But I am rushing forwards. Tumbling over myself, in the effort to recollect what happened, at what time and to whom.
Fortuitously, I have kept my diaries from those days. Diaries then were important things to have, with nothing remotely digital around to store one’s life on. If there had been I probably wouldn’t be able to access it now anyway (always a slightly sobering thought). My very first ‘alternative diary’ was bought from Amsterdam in 1979 and was a 1980 Flikkeragenda. It was beautifully put together, a work of art as much as anything, by a collective signing themselves as ‘Lieverds’ and consisting of Will, John, Ger, Hans and Kees Karel.
Dit is-t-ie dan,it began.’ De eerste agenda voor nederlandse flikkers en belgiese janetten. Inspiriert von unseren deutschen Schwestern zijz we al in Jamnuari 1979 begonnen met lachen , geile praat , typen, lijntrekken, schrijven plazzen ruzie maken, telefoneren uitgaan vrijen fotografferen en heerlijk eten!’
Which roughly translated means: This is it then, the first agenda for Dutch fags and Belgian janets (gay slang for homosexual men in Belgium). Inspired by ‘unseren deutschen Schwestern’ we started in January 1979 by laughing, talking hornily, typing, drawing lines, writing, arguing, making phone calls, going out, having sex, taking pictures and eating delicious food!
In other words, they had kept themselves busy. Inside there was poetry, photographs, history, short stories, information about gay issues and cartoons. I had never seen anything like it before and although it was all in Dutch and I could hardly understand a word, it went with me everywhere for a year (and was quite a talking point in fact when people saw me using it..). There was even a report from London’s 1979 Gay Pride week in it, with a picture of the ‘Dutch Gay support’ banner being carried proudly aloft in the march, which was the first one in fact, that I had been on, too). The entries I made in it that year are very much of their time. In May I had carried it all round Europe with me, whilst camping (yes..I know) and inter-railing for 3 months or so with Gary.
We had started by crossing the North Sea from Harwich to the Hook of Holland and thence up to Amsterdam (which we knew a little of already, from having been there before for a week with two female friends from Ealing, Kryssie and Pauline in the previous year).
We also revisited the Melkveg (Milky Way) club again after having seen some great bands there the year before (it is remarkably still going strong after 50 years, today) but my diary records that May 23rd 1980 found Gary and I at the COC Disco in Amsterdam, where evidently ‘we met Roland‘ and smoked ‘a lot; I supported Gary going home to the tent for the first half, he supported me for the second half’. We also went a number of times to the Viking Club, the first club with a darkroom I had ever been too. This was basically just a very large house over four floors and the darkroom was in the loft. It had been converted by owner Reint Koning in 1977 into a club and it had a different vibe on each floor. It felt quite ´home made´in slightly kitsch way. It was, frankly, an amazing place to be off your head in but equally it was quite fun stone cold sober too. I´m not sure I´ve ever been to a place quite like it before or since. It was one of the reasons Amsterdam felt so special at that time.
The next day after our Melkveg night (and for some time afterwards) the weather was foul: cold and windy, no fun in a tiny pup tent, so we waited or day or two then decided to head south for the sun. We arrived in early June at a campsite in Monfalcone near Trieste; finally, I wrote on the 4th June, ‘finally it is hot. At last‘!
By the 5th though, it had started to rain yet again (it was a poor summer generally across Europe) and now with thunderstorms too. On the 7th I noted ‘it rained all day, 2″ fell (50mm)- quaggy outside with the tent now leaking slightly’. It carried on raining on the 8th and 9th, finally clearing and giving the first glimpse of the sun for 60 hours. ‘Everything is steaming, including us‘ I wrote, after 90mm of rain. We upped and repitched the tent closer to more solid ground. Then we overdosed on the sun. By the 14th Gary was a sort of chocolate brown and I was more of a golden colour.
