Introduction
Following my initial triumph as an actor in the winter of 1980 in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the Bristol Old Vic, which moved to the London Old Vic in the summer, I accepted the position of sales assistant in Bentall’s china department in Kingston-on-Thames, and remained there until just after Christmas time, my next paid acting engagement being a mere walk-on role in a version of Petronius’ “Satyricon” at the Phoenix Theatre, this in the spring of the following year, although I also served as assistant stage manager and percussionist.
If I’m not mistaken, ’81 was the year in which I was most active as an enthusiast of the New Romantic movement, this same having been initiated some two or three years earlier in reaction to the increasing uniformity of Punk. The New Romantics embraced a hyper-nostalgic devotion to diverse eras past which they interpreted as romantic and glamorous, whether recent times such as 1920s Berlin, or more distant historical epochs such as Elizabethan England. I attended New Romantic club nights at Le Kilt and Le Beat Route among others, and was even snapped by the legendary London photographer David Bailey at one of these, but I was never an echt New Romantic, so much as a fellow traveller keen to experience first hand the final truly provocative London music and fashion cult before it imploded as all others had done before it, such was my mindset at the time. Its soundtrack was not guitar Rock, but an electronic dance music influenced by legendary German collectives such as Kraftwerk and Can, and which set the tone, musically speaking for the entire decade, after having been brought into the Pop charts by New Romantic acts as diverse as Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran and Ultravox.
By the end of ’81, the movement had all but run its peacockish course, partly perhaps because of the scarcity of bands clearly identifiable in those days as New Romantic, although it arguably went on to exert a strong influence on the development of music and fashion throughout the eighties, not just in London but other British cities, and thence in the West at large. As for me, I joined Westfield a former women-only college of the University of London situated on the Finchley Road in Hampstead, as a student of French and Drama. Within a short time of having done so, I resumed my lengthy career as a walk-on for the film version of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”, continuing to see myself as a working actor with a fine agent in Margaret Hamilton of Hamilton and Sydney. This despite the fact that I went on to channel all my creative energy during my Westfield years into college-based productions.
Westfield, founded in by 1882 by one Kathleen Chesney, was an all-female college for more than eighty years. She officially merged with east London’s Queen Mary College in 1989 to become Queen Mary and Westfield College, until the turn of the century when the latter was renamed Queen Mary, University of London, while legally retaining the original title of QMWC.
Thanks to the copious quantity of notes I committed to paper during my first two perfectly blissful years at Westfield, once the site of so much noisy felicity, she can live again through the literary works I recently set about forging out of them. The first piece is based on several conversations I had with my great Westfield friend Ged Allen, a tough-talking Liverpool wild kid with a heart of pure gold and a ’50’s style quiff who was an English and Drama student, and with whom I loved to act. He played Malvolio to my Feste in a Westfield production of “Twelth Night” at the Edinburgh Festival in the summer of ’82. When we re-performed it at the college the following winter term, we were like returning heroes, the acting clique freshly returned from Edinburgh, monarchs of all we surveyed, and none more so than Ged and I.
These duologues or rather monologues, because Ged did most of the talking, took place late one night in Scorpio’s, a Greek restaurant situated opposite the college on the Finchley Road and regularly patronized by Westfield students, following a college performance of Lorca’s “Blood Wedding” in which I played the part of the doomed young bridegroom. I have fused two of them together, both having been needless to say edited, and subject to free versification for aesthetic purposes.
I think you should be
one of the greats, Carl,
but you’ve given up
and that’s sad…
when I’m 27
I’d be happy
to be like you…
in your writing,
make sure you’ve got
something really
unbeatable…then say…
‘here, you _______!’
At sixteen,
you knew you
were a genius,
at nineteen,
you thought you were
a failure
& now you think…
what’s genius anyway?
