If you always do what you’re good at, you always go for the safe option – which means you miss out on adventures. If you really want to do something, then it doesn’t matter what skills you have. Stubbornness and determination are part of the story. But there’s something else that propels people like me through a world of pain, confusion and cock-ups. You could say we’re determined to excel in what we’re not good at. There are lots of us like that. Sometimes it’s hard to separate courage and stupidity, so why bother? I happen to think the two go great together, like gammon and pineapple.
Take the world of skiing: the ones on the move always suffer less than those who are static. If you’re proactive, it works better for you. It’s all about forgetting yourself. If you try to avoid getting hurt, you’ll get hurt. That’s a given. The way I see it, if you really want to forget yourself, it pays to be both courageous and stupid…
After being so near and yet so far with Empire, followed by a fruitless two-year search for someone to front the backing tracks myself and Dan Hawkins had put down (Justin, Dan and myself planned to stick together as a unit if we could find a convincing front person), I needed to forget myself. Any courageous and stupid adventure would do just fine. Staying in London too long without achieving your goals is a slow, painful torture. And the more I feared that torture, the more I feared failure – to the point where I feared failure was not even an option. How could it be while Gestapo voices berated me nightly for the crimes of a wasted life? So when my little brother Chris turned up unexpectedly, and invited me over to Venezuela, I didn’t need much persuading.
It was 15 April 1995, so that meant it was my 28th birthday – and an Easter weekend, a great excuse for my mum to visit. She was staying with my older brother Tim up in Finchley Central and they had a present for me to collect. I jumped the tube as I always did, to safeguard precious dole money, and arrived there to find my mum even more excitable than usual. There was a huge cardboard box for me to open. I was wondering how the hell I would manage to squeeze a washing machine into my minuscule Kentish Town bed-sit and resignedly began peeling back the masking tape, when all of a sudden my little brother Chris, whom I hadn’t seen or heard from in five years, burst out of the box. With his sunburned nose, kids’ TV presenter dungarees and eighties mullet hairstyle, he looked like a pantomime lion about to perform a Nik Kershaw medley. It was the best birthday present I ever had.
Venezuela was the land that fashion forgot because the little culture it had was stuck in the eighties and Chris, to his credit, had never really cared what was fashionable anyway. It was refreshing and surreal to hang out with him in the Big Smoke’s artifice of try-hards and fashion victims. Occasionally, taxi drivers and acquaintances of mine would mock his unfashionable appearance, but he’d simply keep the drinks coming with his big heart and deep, generous pockets. He was twice the man they’d ever be, and deep down they knew it. Now I needed to know what had happened since we’d shifted our cargo some five years earlier. And why his nose was so red.
He and Austin had invested their drug-run fund into a bar venture called The Dolphin Inn on the Caribbean island of St Vincent. Unfortunately, as these things invariably do, it all went sour. Family, drugs, money and business is a highly volatile cocktail, even if handled with care, and unfortunately my mad father and brother weren’t the kind of people who handled things all that carefully.
Austin’s ‘wake and bake’ routine (getting stoned before breakfast) had resulted in a cosmic mindset. He’d discovered that practising yoga and landscape painting could quell his demons and pacify the pirate within. Unfortunately, he possessed a blind spot of the ‘world revolves around me’ variety, which led him to believe he’d tapped into a higher new-age collective consciousness that could serve as a template for running not just your personal life but also your business affairs. That meant staff helping themselves to wages and flexi-time Caribbean style. Having run bars in New York and Cape Cod, Chris knew that this would end in tears, for the simple reason that people take the piss. He also suspected that Austin’s insistence on being the only place on the island to serve duck instead of chicken was fundamentally flawed – for the simple reason that there were no ducks in the Caribbean. There were, however, enough chickens to feed the whole of China.
The venture turned into a disaster, with yardies openly dealing drugs there, blood on the dance floor and all manner of racketeering. Their choice of female partners didn’t make things any easier. Ironically, Chris had married precisely for that reason – to help with the registration of the bar – but Jezel, by all accounts, turned out to be somewhat temperamental. Finally, at his wits’ end, he went to her father for advice and was told in no uncertain terms: ‘YAH MUS’ BEAT THA BEETCH!’ Mercifully, Chris chose to interpret the affectionate marriage guidance promptings of his father-in-law as jest.
Austin fared little better. At one stage, after complaining of severe headaches and stomach cramps, he became convinced that one of his casual lady friends, who happened to be an ex-prostitute of local renown, was gradually poisoning him with arsenic. Chris watched on helplessly as she pilfered the nightclub’s earnings – brazenly taunting him at the till, licking her lips and stuffing the takings into her bra.
Yes, it seemed that my family had lost the plot again and, after Chris clobbered Austin one night in a drunken contretemps, it was left to their respective lawyers to finish the job. Eventually, using his superior network of contacts, my father drove his penniless son from the island. I was furious when, a year later, he tried to excuse himself to me over the phone. As far as I was concerned, it was the last straw. I hung up and vowed never to talk to him again.
Meanwhile, Chris had escaped by crewing on a yacht to Venezuela where he swiftly set about organising day trips up a volcano and around waterfalls. Just as I always seem to be on the verge of expiring, he’s always been a survivor. Four years later, he was running a vast adventure tour enterprise, Jakera Tours, whose motto (‘Viva la Vida’) was supposed to be about living – live life. It was only a matter of time then before I got involved and ended up almost dying…
