The Gambolling Baby Boomer Birth of a Rock and Roll Child I was born a Londoner at the tail end of a street to the west of the city called Goldhawk Road, and my first home was a little workman's cottage in the long-demolished Bulmer Place in Notting Hill. You'll search in vain for this poky little street in any London map, although you’ll still be able to locate a Bulmer Mews tucked away some yards away from the main road of Notting Hill Gate. On the day I was born, Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad, radical psychologist RD Laing, controversial war hero Colonel Oliver North, Laurel Canyon songstress Judee Sill, conservative activist Paul Weyrich, and Russian politician Vladimir Putin celebrated their 58th, 28th, 13th, 11th and 3rd birthdays respectively, while Beat poet Amiri Baraka, left-wing revolutionary Ulrike Meinhof, and Falklands War commander Major Julian Thompson all hit 21.What’s more, it was marked by an event which had a colossal if largely unrecognised influence on the evolution of our culture, one known as the Six Gallery reading, or Six Angels in the same Performance. On the evening of the 7th of October 1955, about 150 people gathered at San Francisco’s Six Gallery to witness readings of poems by Allen Ginsberg, Phillip Whalen, Phillip Lamantia, Michael McClure and Gary Snyder, all of whom went on to be leading lights of the Beat Generation. As to the future King of the Beats, Jack Kerouac, he attended but didn't read, preferring to cheerlead instead in a state of ecstatic inebriation. His "On the Road" published two years later, and dealing with his wanderings across America with his muse and friend Neal Cassady, remains Beat's most famous ever work. After the Six Gallery reading, the Beat movement, which had existed in embryonic form since about 1944, left the underground to become an international craze. Thence, the Beatnik took his place as a universally recognised icon with his beret, goatee beard, turtle-neck sweater and sandals.

1955 was also the year in which Rock and Roll made its first major impact on the mainstream as a result of record successes by R&B artists such as Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry and Little Richard. However, it's "The Blackboard Jungle", which, released on the 20th of March, is widely with igniting the Rock and Roll revolution, indeed late 20th Century teenage rebellion as a whole. It did so by featuring Bill Haley & His Comets's cover of Sonny Dae and his Knights’ "Rock Around the Clock" over the film's opening credits. Haley's version, which was remarkable for its earth-shaking sense of urgency, ensured the world would never be the same after it. Then in August, Sun Records released a long playing record entitled "Elvis Presley, Scotty and Bill", featuring a young truck driver from the small town of Tupelo, Mississippi. He went on to become Rock's single most influential figure apart from the Beatles. On the 30th of September, James Dean died in hospital following a motor accident aged 23 after having made only three films, the greatest of which, Nicholas Ray's "Rebel Without a Cause" emerged about a month afterwards. It could be said to be the motion picture industry's defining elegy to the sensitivity and rebelliousness of youth, with Dean its most beautiful and tortured icon ever. As such, his image has never dated, nor been surpassed. The modern cult of youth was born in the mid 1950s. Many theories exist as to how the staid conformist fifties could have yielded as if my magic to the wild Dionysian sixties, some convincing, others less so. For me, if a little leaven is present in a theory for me it leavens, or spoils, the entire lump, even when much of it may be sound. Far from being a sudden, unexpected event, the post-war cultural revolution has historical roots reaching at least as far back as the so-called Enlightenment, since which time the West has been consistently assailed by tendencies hostile to its Judaeo-Christian moral fabric. That said, its true source was the Serpent's false promise to Eve that through defiance of the Creator she and Adam could be as gods, knowing good and evil, which is at the heart of all vain, humanistic philosophy. What happened in the 1960s was simply the culmination of many decades of activity on the part of revolutionaries and avant-gardists, which had been especially intensive since the First World War. Even Rock, a music which the American evangelist John MacArthur once described as having a bombastic atonality and dissonance was foreshadowed at its most experimental by the so-called “emancipation of the dissonant” brought about by Classical composers of various Modernist schools. Still, for all the change that raged around me in the sixties, my own little world of the leafy suburbs of outer west London was an idyllic one which had hardly changed from the day that I was born when the spirit of Victorian morality was still more or less intact in Britain. My brother was born two and a half years later, by which time my parents had been able to afford their own house in Bedford Park in what was then the London Borough of Acton. Built by Norman

Richard Shaw, Bedford Park was the world's first Garden Suburb. By the 1880s, it was a Bohemian centre for intellectuals and artistic free-thinkers its residents going on to include most famously the great Anglo-Irish poet WB Yeats. The painter Arthur Pinero was another resident; as was the actress Florence Farr, who like Yeats was deeply involved in mysticism and the occult. Some time after the dawn of the next century, the area had declined to the extent that bus conductors would allegedly shout out "Poverty Park!" when their vehicles came to a halt at the local stop. However, the foundation, in 1963, of the Bedford Park Society led to the listing of 356 houses by the government, and so, much of the estate becoming part of the Bedford Park Conservation Area. During my boyhood it was still demographically mixed, yet well on the way to becoming completely gentrified. Future Who front man Roger Daltry had relocated there from inner West London when he was 11 years old in 1955 or '56. A few years later, he formed a group in the Skiffle - or Jug Band - style called The Detours. Once it had shape-shifted into The Who, its furiously hedonistic music and philosophy would go on to make a permanent impression on the Western psyche and help fuel the British Invasion of America. Tales of Tasmania and Manitoba

By the time we moved to Bedford Park, My father had been working steadily as a Classical violinist for some years, and so was in a position to ensure that my brother and I enjoy a far more stable childhood than his had ever been. He'd been born Patrick Clancy Halling in Rowella, Tasmania, and raised in Sydney as the son of a Danish father, Carl Christian Halling, and an English mother, whom we always knew as Mary, although she’d come into the world as Phyllis Mary Pinnock possibly in the Dulwich area of south London sometime around the turn of the 20th Century. She grew into a lovely young woman, with dark almost black hair, green eyes, high cheekbones and a most delicately sculpted mouth; but with great beauty come great expectations, and also sometimes great sorrows too. They certainly did in the case of Phyllis, who lost the first love of her life in the First World War, who – evidently serving as an airman in what may have been the Royal Flying Corps – was shot down, possibly over France like so many others of his generation. However, she wasn’t fated to remain single for long, for soon after losing her fiancé, she wed one Peter Robinson, an officer in the British Army, and they had two children in quick succession, Peter Bevan, and Suzanne, known as Dinny. According to Mary's sister Joan, their maternal grandmother’s maiden name had been Butler, which allegedly links the family to the Butlers of Ormonde, a dynasty of Old English nobles of Norman origin which had dominated the south east of Ireland since the

Middle Ages, and so making it a lost or discarded branch. If Joan was right then I'm related by blood to many of the most prominent royal and aristocratic figures in history, perhaps even all of them. These would include her namesake Lady Joan FitzGerald, daughter of James Butler the first Earl of Ormonde, and alleged ancestress of Diana, Princess of Wales. Lady Joan herself was the granddaughter of Edward the 1st of the House of Plantagenet, who was not only the infamous “Hammer of the Scots", but the king who expelled all the Jews from England. Her mother, Eleanor de Bohun, was descended from Charlemagne, the greatest of all the Carolingian Kings, the Merovingians and Carolingians being two dynasties of Frankish rulers who supposedly upheld the divine right of kings. He may also have been Merovingian through his great-grandmother, Bertrada of Prum. At some point between Peter’s birth and that of his younger brother Patrick, she travelled with her husband to Ceylon - now Sri Lanka – in order that they might both work as planters on the famous Ceylonese plantations. There she met the aforesaid Carl Halling. What followed next I can't say for sure but I've been led to believe that at some point after becoming pregnant with her third child, Phyllis went to live with Carl on the island of Tasmania. There my father was born in the beautiful Tamar Valley near the capital city of Launceston. By this time, his parents were apparently working as apple pickers. However, Pat was raised not in Tasmania but the great city of Sydney, New South Wales, which is where poor Carl contracted the terrible wasting disease of multiple sclerosis. After this, Phyllis made some kind of living as a journalist and teacher, variously writing for the Sydney Telegraph, and running her own elementary school. In the meantime, Carl underwent a desperate search for a miracle cure, which at one point led him to an involvement with the mystical Christian Science sect. Sadly, his quest was futile, and he died just before the outbreak of World War II. According to his wishes, he was buried in his native Denmark, although by then he'd allegedly taken out dual citizenship, as had Phyllis. All three children had earlier displayed considerable musical talent, Patrick as violinist, Peter as cellist and Suzanne as pianist. Pat has told me that he was only around nine years old, and a student at the Sydney Conservatorium, when he served on one occasion as soloist for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, a pretty impressive feat for one so young. Soon after Carl’s burial, Mary set off for London with her three children in order that they might further develop their musical careers. Pat studied at both the Royal Academy of Music and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and joined the London Philharmonic 0rchestra while still a teenager during the Blitz on London, serving in the Sea Cadets as a signaller, and seeing action as such on the hospital ships of the Thames River Emergency Service.

By this time, my mother, the former Miss Ann Watt, was already a highly accomplished and successful singer of both classical and light music, notably with Vancouver's legendary Theatre Under the Stars. She'd been born Angela Jean Elisabeth Watt in the city of Brandon, Manitoba on the 13th of November 1915. However, while still an infant she'd moved with her parents and four siblings to the Grandview area of east Vancouver. Grandview's earliest settlers were usually tradesmen or shopkeepers, in shipping or construction work, and largely of British origin. My own grandfather James Watt, who worked variously as a builder and electrician, had been born in the little town of Castlederg in County Tyrone, Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Her mother, Elizabeth Hazeldine, was from Glasgow, Scotland, having been born there to an English father from either Liverpool or Manchester, and a Scottish mother. She was the youngest of six siblings, and while she was alone among her immediate family not to have been born in Britain, she was also the only one to seek permanent residency in the mother country. Within a short time of arriving, she met my father through their shared profession, and they married in the summer of 1948. Seven years later, they decided to have their first child, and so I was born a Londoner, Carl Robert Halling on Friday the 7 October 1955… A Child’s West London I was an articulate and sociable kid from the word go, walking, talking early just like my dad before me, but agitated, unable to rest, what they might call hyperactive today. My first school was a kind of nursery school held locally on a daily basis at the private residence of a lady named Miss Pierce, and then aged 4 years old, I joined the exclusive Lycée Francais Charles de Gaulle, situated in the fabulously opulent West London area of South Kensington, where I was to become bilingual by the age of four or thereabouts.  Almost every race and nationality under the sun was to be found in the Lycée in those days... and among those who went on to be good pals of mine were kids of English, French, Jewish, American, Yugoslavian and Middle Eastern origin.       My father was far from wealthy, but he was determined that my brother and I enjoy the best and richest education imaginable, and we were dressed in lederhosen with our heads shorn like convicts, so that we be distinguished from the common run of British boys with their short back and sides, and to this end, he worked, toiled incessantly to ensure that we did. At some stage in the early 1960s, I became a problem both at school and home, a disruptive influence in the class, and a trouble-maker in the streets, an eccentric loon full of madcap fun and half-deranged imaginativeness whose unusual physical appearance was enhanced by a striking thinness and enormous long-lashed blue

eyes. Less charmingly, I was also the kind of deliberately malicious little hooligan who'd remove a paper from a neighbour's letter-box, and then mutilate it before re-posting it. The era’s famous social and sexual revolution was well under way, and yet for all that, seminal Pop groups such as the Searchers and the Dave Clark Five - even the Beatles themselves – were quaint and wholesome figures in a still innocent England. They fitted in well in a nation of Norman Wisdom pictures and the well-spoken presenters of the BBC Home or Light Service, of coppers, tanners and ten bob notes, sweet shops and tuppeny chews.  Beatlemania invaded my world in 1963, and I first announced my own status as a Beatlemaniac at the Lycée in that landmark year. It was the very year, I think, that I took an intense dislike to an American kid called Robert Graham, who later became my friend. I used to attack him for no reason at all other than to assert my superiority over him. One day, he finally flipped and gave me a rabbit punch in the stomach, but he wasn't punished, perhaps because the teacher had a strong idea I'd started the trouble in the first place. By the end of the year, a single new group had started threatening the Beatles' position as my favourite in the world. They were the Rolling Stones; although my initial reaction to what I saw as a rough and sullen performance of Buddy Holly’s "Not Fade Away" on TV, was one of bitter disappointment. But before long, I'd become utterly entranced by these martyrs to the youth movement, and during a musical discussion I can remember having in about 1965 with some of the new breed of English roses, who may or may not have been flaunting mod girl fringes and kinky boots, I proudly announced my undying fealty. One of the girls was a Fab Four loyalist and had the requisite seraphic smile, while another preferred the Animals, and acted cooler than the rest of us, as if those Geordie bluesmen were somehow superior to mere Pop acts like the Beatles and the Stones. During this golden era, I divided my time between the Lycée and my West London stomping ground, and from a very young age, took Judo classes at the Budokwai in South Kensington. It was there that one of my teachers, a former British international who’d fought in the first ever World Judo championships in Japan, once despairingly said that he always knew it was Saturday once he’d heard my voice. Some of the other kids knew me as Alley Cat, and it was a pretty apt name when you think of it. Later, I took classes at the Judokan in Hammersmith, but if I thought I was going to raise Cain there I had another thing coming, given that its owner was a one-time captain of the British international team who'd served as an air gunner with 83 squadron during World War II. He later held Judo classes in Stalag 383. I went on to study Karate with him, and was still doing so as late as 1973, when I got it into my head that I no longer wished to have

anything to do with anything martial, precious blooming aesthete that I was. For all that, I was rarely happier than on those Wednesday evenings, when I attended the 20th Chiswick Wolf Cub pack and I was less of a menace there than pretty well anywhere else I can think of. Memories such as the solemnity of my enrolment, and being helped up a tree by an older cub to secure my Athletics badge, stayed with me for many years afterwards, as did the times I won my first star…and my swimming badge, with its peculiar frog symbol, as well as the pomp and the seriousness of a mass meeting I attended, with its different coloured scarves, sweaters and hair, and the tears I shed afterwards, despite the kindness of the older cockney kids who were so eager to help me find my way back home to Chiswick High Road. There was a point in the mid 1960s when I was dubbed the General by a long-suffering form teacher at the Lycée in consequence of what she presumably perceived as my dominance in the playground with regard to a tight circle of friends, and my tongue-in-cheek superciliousness in the classroom. This typically saw me at the back of the class leaning against the wall pretending to smoke a fat cigar like a Chicago tough guy. One thing is certain is that I was not above organising elaborate playground deceptions. One of these involved me pretending to banish one of my best friends, Richard, from whatever activity we had going on at the time. He played along by putting on a superb display of water works, which had the desired effect of arousing the tender mercies of some of the girls. They duly rounded on me for my hard-heartedness, but I refused to budge. Of course it was all a big joke, and Richard and I had never been closer. I can remember going around to his house to lounge on his bed, watching "The Baron" or "Adam Adamant", before staying the night at the central London home he shared with his American father, a gentle melancholy widower who’d been very much in love with his English wife. In '67, he spent a week with me in the wilds of Wales as part of a course known as the Able Boys. This was a combination of a simple sailing school and what could be termed outward bound activities which involved us living in tents and cooking our own food under the supervision of "mates". I spent one week there with Bobby, and another with my cousin Rod. If I was Le Général at the Lycée, back home I saw myself as the leader of the kids whose houses backed onto the dirty alley that ran parallel to our side of the Esmond Road in those days but has almost certainly vanished by now. One fateful day, I crossed the road to announce a feud with the kids of the clean alley, so-called because unlike ours it was concreted over rather than being just a dirt track. It was to cost me dear. Soon after the feud had thawed I went over to pal around with some of

the clean alley kids who I now saw as my allies, but there must have still been some bad blood because before long a scrap was under way and I was getting the worst of it. Finally I agreed to leave, and as I shamefully cycled off my bike squeaked all the way home in unison with great heaving sobs. If my good mate, local tough Steve, had been with me on that afternoon in the clean alley, it’s likely I would never have had to suffer as I did. Steve lived virtually opposite us in Bedford Park, but he was from another dimension altogether. He was a skinny cockney kid with muscles like pure steel who seems to me today to have been born to wage war on the bomb sites of post-war London. For some reason, he became devoted to me; "Carly", he'd always cry when he wanted my attention, and he'd always be welcome at our house even though this brought my family some opprobrium within the neighbourhood. One of my mother's closest friends warned her of my association with Steve as if genuinely concerned I might end up going to the bad, but he was a good kid at heart, and one of my dearest memories from my long gone days as a London alley cat.

Wicked Cahoots

When he madehis first personal appearancein the dirty alleyon someone else's rusty bike,screaming alongin a cloud of dustit rendered us allspeechless and motionless.But I was amazedthat despite his grey-faced surliness,he was very affable with us...the bully with a naiveand sentimental heart.He was so happyto hear that I liked his dador that my mum liked himand he was welcometo come to teawith us at five twenty five...Our "adventures" were spectacular:chasing after other bikesters,screaming at the topof our lungsinto blocks of flatsand then runningas our echoed waves of terrorblended with incoherent threats...

"I'll call the Police, I'll..."Wicked cahoots.

This Glam Rock Nation

In September 1968 while still only 12 years old I became the youngest cadet at the Nautical College, Pangbourne, a naval college situated near the little Thameside village of Pangbourne in the county of Berkshire. This probably made me the youngest serving officer in the entire Royal Navy at the time. Founded in 1919, she was still known by her original title, but by 1969 this had been abbreviated to Pangbourne College. However, the boys retained their officer status and spent much of their time in full naval officers' uniform. What's more, naval discipline continued to be enforced, with Pangbourne providing the hardships both of a military college and a traditional English boarding school. In 1996, she became fully co-educational. The Pangbourne I knew had strong links to the Church of England, and so was marked by regular if not daily classes in what was known as Divinity, morning parade ground prayers, evening prayers, and compulsory chapel on Sunday morning. If you missed any of these you would have been seriously punished, although not necessarily with the cane. I was heavily disciplined from my very first term, but I'm indebted to Pangbourne for the values it instilled in me if only unconsciously. They were after all the same values that once made Britain strong and great; and yet, by the time I joined Pangbourne, they were under siege as never before by the so-called counterculture. While failing to fully understand the implications of the cultural revolution of the late 1960s, I passionately celebrated its consequences, and took to my heart many of its icons both artistic and political, and that’s especially true of the Marxist revolutionary leader Che Guevara. In 1970, we moved from Bedford Park to a little industrial suburb close to the Surrey-London border. Our own street was quite gentrified, and several of my parents' closest friends were people from working class districts such as Shepherd's Bush and Notting Hill who’d made a success of their lives and so moved further out into the western suburban sprawl. I finally left Pangbourne in the summer of '72, after a decision had been made involving my poor dad and those directly responsible for me at the college. 1972 could be said to be the year in which the seventies really began as the excitement surrounding the alternative society and its happenings and be-ins and love-ins and free festivals and so on started to fade into recent history. For my part I couldn't wait to get to grips with the dismal new decade even if for the first two years, I'd despised the rise of the new commercial chart Pop and its grinning teenybopper icons. I was of the Hard and Progressive school, and so a recent devotee of Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, ELP, and Yes, and so on, but I was changing, and for better

or worse, this was going to be my era. In late '72, I saw former Bubblegum band the Sweet on a long-forgotten teenage programme called "Lift off with Ayesha", and with all the passion of a former enemy, I became entranced by their hysterical brand of epicene heterosexuality, and especially with high camp bassist Steve Priest, who flirted with out and out cross-dressing as a means of taunting the audience.. Several months later, David Bowie appeared on the chat show Russell Harty Plus in January 1973 with his eyebrows shaved off and sporting a glittering chandelier earring, and my devotion to the strange culture taking over the land making even former skinheads want to grow their hair like the idol of Arsenal Charlie George became total. So many of the popular songs of the era were like football chants set to a stomping Glam Rock beat. It was the golden age of the long-haired boot boy and every street seemed to me to be pregnant with menace in this Glam Rock nation, as if the spirit of Weimar Berlin with its unholy mix of violence and decadence had been resurrected in stuffy old England. It was a terrible time to be young; but I of course loved it, lapped it up. At the same time, I was launched by my dad on an intensive programme of self-improvement. Through home study and with the help of local private tutors I set about making up for the fact that I'd left school at 16 with only two GCE – General Certificate of Education - exams to my name, at ordinary level, of course, which is why they were called "O" levels. I took Karate classes at the Judokan in Hammersmith, and among my fellow students were hard-looking young men – some of them flaunting classic ‘70s feather cuts - who may have been led to the dojo by the prevailing fashion for all things Eastern such as the films of Bruce Lee and the “Kung Fu” television series. There were swimming lessons at the Walton Swimming Pool where I fell hard for a beautiful elfin girl with a close crop hairstyle which made her look a little like a skinhead girl. I think she beckoned to me once to come and be with her but I just stood there as if frozen to the spot. My heart wasn't in the swimming though, and this soon became clear to one of the teachers who asked me why I was even bothering to turn up. I was taught the basics of the Rock guitar solo by a shy middle-aged man whose old-fashioned short back and sides and baggy trousers belied a deep love of the rebel music of Rock and Roll. I probably learned more about music Rock from him than anyone alive or dead, with the possible exception of a Pangbourne friend called Steve, whose songs I stole with their simple chord progressions, which went from C to A minor, and then to F and on to G and then back again to C and so on. In late '72, I joined the London Division of the Royal Naval Reserve as an Ordinary Seaman, attending classes once a week on HMS President on the Embankment, and at some point thereafter, it

became clear to me that I'd been singled out for my budding pretty boy looks. I think this came as a bit of a surprise, but I was flattered rather than offended, as if a seed of narcissism had somehow become implanted within me in late adolescence. I can only wonder what effect this had on my healthy development as a normal male human being. It's not that I wasn't aware of being good-looking before '72, because there had been the occasional comment about my looks on the part of female friends of the family for some years, and I'd even been made aware of being handsome as a very young boy by some of the Lycée girls. However, none of this had ever really registered with me, because I'd always been a typical feisty ruffian of a boy in a lot of ways. Having said that though, I was dreamy and imaginative to an extreme degree, which points to what would today be termed a feminine side, and I’d never gone through a phase of finding girls drippy or whatever. In fact, from as far back as I can remember I'd been prone to falling hopelessly in love with them, especially if they were somehow unattainable to me. What’s more, I was a born romantic, cherishing a grossly sentimental streak all throughout my teens that placed me somewhat at odds with my peers. While still only about fifteen and pretty thuggish for the most part, I was yet capable of becoming entranced by notorious tear-jerkers such as "South Pacific", which I saw with my mother at the cinema. John Schlesinger's film version of the Thomas Hardy novel "Far from the Madding Crowd", which I saw at Pangbourne, was another film that affected me very deeply, too deeply perhaps for an adolescent boy. Who knows, it may have been partly responsible for an obsession with lost love and high romantic tragedy that remains with me to this day. I had an almost mawkish side to my character even as an adolescent and this must surely have exerted some kind of influence on the course of my life, but in no way was I a typical delicate sheltered milquetoast, far from it. For this reason, to realise that I was perceived by certain other men as a pretty boy genuinely took me back, and I hadn’t seen it coming, although – and I can't emphasise this enough - it was a source of fascination to me, not shame. The cult of androgyny was a powerful force in Britain in the early ‘70s, having been incubated first by Mod and then Flower Child culture, as well as Rock acts such as the Stones, the Kinks, Alice Cooper, T. Rex and David Bowie. Furthermore, it was reinforced in the cinema by several movies featuring angelically beautiful men. And yet, you still took your life into your own hands if you chose to parade around like a Glam Rock star in the mean streets of London or any other major British city – to say nothing of the countryside - and therefore few did. One of my big heroes as a boy had been all-American actor Steve McQueen, who incarnated an uncompromising tough guy cool. And yet in '73, many of my new idols were "prettier than most chicks"

