Carl Halling Home Page

Birth of a Rock'n'Roll Child

I was born Friday 7 October 1955 close to the undistinguished source of west London's Goldhawk Road and my first home was in Bulmer Place near Notting Hill Gate. My brother was born two and a half years later, by which time my parents had bought their own house in Bedford Park in what was then the London Borough of Acton, and suburban west London was marked by a homespun simplicity back then that we can only dream of today. By '63, with my brother and I safe in South Kensington’s French Lycee, social change was in the air, though in truth it had been for some time, especially in Britain and the USA, at least since the rise of Rock'n'Roll, and youth culture, whose watershed years were '55 to '56, but for all that England in '63 was still apparently in black and white, and the first shaggy-haired beat groups fitted quite snugly into this innocent time of Norman Wisdom pictures, of the well-spoken presenters of the BBC Home Service, Light Service and World Service, of coppers, tanners and ten bob notes, tuck shops and tuppeny chews.
On this day, NOI leader Elijah Muhammad reached the age of 58, psychologist RD Laing, 28, while Beat poet Amira Baraka, revolutionary leader Ulriche Meinhof and Falklands hero Major Julian Thompson all hit 21. The future Colonel Oliver North celebrated his 12th birthday, Judee Sill her 13th, Paul Weyrich his 8th, Vladimir Putin his 3rd. It was a day marked by an event which had a monumental influence on the evolution of our culture, when at San Franciso's Six Gallery about 150 people gathered to witness readings of poems by Allen Ginsberg, Phillip Whalen, Phillip Lamantia, Michael McClure and Gary Snyder. All went on to be leading lights of the Beat Generation, as did Jack Kerouac the shy Canuck from Lowell, Massachusetts who attended the reading as a well-refreshed cheerleader. His "On the Road" published a year later, and dealing with his wanderings across America with his muse and friend Neal Cassady remains Beat's most famous ever work. After the Six Gallery reading, the Beat movement which had existed in embryonic form since about 1944, left the underground to become an international craze, with the Beatnik taking his place as a universally recognised icon with his beret, goatee beard, turtle-neck sweater and sandals.
1955 was also the year in which Rock'n' Roll assaulted the mainstream thanks to hits by Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard and others, although it's "The Blackboard Jungle", which, released on the 20th of March, is widely credited with igniting the Rock' n' Roll revolution, indeed late 20th Century teenage rebellion as a whole. It did so by featuring Bill Haley & His Comets's "Rock Around the Clock", over the film's opening credits. Originally a rather conventional blues-based song recorded by Sonny Dae and his Knights, Haley's version, which was remarkable for its earth-shaking sense of urgency, ensured the world would never be the same after it. In August Sun Records released a long playing record entitled "Elvis Presley, Scotty and Bill", featuring the so-called King of the Western Bop who went on to become Rock's most influential figure apart from the Beatles. Then James Dean died in September after having made only three films, the greatest of which, Nicholas Ray's "Rebel Without a Cause" came out about a month afterwards. It could be said to be the cinema's defining elegy to the sensitivity and rebelliousness of youth, with Dean its most beautiful and tortured icon. As such his image has never dated, nor been surpassed. The modern cult of youth was born in the mid 1950s.
 Many theories exist as to how the staid conformist fifties could've yielded as if my magic into the wild Dionysian sixties, some convincing, others less so. For me, if a little leaven is present in a theory for me it leavens, or spoils, the entire lump, even when much of it may be sound. As I see it, the Western cultural revolution of the last half century or so was not a sudden, unexpected event, given that tendencies hostile to the Judaeo-Christian moral fabric of our civilisation reach all the way back to the Enlightenment from which so much anti-Christian thought stems. That said, their true source was the Serpent's false promise to Eve that through defiance of the Creator of the Universe she and Adam could be as gods, knowing good and evil, and which is at the heart of all vain, humanistic philosophy. What happened in the 1960s was simply the culmination of many decades of activity on the part of revolutionaries and avant gardists, especially since the First World War. Even Rock, a music which the American evangelist John MacArthur once described as having a bombastic atonality and dissonance was foreshadowed at its most experimental by the emancipation of the dissonant brought about by Classical composers of various Modernist schools. And yet for all the change that raged around me in the sixties, my own little world of the leafy suburbs of outer west London was a largely innocent and even idyllic one which'd hardly changed from the day that I was born, Friday 7 October 1955, when the Victorian spirit was still more or less intact in England.

