Sitting in the living room we heard a muted crump that rattled the big ill-fitting windows of our tower block. Looking towards the West End I saw beyond the grey slate roofs of Fulham a line of dirty smoke curling slowly into the sky from beside the distant pink towers of the Victoria & Albert Museum. For once it wasn’t an IRA bomb, this explosion was all the work of our own government. ‘They’ve gone in,’ I said to Linda. It was Bank Holiday Monday 5 May 1980 and the sixth day of the Iranian Embassy siege, the first news event to be covered live on TV. Two miles away on a clear early summer evening the SAS were storming the embassy and shooting dead the hostage takers, members of the Democratic Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Arabistan (DRFLA).
Over the next few days there was an unprecedented surge of national pride due to the successful outcome of the SAS raid and a definite increase in support for Margaret Thatcher. The left had hoped that an afternoon of general studies once a week and fifteen years of Wednesday Plays on the BBC, with their messages of anti-colonialism and liberality, had been enough to cure the working class of this mindless jingoism but it seemed all along to have been lurking just beneath the surface.
One of the most enduring results of the siege, apart from helping Thatcher increase her grip on power, was that it introduced the world to the Heckler and Koch MP5 9mm. submachine gun. Since I was a child I had been fascinated by guns. Although Molly and Joe were Communists dedicated to the dictatorship of the industrial proletariat, there were ways in which my parents, particularly my mother, held opinions on daily life that were closer to those of the more avant-garde elements of the upper classes than the rest of the people in Valley Road.
There was a theory, prevalent in liberal circles, that giving children warlike toys could awaken in them aggressive, anti-social and overtly male tendencies which were unsuited to the modern world.
At first this wasn’t too much of a problem – all the boys in the street just ran around pointing their fingers at each other shouting ‘Ack, ack, ack’ or ‘Krplow!’ – but soon their parents began buying them plastic or metal toy guns which usually fired a paper roll of percussion caps and this left me pretty badly outgunned with just my fingers. Yet no matter how much I pleaded with her, Molly refused to buy me a toy gun. In the end out of desperation, tired of spending every evening lying dead on the pavement, I started making my own imitation weapons out of bread. What I would do was I would chew an L-shape into a slice of Hovis, then smuggle it out of the house so I could run around the streets shooting other kids with my wholemeal pistol. I brought such conviction to my play-acting that the other children accepted the fact that my bread gun possessed a degree of firepower and as long as it didn’t rain I was fine.
After a while though my parents could see that I was being made to look a little bit too eccentric shooting children with my edible pistol so in an echo of the UN Disarmament Commission, which was formed under the Security Council and which met intermittently from 1954 to 1957, we held our own arms-limitation talks. After furious bargaining the final outcome agreed by all parties was this: I would be allowed toy firearms but they would be limited to non-automatic weapons, a restriction which basically meant I could only own revolvers with a Wild West flavour. No automatic pistols, rifles or submachine guns would be allowed. Like all prohibitions my parents’ partial weapons ban had the opposite effect and left me nursing a lifelong obsession with firearms. Which was also why I’d bought the unlucky air pistol from Linda’s Littlewoods catalogue.
My time at Chelsea might have put me off painting but I still drew, not landscapes done in charcoal or portrayals of the naked human form, but almost exclusively sketches of guns executed in biro. Drawing had always been a way for me to give my internal life a degree of reality. When I was nine or ten I’d invented the state of Saylovia whose buildings, armies and cultural life I’d reproduced in a series of drawings reminiscent of an Uccello with a muscle-wasting disease. Now what I drew was guns. And not just in a sketchbook either but almost anywhere, in the margins of newspapers, down the sides of legal documents and at the top of electricity bills. It was a barometer of the more relaxed attitude to security which existed at that time that you could send in your tax returns decorated with illustrations of Kalashnikovs, 5.56mm M16s and .303 Lee-Enfields all around the edges and nobody would think to inform the police or the intelligence services.
Roland Barthes the French literary theorist, philosopher and critic wrote in a 1957 essay about the then new Citroën DS, ‘Cars today are the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals.’ By this I took him to mean that just as those great medieval places of worship were objects of wonder and awe which embodied all that their era was capable of both technically and philosophically so the motor car now fulfilled that function. Barthes was saying that cars represented exactly where we are as a society, both in terms of design and in terms of technology. In my opinion you could say the same about guns. Plus guns had this tremendous lethality that cars didn’t possess, unless they were being driven by somebody who was drunk, that is.
