Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography (16 page)

‘Oh, this? Um . . . I got it in New York. Funky, innit? You can’t get it though, this is the only one.’

I gave a regretful response while inwardly quite giddy with the notion that Marc Bolan actually thought, had the piece not been unique, I might shoot over to the States and buy a couple. I began sorting out his purchases and bagging them up. Marc went off to talk with John.

When he returned, he had done the single most magnificent and starry thing I have ever known. He had taken the shirt off and was now handing it to me.

‘There you go, babes. I don’t wear things more than once, so knock yourself out . . . Listen, John, I’ll call you, okay. Give Ian and Jake my love, talk soon.’

And with that he tripped out of the shop on his built-up Annello & Davide heels, his green coat now worn over a bare chest. I don’t think I even said thank you. As far as I recall, I was too busy standing there open-mouthed and thunderstruck. John looked at me and laughed. ‘She is
something
isn’t she? That is a
STAR
. It’s a great shirt, by the way.’

I just stood there, holding this saintly relic still warm from the Bolan body. I tried to respond to John but could only manage a noise like the death throes of a seagull.

It’s fair to say that, whereas Marc professed to wear a thing only once, I could make no such claim. I didn’t leave the shirt off for a fortnight. Everyone in the pubs of Bermondsey asked where did I get that shirt, and I would say, ‘This shirt? Marc fucking Bolan gave it to me.’ In return, I would ask where they got
their
shirt, and they would say a shop like Take 6 or Lord John, and then I would ask them to ask me once more where I got my shirt and when they did I would say, ‘Marc fucking Bolan gave it to me’ again.

So where is that shirt now? Why isn’t it in the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame or currently on eBay for ONE MILLION pounds?

Because my mother washed it. In our banging, boiling Bendix washing machine. Probably along with some of my brother’s rotten pants and last week’s football socks. In short, she had taken a recklessly cavalier approach to the ‘DRY-CLEAN ONLY’ warning on the shirt label. I can hear her defence even now:

‘Well, how was I to know? A shirt! Who the pissing hell dry-cleans a shirt? If it can’t take a wash, what’s the point in having it? Blimey, we’d go skint overnight if we had to dry-clean all the shirts in this house! Now buck your ideas up, because I’m busy.’

I was crushed, sickened by this act of wanton philistinism. But, as she further pointed out, ‘If it was so bleedin’ precious, what was it doing laying all over y’bedroom floor?’ She rather had me there.

For the record, when I found it, it was in our airing cupboard, sans any silken lustre, with the remnants of Chuck’s duck walk now barely discernible and suddenly of a size that might just about fit a ventriloquist’s doll.

Whenever Marc came into the shop after this he would always say, ‘How’s the shirt, D? Still loving it?’ And I would say, ‘Had it on last night!’ I lived in mortal fear he would one day ask for it back.

But, of course, real stars don’t do that.

The story about Marc Bolan’s shirt and my mother’s attitude to same might be seen as a neat metaphor for the two disparate worlds I was starting to juggle. I had gone from schoolboy to butterfly in barely a season, but how was I adapting psychologically to this sudden change in altitude? Most work days I would finish at the shop by five, give an air-kiss and a wave to my chums in Mayfair and then get the number 1 bus from Oxford Street all the way back across the Thames to a Mum-cooked tea of cod balls and beans before going out to glug pints of Harp lager in one of Bermondsey’s countless old boozers that really oughtn’t to have been serving us at all. My two lives on either side of the river would seldom collide because they really had so little in common.

Of course I’d tell mates things like ‘I met that Mickie Most today’, and they would ask what he was like and I might say he was really nice – or a bit of a ponce – before we moved on to more pressing local matters such as who was shagging who, how Bloke A was going to ‘glass’ bloke B when he saw him, and what were the odds of Millwall escaping relegation. On occasion though, a good pal like big Irish John Hannon would note my new red-and-yellow stack-heel shoes and ask, ‘Where the fuckin’ hell do you get shoes like that?’ When I told him I had had them made in Carnaby Street, he would look furtively above the hand of cards he might be holding and mutter, ‘Made? You must be on a right old fiddle up there . . .’ And he was right. It was upon this notion that I would build a dubious bridge between the two lifestyles.