One balmy evening which still sticks in my mind, forty years later, we played Bowies ‘Heroes’ (thanks goodness that I had brought my Philips cassette tape recorder with me, in an already overstuffed rucksack: it was quite bulky and heavy but absolutely essential to two very musical lads) and watched a storm to the south over the Adriatic flickering and pulsing with bright lightning. I wasn’t used then to continental thunderstorms and it seemed a marvelously atmospheric thing to be doing, whilst listening to the second side of Heroes. One of those ‘perfect life moments’ that I was to write about in diaries decades later, when trying to piece together what had been important in my life up until then, and that I can still clearly recall, many decades on.
By the 26th June we were in Firenze and holed up; we looked for the gay places to go mentioned in our 1980 Spartacus Gay guide (another weighty tome we were carting around) but I noted that most seemed to have closed down, ‘the authorities must have had a purge’. It was no great surprise in those days when this happened, it was relatively commonplace. Unfortunately, there seems to have been a further flood later and the diary entries of the rest of our time away are now an illegible pink mess. I do know though, that later in Florence, we got talking to a very serious ‘goth’ looking man, with very short cropped hair, dressed in black army pants and boots, who was always studiously reading Dostoevsky in the cafe there. Gary was convinced he was gay, whilst I wasn’t so sure. We just couldn’t think why he didn’t seem more interested in us!
Eventually, after some days and much more agitated speculation had passed, Gary plucked up the courage to go and speak to him. It turned out he was English, from Kent, wasn’t gay- his girlfriend Lisa, was working in Florence at the time, but he was into much of the same things we were at the time (apart from sexually that is) and we hit it off immediately. He wasn’t in the slightest bit phased that we were together (it was often the case in those days, that you really couldn’t be certain, even in those with quite left leaning credentials, that they would be positive about homosexuality or maybe if with the concept not the reality -and we were both quite ‘full on’ I think) and even better, he had some very strong dope on him, (and a local supplier) that he was quite happy to share. We more or less talked every night, all night after that and slept by day, with long deeply meaningful conversations, musings and debates, mostly fuelled by strong black leb. It was a key moment for us, as he was to remain a lifelong friend to us both, despite our separate paths, in time, as was his girlfriend, whom we eventually met and also became close to.
I also know, that it was quite soon after that meeting that we heard from a friend in a letter picked up Post Restante in Firenze that the Joy Division front man Ian Curtis had committed suicide, aged just 23 -more or less our ages (retrospectively I see that it must have taken a long time for the news to get to us, as this actually occurred on May 18th). This was a huge shock at the time (right up there for me with the later shooting of Lennon and of Bowie’s death), as we had all been hugely appreciative fans of ‘Joy Division’ having seen them live several times and been blown away by Ian Curtis’s stage presence and completely captivated by songs such as ‘Transmission’ and ‘She’s lost control’.
It is hard now to appreciate the huge impact this death had on certain sections of youth like us, then. As Pippa Bailey mentioned in an article in the New Statesman recently ‘the story of Joy Division (and later New Order) is repeated so often it feels more like myth than reality’. The two albums they produced (‘Unknown Pleasures’ and ‘Closer’) are of course legendary, the latter released after Curtis death. A podcast about the band produced in 2020 (Transmissions: The definitive story), has little of Curtis’s personal life (his epilepsy, the drug cocktail he took to try and control it and his troubled marriage) but, she writes, ‘you can still hear his friends forty years on trying to make sense of his death’. His fame, when alive, was all over in a year, (Unknown Pleasures was released on the 15th June 1979), although of course for other band members, Bernard Sumner et al, it was just the beginning. Retrospectively, I think it was hard for us, as this was the first person we felt we had ‘known’ in some way that had died; the first suggestion that life could so easily be snuffed out, that we were not in fact invulnerable youths but that, as those war poets had found decades earlier, life comes and goes, waxes and wanes. ‘Out, out brief candle’, we reflected, musing to ourselves.
