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had been struggling at work, both physically and mentally, and the result was turning into depression and a potential breakdown. He would come home and sit slumped in his chair, complaining of pains and dizziness, and we had lost the do-it-yourself man we loved. My worried mother felt he should go to our local GP, a trip full of fear at the best of times for my father. He’d grown up with no National Health system and when, after the war, he finally saw a doctor, it was a man with an upper-class accent and a university education—an absolute alien, as far as my father was concerned. Dad would sit like a child, not asking any questions, convinced that the professional was ‘looking down his nose’ at him. Nevertheless, he took my mother’s advice and made the visit. The doctor, who was not quite as disdainful as Dad had imagined, sympathetically recommended a change of job, and so for a while he considered leaving the print and working for the Post Office. He even toyed with the idea of leaving London and we spent one day visiting the sixties-imagined future that is Hemel Hempstead. We stood in the middle of the toy-town and imagined our future there and, luckily for this story, promptly returned home.

      And then they made him redundant; a real blow for a breadwinner with little savings. It was a dreadful time for him, but after searching he managed to find work as a guillotine operator for a print firm in Old Street. My father recovered his spirit, we stayed as Londoners, and almost as a symbol of regaining his old self, he built me something. A dulcimer is a beautiful four-stringed folk instrument played on the lap. He painted it orange and black and I hung it on my wall, proud of my growing collection and my skilled father.

      Although my aspirations flourished, the band with Phil didn’t. We didn’t even bother to give it a name, let alone play a gig, and we soon drifted apart. Three years later we reunited for an Anna Scher television programme. Written by Charles Verrall, YouMust Be Joking! was a children’s sketch show for Thames TV that featured many of the Anna Scher kids. A teeny-band called Flintlock supplied the music, but on the first show Charles asked Phil and me if we would play a song. Somewhere in the basement of a television studio lies a tape of the boy who would eventually star in the movie Quadrophenia and his mate, sitting on stools, strumming acoustic guitars and singing America’s ‘A Horse With No Name’. Why we didn’t do something cooler I have no idea! Probably too much time spent inMiles’s mother’s pine kitchen soaking up Joni Mitchell et al. Hopefully the tape will never be found.

      To everyone’s surprise Hide and Seek was released with the flourish of a royal premiere. The film was shown at the ABC cinema on Shaftesbury Avenue one Saturday morning in October 1972 in the presence of Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Kent and an invited audience. It was the twenty-first anniversary of the Children’s Film Foundation and Hide and Seek had been chosen for this prestigious birthday celebration.

      Since making the film I had worked with my brother Martin in a small cameo role for the BBC’s children’s storytelling programme Jackanory. Playing two Arsenal supporters returning from a match and bumping into a friend (played by Stephen Brassett), it was hardly a stretch for us, but it was Martin’s first role. Martin was a shy boy—he’d blush if he met a friend in the street—but after a few weeks under Anna’s encouraging tutelage, his confidence grew, and it was now obvious that this relaxed ten-year-old’s cheeky on-screen grin and ice-blue eyes were designed for attraction. I would have to work a little harder from now on.

      My parents brought him along to the Hide and Seek premiere and they watched proudly as I stood in the line-up and shook the slight royal hand, the duchess a pale vision of creams and peroxide. Anna and Charles were there and so was a BBC camera crew for Film ’72, the Barry Norman review programme. It was an enjoyable thrill, but the best screening of the film was a few weeks later in Deptford at a genuine Saturday Morning Pictures. The CFF invited its young cast down to present the film to an audience of local kids—thankfully not the ones who’d tried to bottle us. High on Jublees, they screamed, shouted and laughed in all the right places. Surprisingly, this time the manager didn’t walk down the aisle and threaten to throw us all out.

      Watching the film now, there’s something wonderfully honest about the boy on screen: the accent is dated, yet true to his class, and the reactions are unselfconscious. It’s a glimpse at myself before the advent of aspiration and self-design.

      A week after the premiere I stayed up late and watched Film ’72 and an interviewer asking me if I planned to be an actor when I grew up. I was inspired by the story my father had told about having to leave school at fourteen and not being able to study for the job he really desired, and so my answer was for him: ‘No. Not really. I want to be a journalist.’

      It was a lie. I’d already set my sights on music.

      Thirty years later, the wide-eyed Bowie boy from Islington would make an unexpected return. Working in Dublin, I spend an evening with Joe Elliott of Def Leppard. We end up in one of those drink-fuelled discussions where the aural highlights of your life end up scattered across the living-room floor while you claim that your growing pains had the greatest musical accompaniment of any generation. Being the same age, we concur on most things, and it’s Bolan, Bowie and Bryan that litter the place, along with some crumbs of Humble Pie. Joe claims triumphantly to have experienced various rock epiphanies in the early seventies and shows me some of the evidence: a framed layout of ticket stubs from Sheffield City Hall, circa ’71-75. Thinking fast, I manage to trump his yellowing memorabilia and brandish a dreamlike experience I had one October evening in 1973 at the Marquee Club in Soho.

      Since that cathartic ‘Starman’ I’d devoured everything Bowie: weeping tears through the heartbreaking passion of ‘Time’; crushing my feet into orange platform heels and even trying to reason out the ridiculous whimsy of ‘Laughing Gnome’. I’d worn a white scoop-neck T-shirt that had tiny blue stars and long flared sleeves, and in a pair of loons from Oxford Street I’d felt David holding my hand as I sashayed uptown and went glam.

      So it was with great patience that I’d queued for hours in a wet Wardour Street to see what was billed as The 1980 Floor Show. Bowie was to present songs from Pin-Ups and announce the writing of a musical soon to be released called 1984, and all this was to be filmed by NBC for American television. With guest artists such as Marianne Faithfull— dueting dressed as a nun—and mime artists from Lindsay Kemp’s school, it would become legendary among Bowie aficionados. In bangles and baggies I rushed to the front of the stage and pressed into a mass of boys with painted faces and girls wearing baby-blue eyeshadow and antique fox stoles. The previous July, at the Hammersmith Odeon, we’d all shed tears as Bowie retired Ziggy and said farewell to the Spiders from Mars, but now, just for this show, the Spiders were back, Ziggy had risen from the grave, and I would watch the Pallas Athena of rock stalk the stage in heels. At some magical moment during the night he reached down, looked into my eyes and accepted one of my bangles as a gift. In return, he handed me the map of my future.

      Sadly for Joe, he hadn’t been there, but he’s got it on a bootleg VHS and within moments of me mentioning it, we’re watching the entire event on telly. Through the fractured twists and rolls of his distorted, multi-copied tape, I witness a moment from my past at twenty-four frames a second and it is glorious; a cabaret of decadence that had taught me how to dream. I remember it all as it reels before me. But then, as I watch Bowie lean into the crowd below, I feel weak, for there I am, right where I remember, just in front of the boots of Mick Ronson—a fair-haired boy, just turned fourteen, thrusting his bright face up into the temptation of glitter, lights and flesh; gorging on the glamour of it all.

      I sit forward in my chair, open mouthed. Suddenly I can draw a line between then and everything I had done since.

      ‘That’s me, Joe! That’s me!’ I shout.

      But then some white noise fills the screen, and I’m gone.

       CHAPTER SIX FAGS AND BEER

      Like a fickle lover, the young fan of music thinks nothing of switching his allegiances and changes heart at the drop of a 45. As I browse through what is left of my record collection from the first half of the seventies, it flits capriciously

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