Seven Chapter from a Sad Sack Loser's Life - Chapter Five

A few weeks after “Sleeping Beauty” had culminated at the Buxton Opera House over Christmas 1979, David Cristiansen appeared in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at both the Bristol and London Old Vics alongside legendary method genius and future Hollywood superstar Daniel Day Lewis.
However, the cast as a whole was incredibly gifted and charismatic, and shortly before the opening night, David was lucky enough to see a BOV production of one of his favourite ever musicals, Frank Loesser’s “Guys and Dolls”, featuring Clive Wood as Sky and Pete Postlethwaite as Nathan, which provided him with more unalloyed pleasure than any other theatrical production he’d seen up to that point. Even seeing the London premiere of Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd” a few months later failed to top it.
After resuming his role as Mustardeed in the summer, his next acting job came early the following year courtesy of an old family friend, Howell Jones, who just happened to be the Company Stage Manager at the famous Phoenix Theatre on Charing Cross Road at the time.
A production of Petronius’ "Satyricon" was already under way, and they needed an Assistant Stage Manager at the last minute, and Howell suggested David. He’d also be the show’s percussionist, with primal thrumming rhythms opening the show, and featuring throughout.
Also in '81, David 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 impassioned devotion to past eras perceived to be romantic, 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”.
David 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 photographer David Bailey, believed to have served as model for the central figure of Antonioni’s enigmatic evocation of sixties London, “Blow Up”. But he 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.
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, David’s acting career lost momentum, with the result that some kind of family decision was reached to the effect he should return to his studies with a view to eventually qualifying as a teacher. Thence, he went on to pass interviews for both the University of Exeter, and Leftfield College, London, scraping in with two very average "A" level passes at B and C.
He 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 he started a four-year BA degree course in French and Drama mainly at Leftfield - but also partly at the nearby Central School of Speech and Drama - while staying in a small room on campus.
At first, he was so discontented at finding himself a student again at 25 that in an attempt to escape his situation, he auditioned for work as an acting Assistant Stage Manager, but he wasn’t taken on…so he simply resigned himself to his fate.
A short time later, though, while sauntering around at night close by to the Central School, he was ambushed by a group of his fellow drama students who may have seemed to him to incarnate the sheer carefree rapturous vitality and joy of life of youth, and because of them and those like them, he came to love his time at Leftfield, which just happened to coincide with the first half of the last of a triad of decades in the West of unceasing artistic and social change and experimentation. And Leftfield in the early '80s was a seething hotbed of talent and creativity which provided David with almost unlimited opportunities for acting and performance.
Within days, he’d made a close friend of a fellow French and Drama student by the name of Sebastian Stockbridge.
Seb was a slim, good-looking, dark-haired charmer from the north east of England who, despite a solid private school background and rugby player's powerful wiry frame, dressed like a Rock star with his left ear graced by a pendant earring and favouring skin-tight jeans worn with black pointed boots. Together, they went on to feature in Brecht and Weill's's "The Threepenny Opera".
David had two small roles, the most fascinating to him being that of petty street thief Filch, as he’d been played by legendary monstre sacré Antonin Artaud in one of two film versions of the play directed by G.W. Pabst in 1931, and Artaud, an example of the avant garde faith in extremis, was one of his most beloved cursed poets.
Through this production he went on to play jive-talking disc jockey Galactic Jack in the musical play "The Tooth of Crime", its director having been impressed by Seb and himself in "The Threepenny Opera", and so cast them in the lead role of Hoss, and Galactic Jack, respectively.
It’s no coincidence that its author, Sam Shepard, has gone on record as having been influenced by Artaud in his own work, as the latter’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, David was channelling every inch of his will to perform into one play after the other at Leftfield, while any real ambition to succeed as an actor receded far into the background.
When it came to his French studies, in his essay writing he often flaunted an insolent outspokenness perhaps partly influenced by his favourite accursed artists, but also reflecting his own exhibitionistic need to shock, and while some of his tutors may have viewed these efforts with a jaundiced eye, one came to thrill to them and await them with the sort of impatience normally accorded a favourite TV or radio series. This was the wonderful Dr Elizabeth Lang, born in Lancashire in 1924, as the only child of working class parents who went on to gain a place at Oxford University, before becoming a lecturer there and then at Leftfield.
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:
“Temper your enthusiasm,” she’d tell David, “and the extremes of your reactions. You should have a more conventional frame on which to hang your unconventionality. Don’t push people, you make yourself vulnerable.”