Whilst it was very sad, I think there was also an elemental understanding that his legacy would very likely live on, as indeed it has, as he joined the elite, select list of musicians that have died young. We went on to Roma after Firenze, leaving Richard & Lisa behind there, with plans to keep in touch, and for a time were happy enough, as we met a gay group of french men staying on a campsite there and got in with them (their English was pretty good I recall). Eventually though, we recognised that whilst the journey was interesting there was too much happening back in England at the time, that we were missing out on. It was time to go back home, and around the date of my 23rd birthday on July 25th, we crossed the Channel again by ferry, into Dover, ready to carry on with life in England.
Now home and armed with a waterproof pen, my diary becomes legible again and I can see we soon met up in London with Richard, who had also come back to London and was working as a nurse in Hampstead and ended up eventually living in digs in Fitzjohns Avenue, NW3. We also met up again with a friend of Gary’s, the big, good humoured Welsh gay lad called Bob, who was living in that communal short life house in Fordwych Rd, Kilburn with a few others. As I’ve already mentioned in that period (at least in London but some other large cities too) local authorities would often allow housing stock that was relatively decrepit to be used by licensed groups, the idea being that taught self help would allow them to be patched up temporarily, whilst the council found the time and money to renovate them properly.
The rent therefore was often of a peppercorn amount, somewhere between £4-10 as week, so if you didn’t mind the accommodation being somewhat basic, you could live very cheaply. Also, as far as the councils were concerned, if you had officially licensed people to live in them they couldn’t be squatted, which was happening a lot in the decade before this time and councils were finding it increasingly difficult to evict people.
We saw a lot of this group at Fordwych Rd in the next few months. On August 25th I write that ‘Gary, Bob, Piers, Alison, Richard, Angel and her sister’ and an unnamed ‘girl in a fur coat’ all went to Notting Hill Carnival: lots of police but no trouble in sight’. I appended ‘Comment by a policewomen: Lots of poufs in London ain’t there‘. This wasn’t that remarkable in those days though, and I suspect the only reason I noted it, was that it came from a woman.
Bob had told us that there was going to be a spare room going at Fordwych Rd if we wanted it. So we upped sticks from Gary’s Mum’s house in West Ealing and moved into the communal house in Kilburn. It was within walking distance of Richard’s in Belsize Park too, which was useful.
Every month was crammed full of things happening then: parties to go to, gigs to attend, shifts to do, people to be met: dalliances, alliances, and some suppliances. We fitted a lot in, in those days – lots of live music gigs especially. As an example, looking at one month in my ‘flikkeragenda‘ now, I see we went to the Associates gig at the Hope and Anchor on Sept 24th (‘excellent gig, especially the encore Bounce Back’). They had just released their stunning debut album ‘The Affectionate Punch‘ which was on repeat play in Gary’s bedroom at the time. However, that gig at the Hope & Anchor was the start of a change in our relationship, as I met a rockabilly guy called Chris there (he kept dancing into me at the gig) whom I thought was god’s gift to man at the time and by the 1st October I was meeting him at the Ship pub in Wardour St for a drink and ending up ‘getting quite pissed’. He was living in a pretty poky rented flat above a shop in Agar Grove in Camden at the time, when the area was very run down. Not that I cared too much about the flat. It didn’t really go very far sexually, as he was in a relationship already with a guy called Kieran, whom I also eventually met and kept in touch with them both for quite some years afterwards. Lovely couple. And I had started to see a guy in Balham called Paul, who was just as lovely and not involved with someone else, (as far as I knew).
By the 5th Oct, Gary, Bob and I were all round at Richards small flat (a room really) for the night. ‘Stoned and pissed’ it says. Par for the course then. Friday 10th saw Gary, Alison and I shlep down to Brighton for the day to picket the 1980 Tory Party Conference, where Mrs Thatcher was giving her maiden speech. Unemployment had risen to 2 million as a direct result of Thatcher’s policies and we felt it was our duty to protest. ‘Pouring rain but great fun’ I wrote, ‘though I kept losing Gary and Alison’. There was great pressure on Thatcher at the time to change her policies and much talk in the media of a possible ‘U turn’ as Edward Health’s government had been forced to do in similar circumstances. However this was not to happen.