(as T. Rex kingpin Marc Bolan once described himself). I can only wonder what effect this had on my healthy development as a normal male human being. I fantasised about fame and adulation as a Rock and Roll or movie star as never before throughout the Glam era, and built an image based on David Bowie, spiking my hair like him, and even bleaching it at some point with peroxide. Not surprisingly then, I didn't fit in at all in my new home town, unlike my brother who was far more suited to the area than me with his cockney accent and laddish ways. He wasted little time in becoming part of a local youth scene centred mainly around football, traditional sport of the British working classes. For my part, I came into my own in Spain, or rather the Mar Menor, a large coastal lake of warm saltwater off Murcia's Costa Calida in southeastern Spain, where the family had been vacationing since about 1968. I think it was towards the end of my summer '73 holiday that I finally started to be noticed in a big way by the local youth, most from either Murcia or Madrid, and so la Ribera became vital to me in terms of my becoming a social being among members of both sexes. A large ever-evolving group of us became very close and remained so for four summers running. Spain was such a sweet and friendly nation back then in the relatively innocent early seventies, and the youth of La Ribera as happy and carefree as I imagine southern Californians would have been in the pre-Beatles sixties. What a time it was, a time of constant, frenetic change when everything seemed to be mine for the knowing and the tasting in the wake of a social revolution that had been all but bloodlessly waged on my behalf only a few years before; but there was a high price to be paid for all that gambolling. The Triumph of Decadence Sad Loves of a Seafaring Man

In late summer 1973 the minesweeper HMS Thames set out for Bordeaux in Gironde in the south west of France. It was my first voyage as an Ordinary Deckhand with the RNR and I was just seventeen years old. During the trip I made my best ever RNR friend in the shape of Colin, a fellow OD…who called me only a few years ago from his East London home only a few years ago in point of fact. We talked about the time we became trapped by a gang of mangy-looking stray dogs late one night in the French city of la Rochelle in 1975, after having gotten lost on the way back from a wild night spent with locals. That tale is yet to be written. I also became quite friendly with the most unlikely pair of bosom buddies I ever came across in the RNR or anywhere else. One half was Jimmy, a tough-talking working class ladies' man of about 23,

who was rumoured to be a permanent year long resident of HMS Thames. Jim took me under his wing with a certain intimidating affection, once telling me that he’d “make a ruffy tuffy sailor of me yet”, even though we both knew that that I'd never be anything other than the most useless mariner in the civilised world. The other was an older man, possibly in his mid thirties, but just as much of a lad as Jim, even though he boasted the patrician manner of a City of London stockbroker or merchant banker. To make it clear just how much of a lubber I was, there was one occasion when, during some kind of conference being held below deck, I was asked by an officer what I thought of minesweeping, and I replied that it was a gas. On another, after the ship had been prepared for a major manoeuvre, and every hand was in their respective allotted position, I was found wandering about on deck in a daze only to casually announce that I was taking a stroll. Incidents like these made me the object of good-humoured banter onboard the Thames, where I served as a kind of latter-day Billy Budd, but without the seamanship. Its crew spent a final night together in a night club in the southern port of Portsmouth , though it might just as easily have been Plymouth. The main event was a hyperactive drag artiste who tried desperately to keep us entertained with cabaret style numbers sung in a high woman’s voice, and bawdy jokes told in a deep manly baritone, but the poor man was way out of his depth, and he was savagely heckled for his pains. At one point - perhaps in the hope of seeing a friendly face – he turned towards me, and trilled something along the lines of "Ooh...you look pretty, what's your name?", at which point some of the sailors bellowed back, “Skin”, as in "a nice bit of skin", which was some kind of slang term for an attractive youth. A little while later, the tar with the beard I'd been sitting next to all night asked me to hold the mike for him while he performed Rossini’s “William Tell Overture “on his facial cheeks. Once he’d done so, the MC suavely quipped he’d next be appearing on Thames Television, a joke which had some validity at the time. He ended up passed out on the table in front of us after having collapsed face down with an almighty crash; by no means the only one to suffer such a fate that night. Back onshore, I resumed my growing passion for all that was louche, bizarre and decadent in music, art and culture. However, increasingly in the mid 1970s, I turned away from what I now saw as the old hat tackiness of Glam Rock, convinced that Modernist outrage had nowhere left to go. Instead, I turned my devotion to the more refined corruption of the golden age of Modernism of ca. 1890-1930, and especially to its leading cities, in terms of their being beacons of revolutionary art, and of luxury and dissolution. They included the London of the Yellow Decade, Belle Époque Paris, Jazz Age New York, and most of all Weimar Republic Berlin.

At some point I started using hair cream to slick my hair back in the style of F. Scott Fitzgerald, sometimes parting it in the centre just as my idol had done, and to build up a new retro wardrobe. These went on to include a Gatsby style tab collar, which I wore either with striped collegiate tie, or cravat or neck scarf. Over this, I might wear a short-sleeved Fair Isle sweater, a navy blue blazer from Meakers, and a belted fawn raincoat straight out of a forties film noir. My grey flannel trousers from Simpsons of Piccadilly typically flopped over a pair of two-tone correspondent shoes. There were those cutting edge artists who appeared to share my love affair with the languid cafe and cabaret culture of the continent's immediate past. Among these were established acts, such as David Bowie and Roxy Music, and newer stars such as Steve Harley of Cockney Rebel, and Ron and Russell Mael of LA band Sparks, who’d recently come to Britain in search of Glam Rock glory. Some of Roxy’s followers even went so far as to sport the kind of nostalgic apparel favoured by Ferry himself, but they were rare creatures indeed in mid-seventies London. As for me, I wore my bizarre outdated costumes in arrogant defiance of the continuing ubiquity of shoulder-length hair and flared denim jeans. In 1975, I even had the gall to go to a concert at West London's Queen's Park football stadium dressed in striped boating blazer and white trousers, only to find myself surrounded by hirsute Rock fans. The headliners were my one-time favourites Yes, whose "Relayer" album I'd bought the year before; but my passion for Progressive Rock was a thing of the past. I'd moved on since '71, towards a far deeper love of darkness and loss of innocence. There was nothing even remotely dark, however, about the time I fell in love with a Dutch girl while sitting Spanish "O" level in June 1974 in Gower Street, Central London. She didn't look Dutch; in fact, with her tanned complexion and long dark brown hair, she was Mediterranean in appearance, and even had the name to match, Maria. It was probably she who approached me, because I was so unconfident around girls in those days that I'd have never made the first move, and in all the time I knew her, I didn't have the guts to tell her how I felt. So, once we'd completed our final paper, I allowed her to walk away from me forever with a casual "I might see you around", or some other cliché of that kind. For about a week, I took the train into London and spent the days wandering around the city centre in the truly desperate hope of bumping into her. One time I could have sworn I saw her staring coolly back at me from an underground train, possibly at South Kensington or Notting Hill Gate, just as the doors were closing, but typically I was powerless to act, and simply stood there like a lovesick fool as the train drew away from the station. In time, my infatuation faded, but even to this day certain songs – such as "I Just Don't Want to be Lonely" by The Main Ingredient, and "Natural High" by Bloodstone - will recall for me those few weeks in the summer of '74 that I spent in hopeless pursuit of a woman I didn't even know.

Later on in the summer, and fully recovered from an absurd unspoken passion, I found myself once again in La Ribera in south-eastern Spain. The summer of '74 was one of the most blissful summers I ever spent there, and there were a good few of those. Each afternoon, a gang of us would meet up on the jetty facing our apartment on the Mar Menor which was more or less deserted after lunch. There, we’d listen to Bowie on cassette, or on a portable phonograph, Donny singing “Puppy Love”, and talk and swim and laugh and generally enjoy being young and carefree in a decade of endless possibilities. To some youthful Spanish eyes, I must have seemed an almost impossibly exotic figure from what was then the most radical and daring city in Europe, and I played my racy image up to the hilt. In truth, though, I was barely less sheltered and innocent than they, and how wonderful it was to bask in their soft Mediterranean loveliness for a few brief seasons. However, there was a change that came over Spain with Franco's passing, and the birth of the so-called “Movida”, which could be said to be the Spanish equivalent of London's Swinging Sixties revolution. Perhaps it didn’t happen right away, but by my last vacation in La Ribera in the summer of '84, it was I who was in awe of the local youth rather than the other way around. They seemed so cool to me, dancing their strange jerky chicken wing dance to the latest New Pop hits from Britain. By then, of course, most of my old friends had vanished into their young adult lives, and my time as Charly, the undisputed English prince of La Ribera, had long passed.

I returned to London in late summer '74 with a deep tan and long hair bleached bright yellow by the sun. Only days afterwards I found myself on HMS President, moored then as today on the Embankment near Temple station. This involved my passing through Waterloo mainline station, which wasn't tourist-friendly as it is today, with its cafes and baguette bars, but a dingy intimidating place complete with pub and old-style barber. There I was approached by a former sailor who kept going on about how good looking I was. He even told me that he loved me; but he was no predator, just a sweet lonely old Scotsman who wanted someone to talk to for a few minutes, and I was happy to do that. I even went so far as to agree to a meeting with him the same time the following week, not that I had any intention of keeping it. Besides, it wasn't long before HMS Thames was on its way to Hamburg, second largest city of Germany and its principle port. Once we'd arrived, one of the CPOs warned me not to wander around Hamburg alone, for fear that I might end up being ravaged and dumped in some back alley, or worse. I duly joined up with a group of about three or four other ratings on my first night ashore, and of course we headed straight for the Reeperbahn of Beatle renown. There, in the red light district of St Pauli, sights awaited me I don’t think I’d even suspected existed up until that point. It was all

so different from the quiet outer suburbs, where an organised coach trip took us to us to, possibly a day later. We ended up in a park where I had my picture taken on a bridge by a reporter for the Surrey Comet, before a group of breathless giggling schoolgirls asked me to be in some photos with them. I of course obliged, flattered by their attentions. On the way back to the ship, one of the sailors announced I’d been quite a hit with the Hamburg teenyboppers. Another wryly opined it was due to my appearance, the blond hair and blue eyes of the classic Teuton. Whatever the truth, there was something so touching about those sweet suburban girls and their simple unaffected joy of life, especially in the light of what girls barely older than they were subjecting themselves to a mere matter of miles away.

The Triumph of Decadence

In 1975, I became a student at Brooklands Technical College which lay then as now on the fringes of Weybridge, an affluent outer suburb of south west London. In semi-pastoral Brooklands as in my beloved La Ribera, I learned to be a social being after years of near-seclusion, first at Pangbourne and then as a home student. So, attention came to be a potent narcotic for me in the mid 1970s. However, despite constant displays of flamboyant self-confidence, those who tried to get to know to know me on an intimate level found themselves confronted with a desperately diffident and inhibited individual. The regular Brooklands Disco was a special event for me. On one occasion early on in a Disco night I got up in front of what seemed like the whole college and delivered a solo dance performance to a fiery Glam tune by Bebop Deluxe, possibly with white silk scarf flailing in the air to frenzied cheers and applause. I just blew everyone away. On another, a trio of roughs who I suspect may have gate crashed the Disco only to see in me the worst possible example of the feckless wastrel student strutting and posturing in unmanly white took me aside at the end of the night. Doubtless, they were intent on a touch of the old ultra-violence; but I stood my ground, insisting that despite what they may have thought about me, I was just as straight as they. Apparently convinced of this, they vanished into the departing crowds after muttering a few dark threats, leaving my cherubic face intact. ‘75 again, and my music, swimming and Martial Arts sessions were no more, but the private lessons continued, mainly with a young academic called Michael who lived alone but for several black cats in long time Rock star haven Richmond-on-Thames. He was a quiet slim young man with long darkish curly hair who, as well as being a private tutor, was a successful session musician, who went on to play drums for a fairly well-known Contemporary Folk outfit.

Michael, who specialised in the French Symbolist poets, exerted a strong influence on me in terms of my growing passion for European literature and Modernist culture. However, it was the less known literature of Spain that we studied together, from the anonymous picaresque novel "Lazarillo de Tormes" onwards, and embracing Quevedo, Galdos, Machado, Lorca, and others. He was also an early encourager of my writing, a lifelong passion that was ultimately to degenerate into a chronic case of cacoethes scribendi, or the irresistible compulsion to write. As a result of this, I became incapable of finishing a single cohesive piece of writing until well into the eighties when I managed to complete a short story and a novel both of which have since been destroyed but for a few fragments. It was largely through Michael that I came under the spell of the Berlin of the Weimar Republic of 1919 to 1933: After I'd expressed interest in a copy of one of Christopher Isherwood's Berlin novels, "Mr Norris Changes Trains", conspicuously placed in front of me on his desk, he told me in animated tones that it had inspired the 1972 movie version of the Kander and Ebb musical, “Cabaret”. In fact, while a work of art in its own right written for the screen by Jay Allen, and directed by former dancer Bob Fosse, "Cabaret" had been largely informed by Isherwood's only other Berlin story, "Goodbye to Berlin". Seeing "Cabaret" later on that year was a life-transforming experience for me, one of only a handful brought about by a film, and the beginning of a near-obsessive preoccupation with the Berlin of the Weimar era, which has been likened by some cultural critics to the contemporary West, and with some justification. Certainly, it could be said that much of what's happened to the West since the end of the second world war was to some degree foreshadowed by the still horrifying decadence of post-war Berlin, which begs the question, why? Not an easy question to answer but…more than any other nation in the late 18th and early 19th Century Germany, birthplace of Luther and the Reformation, had played host to Higher Criticism, a school of Biblical criticism which flagrantly attacked the authenticity of the Scriptures. Moreover, late 19th century Europe had witnessed a significant occult revival in Britain, in France, but most especially perhaps in Germany. All this contributed to the terribly debilitated condition of Christianity in Germany in the years leading up to and including the implementation of the Third Reich in 1933. By the onset of the '20s, crushed by war debt and blighted by urban violence between mutually hostile right and left wing factions, Germany stood on the precipice of disaster. However, some kind of reprieve came with an increase of affluence in 1923, at which point Berlin's Golden Age began, and she became the undisputed world epicentre of artistic and intellectual foment. Under her auspices, great artistic freedom thrived in the shape of, among other phenomena, the painters of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement such

as Beckmann, Dix and Grosz, Berg's ground-breaking opera "Wozzek", as well as the staccato cabaret-style music of Kurt Weill, Fritz Lang's dystopian "Metropolis", the provocative dancing of Cabaret Queen Anita Berber and so on. However, Weimar Berlin remains best known for its notorious sexual liberalism, and pictorial depictions of its cabarets and night clubs still have the power to shock today. Given that several other Western cities in the twenties were hardly less dissolute than Berlin, it's little wonder that this key Modernist decade has been described by some critics as the beginning of the end of Western civilisation. In its wake came the Second World War, the collapse of the greatest empire in history, and the rise of the Rock and Roll youth and drug culture, which could be said to be the very triumph of Western decadence.

The Tears of a Woman

I made no less than three sea voyages in 1975, two as a civilian and one with the RNR, as well as spending a week with them docked at the Pool of London. The first of these was to Amsterdam via Edinburgh and St. Malo on the three-masted topsail schooner TS Sir Winston Churchill of the Sail Training Association, now known as the Tall Ships Trust. Based in Portsmouth and Liverpool, the TST was founded in 1956 for the character development of young people aged 16 to 25 through the crewing of traditional tall ships, originally Churchill and the SS Malcolm Miller. Among my shipmates were my 17 year old brother, several young men from Scotland and the north of England, some recent recruits to the RN, and a handful of older Mates who'd been given authority over the rank and file of we deck hands. In overall authority was the elegant, distinguished Ship's Captain, who also happened to be an alumnus of my own alma mater of Pangbourne. It was an all-male crew, and I was quite well-liked at first although my popularity cooled in time. I kept a few pals though. One guy in particular stayed a good friend after we'd tried to impress a couple of girls together during our brief stay in St Malo. He was a small cherubic southerner with long dark hair worn shoulder length like the young Jack Wilde. I got on OK with a few of the others, and some were merely indifferent, but 'Jack' was Churchill's true prince. He helped me out on one occasion when I desperately needed him to, bless his baby-faced soul. I'd fallen hard for one of the girls, and was wandering around in a mournful daze after having failed to pluck up the courage to ask her for her address, when Jack handed me a piece of paper with it on. It transpired she’d scrawled it down just before leaving us, and I was drunk with relief at the news, just walking on air, because there was the danger of me coming down with a serious case of lovesickness had she become lost to me forever. Jack saved my hide.

Life on the Churchill was no luxury cruise. There were heavy storms, and on more than one occasion, we were ordered out of our hammocks in the middle of the night to help trim the sails. I never took any part in this, which can hardly have helped my reputation. I did climb the rigging though, just once, before we came into the port of Amsterdam. Dozens of us manned the yard arms, attached to these by our safety belts alone. I was determined to do it, even though the experience terrified me so much my legs shook throughout. The Dutch capital was marked by the same kind of open sexual licence I'd witnessed only the year before in Hamburg, although it seemed to me to lack the German city’s sinister vibrancy. Then - just as today - the sad De Wallen red-light district was filled to the brim with hundreds of little illuminated one-room apartments, each with a single woman sitting in clear view of onlookers plying her lonely trade. As for Edinburgh, just before setting foot in the city for the first time, one of the lads, dressed to the nines himself in the trendiest seventies gear, all flared slacks and stack-heeled shoes no doubt, warned me not to go strutting about Edinburgh town centre in a flashy boating blazer. Of course, I completely ignored his advice, and, waltzing some time later into an inner city pub in broad daylight wearing said blazer and blue jeans tucked into long white socks, a grinning hard man with long reddish curly hair asked me if I was from Oxford. Perhaps he was aware of the Oxonian reputation for producing flaming aesthetes, but I doubt it. I think he just took one look at my jacket and thought: "Who's thus flash ponce askin' tae ge' hus heed kecked in?", or worse. It may have been touch and go for a while as to whether he was going to inflict some serious damage on my angelic English face, but in the end he left me be. He may even have liked me. The unlikeliest people did in those days. Within a few weeks of returning to London by train from Edinburgh, my brother and I were setting off again, this time as part of what is known as the Ocean Youth Club. We set sail towards the Baltic coast of Denmark by way of Germany's famous Kiel Canal, and while we were once more supervised by Mates under the command of a Ship's Captain, the OYC was more like a cruise than a trial by water, utilising modern yachts rather than traditional tall ships. The captain himself was a lovable bearded larger than life true character with a weakness for freaking out to John Kongos' "He's Gonna Step on You Again", who became a close friend and fellow reveller. My brother and I were quick to recruit a nice young guy called Simon as our best pal and confidante for the trip. It turned out we’d actually met him some ten years previously while passing through Calpe, Spain, either on our way to or from my grandmother’s home on the Costa Brava. Soon after setting foot on Danish soil we got talking to a couple of girls who, as might be expected, had natural golden blonde hair, but

our efforts at romance were wholly innocuous, despite the reputation Scandinavia had for progressive sexual attitudes. A less pleasant romantic episode took place towards the end of the trip, which saw me in pursuit of a German girl called Bettina. I was crazy about her, and she made it pretty clear she was sweet on me too, and yet I'd senselessly dumped her for the sake of a night of drunken idiocy with my brother and Simon, perhaps expecting her to run after me or something. Suddenly, overtaken by sickly pangs of remorse, I set out to find her, and at some point during my search, while walking along some kind of wooden pontoon, I lost my footing and fell fully clothed into the waters of what must have been the Kiel Canal. I wrote to Bettina, but she never replied, and I can't say I blame her. To this day I can't understand what possessed me to ignore her so callously, just in order to tie one on with the boys, which I could have done any night of the week. Self-sabotage was fast becoming a speciality of mine. Still later in the summer I sailed with the RNR to La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast of France, and shortly after that I was with the RNR again, this time in the Pool of London, a stretch of the Thames lying between London Bridge and Rotherhithe. In order to reach the ship, I had to board some kind of launch with a group of other seamen, one of whom, a strikingly handsome Leading Seaman of about 30 I knew only by sight, had taken unofficial charge. Once we were all safely aboard, it was the turn of our golden-headed leader to join us, but as he stepped off the launch, he somehow lost his footing and slipped into the Thames beneath him. Within a matter of minutes his heavy clothing and boots, helped by a vicious current, had dragged him beneath the river's surface and he was lost. Soon after returning to London, I told my mother what had happened, and she wept the tears of one who instinctively knew what those who loved this man must have been feeling at the time. It was only then that the true appalling tragedy of the incident hit home and I ran into the bathroom and sobbed my heart out myself. Thinking back on it, a line from that beautiful song "How Men Are" by Scottish singer-songwriter Roddy Frame comes to mind: "Why should it take the tears of a woman to see how men are?" It was in this same year of ‘75 that I attempted to pass what is known as the AIB or Admiralty Interview Board, with a view to qualifying as a Supply and Secretariat officer in the Royal Navy. This involved my taking the train down to HMS Sultan, the Royal Navy's specialist training centre in Gosport, Hampshire, where I spent three days attending various examinations and interviews intended to assess my potential as a future naval officer. On one occasion, early on in the long weekend just before one assignment or another, I was putting the final touches to my toilette in front of a handy mirror when one of the guys I was sharing a dorm with felt it necessary to remind me that I wasn't at a fashion show. He wasn't going to be coming along with me that night to the

disco, or any night for that matter, but you couldn’t fault his dedication. Two guys eventually did agree to keep me company on one of the nights we spent at Sultan, but they didn't really seem all that keen. As things turned out, they left me alone at a Gosport disco to return to the Sultan for an early night. When I got back myself, I was shocked to discover that Sultan's main entrance had been locked and was now being manned by an armed guard. If the young man nervously trying to reach someone in authority within the training centre on a walkie talkie was wondering exactly what kind of person returns to base dressed to the nines after a night's disco dancing when he was supposed to be in the midst of three days of gruelling tests and interviews that were vital to his future career, then he gave no indication of it. He did however eventually make contact with someone in authority, and I can remember passing through an officer's mess soon afterwards and briefly exchanging pleasantries with its airily affable occupants. English gentlemen of the old school, they of course kept their actual opinions of me to themselves.It may just be me, but I can't help thinking that had I returned to Sultan that night before being locked out, I might have been in with a better chance of passing the AIB, that is, as opposed to failing it, which I perhaps rather predictably did. Ay, every inch the superstar. One of the last notable incidents of the year took place in December, when dressed in all-white with a fawn raincoat I took my friend Brenda, one of the London Division Wrens but originally from the north of England, to a dinner dance at London's Walford Hilton Hotel. We were joined there by a couple of Brenda's close friends, a fair, bearded man in a suit, and his dark, extrovert wife. The husband was one of those deeply gentle men I came across from time to time in the 1970s. They weren't all bearded; but I can think of some who were, such as the madcap ship's captain described earlier. What united them was that they behaved with special protectiveness and affection towards me, and I've never forgotten them for it. Early on in the evening, Brenda became incensed when a group of older seamen started teasing me from their table, which didn't bother me at all because I knew these guys, and they meant no harm. Military life after all, is fuelled by this kind of raillery, but she insisted that their attitude stemmed from the fact that I was "better than what they are", as she put it, possibly in imitation of their pronounced London accents. It was kind of her to say so, but I think her judgement was way off the mark, because with them, what you saw is what you got, and if it wasn't always pretty, at least it was honest. My Future Positively Glittered Those Landmark Years