Each decade seemed to get its own gun, a weapon that seized the public imagination and was reproduced everywhere, a firearm that appeared somehow to embody its era. In the 1960s that gun was undeniably the Kalashnikov assault rifle, the weapon of liberation movements all around the world, seen on news stories, printed on banners at demonstrations and featured on the flag of at least one African country.
The iconic firearm of the 1970s, by contrast, was a weapon of the United States, of capitalist decadence and the libertarian right, the Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum revolver. Big, heavy, chromed, with an enormous phallic barrel producing an awful loud noise, terrible recoil and an enormous muzzle flash, the Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum was the disco boom, but in a handgun.
When I saw the footage of the SAS men storming the Iranian Embassy with their MP5s I was intrigued. Up until then the British Army had been equipped with a full-sized battle rifle, the 7.62mm FN-FAL (sometimes called the elephant gun by soldiers ) and for close-quarter combat the eccentric-looking Sterling submachine gun, a close relative of the WW2 Sten.
By contrast this new gun was sleek, elegant and undeniably European with synthetic materials widely used in its construction. The MP5 really seemed like a gun for the 1980s, a Porsche 911 of a weapon. A machine pistol not in the hands of liberation fighters or maverick detectives but of the death squad of a right-wing monetarist government.
I found out later that one of those held hostage by the Democratic Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Arabistan was a friend of mine and Wassim’s, a Syrian journalist by the name of Mustapha Karkuti who had been trapped at the embassy while waiting to interview the cultural attaché. Mustapha became ill and was released by the DRFLA on day four of the siege, forty-eight hours before the SAS stormed the place.
That Saturday at the Comedy Store Keith Allen, full of fury, performed his whole act wearing a black balaclava pretending he was one of the SAS soldiers who’d stormed the building. It was thrilling that an event could happen in the news then that same day or week you could do a bit about it at the Comedy Store. I loved that about the club. Then one night I quit.
During the summer of 1980 Keith Allen and I took part in a show called The Last Benefit at the Albany Empire in south-east London. Located in a former balloon factory or possibly a bow-tie warehouse on Creek Road in Deptford it was the site for community health projects, children’s theatre, holiday play-schemes, housing-estate-centred outreach theatre and all manner of community-based awfulness. In the evening there was music and comedy with a bar at the back and tables and chairs for the audience with a gallery running round the first floor. It was the venue after the Comedy Store where we performed most often.
The place had been gutted by a major fire the previous year which, though the culprits were never found, everybody who worked there ascribed to the National Front, since the Albany had hosted so many Rock Against Racism gigs. In my view the arsonist could just as well have been somebody with a grudge against jugglers and clowns.
The Last Benefit was a semi-improvised play about a group of people performing a benefit to save their community centre which ended with me and Keith both doing long stand-up bits for no particular reason, bits that got longer and longer as we competed against each other for more and more laughs.
The audiences at the Albany were always good, receptive and intelligent, so there was not too much stress in doing the show, my main problem being that every night Keith wanted to perform naked. ‘That’s it, Lex,’ he’d say. ‘I’m going to take my clothes off tonight.’ And every time I’d try and stop him. I was like Scheherazade in The Thousand and One Nights who has to tell the king a different tale every evening in order not to be beheaded. For each show I needed to think up a new reason for Keith to keep his clothes on, like my mother was in the audience or there was a party of nuns in the front row. ‘Fair enough, Lex,’ he’d say. ‘Not tonight.’ But we both knew it was coming.
On the Saturday when I quit the Comedy Store I’d first of all cycled to Finsbury Town Hall from our flat in Fulham, a trip of five miles or so, to perform an early evening benefit with Threepenny Theatre, doing our entire ninety-minute show. I was riding Linda’s bike, a very cheap ladies’ machine with no gears, because mine was off the road. Afterwards Cliff told me the benefit had been a great success because it had only made a small loss. Then I pedalled a couple of miles to Charing Cross Station where after carrying the bike up and down several flights of stairs I put it on the train to Deptford. From Deptford Station I rode to the Albany Empire where I performed The Last Benefit until about 10.30. It wasn’t my best night because unlike Scheherazade I finally ran out of stories and the people of south-east London were treated to their first but not their last sight of Keith Allen’s penis.
Then I rode back to the train station, pushing through the beer-smelling crowds returning from a night in the West End as I was going the other way. Once back in London I pedalled my girl’s bike to the Comedy Store in time for the show to start at midnight.
The Store could be a volatile environment. One week the audience would be attentive and cultured, the next the whole place could feel on the verge of collapse. This was one of the febrile nights. There was a hysterical feeling in the air and Peter Rosengard, frenetic and twitchy, seemed to have got high on the aura. Keith Allen, having put his clothes back on, had followed me into town and was sitting in the audience but he had told me already that he just wanted to watch the show.
