By the time I left my Sussex boarding school at the end of the summer term in 1982, a few weeks after my twelfth birthday, I preferred life at school to life at home, and though saying goodbye to my friends was painful I had every intention of staying in touch, especially with my girlfriend Alison, with whom I still held the snogging record, and my best friend Tom, who had promised me that somehow, someday we would see Alien.
Over the summer our family returned to the best place in the world: the USA. Whether we were staying in a smart resort or a shabby motel, every second out there was a vibrant and luxurious contrast to life in England in the early Eighties.
A fan of John Wayne and all things western, Dad adored places like Montana, Utah, Wyoming, Texas and Alaska, where he could indulge his cowboy fantasies of honest folk living decent lives in respectful harmony with magnificent nature, but I preferred it when we went to stay with Dad’s older brother David and his wife Leslie in their hillside bungalow in Santa Barbara, California. As far as I was concerned, they lived in a paradise of permanent sunshine, palm trees, multi-coloured cereal that tasted of sweets, exotic household-product smells, giant air-conditioned shopping malls that looked like the lobbies of fancy hotels, friendly people who thought my British accent was ‘cute’, multi-channel 24-hour TV and, best of all, films that came out months before they did in the UK.
Virtually every aspect of Uncle David and Aunty Leslie’s life in Santa Barbara made the materialistic monkey in me salivate. They had not one, but TWO big TV sets operated by remote-control devices like something out of Blake’s 7. They had a fridge with a built-in ice machine that dispensed not boring cubes, but half-moons. They had two cars (one of them a sports car), which sat inside their own garage with an automatic door, and most extraordinarily of all, they had their own swimming pool. That’s right, an actual pool with no one telling you not to run, dive bomb or engage in ‘petting’ (not that ‘petting’ was a priority with just my family using the pool, but still, nice to have the option).
I was also in awe of my cousin Leslie Anne, who had played in the garden with me during a Santa Barbara visit when I must have been about three and she was eleven, leaving me with an impression of a glamorous tower of legs, long brown hair and a big American smile. I’ve made it sound as though she was just a big pair of very hairy legs with a mouth, but actually she was a fairly standard beautiful cousin.
By 1982, however, things were different. Leslie Anne had just started college and this time when she came over she seemed irritable, rolling her eyes when her mother spoke and barely saying a word to her dad. ‘How could she not get on with Uncle David and Aunty Leslie?’ I thought. They’re both so nice and they have such cool jobs. And look at that pool!
One afternoon Aunty Leslie came back from work at her real-estate firm with a briefcase that she set on the glass table in the living room. ‘This isn’t mine,’ she said to me and my sister. ‘It belongs to a client who’s buying a house. Take a look inside.’ We opened the briefcase and found it filled with wads of cash, like something from a TV cop show. Leslie let us take out the wads and throw them in the air as we cried, ‘We’re rich! We’re rich!’ Mum laughed. Dad smiled weakly. Leslie Anne passed the room and shook her head. Then we spent a while picking up the bank notes from the fluffy white rug and putting them back in the briefcase.
Uncle David was a sterner presence than Aunty Leslie, but he got more fun in the evenings when the adults started drinking. During the Second World War he’d been in the RAF, but now he worked at Vandenberg Air Force Base, testing some new rockets called M-X missiles. He knew people at NASA and brought me back a giant poster showing a detailed cross-section of the Space Shuttle that the previous summer we had watched making its first flight on TV. Uncle David could only have been cooler in my eyes if he’d turned out to be partly bionic.
The Summer of Spielberg
Before returning to the UK’s entertainment Middle Ages, I tried to convince Mum to take us to the cinema as many times as possible. One of our first outings that summer in America was to see Tron, a film whose premise – bloke gets sucked into a video game – was so precisely what I wanted to see, it was hard to admit to myself that despite a few amazing moments, I had enjoyed my bag of candy corn more than the actual movie (though I was still delighted when Mum bought me the poster).
‘You kids have to see E.T.,’ said Aunty Leslie. ‘It’s about a little boy who finds an adorable alien in a shed and they go on bike rides. It’s a really neat movie, you’re going to love it.’ My aunt’s description did not supercharge me with eagerness to see E. T., but my sister was keen so I tagged along, hoping for some more candy corn. American schools had just gone back so when we saw the film one afternoon half the audience was made up of elderly couples, and when the lights came up at the end, most of them were still seated, consoling one another as if at a funeral. ‘Come on, let’s go!’ I said to Mum, but she too was still sitting and staring ahead, weeping quietly. Though I’d loved the film, seeing all the adults cry unsettled me. In those days you only really saw adults crying if something very bad was happening. Post E.T. it was a blub-o-rama.
The night before we had to fly home, cousin Leslie Anne took me and my sister for one last trip to the movies. The 1979 James Bond film Moonraker was playing in a double bill with a new movie that Leslie Anne said was ‘kinda like E.T. but not so lame’.
Though Moonraker is not generally considered one of the great Bond films, that night in Santa Barbara I thought it was thrilling, scary and hilarious – I mean, come on! It’s got punch-ups on top of swinging cable cars, a guy called Jaws who has metal teeth, rocket packs, space laser fights AND a pigeon double-taking at a hovercraft gondola driving through St Mark’s Square in Venice! What more do you want?
However, I was confused by the bit at the end of Moonraker when the video screens at mission control suddenly flash up an image of Bond and Dr Goodhead (‘A woman?’) floating nude around a space capsule covered by a sheet. ‘My God, what’s Bond doing?’ says an embarrassed official.
