As we became teenagers me and my mates started going to underage discos. There were various clubs around London that put on nights for the kids who weren’t yet old enough to drink but wanted to hang out, have a dance and, of course, meet girls.
They were cracking nights and some of the bands and performers that played have stayed with me forever, like Adam Faith, Marty Wilde & the Wild Cats, Johnny Mike & the Shades, the Spotnicks, the Piltdown Men (who came over from Hollywood) and Helen Shapiro. I actually went out with Helen Shapiro a couple of times. Her brother was known as ‘Fig Leaf’ and he knew some of my mates. When we went over to their flats in Lower Clapton I would see members of the Krays’ gang hanging around.
Anyway, I was introduced to Helen through Fig Leaf and we dated for a bit, but I never got anywhere with her. Maybe a kiss on the cheek but that was it. What is it they say about Jewish women?
My favourite band from that time, though, was Shane Fenton & the Fentones. Shane, of course, went on to have big success in the 70s as Alvin Stardust, but back then he had a song called ‘Cindy’s Birthday’ which became a bit of a hit. At the time I was dating a girl called Cindy so on her birthday I took her to the club to see the Fentones. Being Bernie Big Bollocks I told her I’d had a word with Shane and he’d written the song just for her, and that got me some brownie points, I can tell you! I wonder if she still believes it’s about her?
At these underage clubs you’d find similar crowds going to the same nights each week and so you’d start to recognise people, and one of the most recognisable was a guy called Mark Feld. I remember the first time I saw him, even amongst a crowd of people, he stood out. He was immaculately dressed in a bright red shirt, pressed black trousers and handmade Anello & Davide shoes, and there was an air about him. Another time I remember seeing him in a suit, brothel creepers (suede shoes with thick crepe soles) and a ‘bum freezer’ jacket. He always made the rest of us feel scruffy by comparison.
Mark was very friendly with a lot of guys in the East End and Lower Clapton. One of his very good friends was a guy called Alan Bodnitz who lived in Hackney. Alan also happened to be friendly with some of my mates, and going to the various clubs together we all got to know each other. We used to go to a place called the Tweeters Club in Manor House, and also the Tottenham Royal, Stamford Hill Boys Club, Brady Boys Club, The Oxford & St George’s in Hackney, and Heaven & Hell in the West End. In fact Alan, Mark, Simon Cohen and Ronnie Morgan were like the in-crowd. They always wore the latest fashions, but where they got the money from I don’t know, ’cos none of my mates could afford clothes like that, but over time we all started to hang out together.
In those days the height of fashion was to have a button-down shirt, and if you had a button-down shirt in gingham you were like the bees knees. We’d wear skin-tight jeans, boots with Cuban (high) heels and winkle picker extensions (that is with a long sharp pointed toe) – the longer the ‘toe’ extension, the trendier you were. Believe it or not in those days I had quite long hair and the fashion was to have it ‘tonged’ – curled using hair tongs. Everyone who was anyone would save up their pennies and go down to Max’s in Stoke Newington High Street to get their hair tonged, and it would cost you about two bob.
Now, all this stuff was always out of our price range and I had only one really good shirt which had to do me for weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs, everything. One Saturday I decided I wanted to be in with the in-crowd, but I couldn’t afford a button-down shirt, so I got an old shirt I wasn’t wearing anymore, took the buttons off of it, and sewed them onto the collars of my nice white shirt so it looked as if it was buttoned-down.
So off we went to the Tweeters Club, I was feeling cock-of-the-walk, and when we arrived there was another group of well-dressed lads there. We got chatting to them and I got talking to a guy called Alan. I’d seen him about, he was known as a bit of a wheeler-dealer. In those days you could get all the old stuff from World War II, old valve radios and whatever, and Alan always had bits and pieces he was selling to other people. I’d only known the guy for an hour or so when he looked at me and said, ‘That looks different, you’ve sewn the buttons onto your collar. That’s not a proper button-down shirt.’
Well, I felt totally deflated, humiliated, and I could’ve lamped him one. A few months later I saw him on a bus but totally blanked him – I didn’t want to give him the time of day. If you haven’t guessed already, that cunt was Alan Sugar!
He might be a multi-millionaire but is he as happy as I am? I’m always laughing and joking, always got a smile on my face, but when do you see him smiling? Give me my family and friends over vast wealth any day of the week.
But back to Mark Feld, who was an altogether nicer bloke. Always friendly, always with a hello and a handshake for everyone. Being in a nightclub with Mark, even when he was only fifteen, was some experience, the guy was just a pussy magnet! The girls loved him. There was just something different about him, he was very laid-back, very cool, always smiling. He just had a charm about him. The rest of us would look at each other and think, ‘Bastard! What has he got that we haven’t?’
All of the above, I suppose!
He always pulled all the nice girls and so we were left to fight over the rest, but you got some reflective glory from being mates with Mark. However there was one time I got one over on him. He was trying it on with this fucking gorgeous girl called Simone Sternberg but she didn’t want to know. Even the great Mark Feld wanted to get off with her but couldn’t – because she was wrapped up with me, boyo!
Mark would always be singing, whenever they played a record in the club he liked he would be singing along, and he would always be dancing. He was a bloody good dancer! If you wanted to dance with a girl you made sure you were nowhere near Mark, he’d show you up, and by comparison make you look like you were a jelly with arms and legs.
I’d see Mark on and off at different places for about a year, we’d always say hello to each other and that, but as we got older and the various members of our gangs left school and went out to work, the scene sort of broke up. I didn’t see Alan Bodnitz anymore, didn’t see Ronnie Morgan anymore, we all seemed to go our different ways. After that I only saw Mark a couple of times, at the Two Eyes Club in the West End when we went to see Cliff Richard and the Shadows and once at the Coronet Club in St John’s Wood. We said hello, how you doing, but no more than that because the music was too loud to talk.
Then some years later I turn on the telly and it’s some pop show. And who should I see on there? Bloody Mark Feld! I called to my mates, ‘Oi, come and have a look at this, Mark Feld is on the telly!’ Except they didn’t call him Feld, they said his name was Marc Bolan. He always said he was going to be a pop star, and that was the first time I realised he’d made it. Of course by then he was in the band Tyrannosaurus Rex, and would soon have huge hits like ‘Ride a White Swan’, ‘Telegram Sam’ and ‘Metal Guru’. Great pop songs, and whenever I heard them they always brought a smile to my face as I thought about him back in those clubs in the really early sixties. He was such a nice guy, you couldn’t help but be pleased for him and think he deserved it when success came his way.
Just don’t ask me what the hell any of those songs are about!
Now I know there’s one thing you are dying to say, but before you ask, no I never worked on Marc Bolan’s Mini, you can’t pin that one on me! In case you don’t know, poor Mark was killed when his car went out of control and hit a fence post in south-west London. How desperately tragic it was. I remember seeing the front cover of all the papers and as soon as I saw the name I knew who it was. It was 1977, fifteen years or so since I’d last seen him, I was going through a long break-up with my first wife, and seeing someone I’d known as a kid die like that was really hard to take. The two events are wrapped up together for me – Mark Feld dying and me getting divorced within a year.
It was like my youth was behind me now, and I was grown up.