LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER FIVE TWENTY-FOUR FRAMES A SECOND

      The screaming engine of the silver Lotus Elan pinned me back into the leather seat and shot me down the empty backstreet. It was exhilarating enough to be nearly horizontal in a speeding car but to have a voluptuous, mini skirted blonde driving me, her slim leg pumping the heavy clutch, was beyond my pubescent dreams. What made it sublime was that the woman with a kid glove on the vibrating gearstick was the pulchritudinous star of the Carry On movies, Liz Fraser.

      I was making another ‘Saturday Morning’ picture, but this time I was starring in it, and Liz, who was playing the lead villain’s moll, was taking me for a spin in her new toy. Catapulted from my black-and-white telly to full glorious colour in the driving seat next to me, I’m sure she knew to what wonderful places she was also driving this twelve-year-old’s imagination. Hide and Seek followed the rules of most Children’s Film Foundation movies: kids rise above the bumbling inadequacies of authority to help capture a bunch of no-gooders; on the way, they have a bit of slapstick at the adults’ expense and learn some lessons about themselves. I played Chris, a policeman’s son, who finds an absconded borstal boy, Keith, hiding in a basement under the house of Roy Dotrice’s grubby Mr Grimes. We soon stumble upon a heist that, with the licence of cinematic coincidence, involves Keith’s father, who’s also the gang’s leader (played by the swarthy Terence Morgan), and his henchmen, Johnny Shannon, Alan Lake and Robin Askwith. The denouement is played out over classic CFF territory—the bomb site. With cameos from AlfredMarks, Bernard Spear and Graham Stark, as well as the delicious Liz, it had a cast list equal to any of the major British comedy productions of the time.

      What thrilled me even more was that I had to take six weeks off school to make it. Of course, I had a tutor, but what kid wouldn’t rather be here, although in saying that, Deptford was not in my comfort zone. The local lads gave us as much trouble as they could without gaining the attention of the police. It was common for me to have to dodge the odd flying milk bottle during filming, and a bunch of fey film types are never great at standing up to that sort of thing. It was usually left to one of the female chaperones to defuse the wrath that our presence instilled in the local gangs. A few cakes off the buffet would also help. Noticeably, it was always quiet when Johnny Shannon was around. Johnny, bald and heavyset, was a fighter turned actor and had notably played the arch villain, Harry Flowers, in Nic Roeg’s Performance. Johnny was a friend of the Krays and someone that would come back into my life during my preparation for The Krays. But at this moment I’m a skinny kid with a bad haircut courtesy of the assistant director, who was given the job of chopping it after the producer felt my ‘feathercut’ too trendy for Deptford. I cried bitter tears when I later saw it in the mirror above our fireplace at home. Dad could have done a better job with his K-Tel special.

      Alan Lake and the young Robin Askwith soon became the set’s bad boys, and though they teased me in a good-natured way throughout the filming, they took me under their mutual wing. A stalwart of British television, Alan was famously married to Britain’s answer to Marilyn Monroe—Diana Dors. Sadly, five months after Diana died of cancer in 1984, Alan, laden with grief, would unburden himself by unloading a gun into his head.

      To a boy of my background one of the added bonuses of making films was money. In those days the authorities felt they needed some promises before trusting what might be devious working-class parents with cash that belonged to a child. And so my mother and I, dressed in our best, went along to County Hall to see a haughty representative from the Inner London Education Authority for an interview and a large dose of condescension. Over a pair of reading glasses my mother was scanned for honesty, and made to understand that a third of the money had to be put away until I was sixteen. Flinching under the wagging finger of authority, my deeply moral mother must have been appalled by the suspicion laid upon her. I’d already been earning my own money working Saturdays at a local greengrocer’s, my father insisting that I put a third of it towards the housekeeping, as he felt that it would give me a sense of financial responsibility. But with this additional sum, I knew what I wanted to do—go electric. As soon as I got the money from the film, I took my old cheese-cutter back to Holloway Road and exchanged guitar and earnings for an amplifier and an Epiphone electric guitar in cherry red. The acting was starting to feed the music, but the music I wanted to play was from outer space.

      One Thursday night, while watching Top of the Pops on a friend’s colour TV, we both agreed that we’d seen the future and it had white nail varnish and orange hair. T.Rex had made way for Slade, but here was someone to make them all look like piffling nonentities, a troubadour to welcome in my sexual awakenings. AMephistophelean messenger for the Space Age, expounding a manifesto that was almost spiritual in its meaninglessness, he spoke his words through a grinning confidence that had me signing up to whatever he was selling for the rest of my life. Pointing his long finger down the barrel of the lens he sang: ‘I had to phone someone so I picked on you,’ and I felt that he had. And oh, but oh, when that guitar solo clawed and choked its way out of the Gold Top Les Paul, brandished like a musical laser gun, the Starman Bowie threw his arm around his golden-suited buddy and I wanted to go to that planet. For a generation, a benchmark was being drawn as to how pop music should look—not the boy next door, nor the corkscrew-haired changeling, not even the hyper-lad of the Faces, but a theatre of glittering aspiration that one could only ever dream of entering. I walked home through the decrepit streets of Islington and planned my future. If we can sparkle he may land tonight…But it would be a few more years before touchdown.

      Phil Daniels was a wiry King’s Cross kid whose twisted smile revealed a cynicism that belied his young years. Small, dark and feral, he seemed more cultured than others, and having just added himself to Anna’s swelling number, I was drawn to him. He also had an electric guitar.

      Phil and I started to meet up and make music with Peter Hugo Daly, another one of Anna’s new recruits, but a patchouli-scented one from the other side of the Essex Road. When Peter’s keyboard was in charge we’d play strung-out jams based on Pink Floyd tracks; if it were Phil’s guitar it would be the Faces; and if it were my Epiphone taking the lead, anything from Ziggy. We rehearsed in Duncan Terrace at the house of a middle-class kid called Miles Landesman, brother of the future writer Cosmo, and his place was a revelation to me. Although his parents Jay and Fran Landesman owned their own home, I was shocked at how strangely out of joint everything was: old rugs thrown about on rough planks; photographs, old paintings and revolutionary posters hanging on scuffed walls; an odd frying pan that they called a ‘wok’, unwashed among half-empty bottles of wine—the first I’d ever seen—in a spacious pine kitchen that smelt sweetly foreign and tantalisingly decadent. Even the rice, left cold in a large pot, looked dirty and brown, not the starched, white stuff I’d seen before in a Chinese takeaway. Obscure, dog-eared books were scattered on shelves and tables, while a tennis racket lay discarded on the stairs, waiting for another summer. But what shocked me the most was that the sofa and chairs in the living room didn’t match! And yet his family were so at ease within this shabby chaos, it was as if nothing mattered or belonged to them enough to care about. The truth was everything belonged to them, unlike in my own house, where Wilson the cat was the only thing not on hire purchase.

      I sat in their living room and tasted my first ‘real’ coffee and thought how horrified my mother would have been by the lack of curtains or nets on the windows. Without nets, she’d once told me, people will think we are poverty stricken. In her mind their absence inferred some kind of moral collapse. I started to become upset with my own home—why didn’t we read newspapers that had more words than photographs? Why didn’t we have books everywhere? Why were we not discussing theatre, politics and macrobiotic diets? Regardless of the spoonfuls of love I was being fed at home, my newly formed taste for garlic pÂtÉ

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