Читать книгу Pete: My Story - Pete Bennett - Страница 6

It started to look like Mum’s career was going to save the family finances. Siouxsie and the Banshees, who were a big post-punk and goth band at the time (they had also starred in Derek Jarman’s Jubilee film), asked her and her friends to go on tour with them. Siouxsie, who came from the same Bromley area as David Bowie, had always been controversial, wearing bondage and fetish gear on stage and getting into trouble at one time for wearing swastika armbands. The Banshees were a huge influence on a lot of other acts that followed. This was a big-name group and they were going to pay Mum £490 for ten days’ work, which was a lot since Dad had so far only managed to get about £17-worth of vouchers out of all his letter writing. I was around nine months old by then, so Dad thought he might be able to cope with looking after me. He got his mum in to help him and, as far as I can remember, nothing drastic went wrong, although they probably wouldn’t have told Mum if it had.

Then Mum got a booking to play with Marc Almond and Soft Cell for a night at Drury Lane, having met Marc at the Batcave, a gothic club just off Carnaby Street in Soho, where a lot of the punk music people were choosing to spend their nights off.

Mum and Dad had a bit of a row over her paying for a babysitter for the night and it ended with Dad making off to the pub with the money allocated for the babysitter, leaving me rolling gently down the hill in my buggy with Mum running after me. I think that was probably the moment when Mum decided it was time to have a go at being a single mother. Not too sure whether Dad walked out or was kicked out, but he definitely wasn’t around any more after that. His disappearance didn’t have any great effect on me at the time since there were always plenty of other interesting-looking people lurking about in our lives to look after me and distract me from the spontaneous combustion of my nuclear family unit.

Mum and I spent a lot of time with Marc Almond back then because Gini ended up marrying Dave Ball, who was the other part of Soft Cell, and Mum started living with their manager, Steve Ø, who had lots of other successful acts on his books at the time as well. That particular relationship didn’t last that long, I think, although her friendship with Marc Almond has lasted a lifetime.

Despite the starry names she was working for, the gigs were only sporadic, not enough to ensure there was food on the table every day of the week, so Mum and her mates still had to keep going with the busking when the cash ran out. They used to take me with them sometimes, popping me in the buggy and letting me conduct along to the music in the hope of attracting a few more coins to fall into their violin cases. Apparently I was always happy and laughing as a baby and willing to go along with whatever was happening, so I was probably a bit of an asset in the ‘cutes’ department. There’s nothing like a cheerful-looking kid to get the donations flowing in. It was my first taste of performance art and I had no complaints about all the attention I was getting either.

I even went on the Russell Harty Show with them and had my picture taken with Pat Phoenix, who was the big soap opera star of the day, famous for playing Elsie Tanner in Coronation Street (sort of like the Barbara Windsor of her day). Anthony Booth, Tony Blair’s father-in-law, was on the bill too, being one of the stars of the comedy series, Till Death Us Do Part. Russell Harty was a sort of camp version of Michael Parkinson and his show was one of the biggest chat shows in the country, a bit like getting invited on to Jonathan Ross these days. The most famous moment was when the androgynous New York model and disco diva, Grace Jones, slapped him around the head on air for turning his back on her in order to talk to another guest.

Mum and her group would do a lot of street entertaining in Covent Garden as well. She used to dress up as a bee to play ‘Flight of the Bumble Bee’ and stuff like that. When there was a competition to find the ‘Busker of the Year’ the only people who were better than them were a six-piece band called The Vulcans, who used to wear white coats and clown around singing funny songs. Mum and I used to go everywhere with them and I became like their group mascot. They would use cardboard boxes as a drum kit and I would hide inside one of the boxes so that I could spring out at the end, like Marilyn Monroe coming out of President Kennedy’s birthday cake. The audience loved it and I loved their applause and their laughter. One of the Vulcans used to do a song about a thick bloke called ‘Neanderthal Man’, while playing a ukulele and wearing a silly hat. One day, hungry for another dose of the limelight, I climbed on to his foot and clung to his leg like a little monkey as he dragged me around behind him, still singing. It went down so well with the crowd that they kept it in the act. I was carving out a career for myself before I even knew what a career was.

When the guys in the Vulcans found out that Mum and I were going to be on our own for Christmas one year they invited us to spend it with them in Portsmouth. We drove down to the coast in the back of their van, singing songs and bouncing around on blankets, since there weren’t any seats. We all went on an outing to the torture museum on Christmas Day. There was an implement for screwing down a woman’s tongue so she couldn’t talk – a bit harsh, I thought, but very interesting!

Another day we all watched a video of Grease together, three times in a row, singing along to the songs. It immediately became my favourite movie. It was nice to sing some new songs because most of the time Mum and I would be pogoing round the flat on our own to Billy Idol’s Whiplash Smile album. ‘Dancing with Myself’ had been both Mum and Dad’s favourite record even before they met, and constant exposure made it mine too.

Mum had another interesting friend called Johny, who was in a goth group called Band of Holy Joy. He stole a gravestone, complete with stone angel, and gave it to Mum as a birthday present one night. Neither of us was too keen to have it in the house, so we smuggled it back into the graveyard together the next day.

