Like Some New Romantic

Among those who appeared in the Cottrell production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" were future Hollywood method legend Daniel Day Lewis, and Nickolas Grace, an actor best known for his portrayals of flamboyant British eccentrics both real and fictional, such as the stuttering Anthony Blanche – himself allegedly based on Oxford aesthete Brian Howard - from the classic 1981 television production of Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited".
The cast as a whole though was incredibly gifted and charismatic, and on what I think was the eve of the first night, I was lucky enough to see a Vic production of one of my favourite ever musicals, Frank Loesser’s “Guys and Dolls”, with Clive Wood as Sky Masterson and Pete Postlethwaite as Nathan Detroit…and I can honestly say this single show provided me with more pleasure than any other theatre production I've seen.
 After resuming my role as Mustardeed in the summer at the London Old Vic, my next acting role came early the following year thanks to the kindness of an old friend of my dad's, the actor Haydn Davies: they'd been at both RADA and the Royal Academy of Music together. It was in a production by Peter Benedict of "Satyricon", one of only two surviving examples of a novel from the early part of the Roman Empire (the other being Apuleius’ “Metamorphoses”).

 It’s believed to have been written by Petronius who evidently served as a courtier specialising in fashion during the reign of the emperor Nero, and according to its testimony, as well as Petronius’ own accounts of Nero’s depravity written shortly before his death in 66AD, imperial Rome's infamous decadence was already firmly in place long before her final fall in the third century. Not that she ever died in a spiritual sense according to many Christians holding to the premillenial view of prophecy…and who therefore believe she’ll be fully revived in the last days before the Second Coming, with the Antichrist as its head.
"Satyricon" opened in May 1981 at the Phoenix Theatre, Charing Cross Road, and at first I had to content myself with serving as the show’s percussionist as well as the ASM, but in time they offered me a small role, and closed the following June.
 Also in '81, I became a kind of part-time member of an initially nameless youth movement whose origins lay in the late 1970s largely among discontented ex-Punks, its soundtrack a largely synthesized dance music influenced by German Art Rock collectives such as Kraftwerk and Can, as well as Glam, Funk and Disco.
 Its adherents were eventually dubbed the New Romantics presumably because they affected a radical nostalgic devotion to eras past, whether relatively recent ones such as the ‘20s or ‘40s, or more distant historical ones such as the Medieval or Elizabethan. Ruffs, veils, frills, kilts and so on were common among them, but then so were demob suits. Several of the cult's more outlandish pioneers went on to become famous names within the worlds of art and fashion. They stood in some contrast to more harder-edged young dandies such as the Kemp Brothers from working class Islington. Their Spandau Ballet began life as the hippest band in London, famously introduced as such at the Scala cinema by writer and broadcaster Robert Elms in May 1980, before mutating into a chart-friendly band with a penchant for soulful Pop songs such as the international smash hit “True”.
 I attended New Romantic nights at Le Kilt and Le Beat Route among other notable clubs of the day, and was even snapped at one of these by the legendary London photographer David Bailey, but I was never a true New Romantic so much as a lone fellow traveller keen to experience first hand the last truly original London music and fashion cult before it imploded as all others had done before it.
 Still, despite its florid decadence, New Romanticism was always far more mainstream than other musical trends which arose at the same time in the wake of Punk, such as Post-Punk and Goth. For this reason, several of its keys acts became part of what’s since become known as New Pop, which tended to combine complex if accessible tunes with a telegenic image. I myself inclined far more towards the shiny happiness of New Pop than the black-clad bleakness of Goth, and this was reflected by a gaudy image so typical of the decade's infamous tastelessness. Yet, while I rejected Goth as a fashion craze, I was passionate about many of its primary influences such as dark romanticism in all its forms and there was a duality about me which was true of the eighties as a whole.

 While it was no longer truly cutting edge by the end of '81, New Romanticism went on to exert a colossal influence on the development of music and fashion throughout the eighties, and partly inspired what became known as the Second British Invasion thanks to a desperate need for striking videos on the part of the newly arrived MTV.

