They never played Gloria Estefan’s ‘Don’t Want to Lose You Now’. That song was so romantic and beautiful – I was such a big Gloria fan. I loved the Cuts Both Ways album and used to really crank up the dial when ‘Oy Mi Canto’ came on. I learnt that in English it means ‘Hear My Voice’ and I remember thinking, ‘What a talent! There’s not many pop stars these days who could sing so beautifully in two different languages.’ I went off Gloria when she suffered spinal injuries in that coach crash, not because she was nearly crippled or anything, it’s because I realised she was shit.
It wasn’t just our Gloria pumping out of my stereo, I was also a huge Prince fan. I bought everything, every biography about him, every album, even every awful film that he starred in, I was there on the day of release outside Our Price, full of excitement.
Let’s get this clear, though. I never dressed up as him. I know some Prince fans go the whole hog and impersonate their idol, but I was getting enough stick at school without turning up on Mufti Day in a purple lace all-in-one body-stocking. I was mesmerised by Prince, the amount of times Mum would catch me miming to his songs and practising that bit where he jumps up and does the splits during ‘Housequake’.
My father must have been beside himself: me, football-phobic, girlfriendless, camp and now the final insult – I choose to have a 5-foot transvestite as my Pop Idol. How could he not ‘get’ Prince? Well anyway he just didn’t, and Prince was banned from the car even though I’d created a parent-friendly cassette of Prince’s classic hits. My efforts were futile and instead we had to endure Chris Rea’s Road to Hell on every journey, well, until he brought out Auberge. Whoopee-doo!
Ever since Dad had got Northampton promoted up from Division Four with a club record of 99 points and 103 goals and then to the heady climes of number six in Division Three, we as a family could afford to leave England and holiday abroad. Naturally, the chance of flying on a plane was so much more fantastic than the five-hour car journey behind a string of caravans to Beverley Park in Torquay.
Flying by plane meant you’d arrived, and in class you’d drop it into conversation that you would be going abroad, on a plane – yes, you heard – on a plane to Spain. The Spain that I had in my head was not the Spain that greeted my eyes when we pulled up at Fuengirola. I’m sure when it was finished being built it would look wonderful. It was to me a bit like Northampton-sur-Mer. Any Spanish culture had been trampled on by English bars promising ‘English food’ and ‘English-speaking staff’ for English customers. Of course this is the snob in me looking back with my fancy ways after sampling the cultural highlights of Barcelona and Madrid. Back then it was amazing. You got proper fish fingers and chips, and you could watch Del Boy on the telly – oh, this was so much better than Torquay.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking Torbay or the neighbouring beauty spots of Paignton or Babbacombe. I have a lot of fond memories of those places, and I for one am over the moon that they are enjoying a revival of fortunes at present, it’s just that we’d holidayed there at the same caravan park for the last five years.
My parents weren’t the sort of people who waited for the designated school holidays, oh no, the Cobblers had their last game and then we were off – ‘Cornwall here we come, lock up your pasties!’ It was even known for Dad to take us out of school to go to the races. We were all in on it. I would not go to school, Dad would drive us to the race track and Mum would write the sick note. Due to her own experiences at school, my mother’s inherent contempt for teachers would often surface in these sick notes. Sometimes she would just write ‘Alan was ill’, leaving me to do the dirty work and choose an appropriate illness, which would be hard for one day. One day off is too long for a headache, yet too short for ringworm.
Once there, the races were so exciting, especially if you got near the front, and the horses would thunder past you, leaving you windswept and breathless. I enjoyed visiting all the different racetracks. I loved the buzz of the winners’ enclosures, and the flurry of the tic-tacking, but most exhilarating of all was being naughty and missing a whole day of school. Newmarket, Leicester, Ripon – by the age of 13, I’d visited them all. I couldn’t read, but I’d visited them all.
I remember being at York races on a school day, studying the form, binoculars around my neck, and bumping into Mr Knott, a teacher at my school. I don’t know who was more embarrassed, he or I. To be fair, he didn’t have a leg to stand on. I was only jeopardising my education by being at the races – he was putting his whole class at risk. Tut tut. We soon got over our awkwardness, especially after I told him about a dead cert in the 2.15, ‘Dancing Lady’, odds-on favourite. He’d be a fool not to bet on it.
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In the summer of 1990, Northampton Town Football Club had fallen out of love with my father and he got the sack. Northampton Town had been relegated back down to the Fourth Division. My father’s battle to keep them up in the Third Division, struggling with no money to buy new players, ended unsurprisingly in disappointment.
The problem with having a job in the public eye, as I am learning now, is that everyone knows your business and wants to let you know their opinion on your business whether you want to hear it or not. When Dad’s sacking was on the front page of the Chronicle and Echo, the taunts of ‘Your dad’s shit’ were replaced with ‘Your dad’s been sacked’ – which is more of a statement than a put-down really, but each to their own. In fact they used to shout ‘Your dad’s shit’ even when he was top of the Fourth Division, so in the end these insults proved more exasperating than anything.
One neighbour knocked on our door saying that she thought it was a shame that we would be moving so suddenly. She had mistakenly assumed that our house in Overstone had been bought by the club and that we would be evicted now Dad was unemployed. This woman hadn’t said a word to us all through Dad’s years of success but somehow Dad’s sacking had awoken some kind of malice in her and she had come round to gloat. Cheeky bint.
However, much to our neighbour’s disappointment, my father wasn’t out of a job for long. Within days he was being wooed by Blackpool City Football Club and in a matter of weeks he was the new manager. Dad informed the family that we would be relocating up north to Blackpool. I would finish my schooling in seagull-shitting distance of the Golden Mile. I really had mixed feelings about this move. The excitement of living by the seaside, the Pleasure Beach just down the road, the dodgems, the Illuminations was undermined by a sense of ‘Here we go again!’ At least in Northampton it was better the devil you know. It was only the diehard bullies who still shouted ‘Faggot!’ and ‘Poof!’ – all the others had given up, bored that I never fought back. All they would get in retaliation was a ‘tut’ or at the most I’d twat them with my copy of Murder on the Orient Express.
The thought of joining a whole new school, friendless, looking as I did with this voice was simply terrifying. But Dad was unemployed, and so we had to go where the work was and that just happened to be the Vegas of the North – Blackpool.
Everyone has a place that seems to draw them back to it, whatever life choices they make, whatever they do. After a few years they can bet their bottom dollar they end up back there. My place is Blackpool. Like a piece of foil to a filling, I end up attached to it, which inevitably turns out to be a painful experience. Our move to Blackpool wasn’t my first time up there: Gary, Mum, Nan and I had gone on a weekend break with Dad’s friend Ted who, with some of his friends, drove us up in a minibus. The weekend was pretty uneventful. It was only a few years later, when Ted got arrested