Fragments 1976 – 1986

I had my 10th birthday dinner in a revolving restaurant at the top of a tower block in Hong Kong. Our roots as working class Londoners were a vague memory by this time in 1976. We would spend days at the weekends and during the holidays on the bank’s junk, being taken around the South China Sea, or in one of the holiday homes on Lantau Island. We’d spend sunny days down at the Football Club, swimming and eating at the bar, where even at that tender age we could sign for what we wanted.

At the age of eleven I left Peak school and started at Island School, a multi-storey comprehensive in the mid-levels, with its own swimming pool where we could spend our lunchtimes in the summer. I had so much freedom, too. I would catch the bus down to Central and take the Star Ferry across to Kowloon with my friends: there was no mobile phone, no ringing home. I remember going to a friends’ twelfth birthday party on the roof of a hotel – where we played spin the bottle and I had my first kiss – before catching the minibus back up to the Peak, arriving home around midnight, where my parents were having a dinner party. I never felt in any danger. 

I loved the life in Hong Kong; eating out at restaurants, going to the Poor Man’s Nightclub (a late night market), swimming in Repulse Bay, walking down to Stanley Market, travelling to school either buy minibus or the Peak Tram. It was an extraordinary place to live.

And then, abruptly, when I was twelve, we came home to England, in September 1978. We left on the 12th, and spent two weeks travelling back via Hawaii, Los Angeles (where we went to Disney Land), New Orleans, and New York. Arriving back in England, I had an interview at Tiffin Boys’ School in Kingston-upon-Thames, bought my school uniform the day after, and started school on the Wednesday, along with everyone else. Bright enough to get in but having learned too little in Hong Kong, I had to go into the first year, so the handful of friends I had from Burlington Road – John Pullen, Mick Scales and Lee Curtis – were all in the year above. 

I did well there – the academic drive of an all boys grammar school suited me – and took my ‘O’ levels a year early, finally catching up with myself. I’d been captain of the rugby team for a while and Troop Leader of the school Scout Troop. But the sixth form was where it began to unravel. Rather than taking English, French and Maths, I was talked into taking two Maths, Physics and Chemistry. My interest waned and my attention drifted onto music and, peripherally, the arts. And girls.

Two years later I was faced with the option or retaking my ‘A’ levels, which I did, scraping the grades to get into Liverpool University to read Physics, which was, at least, my favourite of my ‘A’ levels. I fell in with a bunch of kindred spirits quickly enough, although my intellectual self-esteem was at an all time low, an unwelcome feeling of inferiority that was exacerbated by hanging out with the keen minds of Bob Gutmann* and Ashley Jones.

The best thing, though was that Ash was in a band that was looking for a lead singer, a post for which I unabashedly pushed myself forward. After years of miming in the living room, finally here was a chance to be in a band. It was a bittersweet accomplishment, though; I had never sung in front of other people, not least these young but experienced and talented musicians, two of whom could sing more confidently than me. All the same, I performed my first and only gig with The Zane Gray Incident at the Lion’s Den in Cardiff on January the third, 1986. 

I’m not sure how great a success I was: I was certainly nervous but I think I sang OK, stood near rigid behind the microphone stand. All the same, at a time when I was still finding my feet in an unfamiliar city and struggling with my academic course and confidence, I felt for the first time in two or three years that I had achieved an ambition, and that perhaps, from here, things might improve. 

*That's Bob on the left in today's photo. He and two other friends came up and, very generously, took me out for dinner at Hipping Hall to celebrate my fiftieth, next Saturday.