Inside the dry, warm conference hall to all the Tory grandees, there she announced:
“To those waiting with bated breath for that favourite media catchphrase, the U-turn, I have only one thing to say: You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning”.
This became one of her most famous phrases, from the very many speeches she made in her long premiership. It made headline news the next day and we were all suitably frustrated and angry seeing them. The following year in fact, despite concerns expressed in a letter by 364 leading economists, her Chancellor Geoffrey Howe was to go on to actually increase taxes, in the middle of a recession
That was all still to come. On the conference day itself, I was dried out and back in London by 7.30 in time to meet Paul for a drink at the Salisbury in central London. I was helping out as a volunteer at ‘Gays the Word‘ bookshop at the time and did a shift there on October 17th, from 2-7pm, then went straight up to the Hemmy (Hemingford Arms in Islington) disco from 7-11, on the door evidently (this must have been a Gays the Word benefit, as I wasn’t normally doing the door there then).
My diary notes some altercation with Kieran and Chris that had to be sorted out (not about me, it related to skinhead friends I think) but I was there at Agar Grove ..all night.. until 2pm the next day and that evening was up at the Black Cap in Camden (always just known as the Cap by regulars) with Bob and his friend Boog, who was visiting from Scotland, who was always charming and great fun. The next day I was over at the studio of another friend of his, Eugene, who was a photographer in Pimlico, where he was taking some artistic shots of me and others, wearing animal masks. I have no idea why. I was wearing a dog mask and still have those shots: actually they were pretty good! In the evening I was over at both the Boltons and of course the Coleherne in Earls Court, well known gay pubs by then. No problems entering them now after my first visit in what seemed a lifetime ago.
We were out ‘posing in the Kings Rd‘ on Monday 20th before I ‘saw P and S again later‘ (I have no idea); then doing another Gays the Word shift on the 21st and seeing ‘Sugar and Spice’ at the RC (Royal Court I assume) in the evening.
A friend of ours from Holland, Dirk, was arriving on the 22nd and we had planned to see the Associates at Dingwalls on the 23rd with him. In the event it was cancelled, so we went to see the ‘Women in Art’ exhibition, at the then still exceedingly hip ICA gallery in the Mall instead. Another shift at Gays the Word on the 24th was followed by a trip to see the band Tuxedo Moon at the Moonlight pub in West Hampstead (‘very good live show’) and on Sunday a visit to Liverpool St followed, where the ‘Flip‘ warehouse provided an incredible array of cheap second hand Americana threads for some time, that I practically never stepped out of for a couple of years (different things, not just one outfit!). I was rocking a kind of ´Haircut One Hundred´rockabilly look then. I think rockabilly Chris had got me really hooked into it. ‘Flip’ had branches in Covent Garden and the King’s Road, but the Shoreditch warehouse was the place to go for bargains, with lots of original 50’s and 60’s clothing. As others have since noted, walking up to Curtain Road from Liverpool Street back in the early 80’s really did feel like you were entering ‘uncharted waters’.
Sunday 26th saw me at ‘the P.A.S rally in Hyde Park’, (again I’m not sure now what the initials are shorthand for), then going on to meet a ‘Robert, at the Ship in Wardour St at 8pm’ and seeing the Associates again with him at the Marquee. ‘Good as always’ I note, especially ‘No, Livingstone’ (which it now seems was either never released or renamed). A whole day was spent, probably fairly hazily, at Richard’s flat on the 27th with doubtless a quick trip to Mac Donald’s on the Finchley Rd to stave off hunger pangs and there were further shifts at Gays the Word on the 28th and 31st whilst the 30th saw me back at Eugene’s for more arty photography, nude this time I think. The month ended with a ‘Halloween Party at our place in Fordwych Rd, ‘from 10-oblivion’ my diary simply states. ‘Yeh!’ is scribbled in the diary after this. And so ended a typical month at Fordwych Rd. It was fuelled by the energy of youth, the creativity of the people I was mixing with, the cultural milieu that was London then and the fact that we made a little go a very long way. That the rent on the house was just £5 a week each, helped considerably.