 For two years, I'd worshipped at the altar of those artists who had either immediately predated the age of Modernism of ca. 1880-1920, or been part of its Banquet Years, and beyond into the Golden Twenties, the Années folles and so on. However, in 1976, a brash and gaudy new era started to influence the way I dressed and acted, and for much of that year, I dressed down in a workmanlike uniform of red windcheater, white tee-shirt and cuffed jeans as worn by James Dean in “Rebel Without a Cause”. Dean had died a week to the day before I was born in late 1955, and the 20th anniversary of his death appeared to exert a strong influence on rising Pop stars such as John Miles and Slik's Midge Ure. Slik were one of the biggest bands in Britain in 1976, with an image straight out of “Rebel” or a dozen lesser fifties delinquent movies. Sadly for them, though, and for many other bands who'd surfed the Glam Rock wave or emerged in its wake, they would be unjustly sidelined by the Punk uprising. As entranced as I was the fifties, there were still times when I reverted to the old escapist dandy image I'd adopted in defiance of what I saw as the leaden drabness of post-Hippie Britain, while discovering Modernist giants such as Baudelaire, Wilde, Gide, and Cocteau for the first time. One of these occasions came during the dying days of a famous long hot summer, when I wore top hat and tails and my fingernails painted bright red like some kind of hellish vision from Weimar Berlin to a party hosted by a friend from Brooklands. It was mid-September, and I know that to be a fact because I was supposed to have been at sea at the time on the minesweeper HMS Fittleton. I think it was only a couple of days afterwards that Fittleton capsized and sank to the bottom of the North Sea following a tragic accident involving another larger ship, the frigate HMS Mermaid. It resulted in the loss of twelve men, most of whom I knew personally, given that only weeks earlier I'd spent a few days on Fittleton with more or less exactly the same crew. She'd set sail from Shoreham in Sussex on the 11th of September 1976 with the intention of reaching the port of Hamburg on the 21st for a three day Official Visit, but never arrived. On the 20th, she took part in the NATO exercise "Teamwork" some 80 miles off the Dutch coast in the North Sea, after which she was ordered to undergo a Replenishment at Sea with the 2500 ton frigate HMS Mermaid. It was during this manoeuvre that the bow waves of the frigate inter-reacted with those of the sweeper to cause the two to collide. For some reason I'd earlier decided to opt out of the trip by pleading sickness. It was a decision that came to haunt me, despite the fact that had I taken part in the RAS manoeuvre I'd almost certainly have been assigned to what is known as the Tiller Flat, as had been the case on many previous occasions during exercises of this kind. This would have put me below deck, making escape

difficult, although far from impossible. In other words, I may or may not have survived the accident. Of the twelve who didn't survive I knew three quite well, and they were all men of remarkable generosity of spirit and sweetness of disposition, what I'd call natural gentlemen, and it broke my heart to think of what happened to them. I so wanted to comfort my shipmates for their loss, to bond with them and be part of what they were going through. I wanted to have survived like them. I went over it all again and again in my mind, until I drove myself almost insane with regret and grief. Once more I'd taken the easy way out, but this time it wouldn't be so easy for me to forget or explain away.  Looking back, I can’t help thinking that 1977 was a far darker year than those that came before it, mainly perhaps because it was marked by the violent irruption into the British cultural mainstream of Punk. From its London axis, it spread like a raging plague throughout that landmark year, even infecting the most genteel suburbs with an extreme and often horrifying sartorial eccentricity, which, fused with a defiant DIY ethic and brutal back-to-basics Rock produced something utterly unique even by the standards of the time. I was assaulted for the first time by the monstrous varieties of dress adopted by the early Punks while strolling along the Kings Road in what I think may have been January, and it would only be a matter of time before I too hoped to astound others the way they'd done me. However, for most of ’77, I dressed in a muted form which first took shape as a pair of cream brogue winklepickers, which I went on to supplement with black slip-ons with gold side buckles, mock- crocodile skin shoes with squared off toes, and a pair of black Chelsea boots, all perilously pointed. My new look evolved by degrees at the endless series of parties I attended as one after the other of my old Pangbourne pals celebrated their 21st in houses and apartments in various corners of trendy West and Central London. Of all of these, I was perhaps closest with future oil magnate Craig, who was still finding his feet in London’s most exalted social circles. These included a friend of his from the north of England who forged cutting edge images for some of the most powerful trendsetters in Rock music. I joined them a couple of times at Maunkberrys in Jermyn Street; and apart from the Sombrero in High Street Ken, it was the classiest club my eyes had ever seen. Being the naïf I was, I thought the style that dominated London's club land was somehow Punk-related, but I was way off the mark. It was the antithesis of the middle class hippie look that was still widespread throughout the UK, but deployed for posing, and dancing to the sweetest Soul music, not as a gesture of violent social dissent. It was partly the realm of the Soul Boys, whose love of black dance music was a legacy of the Mods and Skins that preceded them. While the Soul Boys were largely working class hard nuts from various dismal London suburbs, some Soul lovers were in

fact not Soul Boys at all, so much as elegant trendies with a penchant for floppy college boy fringes, plaid shirts worn over white tee-shirts, straight leg jeans, and winklepickers. The Soul Boys also favoured the wedge haircut, which could be worn with streaks of blond or red or even green, brightly-coloured peg-top trousers and winkle pickers or plastic beach sandals. Speaking of the wedge, it was taken up at some point in the late 1970s by a faction of Liverpool football fans who'd developed a taste for European designer sportswear while travelling on the continent for away matches. Thence, the Casual subculture was spawned, and its passion for designer labels persists to this day among British working class youth in every small town and shopping mall throughout the land , although the Casuals themselves have long disappeared. The Restless and the Riotous By the summer I was working as a sailing instructor in Palamos on Spain's Costa Brava. I was an idle and incompetent worker, and after a few months I got the sack. Yet, I chose to stay on in Palamos, parading around town by day, while spending most of my evenings at the Disco where I discovered Donna Summer’s “Love Trilogy”. As much as I loved the party life of a Disco kid, what I wanted most of all was fame. I wanted the endless hedonism too, but enjoyed as a successful working actor like golden boys Peter Firth or Gerry Sundquist. The problem was, I wasn’t really cut out for the task. Granted, I had the pretty boy looks, but very few actors, or even musicians, become truly successful on the strength of looks alone, and this was especially true of the seventies, an age without MP3s or My Space or endless TV talent showcases. I'd not yet appeared in a single play, except for a handful at Pangbourne. My roles there included three en travestis. One of these had me standing onstage for a few brief minutes without uttering a single word. Another was as a maid in a one-act play by Shaw called "Passion, Poison and Petrifaction", which saw me clomping around in drag in studded military boots, while speaking in a hysterical high-pitched voice. I can remember bringing the house down with that one. I also played a society beauty engaged in some kind of illicit liaison with my close friend Simon, but the name of the play escapes me. My only male role was as an effeminate psychopath in a little known Agatha Christie one-acter called “The Rats”, and if the praise of the college nurse was anything to go by, it showed real promise. When all's said and done, though, I was hardly a National Youth Theatre wunderkind. In terms of my other "talents", I'd written a few simple songs on the guitar, but I still couldn’t play bar chords. I wasn't a natural born genius like my cousin Rod. My singing voice was good, though, and already quite versatile. As a would-be writer, I'd filled countless pages with endlessly corrected notes, but there was nothing

tangible to show for it all. It could hardly be said then that my future positively glittered before me.  My final trip with the RNR came towards the end of the summer. Colin wasn’t sailing with us, but I had other mates to raise Cain with, such as the aristocratic Adam. He was a tall redheaded young man of about 26 who looked a little like the youthful Edward Fox, with a trace perhaps of Old Etonian actor, Damian Lewis. Like me, he loved music and fashion and the Soul Boy and Punk Rock scenes - I think he was a regular at the Pantiles night club in Bagshot - and we hit it off from our very first meeting back at the President. He later confided in me about his early life which had been marked by one tragedy after the other, and his quiet and courteous manner masked a troubled inner life which he didn't like to flaunt any more than he did an ability to look after himself in any situation no matter how violent. I can remember one night in a south coast bar when for some reason an inebriate sailor took a serious dislike to me and was clearly keen to do some serious damage to my pretty face, when Adam stood in and caused the sailor to back off. You overestimated his refinement at your peril. I can imagine though that there were those who wondered how he ended up serving as a rating, as they would have done me. I'm thinking especially of some of the young guys from the division that sailed in tandem with us that summer to the port of Ostend in Belgium. There was a time when, as some of these hard young seamen were gathering in an Ostend street for a scrap with some locals who had offended them, Adam and I made it clear we had no intention of joining in. This prompted one of their number, a waiflike little sailor of about 16 or 17 to turn to us with a look of utter bewilderment on his beardless face and ask, "What's wrong with youse guys?", before joining his mates for the impending riot. Adam just didn't see the point of fighting for the sake of it but he was no coward as I've already made quite clear. This secret inner strength would eventually see him being commissioned as an officer in the Royal Navy, which had been his destiny all along; but not mine. My time with the London Division, RNR came to an end in late 1977 with a surprisingly positive character report, which I was very grateful for. If military life had never been for me, it's a part of who I am, and my story would be all the poorer without it. Even later in the summer I joined the former Merchant Navy College in Greenhithe, Kent, as a trainee Radio Officer. I formed several close friendships there; but closest of all was with Jesse, a lovable hard nut with a thick London accent who'd been born into nearby Gravesend's large Asian community. Rough as he was, he was loyal and kind-hearted towards those he liked and trusted, and for a time we were pretty well inseparable. I used to endlessly nag about his attitude, not that there was anything wrong with it - he was one of the kindest guys I've ever known - but he had a habit of talking tough, which intimidated some people, including

myself at times. As things turned out, I was the one who quit college first, even if he did follow me soon afterwards, which caused him to wonder why I’d taken the moral high ground in the first place. I couldn't answer. It was through Jay I think that I started going to discos at Gravesend's Woodville Hall, subject of the versified piece below, which was based on an unfinished short story written in '78 or '79. Pretty well every week for a while, a gang of us from the college would head out to the Woodville Hall, where we were treated like visiting royalty by the - mainly white and Asian - kids, whose outlandish outfits stood out in such striking contrast to the industrial bleakness of their surroundings. English suburban life in those days didn't include mobile phones or DVD players, personal computers or the world wide web, so was a fertile breeding ground for wild and eccentric youth cults such as Punk, New Romanticism, Goth et al. These last two were still in the future, but their seeds had been sown during the heyday of Punk, whose influence pervaded the Hall together with the Soul Boy look. The Woodville Hall Soul Boys knew how to dance like you wouldn't believe...anybody would think they were students of Jazz ballet or something, but they were just ordinary working class kids, who became superstars once they took to the dance floor. The Woodville Hall Soul Boys Soon after I'd paidMy sixty0r seventy pence,I found myselfIn what I thoughtWas a miniature London.I saw girlsIn chandelier earrings,In stiletto heels,Wearing eveningDresses,Which contrasted withThe bizarreHair coloursThey favoured:Jet black0r bleach blonde,With flashes ofRed, Purple0r green.Some wore largeBow ties,Others unceremoniouslyHanged

Their school tiesRound theirNecks.Eye make-upWas exaggerated.The boys all hadShort hair,Wore mohair sweaters,Thin ties,Baggy,Peg-top trousersAnd winklepicker shoes.A band playingRaw street rockAt a frantic speedCame to a sudden,Violent climax...Melodic, rhythmic,Highly danceableSoul musicWas now beginningTo fill the hall,With another group0f short-haired youths...Smoother, more elegant,Less menacingThan the previous ones.These well-dressedStreet boysWore well-pressed pegs0f red or blue...They pirouettedAnd posed...Pirouetted and posed. Farewell Gilded Youth Soon after returning from the Merchant Navy College in December '77, I auditioned for a place on the three year drama course at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in the City of London, which was really what I'd wanted to do in the first place. Incredibly, as I'd already failed two earlier auditions for RADA, Guildhall accepted me for the course beginning in autumn 1978. I was exhilarated; but that didn't stop me sinking further into the nihilistic Punk lifestyle. Having been blown away by the hairstyle of one of a small gang of Punks I knew by sight from nights out in Dartford in late '77, I decided to imitate it a few weeks later. It was spiked in classic Punk style, with a kind of a halo of bright blond taking in the front of the head, both sides, and a strip at the nape of

the neck. I've part of a photograph of myself wearing this style with a long Soul Boy fringe at the front, before I eventually had it cut into the spikes. By the spring of 1978, I'd shorn it all off, and I looked like a skinhead. It was genuinely dangerous being a Punk in the late '70s, and you lived in constant fear of attack or abuse if you chose to dress like one. After all, Punk's culture of insolence and outrage was extreme even by the standards of previous British youth cults such as the Teds, the Rockers, the Mods, the Greasers, the Skins, the Suedeheads and the Smoothies. Britain in those days was a country still dominated to some degree by pre-war moral values, which were Victorian in essence, and a cultural war was being fought for the soul of the nation. It could be said therefore that Punks were the avant-garde of the new Britain in a way that would be impossible today. This explains the incredible hostility Punks attracted from some members of the general public. Close by to where I shared a house with my parents in the furthermost reaches of south west London where suburbia meets country I saw Hersham Punk band Sham '69 shortly before they became nationally famous. I already knew their lead singer Jimmy Pursey by sight; at least I think it was him I saw miming to Chris Spedding's "Motorbiking" at a Walton disco one night. The gig took place in a poky hall above a pub in the centre of a large bleak industrial estate, itself surrounded by small drab council estates and endless rows of council houses. I was often there on a Sunday in the late 70s, usually with my brother and friends, but sometimes alone. On one occasion I can recall, the usual Disco or Pop gave way to a violent Punk Rock anthem which saw the tiny dance space being invaded by deranged pogo-dancers as if they’d been summoned by some malignant deity. On another, a Ted revivalist, a follower of classic Rock and Roll who favoured flashy fifties-style clothing, tried to start some trouble with me in the toilet. At this point, Steve, another Ted who'd befriended me about a year previously when I looked like an extra from a ‘50s High School picture stepped in with the magical words: "He's a mate!" His intervention may have saved me from a hiding that night, because Teds had a loathing of Punks informed by their essential conservatism and respect for tradition. There was a time Steve asked me, almost imploringly, whether I was truly into "this Punk lark" or whatever it was he called it, and I assured him I wasn't. I may even have added that I still loved the fifties, which was actually the truth to an extent; but that wasn’t the point. The fact is I lied to him to look good in his eyes, which was a pretty low thing to do to a friend. On New Years Eve, Jesse and I went to a party in London's swanky West End. It was one of the last - perhaps even the very last - in a long series of celebrations I'd gone to throughout '77 mainly as a result of friends from Pangbourne reaching the landmark age of 21.

Before arriving, we met up as arranged with Craig, and as soon as the introductions were over, Jesse saw fit to impress us with a truly terrifying solo display of his lethal street fighting skills. "I'm suitably impressed", said Craig, and looked it, and he was not a man to be messed with himself, but we got on like a house on fire that insane and dissolute night, which at one point saw me pouring a full glass of beer over my head. What the beautiful dancer I'd spent most of the evening with thought of a nice boy like me doing a thing like that she didn't say. In the late '70s, I met so many people who might have done anything for me, and yet my one true passion appeared to be the creation of endless drunken scenes, and a party wasn't a party for me in those days unless I'd caused one, after which I simply moved on…and the sheer waste of youth, of life, of love makes me weep. What was I thinking? One thing’s for sure…I’ve got plenty of time to come up with an answer.  In the spring of 1978, I arrived in the city of Fuengirola on Spain’s Costa del Sol, with the intention of helping set up a sailing school with a young Englishman whom my father had recently befriended. It had all been prearranged between them, but as things turned out, the project came to nothing. However, I stayed on, living first in an apartment Adam had kindly set me up in, then in a little hotel in town, and finally, rent-free, with an American friend, Charlotte. She was one of a handful of US ex-pats living in Fuengirola alongside young people from Australia, Britain, Ireland, Germany, South America and other parts of the world. It was a hedonistic atmosphere, and I wasted little time in becoming part of it. I spent my nights at the Tam Tam night club, where I set about establishing myself as Fuengirola’s very own Tony Manero…in Punk Rock attire. It was my first year as a Punk, in point of fact, and among the clothes I favoured were a black cap-sleeved wet-look tee-shirt, drainpipe jeans of black or green, worn with black studded belt, festooned with silver chain filched from a Spanish restroom, and kept in place by multiple safety pins, fluorescent pink teddy boy socks, and white shoes with black laces like the ones I’d seen on the cover of a 999 album. At one stage, I even wore a safety pin – disinfected by being dipped into a drink – in my left earlobe, but I removed this once my lug had started to pulsate. After a few weeks, I became lead singer for the Tam Tam house band, and would typically wear so much make-up onstage that one occasion, the microphone became smeared in lipstick. I was always short of money, but I could order anything I wanted from the bar at the Tam Tam, and when I was flat broke, my close friend Sally bought me toasted cheese sandwiches to keep me going. We spent very little time on the beach, but were often to be found at Lew Hoad’s famous Campo de Tenis, that is, when I wasn’t rehearsing with the band, and in the evening, I was often to be found at Sally’s parents’ house, putting on the slap, and perhaps

even painting my nails a gaudy shade of red, before heading along to the Tam Tam to do my gig. However, some nights we preferred to get away from it all to another part of town, and I can still recall the thrill of being alone with her in the demi-light of the Disco, while the evening was still young, hopelessly unaware that such moments are rare even in youth, and get steadily rarer as life forges on. On one occasion as we were strolling through town by night, the legend that was racing champion James Hunt called out her name before emerging from the darkness. They exchanged a few words before Hunt vanished back into the night as suddenly as he’d arrived. I could scarcely believe my eyes, but it was that magical a summer However, I had to return to London to take my place at the Guildhall once it was over. After all, I was going to be a star, wasn't I… A year later, I was back, but not in Fuengirola, even though the guys from the band had so wanted me to reclaim my place as front man…Coco es el unico, as the sticks man once said about me. No, I’d chosen to go with my parents to La Ribera instead, and I felt a deep and overwhelming sense of exhaustion as I stretched out in the Costa Calida sun, but I don't recall being especially disappointed by the fact that only days earlier I'd been asked to leave the Guildhall, or rather strike out on my own as a performer. I was resigned to it, even though my dream of being a gilded youth at the Guildhall had barely lasted a year. It must have been the searing heat that made me feel so burned out. Just before quitting Fuengirola the previous summer of '78, I'd been approached with an offer of singing in the Canary Islands, which I turned down for the sake of the Guildhall. Who knows where it might have led had I said yes instead, but then it would have been a crying shame to have missed out on the Guildhall, even though it all ended in tears. It would take an entire separate volume to list the incredible experiences that arose out of my time at that much lauded place of learning, of which my own dear dad Pat had been an alumnus before me…but I’ll be brief in recounting my own.  What I will say is that I was involved with a string of Rock and Pop bands, and that with one after the other of these I performed at the Folk Nights that were staged on a sporadic basis in the basement of the nearby Lauderdale Tower in the Barbican area of central London. Through one of them, Rockets, I was talent-scouted as lead singer for a guitarist of genius who was hoping to form a band at the Guildhall, and clearly thought I'd cut it as a front man, but for some reason, the band was never formed. He went on to play and write for one of the world's leading Rock superstars, something he's been doing now since 1990. At one point he briefly joined a Guildhall-based Jazz-Funk outfit with another then friend of mine. That band would go on to become one of the most successful Pop acts of the eighties, chalking up one hit

after the other in a Britain in which Jazzy Dance music was favoured by flash boys in white socks and tasselled loafers. I was even invited to an early rehearsal, at a time when they might have done with a front man like me…but of course, I didn’t go. Through another of my groups, Narcissus, I found only disgrace and humiliation, not once but twice. The first time we played together was just prior to the forming of the Rockets, and although it had been a disaster, due to my drunken upstaging of the other band members, at least I got a good gig out of it, thanks to the kindness of Crispian, our piano player. Furthermore, it was through the Rockets that I was offered the gig with Don. However, rather than wait for the call from him, I went on ahead and re-formed the Rockets with original members Mike on drums, and Robin on guitar, and it was a total fiasco. I slapped on the make-up, and Mike and Robin followed suit, but being relatively untainted by personal vanity, the results were unsettling. Sweet-natured Robin painted his Botticellian features like an ancient pagan warrior, while gentle giant Mike saw fit to smother his with military-style camouflage. Not surprisingly, our set was accompanied by a riot of heckling which although far from malicious, ultimately provoked me to irritation, and I ended up tossing my plectrum into the audience with a sarcastic, "Here's to all my loving fans!", or something equally pathetic. I can't help thinking that a petulant outburst did no end of harm to my reputation, because the chutzpah of the natural leader who demands and gets attention and respect through the sheer force of his personality was never among my gifts. Rather I was blessed with the seductive charm of the social climber for whom alpha status comes through the subtle exercise of exquisite manners. In this respect I was perhaps a little like Julien Sorel, anti-hero of Stendhal's "The Scarlet and the Black" who despite humble origins, succeeds in ascending to the very top of the social ladder, only to allow a single act of madness to destroy all his good work. My final band was the '50s revivalist act Z Cars, which even won a small fan base for itself. We were Carl Cool, front man and chief songwriter with a tattoo painted onto his shoulder, Robert Fitzroy-Square, the geek with the Buddy Holly horn rims, Dave Dean the hard man of the band with the don’t mess with me stare, and Little Ricky Ticky, the baby at only 18 who could have been a heart throb had things worked out for us, which they didn’t. Things went wrong for us when one of the key members quit, and we replaced him with a close friend, Ian, who was a far better musician than any of us. With his help, we tried to deviate from our usual three-chord doo-wop or Rock with more complex songs, starting with a tightly arranged version of Arthur Crudup's "That's All Right Mama", complete with harmony backing vocals. Sadly though, we weren’t up to the task, and disillusion swiftly set in. By this time, I’d left the Guildhall anyway, and it just wasn’t the same.

