‘Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.’
– Revelation 21:1–2
The conversation with my mother in our kitchen in France in the early spring of 1985 was quickly resolved. She told me that now the divorce from my dad was coming, we would be moving to Washington DC that summer. She’d found a job working as an assistant at NBC News and had friends in the city from when she’d lived in Manhattan in the sixties. My dad had already moved to New York. I would have no family in Europe. The die was cast.
‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ I told her. ‘I can’t come.’
She looked at me, radiating doubt. ‘You’re still at school,’ she replied, with exasperation. ‘You’re sixteen, a child. I can’t leave you here.’
There we were, together, Mum and I, standing amongst the orange and brown flowered wallpaper of our rented kitchen in Chavenay, both aware that we were also at the central crossroads of my short life. Two paths lay ahead. In one direction, I’d be moving to the US to start at a Maryland high school with my brothers in time for my seventeenth birthday. In the other, London, my new girlfriend who was also returning to England, accelerated maturity and the freedom to make my own catastrophically silly decisions. I’d spent nearly five years acclimatising to France, but now I yearned so badly for those square paving stones and inner-city blues. There was an escape route for me. I had to chase it.
‘I can’t move to another continent,’ I told her. ‘I just can’t. It doesn’t mean I don’t love you, but I was English, then I had to pretend to be French. I’m not going to be American.’
She chewed her lip. It was a fraught enough move for her already. She was a single mum of three children and limited means, starting a new job 6,000 miles away. Was it worth dragging me against my will?
‘Let me phone Su and see if we can make something work,’ she said.
That was all I needed to hear.
My mum’s best friend from school, Su Strettell, lived in Hammersmith with her husband James and three children, Jo, Polly and David. The kids were between two and seven years older than me and every now and then the sisters would look after my brothers and me when we still lived in London. Both girls joined us on holiday sometimes, so that my folks would be able to find a bar to argue in without us. They felt more like family than most of the real thing, though that revelation would have no doubt surprised them.
The Strettell kids were worldly and funny, champion socialisers, at ease in their space. Open to all. We idolised them. They always seemed hip, as older kids often can – but the Strettells substantiated that impression. Later, Jo would go to Saint Martins alongside her friend Sade, and became integral to Spandau Ballet, Steve Strange and the early eighties London club scene that coalesced around the Blitz and then the Wag, before growing to become one of the top make-up artists in the UK, eventually the world.
She and her siblings would invite all of their mischievous friends over to the family Sunday dinner, Strettell Soup, which involved the gently formidable and partially deaf patriarch James emptying every savoury ingredient he’d saved up from the week’s previous meals into a large pot – cuts of roast chicken, leftover curry, tin of salmon, a leek – pouring in a couple of pots of cream, milk and parsley, whisking. It could be rich. But it was an unmissable event of great jollity in the weekly calendar. Huge goblets of fighter-jet-strength gin and tonic (even for children, if desired; otherwise Red Stripe), a guest list that included a mix of people you recognised from early issues of The Face, alongside Su and James’s ribald pals that they knew from the stall Su had selling antiques in Covent Garden market, or from the dusty corners of sixties London bohemia that remained posh no matter how cash-poor they might actually be. All squeezed around the wooden table in the compact, smoky kitchen, heads back, roaring with scandal and gossip. It was the perfect design for dining: low on pomp, intimate volume set high. The stories of where-are-they-now pop-culture nobility I heard. The indigestion I knew.
The Strettells rented a room to a friendly student every year. I could be that friendly student, surely, fifteen quid a week, very, very reasonable indeed.
‘You have to finish school, though,’ said my mum, warily. ‘You have to. It’s not worth the aggro from your dad otherwise.’
‘Of course.’
‘And I won’t have enough money to pay for your everyday needs. You’ll have to get a weekend job and work in the holidays. Are you up to that?’
I promised her that I was.
