Ramble Book

RAMBLE

For several years in my twenties I developed a fear of flying, and every time I boarded a plane, images of the crumpled Hindenburg would pop into my head along with the phrase ‘twisted mass of girders’. (If you’re reading this on a plane, sorry, but honestly, you’re going to be fine. However, in the unlikely event that something does happen, just ask someone to send in the charred remains of your boarding pass and I’ll personally issue a full refund. For the book that is, not the flight.)

In The Cassandra Crossing, a terrorist carrying a deadly plague virus created by the Americans for germ warfare boards a train travelling across Europe, where he infects a load of passengers before the authorities reroute the train across a rickety bridge. Richard Harris, Sophia Loren and O.J. Simpson do their best to avert disaster. SPOILER ALERT: they don’t.

I can trace a number of my biggest fears back to that Sunday-afternoon screening of The Cassandra Crossing and to this day I do my best to avoid deadly viruses, quarantines enforced by armed men in scary hazmat suits, trains that plunge off rickety bridges into ravines and O.J. Simpson.

As I was an easily confused ten-year-old without parents on hand to clarify perplexing moments in films like this, it was left to other equally clueless ten-year-olds to concoct explanations. For example, my friends and I decided that when, in one scene, the plague-carrying terrorist sneezed on a bowl of rice, he was in fact vomiting maggots, thereby adding three more items to my list of Worsties: vomiting, maggots and vomiting maggots.

Obligatory Star Wars Bit

By the time The Empire Strikes Back was released in May 1980, everything Star Wars-related made me vibrate with visceral joy.

Two years earlier, when we were living in Wales, Mum had driven me and my sister all the way to the West End of London to see the first Star Wars film (if you’re thinking, ‘Well actually, Buckles, it was Episode IV – A New Hope,’ then please close this book/switch off this audiobook, get dressed and go out into nature). For the first half of Star Wars I was overwhelmed and a bit frightened (especially by ‘Dark Vader’), but when Princess Leia referred to Chewbacca as a ‘walking carpet’ everyone in the cinema laughed, including Mum, and I knew I was having the best time of my life.

There was no merchandise in the foyer other than the film soundtrack, which Mum bought on cassette to listen to on the way back to Wales. I thought the ‘soundtrack’ would be all the audio from the film, including the talking and sound effects, and when it became clear it meant just the boring classical music I was gutted. It was the characters I loved, the colourful aliens, the funny robots, the cool Americans; it was them I wished I could take back with me to my room in Wales, even if only in audio form.

Then one day later that year I was in WH Smith’s with Mum and I saw a rack of Star Wars action figures. After some energetic and tearful bargaining, I went home with a little Luke and a tiny R2D2 (those are not euphemisms). From then on I negotiated constantly for action figures, accumulating goodies first and baddies later. It was a shock to discover that ‘Dark Vader’ was actually called ‘Darth’. I didn’t think that was a good space name. He may as well have been called Jatthew, or Vominic. Luckily he had an extendable red plastic lightsaber, though it wasn’t long before I was compelled to bite off the tapered tip.

1982 scratchboard art by the 12-year-old, Star Wars-obsessed Buckles. I knew that attempting to draw the humans would go badly, so concentrated instead on the robots, spaceships and a floating baddie helmet.

Over the next three years I wangled action figures of every significant character from the first three Star Wars films, as well as a Landspeeder, X-wing Fighter, TIE Fighter, Droid Factory, Creature Cantina and, on a trip to California when my Aunty Leslie took us to Toys “R” Us and said, incredibly, ‘You can get what you like,’ I came back with a Millennium Falcon. When Dad saw the giant box he made a face that I now understand meant ‘How the fuck am I expected to get that back to the UK, you greedy little shit bag?’ He managed it, though, and unpacking the Falcon on my parents’ bed back in Earl’s Court was no less memorable and moving than the birth of at least two of my children.

