Fun City, to London, experience

FUN CITY

(Originally published in SPUNK magazine (USA), issue 5, Summer 2008)

I spent the bulk of my early youth kicking a football against a wall in Pinxton, a small, ex-mining village in the East Midlands, 17 miles from the nearest city. Nothing ever happened here that would interest anyone outside of these few square miles. The mineshafts may have long since collapsed but their legacy is evident in the face of everyone you pass in the street. “Pinxtoners” are ferociously proud of their rather uneventful history and don’t much like change or strangers. Particularly black or gay ones. Men are MEN and women know their place – in front of the TV with chips, or tea and broken biscuits. Hunting with dogs and even ferrets is still a common Sunday morning past-time. There are small, itchy queues outside the pubs at 11am. Grubby Union Jack flags wave proudly from council estate windows. Spotty youths in baseball caps, shellsuits, perch comically on undersized bikes outside the Chinese takeaway. Occasionally, their mascot bulldog will yawn on the end of its chain. Even the dogs are bored here. Ridicule is highly prized entertainment. If you’re not wearing counterfeit Nike; if you don’t own a dog that’s listed in the Dangerous Dog Act; if your bike isn’t that of a 7 year old girl; if you don’t fucking say fuck every fucking three fucking words, you may as well paint a target on your back.

My family came to Pinxton from Nottingham in 1970, magnetted by my father’s new engineering job on the local industrial estate. I was 3 years old when we moved into our new, identikit council house on the Hawthorne Road estate. My mother quickly decided she hated the place and hit the Valium immediately. Barely a day went by for the next 20 years when she didn’t scold my father for uprooting and dragging her to this time-forsaken backwater. My elder brother, Dale, spent the 70s playing “Scarface” in our local comprehensive school, establishing top dog status by systematically smashing dissident heads on the changing room sinks. The frequent punishments by the headteacher – 6 lashes with a fibreglass cane on each hand – did little to dissuade him from the obvious delight he took in violence. On Saturdays, as part of the DLF (“Derbyshire Lunatic Fringe”), he would dish out more on the football terraces; leaving “congratulatory” calling cards on the smashed bodies of victims.

Whenever my ball burst, I made dinosaurs out of plasticine, read books about UFOs and sewed AC/DC patches onto my armless denim jacket. Heavy Metal was BIG in Pinxton—so big that when punk came along, it was barely noticed and left in the time it took a carrier bag to blow through the village and out the other end. A new wave of ska in the late 70s, however, managed some kind of foothold, against all the odds and The Specials, a smart, multicultural, anti-racist, gang of hyperactive, though politically serious Coventry youths, were the first band to really make me sit up and pay attention. Even at 12/13 years old, I knew that you were either a have or a have-not and that Margaret Thatcher wanted the have-nots to, well, have less. Dark days for Britain and the soundtrack was The Specials’ “Ghost Town”: “No jobs to be found in this country / Can’t go on no more / The people gettin’ angry.”

Looking back, it’s somewhat perplexing then, that in 1981, I should fall helplessly for a petite, camp, heavily made-up, black-clad, bangled beatnik singing about love being “tainted,” over brooding, pinging electropop.  Soft Cell, a Leeds-based, “performance art” duo of singer, Marc Almond and synth boffin, Dave Ball, were number 2 in the chart with an inspired cover of an obscure Northern Soul song (“Tainted Love,” of course). Such a high chart position merited an appearance on the esteemed Top of The Pops TV show – a programme which had made and broken many a popstar since the mid-60s. It wasn’t so much the song as such that hypnotised me that night though.

“I frugged onto the TV screen and a nation’s jaws dropped open. Immediately and from then on, it seemed girls wanted to marry me, mothers wanted to mother me, grandparents wanted to have me arrested, lads wanted to smash my face in, fathers buried their heads in their papers and many gay teenage sons blushed and made an excuse to leave the room so they could go upstairs and write notes to me. Just as with Bowie and Bolan in the seventies, war was declared in school playgrounds the day after, when a growing army of Marc Almond fans stood up to be counted….” (from Tainted Life, his autobiography)

At 14, I hadn’t kissed a girl or a boy, though certainly didn’t mind which I masturbated about. On Saturdays, I was lured to my friend Lee’s house by the promise of playing pool on his full-size table. Though the evening invariably ended with me pissed on the contents of his dad’s drinks cabinet and Lee’s hands down the front of my Farahs. But that Lee wasn’t gay. And neither was I. We just wanted something, “anything” to happen.

