seventeen

Every Saturday afternoon I would meet Tony in Reckless Records. The shop was in a narrow arcade that led from the market square to the main shopping street, sandwiched between a lingerie boutique, Brief Affairs, and a newsagents, PJ Porters, which sold pipes, tobacco and tartan tins of shortbread. Reckless was a bit like Dr Who's tardis. Peering in through the window at walls crammed with overlapping posters - Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison, Joy Division and The Jam - the shop seemed very small. But when you got inside you discovered that it was in fact a lot bigger than it looked.

Reckless sold mostly second-hand LPs. The newer ones, less than five-years-old, were sold in the front of the shop, divided into four terraced sections - soul/disco, rock/metal, indie/new-wave/punk and pop. A door beneath the Hendrix poster led through to a long storeroom at the back of the shop. The room was lined with trestle tables stacked with boxes of assorted recordings loosely grouped by decade (the decade in which, according to the whim of the manager, the featured artist enjoyed their greatest fame). The back room was very cold in winter and like a sauna in summer. As a result most of the slow sellers were warped like giant vinyl popadoms.

By the door to the back room were stairs which led up to the second floor which offered blues, jazz/funk, folk/country/rockabilly and more posters - John Lee Hooker and Jim Reeves. I always used to meet Tony upstairs. It was far more trendy to be found perusing the credits on a Charlie Parker live album or checking out reissued rockabilly rarities on some obscure Scandinavian import label, than to be caught in flagrante downstairs in the seventies section, clutching a concept album recorded during the death throes of some progressive rock dinosaur.

Another benefit of meeting upstairs at Reckless was that we were safe there from the part-time sales assistants who, when not chatting to their mates, would periodically turf out the empty-pocketed malingerers who browsed at the front of the store. Strange, how things turn out. If you listen to Tony's guitar stuff now, it sounds as if he were born to play jazz and country. Who would guess he only stumbled into his love affair with Chet Atkins and Django Reindhart because we had nowhere better to meet on a Saturday afternoon than upstairs at Reckless?

Sometimes I wonder what the hell would have happened if they'd put all the heavy metal records upstairs and he'd started buying Van Halen instead of John Lee Hooker, and Pink Floyd instead of Albert Lee. Maybe he would never have bought the Casino then, contenting himself with a Flying V and a super metal distortion box instead. If he had, I guess, there'd be no transatlantic calls and country houses with sixteen track recording studios and guitar-shaped swimming pools. No, we'd probably still be meeting in town each Saturday afternoon half-deaf in our denims with pockets full of plectrums and heads full of cheap dope and impossible dreams.

Sometimes I bump into the people we used to hang out with in town of a Saturday afternoon, kids we used to sit with on the stone steps of the war memorial listening to the insanity and wisdom of grizzled alcoholics and the predatory prattle of petty drug pushers, smoking and drinking lager from two litre plastic bottles.

Some of those people look quite respectable now, all pushchairs, pensions and British Home Stores jumpers. However, others seem to have hardly changed at all, unable or unwilling to move on; too old to mix on the war memorial steps, too mixed up to grow up.

Gradually, some have turned into the pathetic old drunks and drug pushers they used to take the piss out of. Some scrape a life via begging and benefits, whilst a couple of others sell dodgy memorabilia from a stall down at the market.

They're there every Thursday and Saturday lurking shiftily behind fake Megadeath T-shirts and trays of cheap skull rings, sporting the same haircuts, ball point pen tattoos and pseudo political button badges that everyone else discarded decades ago - worn with pride like decorations for outstanding services to outmoded fashion concepts.

I can understand their nostalgia. There was something strangely human about us back in the early eighties, striving so hard to look and sound like our new wave heroes, but only ever managing to highlight our inadequacies with our ill conceived attempts at music and fashion.

Now every image, every sound is so clean, precise and readily available. The world has turned from awkward analogue imitation to digital designer duplication. Anyone can look and sound like anyone else and everyone does look and sound like everyone else.

I watched a documentary about the Sex Pistols the other night and was amazed to see how easily in 1976 society's conventions could be disturbed by the verbal and visual excesses of rock 'n'roll culture. It worries me slightly that what was anarchic twenty years ago is now considered totally acceptable. Rock music, and more recently dance music, has become the accepted backing track to all TV programmes - sport, holiday, business, crime. This rapid dissemination of new music is probably very positive, enabling innovative sounds and images to be enjoyed by a broader audience. But it may also have a negative side.