Without looking at the screen, Q replies, ‘I think he’s attempting re-entry.’ The line got a big laugh from the Santa Barbara audience and I knew it must have something to do with sex but couldn’t get my head round the specifics, especially as I’d misheard the line as ‘I think he’s attempting rear entry’. But that didn’t make sense, surely? ‘Ohmigod!’ groaned Leslie Anne. ‘I’m sorry you had to see that whole movie.’
My sister, who was just 12 at the time, was flagging after Moonraker and there was some debate about whether or not to stick around for the second film, but after a toilet break we rallied and headed back in … for Poltergeist. Leslie Anne shifted uncomfortably and looked over at us from time to time as it became apparent that Poltergeist was basically a full-on horror film with evil spirits that steal a little girl then terrorise her family with self-stacking chairs, violent trees, melting faces, a portal to hell and a clown toy that was disturbing even before it got possessed and started to strangle the little boy with the big teeth.
What prevented me from finding Poltergeist genuinely scary was the same tone of pleasant middle-class American suburbia that had pervaded E.T. Everything from the family dynamic at the centre of the film to the way it was lit and shot was so similar to E.T. that I assumed Poltergeist had also been made by the same guy.
RAMBLE
In fact, as I found out years later, Spielberg was going to direct Poltergeist while he was still working on E.T. but couldn’t for contractual reasons, at which point he brought in Tobe Hooper. Hooper had been responsible for a film that Tom had told me about at school, a film that, even more than Alien, sounded likely to leave me permanently traumatised but in a less enjoyable way: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. With Spielberg producing and Hooper directing (though to this day there is disagreement about exactly who did what), Poltergeist was initially given an R (or 18) certificate until Spielberg successfully argued it down to a PG. While it may not have deserved an R (a rating that probably would have sunk Poltergeist at the box office), it certainly didn’t deserve a PG. Steven Spielberg cares more about money than traumatising children, that’s the point I’m trying to make here, and no, I wouldn’t be saying that if he’d got me involved in Tintin as well as Joe and Edgar Wright. I was born to play Captain Haddock.
By the time Poltergeist was finished my sister was in tears and Leslie Anne was terrified that my dad would freak out when we got back, but as far as I was concerned I’d just had one of the all-time great nights out.
On the flight home we experienced unusually heavy turbulence as we flew through a valley of storm cloud and my mother, an ex-BOAC flight attendant, wept in fear. Or maybe she and Dad had argued again. Either way, Dad didn’t seem too sympathetic and I took my cue from him, thinking Mum was overreacting. I was yet to develop a fear of flying at that point, and listening to my Madness tape amid the violent lurching and the flashes of lightning was like being on a ride at Disneyland.
Westminster
Back in rainy England, Dad had managed to secure me a place at Westminster, a prestigious and expensive public school in central London, although, as he had got a last-minute cheap deal, unusual terms and conditions applied, one of which was that I couldn’t start until January the following year.
So I spent the autumn term at Westminster Under School, no longer boarding and in uniform again for the first time since Cub Scouts. I was also joining a group of 13-year-old boys who had known each other for years, many of whom looked and sounded like Jacob Rees-Mogg. In fact, one of them was Jacob Rees-Mogg. Though far from being underprivileged myself, I was different enough for some of the more Lord Snooty-ish boys in my class to treat me like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman when she visits the posh Rodeo Drive boutique to buy some non-sex-worker clothes.
At home I had my own room for the first time and decorated it with pictures of David Bowie, the Tron poster I’d brought back from California and arty full-page cigarette advertisements from Sunday magazines (then considered the acme of the ad man’s craft). I sat at my desk listening to Radio 1 on the Sanyo radio cassette recorder I’d finally wangled for my thirteenth birthday (the lo-fi charms of my crystal set having faded by then) and wrote letters to my friends from boarding school, now scattered across the country at other private institutions.
Bad news came one day from Alison who told me she wouldn’t be able to see me over the Christmas holidays because her family was moving abroad. It crossed my mind that she was making this up because she had a new boyfriend, but if that was the case it was a fiction she maintained for the next two and a half years, during which time we stayed in semi-regular contact without ever actually seeing each other.
When I wasn’t writing letters, I was drawing pictures of robots, spaceships, imaginary album covers and film posters.
RAMBLE
I hadn’t seen Blade Runner when I drew a poster for it that autumn, so my design was characteristically literal: a hand running a big machete blade through the words ‘BLADE RUNNER’. Though I was intrigued by the title, the official posters I’d seen in America during the summer made me think it looked like one of those dreary private-detective films with grumpy men in overcoats drinking whisky, chewing matchsticks and being disagreeable with unhappy women. In a way I was right, but I hadn’t factored in the flying cars, gymnastic robot people and thrilling music. I went to see Blade Runner on my own towards the end of 1982 at the Fulham ABC and I emerged afterwards dazed and besotted, though more preoccupied than was necessary by Deckard’s impossible precious photo-enhancing machine, which could look round the corners of a room inside a two-dimensional photograph. OK, it’s science fiction, but there’s no need to take the piss.
That autumn I spent many evenings at my desk with a blank tape loaded into the Sanyo, poised to hit record and play if a good song came on, whereupon I’d listen to it repeatedly, straining to make out the lyrics. Then, as if to satisfy some archival instinct, I’d write them down on sheets of Dad’s Sunday Telegraph letterheaded paper. I was careful to keep the reams of scrawled transcriptions hidden away for fear that Pa would come across them. It wasn’t that I imagined he would have beaten me with his belt while derisively reading out my misheard lyrics to ‘The Message’, ‘Pass the Dutchie’ and ‘John Wayne Is Big Leggy’, but I knew he would have been sad that instead of at least trying to write nineteenth-century naval adventure stories I was copying down the mouthings of creeps. And I didn’t want Dad to be sad.
