. . . almost got my head kicked in.’

‘fuckin’ Paki bastards . . .’

These skinheads don’t seem to get on with anyone. I look at Jeremy. ‘Maybe we should go in.’ Jeremy nods his agreement.

It’s safer inside, but it’s a fine distinction. Unusually for a gig, we decide to watch from the balcony. Normally, we’d be in the mosh pit as close to the front as possible but this doesn’t seem like our sort of crowd. We get seats right at the front and we’ve got a great view. From our vantage point, we gaze down in open mouthed wonder at the carnage below. Hundreds of Nazi skin-heads are shouting, drinking and sieg heiling. It looks like a Nuremberg rally interspersed with pub rock tunes. I can see bald heads and sweat and checked shirts and braces and boots. Fights are breaking out all the time. It’s insane. There’s a support band on stage called Oy You Cunt or something like that. They thrash about for a bit but no one pays them much attention. The audience are too busy fighting.

There’s a brief interval while they reset the stage. The fighting continues unabated. Finally, Sham 69 appear and a big fight breaks out to welcome them. The band patiently wait for it to subside and then launch into ‘Borstal Breakout’, a song about escaping from a young offenders institute which, by the looks of the audience, some may have felt was autobiographical. The end of every song is met with cheers, fights and more Nazi salutes, not necessarily in that order. The gig is broken up three times when the violence gets too out of hand. Each time it happens, Jimmy Pursey the lead singer takes a break from ‘singing’ and pleads for calm. He might as well have asked for everyone to sit cross legged and start meditating. After he’s implored us to chill out and there’s a temporary cessation of hostilities, he launches into another song about sticking the boot in or punching a cat.

They play eight songs in total. There’s ‘Hurry up Harry’ which is a song about trying to get Harry to hurry up because they’re all going down the pub. There isn’t a lot of subtext with Sham songs. There’s one called ‘George Davies is Innocent’. I had no idea who George Davies was but if he’s at the gig, he’s pretty much the only one who is.

Then they played ‘If The Kids are United’. It may have been the most ironic moment of the evening. Halfway through the song, an enormous and very fat skinhead, who is definitely not a kid, jumps up on stage and starts stomping about. No one tells him to stop or get off the stage. No one dares. He accidentally-on-purpose puts his foot through the drum kit. This ruins the gig but is a blessed relief for music lovers who might have been attending. The song comes to a grinding halt. There’s a pause as he inspects his handiwork, he gives a Nazi salute and then for an encore, he attacks a black bouncer. The bouncer appears to be trained in martial arts and kicks him in the head. Before this evening, I’ve never seen a single person kicked in the head, now I’ve seen two in a couple of hours. A riot ensues. Jimmy Pursey bursts into tears and starts ranting at the Sieg Heiling Nazis. Bottles come flying towards him. He’s dragged off stage by security. (It’s the last gig Sham 69 do for eight years. It was probably right for them to take a bit of a break.) The safety curtain thuds down, the houselights come up and that appears to be the end of the evening’s entertainment. No one can say we didn’t get our money’s worth. A large bouncer taps me on the shoulder.

‘I think you lads should leave now.’

We weren’t about to argue. Welcome to Britain in the late 1970s.

Old Ian versus Young Ian