As for The Empire Strikes Back, it started out as the greatest film of all time and ended as the most depressing. SPOILER ALERT: Vominic Vader turns out to be Luke’s dad, which we find out after he’s cut off his son’s hand and made him do some very ugly crying. Meanwhile Han, easily the best guy in the whole thing, has been turned into a giant doorstop. For some people this was a more dramatically complex and satisfying ending for a Star Wars film than the cheesy medal ceremony that concluded the first one, but ten-year-old Buckles was not one of those people. If I’d wanted upsetting dramatic complexity, I could have just watched my mum waxing her legs in the nude.

Disney Bangers

Let me paint you a picture of the Britain I grew up in during the 1970s, using all the same bits of archive they use in TV documentaries. There was social and economic upheaval, rubbish piling up on the streets, the dead going unburied, frequent power cuts, racial unrest, football violence, punk music and, worst of all, disrespectful playground poetry. Here is one sickening example:

In 1976

The Queen pulled down her knicks

She licked her bum

And said ‘yum yum’

In 1976

RAMBLE

Although the seven-year-old me admired that poem, and would often recite it, I knew that it lacked plausibility. Was Her Majesty really so flexible that she could lick her own bum? And was QEII so obsessed with rhyming words that she only felt able to pull down her knicks in 1976? Didn’t the underwear come down in 1972, when she must have wanted a poo? None of it adds up.

Whatever grimness was going on in the outside world during the Seventies, my sister, my brother and I knew nothing about it. Mum and Dad subscribed to the Bubble-of-Innocence school of parenting, part of which relied on keeping us gratefully anaesthetised on a Disney drip.

We loved all things Disney: the Land, which we visited several times on trips to America; the TV show (The Wonderful World of Disney); the films and the songs, which we had on four cassettes filled with music performed by fun animals and boring princesses. As the Eighties arrived and my sister began attending the same boarding school, those cassettes were still a crucial part of keeping us pacified on the depressing Sunday-night car journeys back to The Reformatory.

Disney songs reminded me of carefree times when my parents loved me so much they didn’t send me away to expensive prison, but as for the music itself, much of it (to use one of my mother’s favourite expressions) made me want to open a vein.

Our beige Ford Cortina only had a radio, so the Disney tapes would be played on Dad’s portable tape recorder, which sat on the lap of whichever parent (usually Mum) was in the passenger seat. For that reason, it wasn’t an option to fast-forward through the most syrupy, princessy songs. I was only able to endure sludge like ‘Someday My Prince Will Come’ from Snow White, ‘A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes’ from Cinderella and ‘Rumbly in My Tumbly’ from Winnie the Pooh because I knew that eventually we’d get to a Disney Banger.

When songs like ‘Everybody Wants to Be a Cat’, ‘Pink Elephants on Parade’, ‘I Wan’na Be Like You’ or ‘The Bare Necessities’ were about to start, my sister and I would lean forward, unfettered by boring seat belts (which only squares wore in those days), and we’d dig those Disney grooves. I especially liked ‘The Wonderful Thing About Tiggers’ and the hipster beat combo version of Cruella De Ville (different in arrangement and spelling to the version in the 101 Dalmatians film and not, as I search, findable on the Internet).

The best thing about ‘Tiggers’ and ‘De Ville’ was that even Dad liked them and occasionally sang along. ‘Such good lyrics,’ he would say of ‘Cruella de Ville’. ‘Mind you,’ he would continue, ‘I love anything motivated by the patriarchy’s fear of powerful women.’ Alright, those may not have been his exact words, but I think that was the gist.

BOWIE ANNUAL

Exactly 22 years after I first heard his music in an art class, David Bowie walked towards me at Maida Vale studios in West London. It was September 2002 and he’d just performed a concert for BBC Radio, to which Joe and I had been invited by the show’s host, Jonathan Ross. Jonathan knew we were both big fans, albeit fans whose enthusiasm had been tested by Bowie’s musical output for well over a decade. We had learned that when critics greeted each new release as ‘Bowie’s best since Scary Monsters’, what they actually meant was, ‘Well, this one’s not total bollocks.’