Phyllis, Carl, Pat and Ann

By the time we'd moved to Bedford Park, My father had a successful career as a classical violinist behind him, and so was in a position to ensure that my brother and I enjoy far safer and more comfortable lives than he'd ever known. He'd been born Patrick Clancy Halling in Rowella, Tasmania and raised in Sydney as the son of a Dane, my namesake Carl Halling, and an English mother. She came into the world as Phyllis Mary Pinnock possibly in the Dulwich area of south London and sometime around the turn of the 20th Century, but she was always known to my brother and I as Mary. According to my great aunt and Mary' sister Joan, her maternal grandmother’s maiden name had been Butler, name which allegedly links the family to the Butlers of Ormonde, a dynasty of Old English nobles of Norman origin which'd dominated the south east of Ireland since the Middle Ages, and so making it a lost or discarded branch. Mary grew into a beautiful young woman, with dark hair, green eyes, high cheekbones and an exquisitely sculpted mouth. After losing her fiancee in the First World War, she married an army officer by the name of Peter Robinson, and they had two children in quick succession, Peter Bevan, and Suzanne, known as Dinny. At some point between Peter’s birth and that of his younger brother Patrick, she travelled with her husband to Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, with the purpose of working as a tea planter. There she met a Dane, fluent in Sanscrit, and with a deep love and knowledge of the spiritual traditions of the East, by the name of Carl Halling. What followed next I can't say for sure but through family sources, I've been led to believe that at some point after becoming pregnant with her third child, Mary fled with Carl to the island of Tasmania where my dad was born, although he was raised, as Carl’s son, in Sydney, New South Wales. It was in Sydney that Carl contracted multiple sclerosis, after which I believe Mary made some kind of living as a journalist and teacher. In the meantime, according to what Pat has told me Carl embarked on a desperate spiritual search taking in Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science in the hope no doubt that this'd yield a miraculous cure, but sadly it was unavaiing and Carl died just before the outbreak of World War II. According to his wishes, he was buried in his native Denmark.
 All three children had earlier displayed considerable musical talent, Patrick as a violinist, Peter as a cellist and Suzanne as a pianist. By the time Pat was nine years old he was already the soloist for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, with all his wages according to him being redirected by Mary into the family account. Soon after Carl’s burial, Mary set off for London with her three children in order that they might further develop their musical careers. Pat studied at the Royal Academy of Music, and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and joined the London Philharmonic 0rchestra while still a teenager during the Blitz on London, serving in the Sea Cadets as a signaller, and seeing action as such on the hospital ships of the Thames River Emergency Service. By this time my mother the former Miss Ann Watt was already a highly accomplished and successful singer of both classical and light music, notably with Vancouver's legendary Theatre Under the Stars. She'd been born Angela Jean Watt in the city of Brandon, Manitoba. However, while still an infant she'd moved with her parents and four siblings to the Grandview area of east Vancouver. Grandview's earliest settlers were usually tradesmen or shopkeepers, in shipping or construction work, and largely of British origin. My own grandfather James Watt a carpenter by trade had been born in the little town of Castlederg in County Tyrone, Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Her mother Elizabeth was from Glasgow, Scotland, having been born there to an English father hailing either from Liverpool or Manchester, and a Scottish mother. She was the youngest of six siblings, namely Annie-Isabella, Robert, James, Elizabeth (who died in infancy), Catherine and herself, and the only one of her extended family to emigrate to the mother country, although Isa's only son Don was resident in the UK for a good many years in the early '70s, which she did shortly after the end of the war. She could just as easily have ended up in the US, but a ticket came up for her to travel by boat to the UK and she couldn't resist it. Within a short time of arriving she met my father through their shared profession, and they married in the summer of 1948. Seven years later, they decided to have their first child, and so I was born at the former Hammersmith site of Queen Charlotte's Hospital on October the 7th 1955.
 I was articulate and sociable from the outset, walking early, talking early just like my dad before me, but agitated, unable to rest, what they might call hyperactive today. And at some stage in the early to mid sixties I became a problem both at school and home: a disruptive influence in the class, and a trouble-maker in the streets, an eccentric loon full of madcap fun and half-deranged imaginativeness. My striking thinness was offset by the crew cuts my dad liked my brother and I to sport, and the fact that we were routinely dressed in lederhosen can hardly have moderated our unusual appearance. I'm not sure when we were allowed to shed these, and let our hair grow just a little. From the time I was a small boy, I divided my time between the Lycee Francais de Londres, where I became bilingual while little more than a toddler, and my stomping ground of Bedford Park, Chiswick, Hammersmith, and so on. I took Judo classes at the Budokwai in South Kensington, where one of my teachers, a former British international, said he always knew that it was Saturday when he heard Halling's voice. I was known as Alley Cat by the other kids at the Budokwai, after my surname of Halling, and it was a pretty apt name when you think of it. Later, I took classes at the Judokan in Hammersmith, where I tried to make life hell for its owner, a one-time captain of the British international team, but he knew how to handle me, which was not surprising given that he'd served as an air gunner with 83 squadron during World War II, later holding Judo classes in Stalag 383. Perhaps it took a man like him to know how to control a boy like me. My Lycee teachers weren't so gifted, and one of them once informed my poor mother that I gave her nightmares. More than once she drove me home in tears.
 Bedford Park was a semi-Bohemian, artistic quarter of London on the outskirts of a rough district of the western suburbs, Acton. Therefore, my boyhood surroundings were half Boheme and half hoodlum. The hoodlum influence was stronger than the artistic, which could account for the frequent street feuds, stone and stick and dirt fights that took place, and the day I stole magazines out of my neighbours' letterboxes, and mutilated them, before putting them back, and the day I informed my best friend's mother, from one end of the street to the other: Robert is a f****** b******. Those words caused a long and furious confrontation to take place between Robert's mother and mine on the doorstep of our house. Frightful day, which I regret...even to this one. I was a member of the 20th Chiswick Wolf Cub pack, and how I loved those Wednesday evenings at the cubs, I remember the games, the pomp and seriousness of the camps, the different coloured scarves, sweaters and hair during the mass meetings, the solemnity of my enrolment, being helped up a tree by an older boy, Baloo, or Kim, or someone, to win my Athletics badge, winning my first star, my two year badge, and my swimming badge with its frog symbol, the kindness of the older boys. 1963...and I was a Beatlemaniac, singing yeah, yeah in the car with my brother in the back of our dad's car. That year I think it was, I had a grudge against an American boy Robert who later became my friend. I used to attack him for no reason at all, like a dog does, just to assert my superiority. One day, he gave me a rabbit punch in the stomach and I made such a fuss that my little girlfriend Nevine wanted to escort me to the safety of our teacher, hugging me, kissing me on my forehead, eyes, nose, cheeks. She forced me to see her: Carl didn't do a thing, said Névine, and Robert came up an gave him four rabbit punches in the stomach. But Robert Graham wasn't punished because the teacher knew what a little demon I was.
By the end of '63, I was frequently involving myself in arguments with people who tried to say that some secondary Beat combo or another was destined to swamp the Beatles. No, I disagreed. Only one new group truly roused my interest, though not immediately for I was disappointed by a rough and sullen performance of "Not Fade Away" on Top of the Pops, having heard so much about the Rolling Stones. Public opinion, however, swayed me, and discussing Pop music at the end of '64 with some of the new breed of English roses with their mini-skirts, kinky boots and Marianne Faithfull tresses or Twiggy crops, the Rolling Stones were my new favourites. I loved the martyr Mick, bathed in light with surly, ever-defiant lips, surrounded by his frenzied slaves.
The piece below describes the arrival in the dirty alley at the back of our house of someone who was a terrifying figure to us. He lived virtually opposite me in Bedford Park, and yet he was from another dimension to me altogether. He was a rough kid, a cockney kid, someone who looking back on him today seemed to belong on the bomb sites of post-war London. For all that, however, he became a very close friend, in fact pretty much my best one for a time. He was, as the piece makes clear, a "bully with a naive and sentimental heart...", and I wish him well wherever he might be today.