When I was three or four, Mum was invited to join a theatre company called Impact and travel to Italy with them. Apparently the Italians are very into fringe theatre. The organizers said I could come too because there were going to be a couple of other small children in the troupe and so they were planning to take a childminder with them. Mum leapt at the opportunity and we spent six months touring around the north of Italy in the summer. I learnt to climb trees and they had an old broken record player that I was allowed to mess around with. We all lived together in a communal house in the middle of some lettuce fields. I wish I could remember more about it, it sounds like the most idyllic childhood summer possible when Mum describes it, but I have to rely on her version because my memories have mostly been blown away by events since then.

I always loved watching Mum on stage. She appeared in something called The Magical Olympic Games at the National Theatre on London’s South Bank, and she did a lot at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Pall Mall, just down the road from Buckingham Palace. I was constantly boasting about her to anyone who would listen; still am, as you may have noticed. No one else I knew had a mum who did such great stuff or hung out with such weird and famous people. Every kid watched Top of the Pops in those days, but not many could point to one of their parents on the screen.

She was really versatile, appearing with Paul Weller at Wembley one day and playing with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra the next. She could play anything. She was always having themed parties, like gypsy or Spanish, where all her friends would dress up and they would play music that went with the food, raising money for charities. She was often on Top of the Pops or The Tube, playing with The Cure or Texas or the Smashing Pumpkins. They don’t let kids into those television recordings, something to do with insurance, so I used to have to watch her on the telly just like everyone else. It made me so proud.

Carolyn, the other member of Humouresque, went off to play with Fun Boy Three, and then Mum got hired by the Communards, who were big at the time, having had ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’ at number one in the charts for weeks. Their lead singer was Jimmy Somerville, who was one of the first gay pop stars to come out of the closet and had a really distinctive falsetto singing voice. I loved hanging out with him and used to call him ‘Auntie Jessie’. Mum had to take me with her on one of their two-week tours because her childminder let her down, and the coach driver, John, used to look after me while the rest of them were on stage performing. The bus was always full of lesbians and poofs and the band’s cloney friends, and I was always the centre of attention. I mean, how cool is it to be on the road with a rock band even before your first day at school?

Mum had had a varied and dramatic childhood herself. My Grandad had been working as a civil servant in London when he decided he wanted a better life for his four kids than a council flat in Wandsworth, so he got transferred to Bristol and bought a little house in the country for them all to live in. He was keen on the idea of women getting an education and Mum was bright and did well at school, so it all went well until she was sixteen and she and Grandad fell out. Two powerful characters meeting one another head on, I guess: lots of middle-aged testosterone and adolescent hormones flying around and neither of them willing to give way. It ended up with Mum being chucked out of the house and spending a couple of years living rough, sleeping under the pier in Weston-super-Mare, or on other people’s floors until some friends of the family took her under their wing and helped her fulfil her dream of going to the Guildhall. Maybe that experience was the reason why she didn’t go completely mad when she found out how I was living later on in Brighton. She’d been through the same thing herself and knew that there are worse things than not having a home of your own when you’re young and finding your way in the world. People worry too much about where they are going to sleep each night; something usually turns up.

Mum was a bit of a romantic right from the start, always dreaming of how life should be, but things never quite seemed to work out right for her in the early days. Maybe she was just a bit too feisty for her own good. But if she hadn’t been so feisty maybe she wouldn’t have survived all the ordeals that were to come, and maybe she wouldn’t have fought so hard to get me a fair deal when everything started to go wrong.

The council estate Mum and I were living on in Peckham was a bit rough. I guess it was the sort of place the council put people who they had to house in a hurry (people like my punky single-mum for a start). Other people on the estate weren’t always quite as capable of keeping things together as she was. Quite a few of them had pretty much totally lost the plot.

There was a nine-year-old kid living a few flats down, for instance, who used to come knocking on the door each day begging for food. He was looking after his eight younger brothers and sisters because his mum and dad were both alcoholics and not much good for anything. Mum would always give him something, and one time we went down to their flat for some reason. I was shocked to see how they were living, with pigeons roosting in the bedroom. Most of the kids were naked, rolling around on the floor, not even speaking properly, just grunting at one another like they had been transported through time from the Stone Age. Even when they were dressed their clothes stank of piss.

Their mum came round one evening and told us her husband had been taken into hospital and asked Mum to look after all the kids for her while she went to visit him. She didn’t reappear till the next day, by which time Mum and I had rummaged through all my old clothes and found new stuff for them to wear while their own clothes went through the washing machine, several times. One of the girls had knickers that were so old they disintegrated when she took them off. Her mum accused Mum of stealing them once she got her home and discovered they were missing. It turned out the dad hadn’t been to the hospital at all; they’d just gone down the pub together.

Everyone on the estate was fed up with the family’s constant begging and after a while their flat was burnt out and they had to be re-housed in a new area where they could start afresh. The mother came back to visit us later and told us that the smallest baby had died of an ear infection. I was really upset, having looked after it for that day and got to know it.

‘Ah,’ she casually dismissed my tears. ‘I can always have another one.’

The dad took a bit of a fancy to Mum and came to the door having tried to drown out the smell of unwashed clothes and beer with gallons of cheap aftershave, and told her he had £110 saved in the bank and thought they should get together. Mum went mad, yelling at him that if he had that kind of money he should be spending it on his children, not on trying to get his end away. I was shocked, I’d never seen her so angry about anything. I was really glad I had her to look after me rather than some of the other women I saw around the place.