As '81 went on, my acting career lost a little of its initial momentum, so some kind of family decision was reached to the effect that I should return to my studies with a view to eventually qualifying as a teacher. I went on to pass interviews for both the University of Exeter, and Westfield College, London, scraping in with two mediocre "A" level passes at B and C.
I wanted to stay in London so as to keep open the possibility of picking up some acting work in my spare time, so in the autumn I started a four-year BA degree course in French and Drama mainly at Westfield - but also partly at the nearby Central School of Speech and Drama - while staying in a small room on campus.
 At first I was so unhappy at finding myself a student again at 25 that in an attempt to escape my situation I auditioned for work as an Acting Assistant Stage Manager, but it didn't come to anything. A short time later, while ambling at night close by to the Central School, I was ambushed by a group of my fellow drama students who may have seemed to me to incarnate the sheer carefree rapturous vitality and joy of life of youth. Whatever the truth they made me feel wonderful, and because of them and others like them I came to love my time at Westfield, coinciding as it did with the first half of the crazy eighties, last of a triad of decades in the West of unceasing artistic and social change and experimentation.
The Playboy Philosophy which exploded in the 1960s could be said to have reached its full flowering in the crazy eighties, even if the vast majority of people whose salad days fell within its boundaries ultimately forged respectable lives following a brief season as outsiders. Sadly I never did, and I'm suffering terribly for it now…from a cruel nostalgia for the trappings of status, security, respectability I once scorned. How bitterly I regret such short-sighted narcissism…the kind that's been promoted in the West for over half a century now, as our society has given itself increasingly over to spiritual rebellion and wholesale sensual abandon where once these were marginalized as aberrant. They are the same workings of the flesh that corrupted the antediluvian world, and which survived the Flood to be disseminated throughout the nations to spell the end of one empire after the other, the Babylonian, the Medo-Persian, the Greek, the Roman.
 I had no excuse to embrace them, having been blessed at birth by every good gift. That said, the most desired qualities - intelligence, beauty, talent - are uniquely dangerous unless submitted in their entirety to God, not least to those who possess them. The gifted are visible and therefore vulnerable, and with more temptations than most, all too likely to fall prey to Luciferian pride and Luciferian rebellion...like David's favourite son Absalom who was physically flawless but morally bereft.
 Little wonder therefore that so many of them are drawn to the power offered by art, and especially music, the writer of the first song Lamech having been in the line of Cain. Indeed, there are those Christians who believe that the Cainites were the first pagan people, and that they corrupted the Godly line of Seth through a sensual and wicked music not unlike much contemporary Rock.
 Of course not all Rock music is flagrantly wicked, far from it. Much of it is melodically lovely. While in terms of its lyrics, its finest songs display the most delicate poetic sensibility. The fact remains, however, that no art form has been quite so associated as Rock with rebellion, transgression, licentiousness, intoxication and death-worship, nor been so influential as such.
 To think I once desperately sought fame as a Rock artist myself, and if not as Rock'n'Roll superstar then as actor, or writer, and it was surely a good thing I never gained this pagan form of immortality because had I done so I'd almost certainly have been used for the furtherance of the kingdom of darkness. Once I'd served my purpose I may well have died a solitary premature death as an addict, as has been the fate of so many men and women briefly animated by the charismatic superstar spirit before being cruelly discarded by the Enemy of Souls.

