I Know This Much: From Soho to Spandau. Gary Kemp

the telephone now being ubiquitous, except of course in our house, where we’d have to wait another four years for that modern pleasure.

      I slipped the plastic bag off my guitar and, holding it ready to play, stepped into the booth.

      ‘Dad, my guitar won’t fit in.’

      ‘Go on, I’ve got to shut the door, you’ll be all right.’

      He lifted the guitar gently and I bent sideways about ninety degrees. The guitar’s arm was now facing downwards. Dad carefully closed the door and I shuffled farther in.

      ‘Hang on,’ he said, opening it again, ‘I’ve got to put the money in.’ His arm reached through and the door banged against the front of my guitar as I pressed tighter against the opposite wall. ‘OK, it’s ready. Wait for the light. It lasts a minute.’

      A minute? How long was my song? He closed the airlock and it went silent. I saw the fresh, black disc drop and the needle approach its edge. The red light went on and I looked outside at Dad, who was mouthing ‘Go on’ through the glass. I began strumming.

      ‘Jesus rode through Jericho on his way to the cross…’

      The station was busy with Easter trippers and I was aware of people glancing at us while I sang and Dad proudly guarded his young artist’s recording studio. I reached the final verse and saw that the needle was only a few revolutions away from the end of the disc. I sped up, trying to fit it all in. The final bars were now frantic as I began racing towards the end; and then the light went off. The needle lifted and the disc whirred and started its sedate little journey towards the exit hole. I hadn’t quite finished.

      Nevertheless, I’d made my first record. It felt warm and smelt of summer pavements. I clutched it all the way home in the car, staring at its grooves and wondering at the fine impression my song had made. I played it over and over on my parents’ gramophone until its tiny trenches, ploughed that Easter weekend onWaterloo Station, wore into each other and my voice became a soft shadow, receding into the distance, until eventually I was gone.

      The school hall was abuzz with excited pupils. No classes made it too thrilling to behave in any way other than berserk, and the staff were struggling to get everyone quiet and seated in class rows. I settled at the side, my guitar on my lap, plastic bag removed.

      At the end of the little hall, thin Miss Bannatyne stood next to a tall, grey, stately-looking man in a long maroon robe. His huge chin supported a wide friendly grin. Around his neck hung a heavy plain cross. ‘Good morning, everyone. I’d like to welcome the Bishop of Stepney, Trevor Huddleston, who has kindly agreed to hand out the prizes today.’

      There would have been some singing and some recorder playing, and a long-drawn-out giving of prizes to the leavers. At some point during the proceedings, I was called up and sat on a chair in front of the school. My now minuscule shorts rode up tight into my crotch and the guitar felt cold on my bulging, naked legs that were being drained of blood by the second. Uncomfortably, and unseasonably, it being midsummer, I played and sang ‘Jesus Rode Through Jericho’—an encore from Easter that my headmistress had insisted upon—followed by a new song. The record-buying and private listening having influenced my playing, I’d written a more contemporary follow-up to the now dissolved first acetate.

      My mother was upset about the title. ‘“Alone”? You can’t call it that! They’ll start to worry about you.’ She already had.

      Writing songs was a lonely process, it seemed. Although a dark, maudlin number in a minor key, it still somehow managed to contain a whistling refrain. But a pattern, thank God, was not forming, and it was to be my last in the whistling genre.

      Strangely, and with some measure of foresight, my headmistress recorded the performance on reel-to-reel and I still have it. Listening to it now, what fascinates me most of all is not my child’s voice, surprising lack of nerves or dreadful whistling, but the noises of the children in the background, children I knew, shuffling, coughing, talking as though it were yesterday, and yet now into the final half of their lives. It’s a distant moment of sublime naivety that I want to reach into and pull out. And somewhere, just off to the side of the singing boy, silent, but to me very present upon the tape, the bishop, making a decision that would help create the man now listening.

      In the January of 1971, my brother and I decided to buy our first records.We both had money saved from our paper rounds and together we walked the Essex Road towards a little record shop in Cross Street, painfully called Pop Inn. For such an important event we needed to be attired correctly, and Martin and I were both dressed de rigueur in Brutus shirts with buttoned-down collars.

      I had begged my mother for this essential fashion item the summer before, knowing exactly where to purchase it. At the Angel a shop run by some tasty ex-mods was a windowless little grotto of working-class style. Oh, that giddy sensation when I first saw the Brutuses and Ben Shermans, as one of the shop’s oh-so-fashionable owners slipped them off the shelves and laid them out for my delectation. Folded oblong in shape and protected inside their crisp polythene wrappings, they were like perfect portraits of what shirts should be like, all stiff and pleading to be bought. Some were gingham, others a confectionery of ice-cream colours, and all impossible to choose from. I wanted to own every one of them, collect them with the same eagerness that I’d collected World Cup coins the year before, but I had to make a choice and my eyes kept returning to a pale yellow one. I pictured myself in it; I pictured Tony Bayliss and Stephen Brassett looking at me in it; I pictured myself walking into Anna’s in it. The power of making that choice left me light headed, almost a little nauseous with excitement, and then the owner was slipping it into a brown paper bag and I was desperate to get back home.

      The smell of the fresh cotton as its lemon folds fell open and caught the light had me falling further in love. Little vents and buttons flawlessly set off its short sleeves, and, as I slipped it on, my skin had never felt such bliss. Leaving its straight-bottomed tails hanging out over my trousers, I would be À la mode that winter, but what terrible trousers they now looked next to my new shirt. These were awful. They had to go. More begging ensued.

      Dad took me to a little Jewish tailor he knew of in the East End, and I picked out the electric blue-and-green mohair myself. By the following weekend, the bespectacled cutter had made me the sharpest parallels I could imagine, and although they were unlined, the roughness against my legs was worth suffering. As well as getting a few cast-offs, my brother was quick at catching me up with his own begging, and so there we were, a couple of real tasty geezers in two-tone tonic strides, marching up Cross Street in search of our musical identity.

      Two pairs of mini-brogues with Blakies hammered on to the heels clipped their way into Pop Inn. Presented with a large tray of 45s, the baby suedeheads were bewildered as to what they should pick as their first buy. The bearded shop assistant indulged them by languidly playing a few. Martin heard the double-tracked vocals of the Tremeloes’ ‘Me And My Life’ and made his choice. For Gary, the minute the car horn sounded and the singer’s lazy London drawl spoke to him, he knew what he wanted.

      ‘I think I’m so-phisticated…’

      The Kinks’ ‘Apeman’ was my first record on a consumerist journey that would not only shape my life, but would eventually pay me back in spades.

      Thursday night was Top of the Pops; it had been since ‘Hot Love’ reached number one in March. Marc Bolan’s T.Rex was now being scrawled over my exercise books, and my second single was soon bought. As Marc flicked his corkscrew locks from his glitter tears, I knew the button-down collars had to go. I grew my hair, had it ‘feather-cut’ in a new ‘unisex’ salon called Stanley Kays, and graduated to a turquoise-patterned tulip collar—probably worn under a knitted black tank top with rainbow hoops—and the ultimate playground desirable, a suede Budgie jacket. Adam Faith’s eponymous TV character, Budgie, became a clothes peg for the West End store Mr Freedom, and we all wanted what Budgie wore.My Budgie jacket was cream with a green yoke. I can still smell its urban opulence, although mine was almost certainly tainted with the pungent smell of burgers from Brick Lane, where my cheaper version was bought. I never extended to the white clogs Budgie also made fashionable, although