Over the Moon (4 page)

I was terrified but knew I had to go through with it or my school life would become a misery. When I got to Boot Hill with
a
handful of supporters, my opponent, Lenny, was waiting for me. He was an older boy with a big reputation for violence, swearing and spitting huge distances. A ring of boys gathered around us and their cry went up: ‘Fight! Fight!’

Len tried to see me off quickly, with a haymaking punch that thankfully just missed my nose and a hefty boot to my right thigh. This was it! Driven by panic, I kicked him fair and square in the bollocks and, as he bent double, connected with a lucky punch that left my hand aching. Len looked astonished and backed off, and although the whole charade was pathetic, I knew that I would be able to walk tall in the playground from now on.

It was ironic that I had gone to Shipman County purely to play football because that was the only thing that made my life there bearable. I was still doing pretty well in the Saturday morning school-team matches, and at an away game when I was twelve, there was a breakthrough that made me think my whole Popeye-based plan for sports-related world domination might pay off, after all: I got scouted by West Ham.

Their scout approached me after the match and asked if I would be interested in a trial for the Hammers at nearby Cumberland Road the following Tuesday. This was kind of a silly question. It was all I had ever dreamed of, and I spent the next three days imagining myself at Upton Park putting pinpoint passes through for Vic Keeble or John Dick to finish off.

The fateful day arrived and I got to Cumberland Road to join the thirty or so other hopefuls, all kitted up and aiming to catch the eye of the three or four coaches. They divided us into groups, and after some ball work and a short match, Terry, the
head
coach, called a halt to proceedings. He read out a dozen names and called those boys to him. I wasn’t one of them. So that was it. I was out!

I was sitting slumped and devastated on the grass with the other failures when to my amazement the kids that Terry had chosen all trooped off across the turf. He came back over to us, grinning. We were not the rejects: they were! Terry invited us back to train again the following week. It was official: I was now a West Ham United schoolboy player.

Over the next few weeks, I attended training faithfully and could not have found it more exciting. Some weeks, first-team players came to coach us so I found myself working with idols like Noel Cantwell, Phil Woosnam and John Bond. Mr Bond gloried in the bizarre nickname of Muffin and taught me how to send an opponent flying and then look totally innocent – a very useful skill.

My friend Frank Lampard was starting his illustrious West Ham career in the same schoolboy team as me and we became quite a decent double act. We were both left-footed, and combined well down that side of the pitch, switching and over-lapping. I felt part of the club, especially as they gave us all free tickets to the first-team home games, meaning I no longer had to part with a shilling at the turnstiles.

We played our home games at Clapton FC’s ground behind the Spotted Dog pub, and this illustrious venue was where I scored my solitary goal for the Hammers. We were playing Thurrock and as the ball reached me on the halfway line I swung a boot and hoofed it down the pitch to clear it. The opposing goalie
misjudged
the bounce and it just about trickled over the line. Naturally, I celebrated as if that had been my intention all along.

It’s strange, though, how your priorities in life change. Playing for my beloved West Ham, being coached by my heroes and top international players, I was living the dream, and yet I had not played more than four or five games before everything shifted. A new interest entered my life and became just as all-consuming as my passion for football, which I now allowed to fall away.

As I turned thirteen, and became aware of those perennial adolescent fixations of girls and rock ’n’ roll, I became obsessed with music, and specifically black-oriented blues music played by legendary American musicians. It was an interest that was to shape the rest of my life – and it was all sparked by an illicit trip to Soho.

LIFE CHANGES WHEN
you hit your teens. It’s a cliché, but like most clichés it is true, that as you stand on the cusp between being a boy and becoming a man, you make a host of decisions that will most likely shape the rest of your existence. The biggest irony is that you make these decisions while you are a mass of raging hormones and often have no idea what you really want.

There is no doubt that I was in danger of taking a wrong path in life as I turned thirteen. The pernicious influence of Shipman County may have been warping my innocent soul, because outside of that sorry excuse for a school, I was getting involved in gangs – the Canning Town Boys, to be precise.