There had been emotional scenes at my farewell party held in the depths of the Barbican Estate's Lauderdale Tower, and some had cried openly at the thought of my leaving. During the course of the night, a very dear friend, Gill, told me to contact a London-based impresario and agent well-known for offering young actors their very first positions within the entertainment industry. Her own brother had received his first break through this flamboyant and warm-hearted man, and he’d recently caused a stir in a major starring role on TV: I took her advice and sure enough, he offered me my very first paid acting job as Christian the Chorus Boy - doubling as Joey the Teddy Bear -complete with furry ursine costume - in a pantomime tour of “Sleeping Beauty”. A few weeks after this had culminated at the Buxton Opera House, I was tendered the small part of Mustardseed in "A Midsummer Night's Dream", to be directed by Richard Cottrell at the Bristol Old Vic, at which point, I could have been forgiven for believing that going it alone had been the best thing I ever did…but oh…the indescribable feeling of having passed that audition… West of the Fields Long Gone Children of the Brightest Sun

Among those who appeared in the Richard Cottrell production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at the Bristol Old Vic in early 1980 were legendary method extremist and future Hollywood superstar Daniel Day Lewis, and flamboyant character actor, Nickolas Grace, still best known for playing Anthony Blanche in the 1981 TV production of “Brideshead Revisited”. Evelyn Waugh is believed to have partly based Blanche on the poet and aesthete Brian Howard, who, despite American parentage, was the ultimate sun child of twenties London. The cast as a whole though was incredibly gifted and charismatic, and on what I think was the eve of the first night, I was lucky enough to see a BOV production of one of my favourite ever musicals, Frank Loesser’s “Guys and Dolls” featuring Clive Wood as Sky Masterson and Pete Postlethwaite as Nathan Detroit. I can honestly say it provided me with more unalloyed pleasure than any other show I've seen, before or since. After resuming my role as Mustardeed in the summer at the London Old Vic, my next acting job came early the following year courtesy of an old family friend, Haydn Davies. Haydn had been at both RADA and the Royal Academy of Music with my dad, and he just happened to be the Company Stage Manager at the famous Phoenix Theatre in Charing X Road at the time. As I recall, a production of "Satyricon" was already under way and they wanted me as a last minute Assistant Stage Manager, in charge of preparing the cast’s nonexistent costumes. I’d also be the show’s percussionist, and my primal thrumming rhythms would

open the show, and punctuate the action throughout, although in time the director kindly offered me a small non-speaking role. “Satyricon” is one of only two surviving examples of a novel from the early part of the Roman Empire, the other being Apuleius’ “Metamorphoses”. It’s believed to have been written during the reign of the emperor Nero by Petronius, an imperial courtier specialising in fashion, known as an arbiter elegantarium. According to its testimony, as well as Petronius’ own accounts of Nero’s depravity written shortly before his death in 66AD, imperial Rome's infamous decadence was already firmly in place long before her final fall in the third century. Not that she ever died in a spiritual sense according to many Christians holding to the pre-millennial view of prophecy. They believe she’ll be fully revived in the last days before the Second Coming, with the Antichrist at her head. Also in '81, I became a kind of part-time member of an initially nameless youth movement whose origins lay in the late 1970s, largely among discontented ex-Punks, but who were eventually dubbed Futurists, and then New Romantics. Their music of preference included the kind of synthesized Art Rock pioneered by German collectives such as Kraftwerk and Can, as well as the highbrow Glam of David Bowie and Roxy Music. All of these elements went on to inform the music of Spandau Ballet and Visage, who emerged from the original scene at the Blitz Club in Covent Garden, and Ultravox, a former Punk band of some renown whose fortunes revived with the coming of the New Romantics. The name arose as a result of their adoption of clothing styles from eras widely perceived to be more romantic than the late 20th Century, whether relatively recent ones such as the ‘20s or ‘40s, or more distant historical ones such as the Medieval or Elizabethan. Ruffs, veils, frills, kilts and so on were common among them, but then so were demob suits. Several of the cult's more outlandish trendsetters went on to become famous names within the worlds of art and fashion. They stood in some contrast to more harder-edged young dandies such as the Kemp Brothers from working class Islington. Their Spandau Ballet began life as the hippest band in London, famously introduced as such at the Scala cinema by writer and broadcaster Robert Elms in May 1980. In time, though, they mutated into a chart-friendly band with a penchant for soulful Pop songs such as the international smash hit, “True”. I attended New Romantic nights at Le Kilt and Le Beat Route among other swishy night spots, and was even snapped at one of these by the legendary London photographer David Bailey, but I was never a true New Romantic so much as a lone fellow traveller keen to experience first hand the last truly original London music and fashion cult before it imploded as all others had done before it. Yet, despite its florid decadence, it was always far more mainstream than several other musical movements which arose at the same time in the wake of Punk, such as Post-Punk and Goth. For this reason, several of its keys acts went on to become part of the

New Wave, whose mixture of complex tunes and telegenic Glam image partly inspired the Second British Invasion of the American charts. This occurred thanks largely to a desperate need on the part of the newly arrived Music Television for striking videos, and went on to exert a colossal influence on the development of music and fashion throughout the eighties. As '81 wore on, my acting career lost momentum, with the result that some kind of family decision was reached to the effect that I should return to my studies with a view to eventually qualifying as a teacher. Thence, I went on to pass interviews for both the University of Exeter, and Westfield College, London, scraping in with two very average "A" level passes at B and C. I wanted to stay in London, so as to keep the possibility of picking up some acting work in my spare time open, so in the autumn I started a four-year BA degree course in French and Drama mainly at Westfield - but also partly at the nearby Central School of Speech and Drama - while staying in a small room on campus. At first I was so deeply unhappy at finding myself a student again at 25 that in an attempt to escape my situation I auditioned for work as an acting Assistant Stage Manager; but I wasn’t taken on, so I resigned myself to my fate. A short time later, while sauntering around at night close by to the Central School, I was ambushed by a group of my fellow drama students who may have seemed to me to incarnate the sheer carefree rapturous vitality and joy of life of youth. Whatever the truth, because of them and those like them, I came to love my time at Westfield, coinciding as it did with the first half of the last of a triad of decades in the West of unceasing artistic and social change and experimentation. Indeed, the Playboy philosophy which exploded in the 1960s could be said to have reached its full flowering in the crazy eighties, even if the vast majority of people whose salad days fell within its boundaries ultimately forged respectable lives following a brief season as outsiders. As for me, as much as I loved being young in the ‘70s and ‘80s, I still bitterly regret the shallow narcissism that once caused me to scorn the trappings of status, security and respectability I now pine for like a cruelly spurned lover. This flouting of the elements of a contented life for the sake of a few seasons of joy has been tirelessly promoted in the West for over half a century now, not least through Rock music, the narcissistic art par excellence. When I think of the society it’s created, I’m reminded of the workings of the flesh that corrupted the antediluvian world, and which survived the Flood to be disseminated throughout the nations to spell the end of one empire after the other, the Babylonian, the Medo-Persian, the Greek, the Roman… I had no excuse to embrace the libertine life myself, having been blessed by every great gift a young man could possibly hope for, including a stable childhood and first-rate education. Yet, as I see it, our most treasured qualities, such as brilliance, beauty, charm and talent, which so often operate together, must be submitted to God,

lest they come dangerous, as they so often do. The gifted, being so visible, are also intensely vulnerable. More susceptible than most to a multitude of temptations, they are therefore all too liable to fall prey to Luciferian pride and Luciferian rebellion. In this regard, they are like David's favourite son Absalom, who was physically flawless yet morally bankrupt. Little wonder, then, that so many of them are drawn to the power offered by art, and especially music, the writer of the first song Lamech having been in the line of Cain. Indeed, there are those Christians who believe that the Cainites were the first pagan people, and that they corrupted the Godly line of Seth through a sensual and wicked music not unlike much contemporary Rock. Of course not all Rock music is flagrantly wicked, far from it. Much of it is melodically lovely. While in terms of its lyrics, its finest songs display the most delicate poetic sensibility. The fact remains, however, that no art form has been quite so associated as Rock with rebellion, transgression, licentiousness, intoxication and death-worship, nor been so influential as such. To think I once desperately sought fame as a Rock and Roll star myself, and if not as Rock artist, then actor, or writer, and it was surely a good thing I never gained this pagan form of immortality because had I done so, I'd almost certainly have been used for the furtherance of the kingdom of darkness. Once I'd served my purpose I may well have died a solitary premature death as an addict, as has been the fate of so many men and women briefly animated by the charismatic superstar spirit before being cruelly discarded by the Enemy of Souls.

Ferocity of an Enfant Terrible

As I mentioned earlier, at first I fiercely resented being at Westfield, perhaps because I viewed being back in full-time education at 26 as a giant step backwards in terms of my acting career, but before long I'd embarked on one of the happiest periods of my entire life; and Westfield in the early '80s was a seething hotbed of talent and creativity, providing me with almost unlimited opportunities for acting and performance. Within days, I'd found my first best friend from among my fellow French and Drama students, a slim, good-looking, dark-haired natural born charmer from the north east of England bearing the name of Andrew. Despite a rugby player's powerful wiry frame, he dressed like a classic Rock star du jour, with pierced left ear graced by pendant earring, and favouring skin-tight jeans worn with black pointed suede Cuban-heeled boots. Together, we went on to feature in Brecht and Weill's's "The Threepenny Opera", closely followed by Sam Shepard’s “The Tooth of Crime”. In the first, I had two small roles, the most fascinating for me being that of petty street thief Filch, who'd been played by the celebrated monstre sacré of the arts, Antonin Artaud, in one of two

film versions directed by G.W. Pabst in 1931. I came to be so very proud of this fact because Artaud, a perfect example of the avant-garde faith in extremis, was one of my most beloved cursed poets. Through this production, I went on to play jive-talking disc jockey Galactic Jack in “The Tooth of Crime”, while Andrew landed the lead role of Hoss. Writer Sam Shepard has spoken of being influenced by Artaud in his own work, which is no coincidence, as Artaud's concept of a Theatre of Cruelty has proved prophetic of much of the theatre of the post-war years, indeed art as a whole, with its emphasis on assailing the senses, and in some cases also the sensibilities, of the public through every available means. Before long, I was channelling every inch of my will to perform into one play after the other at Westfield, the beautiful long-vanished college which became my whole world for two glorious years, while any real ambition to succeed as an actor receded far into the background. As for my French studies, I often flaunted an insolence and outspokenness in my essays which somewhat belied my mild-mannered disposition. This may have stemmed in part from the influence of my favourite accursed artists, but it also reflected an exhibitionistic need to shock. How close it brought me to a seared conscience I can't say; but one thing is certain, my compassion started to recede. This didn't happen instantly of course. Yet, even during those first two golden years, some of those who were drawn to me on a deep emotional level betrayed a certain unease with their words, and I was variously described as intense, inscrutable, mysterious, melancholy and disabused. So, why didn't I cross the line beyond which it becomes impossible for a person to respond to the Holy Spirit? Perhaps it was something to do with the prayers of believing friends and relatives. These may have kept something precious alive during those dark years. Certainly, I never stopped being a caring person, and I can recall being appalled by those artists who advocated the actual harming of innocents in the name of art, while celebrating those who extolled the total demolition of the established order. This nihilistic love of destruction kept uneasy company with a high and mighty dudgeon towards what I perceived as social injustice, and among its chief targets were dictators on the right wing of the political spectrum - in fact, the political right as a whole - and while I also opposed left-wing oppression, I reserved my real animus for the right. The 1980s was a decade of protest and riot in the UK, and all through its years of raging discontent, I allied myself with one radical lobby after the other. These included Greenpeace, CND, Animal Aid, Amnesty, and the British-based Anti-Apartheid Movement. I marched against the looming nuclear threat in London and Paris, lectured for Amnesty while blind drunk to a roomful of middle-aged Rotarians, had a letter published in the newspaper of the AAM, and was a remorseless disseminator of rants, pamphlets,

tracts, postcards, and whatever else was at hand as a means of spreading a message of social revolution. Mine was the righteous fury that is rooted in a false notion of the perfectibility of Man, that fails to recognise that oppression stems from the sin we all share, and that has no real satisfying motive other than its own existence. In time, it started to turn inwards, and to eat away at the reserves of tenderness that meant so much to me, its malignity enhanced by alcohol and dissolute living, and an addiction to astrology and other occult topics, and scandalous art and philosophy. My soul effectively started to cave in, and while it was ultimately saved from terminal ruin, I don't think it's ever fully recovered from the damage I inflicted on it. Such is my own "thorn in the flesh"... This first remnant from my Westfield diaries, "Some Sad Dark Secret" testifies to some extent to a former tendency to mental vehemence. It was based on notes contained within a single piece of scrap paper which I unearthed some years ago, and probably dating from 1982 or '83. The first three sections contain words of advice offered me by my former Westfield mentor, Dr Margaret Mein, the fourth and fifth, further words offered me by another of my Westfield tutors, and which served to upbraid me for what he saw as a didacticism reminiscent of Rousseau. He was of course referring not to the painter Henri, but the Swiss-born author, philosopher and composer, who was not just one of the chief inspirers of the French Revolution, but through the emphasis he placed on subjectivity in his writings, the great Romantic movement in the arts. His assertion that Man is born free while being everywhere in chains, which stemmed from his belief in the essential goodness of Man, has assured him a place of honour in the history of Socialism, which is significantly predicated on such a belief. Fused with the mystical and occult tendencies that have been its time-honoured companions, Socialism was effectively my religion at the time. Were I to have survived into middle age still convinced of the perfectibility of Man under certain social conditions, the outcome would almost certainly have been bitter disillusion, because it’s only through the regeneration of the heart that a person can be changed. I learned this truth the hard way.

Some Sad Dark Secret

Dr M. said:“TemperYour enthusiasm,The extremesOf yourreactions,You should haveA moreConventional

FrameOn which toHang yourunconventionality.”

The tone of someOf my workIs oftenA little dubious,She said.She thoughtThat thereWas somethingWrong,That I’m hidingSome sad and darkSecretFrom the world.

She told meNot to rhapsodise,That it would beDifficult,Impossible, perhaps,For me toHarnessMy dynamism.“Don’t push People”,She said.“You makeYourselfVulnerable”.

Dr H. said:“By the third page,I felt I’d beenBulldozed.I can almost seeYour soapbox.Like Rousseau,You’re telling usWhat to do.You seem toWork yourselfInto such anEmotional pitch…

And thisExtraordinary

Capacity for lists.

The Westfield Players

In the summer, a faction of us – mostly culled from the Drama department – took Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” to the internationally famous Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and in our production, Shakespeare's Illyria was transformed into a Hippie paradise, with myself playing Feste as a Dylanesque minstrel strumming dirge-like folk songs with a voice like sand and glue. Most of the Westfield players’ male contingent couldn't have deviated more from the politely liberal norm found nightly at the Fringe Club on Chambers Street if they’d tried. Among the wildest were Gianni, a dashing Britalian of passionately held humanitarian convictions who played Sir Toby Belch, myself, the anarchic product of multiple social and educational influences and Ged, a tough but tender Scouser with slicked back rockabilly hair, who played Malvolio in a mesmerisingly understated manner. He was a fascinating, charismatic guy with a hilariously dark sense of humour who I think had been in a band in the early ‘80s at the legendary Liverpool Post-Punk club, Eric’s. He and his girlfriend Gail, who'd designed the flowing Hippie costumes, and was also a very dear friend, never stopped encouraging me nor believing in me. We were all so close despite sharing a single house, albeit a large one, on what I think was Prince's Street, and there was barely a cross word spoken for the entire fortnight we were its occupants. During my second year I lived in an upper floor apartment in Powis Gardens, Golders Green, with my close friends from the French department, Andrew, a former Sedbergh School alumnus, and fellow northerner David, whose alma mater was Sedbergh’s age-old rivals, Ampleforth, a Catholic college largely run by Benedictine monks. David was an incredibly gifted pianist and guitarist who despite a misleadingly serious demeanour was a warm, affectionate, witty, eccentric character who endlessly buzzed with the nervous energy of near-genius. He might not have wanted to ape the way his flatmates dressed and behaved, but he was fiercely protective of us despite our social butterfly ways. Soon after moving in, I decorated the walls of my room with various provocative images including reproductions of Symbolist and Decadent paintings, and icons of popular culture and the avant-garde. I was determined to live like an aesthete, even if it meant doing so on a shoestring in a cramped little flat in suburban north London, and to this end I organised a salon, which although well-attended didn't survive beyond a single meeting. We were a pretty shoddy imitation of the new Brideshead generation that was thriving in Oxford in the wake of the TV series. We drove our effusive landlady half-crazy at times through heavy-footedness and other crimes of upper floor thoughtlessness, although I don't remember her complaining all that much despite

the fact that we weren't averse to drink-fuelled discussions extending well into the night. In common with most of my friends I tended to drink heavily at night, but almost never during the day. The truth is that self-doubt wasn't an issue for me in the early eighties and I was a truly happy person, in fact so much so that I may have exaggerated my capacity for depth and melancholia as a means of making myself more interesting to others. In the final analysis though, what possible reason was there for me to be discontented, given that my first two Westfield years were fabulous...an unceasing cycle of plays, shows, concerts, discos, parties set in one of the most beautiful and bucolic areas of London? My second year drama project was centred on the one-act play "Playing with Fire" written by Swedish poète maudit, August Strindberg. I was allotted the task of supplying the music for the production as well as the leading role. This was Knut, a sardonic Bohemian painter forced to endure the adulterous behaviour of a friend Alex who following an invitation to stay with him at the house of his upper middle class parents for a few days, embarks on a torrid affair with his wife Kerstin. Alex was played by budding playwright Vince, while lovable Czech madcap Ondrej played Knut's hated bourgeois father. We performed the play a total of three times over the course of a couple of days. Later in the year, I was asked by Vince to appear in a short play of his, “Wild Life”, in which I played a violent young psychopath. It was just one of a succession of plays or shows I appeared in during that heady second year at Westfield, the others including “Twelfth Night”, with the Edinburgh cast more or less intact, Lorca’s “Blood Wedding”, with me miscast as the fiancé, and a Rice-Lloyd Webber showcase in which I played my former idol Che. The piece below was adapted from notes I made during this timeframe, with the first verse actually containing references to "Twelfth Night". It captures the blissful spirit of my first two years at Westfield, a college then in its twilight time prior to being incorporated into Queen Mary on east London’s grim Mile End Road, far, far from the semi-pastoral beauty of Hampstead. It also provides some indication of the unquenchable desire for attention, affection and approval that was typical of me, and the way it affected some of those who cared for me most.

Gallant Festivities

It was my evening, that’sFor sure -At last I’m goodAt something -27 years oldI may be, but…“Spot theEquity card…”

“It’s your aura, Carl…” “When are you goingTo be a superstar?”Said LuceA few days ago -That seemed to beThe questionOn everyone’s lips.“You got Feste perfectly,Just how I envisaged it”“…Not only whenYou’re onstagebut off too!”At last, at last, at lastI’m good at something…

And so the party…Chloecalled me...I listened……To her problems…ReferencesTo my “innocent face”…Livvy said:“Suzy seems ElusiveBut is in fact,Accessible;You’re the opposite -You give to everyoneBut are incapableOf giving in particular.”M. was comparing meTo June Miller…Descriptions by Nin:“She does not dareTo be herself…”Everything I’d alwaysWanted to be, I now am…“…She livesOn the reflectionsOf herself in the eyesOf others...There is no JuneTo grasp and know…”I kept getting up to dance…Suzy said: “I’m afraid…You’re inscrutableYou’re not justBlasé,Are you?”I spoke

Of the spells of calmAnd the hystericalReactionsPsychic Exhaustion Then anxious elation...

A Hateful Work Ethic

After the second year ended in the summer of 1983, I had a few months to spare before travelling to Paris to work as an English language assistant in a French secondary school, the Lycee Jean-Paul Timbaud. This spelled my exile from the old drama clique, and I'd not be joining them in their final year celebrations, and the knowledge of this must surely have affected me. I was, after all, severing myself from a vast network of gifted friends of whom I was deeply fond, and so losing an opportunity of growing as an artist in tandem with like-minded spirits. I could have opted for just a few weeks in France, but did I really want to be deprived of the chance of spending more than six months in the city I’d long worshipped as the only true home of an artist? Earlier in the year, my close friend Monique, a brilliant dynamic woman of North African Jewish ancestry had told me something to the effect that while many were drawn to me, they sensed “la mort” in me. The fact that she was in thrall to the intellectual worldview, and familiar with the works of the great psychologist Freud, who identified a death drive subsequently dubbed “thanatos”, may have had something to do with this observation. Precisely what she meant by death I can’t say, but she may have identified some kind of will to destruction - and specifically self-destruction - in me. As things turned out she was right, although this was barely embryonic in the early '80s if it existed at all. I’d attribute its existence to a cocktail of intoxicants, each one potentially fatal to the human spirit, these being alcohol, astrology and the occult, and intellectualism. All of these exerted a terribly negative effect on my development as a human being in my view. While intellectualism is not evil in itself, of course, it's my contention that intellectuals are more tempted than most by pride, rebellion and sensuality. The same could be said of those blessed with great wealth, great beauty, and great talent. Intellectuals have been among the most powerful men and women in history, and the Modern World has been significantly shaped by the wildly inspired views of geniuses such as Rousseau, Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. Their theories - and especially those of Marx and Freud and their apostles both orthodox and schismatic - fanned the flames of a largely bloodless revolution in the 1960s. While this had been largely quenched by 1972, the philosophies that inspired it, far from fading themselves, set about infiltrating the cultural mainstream where they became more extreme than ever.

