Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography (6 page)

My best friend during those primary school years was Stephen Micalef from the Anglo-Maltese clan two doors along from us. Today, Steve is a rather eccentric ‘street poet’ with a curiously underpowered lifestyle and much lauded among a hardcore of the alternative literati. I have to tell them that their man was ever thus. Steve, and to a much greater extent his brother George, were the first true bohemians I ever met. Whereas our home was modern, bright and aspirational, theirs was ramshackle and do-as-you-please. My dad was a hard-working docker who led his union and went on marches. Papa Salvatore Micalef seemed to live in his bedroom and spend his days playing the accordion. Steve’s dad also spoke with a stutter in a virtually impenetrable machine-gun Maltese accent of the kind that, once in conversation with him, had you doing it too.

Smoking roll-ups the circumference of an ant’s leg, he would throw his arms wide and jabber at us kids about urgent world events as though he had stumbled across us playing chess in the Jardin du Luxembourg. At least, we trusted he was expounding on world events. For all we knew, it might have been a discourse on his bets that day at Plumpton racecourse, because Salvatore liked to gamble as much as he seemed to like not working. When he was drunk he would weep openly for the old country, lapse into full Maltese and then disappear upstairs to play the accordion once more. His wife, Dolly Micalef, came from New Cross. In the main, she would ignore her husband’s Mediterranean ways and regularly implore us to do the same, usually by making faces behind his back. The Micalefs always seemed to have about half a dozen relatives lodging with them, including Uncle Fred, who, while being the nicest of men, had the largest head I have ever seen on a human being outside those carnival ones much favoured during Mardi Gras.

Steve and I were absolutely inseparable from the age of three and remained so until we both turned twenty when, without any reason or warning, one day we didn’t see each other and have never seen each other since. Men can do that sometimes.

Though we were best friends, one thing totally divided our interests – football. I cannot remember a time when the love of football wasn’t a churning, driving engine within me, absorbing my time, causing me to pore over every result, pondering its impact and ramifications. I played it, studied it, lived it. Steve, on the other hand, collected fossils.

Millwall Football Club’s floodlights were just the other side of the railway arches from my bedroom window and so, inevitably, I followed the entire male side of our family into their glare.

It was once I reached the age of five that Dad deemed me steely enough to attend my first fixture. It was Millwall v Newport County, which we won handsomely, 4–0. Few moments in my life rival the experience of attending my first game, of being instantly exploded into the screeching Hogarth sketch wired to the national grid that was match day at the Old Den. Overnight,
Watch with Mother
had lost its edge.

As we left the ground that winter’s night in Cold Blow Lane, inching our way along familiar pavements made fantastic by the tumult, with a dozen or so of his dock mates smoking, jabbering, swearing all at once, Dad shouted down to me:

‘Enjoy that, boy?’

Enjoy it? I haven’t stopped shaking since.

My dad felt the call of this club deep in his bones. Millwall as a thing, a manifestation, walked with him always, making it absolutely part of who he was. Christ, he was actually
from
Millwall, one of those children raised in Millwall, he worked the Millwall docks. Such personal identification made him wildly over-protective toward
his
club and down the years he chalked up a remarkable record for being physically ejected from many different grounds, including the nearby Den.

Some of my earliest football memories are of being beside him as we noisily departed various stadiums long before the final whistle – usually with several stewards or sometimes an actual policeman showing the way.

On one Sunday in 1964 a local copper came to our door and asked me if my father was home. He was actually in bed, but on learning a policeman was asking after him he pulled on a pair of trousers and came down. I sat on the stairs and watched the exchange with a wobbling lip. Was he going to have to go to prison or something? Their talk seemed friendly enough, and at its conclusion some money changed hands. I learned soon after the exact sum the old man forked across was two pounds ten shillings: compensation for the policeman’s helmet that he’d crushed with his backside as he was thrown out of the home game against Coventry the previous day. In those days, if a policeman lost or damaged any part of his uniform he was liable to pay for it unless a felon could be produced. Not wanting to arrest my father – the Den police personally knew most of the more volatile dockers – he’d simply called round the next day for his fifty bob. With a hangdog apology and but a sketchy memory of the skirmish, my dad was more than happy to pay up.

