Over the Moon (22 page)

At the time Phonogram wanted another album from me and I teamed up again with John Cameron, with whom I had written the
Silver Dream Racer
score, to work on
Hot Love
. We kept the motorbike theme going, to a degree. For one self-written track, called ‘On My Bike’, I lugged my Triumph Bonneville into a vocal booth in the studio and nearly asphyxiated myself revving it up to provide a sound effect. I got so carried away that
only
a quick-thinking engineer kicking open the door of the booth averted an incipient case of carbon monoxide poisoning.

Hot Love
was to prove one of my least successful albums but for a while, things also got a little steamy in my private life. A lot of people had probably assumed that I was sexually promiscuous all through the crazy years of Essex Mania. A decent-looking pop star, with screaming girls throwing themselves at him every day: what man
wouldn’t
take advantage?

I
hadn’t
been living that life, in fact, due to being married, my personal sense of morality and, overwhelmingly, wanting Verity to love and respect me, but now I was single and had no reason not to indulge in a few flings. With the Hyde Park flat as my base, I set about belatedly playing the field.

Thirty-three is admittedly quite old to begin sowing wild oats but I saw a lot of girls and formed a lot of liaisons during that period. It was very lucky that my Hyde Park flat happened to have two entrances the badly planned evening that I showed one young lady out of one door as another woman arrived at the other.

I suppose they were quite wild times, looking back, but I guess I was just doing what most men would have done in my situation and, if you will pardon the phrase, making up for lost time. Even then I think I behaved with respect towards the women. We all knew what was going on and I never led any of the ladies on, made promises I couldn’t keep, or said that they were ‘The One’.

Because of this, I was surprised and a little disappointed when one or two of the girls then sold kiss-and-tell stories to the
newspapers.
Their accounts of what had transpired between us never remotely matched the truth, and on a couple of occasions I had never even met the women. Plus, on a basic level, I just think kiss-and-tells lack respect and dignity.

It was fun, sort of, but also there was an inescapable ache and hollowness at the heart of my promiscuous period. I had just come out of a loving marriage with a soul mate with whom I had made two children that were the light of my life. How could casual relationships not seem essentially empty after that?

After the split, I bought Maureen and the kids a house by the Thames in Chiswick and a routine developed whereby I would pick up Verity and Dan on Friday evenings and return them on Sunday nights. We would head down to the farm in Kent or stay in London, where I was meticulous in ensuring that they never encountered any of my new female friends.

So now I was that dreaded thing: a Weekend Dad. We always had a great time, even when they were pretending to like my fry-ups and sausage and mash, and it was noticeable how much Verity had become like a little second mother to Dan. Yet, for me, there was always an ineffable sadness hanging over the weekends, because they were so short and the time with the two of them was so precious.

The low point always came on the quiet Sunday evenings when I drove them back to Chiswick and they reunited with Maureen. Driving away, I would inevitably feel hugely alone and outside of the family unit that I belonged in. Frequently, I pulled away from their house, stopped the car at the end of the street and wondered: how did it come to this? What went wrong?

I wanted to spend more time with them, and Maureen and I agreed it would be healthy to all still hang out together, and so I bought a family holiday home. We had always previously headed off to the South of France but we fancied a change of scenery, so I bought a farmhouse, or
finca
, in a tiny cactus-filled village called Mijas in the mountains above Marbella in Spain.

It was a beautiful old building complete with its own olive trees and I hired a local builder to add a top floor and a swimming pool. The view from the house was magnificent, taking in both Gibraltar and the North African coast, and we had some blissful family holidays there during the years after our marital split.

The location was so remote that I could walk unrecognised and unmolested, unlike in England or France, and I wasn’t the only person heading out there for some seclusion. There were English, Dutch, German and Italian people living on our side of the hill, and most of them had a story to tell.

My nearest neighbour was a charming and charismatic Italian named Giovanni, or Gio, who said he had flown fighter planes for the Israelis in the Six-Day War, been an intelligence officer unearthing Nazi war criminals, and spent time raising hell in Paris with Jacques Brel. He had also flown a plane under a bridge in Malaga, to the huge annoyance of the local authorities, but now spent his time drinking and feeding the vicious guard dogs that patrolled his high-walled property.

