The Spawn of the Swinging Sixties Chapter Six My Future Positively Glittered

Introduction

My Future Positively Glittered consists of two previously published pieces in slightly modified form, these being 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 Blogster on, respectively, May 26 and May 29, 2006. In September of the same year, a further piece, An Evanescent Friendship, which had been first published at Blogster on the 10th of June 2006,
was added. “Final” corrections were made in December.

Summer's End

1976 was the year in which I came increasingly under the influence of the
decade of Brando, Presley and Dean which at the time was less in tune
with my tastes than the stylish 1920s but I was keen for change and
was a massive James Dean fan. So by degrees throughout the year, I
replaced my old foppish wardrobe with the classic Rebel uniform
of red windcheater, white tee-shirt, straight leg jeans, and loafers.

On occasion, however, I reverted to my old image such as the time
towards the end of the legendary long hot summer of '76 that I wore
top hat and tails and reddened nails to a party hosted by a friend
from Prestlands. This took place in September. I know this to be an
absolute certainty because I should have been at sea at the time, on
the minesweeper HMS Kettleton. I think it was only a couple of days
afterwards that Kettleton capsized and sank to the bottom of the
North Sea following a tragic accident involving another larger ship
while engaged in a Replenishment at Sea exercise. 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 Kettleton with more or less
exactly the same crew.

An impression I can recall having at the time at the time with regard to
those who didn't survive was that they were all natural-born
gentlemen. I knew three of them quite well, and they were men of
marked generosity of spirit and sweetness of disposition. That is not
to say that the survivors weren't, far from it...many of them were
good friends of mine. My point is that there was a deep gentleness
about those who didn't make it, according to how I saw them at the
time. It broke my heart to think of what happened to them.

Global Village Soul Boys

It may just be my imagination but 1977 was a far darker year than those
that came before it. It was after all marked by the rise of Punk, a
musical and cultural movement which could be said to have fatally
disabled Rock's uneven progress as an art form by virtue of its DIY
ethic, underpinned by a mood of raw rebellious fury. These elements
combined with an extreme and often grotesque sartorial eccentricity
to produce something utterly unique, and it spread like a raging
inferno, deep into suburbia from its London axis, and so to other
major British and international cities.

If by the end of the year I'd been caught up in Punk like thousands of
others, at first I was relatively unmoved by it all.

Having recently renewed friendly relations with my old Welbourne buddies, I
began attending a lengthy series of parties in various part of
fashionable West and Central London as one after the other of them
hit 21. Of them all, I was perhaps closest with Chris who shared my
passion for the London party life and clubs filled to the brim with
the fashionable and the beautiful.

Together we set about attuning our tired old images to what we saw as the
coolest look of the day. Shortly after the start of the year, I'd
purchased my first pair of winklepickers which was an essential
acquisition for any self-respecting trendy. They were cream-coloured
lace-ups if I'm not mistaken. I went on to acquire something of a
collection of them for myself, including black shoes with
sidebuckles, imitation crocodile skin shoes with squared off toes,
and black Chelsea-style boots, all painfully pointed. By the spring
of '78 or thereabouts I think I'd junked the lot as a means of
sparing my poor feet.

The trendy London club look, whose key elements included floppy college
boy wedge, straight leg jeans or slacks, and winklepicker shoes or
boots, might have been confused by some with Punk. For certainly like
Punk it was adopted in reaction to the once ubiquitous hippie look,
but it was married to a love of Soul music rather than primitive
three-chord Rock. It was common among working class Soul Boys,
although I was not to discover this until later in the year when I
started hanging out at the Woodville Hall in Gravesend, Kent, while
at Merchant Navy college in nearby Greenhithe. Through one of the
guys at college I found out about the Global Village night club under
the Arches near Charing Cross. The Global in '77 was something of a
magnet for working class kids from various London suburbs who
favoured the Soul Boy look which then 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 unwittingly 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.

By the summer, I was starting to as much resemble 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 weeks I lost my job, but stayed on for a time
on a caravan site to pretty well just enjoy myself, notably at the
disco where I spent many a night, with Donna Summer's A
Love Trilogy a very special favourite.

Yes, I would have made a good professional playboy...but what I really
wanted to be was an acting sensation such as charismatic wunderkind
Peter Firth, who like fellow golden boy Gerry Sundquist was a
Northerner who found success on the West End stage in the mid-1970s;
although Firth had also been a child star. While in '77, he was the
quintessence of the beautiful young actor of infinite promise. And if
not an actor, then a Rock star...I just wanted to be famous.

Hardly a Wunderkind

In that selfsame year I was still ill-equipped for my ambitions, given
that few if any actors become truly successful 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 Welbourne 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. 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 Lofty was sadly not on
board, but other friends were, among them, Damon, 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 Lofty was of the type of the warm, bluff working class
Londoner, then Damon appeared to be every inch the classic English
gentleman, although altogether without coldness, being in his own way
as warm as Lofty.

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. Yet I
can imagine that back in '77 there must have been those who wondered
why two such apparently educated sorts as Damon and I chose to serve
as Ordinary Seamen.

I'm thinking in particular of some of the young guys of a certain RNR
Division liaising with us to and from the port of Ostend in Flanders,
Belgium. There was one incident I can recall quite clearly now when
some of these feisty kids were grouping in an Ostend street intent on
defending their honour for some wrong committed against them by some
local youths. Damon and I made it clear that we had no intention of
taking part, with the result that one of their number, a waiflike
young salt of about 16 or 17, previously a pal of ours, turned to us
with a look of utter bewilderment on his beardless face and
uttered: “What's wrong with youse guys?”, before dashing headlong
into the melee. He was of course, implying that we were deficient in
courage and manliness, but as I've already stated, Damon was the
least cowardly of men. Moreover, according to what I observed and
what he himself told me, he was more than averagely successful with
the opposite sex. Yet, for his own reasons he chose to conceal his
extreme personal toughness beneath a display of aristocratic
refinement and reserve. While I was no less robustly heterosexual
than he, 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 Thames Division, RNR came to an end in late 1977 with an
incredibly positive character report. However, I would never wear a
military uniform again.