Ferocity of an Enfant Terrible

As I mentioned earlier, at first I fiercely resented being at Westfield, perhaps because I viewed being back in full-time education at 26 as a giant retrogressive step in terms of my acting career, but before long I'd embarked on one of the happiest periods of my entire life.
 Westfield in the early '80s was a hotbed of talent and creativity and I was provided with almost unlimited opportunities for acting and performance. Within days I'd made a close friend of a fellow French and Drama student, a slim dark good-looking guy from the north east of England called Andrew, who, despite a solid private school background and rugby player's powerful wiry frame, dressed like a Rock star with his left ear graced by a fake diamante earring and favouring skin-tight jeans worn with black pointed boots, and together we went on to feature in Brecht and Weill's's "The Threepenny Opera".
 I had two small roles, the most interesting being Filch a petty street thief, who'd been played by the French writer and actor Antonin Artaud in "L' Opéra de quat'sous", one of two versions of the play directed in 1931 by G.W. Pabst. I came to be so very proud of this fact because Artaud, an example of the avant garde persuasion taken to its most horrific conclusion, was one of my most beloved cursed poets. Through this production I went on to play jive-talking disc jockey Galactic Jack in the musical play "The Tooth of Crime" by Sam Shepard, who has allegedly spoken of being influenced by Artaud. A coincidence perhaps, though Artaud's concept of a Theatre of Cruelty was prophetic of so much post-war theatre, indeed art as a whole with its emphasis on assailing the senses through every available device. Neil, the director had been impressed by myself and Andrew in "The Threepenny Opera" and so cast us in"TheTooth"inconsequence,withAndrewtaking the lead role of Hoss.
 Before long I was channelling every inch of my creative energy into performing at the now vanished college which became my whole world for two glorious years, while any real ambition to succeed as an actor apparently receded far into the background.
 When it came to my French studies, in my essay writing I often flaunted an insolent outspokenness perhaps partly influenced by my favourite accursed artists but also reflecting my own exhibitionistic need to shock. And while some of my tutors may have viewed these efforts with a jaundiced eye, one came to thrill to them and await them with the sort of impatience normally accorded a favourite TV or radio series. This was the wonderful Margaret (Dr M.), more of whom later.
 How close this love of scandalising by way of the written word brought me to a seared conscience I can't say; but one thing is certain, my compassion started to recede. This didn't happen right away of course. Yet, even during those first two golden years, some of those who were drawn to me on a deep emotional level betrayed a certain unease with their words, and I was variously described as intense, inscrutable, mysterious, disabused and sad.
 So, why didn't I cross the line beyond which it becomes impossible for a person to respond to the Holy Spirit? After all, from about 1983, I started to decline as a human being. Perhaps it was something to do with the prayers of believing friends and relatives, so that something precious was kept alive within me during those dark years. Certainly, I never fully stopped being a caring person, and I can recall being outraged by those avant gardists who advocated actual cruelty or the harming of innocents. How then did I square this with my adoration of certain favoured artists who thrived on verbal violence and scenes of madness and destruction? The fact is I couldn't, hypocrite that I was.
 This love affair with destruction kept company with a savage fury towards what I perceived as social injustice, the chief targets of this high and mighty dudgeon being dictators on the right wing of the political spectrum, indeed the political right as a whole, but when it came to left-wing oppression, I was no less indignant.
 The 1980s was a decade of protest and riot in the UK, and all throughout its years of raging discontent, I allied myself with one radical lobby after the other, including Amnesty International, the Anti-Apartheid Movement, Animal Aid, Greenpeace and CND. I marched against the nuclear threat in London and Paris, lectured for Amnesty while blind drunk to a roomful of middle-aged Rotarians, had a letter published in the newspaper of the AAM, and was a remorseless disseminator of radical rants, tracts, pamphlets etc.
 Mine was the righteous fury that is rooted in a false notion of the perfectibility of Man, that fails to recognise that oppression stems from the sin we all share, that has no real satisfying motive other than its own existence. In time, it started to turn inwards, and to eat away at the reserves of tenderness that meant so much to me, its malignity enhanced by alcohol and dissolute living, and an addiction to astrology and other occult topics, and scandalous art and philosophy. My soul effectively started to cave in, and while it was ultimately saved from terminal ruin by God, I don't think it's ever fully recovered from the damage I inflicted on it. Such is my own "thorn in the flesh"...
 This first remnant from my Westfield diaries, "Some Sad Dark Secret" testifies to some extent to a former tendency to mental vehemence. It was based on notes contained within a single piece of scrap paper which I recently unearthed and probably dating from 1982 or '83. The first three sections contain words of advice offered me by Margaret, the fourth and fifth, further words offered me by another of my Westfield tutors, and which served to upbraid me for a didacticism he considered to be reminiscent of Rousseau. He was of course referring not to the painter Henri, but the Swiss-born writer, philosopher and composer, who was also – according to many – not just one of the chief inspirers of the French Revolution, but the Romantic movement in the arts with his emphasis on subjectivity, notably in his revolutionary autobiographical writings.
 His assertion that Man is born free while being everywhere in chains, which stemmed from his belief in the essential goodness of Man, has assured him a place of honour in the history of Socialism, which is significantly predicated on such a belief. Fused with the mystical and occult tendencies that have been its time-honoured companions, Socialism was effectively my religion at the time and had I continued to believe in the perfectibility of Man under certain social conditions which is its essence, I’d have ultimately succumbed to the bitter disillusion that is necessarily the outcome of utopian idealism.