Though I had thankfully been steered away from outright proactive criminality thanks to the Great Potato Robbery (Failed) of 1964, I soon yielded to the outrageous temptations laid before any backstreet teen that suddenly has to handle money all day. Initially, however, far more enticing than the cold hard cash stream was the bunce. When being interviewed for the record shop, keen and dazzled as I was by the prospect of working among the very things I loved most, I can’t deny that there was a part of me thinking, ‘Aye aye – that’s us all sorted for LPs from now on.’ And unlike my friend Tony, who had a sluggish line in malt vinegar from working at Sarson’s local factory, I immediately realized hot pop platters were always going to be an enormous source of sideways income.

Within six weeks of starting my job, it became apparent that 11 Debnams plc was soon going to need some sort of revolving door, what with the carrier bags of popular titles I was piling up in my room and the copious trays of fruit and veg my brother brought home from his job in the Borough Market – in those days purely a pre-dawn distribution centre for the trade – not to mention the continuing carousel of varied stock that the old man tirelessly reprieved from overseas export. I particularly remember at one point in 1975 most rooms in the house were crammed full of duvets (then called continental quilts). Singles were kept in the front room, doubles up in the bedrooms, and king-sized in the passage and in the downstairs toilet. The duvets were one of my dad’s best-ever sellers and all sorts of people used to knock at all hours to buy two or three at a time. Late one night a huge pantechnicon lorry reversed down our little turning and ‘delivered’ about a hundred of the things. When my mum said there was no room to get past them and up the stairs to bed, Dad said, ‘’Salright, shut your row up, they’ll be gone in an hour.’ And they were. All I know is another bloke knocked, there was some low conversation, and Micky and I, who had fallen asleep in the one small space left in the living room, had to help load them into another lorry. Two weeks later the flat was full of Hine brandy that, in every sense, was another very fluid item.

Anyone shocked by this casual racketeering really must understand how such dealings were the norm on inner-city estates back then. findeed, when
Only Fools and Horses
first arrived on TV most people I knew thought it was a documentary. Similarly, in the 1966 version of
Alfie
, I’ve always thought it a brilliant example of authentic period dialogue when Michael Caine advises one of his more mousey conquests, played by Julia Foster, about her finances:

Caine: Here, innit about time you started playin’ the piano on the till down that café where you work?

She: Oh, I couldn’t do that, Alfie, they’re like family to me.

Caine: Well, there’s all the more reason to do ’em! I’ve told ya, a little fiddle on the side gives you an interest in your work. Blimey, that must be the only till in London that ain’t bent!

At first my own efforts at urban smuggling were restricted to one or two special orders for mates sneaked out among my own discounted purchases. From this I would make an extra couple of quid. Soon though, and on the nights when I was left to lock up the shop, I was taking home boxes of the things to knock out in dockland pubs. If I walked into the Wellington, Old Kent Road, with twenty copies of the new Stylistics album I could leave less than ten minutes later with twenty one-pound notes. At the time my official wages came to only £15.58 a week. Then there was the traditional shop worker’s practice of under-ringing – or, as Alfie described it, ‘playing the piano on the till’.

Because One Stop was one of the few places that imported US dance records it was an essential resource for discotheque owners and DJs who came from far and wide to buy enormous amounts of 45s so they could keep abreast of the scene. Hardly a day would pass without some Greek or Lebanese type striding up to the counter and saying, ‘Latest hits! Latest sounds! Yes?’ They would then point to their watch and say, ‘I come back at four. Four! Yes? I need everything new, the best, all you have.’ And then they would place a hundred, sometimes two hundred pounds in cash on the counter and walk out, possibly to buy dozens of chest medallions in Bond Street. On my first day in South Molton Street I’d noticed that the till – and remember this was almost two decades before today’s central stock bar-coded computers – was set back in a recess where nobody could actually see what keys you were depressing to register a sale. Clearly this positioning was not an accident. Thus if you sold a £3.99 LP, you would ring up £2.99 and trouser the phantom pound like some kind of tip. For a £200 cash sale you might be looking at up to thirty quid materializing in your cavernous bin. It is of no surprise then that on days when there would be three of us behind the counter we learned how to sniff the jackpot scent of an approaching club owner’s cologne from several streets away and would almost fist-fight each other for the privilege of attending to his nightclub’s needs.

This seemingly open invitation to help yourself was further cemented because, though the till had an internal roll to track the day’s incoming cash, it did not actually issue a receipt. If a customer wanted one, it would have to be written by hand. This whirlpool of dubious cashflow becomes even more murky when I tell you that, nine times out of ten, anyone who
did
ask for a receipt would then quietly ask you to bump up the total so that their boss would reimburse them for more than they had actually spent – a sum which, remember, had been even further eroded by the time it was eventually rung up on the till. Students of Britain’s economy in the seventies may like to factor this equation into any future thesis pondering how come the country was in such fiscal disarray back then.

