It was in Camberwell that a man tried to snatch me into a car. I can still see his face vividly, dark-haired and with a moustache. I often used to sit on a wall by the old people’s home at the top of Crawford Road. One day I was on there, just hanging out and being a seven-year-old kid really, when I heard a noise behind me. I looked round and saw this man reaching for me. Over his shoulder I could see his car parked by the grass verge with the back door open. I jumped off the wall – which was about ten feet above the pavement on that side – and ran all the way home. I won’t say it haunts me to this day, because it doesn’t, but at the time it scared the hell out of me.
I bought my first record at Crawford Road in 1978. It was Ian Dury and the Blockheads’ ‘Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick’. I listened to it over and over and over again, until my brother started pleading with me not to play it any more. I loved that single. I was really intrigued by Ian Dury too, this man on the telly who, to a young boy with no knowledge of such things, looked like a cripple. I was fascinated by him, he just looked as if he was in pain. I heard people saying he had polio, which sounded like the bubonic plague or something to me – guaranteeing that I was always first in the queue to take the little cube of sugar dipped in polio vaccine. It sounds simplistic I know, but I was only a child. I didn’t stay a fan of the Blockheads for long, it was just that one moment, but your very first record is an important snapshot in your life.
The diversity of my mum’s and Aunt Sally’s taste in music rubbed off on me. There was a lot of rock in there, Cream, Free, AC/DC and so on, but Mum also loved artists like Roberta Flack. When The Fugees later covered ‘Killing Me Softly’, a definitive cover version if there could be such a thing, the memories came flooding back for me when I first heard it on radio. It was like a time warp. Sally would always be singing, as would my mum. Sally used to tell us all about the concerts she went to see. She had a lovely voice and it was great to hear Stones and Beatles songs when she belted them out. Whenever we’d visit Sally at her flat on the Peabody Estate on the Old Kent Road, I used to love singing with her. After a while, I began to try to out-sing her, that’s when I started to get that sensation that I could do anything with my voice.
I was heavily into Stevie Wonder, and Michael Jackson was a big favourite too. Like forty million other album-buyers, I was into Thriller, how could you not be? But for me Off The Wall was something special too. The songs were just monumental, and knowing that Rod Temperton, an Englishman from Cleethorpes, could write tracks like ‘Rock With You’ and ‘Off The Wall’ makes it even more incredible to me.
By the end of the Seventies, like so many other British kids, I was massively into ska. I was never really into punk, not least because I was just too young, but Two Tone fascinated me. In the space of two years it seemed bands like The Specials, The Selecter, Madness and The Beat dominated the school playgrounds of Britain. I was in one of those playgrounds and couldn’t help but be infected. It’s funny how adults theorize about genres of music – in the case of Two Tone they talk about how it perfectly captured the social tensions of Thatcher’s Britain, how it fused Jamaican ska with inner-city desolation and so on. I am aware of that now. Back then, it was so much more personal. It was a style of music and a sartorial choice that, for this eleven-year-old at least, was far more pragmatic than the pages of a broadsheet feature.
I had the full ska uniform: the pork-pie hat, Fred Perrys, Doc Martens, Sta-Prest shirts. We all did. Then there was the music. I adored The Specials, it was obvious Jerry Dammers was a genius. I had every Madness album. The Specials’ ‘Ghost Town’ is still one of my favourite songs ever. That song is always feted by critics for soundtracking the whole social polarization of Thatcher’s Britain, but for me and my mates, it was more about the death of ska – ironic since it was their most successful song and a Number 1 hit. We simply felt like saying, ‘No! Don’t say the clubs are closing down, because we are still dancing . . .’
The music was so deft too, so clever and that has stayed with me. It can be quite hard to splice elements of ska into my albums themselves, but if you go to one of my shows, you will find parts of the gig are drenched in ska and the crowd will be skanking away! Playing live allows you to do that, to break out of any pigeonholes that your records might be placed in. I think it surprises many people that my live set can include ska and Stevie Wonder but to me that is as natural as putting on ‘Superstition’ straight after ‘Ghost Town’. They are both phenomenal songs, that’s all there is to it.
While life in Crawford Road was heavenly to me, the time I spent with my dad was a little less straightforward. Not because of Dad, as we were always so excited to be going to see him, even though it wasn’t as often as we all would perhaps have liked. It was because he had remarried back in 1976, to a woman called Margaret and, inevitably, that complicated matters for everybody.
I wasn’t particularly fond of Margaret, to say the least. She never made me or Luke feel welcome, never made me feel at ease around my own dad. It was often the smallest things, like rationing how much ketchup we could have on our food, or how many biscuits we were allowed to eat. It was weird because Dad was always the one who would dunk two biscuits in his tea at the same time. We would look forward to having a cup of tea and biccies with Dad so this was all very suffocating. Margaret was really formal. She wasn’t off with us in front of Dad, but the most credit I would give her is to say she was polite. I always used to look forward to seeing Dad, of course, but I genuinely did not look forward to seeing Margaret.
Luke and I were never rude to her. In fact, we tried hard with her but Margaret never made us feel loved or wanted. Nonetheless, I promise you, we were very well-behaved children. Dad insisted on that and Mum had raised us that way as well. Speak when you are spoken to or, if you have something you feel really strongly about, then you can speak up. Adults had the right of way in our house, and rightly so. I believe that is the best method with kids. So we were never rude to Margaret, but that didn’t change the chilly atmosphere.
One time, my dad pulled up at a petrol station to fill up the car and while he was paying at the counter, Margaret leant over the seat and said to us, ‘I’ll give you a pound if you tell me whether your mum is with anyone.’ We basically told her to stuff her pound, as politely as we could. When my dad got back in the car we said nothing. Neither did Margaret.
It wasn’t just us that were affected, my dad’s time with his boys was affected too. I remember being made to sit in the dining-room one night when all I really wanted to do was sit on the couch with my dad, my dinner on a tray, and watch TV with him. We weren’t allowed to, but you know what? I think Dad wanted to do that too.
I feel for my dad in a way on that level because if Margaret had made him happy then that would have been cool with us, but I never really had the feeling that she did. There was always an underlying atmosphere, it was really tiring. Then, one day when we were all on a day-trip to Blackpool, while visiting family in Preston, Dad suddenly stopped the car by the sea and said to Margaret, ‘You know what, Margaret? If you don’t want to spend time with my kids, if you don’t want to see the boys, then you’re not welcome when I bring my kids out. When are they ever rude to you?’
At that exact moment, I felt incredibly awkward because I feared Margaret would become even worse and really hate us in the future. But then – and I’m not going to lie – once I was over that initial spasm of fear, I was so happy inside that Dad had stuck up for us, his boys. I think that was pretty much one of the last times we hung out with Margaret.
A line of sorts had been drawn, but Margaret was obviously still there whenever we visited Dad. Every visit was tiring, we were drained by it all. We just wanted to see our dad and have a nice time. Even to the day that my dad and Margaret split up (they eventually divorced), we never had the feeling that she really liked us.
When they did separate, my dad was obviously feeling a lot of pain which wasn’t nice to see for two young boys. I’d seen Mum so desperately troubled by her marriage break-up but I’d