There really was a lot going on in those days, for us all. We lived vicariously day to day and packed a lot in. A week later I was watching one of the greatest gigs of my life, ‘U2’ at the Moonlight in West Hampstead. I´ve even found the gig listing for this online, it cost 1.50 and they were supported by Midnight and the Lemon Boys. They normally opened with ´The Ocean´ and ended with ´I will follow´. ‘An excellent set’, I’ve written, ‘especially the last encore, Father was an Orphan’. It seems they only ended with this three times on the tour. The band had just released their first album ‘Boy’ on the 20th October, two weeks before the set they played there and it was already creating quite a stir. This gig really stays with me still; yes, the details have faded but the overall impression of a band with so much energy, so many inventive ideas, stays. I watched it from the front row, about three feet away from Bono, determined to be right up there ‘in the action’, since the previous one at the Marquee I had been much further back in the crowd. I knew that once the group came on stage it would be impossible not to pogo dance all the way through the set, as by this time there were a band of U2 groupies who simply went apeshit from the start to the final encore and to survive you had to more or less submit to the will of the crowd as one living entity. The music, the sound, the raw energy was such that it sucked you in, whilst it thrilled you to your core.
Those whom have had similar relationships with up and coming bands, seen them performing live in a small setting will understand what I mean, There’s a rush of pure adrenaline that comes from the band, often the lead singer, that hits you in the gut: a wave of sound that carries you to a place that’s not entirely rooted in this world, a euphoric combination, where you became at one with the band, the band became at one with the audience, feeding from the energy, one giant feedback loop of love, for it is all similar to a love affair really, between the performer(s) and audience. At the Moonlight that night, there seemed to be a vulnerability to Bono, his voice at times pleading, asking us for reassurance, unsure of himself, especially of course in ‘Into the heart’ and ‘I will follow’. ‘How can man do this to fellow man’ he seemed to plead with us. Why do I have to grow up and understand all this.. and yet I must’. The cover of this first album ‘Boy’ was slightly controversial at the time, in the way that it had used the innocence of the very young boy, his large eyes, his vulnerability (indeed the cover was deemed too risque and changed for the album’s American release). And that one gig at the Moonlight stands out for me still, decades later, as something of a masterpiece.
Of course it can’t last: if the group is that good, generally they play to larger and larger audiences and it changes the dynamic of the group live into something that’s less intimate and personal. It’s no wonder that bands burn out. I can’t imagine what giving off that energy must feel like year in and out. I must have really loved U2 then, as by November 27th I was back at the Marquee to see them again, ‘another excellent gig by U2’ I wrote ‘but tinged by Bono’s ‘macho-ness”. This is an interesting comment, as I’ve put macho-ness in inverted commas. It is hard to recall exactly now but there was something about his performance on that night that jarred slightly, obviously; perhaps what I was seeing in Bono, was the realisation that he knew by this time that ‘Boy’ was going to be successful, as indeed it eventually was; critical reviews were good.. Paul Morley of the NME had called it “honest, direct and distinctive” while Betty Page of Sounds dubbed U2 the “young poets of the year”, though it only reached 52 in fact on the LP charts on its first release in the UK), and that he was going to be ‘big’. The world was his for the taking. And of course, it was. By March 1987, they would be iconically performing ‘Where the Streets Have No name’ the opening track from The Joshua Tree album, for a legendary rooftop video shoot in LA, next to the infamous Hotel Cecil. But, perhaps at the price that that special vulnerability had been lost?
There were other bands who performed marvellously live in small venues at that time too. I’ve mentioned the Associates already, where Billy Mackenzie’s vulnerability was also on display at close hand and arguably never lost (though sadly he was very much lost from this world too early: another suicide). Jim Kerr of Simple Minds definitely ‘had it and lost it’, as they grew bigger. Some lesser known bands like the Au Pairs and Orange Juice and 23 Skidoo were very, very good live, in the small venues that I saw them in too.
