The Fan with the License: Growing Up Competition Entry

We argued so much that one of us had to be punched. I wish I could call him now and laugh about it all. I can’t do that because Andy Otley is dead. It was a heroin overdose, one needle too much for the boy of such great promise. He was twenty five years old when he went. I have not thought about him for a while, but tonight I am, deeply. For the sake of history, Andy threw the first haymaker; there is still a scar above my eye to prove it. That night was the last time that we ever spoke to each other. I knocked him senseless.

I’m sitting here now, nearly thirty years later, glass of dry white wine by my side, looking out the window to my garden. My life is fine. I live with the girl who matters more than all of them, more than Andy and more than the music. In fact, she is the music. She is the greatest singer that I have ever met, and my life will always be about songs. Next week though, love, music, history and saviours will culminate into something that might just be the most fantastic thing ever. This is my life, what I do. I’m the fan with the license. Perhaps that’s why I am thinking hard. Remembering Andy.

Next weekend I go to the Glastonbury Festival as tour manager for the Blockheads. The band that caused the altercation between me and Andy. I’m forty four years old; the Blockheads are geriatric now, but still brilliant in my opinion. I think if he were still here, Andy at his best would be either very proud of me or utterly furious. I really can’t gauge what his view would be. On one hand, he might say that’s its not very punk, and this band are an end of the pier troupe, trading on past glories, that I, and them are completely retro and meaningless. On the other hand, Andy might have grown up to be a civil servant, or bricklayer, two kids with patio paving, the complete Genesis and Simply Red back catalogue. I don’t think so though. I would love to think that there is a third hand, the hand where Andy would be with me, in the fields of Somerset, pissing on other peoples tents, stealing a strung out hippies stash of hash, then getting off with his lentil boiling girlfriend for good measure. We would have the greatest time. But this is an Andy Otley seen through rose tinted glasses, not the man he ended up being. Bloody music and heroin.

*

We were in the same class at school. A small town in Essex called Basildon. I knew him for three years, from thirteen to sixteen. He was brilliant at Maths and English, read the NME when everyone else was obsessed with Look-In and the Rubettes. He smoked his Mum’s B&H and was the first boy to wear Jam shoes. He had three paper rounds and fleeced everyone behind the school sports hall with his skill at ‘Penny-up-the-wall’. He had extreme ginger hair, a mole on his left cheek like Robert De Niro and was completely wild. I remember once that he cut the top of one of Mr Wilkinson’s fingers in woodwork class, all because he wanted to see what would happen. He tried to seduce Miss Docherty, the games teacher in the store-room after detention. I guarded the door whilst it happened. She was a right one, Miss Docherty.

He knew all the bands and had all the singles, coloured vinyl, the lot. He also had all the opinions. The Sex Pistols (‘Cabaret Puppets’), the Clash (‘public schoolboys, whose fingernails have never been dirty’) and the Jam (‘the only band that you can trust’). He loved X-Ray-Spex. We tried to see them once in London when we were fourteen. The concert was in Victoria Park in the East-End, but somehow we ended up in Kensington. We spent all our pocket money on Cider, gave it to some old tramp that went into an off licence and cadged us a couple of bottles. Andy puked up all over him outside the tube.

I saw my first band with Andy at our youth club. They were a bunch of locals called The Vandals who had created some excitement in Essex. In hindsight, they were useless, but we jumped up and down and spat at them like they were the future of rock and roll. Some fanzine, Bostick Bondage I think it was called, reviewed the gig. Andy got a mention as the ‘shirtless spastic who danced to his own tune even when the music stopped’. That was a perfect description of him. I loved him; he was my best friend fleetingly.

It all started going wrong with the sniffing of glue in the garden shed and the song ‘Reasons to be Cheerful. Part 3’. He never let it lie. I loved that song, we both did. The question was, and the answer was not clear in those days at all. Was the song punk or funk? It was 1979 and in my mind punk had vacated the limelight, replaced by a melting pot of every musical style that this world had to offer. I could not articulate this at the time, just probably said that it was a great disco record. What I loved about the song was that you could dance to it, not just jump up and down, but spin, thrust your crotch and clap your hands. The lyrics were hilarious and an education. I still might not know who John Coltrane is even now without it.

Andy was having none of it though. Ian Dury and the Blockheads were punk, always were and always will be. The rows were mental between us. He accused me of selling out. That I was never a proper punk in the first place, what with my new liking for Luther Vandross and David Bowie. He called me a ‘Soul Boy’ and then ‘Asshole Boy’. It was funny at first, but it became relentless and tiresome. I was becoming wary of him. He was finding other friends, boys with shined up brown boots, bad skin and right wing parents. We were changing. The truth was I’d met a girl. Her name was Sioux. She was a year older than me, of Chinese decent, cool, pretty and bright. She knew about other things. Clothes, books, kissing and Marvin Gaye. I was opening up. Andy was closing down.

It ended badly at a disco called Raquels on a Monday night. They had a teenage night called ‘FAD’. They tried to cater for everyone so they played chart music, disco, ska and slow smoochers at the end of the night. Everyone went and there were many fights. I was dancing with Sioux to a reggae song called ‘Money in my Pocket’ by Dennis Brown when Andy appeared on the floor, under the plastic palm tree. He stepped in-between us, said he wanted a word, in private. I said I was dancing, that set him off. He asked why was I dancing to black mans music. What was I? A punk or a soul boy? There was something in him that night, cider, glue perhaps. His eyes were bulging and his legs twitching. He started screaming about the song, our song, said I knew fuck all about anything and why was I hanging out with a chink girl? He then hit me, hard. I hit him harder and that was that. Sioux disappeared forever.

Andy and I never spoke after that. I used to see him hanging about in the town centre at weekends with skinheads and pretend kid punks who really did not know what they were dressing up for. I know that he went to borstal for assault and robbery. It’s probably where he learnt all about heroin.

*

Perhaps I should stop thinking about him for good. Let it go because we all go our different ways. I have been no angel myself over the years, done bad things; hurt those who have meant something to me. We all do that. Did I let Andy down? I don’t think so now. I grew up quicker that’s all, discovered choices. Andy took only one road, self destruction. Youth is a raffle and I met a girl who was worldlier than both of us for a short amount of time. She showed me a winning ticket. I wonder where she is now.

Yes. I’m going to Glastonbury next week with the Blockheads. It’s going to be great. My girlfriend is not coming with me. It’s a shame because she’ll be performing on another stage in another part of England. She’ll be singing her heart out. I wish I could be in two places at once, but I can’t. The fan with the licence came good though. A real reason to be cheerful.