Was she was trying to save him from himself, and from the addiction to self-destruction that so often accompanies extreme distinction, whether of beauty, intelligence or talent…as if it were the lot of some of the most gifted among us to serve as examples of the potentially ruinous nature of privilege when operating in a purely earthly realm?
But David so loved to play the accursed poet…and to scandalise by way of the written and spoken word. How close this carried him to the threshold of a terminally seared conscience it’s impossible to say; but one thing is certain, his compassion would soon suffer, a process that would prove excruciating to him.
That’s not to say he ever fully stopped being a caring person, because he certainly didn’t, and he continued to be repelled to the core by those artistic revolutionaries who advocated actual physical violence. At the same time, he slavishly certain favoured artists who sought the total demolition of the established order, a consequence that inexorably results in increased crime and violence….not that this occurred to him at the time.
This nihilistic love of destruction kept uneasy company with a high and mighty dudgeon towards what he 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 he also opposed left-wing oppression, he reserved his 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, David allied myself with one radical lobby after the other, including Greenpeace, CND, Animal Aid, Amnesty, and the Anti-Apartheid Movement, which published one of his characteristically apoplectic letters of protest.
And he marched against the looming nuclear threat in London and Paris, 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.
He would ultimately contend that his was the self-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. But at the time, he knew nothing of any of this.

In the summer, a faction from Leftfield, culled mostly from the Drama department, took Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” to the internationally famous Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and in their production, Shakespeare's Illyria was transformed into a Hippie paradise, with David playing Feste as a Dylanesque minstrel strumming dirge-like folk songs with a voice like sand and glue.
Most of the Leftfield 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 Vinny, a dashing Britalian of passionately held humanitarian convictions who played Sir Toby Belch, David, the anarchic product of multiple social and educational influences, and Jez, a tough but tender Scouser with slicked back rockabilly hair, who played Malvolio in a mesmerisingly understated manner.
Jez was a fascinating, charismatic guy with a hilariously dark sense of humour who may have been in a band in the early ‘80s at the legendary Liverpool Post-Punk club, Eric’s. He and his girlfriend Gill, who'd designed the flowing Hippie costumes, and was also a very dear friend of David’s, never stopped encouraging him nor believing in him:
“I think you should be one of the greats, David,” he once told him, “but you've given up and that's sad. When I'm 27, I'd be happy to be like you. In your writing, make sure you've got something really unbeatable...then say...
'here…!'”
Yet, while he was complimented by many at Leftfield, others betrayed their disquiet with their words, as if he had the power to remind them of the true tragic essence of sed non satiata:
“You give to everyone, but are incapable of giving in particular.”
“I’m afraid…you’re inscrutable. You’re not just blasé, are you?”
“I’m afraid there’s something really troubling you, that you don’t want to tell anyone.”
“There’s a mystery about you…you change.”
“I like it when you really feel something, but then it’s so rare.”
“Don’t go away so long like that, David, it worries me.”
“Disabused.”
“Blind, deaf, indifferent.”
David’s relationship with Leftfield was one of the great passions of his life…and one destined to haunt him for the remainder of his days, as if he knew he’d never know such depth of intimacy again…and be increasingly prey to the torment of fading affect.
Then the following year…his second at Leftfield…he lived in an upper floor apartment in Golders Green with his close friends from the French department, Seb, a former Sedbergh School alumnus, and fellow northerner Stephen, whose alma mater was Sedbergh’s age-old rival, Ampleforth, a Catholic college largely run by Benedictine monks.
Steve 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 them despite their social butterfly ways.
And David 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, which was hardly the city of dreaming spires, and to this end he organised what he optimistically termed a salon, which although well-attended didn't survive beyond a single meeting, for as aesthetes, David and co. fell pathetically short of the new Brideshead generation that was thriving at Oxford in the wake of the TV series.
But David couldn’t have cared less…for self-doubt simply wasn't an issue for him in the early eighties and he was a truly happy person; in fact so much so he may have exaggerated his capacity for depth and melancholia as a means of making himself more interesting to others.
In the final analysis though, what possible reason was there for him to be discontented, given that his first two Leftfield years were fabulous...an unceasing cycle of plays, shows, concerts, discos, parties set in one of the most beautiful and bucolic areas of London?
After the second year ended in the summer of 1983, David had a few months to spare before travelling to Paris to work as an English language assistant at a Lycée Technique in the suburb of Bretigny-sur-Orge in Essonne.