So, in July 1985, aged sixteen, I caught the ferry back to England and unpacked my two suitcases in the basement of the Strettells’ terraced house in Tabor Road, Hammersmith, ready to start my new life as an A-Level student at Richmond Sixth Form College in Twickenham. I was distantly aware that I had to negotiate the fact that my place there was dependent upon a minimum of five O-Level passes and I only had one, but I was confident in my powers of dishonesty. First, though, I took the train to Bognor and spent three weeks shoplifting and shivering on comedowns with Teifion and his merry band of teenage junkies.
When I returned to Tabor Road in August I shared the bedroom, and the bed, with David Strettell for a few weeks. He was moving to New York that autumn, staying with his sister Jo in her apartment. In some ways it was a mirror of my mother’s emigration in the early sixties. He had a couple of phone numbers, a bed, and not much else to go on but he was determined that, at eighteen, his life would be lived in New York. He never returned. Thirty-eight years later, he is the owner of the renowned Dashwood Books store and imprint in NoHo.
Then, though, in 1985, without realising it, David had his work cut out designing my immediate future. His taste and personal style were impeccable, light years ahead of my own confused psychedelic-rockabilly stylings.
This look had already been semi-dismantled early in my time back in London, after I’d stepped into the basement of the Clarendon on Hammersmith Broadway one evening in August to witness Kent garage-mods the Prisoners for the first time. The brutal melodic groove of their Hammond organ allied to the crunch and fury of the songs, exploding in that tiny room to a few dozen dancing, devout teenagers like myself, immediately gave me something to believe in. I was lonely in London. I knew nobody, other than the Strettells and my girlfriend Jo, who had returned to Egham, Surrey from Paris, and was currently interrailing in Eastern Europe. I needed something to believe in and the Prisoners gave me so much: four sarcastic Medway wags in smart suits, Breton tops and polo necks, only a few years older than me, gulping down plastic pint pots, simultaneously taking the piss out of and encouraging their audience, all of whom were regulars at every one of their many London pub dates around their lo-fi masterpiece, The Last Fourfathers. I didn’t miss a gig for six months. Soon enough, other audience members started talking to me, swapping numbers, meeting before shows, offering a social lifeline. I briefly (and regrettably) took to wearing Chelsea boots.
David, meanwhile, was shedding the bits of his life he couldn’t bring to New York in his one suitcase and I was greedily accepting whatever came my way. An exquisite red V-neck cashmere sweater, battered black brogues and vintage Levis. Thank you. John Handy’s Hard Work and Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters: landmark jazz-funk albums, amongst many other records of his that I knew nothing of previously but that became cornerstones for me. A heavy-plated book of saucy Helmut Newton photography. The video of Koyaanisqatsi that we’d sat down to at the end of Superman-tab acid trips, threading the images of collapsing Western society through our melted brain mush. The Sensitive Sound of Dionne Warwick and the 7-inch of ‘Love Don’t Live Here Anymore’ by Rose Royce. Several handsome button-downs and white tees. An original sixties mac and checked suit jacket: fits perfectly. Copies of dub testament Scientist Wins the World Cup and Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On, two albums that remain fixtures in my all-time top ten …
It was like the greatest ever episode of the conveyor belt in the Generation Game. Much of what he left to me became my own style and my own musical ground zero. But there was one final gift in particular that opened doors to new worlds, and changed the course of everything for ever.
Their modest patio garden was surrounded by spare bedding. The previous spring David had planted some marijuana seeds in the vague hope that he might grow a couple of small plants from it, to while away his time before he left for NYC. Instead, through a mixture of a very wet spring, unusually sunny summer and natural green fingers, he’d produced five enormous, six-foot bushes. After he harvested them in early August, hung them upside down in the kitchen and then plucked them clear of twig and seed, they delivered four supermarket carrier bags full of homegrown.
We smoked it for a few weeks. It was light, but it was very good for something grown in an inner-London back yard. You could puff it pure and go for a fun-filled wander through Ravenscourt Park or Shepherd’s Bush Market, giddy enough, but low on paranoia. It was gentle.
‘You might as well have it,’ he said, gesturing to the remaining three and three-quarter carrier bags full. ‘I bet they won’t let me bring it into America.’