Thence, they entered the realm of the Post-Modern, while remaining the ultimate consequence of centuries of Modernist influence on the Judaeo-Christian fabric of Western civilisation. However, I was never a true scholar like Monique, so much as someone who was both troubled and fascinated by the idea of hyper-intellectuality. Reading Colin Wilson's "The Outsider" in the early '80s, I especially identified with those intellectuals who were tortured by their own excesses of consciousness such as T.E. Lawrence, who wrote of his nature as being “thought-riddled”. As a child I was extrovert to the point of hyperactivity but by the time of my late adolescence, I found myself becoming subject to rival drives of equal intensity. One of these was towards seclusion and introspection, the other, attention and approbation. It seems this duality is common among sensitive artists and intellectuals, and may help to explain why so many of them have sought some form of escape from the complexities of their inner nature, even to the point of madness. In my own quest for renown, I subjected my body, the creation I tendered so lovingly at times, to a ruthless almost derisive work ethic. It couldn't have differed more from the noble impulse first identified by the German social philosopher Max Weber, and which he dubbed the Protestant Work Ethic. For Weber, the latter didn't so much give birth to Capitalism, which of course it didn't, as facilitate its growth in those nations in which the Reformation had been most successful. If the work ethic beloved of the Calvinist Pilgrims who forged the first American colonies was intended for the glorification of God, mine was a decadent late variant entirely given over to the promotion of the self. To this end, I consumed a variety of intoxicants, not just because I enjoyed doing so but because they enabled the constant socialising that brought me the attention, affirmation and approval I so craved…a narcissistic supply perhaps. How else to explain the sheer demented fervour of my endless self-exaltation? That’s not to say that I wasn't a loving person, because I was; but precisely what kind of love was it that I spread so generously about me? One thing it wasn’t was agape, the perfect, selfless love described in 1 Corinthians 13. In fact, it was a form so unacceptable to God that it would have seen me damned and in Hell had I actually managed to drink myself to death. I was hardly less heartless towards my mind than my body, treating it as an object of research and experimentation. Little wonder then that I turned to drink as a means of pacifying it, although alcohol still wasn't a serious problem for me in the early '80s, when my exhausting daily regimen tended to be fuelled instead by massive quantities of caffeine tablets. That said, Monique didn't like it when I drank to excess as if she'd already singled me out as someone who'd go on to develop a drink problem. In this as in other things she showed remarkable insight. The piece below first existed as a series of scrawled notes based on

several conversations I enjoyed with Monique in 1982 or '83. One of these resulted from an incident in which I'd made a fool of myself by storming off during a gig after having broken a guitar string. After a period spent apparently wandering aimlessly around Golders Green, I bumped into Monique, who'd come looking for me...

She Dear One Who Followed Me

It was she, bless her,who followed me...she'd been crying...she's too good for me,that's for sure..."Your friendsare too good to you...it makes me sickto see them...you don't really give...you indulge in conversation,but your mindis always elsewhere,ticking over.You could hurt me,you know...You are a Don Juan,so much.Like him, you haveno desires...I think you havedeep fears...There's something so...so...in your look.It's not thatyou're empty...but that there isan omnipresent sadnessabout you, a fatality..." From Paris to Cambridge Town From Paris to Golders Green

In the autumn of 1983 I took residence in a room on the grounds of the Lycée Jean-Paul Timbaud in Brétigny-sur-Orge, a commune in the southern suburbs of Paris some sixteen miles south of the city centre. It was during those early days in Paris that I became infected for what I believe to be the first time in my life by a serious sense of self-disillusion, as a new darkness spread over my mind.

This sea-change marked the onset of a real drink problem that went way beyond the usual student booze-ups into the murky realm of drinking alone by day, and there seems little doubt to me today that at its heart lay a conscience that was starting to become calloused through repeated defilement. My well-being, however, remained relatively unaffected, in fact, for those first few months, I was happy, blissfully happy to be a flâneur in the city which had inspired so many great poets to write classics of the art of urban idling. I wrote of my own experiences, usually late at night, in my room with the help of wine and cigarettes, and while few of these notes have survived, some incidents that may have once been committed to paper are still fresh in my mind. There was the time I sat opposite a same-sex couple on the Métro when I was still innocent of its labyrinthine complexities. “She” was a slim white girl, dressed from head to toe in denim, who gazed blissfully, with lips coyly pursed, into some wistful middle distance, while her muscular black boyfriend stared straight through me with eyes in which desire and menace seemed to be mixed, until one of them spoke, almost in a whisper, “Qu'est-ce-que t'en pense?” I recall the night I took the Métro to Montparnasse-Bienvenue, where I slowly sipped a demi-blonde in a brasserie, perhaps of the type immortalised by Brassai in his photographs of the secret life of '30s Paris. At the same time, a bewhiskered old alcoholic in a naval officer's cap, his table strewn with empty wine bottles and cigarette butts, repeatedly screeched the name, "Phillippe!" until a pallid impassive bartender with patent leather hair filled the old man's glass to the brim with a mock-obsequious “Voilà, mon Capitaine!!” I can also remember the afternoon when, enacting the role of the social discontent, I joined an anti CND march through Paris which ended with a bizarre street cabaret performed by a troupe of neo-hippies whose sheer demented defiance may have filled me with longing for a time when I treated my well-thumbed copy of the Fontana Modern Masters bio of Che Guevara by Andrew Sinclair as some kind of sacred text... A day spent as a flâneur would often end with a few hours spent in a movie theatre, perhaps in the vast soulless Forum des Halles shopping precinct, and there was a point I started to hate the movies I chose, as I struggled more and more with fits of deep and uncontrollable depression. For the first time in my life, I was starting to feel worse after having seen a film than before, the result perhaps of creeping anhedonia, which is a reduced ability to take pleasure in the everyday activities. I grew bored of watching others perform. What joy I reasoned was there in watching some dismal movie when there was so much to do in the greatest city in the civilised world? I'd never really been any kind melancholic up until this point but this situation may have started to change in my first few months in Paris. If my travels failed to produce the desired uplifting effect, I'd fall prey to a despair that was wholly out of proportion to the cause.

As a means of protecting myself, I started squandering my hard-earned cash on endless baubles and fripperies. These wholly pointless trinkets included a gaudy short-sleeved shirt by Yves St Laurent, a retro-style alarm clock with the loudest tick in Christendom , a gold-plated toothbrush with I never actually used, a black and gold cigarette holder and matching slim fit lighter, a portrait drawn of me at the Place de Tertre which made me look like a cherubic 12 year old and a black vinyl box jacket procured from the Porte de Clignancourt flea market. Mention must also be made of the many books I bought, such as the three Folio works by Symbolist pioneers, Barbey d'Aurevilly, Villiers de L'Isle Adam and Joséphin Péladan; as well as the second-hand books of poetry by such obscure figures as Trakl and Delève…part of Seguers’ Contemporary Poets collection.  Could the kids who loved to wave and coo at me from all corners of the Lycée have guessed that their precious Carl, the smiling blond Londoner who looked like a lost member of Duran Duran was a secret dark depressive...and a collector of the literary works of late 19th Century decadents...and a social discontent given to recording snarling rants against the callousness of Western society on a cheap cassette tape recorder? The simple answer is never in a thousand years; for I was leading a double life, perhaps even a multiple one. Little wonder, therefore, that I was starting to drink to try and make sense of what was happening to me, which was something akin to the fracturing of the personality. It wasn't long before I tired of the solitary existence of the flâneur, but then becoming more sociable may have simply been the result of being in one place for a significant length of time and nothing more meaningful than that. In fact, I'd befriended twenty year old Marie, English assistant in the neighbouring town of St Genevieve des Bois, while we were both attending classes at the Sorbonne intended to prepare us for the year ahead; and we went on to see more and more of each other as our Parisian sojourn proceeded apace. She’d been a close girlhood chum at convent school of my own great Westfield friend, Astrid…in fact, one of the first times we met up was with Astrid, when we saw "Gimme Shelter" at some dinky little art house theatre; this being, of course, the documentary of the Rolling Stones 1969 American tour which, culminating in the Free Concert at the Altamont Speedway in northern California, infamously marked the end of the Hippie dream of peace and love. Another close friend was Gilles, a maths teacher at the LEP who was the rebellious son of an army officer, and a furious hedonist who worshipped the Rock and Roll lifestyle of Keith Richards and other British bad boy musicians. I still see him now, tall, thin, dark, charismatic, with his head of wiry black hair, dressed in drainpipes and Cuban heeled boots, playing the bass guitar - but brilliantly- at some unearthly hour with friends following a night's heavy partying

before rushing to be with a girl friend as the dawn broke.  My best male friend was Igor, another teacher at the LEP. He was the son of Yugoslavian parents from the suburb of Bagneux whose impassive manner belied the exorbitantly loving and unstable soul of a true poet. He fell in love with Marie at first sight, and spent the whole night on a train bound for the south of France in a romantic delirium singing the songs of Jacques Brel. He referred to our slender swan necks as being typical of what he called "le charme anglais". So many of the people of Bretigny went out of their way to make me feel welcome and content from the headmaster all the way down to the kids some of whom staged near-riots in the classroom whenever I appeared. I felt so unworthy of their kindness, of the incredible hospitality that is characteristic of ordinary French people. However, if I was much loved in the warm-hearted faubourgs, in Paris itself I was at times as much a magnet for menace and hostility as approval. In fact, I was hysterically threatened in Pigalle only days after arriving in the city. I was verbally assaulted again later in the year on a RER train by some kind of madman or derelict who told me to go to the Bois de Boulogne to meet with what he saw as my inevitable violent destiny. I spent an entire train journey from Paris-Austerlitz to Bretigny with a self-professed “voyou” with chilling shark-like eyes who nonetheless seemed quite fond of me, as he made no attempt to harm me. He even gave me his number, telling me that unless I phoned him as promised I was merely what he termed “un anglais c**”. Mention must also be made of the sinister skinhead who called me “une tapette anglaise” for trying on Marie's wide-brimmed hat while travelling home by train after a night out with her and Astrid. After they'd gotten off at St Genevieve, I was left at his mercy as I made my way alone to my room in the insanely driving rain, but thankfully he'd vanished by then. Do I hate them now? No, I wish them all well…they kept me on my toes and made me the man I am today, someone who can get on with anyone.  I left Bretigny without saying goodbye to so many people that it's painful for me to think about it, but frenetic last hour socialising had left me exhausted and demoralised. However, there was one final get-together, organised by Marie and a few other friends. Igor was there of course, as well as another close friend from the LEP, Jean-Charles, and several mutual friends of myself and Marie. Sadly though, Gilles wasn't. I bumped into one of his girl friends in the course of the evening, and she was incredulous I hadn't invited him. Seized by guilt, I phoned him at his home to ask him to make a last minute appearance, but in a muted voice, he told me it was too late for that. It was the last I ever heard of him. I never saw Igor again either, although he did phone me once from Paris. On the other hand, Marie and I stayed friends until the early ‘90s, by which time she'd got married to a fellow church-goer and former Cambridge University alumnus Paul, whom I liked enormously.   

 My parents stopped by that night to pick me up on their way to La Ribera where we were due to stay for a few weeks before returning to the UK, and after a day or so spent sightseeing we set off. Soon after arriving it became clear to me that my beloved pueblo had changed beyond all recognition. Eight years after Franco's death and Spain's innocence was long gone and Western urban decadence and violence had penetrated even into the deepest provinces.  In Murcia, while quietly drinking in a night club with Bruno, a very dear friend of mine from La Ribera's golden age, his future wife Ana, and other friends, I found myself in the surreal position of being visually threatened by a local Punk who clearly objected to the bootlace tie I was wearing which immediately identified me as a hated Rockabilly. This would never have happened ten years before, or perhaps even five.   As for the youth of La Ribera itself, where once they'd been so endearingly naive, now they seemed so worldly and cool, in fact far more so than me, dancing like chickens with their elbows thrust out to the latest New Pop hits from the UK such as King's "Won't You Hold My Hand Now (These Are Heavy Times)", which I endlessly translated for them. They even put the club kids of La Piscine to shame.  I returned to Westfield in the autumn of 1984, and I can't help thinking it was soon afterwards that my recent past started haunting me for the first time, but I may be wrong. Perhaps it never occurred to me that only a few years previously I'd known legends of sport and the cinema, mythical figures of the theatre, blue bloods and patricians, and they'd been kind, generous of spirit to this nonentity from the outer suburbs. Now I was nearly 30, with a raft of opportunities behind me, and a future which looked less likely than ever to provide me with the fame I still ached for with all my soul. At first I lived off-campus, thinking it might be fun to coast during my final year as some kind of enigma freshly returned from Paris; but before long I desperately missed being part of the social hub of the college, even though this was a virtual impossibility for a forgotten student in his fourth year. However, I did eventually move back onto campus to occupy a tiny little room in the Berridge hall of residence in nearby West Hampstead NW9. Thinking that being in a play might help raise my faded profile, I accepted a small role in Cole Porter's "Kiss me Kate", which was being directed by my close friend Mark Crowther, a sweet gentle guy who looked a little like Green Gartside of '80s Sophisti-Pop band Scritti Politti, with a shade perhaps of Val Kilmer or Linus Roache. But it was all too little too late. My time as one of Westfield's leading prodigies had long passed, and other, younger golden children had come to the fore since my departure for Paris, such as the kid named Bill whom my long-time friend and champion Astrid described as being some kind of new edition of me due perhaps to his versatility as musician, actor, comedian and so on. The first I saw of him, he was playing Gorgibus in the original French in a

production directed by Astrid of Moliere's "Les Precieuses Ridicules", a part she'd originally earmarked for me, but I turned it down. To say he went on to greater things would be an understatement.

I read incessantly throughout the year for the sheer pleasure of doing so. For example, while Eugene O'Neill's "The Iceman Cometh" was a compulsory part of the drama course, there was no need for me to wade through "O'Neill", the massive two-part biography of the playwright - published in 1962 and 1972 - by Arthur and Barbara Gelb, but that didn't stop me. In fact it was a joy to do so. I made this descent into the depths of O'Neill's tortured psyche at a time when I was starting to drink during the day at Westfield, often getting hammered around lunchtime in the bar in the company of various friends, such as Vince, my friend from "Playing with Fire", or even earlier thanks to a can or two of extra strong lager. Vince was still trying to persuade me to join forces with him against an indifferent world, he with his writing and me with my acting, but for reasons best known to myself I wasn't playing ball. He'd always sensed something really special in me, which was variously described as energy, intensity, charisma, but for all the praise I received from Vince and others, I didn't seem to have a very high opinion of myself. I'm not quite sure why. I recently watched the testimony of a former violent offender through a website called Transformed Lives, and he described himself as having a big ego and low self esteem before he became a Christian, and this may have been my problem. It's possible that while I had the vast ego of a narcissist that requires constant attention and approval, I somehow also suffered from low self-esteem...which would indicate actual Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Whatever the truth, I was going through one of my perverse phases, affecting a world weariness which I simply didn't have at 30, but which upset and alienated a really good friend, something for which I feel utterly ashamed. It wasn't long before Vince had left college, and for good this time - he'd already somehow spun out his allotted three years to four - and without taking his degree...leaving me to stew in my stupid pseudo-cynicism. My principal final year tutor was my beloved Margaret, and subject of study, the works of literary genius Andre Gide. I thrilled to the perverseness of Gidian characters such as the urbane Menalque from "The Immoralist" (1902), who awakens the Nietzschian superman in Michel, the novella's protagonist, the feral Lafcadio from "The Vatican Cellars" (1914), who commits a crime of terrible cruelty simply for the sake of doing so, and the demonic Passavent, from "The Counterfeiters" (1926), his only novel according to his own definition of the term. While figures of such unmitigated depravity are commonplace today, in countless novels, plays, films, videos etc., when Gide created his monsters, they still had the power to shock. I view them with a different pair of

eyes today. On a lighter note, a special favourite of mine by Gide, who was always a magnificent storyteller, was the novella "Isabelle", which appealed to my softer, more romantic side. Written in 1911, it's the tale of a young student, Gérard Lacase, who stays for a time at a Manor house in Normandy inhabited by two ancient aristocratic families in order to look over their library for research purposes, and while there becomes bewitched by the portrait of the mysterious "Isabelle" only to become disillusioned upon finally meeting her. By the same token my favourite ever play by O'Neill was another story of hopeless love, "A Moon for the Misbegotten" (1947), although "A Long Day's Journey into Night" (1956) came a very close second. Both feature Eugene's tragic yet infinitely romantic elder brother, Jamie. I became fascinated by him; and read all about him in the massive O'Neill biography by the Gelbs. Poor Jamie. How richly blessed he'd been at birth with beauty, charm, and intellect. While part of the Minim Department of Notre Dame University, Indiana, he was one of founder Father Edward Sorin's most favoured princes, destined for a glittering future as a Catholic gentleman of exquisite breeding and learning; and then a prize-winning scholar at Fordham, the exclusive Jesuit university from which he was ultimately expelled for a foolish indiscretion. He was also potentially a very fine writer, although he only left a handful of poems and essays behind, and the owner of a beautiful speaking voice which ensured him work as an actor for a time alongside his father, James. His one true legacy, however, is Jamie Tyrone, the brilliant yet tortured charmer who haunts two of his brother's masterpieces with the infinite sorrow of promise unfulfilled. "The Wanderer of Golders Green" was formed from notes made while I was taking my finals in the summer of '85. It reflects what was a long-standing obsession on my part with romantic weltschmerz - literally world pain - and should not be taken too seriously as such. That said, mention must be made of the intense saturnine melancholy that was making more and more inroads into my naturally sanguine temperament, and at nearly 30 I still wasn't famous, and may have been drinking as heavily as I was partly as a means of coping with this painful fact. What is certain is that from the age of 27, alcohol became more indispensable to me than ever before.

The Wanderer of Golders Green

I decided on a Special BBefore the eve.I bought a lagerAt the BarAnd chatted to Joy.Then Paul

Bought me another.I appreciated the factThat he rememberedThe time he,His gal Carol,And Rory DownedAn entire BottleOf Jack DanielsIn a Paris-bound train.A tanned catBought me a (large) half,Then another half.My fatal eyesAre my downfall.I drank yet another half...

My head was spinningWhen it hit the pillowI awokeWith a terrible headacheAround one o'clock.I prayed it would depart.

I slowly got dressed.I was as chatty as everBefore the exam...French/English translation.Periodically I put my faceIn my hands or groanedOr sighed -My stomachwas burning me inside.

I finished my paperIn 1 hour and a half.As I walked outI caught various eyesSandra’s, Judy’s (quizzical) etc…I went to bed…Slept ‘till five…Read O’Neill until 7ish...Got dressedAnd strolled downTo Golders Green,In order to reliveA few memories.I sang to myself -A few memoriesFlashed into my mind,

But not as manyas I'd have liked -It wasn't the same.It wasn't the same.

Singing songs broughtVoluptuous tears.I snuck into McDonaldsWhere I felt At home,Anonymous, alone.I bought a few things,Toothpaste and pick,Chocolate, yoghurts,Sweets, cigarettesAnd fruit juice.Took a sentimental journeyBack to Powis Gardens,RichnessAnd intensity,RomanticAnd attractive…Sad, suspicious and strange.I sat up until 3am,Reading O’NeillOr writing (inept) poetry.Awoke at 10,But didn’t leaveMy room till 12,Lost my wayTo Swiss Cottage,Lost my happiness.Oh so consciousOf my failureAnd after a fashion,Enjoying this knowledge.

