When a man you’ve never met before gives you flowers, that’s romance. When a man you’ve never met before approaches you with the names and addresses of members of the Troops Out Movement, that’s the UDA. There I was, downing the dregs of a pint of XXXX, slight beginnings of a beer gut chaffing at my belt, when I was approached by a man. Not that way.
I could often be found on Borough High Street, listening to the rancid tones of a cockney larrikin pianist. I spent my time in the corner with me mates, drinking, acting stupid and ignoring the skinheads, right up until Land of Hope and Glory at ten to eleven, when even my mates would give Nazi salutes and clamour for a touch of the Union flag doing the rounds.
‘It’s Matthew, isn’t it?’ said the bloke. Could be a trick question I decided, so pretended I didn’t hear. If he was less confident next time he asked, I’d trust him; too confident, I’d run, worried he could be Searchlight, the IRA, anybody. He held out an envelope for me and I took a peek, why not? Just names and addresses and some tatty old envelopes addressed to Troops Out’s PO Box number. I looked at him in admiration. They’d not been tampered with, at least not after the point at which they were removed from their proper place.
‘I’m the Postman,’ he said. ‘Could you pass these on to the proper people?’
By this he obviously does not mean the addressees; it’s one of those Nazi references meaning someone like us; someone silly, some sexually frustrated bloke, either of these would have done just as well.
A young lady from Leicester describing herself as ‘radical,’ wanted to know if there was a coach in her area bringing people to London for a march. Maybe she could form her own branch?
Why? Why would a woman in Leicester want to form a branch of Troops Out, in Leicester? Did this sort of thing happen outside of London and Belfast? Another letter was more personal, a complaint about someone else. Joan Ruddock MP sent her apologies that she couldn’t attend their next march in person though gave them all her best wishes. There were an awful lot of women’s names on the list. I realised I should have joined Troops Out.
Eddie and I sifted through the mail, then he asked me the strangest question yet. ‘Have you ever sent someone a turd in the mail, Maff?’ Gordon Bennett, think I, imagine asking my mother to post a turd on her way to work one morning. Apparently, the expert turd-sender backs one out onto a newspaper and leaves it to go a little solid for a couple of hours or days even, before popping it into an envelope at a later date. It becomes solid though still a little soft, like a melted Mars Bar, and you can even flatten it. No I’ve never sent a turd in an envelope, though the more I think about it the more I cannot help admiring people with the time to perform such a delicate process. Do they lay four or five turds before choosing their favourite? Is there a quality control process for texture, colour and general all-round content? Imagine sending one with a little bit of baked bean poking out. You’re just exposing yourself and your poor nutrition. For a terrible moment I had a picture in my head of me holding open a jiffy envelope while Eddie Whicker cupped his saggy, greying testicles with his spare hand, spread his arse cheeks with his other and backed out an angry Aryan turd for me to post for him. Instead, he says the UDA will keep the lists and letters for future reference and who knows, I may have contributed some good to the cause. ‘Frank is really gonna like this, Maff, this is good work.’
I gave the letter from Ruddock to Ian Anderson and he issued an immediate press release ‘exposing’ her as an IRA supporter, but it failed to make the newspapers, even The Sun. Thinking I’d passed the first test for the UDA, happiness abounded. I could now threaten to have people shot with greater authority.
On one of the few normal nights out I had during my teenage years I went to the old Hammersmith Odeon to see the Beautiful South. Me and three old school chums in the cheap seats up top, quaffing lager, wearing the t-shirts we bought in the foyer, and eyeing up girls we could never possibly get to. In the toilets before the band hit the stage, a young man in a suit asked if I was a Communist. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m a fucking Nazi.’ He looked at me quite surprised, shook his penis and said, ‘Right on!’
I decided that night that I should change my life. During the encore of You Keep it All In, the South’s laconic front man, Paul Heaton, turned to the crowd and asked if anybody had a problem they kept bottled up. Everyone around me raised their arms. Not me though. That’s none of his fucking business, thought I. We went back to a friend’s house and played The Jam loudly, and they pointed at me during Down In the Tube Station at Midnight, when the guy yawns, ‘Too many right-wing meetings’. My heart was as empty as my life, my pockets were full of lint and my jeans ironed with creases down the middle.
‘Who’s Jackson Browne?’ asks Anderson, all concerned.
‘Where does he live?’ I say suspiciously.
‘On Radio 2. I just heard this song that goes, “I am neither capitalist or Communist”, or something, by Jackson Browne.’
There was not much disco action in any far right cupboards. Everyone was terrified in case they ended up tapping their white toes to a black artist.
‘What’s good to listen to these days, you know, youth culture-wise?’ he continued. How the hell would I know?
‘The Beautiful South?’ I suggested, then hummed A Little Time because Radio 2 loved it. He shrugged his shoulders, so I played him a tape.
‘I love this song!’ he said, ‘any blacks in the band?’
‘No, they’re all white, Ian.’
‘Do a piece on them for one of the mags, make it good.’
He trudged out of the room in the direction of the bottle of booze.
Then I remembered. ‘Ian… er… one Irish chick and about five lefties.’ But he didn’t hear. He’d shot off upstairs to go rummaging under his bed for a copy of the old Bulldog magazine.
So, I wrote an article about pop music for Anderson. I was going to end it with ‘not bad for a bunch of Marxists’ but thought better of it. Any good nationalist music reviewer must include an attack on black musicians, so we added in something about ‘negro rhythms’.
This was the first instalment in Anderson’s next project. No doubt he thought we were going to corner the Smash Hits market and get Kylie Minogue around to his grotty back room for a provocative photo shoot and questions like ‘Mandela: Shoot or swing?’