Wicked Cahoots

When he made
his first personal appearance
in the dirty alley
on someone else's rusty bike,
screaming along
in a cloud of dust
it rendered us all
speechless and motionless.
But I was amazed
that despite his grey-faced surliness,
he was very affable with us...
the bully with a naive
and sentimental heart.
He was so happy
to hear that I liked his dad
or that my mum liked him
and he was welcome
to come to tea
with us at five twenty five...
Our "adventures" were spectacular:
chasing after other bikesters,
screaming at the top
of our lungs
into blocks of flats
and then running
as our echoed waves of terror
blended with incoherent threats...
"I'll call the Police, I'll..."
Wicked cahoots.

This Glam Rock Nation

In September 1968 while still only 12 years old I became the youngest cadet at the Nautical College Pangbourne, a naval college situated near the little Thameside village of Pangbourne in the county of Berkshire. This probably made me the youngest serving officer in the entire Royal Navy at the time. Founded in 1919, she was still known by her original title of the Nautical College Pangbourne, but by 1969 this'd been abbreviated to Pangbourne College. However, the boys retained their officer status and spent much of their time in full naval officers' uniform. What's more, naval discipline continued to be enforced, with Pangbourne providing the hardships both of a military college and a traditional English boarding school. In 1996, she became fully co-educational. The Pangbourne I knew had strong links to the Church of England, and so was marked by regular if not daily classes in what was known as Divinity, morning parade ground prayers, evening prayers, and compulsory chapel on Sunday morning. If you missed any of these you would've been seriously punished, although not necessarily with the cane. I was however beaten on numerous occasions although with never more than four cuts, or swishes of the cane. I was heavily disciplined from my very first term in fact; but I'd like to go on record as saying that I'm indebted to Pangbourne for the values it instilled in me if only unconsciously. They were after all the same values that once made Britain strong and great; and yet, by the time I joined Pangbourne, they were under siege as never before by the so-called counterculture. While failing to fully understand the implications of the cultural revolution of the late 1960s, I passionately celebrated its consequences, and took to my heart many of its icons both artistic and political, Che Guevara being my hero for a good long time. Needless to say, he no longer is.
 My parents, brother and I had moved to a little working class suburb about a dozen miles from the centre of London in 1970, which made me something of a fish out of water once I finally left Pangbourne in the summer of '72, after a decision had been made involving my poor dad and those directly responsible for me at the college. After all, I was no longer either in west London where I grew up, nor at the school that'd been my whole world for four long years and where I'd formed some of the deepest friendships of my life. 1972 could be said to be the year in which the seventies really began as the excitement surrounding the alternative society and its happenings and be-ins and love-ins and free festivals and so on started to fade into recent history. For my part I couldn't wait to get to grips with the dismal new decade even if for the first two years, I'd despised the rise of the new commercial chart Pop and its teenybop idols. I was of the school of Hard and Progressive Rock...Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Yes and so on. But I was changing. For better or worse, this was going to be my era. In late '72, I saw former Bubblegum band the Sweet on a long-forgotten teenage programme called "Lift off with Ayesha", and with all the passion of a former enemy I fell in love with their new camp image, all eye-shadow and glittering outfits and massive stack-heeled boots. Several months later a certain Rock chameleon appeared on the chat show Russell Harty Plus in January 1973 with his eyebrows shaved off and my devotion to the strange culture taking over the land making even former skinheads want to look like Charlie George or some other flash dressing hard man became total. So many of the popular songs of the era were like football chants set to a stomping Glam Rock beat. It was was the golden age of the long-haired boot boy and every street seemed to me to be pregnant with menace in this Glam Rock nation, as if the spirit of Weimar Berlin with its unholy mix of violence and decadence had been resurrected in stuffy old England. It was a terrible time to be young; but I of course loved it, lapped it up.
 In late '72 I was launched by my dad on an intensive programme of self-improvement. Through home study and with the help of local private tutors I set about making up for the fact that I'd left school early at 16 with only two GCE (General Certificate of Education) exams to my name; at ordinary level, of course, which is why they were called "O" levels. I studied various martial arts at the Judokan in Hammersmith, west London. Among my fellow students were shaggy-haired hard cases who may have been influenced by the prevailing fashion for all things Eastern, what with the cult of Bruce Lee and so on. Some of them had feather cuts as I remember. Perhaps they'd seen Rod Stewart strutting on Top of the Pops with one singing "Maggie May" or "You Wear it Well". I also went to swimming classes at a local baths. I had a fierce crush on one of my fellow swimmers. She looked a little like a skinhead girl with her cute short haircut; but my heart wasn't in the swimming, and one of the teachers told me so, wondering why I was wasting my time even turning up. She had a point. I learned how to play basic Rock guitar from a kindly soft-spoken man who taught Rock guitar from his little house near the Thames in suburban Surrey, and who looked so square with his short back and sides and baggy dad-style trousers; but he loved his Rock'n'Roll. He taught me the basis of the Rock solo, which involved going up and down the Blues scale in whatever key you chose. I was a lazy pupil in this as in all things, but I probably learned more from that man about the guitar than anyone, with the possible exception of a Pangbourne friend called Steve, whose songs I stole with their simple chord progressions...C, A minor, F, G and back again to C and so on. And then there was Deep Purple's "Black Night", whose simple bluesy riff I'd once played to a pal at Pangbourne, at which point the kid turned to whoever else was present and announced something: "Hey guys, we've got a natural here!".
 Then in late '72 I joined the London Division of the Royal Naval Reserve as an Ordinary Seaman, attending classes once a week on HMS President on the Embankment. At some point soon after this, it became clear to me that I'd been noticed for my angelic good looks. I think this came as a bit of a surprise, but I was flattered rather than offended, as if a seed of narcissism had somehow become implanted within me in late adolescence. I can only wonder what effect this had on my healthy development as a normal male human being. It's not that I wasn't aware of being good-looking before '72, because there'd been occasional comments about my looks by female friends of the family for some time, and I'd even been aware of being handsome as a very young child. But none of that had ever meant much to me. In my early to mid teens I'd been quite a typical boy in a lot of ways, friendly, feisty, self-confident and so on, but I'd never gone through a phase of finding girls drippy or whatever, in fact from as far back as I can remember I'd been prone to falling hopelessly in love with them especially if they were somehow unattainable to me. I was a born romantic, cherishing a grossly sentimental streak all throughout my teens that may've placed me at odds with my peers. While still only about fifteen and pretty thuggish for the most part I nonetheless was capable of becoming entranced by notorious weepies such as "South Pacific" which I saw with my mother at the cinema. John Schlesinger's film version of the Thomas Hardy novel "Far from the Madding Crowd" which I saw at Pangbourne was another film that affected me very deeply indeed, too deeply perhaps for an adolescent boy and it may've been partly responsible for an obsession with lost love and high romantic tragedy that remains with me to this day. I'd a dreamy almost mawkish side to my character even as an adolescent and this must surely have exerted some kind of influence on the course of my life. But in no way was I a typical delicate sheltered milquetoast, far from it. For this reason, to realise that I was perceived by certain other men as a pretty boy genuinely took me back, and I'd not seen it coming, although I can't emphasise this enough, it was a source of delight to me, not shame. Not to put too fine a point on it, I was where it was at, and that was cool by me. The cult of androgyny was a powerful force in the Britain of the early 1970s, and to a lesser extent all throughout the West, having been incubated by sixties Mod and then Hippie culture, and Rock acts as diverse as the Kinks, the Rolling Stones, Alice Cooper, Marc Bolan and David Bowie. It'd been some ten years since this Rock'n'Roll child had first been first confronted with male androgyny although subtly in the shape of the Beat groups of the Mod era but by '73, certain Rock stars were flirting with out and out transvestisism in defiance of the Bible's strict warnings about adopting the clothes and mannerisms of the opposite sex. In the mean streets of London and other big British cities, however, youi took your life into your hands if you chose to parade around like Bolan or Bowie, and therefore few did. One of my big heroes as a boy had been all-American actor Steve McQueen, who incarnated an uncompromising tough guy cool. And yet in '73, many of my new idols were "prettier than most chicks" as Marc Bolan once described himself. I can only wonder what effect this had on my healthy development as a normal male human being, and the same goes for all of those who worshipped at the altar of Glam.