I hadn’t suddenly become a bad boy, and largely my behaviour was down to peer group pressure, but slowly I was going off the rails. In the same way that I sometimes kept my head down and went along with the hooligan behaviour at Shipman, outside of school I was being swept along with the tribalism of fights with rival gangs from other parts of London.

The East End and south east London have never got on all that well – just look at the hatred between West Ham and
Millwall
– and, true to type, the Canning Town Boys’ worst enemies were from down Bermondsey way. They were mostly just fistfights, although the odd flick knife would sometimes get flashed about. Thankfully, I never saw one used.

We were no angels and we would head on to other gangs’ turf and try to take their area. They would do the same: I was once in a youth club full of old snooker tables in Abbey Arms in West Ham when a mob from the Elephant and Castle came storming in. The resulting scrap, with snooker cues getting smashed over people’s heads, was like a scene from a Wild West saloon.

Around this time I was also forming a love for motorbikes that has lasted until today. Once an unsmiling rocker named Rick offered me a ride down east London and Essex’s very own Route 66, the A13, on the back of his BSA Gold Star. As we flew through the Blackwall Tunnel towards oncoming traffic at 100 m.p.h., I was in heaven. Needless to say, my parents didn’t learn about this adventure.

I took another mini-walk on the wild side when I worked at a travelling fair that pitched up in a park near our flat. Maybe it appealed to my gypsy blood, because I loved its sense of community and danger, especially when I graduated from manning a tame stall where punters threw darts at balloons to collecting fares as I jumped between cars on the dodgems. When it came time for the fair to move on, I was all set to roll with them until my dad suggested it might actually be a better idea to go back to school.

It goes without saying that as well as my increasing delinquency I was forming an interest in girls and in sex, although I
was
far too timid to do anything about it. I was also totally ignorant and naïve. When I was about eleven, some older boys had told me that girls had one ball, and I half-believed that until I was fourteen.

I was keen to learn, though. My favourite attraction at the fair was a stall that invited men to hurl a wooden ball at a small target next to a bed with two (real) women lying in it. If they scored a direct hit, the girls were hurled out in a flurry of cigarette ash, swearing and flying negligees. I would never have dared to have a go myself but I observed closely and took some stimulating memories home for later consideration.

Even so, a fleeting glimpse of thigh at a fairground was not enough to satisfy my rising curiosity in the female form, and a gang of mates hatched a plan to broaden our manly horizons. We decided to undertake a trip to the West End, and specifically to Soho’s notorious red-light district.

Every undercover mission needs a cover story, so I duly lied to my mum and dad that I was visiting a school friend in Custom House and would be staying overnight. Instead, nine or ten emboldened adolescents caught the bus into central London, looking like a motley crew of pubescent gangsters in our Italian suits, button-down shirts and chisel-toe shoes.

The two oldest boys, Tommy and Freddie, who fancied themselves relative men of the world at fifteen, led the way as we filed through the sleazy streets of Soho, past the strip joints, peep shows and dirty bookshops, trying to look sophisticated despite our eyes being on stalks. It was pretty exciting and our hearts were beating fast beneath those pinstripes.

Eventually we plucked up the courage to go into one of those alluring yet intimidating strip-club doors. For all of our false bravado, there was no way that we looked old enough for adult entertainment, but the Greek Cypriot bouncer on the door couldn’t have cared less as he took our money and waved us up the stairs.

We found ourselves in a smoke-filled red-lit room. Three or four distinctly seedy-looking men sat in battered old cinema seats facing an empty stage as music played. For an awful moment I thought one man was the Shipman County headmaster, Mr ‘Ding-Dong’ Bell. I could not have been more relieved when I squinted through the semi-darkness and found I was wrong.

There was a tiny bar in the corner of the room, and after the hotpants-wearing waitress had finished a leisurely fag, we ordered drinks. I asked for a rum and black in a voice a few octaves below its everyday pitch, and as I took my first sip, a stripper took the stage. She was introduced as Lulu: she was the image of my friend Roger Foster’s mum.