Gio and I occasionally spent days with the nomadic goat herders who roamed the hills above Marbella. Gio, a brilliant cook, would rustle up breakfast over an open fire and then act as an interpreter as the shepherds told me how they would
wander
an area a hundred miles wide to graze their herds, spending the night in any semi-derelict buildings they might stumble across. Hearing their rustic stories under the blazing Spanish sun was a fantastic experience, and I loved it.

Giovanni, sadly, was to meet a sticky end. After one drinking session with the herders, he fell and broke his leg badly. After the local hospital inserted metal pins to hold it together, he never bothered to return and have them removed, and they rusted and fatally infected his bloodstream. It was a fittingly cavalier way for him to go.

Mostly, though, time at the
finca
was all about Verity and Dan. They loved the swimming pool, although its existence was a matter of some controversy for the Spanish locals on the other side of the hill, who complained that it was an extravagance in an area of little rainfall where water was precious.

Conceding their point, I got water for the pool delivered in a tanker from town rather than draining the local well, but the locals repaid this considerateness by stealing my water under cover of darkness. They also controlled the electricity for our side of the hill, which meant that we were sometimes plunged unexpectedly into darkness.

Nevertheless, these holidays were wonderful and exactly what we needed to ensure that Verity, Dan and I remained inter-woven into the fabric of each other’s lives and didn’t drift apart. Danny and I had some great boys’ adventures there as he grew older, especially the hours that I bounced across the mountains on a Honda 250cc off-road motorbike, with Dan an excited passenger on the pillion in front of me.

One day I lost control of the bike on a mountain track and, about to plummet down the side of a hill, threw Danny off before the bike and I vanished over the edge. Recovering my wits as I lay prone beneath the bike and a pile of ash, I looked up to see Dan, twenty feet above me, indignantly shouting, ‘What did you do that for?’

Back in Britain,
Hot Love
had been a bit of a flop, and while the national tour to promote it later in 1980 had been fun, it had also been fairly gruelling. At the end of it, I was invited to be the first commoner to turn on the Christmas lights in Regent Street, which was a surprise and an honour. I even designed them, in collaboration with jewellery company Butler & Wilson. The following year Regent Street reverted to type and Princess Diana did it.

After a tumultuous time in both my career and my private life, I felt as if I needed to get away. Yusuf Islam had offered me the opportunity to spend some time in his apartment in Rio and I decided to take him up on the offer and to extend it into a wider trip across South America. Packing a bag, I took off on a solo excursion across Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil like an aging gap-year student.

Travelling alone is not for everyone but I loved it. Maybe it goes back once again to being an only child. Freed from the tiresome obligation to make conversation with a companion, you can be like a spy in a movie, observe everything at close hand and soak up the exoticism and
foreignness
of your surroundings. Maybe it is selfish, to a degree, but it is hugely satisfying. Sometimes, I think it’s the only way to travel.

I flew first to Argentina, where I had been advised to keep a low profile, as
Evita
had not exactly been a huge hit with the ruling Junta. There again, they had a lot to answer for. As a member of Amnesty International, I was aware that the Argentine military regime was suspected of eliminating thousands of its citizens: the so-called Disappeared Ones.

Nevertheless, when I landed in Buenos Aires the city seemed surprisingly European, even down to having a Harrods. As I settled in and began to meet the locals, I found them warm and welcoming. On the other hand, I suppose a couple of years later after the Falklands War it might have been a different story.

It wasn’t hard to find confirmation of the kind of stories I had heard through Amnesty. In a bar I met a young man, who told me in whispers how his younger sister had been kidnapped and held to ransom. She was kept tied up and blindfolded in a cave for three weeks until her wealthy father paid the ransom: he knew that the military regime was to blame.

He later introduced me to his sister, who was clearly traumatised and had been mentally scarred by her horrendous experience. It was heartbreaking to see, and when I returned to Britain I made sure to recount her tale, and those of other people that I met, to Amnesty.