And yet, stood in the small audience at Maida Vale watching the 55-year-old Bowie with his boyish floppy hairdo and smart-casual clothes emphasising a face that was at last showing its age, I found myself getting tearful a couple of times, overwhelmed by being just a few metres from someone who had meant so much to me over the years, particularly in the Eighties when I was discovering him and his work for the first time.

Then, after the show, there he was, walking towards a little group of us standing in a backstage corridor with Jonathan Ross. Bowie spotted Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, who had also been invited along. It was only a year since the first series of The Office had aired, but it had quickly become a mainstream success and Ricky and Stephen were well on the way to becoming full-blown celebrities. I’d met Ricky a couple of times at Jonathan’s house and I knew he was also a huge Bowie fan, so it was cool to see him meet his hero for the first time and have Bowie tell him that he thought The Office was great, but I left Maida Vale deflated.

As well as being an artist whose work I admired, David Bowie was someone I’d always thought of as a person who had a similar outlook on life to me, someone who found the same kinds of things interesting, someone whose taste in music I could trust and whose recommendations were worth exploring. In other words, I’d always thought of him as my friend, but then I had to stand by and watch as he declared his affection, not for me but another comedian. OK, so Ricky was at least as much of a fan as I was, and even back then he’d made a more lasting contribution to the world of comedy, but that didn’t make it any less galling.

‘Serves me right for taking the piss out of Zavid for so long,’ I thought.

After the first flush of unequivocal adoration, Bowie had become something of a comedy character for me, Joe and our friends. We enjoyed dissecting his less well-judged career moments, pronouncements and pontifications, often while doing an impression that relied on the gentle buzzing sound Bowie produced when he spoke words with an ‘s’ in them; for example, ‘zuperlatative’ – a pleasing Bowie variant of ‘superlative’ we’d heard him use in an interview. Over time this impression evolved into a single noise that was our shorthand for Bowie: ‘wuzza’. Instead of discussing the serious issues of the day, we whiled away many hours with symposiums of ‘wuzza, wuzza, wuzza’s. I don’t suppose any of that would have endeared us to Zavid, but I’ve always taken the piss out of people I love, and I really love David Bowie.

‘We’re going to have a free drawing class today,’ said our art teacher, walking over to the record player in the corner and setting the arm down. ‘Here’s some music to inspire you. It just came out last week.’ It was September 1980.

Sun shone through the big glass panels that ran down one side of the art room as the space filled with the sound of clicks, hisses, a rattle, someone counting in, then squalling electric guitar, a woman declaiming in a foreign language and a man who sounded nutty. I exchanged WTF? glances with other mystified ten-year-olds. This music was weird, but the second song was more conventional, and by the time they were chanting ‘Up the hill backwards, / It’ll be all right, ooooh’, I was sufficiently intrigued to ask the teacher who we were listening to.

I liked the name ‘Bowie’. It sounded strong, supple and elegant with the potential to unleash arrows. It was, well, bow-y.

William Mullins (aka Muggins or Bill Muggs) came back to school the following term with his brother’s copy of the Bowie compilation ChangesOneBowie and we listened to it on the common-room record player. Even as I was listening to ‘Space Oddity’ for the first time I was looking forward to hearing it again.

The cover of ChangesOneBowie is a black-and-white photograph of DB taken in 1976 by Tom Kelley, who took the famous nude calendar shots of Marilyn Monroe. It captures Bowie at his most conventionally handsome, yet disarmingly fey. His hair is swept back, his hand is up to his mouth as if he’s considering a work of art, and there’s a distant look in his eyes that says, ‘I’m thinking of complicated things in a more original and zensitive way than an ordinary person would.’ I stared at the cover of ChangesOneBowie and thought, ‘Mmm. Yes, please.’

A few weeks later Bill Muggs turned up with Hunky Dory and, though I was a bit confused by Bowie suddenly looking like somebody’s hippy mum on the cover, as soon as ‘Life on Mars’ came on with lyrics about cavemen and Mickey Mouse combining the esoteric and the accessible, I recognised it as the kind of powerfully dramatic, emotional and mysterious music I’d often heard playing in my head, playing in my heart even, but never out loud. Or maybe I’d just heard it on the radio and forgot.