 I fantasised about fame and adulation as a Rock or movie star as never before throughout the Glam era, and built an image based on David Bowie, spiking my hair like him, and even peroxiding it at some point. Not surprisingly then I didn't really fit in in my new home town, unlike my brother who was far more suited to the area than me with his strong London acccent and laddish ways, and he wasted little time in becoming part of a local youth scene centred mainly around football, traditional sport of the British working classes. For my part, I came into my own in Spain, or rather Santiago de la Ribera on the Mar Menor near Murcia, where the family had been vacationing since about 1968. I think it was towards the end of my summer '73 holiday that I finally started to be noticed in a big way by the local youth, most from either Murcia or Madrid, and so la Ribera became vital to me in terms of my becoming a social being among members of both sexes. A large variable group of us became very close and remained so for four summers running. Spain was such a sweet and friendly nation back then in the relatively innocent early seventies, and the youth of La Ribera as happy and carefree as I imagine southern Californians would have been in the pre-Beatles sixties. It was really a great time, and probably signalled the start for me of a lifelong love affair with the Spain and the Spanish people, indeed with Latin and continental Europe as a whole. In the early 1970s, everything seemed to be mine for the knowing, for the tasting, for the taking. It was a time of constant, frenetic change and I greedily eyed the fruits of a social revolution that had been all but bloodlessly waged on my behalf in the sixties. I was soon to feast on them...never once considering the welfare of those fated to follow in my wake, to come to maturity in a world in which baby-boomers like me had lately gambolled like so many senseless, sensuous fauns. Pity their poor souls.