Today alternative cultures are highjacked so quickly by the mainstream that many new ideas are in danger of being stifled by commercial pressures before they have a chance to truly develop and grow. There is a danger, therefore, that radical creativity, which for centuries has been the lifeblood of cultural evolution, will in future be replaced by a meaningless procession of shallow variations on well worn themes. It's happening already.

I saw a female lawyer being interviewed on TV the other day with dreadlocks, a denim jacket and a pierced nose. When we were young that was sufficient grounds to have you kicked out of Sainsbury's. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that tolerance of alternative cultures isn't a good thing. But the ubiquity of certain images means that they are increasingly becoming devoid of any special symbolic significance. And without definitive symbols it is very difficult to use art to express ideas or emotions in a specific way. Hence the message you are attempting to put across becomes confused and diluted. Nothing is outrageous any more. There seems to be no original avenue of rebellion that doesn't become just another marketing opportunity, a slogan by which to sell T-shirts.

When I was at school, drugs were the currency of counter culture, the preserve of militants and artists. But, increasingly, illegal drugs and the dangers associated with them, have been absorbed into the mainstream. You read stories in the local papers about eleven-year-olds dealing in acid, dishing tabs out in the playground like they were sherbet lemons. You see the kids skulking around dark alleyways, decked out in off-the-peg street credibility, whilst mum and dad pay fifty quid to see some mediocre, middle-aged rock guitarist whose joint smoking and garishly patterned shirts were sufficient in the early sixties to turn him into a star.

I feel sorry for the kids these days with nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, no cushioning generation gap to hang out in for a while. Perhaps we were the lucky ones, celebrating our adolescence with a pierced ear and a can of shandy, challenging the system by daring to let our hair touch our collars and wearing non regulation shoes to school.

Perhaps those passing acquaintances from my youth who sell cheap crap down at the market, are right not to move forward, to hover on the fringes, forever living a post-punk ideal of vinyl LPs and spiky dyed hair, never to embrace this brave new world of computers, satellites and hundred pound trainers, a world in which you have to invent some new and exciting way to painfully torture the life from ten total strangers to guarantee front page exposure. Who can blame those who wish to live in a time warp and view the world from self-inflicted suspended animation?

I used to look back and cringe at the foolish things I said, did and wore as I stumbled my way through adolescence. But now I feel there was something rather endearing about my uncultured clumsiness. And as time has passed my embarrassment has given way to a genuine fondness for all those aimless afternoons I spent in town.

My mum used to get worried about the kind of elements I hung out with (harmless though they were by today's standards). One Saturday afternoon, on the way back from Tesco's, mum spotted me on the war memorial steps taking an experimental swig from a two litre plastic lager bottle. She made the mistake of forbidding me from going out by myself again. However this only served to make it seem that much more attractive. And the next weekend, despite the fact that it was pouring with rain, as soon as she'd left for Tesco's I sneaked out of the house and headed for town.

For a moment walking down the street I felt the tug of parental authority, a magnetic guilt that nagged at me to return to the house. But that was easily overcome by brooding upon my hatred of the unhappiness of adults.

'Why should I let them fuck up my life, just because they've fucked up theirs?' I asked myself, and strode on toward the point of no return (near the traffic lights by the shops at the top of the road). As soon as I'd passed that point, I was filled with a sense of defiant elation, like a balloon floating, not particularly going anywhere, just happy to have pulled free from a hand, breezing through the clouds with no fear of bursting.

Although it was raining quite heavily, I hadn't bothered to put on my raincoat. Wearing an anarchic CRASS patch on the back of my Harrington jacket and a button badge that said PISS OFF made me feel like a man in control of his own destiny, a man impervious to wind and rain. And I splashed implacably along the puddled High Street, as if I my indifference to the weather would somehow prevent me from catching a cold.

Having been banned from the town by my mum, I'd hadn't specifically arranged to meet Tony anywhere that Saturday. In fact, I'd made up some vague excuse about distant relatives visiting from the north, imaginary cousins I hadn't seen for years.