Some Sad Dark Secret

Dr M. said:
“Temper
Your enthusiasm,
The extremes
Of your
reactions,
You should have
A more
Conventional
Frame
On which to
Hang your
unconventionality.”

The tone of some
Of my work
Is often
A little dubious,
She said.
She thought
That there
Was something
Wrong,
That I’m hiding
Some sad and dark
Secret
From the world.

She told me
Not to rhapsodise,
That it would be
Difficult,
Impossible, perhaps,
For me to
Harness
My dynamism.
“Don’t push People”,
She said.
“You make
Yourself
Vulnerable”.

Dr H. said:
“By the third page,
I felt I’d been
Bulldozed.
I can almost see
Your soapbox.
Like Rousseau,
You’re telling us
What to do.
You seem to
Work yourself
Into such an
Emotional pitch…

And this
Extraordinary
Capacity for lists.

The Westfield Players

In the summer, a faction of us – mostly culled from the Drama department – took Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Directed by the brilliant Dawn with Shakespeare's Illyria transformed into a Hippie paradise, I played Feste as a Dylanesque minstrel strumming dirge-like folk songs with a voice like sand and glue.
Most of the Westfield contingent's male players couldn't have deviated more from the politely liberal norm we seemed to encounter nightly at the Fringe Club on Chambers Street if we'd tried. Among the strangest were Gianni (Sir Toby Belch), a dashing Italian of fiercely radical sympathies…myself (Feste) the anarchic product of multiple social and educational influences…and Ged (Malvolio) a tough but colossally kind-hearted Scouser with slicked back rockabilly hair, usually dressed down in denims as was the fashion at the time. Ged I think had been around during the Punk days at Eric's in Liverpool, and was a fascinating, charismatic guy with a hilariously dark sense of humour. He and his girlfriend Gail, who'd designed the flowing Hippie costumes, and was also a very dear friend, never stopped encouraging me nor believing in me. We were all so close despite sharing a single house, albeit a large one, on what I think was Prince's Street, and there was barelyacrosswordspokenfortheentire fortnight we occupied it.
 During my second year I lived in an upper floor apartment in Powis Gardens, Golders Green, sharing it with my close friends from the French department, Andrew and David. Both were from the north of England, Andrew, a former alumnus of Sedbergh College, from Darlington, and David, whose alma mater was the famous Catholic school Ampleforth, from Hull. David was an incredibly gifted pianist and guitarist who despite a misleadingly serious demeanour was a warm, affectionate, witty, eccentric character who endlessly buzzed with the nervous energy of near-genius. He might not have wanted to ape the way his flatmates dressed and behaved, but he was fiercely protective of us despite our shallow social butterfly ways.
 Soon after moving in, I decorated the walls of my room and the lounge, which doubled as David’s bedroom, with various provocative images including reproductions of Symbolist and Decadent paintings, and icons of popular culture and the avant garde. I was determined to live like an aesthete, even if it meant doing so on a shoestring in a cramped little flat in suburban north London, and to this end I organised what I optimistically called a salon, which although well-attended didn't survive beyond a single meeting. We were a pretty shoddy imitation of the new Brideshead generation that was thriving in Oxford in the wake of the TV series.
 We drove our effusive landlady half-crazy at times through heavy-footedness and other crimes of upper floor thoughtlessness, although I don't remember her complaining all that much despite the fact that we weren't averse to drink-fuelled discussions extending well into the night. In common with most of my friends I tended to drink heavily at night, but almost never during the day. The truth is that self-doubt wasn't an issue for me in the early eighties and I was a truly happy person, in fact so much so that I may have exaggerated my capacity for depth and melancholia as a means of making myself more interesting to others. In the final analysis though, what possible reason was there for me to be discontented, given that my first two Westfield years were fabulous...an unceasing cycle of plays, shows, concerts, discos, parties set in one of the most beautiful and bucolic areas of London?
 My second year drama project was centred on the one-act play "Playing with Fire" written by Swedish poete maudit August Strindberg. I was allotted the task of supplying the music for the production as well as the leading role of Knut, a sardonic Bohemian painter forced to endure the adulterous behaviour of a friend Alex who following an invitation to stay with him at the house of his upper middle class parents for a few days, embarks on a torrid affair with his wife Kerstin. Alex was played by budding playwright Vince, while lovable Czech loon Ondrej played Knut's hated bourgeois father.