I gladly accepted the donation.
Soon after, I caught the 267 bus out west towards Twickenham, and an appointment with the college secretary who cheerfully accepted the lie that the certificates of my delayed exam passes were on their way from France still. She inked my name into A-Level English, French and Politics.
A few days later I returned for my first day at Richmond College, armed with several bunches from David’s weed bush decanted into plastic coin bags: essential tools in making new friends quickly. The means, too, to avoid the necessity of that weekend job for the time being.
Within two years I was working on the third floor of a well-known high-street retailer’s buying office in Fulham, in the fast-moving consumer goods department, as a clerk assisting a buyer. It was not exhilarating work, nor was I a gifted clerical administrator. I’d followed my carefree path to its natural conclusion.
In January 1986 I had walked out of Richmond College for the last time, promising to return when ready to pick up my A-Levels again. The weed had run out, however, and so had my income. So I applied for a job at Fred. Olsen Cruise Lines off Regent Street as a reservations clerk, booking travellers on to the wrong ferry at the wrong time from the wrong port, either from Harwich or Hull to Bergen in Norway. I made a lot of customers very unhappy for £100 a week until, five months in, I resigned, walked downstairs to the sister agency and secured a staff-discounted open-return flight to Rhodes.
When I got back a month later I signed up with a temporary agency. There was a fortnight microfiche copying at the Kodak Factory on Lillie Road, pressing a green button from eight-thirty until five with a bunch of stoners blasting out Dark Side of the Moon over the factory speakers. Sign on. Two days lugging postbags up and down the ICL tower on a brutal speed comedown, until I was sent home. Sign on. Some filing at an estate agent for a week. Sign on. Office furniture removal for a fortnight. Sign on. Stint in a stockroom. Sign on …
Then, I got six weeks temporary work clearing a building, dumping the rubbish, and carrying the serviceable office furniture across to the adjacent building, that well-known high-street retailer’s buying office. They’d hired a rum crew of the agency’s Hammersmith regulars for this longer-than-usual job. They knew we’d turn up for the duration. What else had we going on? There was a guy whose main gig was organising medieval banquets and jousts at the weekend, but business was slow. There were a couple of students on gap years, saving up for big summers. There was a doctor who’d been struck off for something that nobody could bring themselves to ask about, but who was very keen to share his medical knowledge. There was a murderer out on licence. There was a guy who lived so hard for clubbing that he didn’t have mental space for a full-time job. A couple of actors in loud, perpetual, passive-aggressive competition. And there were the terminally unemployed, me and an old soak who claimed to have been retired and wealthy but wanted the flexibility, as he described it, of temporary work. We moved tables and swivel chairs, scooped up polystyrene and ceiling mesh, and tipped it down a chute.
I enjoyed it. There was a building manager only vaguely interested in what we achieved, so just so long as the office was clear and the tables were in the opposite building in four weeks we were our own masters. We took a lot of tea breaks. At lunch we’d buy trays of subsidised pies, lasagne and chips, crumble, and lounge around on the sofas in the suits’ top-deck canteen in our dusty jeans and stinking T-shirts arguing forcefully about Maggie Thatcher and unions and jazz-funk and the IRA and drug laws and the Smiths and capital punishment and why the market for medieval jousting was never going to be there in 1987, the actors boring on at full whack, darling, until the building manager would roll up, shushing us and tapping his wrist. We turned up late. We skipped out early on Friday. At the end of it, they asked if I fancied a fortnight in the post room. You bet.
Towards the close of that stint, one of the women who worked in the offices started chatting to me about the book I was reading on my break (Money, by Martin Amis: living the eighties). The next day the agency said she’d requested I do some work helping her out next week on the buying desk for cameras and films.
I was a young man working with fifty or sixty women and a handful of lecherous old men in charge of the fast-moving consumer goods division. I brought the maternal urge out in some colleagues, so they overlooked the woeful attention to detail I brought to the task. At the end of the temp period they offered me the role of buyer’s assistant. £7,800 per annum, starting in April 1987. Where do I sign?