"You've never mentioned your cousins before," Tony had said.

"Well, it's been so long since I've seen them," I'd lied. "I hardly remember them."

Tony wasn't in Reckless that Saturday. And, for a while, I thought I might have had a wasted journey. However, I did eventually catch up with him in Andy's Music, buying some Super Glide string polish for his Casino.

"What happened to your cousins?" he asked.

"They couldn't come," I said. "Because of the weather - floods and that."

"I didn't think it was raining that hard," said Tony.

"It's always flooding where they live," I said, elaborating the lie. "Even if it rains just a bit."

"Why don't they move then?" said Tony.

"How should I know?" I said, unable on the spur of the moment to think-up a more convincing answer. I added hurriedly, "How's the guitar?"

"Fine," said Tony, giving me a quizzical look. "Same as it was yesterday."

"Great," I said with a nervous smile.

"You all right?" asked Tony as we jangled out through the door to the music shop.

"Yea," I said. "Why?"

"I don't know. You're acting a bit weird," he said warily.

"That's great coming from you," I said with a false laugh. "You calling me weird? That's great, that is!"

Because of the rain, the town wasn't very busy. Normally the pavements were so crowded with prams and shopping trolleys and people stopping to chat, you had to walk in the road on the far side of parked cars if you wanted to progress at anything more than tortoise pace. But that Saturday (keeping a wary eye-out for umbrellas, poked blindly into the downpour) we were able to weave our way to the memorial reasonably quickly.

The war memorial was at the opposite end of town to the music shop, to the west of the High Street on the edge of the park. You could get down to Park Road from the High Street via an alleyway between Woolworth's and Dorothy Perkin's. The memorial was at the corner of the road just beyond the park's black iron gates.

Just inside the gates were a couple of gnarled oak trees, hundreds of years old. The trees had rarely been pruned and a copious canopy spread over the steps of the memorial, sheltering it from the brunt of the rain. So, despite the weather, there were still quite a few of the usual crowd sitting on the steps smoking and shuffling to the muffled beat of a ghetto blaster wrapped in a Woolworth's carrier bag. We nodded collectively to the kids we knew and then went over to chat to Stewy, a podgy, ginger-haired bass player who was in the year above us at school, but was still dead friendly.

The three of us sat in a row against the side of the cross that faced the street, backs against the carved names of Westingshire Infantrymen who died in the Great War (from E.G. Shackleton to W.A.E. Yates), and watched the cars splash in and out of the puddled car park. And what cars there were.

Through the centuries, Westing has always been a prosperous town, a trading centre through which travellers (no matter where they are going) always seem to pass. The town is like the magnetic pin at the centre of a compass, the constant point from which the needle pivots east to west and north to south. Since the building of the bypass that links Westing to the motorway, the town has blossomed from an historic cross-roads into a centre for the new electronics industries, and its prosperity has grown beyond all proportion to its size. Anyone with a love of cars could happily sit on the steps of the war memorial all day long just watching the four-wheeled fruits of new-found wealth cruise in and out of the car park.

Each Saturday, there were two particular cars we would always look out for. And, each week, without fail, their arrival would herald the start of the same argument between me and Stewy. The first car to arrive was a fire engine red 1970's Corvette Stingray, which growled into the car park like a hungry wolf. The second car was a mint condition Ford Customline Flathead V8. It was cream with a black roof and mirror-bright chrome, and it purred along like a contented cat.

Every week the Stingray would park in a reserved space by the fencing facing the memorial and a couple would get out. Mr Stingray had thinning blonde hair and a wiry moustache of blonde shoe-brush bristles. He wore very large glasses with bright red frames that matched the colour of his car.

On some people, particularly people with thin faces, those big glasses can look pretty stupid, but they quite suited Mr Stingray as he had an unusually large head. He had big chunky hands too and a ballooning baboon's backside, even though he was otherwise quite average in build. As Stewy once remarked, Mr Stingray looked as if someone had shoved an air-pipe up his bum and blown him up like a novelty balloon.