 We performed the play a total of three times over the course of a couple of days. Later in the year, I was asked by Vince to play one of the leads in a brilliant but provocative short play of his known as “Wild Life”. I seemed to appear in one play or show after the other that second year at Westfield…re-performing Feste with the Edinburgh cast more or less intact…playing the Novio in Lorca’s “Blood Wedding”…my former idol Che in a Rice-Lloyd Webber showcase and so on and so on…my energy and love of life and people apparently knowing no limits.

 The piece below, adapted from notes I made during this timeframe - with the first verse actually containing references to "Twelfth Night" - captures the spirit of those heady first two years at Westfield, a college then in its twilight time prior to being incorporated into Queen Mary on east London’s grim Mile End Road, far, far from the semi-pastoral beauty of Hampstead. It also provides some indication of the unquenchable desire for attention, affection and approval that characterised me back then, and the way it affected some of those who cared for me most.

Gallant Festivities

It was my evening, that’s
For sure -
At last I’m good
At something -
27 years old
I may be, but…
“Spot the
Equity card…”
“It’s your aura, Carl…”
I even signed
One of Phil’s friends’
Programmes -
“When are you going
To be a superstar?”
Said Luce
A few days ago -
That seemed to be
The question
On everyone’s lips.
“You got Feste perfectly,
Just how I envisaged it”
“…Not only when
You’re onstage
but off too!”
At last, at last, at last
I’m good at something…

And so the party…Chloe
called me...I listened…
…To her problems…
References
To my “innocent face”…
Livvy said:
“Susy seems Elusive
But is in fact,
Accessible;
You’re the opposite -
You give to everyone
But are incapable
Of giving in particular.”
M. was comparing me
To June Miller
Descriptions by Nin:
“She does not dare
To be herself…”
Everything I’d always
Wanted to be, I now am…
“…She lives
On the reflections
Of herself in the eyes
Of others...
There is no June
To grasp and know…”
I kept getting up to dance…
Susy said: “I’m afraid…
You’re inscrutable
You’re not just
Blasé,
Are you?”
I spoke
Of the spells of calm
And the hysterical
Reactions
Psychic
Exhaustion
Then anxious elation...

A Hateful Work Ethic

I'd say things started to go a little wrong for me once I left Westfield in the summer of '83 with a few months to spare before travelling to Paris to work as an English language assistant in a French secondary school, the Lycee Jean-Paul Timbaud. This spelled my exile from the old drama clique, and I'd not be joining them in their final year celebrations, and the knowledge of this must have affected me. I was after all severing myself from a vast network of gifted friends of whom I was deeply fond, and so losing an opportunity of growing as an artist in tandem with like-minded spirits. I could have opted for just a few weeks in France, but did I really want to be deprived of the chance of spending more than six months in the city I’d long worshipped as the only true home of an artist?
 Earlier in the year, my close friend Monique, a brilliant dynamic woman of North African Jewish ancestry had told me something to the effect that while many were drawn to me, they sensed la mort in me. The fact that she was in thrall to the intellectual worldview, and familiar with the works of the great psychologist Freud who identified a death drive subsequently dubbed thanatos (although Freud himself never referred to it as such) may have had something to do with this observation.
 Precisely what she meant by death I can’t say, but she may have identified some kind of will to destruction - and specifically self-destruction - in me. As things turned out she was right, although this was barely embryonic in the early '80s if it existed at all. I’d attribute it to a cocktail of intoxicants, each one potentially fatal to the human spirit, including alcohol, the most obvious, astrology and the occult, and intellectualism. All of these exerted a terribly negative effect on my development as a human being in my view. While intellectualism is not evil in itself of course, it's my contention that intellectuals are more tempted than most by various dark lures including pride, rebellion and sensuality. The same could be said of those blessed with great beauty, or talent and so on.