The problem was that, like most parents who love their children, Dad was unable to be consistent with the application of his values. When he was home he tried to steer us away from the most crass and deadening aspects of modern culture and technology, but when he was abroad all bets were off, as Mum lacked the time or the inclination to enforce his campaign of disapproval – a fact that probably drove him nuts and was no doubt the source of some of their rows.
But Mum couldn’t be held solely responsible for allowing my pop-culture addiction to flourish. Now and then, perhaps feeling guilty for being away so much and keen just to see us all happy, Dad would capitulate big style.
The Best Day of My Life
Tom had an Atari 2600 games console and I thought he was the luckiest person I knew. If I wanted to play Space Invaders, and I wanted to all the time, I had to wait until we were on holiday somewhere with an arcade nearby, then plead with Mum and Dad to give me a few 10p pieces and let me loose for half an hour.
Essentially, Tom had a whole arcade in his front room. We had Pong. Don’t get me wrong, Pong was great and I’ll never forget the quasi-supernatural wonder of being able to control what was happening on our TV for the first time, even though it was just moving a white line up and down the side of the screen to the sound of ‘bip’ and ‘boop’, but the Atari was an entirely different species of amazing.
For a start it was called ‘ATARI’, a word that looked cool, sounded cool and was always accompanied by a logo that resembled three jet-plane vapour trails converging en route to space, which I think we can all agree is cool (when it popped up as a neon sign in Blade Runner I let out a little hoot of nerdy joy). Then there was the console, with its sports-car and bachelor-pad design aesthetic of futuristic black plastic ridges and fake wood veneer. The Atari console was also heavy and, unlike our Binatone Pong machine, it felt serious and powerful. All of this meant full arousal before even plugging in a game cartridge, an act that in itself made one feel like an employee on a starship (though admittedly, quite a low-level employee on quite a stupid and pointless starship).
Ever since playing Space Invaders on Tom’s Atari the previous year, I seldom missed an opportunity to suggest to my parents that we should get one, too, though I knew it was one of the longest of long shots. Dad already thought we spent too much time in front of the TV, so why would he invest in a device that would keep us away from books and nature even longer?
One evening, when he was in a good mood, I told him that video games improved hand–eye coordination and were an important part of helping young people adjust to a machine-based future. He chuckled and put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Well, I dare say you might be right, old boy.’ ‘Oh shit,’ I thought, ‘I think the motherfucker might be cracking.’ (NOTE: That’s a modern translation of my 13-year-old thoughts.)
Sure enough, that December Dad returned from another trip to America carrying a mysterious package, and on Christmas Day I found myself tearing away a corner of wrapping paper to reveal the Atari logo on the box of the 2600 with not only the Combat game cartridge included, but also my beloved Space Invaders. ‘But it’s not just for you, Adam. You make sure Clare and David get to play it, too,’ commanded Dad.
‘Of course, sure, whatever! Thanks, Dad! Thanks, Mum! This is the Best Day of My Life!’
Any anxieties Dad might have had about turning his children into dead-eyed video-game junkies were offset by the satisfaction he felt at having bought the console in the US, where it was about half the price it was in the UK. But the Best Day of My Life took a knock when I tried to plug it in.
In the days before travelling with a wide selection of electrical devices became commonplace, Dad had forgotten about the voltage difference between the US and the UK. The disappointment I felt was an entirely new kind of disappointment: a deep existential melancholy with some hopelessness mixed in. Dad got angry; partly with me for not dealing with the situation more stoically, but mainly with himself for going against his instincts and revealing himself as a voltage moron.
Much as he probably would have liked to have thrown the American Atari in a skip and have my memory wiped, Dad knew this was a genie that couldn’t be squeezed back in the bottle. When the shops opened again on Boxing Day he went out first thing in the morning and spent all the money he’d saved with his transatlantic bargain on a power transformer the size of a shoebox, which would enable us to switch on the console. That’s when we discovered that the American Atari wouldn’t work on a British TV set. So much for the special relationship.
When I put in the Space Invaders cartridge and turned on the machine I could hear the sounds of the game, but the picture was just a scrolling Venetian blind of oranges and blacks. I sat there for hours vainly twiddling the TV’s tuning knob, praying to God that the mess of lines would suddenly resolve into a coherent picture so I could start shooting down invaders, but apparently God did not consider this request a high priority.
Knowing that I would probably become a danger to myself and others if the situation was left unresolved, Dad eventually buried the pain of all the money he’d wasted and went down to WH Smith’s at the end of the road where he bought a British Atari 2600 and the Best Day of My Life began again.
If anything the painful struggles I had bravely endured up to that point – the heartbreak of first the voltage problem, then the NTSC/PAL débâcle – just intensified the joy when our TV screen was finally filled with blocky yellow crab-like invaders and the harsh 8-bit sound of their inexorable marching reverberated around the room.
I suppose one obvious punchline to this particular story of parental love conflicted by technology would be for me to tell you that I got bored of the Atari after just a couple of weeks, but I didn’t. Our relationship was deep, loving and lasted many, many months.
One of Dad’s concerns was that video games would destroy our imaginations, but looking back, it’s clear the opposite was true. Without a reasonably serviceable imagination, you wouldn’t get more than a few minutes of gameplay out of the Atari before being driven mad by how basic the technology was.