Sad Loves of a Seafaring Man

In late summer 1973 the minesweeper HMS Thames set out for Bordeaux in Gironde in the south west of France. It was my first voyage as an Ordinary Deckhand with the RNR and I was just seventeen years old. During the trip I made my best-ever RNR friend in the shape of a fellow OD  Colin who called me only a few years ago from his east London home to talk about old memories, including the time we became trapped by a gang of mangy-looking stray dogs late at night in la Rochelle in 1975 while searching for our ship after a wild night spent with locals at a bar, then a night club. Even more recently, another good RNR friend Taffy, who sailed with us to La Rochelle by way of the Ile de Re got in touch with me though Blogster. He could have knocked me over with a feather. After all the last time I'd seen him was close by to Waterloo Station when I was on my way to the Old Vic as an actor in the summer of 1980. Colin and his fiancee came to see the show, Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream", shortly afterwards, but I can't say how long. However, he did mention having spoken to Taff, who was his best friend. But I digress.
 I also became quite friendly with the most unlikely pair of best pals I ever came across in the RNR or anywhere else. One half was Jimmy, a tough-talking but essentially kind-hearted working class ladies' man of about 23 who was rumoured to be a permanent year-long resident of HMS Thames; the other, an older man, possibly in his mid thirties, but just as wildly social as Jim even though he boasted the super-posh accent and patrician manner of a City of London stockbroker or merchant banker. Jimmy took me under his wing with a certain intimidating affection: "We'll make a ruffy tuffy sailor of you you yet!" he once told me, even though we both knew that that I'd never be anything other than the most useless sailor in the civilised world. To make it clear just how much of a lubber I was, there was one occasion below deck during some kind of conference when, after having been asked by an officer what I thought of minesweeping, I replied that it was a gas...another when the ship had been prepared for a major manoeuvre and everyone onboard had retreated to their respective allotted positions, when I was found wandering on deck in a daze only to casually announce that I was taking a stroll. Incidents like these made me an object of good-humoured banter on the part of Jimmy and others for whom I was a sort of latter-day Billy Budd but without the seamanship.
 The crew spent its final night together in a night club in the port of Portsmouth, although it might just as easily have been Plymouth. The main attraction was a limp-wristed drag artiste who tried desperately to keep us entertained by singing cabaret style numbers in a comic falsetto, and telling bawdy jokes in a deep rich baritone, only to be remorselessly heckled. At one point he turned his attention to me, that is I think it was me; I was trying not at attract too much attention to myself at the time, because I was wearing glasses and I hated the look of myself in the cheap horn-rimmed specs that were the only pair I had in those days. My short sight always made me feel somehow defective, incomplete; so I refused to wear glasses except for when I really needed them until I was well into my thirties. "Ooh...you look pretty, what's your name?", I think he trilled. "Skin!" was what some of the sailors bellowed back, this being a nickname of mine, perhaps as in "a bit of skin" or something. It's all a bit of a blur to me now. Before too long, the bearded sailor seated next to me had collapsed face down onto the table with a thunderous crash. Only a short while earlier, he'd performed the theme from Rossini's "William Tell" on his facial cheeks while I held the mike for him. I don't know whether he ever appeared as a musician in public again, but he was certainly a star that night. The DJ said something about his next appearance being for Radio Thames, which was popular at the time.
 Back onshore, I resumed my growing passion for louche and shady music, art and culture. Yet, more and more in '74 I turned away from what I now saw as the old hat tackiness of Glam Rock, convinced that Modernist outrage had nowhere left to go. Instead, I turned my devotion to the more stylish glamour of previous Modernist eras and particularly the twenties and thirties. At some point I started using hair cream to slick my hair back in the style of F. Scott Fitzgerald, sometimes parting it in the centre just as my idol had done. I started building up a new retro wardrobe, which came to include a Gatsby style tab-collared shirt, often worn with black and white college-style tie; several cravats and neck scarves; a navy blue blazer from Meakers; a fair isle short-sleeved sweater; a pair of grey flannel trousers from Simpsons of Piccadilly, a pair of two-tone brown and white, or "correspondant", shoes; and a belted fawn raincoat straight out of a forties film noir.
 As the seventies progressed my passion for the decadence of the West and especially the continental Europe of the golden age of Modernism of ca. 1890-1930 grew to obsessive proportions. This was especially true of its leading cities, in terms of their being beacons of revolutionary art, and of style, luxury and dissolution, such as the London of the Yellow Decade, Belle Epoque Paris, Jazz Age New York, and most of all Weimar Republic Berlin. There were those cutting edge Rock and Pop artists who appeared to share my European love affair, such as Sparks and Manhattan Transfer, and Britain's own favourite lounge lizard Bryan Ferry. Much of the latter's work with his band Roxy Music was haunted by the languid cafe and cabaret music of the continent's immediate past. What's more, some of Roxy's followers sported the kind of nostalgic apparel favoured by Ferry himself, but they were rare creatures in mid-seventies London. As for me, I wore my bizarre outdated costumes in arrogant defiance of the continuing ubiquity of long hair and flared jeans. In 1975, I attended a concert at west London's Queen's Park football stadium in striped boating blazer and white trousers, while surrounded by hirsute relics from the Hippie era. The headliners were my one-time favourites Yes, whose "Relayer" album I'd bought the year before; but my passion for Prog Rock was a thing of the past. I'd moved on since '71, that is, towards far greater love of darkness and loss of innocence.
 But there was nothing remotely dark about the time I fell in love with a Dutch girl Maria while sitting Spanish "O" level in June 1974 in Gower Street, central London. She didn't look Dutch, in fact, with her tanned complexion and long dark brown hair, she was Meditteranean by physical appearance, and even had the name to match. It was probably Maria who first approached me, because I was so unconfident around girls in those days that I'd never have made the first move. Over the course of the next few days, I fell ever deeper in love, but I didn't have the courage to make my feelings known to her. This was so typical of me, to assume an attitude of diffident indifference when confronted by something or someone I truly desired. So, once we'd completed our final paper, I allowed her to walk away from me forever with a casual "I might see you around", or some other cliche of that kind. For about a week, I took the train into London and spent the days wandering around the city centre in the truly desperate hope of bumping into her. One time I could've sworn I saw her staring coolly back at me from an underground train, possibly at South Kensington or Notting Hill Gate, just as the doors were closing, but typically I was powerless to act, and simply stood there like a lovesick loon as the train drew away from the station. In time of course, my infatuation faded, but even to this day certain songs will recall for me those few weeks in the summer of '74 that I spent in hopeless pursuit of a woman I didn't even know. They include Sweet Soul standards, "I Just Don't Want to be Lonely" by The Main Ingredient, and "Natural High" by Bloodstone, with its pathetic lines: "Why do I keep my mind on you all the time, and I don't even know you, why do I feel this way, thinking about you every day, and I don't even know you..."
 Later on in the summer having recovered from my insane passion for a girl I hardly knew, I found myself once again in Santiago de La Ribera by the Mar Menor or little sea, this being a large coastal lake of warm saltwater off Murcia's Costa Calida in southeastern Spain, and the summer of '74 was one of the most blissfully happy summers I spent there. Every afternoon, we used to meet on the balnario or jetty facing our apartment on the Mar Menor which was more or less deserted after lunch, that's myself and my brother, and Spanish friends both male and female, to listen to music and talk and laugh and swim and generally enjoy being young and carefree in a decade of endless possibilities. To some youthful Spanish eyes back in '74-'76, I appeared as an almost impossibly exotic figure from what seemed to them to be the most radical and daring city in Europe, which of course London was. I played up to my racy image to the hilt, where in truth I was barely less sheltered and innocent than they were. There was a change with Franco's passing, and the birth of the so-called Movida, which could be said to be the Spanish and specifically Madridian equivalent of London's Swinging Sixties revolution. By my last vacation in La Ribera in the summer of '84, it was I who was in awe of the local youth rather than the other way around. They seemed so cool to me, dancing their strange jerky chicken wing dance to the latest New Pop hits from Britain. By then of course most of my old friends had vanished into their young adult lives, and my time as Charly the English prince of Santiago de la Ribera had long passed. I was yesterday's man, and I was sad about it, but I couldn't expect to be chased forever. Some people have to actually grow up.
 I returned to London in late summer '74 with a deep tan and hair bleached bright yellow by the sun, and hanging long over my ears and down over my forehead. Within days I found myself on HMS President, moored then as today on the Embankment near Temple station. This entailed my passing through Waterloo mainline station, which wasn't tourist-friendly as it is today, with its cafes and baguette bars, but a dingy intimidating place complete with pub and old-style barber. There I was I was accosted by a hoary old Scotsman, a former sailor who kept going on about how good looking I was. He even told me that he loved me; but he was harmless...just a sweet lonely old guy who wanted someone to talk to for a few minutes, which I was happy to do and then move on. It was all very innocent. I even went so far as to agree to a meeting with him the same time the following week, not that I had any intention of keeping it.
 Only days afterwards, HMS Thames was on its way to Hamburg, second largest city of Germany and its principle port. Once we'd arrived, one of the NCOs, a Chief Petty Officer I think advised me not to wander alone in the city. I duly fell in with a group of about three or four, and on our first night ashore we set off on a voyage into parts of the city such as the red light district St Pauli with its infamous Reeperbahn, the so-called "sinful mile" which is lined with restaurants, discos and dives, as well as strip clubs, sex shops, bordellos and so on. On St Pauli streets and in St Paul bars I saw things I'd never even suspected could exist. It was all in such stark contrast to the pleasant outer suburbs to which a coach trip was organised at some point during our run ashore. We ended up in a park where I had my picture taken on a bridge by a reporter for the Surrey Comet; then a group of breathless giggling schoolgirls asked me to be in some photos with them. I of course said yes, ever happy to oblige, and it was a bit of an ego boost for me, as if I needed one. On the way back to the ship, one of the sailors remarked that I'd been a hit with the Hamburg teenyboppers, while another snapped back that it was only because I was blond and blue-eyed, Teutonic-looking in other words. Whatever the truth, there was something deeply moving about these sweet suburban girls and their simple unaffected joy of life, especially in the light of what girls barely older than they were subjecting themselves to in the sad lost northern Babylon of only a matter of miles away.

