Global Village Soul Boys

Introduction

"Global Village Soul Boys" as it was published at Faithwriters.com in August 2007, consisted of two previously published pieces of writing in slightly modified form, which is to say, "My Future Positively Glittered" (now divided into two sections, "Global Village Soul Boys" and "Hardly a Wunderkind") and "Summer's End", whose first drafts were published at the Blogster.com website on, respectively, May 26 and May 29, 2006. In September of the same year, a further section, "A Evanescent Friendship", which had been first published at Blogster on the 10th of June 2006, was edited and then added to the piece to create its definitive version.

Summer's End

1976 was the year in which I came increasingly under the influence of the decade of James Dean, Elvis Presley and the Rock'n'Roll cultural revolution, which at the time was far less congenial to my tastes than the stylish 1920s, and yet I was thirsty for change. Thence, by degrees throughout '76, I sidelined my old dandified wardrobe in favour of a far more overtly masculin outfit of red windcheater, white tee-shirt, straight leg jeans, and loafers or black working boots. However, on occasion I reverted to the foppish apparel of previous years, such as the time towards the end of the famed long hot summer of '76 I wore top hat and tails and reddened nails to a party hosted by a friend from Brooklands College.
This party took place in September 1976. I know this to be an absolute certainty because I should 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. HMS Fittleton had been accepted into the Royal Navy in January 1955, although she wasn't actually named Fittleton (after the Wiltshire village) until almost exactly 21 years later. She set sail from Shoreham in Sussex on the 11th of September 1976 with the intention of reaching the port of Hamburg on the 21st of that month for a three day Official Visit, but never arrived. On the 20th she took part in the NATO exercise "Teamwork" 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, and it was during this exercise that the bow waves of the frigate inter-reacted with those of the sweeper to cause the two to collide.
For some reason I decided I didn't want to be onboard for this particular trip and so pleaded sickness, a decision I was ultimately to regret rather than rejoice, that is at least partly, and despite the fact that had I taken part in the RAS manoeuvre, I'd almost certainly have been assigned Tiller Flat duty, as had been the case on several previous occasions during exercises of this kind. This would have resulted in me being in a highly precarious place when the Fittleton turned over, namely below deck, rendering escape exceptionally difficult although not impossible. An impression I can recall cultivating at the time with respect to those who didn't survive was that they were natural gentlemen. I knew three of them quite well, and they were men of marked generosity of spirit and sweetness of disposition. That is not say that the survivors weren't, far from it...many of them were good friends of mine, and I had really begun to fit in so well by '76, making my absence from Fittleton particularly hard for me to bear, although I was not made to suffer for it, that is by anyone other than myself.

Global Village Soul Boys

1977 was a far darker year than its immediate predecessors as I see it. It was marked by the ascendancy of Punk, a musical and cultural movement which could be said to have hampered Rock's uneven progress as an art form by force of its DIY ethic, underpinned by a mood of raw rebellious fury. These elements combined with an extreme and often grotesque sartorial eccentricity that was unique at the time, spreading deep into suburbia from its London axis and thence to other major British and international cities.
Having recently renewed friendly relations with my old Pangbourne buddies, I began attending a long series of parties in various quarters of fashionable west and central London as one after the other of them hit 21. Of them all, I was perhaps closest with Craig H., an up and coming businessmen who shared my love of the trendy London life and night clubs filled to the brim with the fashionable and the beautiful. Together we set about attuning our respective images to what we saw as the coolest look of the day. Its most salient elements were short hair, typically worn with a college boy fringe, straight leg jeans or slacks, with or without cuffs, winklepicker shoes or boots, and a baggy shirt worn with small collar archly upturned. Shortly after the onset of the year, I'd purchased my first pair of winklepickers, and went on to amass something of a collection, including a pair of imitation crocodile skin shoes, black Chelsea-style boots, and black shoes with sidebuckles, all with painfully pointed toes. By the spring of '78 or thereabouts I think I'd junked the lot as a means of sparing my poor feet.
This cutting edge London look might have been confused by some with Punk, but although like Punk it was adopted in reaction to hackneyed hippie-style clothing, it was a far more elegant variant, married to a love of Soul music rather than primitive three-chord Rock. When sported by working class kids, it was known as the Soul Boy look although I was not to discover that fact until later in the year when I started frequenting on one hand dances at the Woodville Hall in Gravesend while attending Merchant Navy college in nearby Greenhithe, Kent, and on the other the giant Global Village night club under the Arches near Charing Cross. The Global circa '77 was something of a magnet for working class kids from various London suburbs sporting this peacockish image, which consisted of such elements as the wedge haircut, often streaked with a variety of tints, brightly coloured peg-top trousers, and winklepickers, or beach sandals.
When the Soul Boy wedge was married to a passion for European designer sports clothing, it mutated into the so-called Casual style which exploded in the late '70s and early '80s on the football terraces, first allegedly in Liverpool, and then nationally, going on to influence a passion for casual sporting attire on the part of the youth of Britain and beyond that persists to this day. For the greater part of '77, it was the Soul Boy look I aspired to rather than that of Punk, although I started to flirt with Punk once I'd become aware of the monstrous vagaries of attire that were regularly on display on Chelsea's Kings Road and elsewhere in the early part of the year.