‘Lulu’ the erotic dancer went through the most mechanical and non-erotic dance routine you can imagine to the strains of Guy Mitchell’s ‘She Wears Red Feathers and a Huly-Huly Skirt’. I didn’t know where to look. ‘This is great!’ whispered Kenny Palmer, but although the atmosphere in the club was exciting, I found watching the poor woman strip down to her G-string embarrassing, not arousing. As she shuffled off with a sigh, I could only think, ‘I wonder if she likes doing this?’

It transpired that a handful of women spent their nights trudging between Soho’s clubs doing the same routine in each dive, so I had another deep-voiced rum and black as we waited
half
an hour for the next girl to show up to entertain us. Without being rude, she was a poor man’s Doris Day, but she at least threw herself into her performance more than listless Lulu had.

Despite this, as we endured another thirty-minute wait after she had gone, we felt that we were being fleeced, and we decided to do a runner without paying for the drinks. Ten besuited schoolboys bolted en masse down the stairs and into the street. I evaded the Cypriot bouncer’s clutches by the skin of my teeth.

We were cockily congratulating ourselves on getting away with it when we turned a corner and a grey Jaguar pulled up alongside us and slowed down. Its windows were wound down so I could see clearly the man in the front passenger seat as he smiled at me, snarled, and then produced a tasty-looking butcher’s hook from his lap.

‘Run!’ I yelled, as the man’s mate in the back seat of the car unveiled a shotgun from under a cloth. Terrified, we scattered in every direction. Jimmy Anderson and I shot down a back alley, scaled a ten-foot wall as if we had a rocket up our arses and sprinted to safety through some market stalls.

We had now lost both the Jaguar and the rest of our mates, so Jimmy and I prowled nervously around Soho’s back passages for a while before sneaking back down Wardour Street. As we crept along the pavement, nervously scrutinising each car that passed, we heard some killer music blasting out of the door of a club called the Flamingo. We joined the queue on the pavement and filed into the dark interior.

You get a few – very few – moments in your life when suddenly something happens and you know immediately that
things
will never be the same again. I believe they call them epiphanies and here was mine. What I found in the Flamingo altered everything I intuited, felt and knew about myself, and about my future. It rearranged my very DNA.

The Flamingo was an all-night rhythm and blues club – from the days when rhythm and blues meant Mose Allison, not Beyoncé – full of black American soldiers on leave. As they used to say in the movies, the joint was jumping. Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames were on stage, and while I didn’t know much about Georgie before that night, his band blew me away.

The Flamingo felt alive. The atmosphere and the energy were incredible. This was the blues as it should be played: rich and strong and loud and powerful. Previously, I knew clubs as discos where a lame band or a DJ went through the motions as boys stood around drinking and girls shuffled from foot to foot, but here was something else entirely.

Everything in the bar was special. The fantastic musicianship; the vibrant, edgy ambience; the cool blues records they played between the bands. I would never have thought it possible, but suddenly I couldn’t care less about the West Ham youth team or becoming a footballer. I had found my star over Bethlehem, my crescent over Mecca, the meaning of my life.

The Blue Flames transfixed me. I loved the propulsive, thrilling thrust of the guitar, the suggestive sexy throb of the bass, and most of all I loved the drums. They were the rock that the whole amazing musical edifice was built on, the foundation for this crazy, explosive racket. That was my future settled, then: I was going to be a rock ’n’ roll drummer.

The Flamingo boogied and jived until 4.30 a.m. and Jimmy and I stayed glued to the music until the bitter end. We had spent all our money – those rum and blacks didn’t come cheap – so as the lights came up, we picked up our jackets and started the long walk home. As we floated back to the East End, we made plans non-stop. We would form a band: I would drum, with Jimmy on the trumpet; we would play the Flamingo. This had to be.

By the time I got home and stumbled in the door of Avondale Court at 7.30 a.m., Dad was up and about in the kitchen, making his morning cup of tea. ‘Hello, mate,’ he greeted me. ‘Did you enjoy yourself last night?’

I had to bite my tongue. I couldn’t let Dad in on the secret of my strip-club misadventure or, more importantly, tell him about my life-changing Flamingo all-nighter, for the very good reason that he thought I’d been kipping at a mate’s house in Custom House. ‘Yeah, it was neat,’ I said, but I knew we had to have a big conversation, and my mind was racing as we carried our cuppas through to the front room.