The thrill wore off very quickly. Mainly, I dealt with customer complaints. Boilerplate apology, routine replacement and a couple of free films as a ‘gesture of goodwill’ no matter how ludicrous the claim. Always complain. I spent a good while redirecting stock between branches. Every now and then, I was also given a list of goods needed for our own model shop floor on the adjacent wing of the building. It was a full-scale fast-moving consumer goods department built to scale in order to experiment with signage, racking, display – all the good stuff. This model shop was the domain of a lad called Paddy. Paddy was a similar age to me, around nineteen, twenty, from a family of East End butchers. Sturdy. Reliable. Felt the heat, not the cold. Prone to sweat. Silk Cut in his top pocket, frizzy barnet, a bit of a waddle. Tony Blackburn playing soul on Radio London in the morning; his Depeche Mode and U2 compilations in the afternoon. He could build the displays himself, but every now and then he needed someone to help lug them around the empty shop.
‘Fancy a Uri?’ he asked one afternoon after we’d carried some units back and forth.
‘A what?’
‘A Uri Geller,’ he replied, as if addressing a toddler. ‘Stella. The liquid mindbender.’
Two pints in, he asked if I was happy with my wages, if I was interested in earning a bit more. Of course I was.
‘I know a bloke in Whitechapel who’ll buy those Kodak films for a pound a pop, sell them on his stall. If you order in an extra slab, we can go 50p each on them.’
I had so many 35mm films already in my drawers and stacked next to my desk I could just put a slab of fifty straight in my bag. The office was awash with films, cameras and all associated paraphernalia. I was posting 35mm film in envelopes to disappointed customers unchecked all day. There was no accountability. Getting film stock in was not a problem. I ordered all the films in for the office anyway, hundreds every week. Carrying them out of the building was the risk, as the front-desk security did random bag searches. Where am I going with these 250 Kodak 400s? That’s a very good question. Fuck it. We did it once in a sweat and never thought twice about it again.
There was a limit to how many 35mm films Paddy’s pal wanted passed under the table in a Bethnal Green pub every month, so there was a natural, necessary brake on our ambitions. How many times? Not many. Every time, I put half of the payout into my body and the other half into an envelope hidden inside a Thee Mighty Caesars album sleeve in my rack because I knew that nobody in the flat I shared would ever take that record off the shelf. I dropped ecstasy for the first time at a rare groove night at the Electric Ballroom in Camden one Saturday and had a revelatory journey on the upper deck of a night bus back to West London. I decided I’d saved enough inside that album sleeve. It was time to change the channel.
In May 1988 I walked into my boss’s office and handed her a note saying I was leaving in a month. She understood. She wasn’t sad to see me go.
‘How will you pay for your posh shoes without a job?’ asked Carole, my colleague who sat opposite me, a little bitterly. She had a son my age and treated me with concern and care throughout our fifteen months together – even though she despaired of my fondness for clothes and records. She thought I should instead be saving to buy a flat in Sutton, near her. She looked down at my new Bass Weejun loafers. ‘I bet you regret those now.’
A month later, I stood on the verge of the A20 with my girlfriend, watching the traffic scoot down the ramp. I had a rucksack on my back, a two-man tent packed on top. It was late June. We were headed down to the Côte d’Azur to work on the beaches for the summer selling doughnuts, camping on a site behind the dunes for ten weeks. By the time of our return in mid-September, we’d have made enough money to buy flights to New York City, where, in a small Midtown apartment, my father would introduce me to my new, hitherto unknown seven-year-old sister, Gaby, before we headed down to DC to see my mum and brothers. That grand bonus I’d awarded myself remained largely uncashed as traveller’s cheques in my waistband until we reached the States.
I stuck out my thumb. Soon, an articulated lorry pulled over. The driver, nose flattened, leaned over and opened his passenger door.
‘Where are you going?’ he shouted down.
‘South of France?’
He laughed. ‘Paris do you?’
We climbed in.