Every week, after Mr Stingray had bounced out of his car, he would hover beside it in a lilac or pastel coloured polo shirt, hands half-shoved into the pockets of his chunky trousers, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet as he waited for his wife to check her make up. She always sat in the passenger seat of the Stingray with the door open for about a minute, leaning forward to check her lips and eyes in the mirror on the sun visor. She always wore cotton trousers, high heels and a scarf and she always took her husband's arm (for balance rather than from any great sense of affection) as they walked briskly to the back entrance of Marks and Spencer's.

We knew the owner of the Flathead V8. He was called David Grant and his brother was at school with Stewy's brother. A couple of years earlier David Grant had taken over the family greetings card business, started up by his father who'd died suddenly from a rare form of liver cancer. Using part of the proceeds of his father's will, David had acquired exclusive rights to distribute a series of postcards based on obscure fifties B musical movies and their little known stars. Fortuitously, shortly afterwards several of the musicals were shown on Channel Four in a late night series entitled B-Bop a Lula. Because the songs featured in the films were so ludicrously bad, they immediately attracted a cult following. David resold the postcard rights for a tidy profit and, among other things, treated himself to the Flathead.

David did not, I hasten to add, park in the Park Road car park in order to do a bit of shopping at Marks and Spencer's, but, rather, to indulge in a few frames of snooker at the Lloyd George club (which was in a warehouse between the exhaust and tyre centre and the back of Woolworth's). David generally played with another fifties freak who looked exactly like a young Cliff Richard (I don't know his what his real name was because I never heard anyone call him anything other than Cliff.)

Dave and Cliff would often wave to us as they swaggered out of the car park in their authentic fifties jackets, their quiffs shining with a tubsworth of Brylcream. And as they disappeared through the door to the Lloyd George Club, our customary argument would start about which car was better the Flathead or the Stingray. In a sense, it was an argument that neither of us could ever win. It's like saying who was the greatest footballer Stanley Matthews or George Best? Each was a classic of their generation.

I preferred the Stingray back then, with its wide-wheeled, rubber-burning brashness, shark-like lines and gallon-guzzling acceleration. I would dream of tearing up a thousand dark desert miles with Hendrix on the stereo and Debbie by my side. In my dreams she was always a libidinous, tanned, blonde Debbie with a Grand Canyon cleavage and a Texan drawl (rather than a five foot two inch Debbie all cheap eye-shadow, gold stud earrings and a spot-welded bra-clasp).

These days, my tastes have matured somewhat and I think I would probably prefer to cruise to the coast in some classic fifties convertible. But back then I was Corvette crazy. I even bought a Corgi die cast model of the Stingray and painted it red with a tiny pot of Humbrol model paint. That's how into it I was, much to Stewy's derision.

Often my arguments with Stewy about cars would turn into mock battles with Tony taking the role of impromptu adjudicator when things got out of hand. Generally these battles started with us fairly amicably extolling the virtues of our favoured vehicles before embarking on a ritual exchange of insults. Our aim was to make each taunt more insulting than the last. For example, Stewy might start off fairly tamely by calling me fuck face. I would respond by calling him, say, cunt features. The battle of the bizarre put-downs would then continue thus.

"You sackful of knob cheese."

"You buffalo's bollock bag."

"You septic fuck-bucket."

"You ulcerated piss-flap."

"You pus-filled hog's helmet."

"You warty frog's foreskin."

Generally this name calling would continue until we had scraped the bottom of our filth-filled imaginations, and unable to match our previous put downs would resort to a more traditional method of resolving our dispute (i.e., hitting each other as hard as we could).

That day the stormy weather had torn through the uncared-for oaks at the park's edge, showering the war memorial with bark and twigs and a couple of large mossy branches. Armed with a branch a piece, me and Stewy acted out a Neanderthal combat. Grunting like ape men we smashed the branches together, damp wood splintering everywhere. Every second or third clash a huge chunk of branch would snap off, reducing our weapons eventually to pathetic stumps, which we prodded at each other with exaggerated flourishes, like ham actors acting out a Shakespearean duel.

Eventually, boredom and the indignation of the girls who sat on the steps of the memorial (swearing as they picked bits of rotten wood from their carefully-spiked hair) brought our combat to an end.

Rain-damp and breathless from log waving and apelike grunting, me and Stewy rejoined Tony on the steps, and sat with our backs turned to a barrage of insults from the girls, until eventually their irritation subsided and we could watch the cars pass in peace.