The oddest thing about this skimming and skulduggery was that we never once openly acknowledged to each other that it was going on. You simply knew and tried to be sensible about it by always keeping in mind that the official day’s takings on that inner record had to be kept at a credible amount. Therefore you could never strong it on slow days – which, as the quality of the hi-fi system in my bedroom could attest, were thankfully few.

To completely round off this licence to privatize profits, the shop’s ultimate owners – who in part I seem to recall were the always trendy Island Records – actually allowed us, the staff, to do our own biannual stock checks. In all my time there, I don’t believe a single discrepancy was ever unearthed.

So what did I do with all this free-and-easy disposable income? Well, I disposed of it. All my life I’ve had an attitude to money similar to the one my mother held towards shirts that belonged to Marc Bolan: I can knock it out with a quite astonishing brio. I
burn
through it frivolously and deliciously, and thank God that I have within me not a scintilla of fear about what the lack of it might bring. I have a low opinion of money and I find its suffocating power over people to be sinister bourgeois bullshit. I know this will make no sense to most people, but there it is.

This is not the acquired philosophy of one who has grown soft and callous through years of fabulous income. I have been exactly the same since the moment I decided to blow off my O levels and take a job at fourteen. I am from totally non-moneyed roots, where the idea of having any savings was unimaginable – wasteful, even. Like the old man, I have always regarded even the most rudimentary financial planning as the dreary stamp of a sluggard. In our family you earned money, you got paid, you knocked it out. You spent it on your kids, on friends, on noisy nights and rollicking days. Most importantly, you went through it before anyone could ask for it back or produce something as sordid as a utility bill. When they did, you told them to fuck off until you had moved a few things about. My dad and his brothers all talked openly of being flush or being ‘pot-less’ – and with equal indifference.

We were certainly not a materially fixated family. There was never any ambition to own a house and we never had a car. That said, we always had a good three-piece suite and good curtains in the front room. And on a night out, it would be, ‘Fuck the bus, Bet – we’re getting cabs there and back.’ Making things lively and giving that result- ant electricity ease was all that money was for. Our annual holidays may have been domestic and modest in their destination, but we always went first class by train and stayed in the best available chalets (seaside) or boats (Norfolk Broads). If my mum said, ‘Blimey, Fred, you sure? How we gonna pay for all this?’ Spud would respond with the most tremendous authority, ‘Never you mind about that, Bet. We’ll sort it all out on the morning.’ And he would. Because he had to.

The only true sin in my family was to be idly unemployed. Getting a hand-out or aimlessly signing on was seen as an admission that somehow you had given up on your God-given Baker wits and had accepted the rules of the establishment. You were in their pay instead of your own – no matter how much ducking and diving that involved. The key was to be a forager and rely on
nobody
, least of all the government, nor any other strangers.

At the record shop I would happily under-ring a discotheque bonanza without a qualm. Yet in the decades subsequent I never once submitted a routine expenses bill to an employer, even though I have coughed up for countless legitimate business meals, drinks and cab fares, both for myself and (often famous) others. Whatever few quid I hustled back at One Stop I have since
poured
back into the economy a million times over. It’s a bizarre and fractured code to live by, I’ll admit, but it’s consistent and I’ll argue vaguely noble. Nothing I have done in my career has ever been to amass wealth. Even today, I have no second or holiday home, no top-of-the-range car, less than ten grand in the bank – often much less. Yet I have stayed in the presidential suite at the Four Seasons New York, flown Concorde, and had lots of six-week holidays with people I love – and I have paid for it all myself. Every penny I have earned – and it has been
millions
– has been used to facilitate a wonderful series of experiences or otherwise to foot the bill for something extended, rash and marvellous. Some people will sit there and let you buy the drinks all night. I don’t care. That’s the way they live and this is the way I live. They are cheerless and constipated and I know I’m having way more fun with a lot more style. We have a great home and we live wonderfully. I genuinely have no clue as to whether any talent I have developed for writing and performing is innate and natural or simply forged through a burning necessity to keep the plates spinning for all who rely on me. It’s career and life as Swiss Army knife. Let the conservative suits in the City have their big bonuses. They can also have the long years toiling behind the office desks and the bonus heart attacks too.