I Owe You Nothing. Luke Goss

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СКАЧАТЬ been given a saxophone, and lessons. He never progressed much beyond painstakingly picking his way through ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’, although if you hear Mum talk you’d think he was orchestral standard. I’m glad he never persevered with the sax because he might have ended up concentrating on that and not singing, which would have been a great loss. He used the sax to great effect to impress girls, but when they asked him to play something he usually had an excuse ready.

      One of the nicest things about the present was that it was not for Christmas or a birthday, it was simply an extra loving gesture, and I know that Tony was the main force behind it, so I owe him an enormous debt. Looking back, they must have been mad buying a drum kit for a twelve-year-old, especially if they wanted to stay on friendly terms with the neighbours. But because I was so desperate to play, and because I worked so hard at it, it was no time at all before I could do it properly. Our first neighbours, though, did take the soft option – they moved. After that we had a crowd of young people living next door and they did not seem to mind. Mum and Tony insisted that I never played late at night, so I don’t remember too much friction. Mum knew how desperate I had been to have drums, and she appreciated that I had to learn, so she was my defender. When she said ‘Not now, Luke’, I stopped, however itchy my fingers were.

      ‘If Luke is interested in something, it doesn’t take him long to master it,’ she says. ‘I don’t blame the neighbours for moving, I think I would have too if I’d had a choice! But within a couple of months he was making professional-sounding noises on his drums, and it just got better and better. The most irritating thing was not the noise, it was trying to get him to do anything else.’

      It is hard to describe the pleasure I had from owning that kit. Every time I went into my bedroom, I forgot whatever else I was supposed to be doing and sat down at the drums. When I woke in the morning it was the first thing I looked at, because it was a huge kit that filled half the bedroom, and for a few weeks I had to keep reminding myself that it was really mine.

      There were times in those first few months when I felt so frustrated by the limits of my ability; when I felt like stabbing the drum kit with a knife; when my aching ankles would not do what they were supposed to do and when I could hear in my head what I wanted it to sound like, but I simply did not have the muscle development to produce that sound. But I worked at it every day, until my arms ached, my fingers bled and my head span.

      I had one drum lesson at school in a lunch break, but it was simply a matter of banging sticks on a desk, and I was able to teach myself much better at home. Learning any instrument comes down to practice, practice and more practice, and because I enjoyed it I never found that a struggle.

      What is the first thing a boy who plays the drums does? He forms a band. There were a group of other kids at school who were keen on the idea, but I was the main force behind it. Matt and I met Craig Logan, who was a year younger than us, when we started at Collingwood School. He came round to our house and we gave him a lift home on the back of one of our bikes; he decided we were completely crazy because we cycled across people’s gardens. Craig’s family were resolutely middle class – big house, two cars on the drive, so clean that you felt you couldn’t stand on the carpet – and Craig had been brought up to be more conventional, less rebellious than we were.

      Craig had a bass guitar. Another mate, Peter Kirtley, played the keyboards. He was always known as ‘Little Pete’, which is ironic because he is now over six feet tall. He still plays, and his band has just been signed by a record company. His father was a jazz musician, so there was no problem about rehearsing at his house.

      We called the first band Caviar. We didn’t know what caviar was, but it sounded posh. We dressed like the early Duran Duran: long hair, frilly shirts, earrings. With hindsight, we probably looked and sounded dreadful, but at the time we thought we were fantastic.

      My hair and my slavish interest in music did not do me any favours with the teaching staff at school, and neither did my refusal to conform. We’d had a fairly gypsy-like upbringing, travelling about and meeting lots of different people through Tony’s and Mum’s work. We had never been treated like children, and we found it hard to fit into a vast school of 2,000 pupils where there was no scope for any individuality. I didn’t like school, I felt too old to be there and I desperately wanted to get on with my life. It did little to prepare us for the harsh realities of life ahead: one simple lesson about the difference between gross and net might have saved Matt and me a small fortune.

      No doubt there were some kids who got what they wanted from that school, who enjoyed it and did well there. But I felt let down and betrayed by the whole system.

      I could not understand – then or now – why there had to be such a formal gulf between teachers and pupils. Teachers were not allowed to act like human beings any more than pupils were. There were a couple of teachers I liked, and once when one of them looked really upset I wanted to go up to her and put my arm around her, but of course that was out of the question. Apart from a formal ‘good morning’ and ‘good afternoon’, you were not supposed to have any social chat with the staff.

      We joined the school a year after everyone else, because of our move from Cheddar, but it did not take us long to make friends. We soon became part of the school ‘in-crowd’, mainly because of our style and music. Craig was a ‘boff’ – one of the boffins who took school seriously.

      Our school uniform was black trousers, jumper and shoes, a white shirt and a red, yellow and green striped tie. Small collars were fashionable at the time, and I would tie my tie with the thin side on top and the thick side tucked into my shirt. I was always very neat and clean, but I was in trouble because my hair was long. Mum and Tony went to see the headmaster about it, and Tony argued forcibly that because we were otherwise so tidy and clean, and our hair was freshly washed every day, they were making a fuss about nothing. His only concession was that he agreed we would tie it back during woodwork, when the school reckoned it was dangerous. As the rest of the boys of our age seemed to think it was cool to be scruffy, the headmaster took his point.

      Clothes were a constant preoccupation. Mum gave us a clothing allowance from the age of eleven onwards. She gave us £20 a month, which was enough to keep us in the styles we enjoyed, because you could buy a good jacket for £30. By the time I was twelve or thirteen I had a couple of suits and loads of tops and trousers. I spent most of my spare time, when I wasn’t rehearsing with the band, working to earn more money.

      Tony was running a property maintenance company again, and I used to do some work for him. I remember when I was thirteen spending a large chunk of my summer holiday plastering the Inland Revenue office at Victoria and then, because Tony was again having financial problems, never being paid. I had to lug huge bags of plaster up to the top floor. Granddad was helping as well, and he was never paid either: we still give Tony a hard time about it. When, in later years, the Inland Revenue began pursuing me for money I liked to think about how I gave them my services for nothing.

      I also had a weekend job at a garden centre: hard, heavy work unloading paving stones for £5.75 a day. After cycling a few miles to get there at seven thirty in the morning and back again at six in the evening, I was completely exhausted, and the payment was sheer exploitation. Later on I had a Saturday job at a hairdressers. It was originally arranged by the school, for work experience, and I stayed on doing a couple of evenings and Saturdays after that. I put down ‘hairdressing’ as my work experience choice because I had visions of spending a week in a trendy London salon, running my fingers through the beautiful blonde locks of some real stunners. Instead I ended up in a village shop in Windlesham, shampooing the blue-rinsed hair of the elderly clients. It was a unisex salon, and I remember a weird experience washing the hair of a bald man, which I know is a contradiction in terms. I can remember my thumbs skidding across the frictionless surface of his bald crown, and him wriggling in his chair as if he were enjoying it. It must have been the shortest shampoo on record. But I managed to save enough money to trade in my electronic drum СКАЧАТЬ