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| Mail On Sunday Interview |
| My father was a printer and when he came home, he would smell so strongly of ink that he would have to scrub his hands with Swarfega to get rid of it. My mother was forced to work to supplement his meagre income and, for a time, she was the milk lady at my junior school. I remember being sent outside the classroom for misbehaving once and my mother walking past me. She rather diplomatically ignored me and it was never mentioned – perhaps because she thought I’d been sufficiently punished. Before that my mother worked as a seamstress in a factory, making the now very politically incorrect golliwogs. We had hundreds of them at home awaiting finishing touches. One night, I had a terrible dream that my father had come home from work the same size as one of the dolls – I woke up terrified and ran into my parents’ room. What I didn’t know was that my mother was looking after a friend’s baby for the night and, when she pulled back the covers to let me into her bed, I saw this tiny thing lying beside her, I thought to myself: ‘So it’s true! My dad has shrunk!’ Her sewing talents weren’t confined to golliwogs, though. Years later, when my brother, Martin, and I were in pop bands and started playing in clubs, my mum would make us mad baggy trousers and crazy shirts to wear. Although we had no sisters, we more than made up for their absence by wearing make-up and hairspray. When I was 15, the council moved us into a small house with a bathroom and a garden. It felt like luxury: before then, we’d lived in a place with an outside loo and, for a while, no electricity. Because we couldn’t bath, we’d have ‘a good wash’, which meant standing naked in the kitchen and cleaning ourselves over the sink. The first time I became aware of my family’s financial difficulties was when I saw holes in the pockets of my mum’s coat. Once she started crying when she caught me limping down the street because my shoes were too tight. Not surprisingly, my dad insisted that Martin and I go out to work very early, so we both had paper rounds at the age of nine and later on, worked for a greengrocer. Whatever money I got, I had to give to my parents. Growing up, Martin and I were very different – he was always more physical than I was and, although he was two years younger, he could beat me up. We had different interests, too. I was into books and music and, because I was older and doing everything before him, he would go in the opposite direction, getting into football and Bruce Lee instead. Years later, when we were in bands, we really appreciated those differences. Martin was the much better looking one and was knowledgeable about style, while I wrote the music and lyrics. Together we were a force – we needed each other. Martin was quite a shy boy, but the thing that brought him out of himself – and opened doors for both of us – was the amateur theatre club across the road from our council estate in Islington, north London. After chancing upon it one day, the next think I knew my brother and I were being asked to appear on television. The first thing we ever did was together: we played two brothers who had just been to an Arsenal match on Jackanory. My parents gave us lots of love and support, and although they encouraged us to be actors, they were never pushy – they just made sure we kept both feet firmly on the ground. There was no children’s television in those days, so on Saturday mornings we would go to the local cinema in packs. One of us would pay to get in and then let the others in through the back door. During the film, whenever the cavalry or cowboys appeared on their horses, we would all raucously bang our heels on the backs of the seats in front. The lights would come on and we’d all be told to shut up or the film would be stopped. Looking back, 1971 was the seminal year of my childhood because so many wonderful things happened to me, I started supporting Arsenal and, the first time I went to see them play, they won the double. I thought that was a pretty good sign of things to come. I was also able to buy a guitar with money I had earned doing a film for the Children’s Film Foundation. I had been writing songs for quite a while, resolutely refusing to play anything written by other people and, later that year, I remember rather precociously performing a few of them at my school prize-giving ceremony. A chap called Trevor Huddleston, who was giving out the prizes, saw me and decided to take me under his wing. He turned up at our house one night and gave me a brand-new cassette player, telling me to record every song I wrote. Before then, Id had to make do with what we called Voice-O-Graphs – little booths in railway stations in which you could record messages for one minute. I used to squeeze into the tiny space with my guitar and, standing sideways, record my songs. You can imagine how incredibly grateful I was for that cassette player. It was also in 1971 that I saw David Bowie perform Starman on Top Of The Pops, and thought, ‘That’s the planet I want to live on’. The next day, I painted my nails with a dark polish, tried to tease my hair into a similar style to Bowie’s and went to Oxford Street to buy a pair of baggy trousers. Bowie and Neil Armstrong were my heroes. I was lucky to be a part of that hope-filled time, when an entire generation felt that anything was possible. |
| Boys Will Be Boys |
| Interview by Celia Walden Mail on Sunday, 8th September 2002 |
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