All the candour of youth was there, as well as all youth’s passionate purity. One felt that he had kept himself unspotted from the world.
OSCAR WILDE, The Picture of Dorian Gray
I took for granted that I had a room of my own, and that I could do with it what I wanted. It had a sloping ceiling and two windows at floor level overlooking the village green. People made jokes about being able to see in as they went past on the bus so I went up into the attic, found some darker, heavier curtains and kept them shut.
Most of the time I was at home I spent in my room – listening to music, reading, and either avoiding or interrogating myself. The room filled up with my father’s Russian novels and American poetry, with disco clothes and then jumble-sale clothes, mouldering coffee cups and newspapers. I had a full-length mirror which stood in for the rest of the world. I would dance and sing in front of it, but rarely considered my reflection. I ignored my body as much as I could and concentrated on surfaces. All my attention went into clothes, hair and make-up.
The walls of my room became the place where I asserted myself. In the first year in Essex, when I was eleven, I painted grotesque versions of cartoon animals behind my bed. Cold, I bashed through the plasterboard covering the fireplace to discover there was no longer a hearth. I put up posters of the Bay City Rollers, as did my sister. When we fought, she cut off my favourite Roller’s head. The putting-up and ripping-down of pop stars began to happen more and more frequently as I accelerated through adolescence.
When we were thirteen, Janey had briefly turned me and Cara into fans of Elton John because her father worked for his record label (which I found astounding even though I didn’t really know what a record label was) and so she had all his albums. We didn’t know how to go out and find pop stars and here one was. Her room was covered in pictures of him and then one day in a collective shift and without discussion, we found that we all three had moved on.
‘Elton’s crap.’
‘Yeah.’
‘So why’s he all over your room?’
‘Dunno.’
‘Let’s take him down.’
‘Yeah.’
And we did, pulling and tearing and shredding until we couldn’t see him any more. Her bare walls were shocking. What would she put up next? I don’t know because taking down those posters was the last thing I remember doing in Janey’s room. It was as if tracks had been switched and we would meet less, talk less, move apart.
The official pin-ups of teen magazines were as consistent as eighteenth-century portraiture.* David Essex, David Cassidy, even David Bowie looked pretty much alike from the other side of my room. Their enlarged immobilised faces were like tepid wax or drying plaster. They had a suggestion of life and warmth but the more you looked, the less they looked back. They peered wistfully past you or, if gazing directly into the lens, would lower their head and look up with a doggish gaze. Bands stood around like eighteenth-century families, conscious of their position in the group and not sure what to do with their hands. In some shots they were lined up like football teams, and duly folded their arms and demonstrated inexhaustible grins. They were usually placed in front of a vague pastel background or outdoors among, and sometimes in, trees. We were rarely given them as we wanted to see them – playing music.
After the pin-ups, I became more interested in gravitas. I put up a copy of ‘Desiderata’ (‘Go placidly amid the noise and haste …’) not because I liked what it said but because I liked the smoky late-night design, purple and black with louche flared type. I tried out a poster of one of the album covers drawn by Roger Dean for Yes. I never listened to Yes, but people talked about Roger Dean. My poster was a cartoon of the edge of the world, and returned me to my childhood curiosity about finding myself in such a place.
Punk did not lend itself to pin-ups. If a band posed for a picture, they stuck their tongues out and put their fingers up. The New Musical Express was my source of imagery by then, and it was monochrome newsprint. I started cutting things out and glueing them on to a wall, making a collage. Bands were disarranged, the unknown and the famous indistinguishable. I had no names for most of those I included. The wall was a random collection of images thrown together and allowed to expand until it filled up the available space, somewhat like the music.
The last posters I put up, just a few months before I left home, came with the second Pop Group album, For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder? They featured images of famine, torture and murder alongside such statements as ‘Nixon and Kissinger should be tried for war crimes’ and ‘Just heard that President Carter is threatening military intervention. American aircraft carriers are heading for Iran.’ There were details of British police brutality on one side and Abba and the Beatles on the other, captioned ‘Escapism is not freedom’. If I had liked the record more, I might have taken more notice of what the posters said.
* ‘At a distance one would take a dozen of their portraits for twelve copies of the same original … they all have the same neck, the same arms, the same colouring and the same attitude’ – J. B. le Blanc, Letters on the English and French Nations, 1747.