Of All Sad Words of Tongue or Pen

My first employment after leaving Westfield in the summer of 1985 was as a deliverer of novelty telegrams. This often brought me into potentially hazardous situations, but for me the risk was worth it, because I was getting well paid to show off and party, two of my favourite occupations at the time...but it was an unusual way of life for a man of thirty.  What I really wanted was the immortality provided by fame, and I didn't care whether this came through acting, music or literature, or any other means for that matter, but until my big break came, I was content to feed my addiction to attention through the novelty telegrams industry. I evidently had no deep desire to leave anything

behind by way of children, nor for any career other than one liable to project me to international renown. How then did I end up as a PGCE student at Homerton College, Cambridge in the autumn?  The truth is that once again I'd yielded to family pressure to provide myself with the safety net that's been dear to the hearts of parents of would-be wunderkinds since time immemorial, and despised by the artists themselves: the great English singer-songwriter Nick Drake once told his father it was the one thing he didn't want. For my part, I was so unhappy about having to go to Cambridge that just days before I was due to start there, I arranged to audition for a Jazz Funk band. I was all set to sing "The Chinese Way" by Level 42 and another song of its kind, but I never made it. Late, and desperately drunk on the afternoon of my audition, I simply threw in the towel and resigned myself to Cambridge. For all I know they may still be waiting for me to this day, relics from an age of tasselled loafers and white socks.  From the time I arrived in the beautiful medieval university city of Cambridge, I was made to feel most welcome and wanted by everyone, and I made some wonderful friends at Homerton itself. They included Jonathan, a poet and actor from the little town of Downham Market in Norfolk, Dean, a singer-songwriter of dark genius from Yeovil in Somerset who eventually went on to become part of London's psychedelic underground, and Claire, a stunning red-head whose beauty and charm belied the fact that she hailed from Slough, a vast sprawling suburb to the west of London most famous for having inspired an infamous poem by John Betjeman. When I made my first appearance at the Manor Community College in the tough London overspill area of Arbury where I was due to begin my period of Teaching Practice the following January, the pupils reacted to me as if I was some kind of visiting movie or Rock star. My TP would've been a breeze. Everything was falling into place for me at Cambridge, and I was offered several golden chances to succeed as an actor within its hallowed confines. Towards the end of the first term, Tim Scott, the then president of the  Cambridge University Footlights Dramatic Club had gone out of his way to ask myself and Jonathan to appear in the sole production he was preparing to mark his year-long tenure. He was a Homerton man, and so clearly wanted to give a couple of his fellow students a break after having seen us perform a couple of Jonathan's satirical songs for the club. This was a privilege almost without measure, given that since its inception Footlights has nurtured the talents of Cecil Beaton, Jonathan Miller, Germaine Greer, David Frost, John Cleese, Peter Cook, Graham Chapman, Eric Idle, Stephen Fry, Emma Thompson, Hugh Lawrie and Sasha Baron Cohen among many others. I could have been added to that list. As if this opportunity weren't enough to persuade me to stay put, a young undergraduate, renowned for the high quality of the plays he produced personally asked me to feature in one of his productions during the Lent Term after seeing me interpret the part of Tom in

Tennessee Williams' “The Glass Menagerie" some time before Christmas. Someone told me that if he took an interest in you, you were pretty well made as an actor at Cambridge. What more did I want? For Spielberg himself to be in the audience and discover me? I can actually remember being quite disappointed that he wasn't a talent scout from outside of the university. That's how self-deluded I was. I was so obsessed by fame that I could barely wait to get my clammy hands on it, and yet it seems that whenever I was offered a serious chance at achieving it, I bungled it.  In my defence though, I did feel trapped by the course, and was finding it heavy going. In order to pass, you had to spend a full year as a teacher after completion of the basic PGCE. That meant it would be two years before I was free again to call myself an actor and work as such. It just seemed an awfully long time, when in fact it wasn't at all, and two years after quitting Cambridge I was even further away from my dream than when I'd started off. The truth is I left Homerton for no good reason, and my decision still pains me to this day, although my faith helps me to cope with the anguish the idiocies of my youth have left me with. Without it these words from Whittier's “Maud Muller” might tear me to shreds of utter nothingness:For of all sad words of tongue or pen,The saddest are these: ‘it might have been'. Within a matter of hours of the start of the Lent Term of 1987, I was gone, vanished into the night in the company of a close friend I'd wheedled into helping me out. It wasn't her fault; she'd originally told me to go to Cambridge, and just get stuck in, but I hadn't listened. Once I was free I started to furiously audition, commuting to London from a little village in rural Hampshire  just a stone’s throw the coast near Portsmouth, where I was resident at the time. It was music rather than acting I was interested in at the time, not that it ever really mattered to me how I became famous, just so long as I did. I auditioned for a series of desperately unsuitable bands, including the Jazz-Funk outfit from Croydon, whose Soul Boy musicians didn’t seem to believe me when I told them I knew one of the guys from Level 42…and the Rock 'n' Roll revival band from Pompey itself...but none of them took to me, and I can't say I blame them. I was usually tanked up to start with, and then there was the question of my image. I think it's fair to say that highlighted hair, dinky gold ear studs and skin tight jeans didn't go down all that well in the places I chose to audition. I returned to London in the summer of 1987 to a minor flurry of creative activity. First, I took part in a rehearsed reading at Notting Hill’s justly reputable Gate Theatre of a play whose name eludes me, but it was directed by Astrid. Then, at her behest, I served as MC for a week-long benefit for the Gate called "Captain Kirk's Midsummer Log". I did so in the persona of one Mr Denmark 1979, a comic monstrosity

created for me by Astrid. Among those appearing on the bill were comedienne Jo Brand, in her then incarnation of The Sea Monster, satirist Rory Bremner, whom I'd known in both Edinburgh and Paris, and Renaissance Man Patrick Marber, initially a stand-up comic, but best known today as an award-winning playwright and Oscar-nominated screenwriter. The Denmark character went down so well at the benefit that I wrote an entire show around him on the premiss that winning a Scandinavian male beauty contest in 1979 had so altered the balance of his mind that he’d since convinced himself he’d been at the forefront of pretty well every major cultural development since the dawn of Pop, only to be cravenly ripped off by Sinatra, Elvis, the Beatles, the Stones, Punks, Rappers and so on. It premiered a few months after the benefit at a new variety venue called Club Shout, again to great success.  1987 was also the year I got seriously involved in walk-on work for television and the cinema, although I wasn’t entirely new to the game. For example, I briefly feature as a side drummer in a Salvation Army band in"A Mirror Crack'd" (1981), based on the Agatha Christie novel. This was at a typical English village fete set in the 1950s, and the scene is graced first by Geraldine Chaplin, and then Elisabeth Taylor. Also, in Charles Jarrott’s "Poor Little Rich Girl" (1987), I can be seen gesticulating in a white suit as twenties crooner Rudy Vallee in a party scene featuring Farrah Fawcett as Betty Hutton and Burl Ives as FW Woolworth. But these were just isolated episodes. From around 1987, I took the work more seriously, first in the sitcom "Life Without George", and then in long-running police series "The Bill" in which I played a scene of crime photographer for about five years. Soon after I'd finished my work for "Life Without George" I started rehearsals for Astrid for a play called "The Audition" written by the Catalonian dramatist Rudolf Sirera. with English translation by John London. It was due to have its world premiere at the Gate early in the winter of '88. Apparently set by Sirera in pre-revolutionary France, Astrid updated it to the late 19th Century, with a setting reminiscent of  Wilde’s "Dorian Gray"  or a Parisian equivalent, perhaps by Lorrain. It involves the kidnapping of an actor Gabriel De Beaumont by an unnamed Marquis, who goes on to sadistically toy with his victim before finally murdering him. It received some good reviews, and I was singled out for some praise by The London Times. I should have capitalised on this modest success, but Rob, a close friend from the Guildhall now working as a teacher at the Callan School of English in Oxford Street, had earlier urged me to join him there. As I'd already trained with them and been offered a job by the time "The Audition" had got under way, I started work as a teacher soon after it had wrapped. Thus, I entered into one of the most purely blissful period of my entire life, even while my theatrical career suffered.

I could write a whole book on my time at Callan's alone, indeed on pretty much any of the major episodes of my life, this being merely one version of it, to which multiple layers like so many onion skins could be added to create something approaching an accurate self- portrait guaranteed to move even the most indurate of men and women. Lone Birthday Dancing The Joy of a Fool

Being a teacher at the Callan School of English was a dream job for me. It provided me with a social life on a plate, as well as enough money to finance the hours I spent each evening in the Champion public house in Wells Street, where some time after 7.30pm, after the final class had ended, student and teacher alike would meet to drink and talk and laugh and do as they wished until closing time. I'd usually leave at about 10.30pm to catch the last train home from Waterloo, although sometimes I'd miss it and have to catch a later train. I can swear I spent one night wrapped in newspaper on a station bench deep in the Surrey hinterland. At other times, there'd be a party to go to, or the Callan's disco, which would be held on an occasional basis on Wardour Street. Most of the teachers socialised with their own kind, but I preferred the company of the students, and at any given time it would be almost impossible to extricate me from my circle of favourites from Italy, Japan, Spain, Brazil, Poland, France etc. This proved frustrating to my good friends Stash and Noddy when they were trying to organise rehearsals for a band we were supposed to be getting together. Thanks to me, this never happened despite some early promise, for Noddy was a gifted guitarist and Stash a potentially good front man. While Noddy was a student from Sao Paolo, Stash was a "resting" actor like myself, in fact one of several among the Callan teachers, who were a fascinating diverse crowd, and I made many friends from among them. I spent my spare cash on clothes, cassettes, books, as well as rent during the months I spent as a tenant of a friend of my fathers’ from the London session world, a small bearded always nattily dressed Welsh violinist with a Celtic wildness of spirit who was yet enormously warm and charming. Like so many of his tribe, Robin was an almost preternaturally charismatic figure, with a fatal aura of vulnerability. I also spent several hundreds of pounds being initiated into the art of self-hypnosis by a Harley Street doctor who specialised in hypnotherapy and nutritional medicine, in the hope of finding a solution not just to my excessive use of alcohol, but the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder to which I was falling more and more prey in the late 1980s.

Yet, despite the drinking and the OCD, I was exorbitantly happy during this period of my life. Any melancholy I affected - in my writings and elsewhere - should be taken with a pinch of salt in the light of the fact that for me sadness was the ultimate mark of artistic and emotional profundity. I coveted it with all the passion of one who was by nature essentially high-spirited. Indeed it may be that it was this very carefree frivolity of mine, this absence of angst, that prevented me really getting anywhere as an actor. Looking back, the overwhelming impression I have is of a man whose primary emotional condition was one of utter exaltation and enraptured joy of life, while including a tendency to veer wildly between the effusive affection I aspired to, and the lapses of affect I dreaded. The piece below provides some indication of this. It was forged using notes scrawled onto seven sides of an ancient now coverless notebook, possibly late at night following an evening's carousal and in a state of serene intoxication. All punctuation was removed and extracts from the notes tacked together not randomly as in the so-called cut up technique but selectively, and more or less sequentially.

Strange Coldness Perplexing

the catholic nurseall sensitivecaring noticingeverythingwhat can she thinkof my hot/cold torment

always near blowing itliving in the fast laneso friendly kindthe girlsdewy eyedwanda abandoned mebolton is in my hands

and yet my coldnesshurtsthe more emotionalthey staytrying to find a reasonfor my ice-like suspicionfish eyescoldly indifferent eyessuspect everything that moves

socialising just to be loudcompensate for cold

lack of essential trustwarmthi love themdespite myselfmy desire to loveis unconscious and gigantesque

i never knowwhen i'm going to miss someonestrange coldness perplexingi've got to work to get devotionbut once i get iti really get people on my sidethere are carl peoplewho can survivemy shark-like coldnessand there are thosewho want somethingmore personali can be very devoted to thosewho can stay the course

my soul is achingfor an impartial love of peoplei'm at war with myself…

A Cult of Nowness

In the early 1990, I lost my position at Callan's, which was a devastating blow, but I'd asked for it because I'd quit without warning, and then decided I wanted to return in my own sweet time, despite having earlier refused an offer to do so from the school itself. I begged for the return of my beloved job...not just in person, but by letter and through poor Rob, but this time, they refused to be swayed and I don't blame them in the slightest, because up to this point, they'd shown incredible tolerance towards my insultingly slack approach to punctuality and other abuses of what was a very fair system, until finally their patience just snapped. So...two years spent in the greatest job I ever had ended with the last of a triad of decades marked by persistent frenzied social upheaval and artistic innovation…much of this taking place within the two leading late Modern forms of creative expression of the cinema and Rock and Roll. Rock as I see it is has never been just a simple popular music derived from various Folk genres, so much as an enormously influential international subculture of varying artistic and intellectual substance. Some critics have even gone so far as to describe it as a

religion, and they have a point, as Rock has possessed a spiritual dimension since its inception, and an intellectual one since about ‘65. Possibly more than any other artist of the sixties, it’s Bob Dylan who helped invest mere Beat music with genuine artistic credibility.  Since Dylan's glory days as Pop's first true poet, there have been many Rock stars who've looked to earlier strains of Modernism for lyrical inspiration. In fact, it could be said that Rock has been the main engine of the avant-garde impulse in the West since the late 1960s, with all the nihilism this entails. Those who – like me- grew to maturity in the said swinging sixties, were unavoidably affected on a deep and perhaps largely subconscious level by the cultural revolution of which Rock was such an essential part. For my part, I contend that from quitting formal education aged 16 to coming to faith some two decades later, I was in thrall to a cult of instant gratification that's been growing progressively more powerful throughout the west since about 1955.  If what I'm saying is false, then why didn't I build a future for myself during those years, in terms of a profession, a family, financial security, and so on? The truth is that before quitting the booze for good, I viewed all these with an indifference verging on contempt and it hurts me deeply to realise the extent to which I sabotaged my life with such a negative identity.

Reluctantly delivered from a job I genuinely loved, I briefly revived my acting career thanks once again to the influence of my dear friend Astrid. She suggested I might like to play Feste for a production of "Twelfth Night", to be staged in the summer at the Jacksons Lane theatre in North London. Somehow she knew the director, Lesley. So, after a successful audition for her, I set about re-learning Feste's lines, and arranging the songs according to the original primitive melodies. My hyperkinetic performance was exceptionally well-received, and one well-spoken Englishwoman even went so far as to tell me that I was the finest Feste she'd ever seen. It’s a pity she wasn’t a passing casting director. Once again, the Fool of Illyria had served me well…and in keeping with the festive spirit of the play, rehearsals and performances were accompanied by some pretty heavy partying by myself and most of the members of the cast, until the inevitable sad dispersal. Yet, if the play itself was pure joy to be involved in, the same can’t be said for travelling to and from Highgate for rehearsals and performances, for it was during these lengthy trips across the capital that I started feeling the need to inure myself as never before against what I saw as nocturnal London's ever-present aura of menace. It’s likely that years of hard living were finally starting to take their toll on my nervous system, for in addition to alcohol and nicotine, I'd been taking industrial strength doses of caffeine for years, initially in

tablet form, and then in the shape of the coffee cocktails I liked to swill one after the other before afternoon classes at Callan’s. This may go some way towards explaining the sheer paranoia which ultimately caused me to start drinking on the way to rehearsals, and then for the first time in my life as a professional actor, during rehearsals. However, I’d promised Leslie I’d not touch a drop for the actual performances, and was as good as my word. Later in the year, I began another PGCE course, this time at the West London Institute of Education, based in Twickenham, taking up residence in nearby Isleworth. I began quite promisingly, fitting in well, and making good friends, and as might be expected, I excelled in drama and physical education. I didn't drink during the day and on those rare occasions I did, it was just a question of a pint or so with lunch. I’d mentally determined to complete the course, but as the following piece testifies, I was a hardly abstinent at night.  It was adapted in 2006 from a letter typed during my WLIE days to an old Westfield friend Georgina, now a professional photographer. When it was recovered, having never been finished, nor sent, it was as scrap paper, lost in a sea of miscellaneous mementos.

A Letter Unsent

Dear GeorginaI haven't been in touchfor a long time.Sorry.The last timeI saw youwas inSt. Christopher's Place.It was a lovely evening...when I knockedthat chair over.I am sorry.Since then,I've had nota few accidentsof that kind.Just three days ago,I slipped outin a gardenat a friend's house...and keeled over,not once,not twice,but three times,like a log...clonking my nutso violently

that people heard mein the sitting room.What's more,I can't remembera single sentencespokenall evening.The problem is...

A Thrilling but Lethal Lifestyle

My Teaching Practice was due to take place towards the end of the first term but I was desperately behind in my work, so provisionally removed myself from the course in order to decide whether it was worth my staying on or not. In the event I chose to quit, and met with the head of my course to discuss this, and she was very agreeable, making no effort to dissuade me.However, rather than return to my parents' home, I stayed on in Isleworth to rekindle my five-year old career as a deliverer of novelty telegrams, while continuing to work as a walk-on artist for the TV series "The Bill", based in the south London suburb of Merton, Surrey.   I also became half of a musical duo formed with a slim young north country guy with reddish blond hair and brilliant light green eyes who went by the name of Mark Windsor, although his true surname was a sight more Mancunian. I’d met him through an ad he’d put in the Stage newspaper for acts for a variety show he was putting together at the time, before going on to perform as Mr Denmark for him a few times. We began as buskers in Leicester Square, before settling down for rehearsals in the hope of getting some gigs, our repertoire consisting of early Rock and Roll and Motown classics, as well as a host of originals, mainly written by Mark, with one or two contributed by myself. I wanted to call the band Venus Xtravaganza, but we settled for Mark's choice of The Unknowns, if we were ever called anything at all. Although he was specialising as a singer-songwriter at the time, Mark has since developed into a true Renaissance man…actor, comedian, songwriter, performer, writer, film maker and esoteric thinker. We remain close friends to this day.

Early in 1991 I took off to the seaside town of Hastings for a month or so to attempt to pass a TEFL course down there. How vividly I recall the thrill of seeing seagulls hovering over central Hastings soon after arriving at the station for my interview, which I passed, but I couldn't say it went well. I constantly avoided my interviewer's eyes until she virtually ordered me to look at her, then saying something like: "I said look at me, not stare". This as if to emphasize her belief that I didn't stand a snowball's chance in Hell of passing.

 Winter 1991 was arctic in a way I haven't known an English winter to be since. Not literally of course, but I can remember wearing several coats just in order to be able to bear a cold that apparently doesn't exist any more in this country. I worked like a Trojan but I was struggling terribly, tormented by OCD and its endless demands on my time and energies in the shape of rituals both physical and mental. I didn't drink at all during the day, but at night I was sometimes so stoned I was incoherent. Predictably perhaps I was failed. I asked the authorities if they might reconsider, but they made it clear to me that their decision was final. It was a bit of a let-down for sure, but I'd loved my time in Hastings, a beautiful old town that's since become a major London overspill area, even while continuing the search for some kind of spiritual solution to my mental troubles…this leading me to a "church" in Claremont Road which was far from the kind of I’d ultimately to seek out. At least part of the reason for my torment may be provided by the following extracts from a letter my mother wrote me during a fascinating but fruitless sojourn: "...I had a chance to look at your library...I could not believe what I saw. These very strange books, beyond my comprehension, most of them, and I thought what a dissipation of a good mind that thought it right to read such matters...I feel very deeply that you have up to your present state, almost ruined your mind. Your happy, smiling face has left you, your humorous nature, ditto, your spirited state of mind, your cheerful, sunny, exuberant well-being, all gone. Too much thought given to the unhappiness and sad state of others (often those you can not help, in any way)...I've said recently that I am convinced that anyone can get oneself into a state of agitation or distress or anxiety by thinking or reading about, or witnessing unpleasant things, and the only thing to do is to, as much as possible, avoid such matters, to not let them get hold in the mind. Your fertile mind has led you astray. Why, and how?" How many millions of mothers over the course of the centuries have asked this of offspring who've been inexplicably drawn to the shadowlands of life only to lose their way back to sanity? Only God knows. Most of course, successfully make the journey back before settling into a normal mode of life, but the danger of becoming lost is always there, especially for those who remain in the shadows far beyond adolescence. Eternal adolescence is arguably one of the prime features of our era, facilitated by its exaltation of youth. And while there are those who'd insist that far fewer young people today are in thrall to the dark glamour of self-destructive genius than in previous Rock eras, the worldview still very much exists.    The following summer of 1992, I made another attempt at passing the TEFL course, this time at Regent's College named after the famous north London park. However, by this time I was drinking all day every day, and the course was a disaster as a result, even though I worked hard and

even gave some good classes. I still have some video footage of myself teaching and not for single second would anyone watching it believe that I was out of my head on booze. It was a fabulous summer, and much of it I spent in a state of manic hyperactivity. Bliss it was to stride in the warm suburban evening sun to my local station with the Orb's eerie "Blue Room" throbbing over and over in my head on my way to yet another long night of drinking and socialising to the point of ecstatic insensibility. I could have passed out on any one of these wild nights and awoken again in Hell, but that didn't concern me. The romantic decadence associated with the eighties was no longer even remotely current, and there was a new spirit as I saw it, a mystic techno-bohemianism which appeared to me to be everywhere in the early nineties. I wanted to visit as many clubs and venues as I could where it was being celebrated, but as things turned out I only ever went to one, Cyber Seed in Covent Garden, which was poorly attended and only lasted a short time. However, had I not become a Christian, wild horses couldn't have prevented me from further exploration. Later on in this final beautiful lethal summer of intoxication, soon after appearing as Stefano in "The Tempest" at the Conway Hall in Red Lion Square, I  set out on yet another PGCE course, this time at the University of Greenwich in south east London. Bearing the suffix fe for Further Education its purpose was to train myself and my fellow students to teach pupils in sixth form colleges and other further education establishments. On top of this, there were the gigs with Mark, the novelty telegrams, and who knows what else, and I loved every second of a frenetic lifestyle which the following piece – almost certainly drafted on 8 October 1992, or perhaps a year earlier - serves to evoke it at its apex...and there's a twilight mood to it, with the birthday boy performing his Dionysian solo dance in defiance of the wholesale ruin of mind, body and soul he's so obviously invoking.

Lone Birthday Boy Dancing

Yesterday for my birthday,I started offwith a bottle of wine...I took the traininto town...I had half a bitterat the Cafe de Piafin Waterloo...I went to workfor a couple of hours or so;I had a pint after work;I went for an audition;after the audition,I had another pint

and a half;I had another half,before meeting my mates,for my b'day celebrations;we had a pint together;we went intothe night club,where we had champagne(I had three glasses);I had a furtherglass of vino,by which time,I was so gonethat I drew an audienceof about thirtyby performing a solodancing spotin the middleof the disco floor...We all piled off to the pubafter that,where I had another drink(I can't rememberwhat it was)...I then made my way home,took the bus from Surbiton,but ended upin the wilds of Surrey;I took another bus home,and watched some tellyand had something to eatbefore crashing out...I really, really enjoyedthe eve, but today,I've been walking aroundlike a zomb;I've had only one drink today,an early morningrestorative effort;I spent the day working,then I went to a bookshop,where, like a monk,I go for a day'sdrying out session...Drying out is really awful;you jump at every shadow;you feel dizzy,you notice everything;

very often,I don't follow through… Reborn in the Nick of Time Reborn in the Nick of Time

The period embracing the autumn of 1992 and the first few weeks of winter may well have been the most debauched of my entire existence. I'd get up early, possibly about six, and then prepare myself for a day ahead with a bottle of wine, usually fortified, then I'd keep my units topped up throughout the day with vodka or gin, taking regular swigs from the miniatures I liked to have with me at all times. Some evenings I'd spend in central London, others with my new friends from the college, and we were a close and pretty wild crowd for a while. There were times in town when I couldn't keep the booze down, so I'd order a king-sized cola from MacDonalds, which I'd then lace with spirits before cautiously sipping from it through a straw. I was a euphoric drunk and so almost never unpleasant...but I was unpredictable...a true Dionysian who'd cry out on a British Rail train in the middle of the afternoon, causing passengers to flinch with alarm...or perform a wild disjointed Karate kick into thin air on a crowded London street. One afternoon I tore my clothes to shreds after having arrived too late for an audition and a barman who served me later on in the day asked me if I'd been involved in a fight...and then there was the shameful night at Waterloo station - or was it Liverpool Street? - that I had to be escorted across the concourse to my train by one of the drunks who used to sleep rough at mainline stations back then.  However, all these insane incidents came to a head one night in early 1993 in an Indian restaurant in Hampton Court close to the Surrey-London border. I'd been dining there with two female friends when, suddenly feeling like pure death, I asked the one closest to me whether I looked as bad as I felt. She told me I did, so I got up from the table, walked a few paces and then collapsed as if stone dead in the middle of the restaurant. I was then carried bodily out into the fresh night air by two or three Indian waiters, one of whom set about shocking some life back into me by flicking ice cold water in my face. "Don't give up", he pleaded, his voice betraying true concern...and in time thanks to him some semblance of life returned, and I was well enough to be driven home. Yet, within two days I was drinking as heavily as before, continuing to do so virtually around the clock until the weekend. I then spent Saturday evening with my close friend from the restaurant, and at some point in the morning of the 16th after having drunk solidly all night I asked her to fill a long glass with neat gin and each sip took me further and further into the desired state of blissful forgetfulness.