The Trumph of Decadence

In 1975 aged nineteen I became a student at Brooklands Technical College which lay then as now on the fringes of Weybridge, an affluent outer suburb of south west London. In semi-pastoral Brooklands as in my beloved Santiago de la Ribera, I learned to be a social being after years of near-seclusion, first at Pangbourne and then as a home student. So, attention went on to be a potent narcotic for me in the mid 1970s, but despite constant displays of flamboyant self-confidence, those who tried to get to know to know me on an intimate level found themselves confronted with a desperately diffident and inhibited individual. I remained a shy suburban boy at heart. The Brooklands Disco was a special sphere in this respect, and these were regular, perhaps even weekly events. On one occasion early on in Disco night I got up in front of what seemed like the whole college and delivered a solo dance performance to a fiery Glam tune by Bebop Deluxe's possibly with white silk scarf flailing in the air to frenzied cheers and applause. On another, a trio of thugs who I suspect may have gatecrashed the Disco only to see in me the worst possible example of the feckless wastrel student strutting and posturing in unmanly white took me aside once the music had stopped clearly intent on some form of ultra-violence; but I stood my ground, insisting that despite what they may have thought I was just as straight as they were. Apparently convinced of this, after a few threatening words they vanished into the crowd, my cherubic face intact. 
 1975 again...and my music, swimming and Martial Arts sessions were no more, but the private lessons continued, mainly with a quiet slim young man with darkish curly hair called Michael. He lived alone but for a family of black cats in longtime Rock star haven Richmond-on-Thames, and was a musician as well as an academic who went on to play drums for a fairly successful Contemporary Folk outfit. Michael exerted a strong influence on me in terms of my growing passion for European literature and Modernist culture. He had a special feel for French Symbolist poetry, but it was the less known literature of Spain that we studied together, from the anonymous picaresque novel "Lazarillo de Tormes" (1554) onwards, and embracing Quevedo, Galdos, Machado, Lorca, and others. He was also an early encourager of my writing, a lifelong passion that was ultimately to degenerate into a chronic case of cacoethes scribendi, or the irresistible compulsion to write creatively. The result being that I was incapable of finishing a single cohesive piece of writing until well into the eighties when I managed to complete a short story and a novel both of which have since been destroyed but for a few fragments. It was through Michael that I came under the spell of the Berlin of the Weimar Republic of 1919 to 1933. After I'd expressed interest in a copy of one of Christopher Isherwood's Berlin novels "Mr Norris Changes Trains", placed prominently in front of me on Michael's writing desk, he excitedy informed me that "Norris" had inspired the 1972 movie version of Kander and Ebb's musical "Cabaret" directed by Bob Fosse, itself somewhat based on the John Van Druten play, "I am a Camera". In fact, while a work of art in its own right written for the screen by Jay Allen, "Cabaret" had been largely informed by Isherwood's only other Berlin story, "Goodbye to Berlin", penned in 1939 but referring to incidents that took place between six to eight years earlier. Seeing "Cabaret" later on that year was a life-transforming experience for me, one of only a handful brought about by a film.