Either way, I realised I was interested in David Bowie.

Up to that point all the strangers I’d been interested in were fictional – the Bionic Man, the Bionic Woman, the Invisible Man and the Man from Atlantis – not really superheroes, but enhanced humans that I thought I’d get on well with. Bowie was the first real person to join that list, and for the next few years we got on very well indeed.

CHAPTER 4

FIRST-CLASS BASTARD

Before I moved out of London, I seldom travelled by train. On the rare occasions I did, it never occurred to me to buy a first-class ticket. I was happy to sit in my standard-class seat, stare out of the window and enjoy the loud telephone conversations of twats.

In 2008 I moved out to Norfolk with my family and life as a semi-frequent train commuter began. I was doing a weekly radio show on BBC 6 Music with Joe at the time, so every Friday I’d cycle to Norwich, get on the train to Liverpool Street, stay at my in-laws’ place in West London on Friday night, cycle to the 6 Music studio in Great Portland Street on Saturday morning, talk bollocks with Joe from 10 a.m. till 1 p.m., then get the train from Liverpool Street back to Norwich. (‘That was an interesting routine you just outlined there, Buckles, thanks!’ You’re welcome.)

The more I took the train, the more I found myself wanting to do some important laptop work as I travelled: sorting and labelling 10,000 digital photographs of my children, reading YouTube comments for OK Go videos, editing footage of myself dressed as Gwen Stefani pointing at animated turds and saying, ‘Oooh, this my shit, this my shit’ – that kind of thing.

Sometimes I was able to get a four-person table seat to myself (an optimal scenario for my preferred workflow), but even then I was without plug sockets or Wi-Fi and had to contend with the sound of children watching wisecracking animated films without headphones, groups of boisterous men enjoying lager-powered sports bants and of course the loud telephone conversations of twats.

For a few months I experimented with the Quiet Carriage (or QC). This is a single train carriage in which prominently displayed signs make it clear that it’s an environment reserved for those who are not uplifted by percussion leakage from shitty headphones and do not enjoy listening to one side of someone else’s entirely unnecessary phone conversation. In my mind the QC was first class for standard-class travellers. Affordable paradise.

At busier times, however, affordable paradise went wrong, and the QC ended up being the most stressful of all the carriages. Any remaining seats were quickly snaffled by people who considered refraining from behaviour that might disturb others as risibly effete. I’m talking about Inconsiderate Shitbags (or IS), a community that sees no race, gender or class, such is their commitment to inclusivity and representation. Members of IS are just as likely to be self-important business berks and red-trousered toffs as they are truculent tinkers or boozed-up bootblacks.

For the IS, the quaint codes of the QC are there to be ignored at will. Sit in the Quiet Carriage during peak hours and you won’t have to wait long before some utter fucker thinks of some excuse for a phone call or just launches into a chat with a pal (both entirely antithetical to the spirit of the QC). When it becomes clear that there’s an IS member in the QC, heads begin to pop up, like angry meerkats, focusing all their disapproval on the culprit.

One evening, when the peace of a packed but luxuriously silent Quiet Carriage was torpedoed by a young man in a suit taking a phone call, I went full angry meerkat. Mine was one of six other heads that periscoped up and began scanning the carriage, first locating the offending IS operative, then looking around at the other meerkats as if to say, ‘Can we believe this guy and his phone call? This is the ONLY carriage in the whole train where you’re asked to be quiet and this guy isn’t giving a single hoot.’

I waited for someone to say something, but of course no one did. At last the man finished his call, and once again the carriage was beautifully quiet. My shoulders began to relax and my breathing was starting to return to normal when the man started jabbing at his phone again before bringing it back up to his unbelievable fucking ear. I couldn’t take it. Someone had to speak for the meerkats.

Aiming for a tone that was relaxed, geezerish and non-crazy, I said, ‘Hey! Mate! It’s the Quiet Carriage, mate!’ The man continued to chat without even registering me and the other meerkats cringed. Feeling I had committed myself, I tried again, but this time when I called ‘Mate! Quiet Carriage!’ I pointed at one of the large ‘Quiet Carriage’ stickers on the windows, to demonstrate that my position was backed up by stickers.