 I awoke exhilarated, which was normal for me following a lengthy binge. It was my one drying out day of the week, and so I probably spent it writing as well as cleaning up the accumulated chaos of the past week. One thing I definitely did was listen to a radio documentary on the legendary L.A. Rock band the Doors which I'd taped some weeks or perhaps months earlier. I especially savoured "When the Music's Over" from what was then one of my favourite albums, "Strange Days" released in the wake of the Summer of Love on my 12th birthday, 7 October 1967. This apocalyptic epic with its unearthly screams and ecstatically discordant guitar solo seemed to me about living in the shadow of death, beckoning death, mocking death, defying death. I powerfully identified with the Doors' gifted singer Jim Morrison...who'd been drawn as a very young man to poets of darkly prophetic intensity, such as Blake, Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Artaud, as well as the poets of the Beat Generation, who were themselves children of the - largely French - Romantic poètes maudits, whose works have the power to change lives, as they surely did Morrison's. His philosophy of life was clearly informed by Blake, who wrote of "the road of excess" leading to "the palace of wisdom", while his hell raising persona came to a degree from Rimbaud, who extolled the virtues of "a long, immense and systematic derangement of all the senses" as an angel-faced hooligan in the Paris of the early 1870s. What a price he paid...dead at just 27...like Jones, Hendrix, Joplin before him, and so the '60s dream was revealed as the beguiling chimera it'd been all along.  After having spent the day revelling in my own inane notion of myself as a poet on the edge like my heroes, at some point in the early evening I got what I'd been courting for so long...an intimation of early death, when for pretty well the first time in my life alcohol stopped being my beloved elixir and became a mortal enemy, causing my legs to lose sensation and my life force to recede at a furious and terrifying rate. In a blind panic, I opened a spare bottle of sparkling wine I had about the house even though I'd hoped not to have to drink that day. Once I'd drained it, I felt better for a while, in fact so much so that I took a few snaps of myself lounging around looking haggard and unshaven, with freshly cropped hair. Soon after this macabre photo session I set off in search of more alcohol. Arriving at a local delicatessen, the Asian shop keeper nervously told me that the off-license wasn't open for some time yet. There was nothing for me to do but take refuge on a nearby green, where I lay for a while, still dressed I imagine in the shabby white cut-offs I'd been wearing earlier. Finally, the offie opened and I was able to buy more booze. I can't remember what I bought, but I think it may have been a litre of gin, because that's what I was guzzling from the next day. One of the last things I remember doing on Sunday evening was singing hymns in a nearby Methodist church as the tears flowed...tears of remorse, tears of fear, tears of desperation.

 I've no further memory of what happened that hellish night, but there were many such nights ahead. At least one of these saw me endlessly pacing up and down corridors and stairs in an attempt to stay conscious and so - as I saw it - not die...and each time I shut my eyes I could have sworn I saw demonic entities beckoning me into a bottomless black abyss. I set about ridding my house of artefacts I somehow knew to be offensive to God from what I think was the night of the 16th and 17th onwards. Many books were destroyed...books on astrology and numerology and other mystical and occult subjects, books on war and crime and atrocity, and books about artists some call accursed for their kinship with drunkenness and madness and death.

I genuinely believe though that for all the horrors I underwent, it was during that first night that I came to accept Christ as my Saviour. Had my violent conversion not come about when it did, I might have been lost forever, depending of course on where a person stands on the issue of Predestination and Free Will, but I'd have surely immersed myself in the new Bohemianism of the 1990s. The adversary values of the sixties had apparently vanished by about 1973, when in fact they'd simply gone back underground, where they set about fertilising new anti-establishment clans such as the Anarcho-Punks and the New Age Travellers who quietly flourished throughout the '80s. Around '92, some kind of amalgam between these tribes and the growing Rave-Dance movement produced yet another great counterculture, and I was ready…ready as I’d never been to take my place as a zealot of the New Age/New Edge, only to be delivered from its seductive grasp by a violent "Road to Damascus" conversion to Christianity. However, if I'd been reborn against all the odds, I still had to suffer in the physical, if only briefly. Many Christians are of the opinion that the longer a person puts off coming to Christ the less likely it becomes of their ever doing so and I'm among them. I also believe that Christians who convert relatively late in life may be required to pay a far higher price for the follies of their pre-Christian existence than more youthful converts, especially if these include alcohol, drugs, fornication, and involvement in the occult. God can and does heal Christians damaged by their pre-conversion sins but He's not obliged to do so as his Grace is sufficient, so while I was almost certainly already a Christian by the morning of the 17th of January, my ordeal was far from over. I somehow made it into New Eltham that Monday morning for classes at the University, but by evening I felt so ill I started swigging from my litre bottle of gin. I also phoned Alcoholics Anonymous at my mother's request, and agreed to give a meeting a shot. Next day, on the way to Richmond College, I got the feeling my heart was about to explode, not just once but over and over again. After classes, I tried walking through Twickenham but I couldn't feel

my legs and was struggling to stay conscious, so I ended up ordering a double brandy from the pub next door to the Police Station. I was shaking so much the landlord thought I was fresh from an interrogation session. Later, I was thrown out of another pub for preaching at the top of my voice, then, walking through Twickenham town centre I started making the sign of the cross to passers-by, telling one poor young guy never to take to drink like some kind of walking advert for temperance and he nodded without saying a word before scurrying away. Back home, in an effort to calm myself down, I dug out an old capsule of Chlomethiazole, a sedative commonly used in treating and controlling the effects of acute alcohol withdrawal, but dangerous, in fact potentially fatal, when used in conjunction with alcohol. I still had some capsules left over from about 1990 when I'd been prescribed them by my then doctor, which meant they'd long gone beyond their expiry date. For a time I felt better and was able to sleep, but soon after waking I felt worse than ever. Later, at an AA meeting, I kept leaving the room to douse my head in cold water, anything to shock some life back into me, to the dismay of my sponsor Don who wanted me to stay put, as if doing so would exert a healing effect. Wednesday morning saw me pacing the office of the first available doctor, who seemed at a loss as to what to do with me, but then it may have been touch and go as to whether I was going to stay on my feet or overdose on the spot and die on him. It was he who prescribed me the Valium which caused me to fall into a deep, deep sleep which may have saved my life, and from which I awoke to sense that a frontier had been passed and that I was out of danger at long last. The piece below first existed as a series of rough notes scrawled on a piece of scrap paper in the dying days of 1993 and are a pretty accurate account of the incidents I've just described.

Oblivion in Recession

The legs started going,HowlingsIn my head.Thought I'd goKept awake with water,Breathing,Arrogantly telling myselfI'd stay straight.Drank gin and wine,Went out,Tried to buy more,Unshaven,Filthy white shorts,Lost, rolling on lawn,

Somehow got home.Monday, waiting for offie,Looked like death,Fear in eyesOf passers-by,Waiting for drink,Drink relieved me.Drank all day,Collapsed wept"Don't Die on Me".Next day,Double brandyJust about settled me,Drank some more,Thought constantlyI'd collapseThen what?Fit? Coronary?Insanity? Worse?Took a HeminevrinPaced the houseAll night,Pain in chest,Weak legs,Lack of feelingIn extremities,Visions of darkness.Drank waterTo keep theLife functions goingPlayed devotional music,Dedicated my lifeTo God,Prayed constantly,Renounced evil.Next day,Two ValiumsHelped me sleep.By eve,I started to feel better.Suddenly,All is clearer,Taste, sounds,I feel human again.I made my choice,And oblivion has receded,And shall disappear...

Called by Contact for Christ

To reiterate an earlier assertion...there is a widely held belief within Christianity that the sooner a person comes to Christ the better when it comes to their immortal soul. The same could be said for their subsequent relationship with God. There may for example be serious health problems resulting from a former self-destructive lifestyle which could damage their effectiveness as Christian witnesses. On the other hand, one possible advantage of being a late convert is a testimony with the power to cause those normally sceptical of the transforming power of the born again experience to sit up and take notice. Such as that of this rescued Rock and Roll child...raised in an age in which messages of revolt...and defiance of all forms of authority, society, the family, God himself were being spread by an adversary culture led by Rock music. We drank deeply we children of the sixties from the spiritual darkness that was all around from about '65 onwards, and it affected us in ways I believe to be unique to us. That darkness has been a thorn in my flesh ever since my first days as a Christian, when I suffered from panic attacks that at one stage could be triggered simply by venturing beyond my front door, and I've never been able to fully throw it off. I struggled on with the PGCE, partly at the University of Greenwich, and partly at Richmond College, Twickenham, while rehearsing for a couple of tiny parts for the play “Simples of the Moon” by Rosalind Scanlon, under the direction of Astrid. Based on the life of James Joyce's troubled, fascinating daughter the dancer Lucia Joyce, it premiered at the Lyric Studio, Hammersmith on the 4th of February 1993“Simples of the Moon”. I also attended occasional drugs and alcohol counselling sessions at a church in Greenwich, south east London with dear Ellen, a lovely blonde woman of about 45 with a soft and soothing London accent and the gentlest pale blue eyes imaginable.  The only time I ever knew her to lose her composure was when I announced over the phone that a matter of hours after deciding of my own volition to stop taking Diazepam, I'd switched to Chlomethiazole...unaware at the time that when it interacts with Valium, it can be fatal. However, enough time had passed between my taking the capsule and calling Ellen for me to be out of acute danger, and I can recall her literally laughing with relief at this realisation. I owe so much to people like Ellen, and my AA sponsor Don - who kept tabs on me during my very worst time - and other AA friends like Alan, who had such a soft spot for me because it had only been a short time before we met that he’d been in an even worse state than me. As far as I’m concerned, they're the salt of the earth. Still, I chose to attend only a handful of meetings before stopping altogether. One of the reasons for this was that a matter of days after coming to Christ, I received a phone call from a counsellor for an

organisation called Contact for Christ based in Selsdon, south London. I think he'd got in touch as a result of my having half-heartedly filled in a form that I'd picked up on a train, perhaps the previous summer while filled with alcoholic anticipation as I slowly approached Waterloo station by British Rail train with the sun setting over the foreboding south London cityscape. Knowing me I tried to put him off, but he was persistent and before I knew it he was at the door of my parents' house, a trim, dark, handsome man in late middle age called Spencer with gently piercing coffee coloured eyes and a luxuriant white moustache, and at his insistence we prayed together. Some time later I visited him and his wife Grace at his large and elegant house where suburb meets country just beyond the Greater London border. On that day, he and I made an extensive list of aspects of my pre-Christian life he felt required deep repentance, and we prayed over each of these in turn. My continuing use of tobacco was one of the lesser issues addressed, and while it may have been coincidental, soon after I'd taken my last Valium, I stopped enjoying cigarettes, so that a single draw was enough to interfere with my breathing for the rest of the day, and so rob me of a good night’s sleep. In addition, we discussed which church I should be attending, and there was some talk of my joining Spencer and Grace at their little family fellowship in the suburbs, but in the end, Spencer gave his blessing to Cornerstone Bible Church, where I went on to be baptised by the pastor. Cornerstone, known today as Cornerstone the Church, is a large fellowship affiliated to the Word of Faith Movement and specifically Rhema Ministries of Johannesburg, South Africa, pastored by Ray McCauley. I'd attended my very first service there even before becoming a Christian in late 1992. Drunk at the time as I recall, I’d sat next to a beautiful blonde woman of about 55 whom I later discovered to be a successful actress who at the height of her career in the sixties had appeared in television cult classics “The Avengers” and “The Prisoner”. Apart from an elder from the Jesus Fellowship, who’d laid hands on me at a meeting of theirs in central London, she was my very first Christian mentor, if only for a very brief period of time. However, I was never to see or speak to her again as I didn’t return to the church for several months, and by the time I did as a new believer, I think she’d moved to another church. We kept on missing each other, and she died in June 2001. I’ve never forgotten her.

Descent into the Hothouse

In the early part of '94, I set out on the final phase of the PGCE (FE) at the University of Greenwich in New Eltham, south east London. To recap, there'd been two previous attempts at passing this exam, the first taking place in 1986-'87 at Homerton College, Cambridge, and

the second, in 1990, at the former West London Institute of Higher Education, based on two campuses in the suburbs of Isleworth and east Twickenham. The third was the only one I actually managed to complete, although not successfully...mainly I think because I didn't show enough authority in the classroom at Esher College where I did my Teaching Practice. To their credit, my tutors at Greenwich did offer me the opportunity of retaking just the TP component, but I chose to turn them down. Perhaps I was a little put out about being failed after so much time and effort…but if I was, it wasn't for long because in September I successfully auditioned for a newly formed fringe theatre group called Grip based at the Rose and Crown pub in Kingston for the role of Roote in Harold Pinter's little known "The Hothouse".  While perhaps not among Pinter's greatest plays, "The Hothouse" is a superbly written piece nonetheless, and supremely Pinteresque, with its almost high poetic verbal virtuosity and inventiveness and dark surreal humour laced with a constant sense of impending violence. Written in 1958, it wasn't performed until 1980, when it was directed by Pinter himself for London’s Hampstead and Ambassador Theatres. From the auditions onwards, I gelled with the American director Tim because while most of the auditions I'd attended up to this point had hinged on the time-honoured method of the actor performing a piece from memory before a panel of interviewers, Tim had us reading from the play in small groups, which enabled us to attain a basic feel for the character and so feel like we were actually acting rather than coldly reciting. For me, this is the only way to audition.  Once he'd told me the part of Roote was mine, I devoted myself to his vision of Roote, the pompous yet deranged director of an unnamed English psychiatric hospital: the Hothouse of the title. He demanded of me an interpretation of Roote which was deeply at odds with my usual highly Method-oriented, subtle, intense, introspective and yet somehow also emotionally vehement approach to acting, but his directorial instincts were spot-on, as his production went on to receive spectacular reviews not just in the local press, but in the international listings magazine Time Out in which my performance was described as “flawlessly accurate” and “lit by flashes of black humour”. An amazing triumph for a humble fringe show. A major agent went out of her way to express her interest in me, and asked me to ensure my details reach her which I did...but I never heard from her again, possibly due to the shabby condition of my CV at the time, and I didn't pursue the matter further. Why I didn't more fully exploit the opportunities offered me by the unexpected success of "The Hothouse" and so go on to the West End superstardom some may have seen as mine for the taking remains something of a mystery.  In my defence I can only say that since my recent conversion my priorities had shifted so that I viewed worldly success with less relish

than I'd done only a few years before. Also, I badly missed the relaxation alcohol once provided me with following my work onstage, and the revels extending deep into the night during which I’d throw my youth and affections about me like some kind of maniacal gambler. So, while I still loved acting itself, the process of being an actor had become pure torture. I'd boxed myself into the position of no longer being able to enjoy social situations as others do, nor to relax. This may have been something to do with what the state of my endorphins, the body's natural feel-good chemicals, there being a theory doing the rounds today that these can be permanently depleted by long-term abuse of alcohol and other narcotics...but I'm in no position to either endorse nor dismiss it myself.  To further complicate matters, towards the end of '94 I started suffering from deep tormenting spiritual problems for which I'd ultimately seek a solution in the shape of what is known as Deliverance Ministry. This came first through a venerable evangelist called Frank, who laid hands on me after lunch at his home deep in the heart of the Devonshire countryside…but there were further sessions...one of these taking place at night in a beautiful old Anglican church with just myself, the vicar, and the vicar's wife in attendance. Within a short time of “The Hothouse” reaching the end of its two week run, Grip’s artistic director Martin asked me if I’d like to audition for his upcoming production of Jim Cartwright's two-handed play “Two”. Naturally I said yes and so after a successful audition, found myself playing all the male characters opposite a brilliant Liverpudlian actress Jane who played all the female, and by the end of the run the houses were so packed that people were sitting on the side of the stage at our feet, something I'd never experienced before on the London fringe. Yet, as much as I loved working with Martin and Jane, I dreaded the end of each performance, which would see me make my excuses as soon as it was possible to do so without causing undue offence. Release from what had become a torturous dungeon of sobriety came while I was attending some unrelated function at the Rose and Crown a day or so following my final performance in "Two", when a guy I'd only just met offered to buy me a drink and I asked for a glass of wine. Apart from the time at my parents’ house a few weeks earlier when I took a swig of what I thought was water but which turned out to be vodka or gin, this was the first alcohol to pass my lips since January '93. This single glass of wine made me feel amazing, doubly so given the purity of my system. I cycled home that night in a state of total rapture, feeling for the first time in months that I could do anything. Over the next few week my drinking increased, reaching a climax in a pub in Twickenham where I met an old university friend who'd just finished a course at St Mary's University College in nearby Strawberry Hill, and where I drank and smoked myself into a stupor.

 Cycling home afterwards, I took a bend near Hampton Wick and came off my bike, striking my head against a bus shelter. I stayed flat on my back for a while abject and stinking of drink -I could've sworn I saw a shadowy figure running towards me as I lay there in the dark - but before long I was shakily resuming my journey home. However, weeks of controlled drinking and one massive binge, possibly combined with the ill effects of a violent blow to the head, resulted in my becoming ill and virtually incapacitated for what might have been as long as a fortnight. Time and again during this awful period I'd awake from a feverish semi-sleep, dizzy, faint and nauseous, with my face a deathly yellowy pale, but each time a single further second of consciousness seemed beyond me I felt the Lord breathing life back into me and the terror of dying subsided. All I could do was lie around, waiting, praying for a return to normality...and when this came, I determined never to drink again as long as I lived. But we swiftly forget our sojourns in Hell... A Final Distant Clarion Cry The Twilight of an Actor

A few months after appearing in Jim Cartwright’s bitter-sweet two-hander “Two”, I performed in one final play at the Rose and Crown theatre, the character-driven comedy “Lovelives”. Written entirely by the cast, it consisted of a series of sketches centring on the disastrous antics of a group of singletons who'd come together at a lonely hearts club in the suburbs. Perhaps then it chimed perfectly with the spirit of British post-war comedy and its characteristic celebration of banality and even failure. A great success at the R&C, it could in my view have been developed into a television play or even series, but sadly, as is all too often the case, a brilliant cast dispersed after the final show. Later in '95, I played two small roles in a production at the Tristan Bates theatre near Leicester Square of the famous Greek tragedy "Iphigeneia in Taurois", written by Euripides somewhere between 414 and 412 BC, these being Pylades, constant companion of the main character Orestes, and the Messenger, who I played as a maniacal fool with the kind of "refined" English accent once supposedly affected by policemen and non-commissioned officers. Directed by a close friend, the houses were sparse at first, picking up towards the end of the run. A few months later in January '96, I joined a Christian theatre company based at the Elim Pentecostal church in West Croydon, Surrey called Street Level, going on to serve variously as MC, script writer, actor, singer and musician with two other members, married company leader Sally, and 19 year old Esther from nearby Sanderstead. Together, we toured a series of shows around schools in various - usually tough - multicultural areas of South East London. One of these, “Choices”, was almost entirely written by me, although it had

been based on an idea by Sally who also heavily edited it for performance purposes. On the whole, the kids were incredibly receptive to our productions, and we were greeted by them with an almost uniform affection, and there was an incredible chemistry between Sally, Esther and myself...and then things started to go wrong. Towards the end of the summer, Sally asked me to write a large scale project for the group, suggesting a contemporary version of John Bunyan’s classic Christian allegory "The Pilgrim’s Progress". This I set about doing, and after some weeks of labouring over what turned out to be an unwieldy and often violent epic marked by scenes of the blackest humour, I started to have second thoughts about carrying on with Street Level. The play, "Paul Grim's Progress", had left me in a bad way, and I didn't fancy too many more of the long and costly train journeys that were necessary to get me to Croydon and back. Consequently I began to withdraw, which wasn't a very kind thing to do because Sally had started to depend on me, especially since Esther’s departure at the end of the “Choices” tour. What's more, she’d taken on the responsibility of new productions, and the training of a fresh crew of young Christian actors.  As things turned out, "Paul Grim's Progress" was never produced, which is not surprising because although artistically it was a good piece, it was overly dark for a Christian play, with some scenes like something out of a horror movie. In terms of my Christian life, I was still only a little over three years old, and it showed. In time I destroyed all but a few pages of it. By the time I made my final exit from Street Level, I'd long defected from Cornerstone to the Thames Vineyard Christian Fellowship, part of the Association of Vineyard Churches founded by John Wimber in the 1970s. This was as a result of being told by a phone friend that the Vineyard movement contained members whose spiritual gifts were in the realm of the truly exceptional. My curiosity aroused, I went along one Sunday evening and had a powerful experience which made me want to stay; and so I did. As with Cornerstone I joined a Home Fellowship group where I completed part of the Alpha course, which had been pioneered by Nicky Gumbel of West London's famous Holy Trinity Brompton. I'd visited HTB at some point in the mid '90s, when it was at the height of the revival movement known as the Toronto Blessing. This was so called because it'd been ignited in January 1994 at the Toronto Airport Vineyard Church by St. Louis Vineyard pastor Randy Clark, who'd himself received it from South African evangelist Rodney Howard Brown during a service at Rhema Bible Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, then pastored by Kenneth Hagin Jr., father of the Word of Faith movement. Word Faith being now one of the major strains of Charismatic Christianity, with its emphasis on "Positive Confession". The Anointing spread to the UK in the summer of 1994 where it was eventually dubbed The Toronto Blessing by The Daily Telegraph. Its

main centres included HTB, Terry Virgo's New Frontiers family of churches and Gerald Coates' Pioneer People. Pioneer's centre at the time was a cinema in the Surrey suburb of Esher, which I visited a couple of times, and which was so packed that I was forced to stand all throughout the service, a situation which was duplicated when I dropped in at the London HQ of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God one afternoon around about the same time. Like many Charismatic churches, UCKG upholds the Fivefold ministry, and so believes that the five gifts referred to in Ephesians 4:11, namely Apostle, Prophet, Evangelist, Pastor and Teacher, are still in operation. My last hurrah as an actor came in the spring of '98, when I started rehearsing for a production of Shakespeare’s infamous Scottish Play, to be staged at Fulham’s Lost Theatre in the summer. And despite the fact that my three cameos - as Lennox, the Doctor, and an Old Man - were praised by cast and audience members alike, I’ve not acted since beyond a handful of ill-fated auditions. What's more, while I’m still open to the possibility of film or TV work, the likelihood of my ever appearing onstage in a play again is virtually nonexistent. Quite simply, the passion to perform in front of a live audience that raged within me like a forest fire for more than two decades has long been extinguished, or rather turned to dread. Some months after my final performance at the Lost Theatre I wrote the prose piece that eventually turned into “Such a Short Space of Time”. Its creation took place in what I recall as the glorious summer of 1999 which was of course the last of the millennium, and my parents were on vacation at the time, so I was often at the house where I’d spent my adolescence and young manhood, performing a variety of tasks such as watering my mother’s flowers, or just simply soaking up the atmosphere of a place I loved. Taking sneaky advantage of my parents’ absence I transferred some of my old vinyl records onto cassette, something that my own ancient hi-fi was incapable of doing. It was an unsettling experience...to listen to songs that, perhaps in the cases of some of them, I’d not heard for ten or fifteen years, or more, and which evoked with a heartrending intensity a time in my life when I was filled to the brim with sheer youthful joy of life and undiluted hope for the future. Yet as I did so, it seemed to me that it was only very recently that I’d first heard them, despite the colossal changes that’d taken place since, not just in my own life but those of my entire generation. And so I was confronted at once with the devastating transience of human life, and the effect the passage of time exerts on us all.