This spelled his exile from the old drama clique, and he'd not be joining them in their final year celebrations, and the knowledge of this must surely have affected him. He was, after all, severing himself from a vast network of gifted friends of whom he was deeply fond, and so losing an opportunity of growing as an artist in tandem with like-minded spirits. He could have opted for just a few weeks in France, but did he really want to be deprived of the chance of spending more than six months in the city he’d long worshipped as the only true home of an artist?
Earlier in the year, his close friend Madeleine, a brilliant dynamic woman of North African Jewish ancestry had told him something to the effect that while many were drawn to him, it wasn’t just in consequence of any magnetic attractiveness he might have possessed:
“They sense death in you,” she chillingly opined.
Cognizant as she was of the intellectual worldview of the great psychologist Sigmund Freud, who identified a death drive subsequently dubbed “thanatos”, she may have divined some kind of will to destruction within him…or rather, self-destruction.
As things turned out, she was right in doing so, although this was barely embryonic in the early '80s, if it existed at all, but he would ultimately attribute its existence to a cocktail of intoxicants, namely, alcohol, the occult, and intellectualism, and to be of the belief that each exerted a terribly negative effect on his development as a human being.
It was not, he would contend, that intellectualism is evil in itself, but that intellectuals are more tempted than most by pride, rebellion and sensuality, and that the same could be said of those blessed with great wealth, great beauty, and great talent. He’d see intellectuals as among the most powerful men and women in history, and the Modern World as having been significantly shaped by the wildly inspired views of men such as Rousseau, Darwin, Nietzsche, and especially Marx and Freud.
To the man he’d become, their theories fanned the flames of a largely bloodless revolution in the 1960s, and rather than fade once the latter had been largely quenched, set about infiltrating the cultural mainstream where they became more extreme than ever, and so to enter 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, David was never a true scholar like Madeleine, 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, he 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 he’d been extrovert to the point of hyperactivity, but by the time of his late adolescence, found himself subject to rival drives of equal intensity, one towards seclusion and introspection, the other, attention and approbation.
In his quest for the latter, he subjected his body, the creation he tendered so lovingly at times, to a ruthless almost derisive work ethic, and to stimulate this, he consumed a variety of intoxicants, not just because he enjoyed doing so, but because they enabled the constant socialising that brought him the affirmation he so craved…what could be termed a narcissistic supply. How else to explain the sheer demented fervour of his endless self-exaltation?
That’s not to say he wasn't a loving person, because he was; but precisely what kind of love was it that he spread so generously about himself? One thing it wasn’t was agape, the perfect, selfless love described in 1 Corinthians 13.
He was hardly less heartless towards his mind than his body, treating it as an object of research and experimentation. Little wonder then that he turned to drink as a means of pacifying it, although alcohol still wasn't a serious problem for him in the early '80s, when his exhausting daily regimen tended to be fuelled instead by massive quantities of caffeine tablets. That said, Madeleine didn't like it when he drank to excess, as if she'd already singled him out as someone who'd go on to develop a drink problem. In this as in other things she showed remarkable insight.
"Your friends are too good to you…it makes me sick to see them...you don't really give...you indulge in conversation, but your mind is always elsewhere, ticking over. You could hurt me, you know...you are a Don Juan, so much. Like him, you have no desires...I think you have deep fears...it's not that you're empty...but that there is an omnipresent sadness about you, a fatality..."

In the autumn of 1983, David took residence in a room on the grounds of his allotted Lycée 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 he became infected by a serious sense of self-disillusion, as a new darkness spread over his 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 which David would ultimately attribute to a conscience that was starting to become calloused through repeated defilement. His well-being, however, remained relatively unaffected, in fact, for those first few months, he 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. He wrote of his own experiences, usually late at night, in his room with the help of wine and cigarettes, and while few of these notes survived, some incidents that may once have been committed to paper stayed fresh in his mind.
There was the time he sat opposite a same-sex couple on the Métro when he 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 him 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?”
He came to recall the night he took the Métro to Montparnasse-Bienvenue, where he 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!!”
And then there was the afternoon when, enacting the role of the social discontent, he joined an anti nuclear march through Paris which ended with a bizarre street cabaret performed by a troupe of neo-hippies whose sheer demented defiance may have filled him with longing for a time when he treated his 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 he started to hate the movies he chose, as he struggled more and more with fits of deep and uncontrollable depression. For the first time in his life, he was starting to feel worse after having seen a film than before, the result perhaps of creeping anhedonia, which is a reduced ability to enjoy activities found pleasurable by the majority.
He grew bored of watching others perform. What joy, he reasoned, was to be found in watching some dismal movie, when there was so much to do in the greatest city in the civilised world?