Sometimes Quiet Carriage stickers seem only to prohibit the use of mobiles, but these stickers also included symbols prohibiting noisy headphones and talking people, making it as clear as possible that ‘quiet’ didn’t mean whatever kind of ‘quiet’ happened to suit you at that moment; it meant actual silence, like in a library or an exam room or a nice relaxing crypt.

This time, the man registered me. He glanced at the sticker, nodded and continued his conversation. I sank into my seat. I wasn’t prepared to make a scene.

You’ve got to lighten up, Buckles, I told myself. There’s more important stuff out there to go angry meerkat on. But then another voice – one that sounded a lot like my dad – chimed in: ‘Moments like these aren’t merely some bourgeois pursuit of order. For those who aspire to a society in which we harmoniously coexist, the Quiet Carriage is a proving ground, and if you’re too cowardly to challenge phone-call man then I hope you like chaos, because that’s what you’re going to get.’

RAMBLE

The thing is, I don’t mind a bit of chaos, but Dad really hated the stuff. On The Adam and Joe Show in the late Nineties we asked him to review the techno track ‘Higher State of Consciousness’ by American DJ Josh Wink, and upon hearing its electronic shrieks and squeals, my dad seemed genuinely worried, likening the noises to dark wheeling systems in a universe coming apart. ‘It’s chaos!’ he kept saying. ‘Chaos.’ But if you’ve liberated concentration camps and never tried ecstasy, techno is probably always going to be a tough sell.

Whatever my thoughts on chaos in the QC, I was too cowardly for a confrontation, so there was only one thing for it.

Whenever I took the train on weekends the conductor would regularly announce that passengers could upgrade from standard to first class for £7.50. I never took any notice of these announcements until one weekend when there was a big football match on in Norwich, and the train from London was rammed. Like many others I found myself without a seat, standing in the corridor outside the toilet, trying to digest a stomach full of impotent rage. The ticket collector pushed his way through, mumbling apology-style bollocks about the lack of seats, and when he came to me, I said it: ‘Could I have an upgrade, please?’

A minute later the doors to first class slid open and I stumbled out of the corridor scrum into paradise. It was busy, but there were free seats, and it was cool and quiet, with a more relaxing colour scheme. I found a single seat by the window with my own power socket below the table. I opened my laptop and my little Wi-Fi radar locked in satisfyingly (that will be a useful line if I ever write robot porn).

The Wi-Fi was free.

My first-class upgrade also entitled me to free water, free tea or coffee, free crisps and free biscuits in the buffet car. I loaded up. The crunchy yet moist apple-flavoured biscuits were extraordinary and I returned for more, flashing my first-class upgrade like a detective flashing his badge at a DELICIOUS crime scene.

It was the greatest journey of my life.

The Rubicon had been crossed. As long as I could afford it, I would never return to standard class.

Nowadays I travel via Cambridge to King’s Cross, which is closer to where I tend to record podcasts and do gigs for members of the liberal elite. The first-class situation on that route is not great, perhaps due to the relatively short journey times. The first-class compartment from Norwich to Cambridge currently sits just seven people and there are no free drinks – not even water – no snacks and certainly no fucking apple biscuits. But it’s seldom busy and it’s always quiet. Well, not quite always …

For the last year or so the train from King’s Cross to Cambridge has run late more than half the time, which means I end up missing the connection to Norwich and have to wait around in Cambridge station for another hour. I like to use this time to have a run-in with a member of staff at WH Smith’s before taking the next available, much busier train. This happened a few weeks ago and by the time I finally boarded the Norwich train I was desperate to sink into my favourite first-class seat (a single one at the back by the driver’s door). To my dismay I found it was already occupied by a young person with a couple of non-first-class-looking plastic shopping bags. They were engaged in a loud mobile phone call and everyone else in the unusually busy carriage was obliged to listen.