Such a Short Space of Time

I love…not just those…I knew back then,

But those…Who were youngBack then,But who’ve sinceCome to grief, who…Having soared so high,Found theConsequent descentToo dreadful to bear,With my past itself,Which was onlyYesterday,No…even less time…A moment ago,And when I playRecords from 1975,Soul records,Glam records,Progressive records,Twenty years melt awayInto nothingness…What is a twenty-year period?Little more thanA blink of an eye…How couldSuch a short spaceOf timeCause such devastation?

Dispersals and Beginnings

A few months later and the troubled, turbulent 20th Century gave way to the 21st to the sound of fireworks frantically exploding all throughout my neighbourhood. Phoning my father that night to wish him a happy new year I discovered that my mother was desperately ill with flu. It’s crossed my mind since that she may have become susceptible to the flu virus partly as a result of stress caused by the fact that I’d latterly quit yet another course; this time an MA in French and Theory of Literature from University College, London, which was one of the most prestigious of its kind in the world. In time though, her incredible Scots-Irish constitution - shared by so many of the early pioneers of the American South and West - saw her through to a complete recovery. I'd found the course magnetically compelling on an intellectual level, despite an awareness that writing extensively about Literary Theory might come increasingly to disturb me, and perhaps even challenge my faith, given its emphasis on what is known as Deconstruction, a term coined by French philosopher Jacques

Derrida. I withdrew on the advice of one or two members of the church I was attending at the time, Liberty Christian Centre, a satellite of the Kensington Temple, another London church which had been receptive to the Anointing as well as the subsequent Brownsville Revival, and part of the Elim Pentecostal movement. It's a decision that's haunted me ever since...although its rightness was recently corroborated by an American pastor whose sermons are among the most brilliant I've ever heard. Subsequent to making it I started playing guitar for Liberty at the urging of my friend Marina, Russian wife of Pastor Louis of New York City. She went on to become worship leader, alternating as such with Martha, another close friend, originally from Peru. It was Louis who’d got in touch with me the previous summer through KT about joining a cell group at his home in the Surrey suburbs. This eventually mutated into Liberty, with which I forged very close ties from the outset. Then, shortly after agreeing to be Liberty's lone musician, I quit my position as a telephone canvasser for an e-commerce company based in Surbiton, Surrey, thus bringing a fairly lengthy period spent as an office worker to an end. A real change in my professional fortunes came around Christmastime when I was made lead singer for Nuages, a Jazz band named after the instrumental by the great French Gypsy Swing guitarist Django Reinhard, which had earlier been formed by Barrie, an old friend of my father's going on to be complemented at various times by my dad, bass player John, and myself. We went on to cut several very fine demos arranged by Barrie, but they didn't result in the interest they deserved, given the talent involved. In early '01, Pastor Louis decided to dissolve Liberty, which was a sad event for all of us, so I made yet another return to Cornerstone, to be joined there by Martha and a couple of other friends from the LCC. What's more, I stayed in close touch with gifted guitarist Paul. We cut a few demos together of some Christian songs I'd written at the inspiration of a visitor from KT, and may work together again yet. Around about the same time, while working as a door-to-door leafleter, I took a short computer course at my local adult education centre, but nothing came of it in terms of employment. The following summer, in the wake of the 2002 Shelton Arts Festival, Nuages disbanded, which was a real shame because we'd finally found the audience we’d been searching for all along at the festival, evidenced by the passion with which our first performance there was greeted. The day after our final show, I started working from home making appointments for a travelling salesman, and was briefly very successful at it, until things started tailing off in the autumn and I was let go. By this time I'd effectively left Cornerstone for good, although I have returned a few times since. This sudden exit came in consequence of a desire born of intensive internet research to seek out churches existing beyond the Pentecostal/Charismatic fold, these being Cessationist, which is to say they don't accept that the more spectacular Gifts of the Holy

Spirit such as Tongues and Prophecy are still in operation. Up until then, any church that didn't encourage the speaking in other tongues I'd not recognised as being truly Christian. That is not the case today. One of my main inspirations during this period of wandering was the Cessationist Sermon Audio website, and I downloaded so many of their sermons that my computer may've crashed as a result. I was also inspired by the many online Discernment Ministries, although not all of these were - or are - Cessationist, and among the churches I visited were Bethel Baptist Church (Wimbledon), Christ Church (Teddington) and Duke Street Church, (Richmond), all located in the pleasant and affluent outer suburbs of south west London. Bethel is an Independent Fundamentalist Baptist church based on the US model and therefore using the King James Version of the Bible only. I went to three possibly successive services at Bethel, and fully intended to return for a fourth and so witness the preaching of Sermon Audio favourite David Cloud of Way of Life Ministries, but never did. What happened was that I was held up at Wimbledon British Rail station for over an hour on my final Sunday at Bethel and this may've put me off travelling by train to church, although I was also tiring of the constant new boy status of the inveterate church-hopper. Christ Church is part of the Free Church of England which separated from the established C of E in 1844 in response to the High Church Anglicanism of the then Bishop of Exeter, Henry Phillpotts. It’s Evangelical, as well as liturgical and Episcopal, and its member churches adhere to the Doctrines of Grace, also known as the five points of Calvinism, namely Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace, and the Perseverance of the Saints. According to Calvinism, those who form part of the Elect have been predestined to final salvation by God, and that no one can come to saving faith through their own free will due to total depravity. Duke Street is also a Grace (Baptist) church, while Bethel is Free Will. As a result, many Calvinists would describe it as Arminian, after the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius who emphasized free will and individual responsibility when it comes to responding to the Gospel. They would not, however, be entirely accurate in doing so because true Arminians maintain that salvation can be lost, while most IFB fellowships believe in the doctrine of Once Saved Always Saved. In short, they are neither Calvinist nor Arminian, which is an oxymoronic statement to some believers. For me, all true believers are united by a clear adherence to certain key doctrines forming the basis of the one true faith without which there can be no salvation, even when they may be divided by non-saving inessentials, or secondary truths. For example, while I’m an upholder of baptism by full immersion, I certainly don’t believe adherents of infant baptism to be heretics, at least not

automatically. On the other hand, I have a real problem with those who maintain that a person must be baptised in order to be saved, because the Bible makes it clear that we are saved by faith alone. That said, every Christian should be baptised by full immersion because God commands it, and God urges us to keep his commandments. Also, while I believe that Christ's return will be followed by his establishing a literal thousand year reign on earth, which makes me a pre-millennialist, a person can insist that Christ won’t return until after the millennium, or that the millennium lies in the past, and still be a saved Christian. What are at issue here are justifiable differences in scriptural interpretation. Before 2003 which was my year of relentless internet research, I'd known next to nothing about the finer points of my faith, although I was fairly well versed in the subject of prophecy thanks to having been introduced to this early in my Christian life by Spencer and Grace, through various magazines and books such as “Prophecy Today” and the works of Barry R Smith. I had no clue as to the meaning of Calvinism or Arminianism, Predestination or Foreknowledge, Cessationism or Continuationism and so on, but that didn't affect the state of my soul, in fact, no one is either saved or damned by believing one or the other of these distinctions, but by faith alone, with true saving faith producing the fruits of repentance. No Christian has a perfect knowledge of the truth, but I believe there is unity to be found between Evangelicals adhering to the fundamentals of the faith irrespective of what church they choose to worship in, but this can never be achieved at the expense of compromising the pure Word of God.

Until recently when I became a member of Duke Street, I hadn't been settled within a church since 2001, which points to a deep inner turbulence that I still haven't managed to understand...although it may be at least partly attributable to the fact that I accepted Christ relatively late. After all, the Bible makes it clear that each person who rejects the sovereignty of the fleshly realm for Christ’s sake will know incessant tribulation and persecution. Perhaps this is especially true of repentant Christians who come to faith following a relatively long period of time within the decadent heart of the world as avid flunkies of the Flesh. However, as comfort these late converts have a true and infinitely worthwhile purpose in life. This was something that constantly escaped me in my youth, for all the fierce, flaming fanaticism of my beliefs and ideals. In many ways though I’ve been my own worst enemy. One by one I’ve had to slay evil habits left over from my pre-Christian existence. In my early days as a Christian for instance I still entertained a fixation on the occult, albeit from a Christian perspective. Now I can barely stand to look at pages filled with occult information and symbols. Most recently I’ve had to address the matter of my dress, which may not seem very important to some - God looks at the

heart after all - but I disagree. For close on a decade I was more or less addicted to designer sportswear, and among the objects of my love affair were shady baseball caps, sweat tops with massive logos, flashy striped trakkie Bs, and chunky branded trainers...and I wore an ear stud to boot. Some Christians associate earrings on men with ancient pagan idolatry, and specifically the notion of being enslaved, and that makes good sense to me. I've recently come to realise that if a Christian's outer appearance fails to reflect a changed life, he may be cheating others of the chance of coming to Christ through him. He will also be cheating himself of respect, and God of potential converts. In short, I think it’s time I started looking like the Christian I profess to be. Perhaps then I might actually start acting like a person worthy of the name. In a general sense the year 2000 turned out to be something of a turning point for me, not just spiritually, but in terms of my entire personality, which has become more inward looking, even by the standards of the previous seven years. Significantly perhaps, the previous year had been the first since I was about 17 that I faced the world with my hair its natural medium brown after having dyed it for nearly three decades. What prompted this was not a sudden loathing for the vanity of the bottle blond, but the fact that the peroxide-based streaking kits I favoured were causing me to have breathing difficulties. At first I missed being blond, but in time I came to prefer my natural colour after years of youthful blond androgyny. For throughout my twenties and for much of my thirties I remained in a state of extended adolescence, blond being after all the natural colour of eternal youth. As a result I took no real responsibility as a man in the true sense of the word, as leader, provider, protector, etc, opting instead for a variety of marginal male personas, such as man about town and dandy, Punk agitator, hellraising libertine, self-destructive genius, shadowy man of learning and so on ad nauseam. I’ve ditched them all as so much pretentious claptrap. I've elicited a lot of admiration in my time for attempting to take the romantic bohemian rebel existence to its logical conclusion when all around me were conforming at a furious rate, and perhaps still do. But the price for doing so has been high, in terms of social and financial humiliation, for which I've no one to blame but myself. If I thought they'd listen I'd tell the young...listen to your parents, not the voices of fashionable rebellion...because they're trying to protect you from social failure out of knowledge of how painful this is beyond a certain age. Young people still worship at the altar of romantic rebellion as they've done since time immemorial, but perhaps not to the same degree as my own poor generation. We came to maturity to a frenetic Rock soundtrack in the tail-spinning nineteen sixties, and who can say what effect it had on us, this music...tailor-made to inspire a generation scornful of deferred gratification, a generation of hipsters.

 However, Rock was far more than another mere music form…being a total art involving poetry, theatre, fashion, but even more than that…a way of life with a strong spiritual foundation. It could be said that its first true ancestor was the great 19th Century artistic and cultural movement known as Romanticism, which reached a climax with Nietzsche who by declaring God's death, cleared the way for the eventual rule of a Do Your Own Thing philosophy so dear to the heart of Rock and Roll culture. Of course, nothing is new under the sun, but a strong case can be made for Romanticism as having birthed the notion of the artist as tormented genius at the vanguard of social revolution and eternally defiant of middle class restraint and respectability.

The March of the Modern

Tracing the history of the artist as rebel...it was the great English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley who may've been the first to give expression to the notion of an artistic avant-garde by asserting that “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”. Then, in the post-Napoleonic Paris of the early 1830s, a seminal avant garde emerged. They were the Jeunes-France, a band of young Romantic writers allegedly dubbed the Bousingos by the press following a night of riotous boozing on the part of some of their number. Their leading lights, among them a fiery Theophile Gautier decades before he became an establishment darling, cultivated dandified and eccentric personas intended to shock the bourgeoisie, while inclining to political radicalism. Needless to say perhaps, they owed a great debt to the earlier English and German Romantics, as well as previous generations of dandies, such as the Muscadins and Incroyables of the dying days of the Revolution. They were the Rock and Roll bad boys of their day. The first Bohemian wave eventually produced the Decadents, and the great Symbolist movement in the arts, both of which came into being around 1880, notably in Paris, where the so-called Decadent Spirit was born, whose most infamous fruit could be said to have been the novel “Against the Grain”, an account of the sensation-seeking existence of a reclusive aristocrat Jean des Esseintes by Joris Karl Huysmans. In general though the 19th Century was assailed by a succession of inspired works from the pens of Romantic rebels, each more ferociously avant-garde than the one coming before, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Jarry and especially Nietzsche, among them. Falling under the latter's spell since his death in 1900 have been politicians, writers, psychologists, Rock stars, anarchists, and many of the philosophers whose works have formed the basis of the literary Theory that currently dominates Western academia. In short his influence over the development of the modern Western soul has been incalculable, perhaps greater than any other philosopher or artist.

 However, the avant-garde spirit truly exploded on an international scale with the Modernist movement in the arts, which was at its level of maximum intensity from about 1890 to 1930. This extraordinary period birthed such masterpieces of innovation as Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” (1913), T.S Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (1922), James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (1922), as well as dozens of revolutionary art movements including Expressionism, Futurism, Dada and Surrealism, as well as Serialism in music, and the ascent of Jazz which together with the moving picture industry formed the bedrock of popular Modernism, or pop culture. Although Jazz was ultimately supplanted by its wayward spawn, Rock and Roll, also a son of the Blues. One possible definition of Modernism in an artistic sense is the avant-garde removed from its spiritual home of Paris and then transformed into an international movement of cataclysmic power and influence. In terms of the Modern as a cultural phenomenon, on the other hand, some critics trace its roots to the so-called Enlightenment of the 18th Century, which produced great defiance of God on the part of lofty Reason, and so for them, Modernism is a precursor of the avant-garde, rather than a spirit that arose out of it. Others go even further back into the depths of Western history for its origins, to the Renaissance and its revival of Classical Antiquity. What is certain though is that the contemporary West has reached the very limits of the Modern Revolution, and one of the results of its having done so as I see it is the mass acceptance of revolutionary beliefs once seen as the preserve of the avant-garde; especially with regard to traditional Christian morality. This process could be said to have accelerated to breakneck speed around 1955-‘56, when both the Beat Movement and the new Pop music of Rock ’n’ Roll were starting to make strong inroads into the mainstream. Some ten years after this, there was a further frenetic increase in momentum as Pop began to lose its initial sheen of innocence, and so perhaps evolve into the more diverse music of Rock. This coincided with the growth of the Hippie counterculture. The eclectic art of Rock went on to run the gamut from the most infantile pop ditties to complex compositions influenced variously by Classical music, Jazz, Folk, and other pre-Rock music forms, and so become an international language disseminating values traditionally seen as morally unconventional as no other artistic movement before it. As a result, certain Rock artists attained through popular consumer culture a degree of influence that previous generations of innovative artists operating within the bounds of high culture could only dream of.

A Final Distant Clarion Cry

I fell under the influence of various Fundamentalist Christian critics of Rock music for a brief period in 2003, which made me feel inclined to destroy all traces of Rock music in my possession, even

though I’d long lost any real taste for Hard Rock by then, whether in the shape of Metal, Punk, Goth, Grunge or whatever. However, by the summer of 2003 my attitude had mellowed to the extent that I felt able to write about an hour’s worth of Rock songs in response to a request from my dad for songs for a possible collaboration with the son of a close friend, but these were as far from Hard Rock as it’s possible to be, being influenced by such relatively benign and melodic genres as Folk, Pop and Soul. The songs, some new, some upgrades of old tunes, were recorded on a Sony CFS-B21L cassette-corder, which I think has been discontinued, and were generally well-received despite having been crudely recorded. Pat even went so far as to suggest that I record them properly in a studio, which was a high compliment indeed, given that unlike me, he’s a trained musician who’s been a professional since the age of 9, where I’m just a primitive with an ear for a catchy tune. A year or so later a project was mooted by Pat which involved the recording of a popular standards album featuring myself and harmonica genius James Hughes as well as his own London Swingtette. In spring 2008, the CD was finally released with the title “A Taste of Summer Wine”, due to the fact that Jim’s playing had long been featured on the much loved situation comedy “Last of the Summer Wine”, including the theme by Ronnie Hazelhurst, and Pat had served as leader for the show for some time. A year on, and the writing project “Rescue of a Rock and Roll Child” looks set to follow suit after more than three years of labour. It's the first one I’m pretty well 100% sure won’t end up being shredded or deleted. As I've stated elsewhere, soon after becoming a Christian I destroyed most of what I’d written up until that point, and then wrote quite happily for a time as a Christian, until it seems that God called a halt to my literary activities. It was as if I was being saturated with an almost tangible leaden darkness which took me over to the extent of altering the expression in my eyes.  Once again I started destroying any writings I managed to finish, sometimes dumping whole manuscripts in handy dustbins or one sheet after the other down murky London drains. This went on until about 1998 when I more or less gave up creative writing altogether, which is a good job given that these early Christian writings reflected a continuing preoccupation with subjects that’d held me spellbound prior to my conversion such as mysticism and the occult, which were being glorified through me despite a false warning tone. This I strongly believe. What's more, some of my writings mixed truth and fiction to produce a pointless and deceptive hybrid. Finally, in January 2006, I believe God made it clear that I was mature enough to be able to write again, and so I started tentatively publishing pieces at the Blogster website with the first autobiographical one being written sometime around the spring of 2006. As things stand, I'm desperately trying to put the finishing touches to the memoir that evolved out of them, in fact, since 2006,

I've done very little except write, so there's really not much to say by way of wrapping things up. What I will say is that shortly before last Christmas I was accepted as a member at Duke Street Church, which made me very proud, and filled with gratitude towards those who supervised my application.  Around about the same time, I was informed that Margaret my one-time mentor at Westfield College had died aged 84 in her adopted village of Woodstock, Oxfordshire. The executor of her will, Christine, who was also the publisher of her final book, "Proust et ses Contemporains" in 2006, asked me to read one of the lessons at her funeral and deliver a eulogy in the capacity of a former student. This took place in the parish church of St Martin's in the beautiful village of Bladon, where Winston Churchill is buried, which is significant given that Margaret was one of the founding members of the Churchill Centre and had written on the great man's relationship with the Christian faith. His parents and children and other members of his family are also buried in St Martin's Church, Bladon. I discovered through Christine and her friend and co-executor Polly that Margaret had been born in 1924 as an only child of working class parents in Lancashire, but had gone on to gain a place at Oxford University, before becoming a lecturer there and then at Westfield. What an ascent...from humble northern roots to a lectureship at the most hallowed place of learning in history...little wonder she was so fragile, almost febrile as a person, but so kind, so single-minded in her devotion to those who shared her passionate view of art and life. It was such a sad experience for me to be reunited with Margaret after nearly a quarter of a century while being unable to communicate. It made me realise how important it is to stay close to friends and family, because there comes a time when it is no longer possible to reconcile with them. It's too late; they've gone; and the world is always so much the poorer for their sudden absence and silence. What else have I done since 2006? How have I spent my time? As I mentioned earlier, much of it has been devoted to writing, but I also sporadically seek out work, both artistic and otherwise. I recently acquired a good many friends at the enormously popular Face Book social networking site, most from my Guildhall and Westfield days, which was a source of great joy to me. My reclusive body may have become sluggish through the melancholy brought by age and vicissitude, but I've a heart that teems with affection for the friends of my past. In terms of my online life, every so often I find myself immersed in a labyrinthine search for information related to a subject that has me briefly in its thrall. As a result it requires mental processing through a punishing bout of research and the fervid taking of notes. The most recent topics to beset me were the nature of the giants of Genesis 6:4, and the spread of pagan religion following the

destruction of the Tower of Babel when God confused the languages, and I couldn't wait to be free of them. As a general rule I'm most content when at peace with my faith, and least while lost in an endless quest for cyber-knowledge with one page linking incessantly to the other until information overload becomes a serious threat. From time to time, however, I'm tempted to venture beyond my comfort zone into the mysteries of the Bible and history. It's hard for the intellectually curious to resist doing this, and according to the Bible, knowledge shall increase (Daniel 12:4) in the time before the Second Coming of Christ, and this may well be via the miraculous medium of the World Wide Web. There's really not a whole lot left to add to this particular piece of writing. Some months ago, I started work on a second volume of memoirs, this one being woefully inadequate as a full account of my existence, although quite successful as an undercoat. That said, whether future layers will ever actually be applied to it remains to be seen. It may just be that writing will be sidelined in the same way that music has since 2006, but then that's highly unlikely. Writing is something I've wanted to do since I was about 17, and now that I'm finally able to bare my soul to the world thanks to the miraculous magnificence of the internet, the chances of my lapsing into cyber-obscurity are pretty slim.  In conclusion, for anyone still interested, I'll be resuming work on my second autobiographical volume as soon as I'm done with the "Rescue"...and I do hope there is...someone who's persevered this far I mean. After all, it's not just about me; this is a testimony more than anything else. And one that's now at an end.