After the European feel of Buenos Aires, the Uruguayan capital of Montevideo was far more of an exciting culture shock and definitively Latin American. It was not unlike Cuba, particularly in the proliferation of pristine 1950s American gas-guzzler cars that are lovingly preserved by their owners and sail like galleons through the dusty streets of the city.

It was in Montevideo that an extraordinary adventure began which, had it turned out differently, could have defined my life, ended my career and led to me languishing in a second-world jail for more years than I would care to contemplate. It began early one morning as I strolled by the Atlantic, musing that it was time for me to up sticks and head down to Yusuf’s place in time to catch the world-famous Rio Carnival.

I nodded hello to two men who were leaning on a rather beaten-up Ford Mustang and they returned my greeting and then spoke to me in Spanish. When I indicated that I didn’t speak the language they asked me in broken English where I was from, and were delighted to hear England: ‘Ah! Manchester United!’ (What a shame they didn’t say West Ham.) Continuing our pidgin-English conversation, they asked where I was heading and I told them I was bound for Rio. ‘So are we!’ they told me. ‘Would you like a lift?’

You only live once and this was exactly the sort of spontaneous adventure I had headed off to South America on my Jack Jones to enjoy. Of course I would! I headed back to my guest-house to pick up my bags and reconvened with my newfound friends by the beach an hour later.

We pointed the Mustang towards Brazil and I got to know my companions better. Jesus was a handsome, long-haired man in his thirties with twinkling brown eyes, and proudly told me that he was from Chile. Mario was a slightly chubby Costa Rican in a worn blue suit whose English apparently extended no further than ‘Bobby Charlton’ and ‘Let’s boogie!’

Montevideo to Rio is a seriously long journey but it passed in a haze largely because Jesus and Mario seemed to have a limitless
stash
of industrial-strength marijuana. I have never been a big dope-head and never even smoked my first joint until I was thirty, but taking occasional puffs on the endless spliffs that Jesus and Mario passed between each other, I was soon happily out of my box.

The three of us shared petrol costs and the driving, and travelled long into the night. When we became exhausted, we would stop at some seriously basic roadside motels. This was a truly cheapskate trip: we all shared not just a room but a bed, which meant that I could lie awake all night listening to Mario talking in his sleep in Spanish.

One morning shortly after we hit Brazil, my need for speed got the better of me again and we were pulled over by a traffic cop. Jesus and Mario leapt from their cannabis-induced stupors and reached the policeman even before he had got off his bike. After their long, earnest conversation had ended in handshakes all round and the policeman riding off, they returned to the Mustang looking mightily relieved.

‘I must drive,’ reported Jesus. ‘He has let us go, but you must never drive again in Brazil! I told him you are English and so you are used to driving on the wrong side of the road.’

I thanked them for their sterling efforts, but as they lit up yet another monster pure-marijuana spliff, I couldn’t help feeling a tad surprised by the alacrity with which they had intercepted the traffic cop. ‘Jesus,’ I asked, ‘where is Mario getting all of the grass from?’

With a conspiratorial grin, Jesus pulled away one of the panels of the car to reveal a hidden compartment groaning with
weed.
So I was in the middle of an international drug run with two men for whom the Rio Carnival was the biggest payday of the year. As Mario skinned up another joint and proclaimed ‘Let’s boogie!’, I wondered just how
that
one would have played in the
Sun
or the
Daily Express
.

My bandit friends dropped me off on a street corner in Rio and vanished and I was immediately struck by the vibrancy of the city. Carnival was a week away and heady excitement was in the air. I hailed a taxi to Yusuf’s apartment and enjoyed my first good night’s sleep since I had left Uruguay.

The next morning I left Yusuf’s hillside home, which was spartan but lovely with beautiful views from its balcony, and set out to explore this new, magical and enchanting metropolis. Rio was certainly a city of extremes. Multi-million-pound luxury flats and apartments nestled alongside the Copacabana beach; a few hundred yards away, families languished in tin shacks in filthy shanty towns.