For 1981, I switched to the english ‘Big Red Diary’. ‘1981 Utopias‘ it said on the front cover, ever hopeful. This publication from the Pluto Press was very different to the diary I’d had the year before with its ‘Flikker’ agenda. It perhaps shows in retrospect that I was becoming more politically orientated in my outlook, which was no great surprise really, given the company I’d been keeping. Britain under the Tories it starts on p3 and then goes into a long spiel about cutbacks, changes and future plans of the Tories then in power, led by Margaret ‘Maggie’ Thatcher. I appear to have also felt the change in tone keenly, as I’ve stuck various gay stickers over this page. There’s a particular vitriolic portrayal of Thatcher on p4 with a Medusa like cartoon of her, her famous bouffant made up of serpent tongued snakes. Strong stuff! Recently Gillian Anderson’s portrayal of her in The Crown was uncannily accurate, though doing something of a job reminding us that she was a women operating in a man’s world. Years later, my concerns about her would be re-amplified, as we attempted to run a credible, government funded safer sex campaign, for gay men, with her always watching from the touchlines.
We had ended 1980, with one hell of a New Years Eve bash at Fordwch Rd, ( I think this was the one where Jimmy turned up and stayed over). I was back over at Richard’s telling him all about it though, by the afternoon of the 1st and then off to see the Passage play a gig at the ICA in the evening and out again on the 4th to see Josef K and Orange Juice at the ICA again (‘interesting gig’). Later that month I was attending meetings at another housing co-op, this one especially for gay men & lesbians called ‘April’ and based in Hackney’s decrepit council stock. I felt it was time to breakaway to new pastures. By attending the meetings regularly you could get offered a housing space if it came up, and so I was attending them every two weeks.
By February 17th, I was going to Cabaret Futura at 13, Wardour Street in Soho, with Richard, his girlfriend Lisa and Gary, which was hosted by Richard Strange. This was an alternate incarnation of the so called ‘New Romantic’ movement (with Steve Strange) but Richard Strange’s version (absolutely no relation) was more political, aesthetic and slightly dystopian: very much of its time really. Strange has since described how
‘our clientele would enter through a small glass door, then go down a tacky mirrored staircase to a small lobby, all gilt and red flock wall paper, like a Louisiana whorehouse, where our enchanting door girl, Giussepina de Camillo, would meet and greet. She always arrived for work accompanied by her pet, an 11-foot-long python named Sainsbury, who would lay dreamily coiled at her feet, under the cash register, for the entire evening‘.
‘Once past the slumbering serpent, the guests would pass through a small archway and into the main performance room, dimly lit with a small, raised stage with steps leading up from the floor. Tables and chairs ranged halfway back, a pall of blue cigarette smoke over the bar, and the exquisite thrumming of gossip. It had always been my intention to style the physical space of the club on the German model immortalised, if not invented by, Auden and Isherwood.’
In her intriguing book ‘Cabaret’, (link with preview section) the writer Lisa Appignanesi wrote in 1984, ‘Of all the cabarets to spring up in Britain over recent years, it was Soho’s groundbreaking Cabaret Futura, the brain-child of Richard Strange, which bears most atmospheric resemblance to its Weimar kin. Cabaret Futura became the focus and meeting place for the energy which fed the explosion in fashion, photography, filmmaking and music. More than that, it suggested a reaction to television, the growing demand for a live venue to serve specific, not standardised tastes.’ However it was always interesting but often in a rather worthy kind of way. It was also basically pretty ‘straight’, (but not straight) which jarred a little from the cruisy places I was more used to going by then. Alternatively, it might have just been that the gay men there were on their best behaviour.
The 6th (of February) was memorable, both for seeing what had developed from the ex Joy Division members after Ian Curtis´s death, for the first time, with New Order playing an early gig in their career (about 6 months in) at Heaven (‘underneath the arches in Charing Cross’ at it always styled itself) but also as Gary & I finally decided to go our separate ways. By the 20th February I was ‘in’ to April Co-op, having been offered a place in Bethune Rd, near Manor House in Hackney. It was a bit further out from everything but not especially so. For the first time I’d be living in a house full of gay men: it could be heaven, it could be hell!