The artwork on the Atari game packages resembled posters for blockbuster movies with lushly realistic paintings of men in action-packed situations (and the occasional woman running away from something), but the gulf between the artwork and the actual gameplay was comically vast. On the package for a game called Outlaw, for example, a couple of bearded cowboy desperados fired six-shooters in a rocky canyon at sundown as a covered wagon pulled by a team of stallions hurtled by. What you actually saw when you played the game, however, was a rectangle with some blocky shapes within it to represent two cowboys and a cactus. If your blocky bullet hit a blocky cowboy in the blocks, he would sit down suddenly with a disheartened electronic fart. It was basic but fun, and on a couple of memorably joyful occasions even Dad sat down to play a few games, claiming that it appealed to his love of all things Wild West.
No less primitive than Outlaw, at least graphically speaking, was a game called Adventure, in which the player was represented by a single square block that could be moved around the screen to explore a series of ‘rooms’, ‘dungeons’ and ‘mazes’ – in other words, rectangles of various colours, some containing more blocks than others. The object of Adventure was to locate a ‘chalice’ and bring it back to your ‘castle’. Now and then blocky ‘dragons’ that looked like ducks would appear and move with alarming speed towards your block in order to eat you.
Most of the time the game was completely silent, with no music and only minimal sound effects, contributing to a state of tense hypnotic absorption during gameplay. Adventure was my introduction to the experience of navigating a virtual space, only a small part of which was visible on the TV screen, and the slow process of mapping and mastering that phantom universe occupied my thoughts by day and my dreams by night.
RAMBLE
Last Christmas I bought a Nintendo Switch for my own children and gave them the same speech my dad gave me: ‘This is for ALL of you to share!’ Then I downloaded an Atari 2600 emulator, anticipating with relish the satisfying circularity of us all sat round playing Outlaw together. But the children found the sounds so maddeningly horrible that within a couple of minutes I was once again left blasting away on my own, while they went outside to dance, laugh and read to each other.
The Timeshifter
The other technological game-changer for me back in 1982 was also introduced by my dad and ended up playing a significant part in my friendship with Joe Cornish and our eventual entry into the world of DIY television in the Nineties.
One of the perks of Dad’s job at the Telegraph was that from time to time he was sent free shit in the hope that he might mention the shit in one of his travel columns. One day he came back from the office with some state-of-the-art, solid-gold shit: the Sharp VC-2300H portable VHS video recorder plus XC-30 colour video camera.
Domestic video cassette recorders (or VCRs for younger readers) were only just beginning to become affordable at the time, with just a handful of video rental stores popping up in London’s wealthier neighbourhoods before becoming commonplace towards the end of the Eighties. Video cameras were even more rare, and outside the TV and film industries the only places you might find them were educational and scientific establishments and the bat caves of techy millionaires.
The gear Dad had been lent comprised a VCR about the size and weight of a modern domestic printer and a camera unit that had to be attached to the recorder by a thick rubber cable. All this was ‘portable’ to the extent that it was physically possible to hold the camera and carry the recorder at the same time, but if you wanted to use the thing outside it meant attaching a heavy battery that would enable you to record for about 30 minutes, assuming your back hadn’t given out by then.
Dad used the camera to film my last Sports Day at boarding school and I still have the desaturated VHS footage of me giving it one last spurt of effort at the end of the 800-metre race before coming in dead last. My mum can be heard chuckling off camera as Dad says sympathetically, ‘Well, the idea was a good one.’
It wasn’t until I started hanging out with Joe a couple of years later that I began to use the camera for anything more ambitious than the odd family home movie. Before then I was far more excited about using the VCR to tape programmes off the TV so I could watch them more than once – a concept that at the time was entirely novel, almost magical. I had to think carefully about what I would actually record, as we’d been supplied with only three 60-minute VHS tapes, and new ones were expensive and hard to come by.
The first programme I taped was Top of the Pops on 22 July 1982. The show included the video for ‘Driving in My Car’ by Madness as well as The Stranglers miming to ‘Strange Little Girl’ and, most exciting in terms of rewatchability, the video for a song that ticked the same boxes that Kraftwerk’s ‘The Model’ had a few months before: electronic; bored vocal; German. However, ‘Da Da Da’, a one-hit wonder by a band called Trio, made ‘The Model’ sound lush and overproduced by comparison.
‘Da Da Da’ was little more than a beat from a Casio VL-Tone pocket electronic keyboard on which the lead singer, a lugubrious skinhead in white T-shirt and suit jacket, played a five-note sequence during the chorus and sang in German: ‘Da da da, Ich lieb’ dich nicht, du liebst mich nicht’ or ‘I don’t love you, you don’t love me’. While the football-chant choruses of ‘Come On Eileen’ were filling dance floors across the UK, it was Trio that set my pulse racing and afforded me that wonderful punk epiphany that making intriguing music might not be the sole preserve of trained or even talented musicians.
My next adventure with the VCR was figuring out how to use the timer record function and convincing Dad that if he got hold of some longer videotapes I could record some war documentaries and boring opera shite for him to watch of an evening. Thereafter the highlight of my week became the day that I’d get back from school to find Mum had bought the new TV and Radio Times. I’d sit at the kitchen table with a hefty slice of Battenberg and one of Dad’s yellow highlighters (being careful to leave the top off and not put it back where I found it when I was finished) and scan the listings for anything interesting being shown past my bedtime that I could tape and watch at the weekend.
Most of what I taped was worthless crap that I’d fast-forward through on the lookout for gore, robots or boobs, but there were a few films that I ended up watching many times, even going so far as to break off the plastic tabs on the spine of the video cassette to prevent them being accidentally recorded over.