I didn’t know what Marc Almond was either. Yes, he vaguely resembled a man but his Cleopatra eye make-up, effeminate dance mannerisms, the yearning in his voice suggested Liza Minnelli in Cabaret, albeit one surrounded by (sex) dwarves. As Almond deftly reports, the day after that TOTP appearance, the schoolyard was awash with jocular yelps of “Did you see that puff on TV last night?!” (“Puff” being early ’80s slang for effeminate gentleman). Yes, I did see him. A nd I wanted to see him again. I just wasn’t sure why.

I didn’t have to wait long. “Tainted Love” was Number 1 in the chart by the following week. Obviously, I wasn’t alone – thousands had been transfixed by Almond’s inadvertent/accidental magnetism – or was it just that great song?

My obsession with Soft Cell took hold quickly and in absolute defiance of Pinxton’s macho traditionalism. At school, I was tagged “homo,” not simply for rejecting the advances of any hopeful girl who came near me (I wasn’t bad-looking and being the brother of the school kingpin had a plus side a better man might’ve enjoyed) but also for papering my schoolbooks with pictures of the androgynous popstars of the day : Almond, Phil Oakey, Boy George, Martin Gore of Depeche Mode. My clothes, too, began to change. Out were the neat pleated slacks, Fred Perry polo shirt and white tennis socks of the ska scene. Black was in; silver bangles, skull rings, tousled hair, even mascara. The day I walked down the street and a gang of tough, elder boys yelled after me, “Hey! Queer! Homo!” and finally, “Marc Almond!!” was both terrifying and exhilarating. I was never beaten up. Perhaps the sanctity of my brother’s “status” had something to do with that. A boy who’d hit me on the first day of school, when I was 11, not knowing “who I was,” reportedly spent a week in hospital when my brother found out. Even so, if ever there was a walking punchbag in this testosterone-fuelled, tattoo-necked, beer-breathed village where time had stood still, surely I was it?

A world away, Soft Cell were unleashing tawdry tales of sexual and chemical excess beneath flashing neon signs. Pawing over every minute detail of their debut album, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, I daydreamt Soho, seedy films, grimy London bedsits, scandal, shady characters in cellar bars, a red bulb flickering beneath a tacky, tassled bedside lamp. That the album was actually recorded in New York wasn’t a deal-breaking issue.

‘Fun City’ (originally released as a 1982 fanclub-only single under the moniker Marc & The Mambas) told of a boy leaving his hometown for the bright lights of the big city. It’s a bastardised Dick Whittington for the 20th Century, wherein Dick was more likely to become a rent boy than the mayor.

“I left my home with a pain in my heart / Not a word of goodbye to the ones that I loved / Taking a train away from the rain to the lights and the smoke /Got to find my own way now / Fun City, Fun City… / To London, experience.”

Marc: “‘Fun City’ is almost directly autobiographical. It’s like when I first left college and first came down to London, I had no money so the only way I could do it was by selling myself! (laughs).”

As depressing a tale as it was, it was a fairytale adventure compared to anything I was(n’t) experiencing in Pinxton. I spent years staring out the window, watching the same jobless, seemingly thoughtless, emotionally bereft men zigzag drunkenly from pub to pub. I had to get out or I’d join their ranks. Of this, I was certain. Marc, unbeknownst, urged me on. He may as well have been advertising a rent-free room. I wanted to be amongst people who felt too much, who didn’t fit in, who were searching for themselves, for that indescribable “something.”

The years churned by, as if hand-cranked. As my mother will testify, I barely left my bedroom. Photos of me from this time, reluctantly taken by my father, show a frail, pallid, dejected youth posing limply beneath pictures of Marc or Morrissey : the soundtrackers to my life…or at least, the one I thought I wanted.

I finally made it to London many years later. Almond is, reportedly, still here, somewhere though, of course, Soft Cell have long packed up the Synclavier. Even so, after 12 years of Metropolition, I always make a point of walking through Soho whenever I’m in the West End and absorbing that unmistakable ambience of “sleaze” typified, personalised by Almond. It still hangs, like an ancient scent (stench?), on the air. The neons fizz in the rain. Multicoloured, tacky plastic curtains protect passing innocents from the hardcore images within. Tough, Eastern European hoodlums puff fags in the doorways of sticky carpet clip joints. “Poppers” scrawled in garish, pink marker pen. Shop mannequins in Gimp masks. “Are you looking for a girl?” Model, second floor. It’s all there. Though strangely, somehow, I don’t want it anymore.