He'd never really been any kind melancholic up until this point but this situation may have started to change in his first few months in Paris. If his travels failed to produce the desired uplifting effect, he'd fall prey to a despair that was wholly out of proportion to the cause.
As a means of protecting himself, he started squandering his 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 which he never actually used, a black and gold cigarette holder and matching slim fit lighter, a portrait drawn of him at the Place de Tertre which made him 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 he 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 him from all corners of the Lycée have guessed that their precious David who looked like a lost member of Wham or Duran Duran was a secret dark depressive?
“I love you, David!”
“David, I want to kees you…”
Could they ever have known he was 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 not in a thousand years…for he was leading a double life, perhaps even a multiple one. Little wonder, therefore, that he was starting to drink to try and make sense of what was happening to him, which was something akin to the fracturing of the personality.
It wasn't long before he 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, he'd befriended twenty year old Theresa “Tessa” Evans, English assistant in the neighbouring town of St Genevieve des Bois, while they were both attending classes at the Sorbonne intended to prepare them for the year ahead; and they went on to see more and more of each other as their Parisian sojourn proceeded apace.
She’d been a close girlhood chum at convent school of his own great Westfield friend, Ariana Hansen…in fact, one of the first times they met up was with Ariana, when they saw "Gimme Shelter" in some dinky little art house theatre; this being, of course, the documentary of the Rolling Stones 1969 American tour which, culminating in the infamous Free Concert at the Altamont Speedway in northern California, marked the end of the Hippie dream of peace and love.
Another close friend was Jules Cendrars, 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. There was a vision that never left him…of Jules, 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.
His best male friend was Milan Curkovic, 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 Tessa 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 David’s and Tessa’s elegant 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 David feel welcome and content from the headmaster all the way down to the kids, some of whom staged near-riots in the classroom whenever he appeared. He felt so unworthy of their kindness, of the incredible hospitality that is characteristic of ordinary French people.
However, if he was much loved in the warm-hearted faubourgs, in Paris itself he was at times as much a magnet for menace and hostility as approval. In fact, he was hysterically threatened in the streets of Pigalle only days after arriving in the city; and then verbally assaulted later in the year, this time on a RER train by some kind of madman or derelict who’d taken exception to his earrings and was furiously urging him to go to the Bois de Boulogne, but what he suggested he do there is too obscene to print.
He spent an entire train journey from Paris-Austerlitz to Bretigny with a self-professed “voyou” with chilling shark-like eyes, who nonetheless made no attempt to threaten him. He even gave him his number, telling him that unless he phoned him as promised, he was merely what he termed “un “anglais c**”.
Mention must also be made of the sinister skinhead who called him “une tapette anglaise” for trying on Tessa's wide-brimmed hat while travelling home by train after a night out with her and Ariana. After they'd gotten off at Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, David was left at his mercy on the train, and then afterwards, as he made his way alone to his room in the insanely driving rain; but by then, the skinhead had vanished into the darkness. Once again, he’d been mysteriously protected against all the odds.
David left his beloved Brétigny without saying goodbye to so many people that it was painful to think of it afterwards, but frenetic last hour socialising had left him exhausted and demoralised. However, there was one final get-together, organised by Tessa and a few other friends. Milan was there of course, as well as well as several mutual friends of Tessa’s and his. Sadly though, Jules wasn't, although he bumped into one of his girl friends, who, her voice dripping with incredulity, asked:
“Où est Jules?”
Seized by guilt for having failed to invite him, David phoned him at his home to ask him to make a last minute appearance, but in a muted voice, he told him:
“Nah, I’m in the bath, man, it’s too late…”
It was the last he ever heard of him. As for Milan, he was to phone him in London a few months later, but he never saw him again. On the other hand, Tessa and he stayed friends until the early ‘90s, by which time she'd got married to a fellow church-goer and former Cambridge University alumnus called Peter, who also became a good friend.
His parents stopped by that night to pick him up on their way to La Ribera where they were due to stay for a few weeks before returning to the UK, and after a day or so spent sightseeing, they set off. Soon after arriving, it became clear to David that eight years after Franco’s death, with Spain’s beatific innocence long gone, his beloved pueblo had changed beyond all recognition.
In Murcia, while quietly drinking in a night club with some very dear friends of his from La Ribera's golden age, he found himself in the surreal position of being visually threatened by a local Punk who clearly objected to the bootlace tie he was wearing which immediately identified him as a hated Rockabilly. Such a thing 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 that David was in awe of them, as they danced 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 David endlessly translated for them.