Rollercoaster was a thriller about a theme-park safety inspector on the trail of an extortionist blowing up rides with radio-controlled devices. It had everything: rollercoasters, which I adored and associated with our trips to America; radio-controlled devices and violent deaths, which all fine young men find exciting; George Segal, who seemed nice and funny; Timothy Bottoms, whose surname was ‘Bottoms’, and in one scene, which took place at the opening of a new theme park, a peculiar band playing two songs that I liked. Over a decade later I realised the band was Sparks and when I found the album that contained the songs they played in Rollercoaster (1976’s Big Beat), the sense of closure and satisfaction was worryingly profound.
Another film that achieved protected VHS tape status that year also had a baldly descriptive title. Alligator was about an alligator that gets flushed down a toilet as a baby alligator, then starts munching sewage workers once it’s grown into a giant alligator. Though entirely tame by modern standards, it was one of the gorier films I’d seen up to that point and, looking back, I can see it was a crucial part of my training for the day I would watch Alien. To that extent it was probably about as useful as jogging to a sweet shop to prepare for a marathon (though not, of course, for a Snickers – pffrrrt), but the fact that I wasn’t scared by Alligator made me feel that I could probably deal with some pretty hardcore cinematic mayhem.
I experienced a subtler but far more enduring form of mind-mangling when I taped a film being shown late one night on BBC Two called Dark Star. It was a piece of low-budget sci-fi about a small group of hippy astronaut men touring the galaxy in a claustrophobic ship in order to blow up unstable planets. They did this using artificially intelligent bombs that chatted happily to the crew before being deployed.
I expected science-fiction films to feature clean-cut, straightforwardly heroic leading men, but Dark Star had five hairy weirdos (one in cryogenic stasis following a fatal seat malfunction), and none of them was especially heroic or even very likeable. The film also had an unusual sense of humour, and to the hypothetical question, ‘What would it really be like to live and work on a spaceship?’ Dark Star’s answer was, ‘It would be boring and crap.’ According to some people I showed it to over the years, the same could be said of the film itself – but I thought it was funny and full of moments that stuck with me for years.
One of the best things about Dark Star was John Carpenter’s electronic score, which did a great job of transporting me beyond the cheap homemade sets to somewhere appropriately strange and science fiction-ish. There were also other bits of music in the film that were entertainingly inappropriate: easy listening, some surf rock and, best of all, the theme tune: a country song specially written for the film called ‘Benson, Arizona’, which is still in my list of Songs That Make Me Struggle Not to Cry.
RAMBLE
SONGS THAT MAKE ME STRUGGLE NOT TO CRY
These aren’t sad songs so much as songs that have something in them that turns my sentimentality tap on full.
‘S.O.S.’
– ABBA
Unrequited love is dreary and depressing for all concerned, but this makes it sound like standing on top of a mountain as fireworks go off while the meaning of life is revealed (and the meaning of life turns out not to be a disappointment).
‘DANCE THE NIGHT AWAY’
– THE MAVERICKS
I think people assume I’m being ironic about this or suggesting it would make me cry because it’s so crap, but no, it’s the opposite. I think it’s so good, so brilliantly produced and defiantly uplifting that it makes me weepy. No need to tweet how disappointed you are by my poor taste – it won’t make me like it any less.
‘I’M NOT THE MAN I USED TO BE’
– FINE YOUNG CANNIBALS
Funky drummer breakbeat + melancholy chords + sense of regret = Buckles struggling not to cry.
‘LILAC WINE’
– NINA SIMONE or JEFF BUCKLEY
Both versions do the job.
‘ONE DAY I’LL FLY AWAY’
– RANDY CRAWFORD
On occasions when I’ve made a mess of something in my life, I like songs that indulge my feelings of self-pity and promote the fantasy that I might just escape somehow, maybe by assuming a new identity and plying an honest trade in a small rural community in New Zealand or somewhere like that. By the end of the song I’ve usually thought through all the practical problems with the New Zealand plan and I try to start clearing up the mess.
‘DISNEY GIRLS’
– THE BEACH BOYS
The Beach Boys are celebrated for their excellent goofy surf pop and their complex, hallucinatory evocations of mental turmoil, but they also had a good line in corny and sentimental stuff like ‘Disney Girls’. It’s a song about that feeling of being overwhelmed by modern life and yearning for a simpler, happier, more innocent time, while acknowledging that those good old days may never have existed. ‘Reality, it’s not for me,’ admits the author.
‘GRACELAND’
– PAUL SIMON
When the Graceland album came out in 1986, I thought it sounded like a boring old white bloke trying too hard to look more ‘authentic’ by hanging out with ethnic musicians. Then a few years later I went on a trip where for some reason it was the only tape I had with me and it got under my skin. Now the ‘losing love is like a window in your heart’ bit in the song ‘Graceland’ does me in every time.
‘SUFFERING JUKEBOX’
– SILVER JEWS
Give it a listen and read about the man who made it and if you don’t find it moving, well, then I guess you’re just the most evil, cold-hearted person in the world. Or maybe it’s just not your sort of thing.
‘BENSON, ARIZONA’
– JOHN YAGER
Missing people is easy. Connecting with them is harder, as anyone who has ever made an unsatisfactory call home from a business trip will attest. But if you were working in outer space, you wouldn’t even be able to call home and missing them would be even sweeter and even sadder. Ah, the simplicity of outer space!