Rosengard however was desperate for him to perform. I dutifully asked Keith again if he wanted to go on but he said once more that no he didn’t. I told Peter this but he was insistent and got some of his friends to start chanting ‘Keith, Keith, Keith’ while I was on stage introducing the next act. As I came off stage getting into the frenzied mood myself I grabbed Peter by the throat and dragged him into the kitchen where I tried to strangle him while banging his head repeatedly against the tiled wall, then I told him I was quitting at the end of the night.
I knew that without me the place would close, which made me sad. All those comedians with nowhere to go, but at least we’d all had the most amazing year. Linda summed it up best: she said when you were young you always had the feeling on a Saturday night that wherever you were there was always a more exciting party going on somewhere else. When you were at the Comedy Store you never had that feeling: there was no better place to be in the whole world.
In the following weeks I would check the papers to see if the ad for the club was gone or casually saunter past on a Saturday night, every time expecting the Comedy Store to be closed, but it is still going strong thirty-five years later.
There is a kind of fiction called counter-factual which imagines different outcomes for world events, such as what if the Nazis rather than the Allies had won the Second World War. But when I hear of a novel that conjectures on what life would be like if Martin Luther had been killed by a wasp so the Protestant Reformation would never have occurred I always think: But he wasn’t . . . it did. So what actually happened was that modern comedy as we know it began at the Comedy Store and for the first few months I kept that place going more or less by myself. That is until Tony Allen then Keith Allen, followed by Pete and Nigel, then Rik and Ade came along, though even then I set the tone. Maybe if Linda hadn’t seen that ad in Private Eye or if I had chosen to stay on in Guernsey and become a bus driver because I already had the jacket the whole comedy revolution and the gigantic arena-filling business that is modern stand-up would have occurred anyway. But it would not have been in that place and not at that time and it would not have looked like it did. You’re welcome.
A few months before I left the Comedy Store a very smooth young man called Simon Oakes approached me and Tony and asked if we would consider coming up to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival as part of a number of shows run by a group called Bristol Express based at that city’s university. We were to go on at midnight in a lecture hall at the Heriot-Watt University building.
Just after my twenty-eighth birthday Linda and I caught the train up to Scotland. Though we were still in the United Kingdom it was surprising how foreign Edinburgh felt. All the craggy grey-stone buildings set about with towers and tiny windows appeared designed to repel some nameless invading horde; even the libraries, schools and the family-planning clinics looked like they could be defended against a determined enemy. The streets around Edinburgh Waverley Station were swarming with mime artists so maybe it was them the buildings were designed to hold off.
Outside the station we caught a red-and-cream corporation bus heading for the Pentland Hills. Because accommodation in Edinburgh during the festival was so expensive Linda had booked us into a tiny caravan in a woman’s garden just beyond the edge of the city where the suburbs gave way to small farmhouses and fields full of rust-coloured Highland cattle who all looked angry as if they were nursing a bad hangover.
From the bus everything appeared very old-fashioned. There didn’t seem to be even the small Asian-run supermarkets that you got in London, only tiny and dark general stores often down a small set of stone steps.
On a main shopping street we did see one very distinctive and colourful clothing store. Sigmund Freud had said, ‘The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is what does a woman want?’ This chain was called What Every Woman Wants and the answer to Freud’s question seemed to be a pink nylon cardigan with a sequined butterfly stuck on its back.
We got off at the last stop. Behind us the bus turned in a small lay-by and headed back into the city as we dragged our cases over the road to our caravan half hidden amongst hollyhocks and sweet peas in the garden of a pebble-dashed bungalow. The dining table became the bed at night and the toilet was a plastic chemical affair in a sort of walk-in cupboard, little more than a bucket with corrosive blue liquid swilling about in it. At first we felt unable to use this primitive arrangement and instead walked over the road to a nearby petrol station but within days we were happily taking books into the cupboard with us.
The plan was that me and Tony would alternate who went on first for each show. On our opening night I appeared second and I still don’t know what went wrong. I think perhaps it was inexperience. I saw myself as a veteran but in the States a comic like Robin Williams would have done over a thousand short, ten-minute spots in front of a diverse range of audiences in basement rooms, bars and clubs before he graduated to a longer set. I had maybe performed comedy just over a hundred times to audiences that were by and large of a similar mindset so in this alien place with a crowd I was unsure of I tried to be ingratiating, to make them like me, but with aggressive and unusual material like mine that didn’t work at all. After I came off stage Simon Oakes said to me, ‘I think Tony should close the show from now on.’ The pitying looks everybody gave me were hard to take.