 Intellectuals have been among the most powerful and often also dangerous men and women in history, and the Modern World has been significantly shaped by the wildly inspired views of geniuses such as Rousseau, Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. Their theories - and especially those of Marx and Freud and their apostles both orthodox and schismatic - fanned the flames of a largely bloodless revolution in the 1960s and while this had been quenched by about 1972, the philosophies that inspired it, far from fading themselves, set about infiltrating the cultural mainstream where they became more extreme than ever, and soenteredtherealmofthePostmodern,while remaining the ultimate consequence of centuries of Modernist erosion of the Judaeo-Christian fabric of Western civilisation.
 However, I was never an intellectual in the manner of Monique, who'd chosen a career in academia as I recall, so much as someone who was both troubled and fascinated by the idea of extreme cerebrality. Reading Colin Wilson's "The Outsider" in the early '80s, I especially identified with those intellectuals who were tortured by their own excesses of consciousness such as T.E. Lawrence, who wrote of his "thought-riddled" nature.
 As a child I was extrovert to the point of hyperactivity but by the time of my late adolescence I found myself becoming subject to rival drives of equal intensity. One of these was towards seclusion and introspection, the other, attention and approbation. It seems this duality is common among sensitive artists and intellectuals, and may help to explain why so many of them have sought some form of escape from the complexities of their inner nature, even to the point of madness.
 In my own quest for renown, I subjected my body, the creation I tendered so lovingly at times, to a ruthless almost derisive work ethic which couldn't have differed more from the noble impulse first identified by the German social philosopher Max Weber, and which he dubbed the Protestant Work Ethic. For Weber, the latter didn't so much give birth to Capitalism, which of course it didn't, as facilitate its growth in those nations in which the Reformation had been most successful. If the work ethic beloved of the Calvinist Pilgrims who forged the first American colonies was intended for the glorification of God, mine was a decadent late variant entirely given over to the promotion of the self.
 To this end, I consumed a variety of intoxicants, not just because I enjoyed doing so but because they enabled the constant socialising that brought me the attention, affirmation and approval I so craved...my narcissistic supply, some might call it, and they'd have a point. How else to explain the sheer demented fervour of my endless self-exaltation? That’s not to say that I wasn't loving towards others because I was, but precisely what kind of love was it that I spread so generously about me? One thing it wasn’t was agape, the selfless love described in 1 Corinthians 13…in fact it was a form so unacceptable to God that it would have seen me damned and in Hell had I managed to drink myself to death.
 I was hardly less heartless towards my mind than my body, treating it as an object of research and experimentation. Little wonder then that I turned in time to drink as a means of pacifying it, although alcohol still wasn't a serious problem for me in the early '80s, when my exhausting daily regimen tended to be fuelled instead by massive quantities of caffeine tablets. That said, Monique didn't like it when I drank to excess as if she'd already singled me out as someone who'd go on to develop a drink problem. In this as in other things she showed remarkable insight.
 The piece below first existed as a series of scrawled notes based on several conversations I enjoyed with Monique in 1982 or '83. One of these resulted from an incident in which I'd made a fool of myself by storming off during a gig after having broken a guitar string. As the guitar belonged to my flatmate David who was in the audience, he quite reasonably expressed his displeasure out loud, while my musical partner Aidan told me to keep playing. Feeling humiliated without any real cause, I threw an atypical temper tantrum before storming out of college and making my way back to Golders Green. After a period spent wandering aimlessly in Golders, I eventually bumped into Monique who'd come looking for me...

She Dear One Who Followed Me

It was she, bless her,
who followed me...
she'd been crying...
she's too good for me,
that's for sure...
"Your friends
are too good to you...
it makes me sick
to see them...
you don't really give...
you indulge in conversation,
but your mind
is always elsewhere,
ticking over.
You could hurt me,
you know...
You are a Don Juan,
so much.
Like him, you have
no desires...
I think you have
deep fears...
There's something so...so...
in your look.
It's not that
you're empty...
but that there is
an omnipresent sadness
about you, a fatality..."

1980s; below: Westfield Col.