The character I liked best in Dark Star was the memorably named Sergeant Pinback, played by Dan O’Bannon (who also co-wrote the movie). Pinback’s makes video diaries detailing his efforts to get along with the rest of the crew, decades before the concept of video diaries became familiar via TV reality shows and internet vlogs. Pinback’s responsibilities include looking after an alien life form that he found on a foreign planet and brought aboard the ship as a pet. The alien is clearly an inflatable beach ball that’s been painted red with black and yellow spots and has two clawed feet obviously being worn as gloves by one of the film crew, but with basic puppetry and some amusing burbly sound effects, it comes to life completely, especially in a confrontation between Pinback and the mischievous alien that plays out in a lift shaft, an idea O’Bannon hung on to for Alien years later, when he wrote the screenplay.
The climax of Dark Star is a philosophical debate between one of the artificially intelligent bombs and crew member Lieutenant Doolittle. After sustaining damage in a meteor shower, the bomb is unable to detach itself from the ship but is determined to detonate regardless as it received an order to do so. In an effort to convince it otherwise, Doolittle engages the bomb in a discussion about the difficulty of knowing for certain whether anything is real. Those kinds of ideas were new to me when I first saw Dark Star, so I felt I was watching something clever and deep rather than just eavesdropping on a couple of students who have recently discovered cannabis.
Later, when I learned about the concept of mutually assured destruction supposedly acting as a deterrent to nuclear war, it reminded me of Doolittle ‘psyching out’ the bomb and I couldn’t quite believe that the safety of the world relied on a similarly dopey exercise in philosophical doublethink.
It Started with a Kiss
Somehow I made it through the first ten years of my life without absorbing any accurate information about sex whatsoever. Sure, I knew it was dirty, shameful and wrong, but beyond that, I was clueless.
I was first made aware of the concept of sexual intercourse when, for a short while aged around seven, I formed an odd friendship with a boy at school who, like me, was chubby, smutty and full of shame. I went round to his house one day and he revealed to me that his dad had stashed a variety of pornographic magazines under the carpet in the loft. We got some cakes and looked at the pictures. It wasn’t long before our societal programming kicked in and we started to feel guilty, but rather than being put off, we doubled down. ‘We like cakes and sex magazines!’ we declared. ‘We’re SUPERPIGS!’
After a couple of these sessions, I decided I was no longer comfortable identifying as a Superpig and that was the last time I looked at pornography while eating cakes, at least with another person in the room.
Because my parents seemed too nice to ever do the kinds of things I’d seen in the carpet porn, I decided that sexual intercourse was not necessary for human reproduction. My theory was that women simply became pregnant from time to time, and if they wanted to have a baby, they just let it carry on growing until it popped out. If being pregnant wasn’t convenient, they could take a pill and the foetus would evaporate, like a headache. As far as sex was concerned, that was something extra you could do if you were a pervert or a Superpig, but there was no way my mummy and daddy would ever do anything like that.
For a while my ground-breaking reproductive notions went unchallenged. Then one day, in one of my first proper biology lessons, the teacher asked if anyone knew which animals were able to reproduce asexually. Enjoying the unusual sensation of having the answer to a teacher’s question, I stuck my hand up and began to outline my Spontaneous Pregnancy Theory. There was a strong ripple of laughter from my fellow students, but I didn’t mind. In fact, I was looking forward to seeing the gigglers humiliated when they discovered that, actually, young Buckles was correct: of course humans don’t need to have sex to reproduce; that would mean the willy of every single child’s daddy had gone in and out of their mummy’s fanny until seeds came out, which would be completely appalling. You can imagine my surprise and disappointment when it turned out the teacher was a Spontaneous Pregnancy Theory denier.
To his credit, he handled it nicely and didn’t laugh in my face, but he made it clear that, contrary to my position, every human baby ever born had been the result of sexual intercourse. As one last desperate face-saving measure, I put up my hand again and said, ‘Well, not EVERY baby …’
‘Yes,’ said the teacher, ‘every single baby.’
‘Not Jesus,’ I said as the bell went.
Once in a while my unfamiliarity with both birds and bees was mildly useful. Daniel Bradford, a boy from the year above who was always on the look-out for clever ways to humiliate people, approached me one day outside the dining room and showed me his hand, which he held in a claw shape as if it had been paralysed. He pointed to the clawed hand and said, ‘Wanker’s cramp. D’you get it?’ The joke was that he was demonstrating how a hand might look after excessive masturbation, and I was supposed to say, ‘Oh yeah, I get it,’ to which he would then reply, ‘Eurgh! You’re sick! You get wanker’s cramp!’ Unfortunately for Daniel Bradford, I didn’t understand a single word he was saying and he had to repeat the set-up three more times before I said, ‘No, sorry, I don’t get it,’ at which point he huffed off in medium dudgeon.
More often, however, my lack of accurate sex info led to deep anxiety. One night as I lay asleep in my room I had a dream that featured June Whitfield from Terry and June, a British sitcom about suburban married life that I would sometimes watch when I was out of options. In the dream, June (who must have been nearly 60 at the time) was straddling me as I lay in her garden. Terry was out or busy inside the house, I suppose. She raised her skirts as she lowered herself and the next thing I knew I was awake and ejaculating into the folds of my pyjama bottoms.
Completely freaked out, I cleaned up, stuffed the soiled PJ bottoms under the bed, put on a fresh pair and tried unsuccessfully to get back to sleep. No one had warned me about nocturnal emissions and I now believed I was an out-of-control little sex pervert with granny issues. The next morning at breakfast I prodded at the moat of Golden Syrup around my Ready Brek, nauseated with shame and anxiety. ‘It Started with a Kiss’ by Hot Chocolate was playing on the radio and every time I heard the song over the next few weeks it served as a powerful reminder that I was a sick freak.