Gillingham, Oxford, Southend, on at least two separate occasions at Crystal Palace’s Selhurst Park, and most vividly to me, during at 6–1 defeat at Loftus Road – these were but a few of the grounds where Spud was assisted to exit early amidst a flurry of flailing arms and bad language. I soon got used to it and would just sigh inwardly as I was denied the denouement at yet another match.

I would also, during school holidays, wander around to the notoriously intimidating ground – once superbly described as ‘an enormous trap’ – to watch the players training. You could do that then, simply amble unchallenged through the club gates and sit on the echoing terraces while your heroes larked about in front of you. I would then stand in the tiny car park, wait for them to get changed and ask them all for the latest in a series of repeated autographs.

‘What do you do with them all – sell ’em?’ they would chuckle as they obliged me with a signature for the fourth time that week. Of course the market for football trivia then was practically nonexistent – particularly for a modestly placed team like Millwall. What I would do was cut them out and stick them in scrapbooks next to match reports from the
South London Press
(we rarely made the nationals) or spend hours attempting to replicate their writing styles myself, be it the angular scribble of Tommy Wilson or the succession of loops by which Eamon Dunphy left his mark. In all I was as besotted with my football club as any fan of the Beatles then or Justin Beiber today.

I could play a bit too. I played for school and borough – Bermondsey – and rose early every Sunday morning to take part in the far-off Norwood Sunday league for a team inexplicably called Loughborough. The one thing I didn’t have was aggression. I could be intimidated by an opposing team member at the drop of an eyebrow. I had seen many post-match scores being settled in the changing rooms and, like Geoffrey Kelly’s series of broken arms, it didn’t appeal to me. Therefore on the pitch I was fly, a good goal scorer, and blessed with what they call a good footballing brain – but absolutely no bottle at all. As my dad correctly put it after one lacklustre match: ‘Don’t get stuck in much, do ya, boy?’

And here would be a perfect point to once and for all let everybody know that I did not kill Bob Marley. Let me say it again: Bob Marley’s death had nothing to do with me. Now, if you are unaware of the Internet legend that claims I did indeed kill Bob Marley, you are probably wondering quite why an individual should wish to go round noisily ruling themselves out of murder inquiries. Particularly celebrity ones. Particularly if the celebrity concerned was not actually murdered.

Well, I know exactly who to blame for this outrageous and criminal slur. Me. Oh, and I had an accomplice. My big mouth. Okay, so the rumour goes that while representing the
New Musical Express
football team against the Wailers one evening, I savagely tackled Bob Marley and mangled his big toe. So injured was Marley that he had to hobble off. Cut to several years later and Bob tragically dies of a cancer that doctors say originated from an old football injury. In his toe. Got it? No further questions, your witness. Except, and here’s a humiliating confession, I never did play football against Bob Marley and the Wailers. It’s true that in 1974, many years before I joined the
NME
, the nascent Jamaican legends had indeed played an informal match in Hyde Park against an
NME
XI. And it’s true that I later played many games for the same – rather good – rock press team. But that wasn’t until 1979 and, useful a squad as we could be, the hurtful truth was that knocking over the likes of The Jam and Madness hardly pointed to glory when old stagers constantly reminded us young pups how good Bob and the boys were. You couldn’t get near them, apparently, and to pit yourself against opposition of that calibre was, unlike these punky lightweights, a real test. Which was why, many years later, on the radio, I shamefully parlayed my playing past to include the Wailers fixture – though a cursory examination of the dates involved would have exposed the fact that by the late seventies Jah Bob and Ting were global superstars and hardly likely to have been indulging in casual kick-abouts in public parks.

On about the tenth re-telling of my boast – and by that I mean lie – a chuckling caller interjected, ‘Here, you weren’t the one that gave him that injury that killed him, were you?!’ and I suddenly figured how funny it would be if indeed that grim penny dropped on me live on air. Feigning shock, I pretended to piece together the events and of course recalled how heavily I had actually tackled the great man at one point. For the rest of the show I pretended to be very distracted by this awful realization. Then I went home. Then the Internet got invented. Then people started hissing at me in the street. Then it was too late.