 Weimar Republic Berlin has been likened by some cultural critics to the contemporary West, and it could be said that much of what's happened to the West since the end of the second world war was to some degree foreshadowed by the still horrifying decadence of post-war Berlin. Needless to say the Weimar era didn't spring out of nowhere. More than any other nation in the late 18th and early 19th Century Germany, birthplace of Luther and the Reformation, had played host to Higher Criticism, a school of Biblical criticism which flagrantly attacked the authenticity of the Scriptures. Moreover, late 19th century Europe had witnessed a significant occult revival in Britain, in France, but most especially perhaps in Germany. All this contributed to the terribly debilitated condition of Christianity in Germany in the years leading up to and including the implementation of the Third Reich in 1933. Ruined by remorseless attacks on the fundamentals of the faith, the German Church of the Weimar and Hitlerian eras was ripe for deception to the point of putrefaction.

 By the onset of the '20s, crushed by war debt and blighted by urban violence between mutually hostile extreme right and left wing factions, Germany stood on the precipice of disaster. However, some kind of reprieve came with an increase of affluence in 1923, at which point Berlin's Golden Age began, and she became the undisputed world epicentre of artistic and intellectual foment. Under her auspices, great artistic freedom thrived in the shape of, among other phenomena, the painters of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement such as Beckmann, Dix and Grosz, Berg's ground-breaking opera "Wozzek", as well as the staccato cabaret-style music of Kurt Weill, Fritz Lang's dystopian "Metropolis", the scandalous dancing of Cabaret Queen Anita Berber and so on. But Weimar Berlin remains best known for its notorious sexual liberalism which still has the power to shock as seen in pictorial and photographic depictions of the cabarets and night clubs in which license and intoxication flourished unabated. Given that several other Western cities in the twenties were hardly less hysterically dissolute than Berlin, it's little wonder that this key Modernist decade has been described by some critics as the beginning of the end of Western civilisation. In its wake came the Second World War, the collapse of the greatest empire in history, and the rise of the Rock'n'Roll youth and drug culture, which could be said to be the very triumph of Western decadence.