Over the summer I had watched Damien: Omen II at Tom’s house, in which the adolescent spawn of Satan finally comes to terms with his true identity when he checks his scalp in a bathroom mirror and finds 666: the tattoo of the beast. After another couple of night-time ‘ejaculaccidents’, I went into the bathroom, locked the door and conducted a thorough search of my scalp. I didn’t find any beast tattoos, but that didn’t stop the waves of guilt that would engulf me several times a day and the worry that I could never have a normal life, because I never knew when and where I might suddenly start exploding with jizz.
Science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke came to talk at Westminster Under School one afternoon. Someone asked if he believed in aliens and Clarke replied that there are many more stars in the sky than there are grains of sand on all the beaches of the world, so it’s unlikely that we’re alone in the universe, but I believed I was. You thought I was going to say that Arthur C. Clarke brought me to spontaneous orgasm, didn’t you? I wasn’t that far gone. Jean-Luc Picard? That’s another story.
A few weeks later a boy in my class made a joke about ‘wet dreams’, which as usual I didn’t understand. When he explained and I realised I wasn’t the only little sex pervert in the world, it was the most wonderful and intense feeling of relief I had ever experienced. Apart from that time with June, of course.
Is Everything Going to Be All Right?
When it comes to existential threats these days, we’re spoilt for choice, with everything from environmental catastrophe to sinister clown politicians encouraging us to compete for who can abandon most hope, but when I was 13 the prospects for our extinction seemed less varied and more imminent.
The characterisation of the Eighties as a gaudy pink neon festival of big-haired, good-time materialism was belied by a deeper truth, which was that many people of my generation were just waiting helplessly for a nuclear bomb to drop and for life to turn into the bleakest of horror films.
One drawing I did in 1983 that I was particularly pleased with was of a nuclear mushroom cloud copied from an encyclopaedia. I smudged the pencil the make it look more realistic and at the base of the cloud I wrote the word ‘NO’. Sure, it was angry, hard-hitting work, but I guess that’s just the kind of artist I am. I just couldn’t carry on drawing spaceships in the face of a possible nuclear war.
‘There won’t be a nuclear war,’ counselled my mum, and though her confidence kept my fear at bay, the TV was full of programmes that brought it rushing back.
Nuclear war was such a realistic prospect that the British Government had hired the animation company responsible for a creepy children’s show called Crystal Tipps and Alistair to create a series of EVEN CREEPIER public information films called Protect and Survive, designed to help people prepare if a nuclear attack was imminent. Extracts from the Protect and Survive films and booklets were leaked to the British media and turned up later in one of the TV shows I wish I’d never stumbled across.
A Guide to Armageddon, broadcast in July 1982 as part of the BBC’s popular science ‘strand’ Q.E.D., included hair-frazzling, meat-cooking, panic-inducing demonstrations of what would happen if a nuclear bomb fell on London. The programme featured a young couple doing their best to follow the handy hints in the Protect and Survive booklets but the implication (dramatised a few years later in Raymond Briggs’s ultra-bleak animated film When the Wind Blows, complete with ‘bombastic’ Eighties Bowie soundtrack song) was that preparations such as painting windows white and making a shelter from a door and some mattresses were so pitifully ineffectual you’d be better off with instant vaporisation.
I got the impression from Mum’s Daily Mail that worrying about this sort of stuff was the sole preserve of the lesbians and hippies protesting at RAF Greenham Common, but being confronted with it all on a BBC science programme suggested otherwise. And that was before The Day After.
A big-budget American TV movie, The Day After imagined what would happen in the event of a nuclear strike on the US. SPOILER ALERT: it would be bad. It focused on a group of people from Kansas (including Steve Guttenberg, later to star as Sergeant Mahoney in the more upbeat Police Academy), who, in the run-up to the strike, carry on with their lives hoping the worst won’t happen. When the worst happens, loads of people die quickly, then the ‘survivors’ die slowly. Even Steve Guttenberg has the cheeky smile melted off his face.
I didn’t plan to see The Day After when ITV showed it one Saturday night a few weeks before Christmas in 1983 (festive fun for all the family!), but I couldn’t resist checking on it from time to time, looking at it for a few minutes before switching over again when my heart started pounding too hard (much the same way I check Twitter nowadays). By the time the BBC showed their own British nuclear disaster movie, Threads, in 1984, I’d learned my lesson and made sure I was nowhere near a television.
One of the things that made The Day After so chilling was that it was well made and didn’t deliver the usual doses of Hollywood Stupidity Serum that would normally enable audiences to find horror and disaster highly entertaining. Instead, moments of special-FX-heavy destruction were juxtaposed with scenes that felt depressingly real: military men in bunkers, obediently following protocol.
Unlike a lot of children who saw The Day After, I never actually had bad dreams. Instead, the nightmare of nuclear Armageddon suffused my waking life, adding to each happy moment the addendum: ‘but – we’re all going to die horribly, probably quite soon’. My parents continued to brush off my concerns, but the banal fact of expensive nuclear weapons, buttons, bunkers and army men with laminated firing codes in ring binders ensured that I was never able to relax completely.
BOWIE ANNUAL
In my last term at boarding school I won the art prize, which was a book token. I used it to buy David Bowie: An Illustrated Record by Charles Shaar Murray and Roy Carr, and for the next few years this became the roadmap for my journey through Bowieopolis and its sprawling suburbs.