I went back to the caravan in the same sort of state as I’d been in on Black Pistol Saturday and so my performance on the second night came after me not getting any sleep and spending the entire long day in a frazzled semi-coma. Such was my state of rage and resentment that without conscious thought I completely exploded my act. What had before been in neat packages was now a jagged demented rant, punchlines came before set-ups, stuff started and then stopped dead and into this mix I added something which had been evolving since the start of Threepenny Theatre. This was my Cockney mod poet, not exactly a ‘character’, more a demonic possession. Inspired to a certain extent by Ian Dury and dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson and partly by the Cockney drinkers in the Bedford, at some point he had acquired a pork-pie hat which I wore tipped down over my eyes. Originally he’d only performed an early version of my song ‘Ullo John! Gotta New Motor?’ but that night, fired up as I was, I suddenly just started swearing, a huge torrent of obscenities in a Cockney accent. ‘Fuck, cunt, shit, piss, wank!’ I began shouting. ‘How’s your old fuck, cunt, shit, piss, wank? How’s the old motor? You cunt, wank, bollocks, shit, wank. You old fuck, cunt, shit, piss, wank.’
A man called Mike Scott who was head of Granada TV tried to get out during my act and left under a torrent of abuse. When I came off after thirty minutes I was greeted with applause not just from the audience but from a crowd that had gathered backstage, people who had drifted in attracted by the sound of me shouting and the accompanying waves of laughter.
After that, every night I would take the last bus into town to do the show. To get back I caught one that stopped about a mile away and then walked through the dark streets past the sleeping cattle up the hill to our caravan. In the afternoons me and Linda would often go to the nearby artificial ski slope, have a hot chocolate and watch people injuring themselves. The only thing we never did was see any shows.
One afternoon Tony came to our caravan and we went for a walk across the fields and lanes, surprisingly for an urban hippy he was able to name all the wild flowers and hedgerow plants. When Tsarist Russia wanted to deal with its radical opponents it would often exile them to Siberia, which from the accounts I’d read seemed like quite a pleasant experience. The conditions were spartan but the revolutionaries were often allowed to bring their wives, and female radicals were also present in the colonies. In the brief Siberian summer there’d be walks and picnics and during the long winter the exiles would organise plays, concerts and discussion groups. This felt pretty much like my Edinburgh Festival.
The Fringe then was entirely university review shows or plays; there was not a single piece of stand-up comedy until me and Tony arrived. The student newspaper’s reviewer while liking the show also said something like, ‘I don’t understand what these guys are doing. It’s not a review by medical students and it’s not a play. They just stand at a microphone and talk. What’s all that about?’
This idyll was nearly ruined when one day towards the end of the first week Molly turned up unannounced at the caravan and tried to stay for a week. She’d chosen her time well because the night before Linda had caught the sleeper train back to London. By then she had given up working full-time so that she could come to as many of my shows as possible but had a part-time job finding accommodation for accountancy students. My mother said she’d been planning ‘to stay with this woman I know in Edinburgh’. She hadn’t bothered to get an exact address or anything but had gone to a street which more or less sounded like the right one then had knocked on a door at random. The people who answered the door predictably knew nothing of her friend so after telling them to fuck off she had come to our caravan. I put up with this for two nights, sharing a tiny mobile home and the bucket in the cupboard with my mother, but as soon as Linda returned she dragged Molly to the centre of town and forced her onto a coach embarking on a week-long tour of the Highlands. I pitied those poor people on the bus with my mother.
Occasionally when I’d been MC-ing the Comedy Store me and Peter Richardson would cycle home together, westward through the early mornings, he towards Battersea and me on my way to Fulham. As we pedalled past the Ritz, Green Park and a dark and silent Harrods we would talk about how the Comedy Store wasn’t really working out but the Alternative Cabaret collective didn’t do the job either. What we agreed was perfect about the Comedy Store was its location; being in a strip club gave the show an edgy, authentic, demi-monde feel that the Alternative Cabaret gigs in rooms above pubs, arts centres and Students’ Unions lacked. Those shows just felt like a continuation of the old fringe theatre circuit. What Peter and I imagined was finding another strip club in Soho but one where we could choose the acts, control the atmosphere and perform our best material every night without having to cope with an out-of-control audience.
I had forgotten all about these conversations but sometime in my second week in Edinburgh I got a message at the theatre to phone Peter. When we spoke he told me that while I’d been rampaging around strangling people he’d been quietly going about finding us our own place. Peter had secured finance from theatrical impresario Michael White for a new comedy club located in a theatre within the Raymond Revuebar just around the corner from the Comedy Store and he wanted me to be the MC.