Above and beyond such things as dates and radio bravado though is the undeniable fact that anyone who knows me can vouchsafe: far from being some sort of midfield animal, I have never actually put in a tackle in my life and am rightly infamous for it. Useful in other ways, maybe. But getting stuck in, as Dad would say? No. See, they might bite back. Even from the grave.

Just Give Me that Rock’n’Roll Music

‘
T
here’s a lady there got opera glasses on me! She thinks I’m a racehorse!
’

The snippet above is lifted from the pelting dialogue on
Max at the Met
, a record of Max Miller’s 1957 appearance at the Metropolitan Theatre, Edgware Road. By the age of five I knew every word on the ten-inch disc, which goes to show a) how much I loved it and b) how much it was played indoors. I actually understood but a fraction of what was being said – opera glasses? – but found the attack of Max Miller’s performance, plus the waves of hysteria that followed even the simplest of his asides, tremendously exciting.

‘He’s a boy, isn’t he, eh? Well, you can’t tell. You can’t tell! You can change overnight!’

The whoops of disbelieving laughter that followed lines like that carried me along with them. The fact that I had no idea what was being implied was irrelevant; this stuff was galvanizing. There was one line, delivered after Max said he’d arrived home early to find a naked man in his house, that ran,

‘So she said, “Don’t lose your temper, Miller, don’t go raving mad – he’s a nudist and he’s come in to use the phone.” There’s a clever one from the wife, eh!’

Kaboom! I was gone, busting a gut harder than the audience on the record, even though I was hearing it for the hundredth time. Why? Well, I think I had figured out what a nudist was, and that was more than enough joke for me. My mum, though, would raise an eyebrow.

‘Here, I don’t know what you’re bleedin’ laughing at – you shouldn’t even be listening to stuff like that.’

Why not? Everyone at the Metropolitan seemed to be terrifically cheered up by it. Did the rest of the world know you could attain such heights of pleasure, or was it only experienced by us free spirits?

As a family, we never owned many records but those we did have were hammered into the ground around the clock. These included Craig Douglas’ ‘My First Love Affair’, Frankie Laine’s ‘The Kid’s Last Fight’, ‘Sixteen Tons’ by Tennessee Ernie Ford, ‘April Love’ by Pat Boone, Danny Kaye’s ‘The Little Fiddle’ and a raucous, almost surreal, performance by the Victorian theatre troupe Casey’s Court that whizzed around at 78 rpm. I later found that none of these pre-rock’n’roll sounds had actually been bought by either Mum or Dad; they’d been given to us as a job lot by my aunt Pat.

Like most people, for their own tastes, my parents relied on the BBC – via a huge radiogram that took up a hefty portion of our living room – or used the record library in Spa Road, a ten-minute bus journey away but attended twice a week. Everyone in my family belonged to the library anyway, but only adults could join the record division. I could never understand why it was de rigueur to be as quiet among the records as it was among the books, but this wonky restriction was observed by all. On allowing the hushed members to take out a library record, the assistant would first consult a small postcard stored with the disc. On this card would be a diagram of both sides of the album with any scratches or scuffs it had already suffered clearly marked in biro. If upon returning the LP it was discovered you had added to this damage-map, you could be fined 2d. A good system but one that was rendered useless in the face of something Dad did to all library records before returning just to ensure the staff wouldn’t be touching him for any tuppences. Every time, before setting off on the bus for Spa Road, he would vigorously wash the LPs under the hot tap in the kitchen and then dry them with a tea towel. He did it in good faith and it did give the discs a lovely temporary gloss, but any subsequent playings of them would sound as though the performing orchestra was led by a deep fat fryer. It is a powerful moment for me whenever I conjure up the memory of Spud drenching Russ Conway beneath the raging torrent and it is only matched in its unlikely juxtaposition by another of his kitchen habits, that of steaming his trilby hat over a boiling kettle prior to a night out at the Duke of Suffolk. ‘Brings the shape back handsome, this does,’ he would assure me. Though here was a man who, upon learning that hot lemon was good for a cold, would boil up fizzy bottled lemonade and swig the scalding liquid down.