The book was the size of a vinyl LP and filled with critiques of all Bowie’s musical output up to 1981 as well as great illustrations, photographs and full-sized colour reproductions of all Bowie’s album sleeves up to Scary Monsters, but it was badly bound and fell apart after only a few months. That gave me the opportunity to stick my favourite record-cover images and other full-page Bowie pics on my wall at home, and then later in my study at school.
Bowie always looked so cool and strange that I thought having his face on my wall might confer those same qualities on me, but I probably fancied him, too, especially in pictures from the late Seventies, though I didn’t yet appreciate that what I was attracted to was the look of someone who had made himself ill by taking more than the recommended daily amount of cocaine.
I was also unaware that Bowie had once been what certain newspapers liked to call ‘a gender-bender’, a phrase that was tossed about both willy and nilly after Boy George first appeared on Top of the Pops in September 1982. Between wet dreams of old ladies and not being sure if Boy George was a boy or a girl (or something else entirely), I had enough on my sexy plate without worrying about Bowie’s ‘zexuality’. To me, the man who made Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust and Scary Monsters was straightforwardly wholesome, and maybe a psychoanalyst (albeit one who’s only recently started in the profession) would suggest Bowie was a surrogate parent figure for me after all that boarding-school separation trauma. I just know that whenever I heard ‘Kooks’ or the vertiginous chord progressions of ‘Life on Mars’, it was more like being wrapped in a blanket than getting rogered by an alien.
Somehow I had convinced a friend at school not only to lend me their Walkman, but to make a copy of Hunky Dory on one side of a TDK D-C90 with Scary Monsters on the other (though it cut off the last few seconds of ‘It’s No Game (No.2)’ – not a problem, as it’s just wobbly clunking noises). Listening to Hunky Dory on stereo headphones for the first time was like suddenly being able to taste and smell again after a bad cold, especially a minute into the track ‘Quicksand’ when acoustic guitars began gently duelling from the left and right channels. I told my mum to listen and she, too, was impressed by this adventure across the stereo spectrum. ‘But what’s he singing about?’ asked Mum.
I didn’t know the lyrics of ‘Quicksand’ were derived from the 24-year-old Bowie’s flirtations with the writings of occultist Aleister Crowley, nihilistic Nietzschean philosophy, and a load of other possibly unsavoury cobblers. I assumed that lines like ‘Don’t believe in yourself’ and ‘Knowledge comes with death’s release’ were just entertainingly odd Bowie bumper-sticker phrases that didn’t detract from the overall loveliness and optimism of the music.
As for ‘Ashes to Ashes’ from Scary Monsters, I didn’t have a clue what he was bollocking on about – ‘Do you remember a gather spin, he search another zone?’ – and I couldn’t even tell what instruments were being used to create the song’s alien mood buffet. All I knew was that two minutes in, when it got to the ‘I never done good things, / I never done bad things’ section, my emotional fuel rods would start to jump about uncontrollably and I felt transcendent.
An Illustrated Record also included overviews of music on which Bowie had collaborated, and I was particularly intrigued by the black-and-white image on the cover of an LP by someone called Lou Reed. I did a painting of it and wrote on the bottom ‘Lou Reed Vicious’. Dad came into my room and admired my work. ‘It’s a good picture,’ said Dad, ‘of a very creepy-looking man. What does “Lou Reed Vicious” mean?’
‘He’s called Lou Reed and one of his songs is called “Vicious”,’ I explained.
‘Hmmm. All very sinister,’ replied Pa as he walked out.
The next time I was at WH Smith’s I flicked through the vinyl racks, found a copy of Transformer and studied the back cover for the first time. I liked the look of the fellow in the white T-shirt, tipping his leather cap to the long-legged lady on the left of the image, although it looked as if he had a baguette in his pocket, which I found confusing. Surely the baguette would get all linty and his pocket would be full of crumbs?
RAMBLE
I’m pretending to be naïve here, of course. I always supposed the man had an unusually large willy, but having just searched for more information about the Transformer back cover, I now know Big Willy Man was Lou Reed’s former road manager and that the bulge in his jeans was actually a banana wrapped in a sock, making my linty baguette joke rather redundant.
The cassette of Transformer was only £1.99 so I decided to take a chance. I handed over a gift token and 10 minutes later I borrowed my dad’s tape player, settled down at my desk with my drawing stuff in the room I shared with my sister and heard Transformer for the first time.
As far as I was concerned this was an album I had plucked from obscurity, generously taking time out from my busy TV, cake and biscuit schedule to give it a try. It’s not a hard album to like, but I thought myself very sophisticated for instantly appreciating ‘Walk on the Wild Side’, despite a jazzy sound that I associated with old people’s music and lyrics that hinted at something adult and transgressive, though I didn’t really understand what. I assumed that ‘giving head’ probably meant kissing with tongues, but just, like, really deep in someone’s head.
It only took a few listens before I liked every song on Transformer and found them warm and comforting, especially ‘Perfect Day’ and, my favourite, ‘Satellite of Love’, on which I fancied I could hear Bowie’s yelpy voice in the background, making me like it all the more. Even rockier tracks like ‘I’m So Free’ and ‘Vicious’ sounded to me like the rest of the album: bathed in golden light and love.
Twenty years later I would sing Transformer’s opening song ‘Make Up’ to get my baby son to sleep. I briefly considered changing some of the lyrics to suit his gender but decided that he probably wouldn’t be too badly confused by being told he was ‘a slick little girl’. So far, he seems anxiety free in that particular department.
