hairy. But it wasn’t just their looks. They were Other, a different species from me and my friends, and we were happy with that. I was an anti-adult bigot. I believed in child/grown-up apartheid. I didn’t want to think of them as anything other than alien. I didn’t want them to think of me at all.
Even as I grew into my early twenties, adults remained off-putting. They operated outside us, in their different world. We were in our own gated community, within theirs. This suited us. We looked inwards, we liked our prison. But sometimes our elders would crash across the invisible fences. It was always uninvited, always a surprise.
During the summer I was 21, I worked for a few weeks teaching English as a foreign language in a residential school in Kent. The school was like a stately home, and we taught children from all lands: Italy, Japan, Israel, what was then Yugoslavia. Any child whose rich parents chose to go off shopping in London rather than risk a week’s holiday with their offspring.
At the end of the three weeks, there was a staff party. All of us teachers got drunk; I jumped, fully clothed, into the swimming pool. In the corridor by the kitchens, another teacher, our team leader, a man in his forties, said something irrelevant and plonked his lips on mine. He had a moustache. It was like having your mouth explored by an adventurous damp nailbrush – as sexy as that.
That same summer, I used my TEFL money, plus cash I’d earned as a cleaner, to get a train to Barcelona with three girlfriends. We hung out on the Ramblas, at a square where tourists mingled with black-clad heroin addicts. Another middle-aged man with another moustache: this one grabbed me on the way to some restaurant toilets.
Why did drunk older men think that snogging was an inevitable consequence of having fun? The way they kissed wasn’t sexual, but controlling. It was as though they clamped their mouths on yours to shut you up. But we hadn’t even noticed them before they talked to us.
Adults are outsiders in young people’s real lives, until we make ourselves known, by forcing our way in, by telling them what to do. Until we blunder over, unwelcome gate-crashers at the party.
On the front of a magazine, I see this: ‘Adults Suck and Then You Are One’. A slogan on a jumper. I would like to own this jumper.
Because now I am an adult – one of those inappropriate, frightening, physically bizarre people. I’m quite good at talking to kids, but isn’t there something creepy about that? There’s no hiding my sagging skin, my English teeth. I don’t stick my tongue down anyone’s throat unless I’m married to them. But when I grab my son’s friends as a joke, pretend to chase them round the kitchen for a kiss, COME HERE, LITTLE BOY, MWAH MWAH MWAH, a lumbering dinosaur great-aunt, I wonder: Is this funny or am I properly freaking them out?
What is it about adulthood that is still so unappealing? I don’t want to go back to school, with its bewildering, kid-enforced social rules, so rigid they couldn’t be broken, so fluid they changed every day. But I don’t want to be like the grown-ups I grew up with. So … separate, in such an unappealing world. Dull. Rule-bound. Constricted by paying bills and by convention. Even in what you wore: no one had many clothes then, and what adults wore was practical, designed not to stand out, except on special occasions. Despite the outré flamboyance of some grown-ups’ going-out wear, their working clothes were joyless: suits and sensible skirts, overalls, pinnies.
Adults, teenagers and children were all demarcated when I was young. But something happened between then and now. Children got older (they gained status within the family) and parents got younger – if not actually younger, then in the way they looked, their approach to life. Everyone’s a teenager now, and for a lot longer. The teenager has become revered, absorbed into our normal. Parents and their older children go to the same places to eat, to dance, to hang out. They listen to the same music.
Those teenage tenets of non-conformity, of staying true to your beliefs, rather than compromising them for an easy life, of rebelling against rules that you know are worthless and mean nothing … These are now the attitudes that we all respect. Even in adults, even in politicians. Authenticity is all, and authenticity means an anti-establishment, punching-up strength of character. Tedious, conventional adulthood, that refuge of phoneys and scoundrels, of lecherous old men with moustaches, of the boring, the selfish, the power-hungry – that doesn’t cut it any more. We have extended youth so far that its values have become universal and nobody interesting can ever fully grow up.
Back then, culture was relentless. New music, new ways of dressing and dancing and being would rise with sudden force, crash and break and sweep away all that had gone before. You would see a band in some horrible dive, or hear a track on a dance floor and that was it: everything changed. And somehow everyone knew about it, though there was no internet, no mobile phones. There were magazines, but they came out monthly, or once a week. There were pagers, but they were for drug dealers or on-call doctors, not for telling everyone about a brilliant club that had opened, a squat that was holding free parties, a place where it was all going off. There were radio shows that helped, record shops to hang around in, hand-drawn flyers, but really … We just all knew.
It felt like we were constantly on the cusp of something. A revolution. A change. We’d push at doors and they would open easily. We would be let into places that only weeks before had kept us outside, pulling faces through the windows. And the new kept on coming.
The beginning can be so enthralling, so thrilling, you forget that, for anything to start and thrive, another thing must weaken. The end of the old way is still a death. Something fades, gives up, sits down and never gets up again. Or it fights and dies anyway.
In 1988, I got my first proper job – not cleaning, not TEFL, not working in a shop – and it was the best job ever. I started working for Smash Hits magazine, as a writer. In my job interview, the editor asked me if he should put Elton John on the cover of the new issue (Elton was Number 1 at the time). I said, ‘No way, you should put Brother Beyond on instead.’ That was my lucky break: the editor had, in fact, just done that very thing. I got the job because I wasn’t too far from being one of the pop fans who pored over Smash Hits. This was because I was a pop fan who pored over Smash Hits.
It was the era of Kylie and Bros, and the Smash Hits office was above the BOY shop in Carnaby Street. On my first day, I arrived at 9 a.m., and had to sit on the step outside for an hour until anyone else turned up. Once in, I was installed on a spare chair, in front of an electric typewriter, within a room that appeared to have been attacked by a litter bomb. Every single surface was piled high with paper and 12-inch singles and cassettes and overflowing ashtrays.
Almost all of the staff were from outside London – from Perth, Dublin, Belfast, Dundee, Liverpool – and none of them seemed so different from me. I kept looking around the room, peering between the teetering debris, wondering where the grown-up was – the suit, the scary person in charge. There wasn’t one. Perhaps that was why everyone stayed so late. They were having fun: a new concept when it came to work, for me. I soon joined in, and I didn’t really leave that room – not during weekday daylight hours – for the next two years.
The start of the 90s was marked by my flat burning down. It was a rented flat, three storeys above a pharmacy in south London. At the time, the road was a market street, full of fruit and veg stalls run by shouty locals. On weekends we would wait until the market was ending, then go out and blag cheap vegetables.
I shared the flat with four friends. Two of them plus another mate were in when the fire started. It was very quick. (‘In the time it takes to build a spliff but not light it,’ said D.) They