Hardly a Wunderkind

By the summer, I was starting to as much ressemble a Punk as a Soul Boy, squandering my youth like a profligate in night clubs and bars in Palamos on Spain's Costa Brava, while working by day as a sailing instructor. After a few months I lost my job, but stayed on in Palamos for a time on a caravan site to engage in a constant almost Sisyphian round of alcohol-fuelled festivities, as if driven by a quenchless thirst for whatever lay just beyond my reach.
This obsession with what I didn't possess may have been partly behind the quest for fame as actor, writer, or Rock idol, but especially as actor that began to characterise my life from about the mid-70s onwards. In '77 I was still ill-equipped for my ambition, given that few if any actors become truly succesful on the strength of their looks alone, which is surely why there are so many more pulchritudinous male models than actors. I had not yet appeared in a single play, except a handful at Pangbourne which had provoked more hilarity than praise. My roles there consisted of two elderly women, a beauty with Mia Farrow hair conducting some kind of illicit liaison as I recall, and a posturing psychopath called Alec, this in "The Rats", a little known Agatha Christie one act play. In short, I was hardly a National Youth Theatre wonder kid. I had written a few songs, but my guitar playing was yet threadbare and weak, even though I already had a good baritone singing voice. Still there was precious little proof to date of any real ability or success of any kind. My future positively glittered before me.

An Evanescent Friendship

I underwent my final RNR voyage, destination Ostend in Belgium, towards the end of the summer of 1977. My best RNR pal Colin was sadly not onboard, but other friends were, among them, Adam, a tall and elegant red-haired man a little in appearance as I recall like the charismatic British actor Edward Fox, with a trace perhaps of Damian Lewis. If Colin was of the type of the bluff, warm-natured cockney, then Adam, who was probably about 26, was every inch the gentleman cavalier, and entirely aristocratic in manner, although far from cold or reserved.
His family background was almost inconceivably tragic, and his soft and courtly manners masked a troubled inner life which he kept almost entirely to himself, as well as considerable physical courage: I remember a time when for some reason a drunken sailor started threatening me in a bar, and Adam placed himself between me and my would-be attacker, with the result that he saved me from a possible battering.
I can imagine that back in '77 there must have been those who wondered why two such apparently refined and cultivated young men as Adam and I chose to serve as Ordinary Seaman. I am thinking in particular of some of the young men of a certain RNR Division liaising with us to and from Ostend. There was an incident I can recall quite clearly now when some of these hyper-patriotic seamen were excitedly congregating in an Ostend street intent on defending their personal and regional honour for some wrong committed by what was probably a gang of local youths. Adam and I clearly had no intention entering into the imminent brawl. Thence, one of their number, a waiflike young sailor of about 16 or 17 turned to a small group of us from London Division and incredulously asked of us: "What's wrong with youse guys?" He was of course, implying that we were deficient in courage and manliness, but as I've already stated, Adam was the least cowardly of men. Moreover, according to what I observed and what he himself told me, he was more than averagely succcessful with the opposite sex. Yet, for his own reasons he deemed it politic to conceal his extreme masculinity beneath a display of aristocratic suavity. While I was no less robustly heterosexual than he was, I did not share the inner fortitude which would eventually see him assuming the uniform and calling of a naval officer. It had of course been his destiny all along. But not mine. My tenure with the London Division, RNR came to an end in late 1977 with an incredibly positive character report. However, I would never wear a military uniform again.