The Tears of a Woman

I made no less than three sea voyages in 1975, two as a civilian and one with the RNR, as well as spending a week with them docked at the Pool of London. The first of these was destined for Amsterdam via Edinburgh and northern France on the three-masted topsail schooner TS Sir Winston Churchill of the Sail Training Association, now known as the Tall Ships Trust. Based in Portsmouth and Liverpool, the TST was founded in 1956 for the character development of young people aged 16 to 25 through the crewing of traditional tall ships, originally Churchill and the SS Malcolm Miller. Among my shipmates were, apart from my 17 year old brother, several young men from Scotland and the north of England, some recent recruits to the RN, and a handful of older "Mates" who'd been given authority over the rank and file of we deck hands. In overall authority was the elegant, distinguished Ship's Captain, who also happened to be an alumnus of my own alma mater of Pangbourne. It was an all-male crew, and I was quite well-liked at first although my popularity cooled in time. I kept a few pals though. One guy in particular stayed a good friend after we'd tried to impress a couple of girls together during a brief stay in France; St Malo, I think it was. He was a small baby-faced southerner with long dark hair worn shoulder length like the young Jack Wilde. I'd boldly put my arm around the one I fancied, Martine, and she'd got a little upset with me. Then, wandering around a little later in a mournful daze and desperate for Martine's address, 'Jack' gave it to me after she'd scrawled it on a piece of paper either for him or one of the other lads. I was drunk with relief for a while, just walking on air, because there was the danger of me coming down with a serious case of lovesickness had she become lost to me forever. I got on OK with a few of the others, and some were merely indifferent, but 'Jack' was Churchill's true prince. Life on the Churchill was no luxury cruise. There were storms which saw seamen sprawled all over the deck being violently sick attached to the ship only by safety belts. On more than one occasion, we were turfed out of our hammocks in the middle of the night to help trim the sails...something I never took any part in, which can hardly have helped my reputation. I did climb the rigging once though, and that was just before we came into the port of Amsterdam, with dozens of us manning the yard arms, again attached only by safety belts. The Dutch capital was marked by the same kind of open sexual license I'd witnessed only the year before in Hamburg, although without the same sinister vibrancy. I can remember a kind of perfunctory weariness about the decadence of Amsterdam, although that was only my impression as a 19 year old greenhorn. Today as then I'm sure the sad De Wallen red-light district is filled to the brim with hundreds of little illuminated one-room apartments, each with a single woman sitting in clear view of onlookers plying her lonely trade.
 As for Edinburgh, just before setting foot in the city for the first time, one of the lads, dressed to the nines himself in the trendiest seventies gear, all flared slacks and stack-heeled shoes no doubt, warned me not to go strutting about Edinburgh town centre in a flashy boating blazer. I completely ignored his advice of course, so, waltzing some time later into an inner city pub in broad daylight wearing said blazer and blue jeans tucked into long white socks, a grinning hard man with long reddish curly hair asked me if I was from Oxford. Perhaps he was aware of the Oxonian reputation for producing flaming aesthetes, but I doubt it. I think he just took one look at my jacket and thought: "Who's thus flash ponce askin' tae ge' hus heed kecked in?", or worse. It may have been touch and go for a while as to whether he was going to inflict some serious damage on my angelic English face, but in the end he left me be. He may even have liked me. The unlikeliest people did in those days.
 Within a few weeks of returning to London by train from Edinburgh, my brother and I were setting off again, this time towards the Baltic coast of Denmark by way of Germany's famous Kiel Canal as part of what is known as the Ocean Youth Club. While we were once more supervised by "Mates" under the command of a Ship's Captain, the OYC was more like a cruise than a trial by water, utilising modern yachts rather than traditional tall ships. The captain was a lovable bearded larger than life true character with a weakness for freaking out to John Kongos' "He's Gonna Step on You Again". My brother and I wasted little time in recruiting a nice young guy from Wotton-under-the Edge called Simon as our chief crony who as it turned out we'd actually first met him on holiday in Spain about ten years previously. Soon after setting foot on Danish soil we three got talking to a couple of girls who, as might be expected, had natural golden blonde hair. Our efforts at romance were wholly innocuous, despite the reputation Scandinavia had for progressive sexual attitudes in the '60s and '70s.
 A less pleasant romantic episode took place towards the end of the trip, which saw me in pursuit of a pretty German girl, Bettina. I was crazy for her, and she clearly liked me too, and yet I'd senselessly dumped her for the sake of a night of drunken idiocy with my brother and Simon, perhaps expecting her to run after me or something. Suddenly, overtaken by sickly pangs of remorse, I set out to find her, and at some point during my search, while walking along some kind of wooden pontoon I lost my footing and fell fully clothed into the waters of what must have been Kiel Canal. I wrote to Bettina, but she never wrote back, and I can't say I blame her. To this day I can't understand what possessed me to ignore her so callously, just in order to tie one on with the boys which I could have done any night of the week. Self-sabotage was fast becoming a speciality of mine.
 It was later in the year I think that I took my friend Brenda, one of the London Division Wrens but originally from the north of England, to a dinner dance at London's Walford Hilton Hotel. At some point we were joined there by a couple of Brenda's close friends, a fair, bearded man in a suit, and his dark, extrovert wife. The husband was one of those deeply gentle men I came across from time to time in the 1970s. They weren't all bearded; but I can think of some who were, such as the madcap ship's captain described above. What united them was that they behaved with special protectiveness and affection towards me, and I've never forgotten them for it. Early in the evening, Brenda became incensed when a group of older seamen started teasing me from their table, which didn't bother me at all because I knew these guys, and they meant no harm. Military life after all, is fuelled by this kind of raillerie. But Brenda insisted that their attitude stemmed from the fact that I was "better than what they are", as she put it, possibly in imitation of their cockney accents. She'd been taken in by my appearance, which made me more dangerous by far than they, not just to others, but to myself. With them, what you saw is what you got, and if it wasn't always pretty, then at least it was honest.  I didn't see much of Brenda after that night, in fact on only one occasion I can clearly remember, and she seemed a little sad and distant. I had long sideburns at the time and I can remember her expressing some distaste for my Teddy Boy image as she saw it, perhaps sensing a certain new coarseness, Teds being the British equivalent of 1950s juvenile delinquents. How horrified she would have been to see me two years from then as a full-blown Punk with cropped hair and a safety pin through my ear.
 It was only a matter of weeks after returning from the OYC trip to the Baltic that I sailed with the RNR to La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast of France,and then shortly after that I was with the RNR again, this time in the Pool of London, subject of a famous British crime film directed by Basil Dearden in 1951 and referring to that stretch of the Thames lying between London Bridge and Rotherhithe. In order to reach my ship, I had to board some kind of launch with a group of other seamen, one of whom, a strikingly good-looking blond seaman of about 30 I knew only by sight, had taken unofficial charge. Once we were all safely aboard, it was the turn of our self-appointed leader to join us, but as he stepped off the launch, he somehow lost his footing and slipped into the Thames beneath him. Within a matter of minutes his heavy clothing and boots, helped by a vicious current, had dragged him beneath the river's surface and he was lost. Soon after returning to London, I told my mother what happened, and as she wept the tears of one who instinctively knew what those who loved this poor man must have been feeling at the time, the true appalling tragedy of the incident hit home and I ran into the bathroom and sobbed my heart out myself. Thinking back on it, a line from that beautiful song "How Men Are" by Scottish singer-songwriter Roddy Frame comes to mind: "Why should it take the tears of a woman to see how men are?"
 Still in '75 I attempted to pass what is known as the AIB or Admiralty Interview Board with a view to qualifying as a Supply and Secretariat officer in the Royal Navy. This involved my taking the train down to HMS Sultan, the Royal Navy's specialist training centre in Gosport, Hampshire, where I spent three days attending various examinations and interviews intended to assess my potential as a future naval officer.
 On one occasion early on in the long weekend just before one assignment or another, I was primping in the mirror putting the final touches to my dress when one of the guys I was sharing a dormitory reminded me that I was at a naval base not a fashion parade. Something like that anyway. Whatever it was, he wasn't going to be coming along with me that night to the disco, or any night for that matter. Two guys eventually did agree to keep me company on one of the nights we spent at Sultan, but they didn't really seem all that keen. As things turned out I was left alone at a Gosport disco dancing with a pretty young woman with shortish blond curly hair and the unusual name of Shiralee (Indigenous Australian for "burden" or "duty"). Later that night I escorted her along a busy main leading back to Sultan, as she must have lived nearby. Cars sounded their horns as I kissed her good night. Shortly after doing so, I discovered that Sultan's main entrance had been locked and was now being manned by an armed guard.
 If the young man nervously trying to reach someone in authority within the training centre on a walkie talkie was wondering exactly what kind of person returns to base dressed to the nines after a night's disco dancing when he was supposed to be in the midst of three days of gruelling tests and interviews that were vital to his future career, then he gave no indication of it. He did however eventually make contact with someone in authority, and I can remember passing through an officer's mess soon afterwards and briefly exchanging pleasantries with its airily affable occupants. English gentlemen of the old school, they of course kept their actual opinions of me to themselves. It may just be me, but I can't help thinking that had I returned to Sultan that night before being locked out, I might have been in with a better chance of passing the AIB, that is, as opposed to failing it, which I perhaps rather predictably did. Ay, every inch the superstar.