I'm 55 now. The last 20 years or so seem to merge into one big, long and absolutely not displeasing phase. The last time I felt real change was in my thirties.
The worst thing for me about your thirties is that you begin to notice a pattern about your life that didn't seem possible in your twenties. You don't so much gain a rounded outlook on life, carefully honed on the back of your many different experiences, as much as you do a sort of single, well-thumbed formula for your own existence. I had always believed, until a few years ago, that if you did loads of different things in your life you might end up, albeit at the higher end of the scale, a renaissance man, celebrated and admired all round, or even, at the lower end of the scale, just a decent all rounder, someone to go to for advice. This may indeed be true for some but I certainly don't believe it any more of my own life. Which is a shame, because I love giving advice.
I would like to think that I've done loads of different things in my life. Actually, I have done loads of different things in my life but I always seem to approach them in the same way and that's what I mean about life becoming formulaic as opposed to varied. No matter what I had ended up doing I would have probably been the same person at the end of it. Sure, you learn some lessons, you have to, and you learn to adapt and to vary yourself as much as you need to, but its still you. You the doctor, you the lawyer, you the brickie, you the whatever, its all you. For this reason I've always distrusted people who seem to elevate their careers to the point that they themselves disappear, or maybe it's just that I envy their ability to conceal themselves so well.
I certainly went through loads of phases as a child. My first memory of wanting to be something was that I wanted to be a dinosaur. I wanted to be a Brachiosaurus because it was hugest dinosaur I could think of and its nose was on top of its head rather than in the middle of its face. I thought that was super cool. Then I wanted to be Brian Boru who was the all - conquering High King of Ireland and that sounded cool too and then I decided that I could achieve a hybrid of both ambitions by becoming a rugby player, playing for Ireland. And so started an obsession with the oval ball which has been with me all my life since and which I have inflicted on all those who have come to know me. My son is now the same.
I was sent to away to boarding school (which I still think is a bizarre idea) back in the days when parents thought that the best way to ensure their kids turned out fully rounded and able to deal with life was to send them as far away from them as possible. I could understand the desire to do this if the parents wanted more 'alone time' but the truth is that my parents would have gladly sent the other one of them with us, given half the chance. At school, the phases came thick and fast, although there is good reason for this. Hundreds of boys, stuck together day after day, night after night, in a remote part of Yorkshire, can be quite harsh on each other, out of nothing more malicious than extreme boredom and a desire to survive somewhere other than at the bottom of the pile. The more you change and reinvent yourself the harder it is for anyone to find those aspects of the real you that are either tedious, irritating or vulnerable to attack. It was certainly due to this that the possibility of my ever being a musician reared its deceptively attractive head. If I'm going to be fully analytical about this, with the glorious gift of hindsight, I suppose it was a mixture of the need for survival and a degree of self-doubt that taught me to hide myself behind something that, if confronted and breached, could be me more easily rebuilt than the fragile ego of a young boy.
I also found that playing the giddy goat in lessons (or acting the little bollix as we say at home), bought me badly needed cheap popularity when I needed it most. I paid dearly for this cheap insubordination but you what you have to do.
I was musical, for sure. And I was as talented a boy musician as you can be, if your game plan is to absorb talent by means other than hard work and practice. I had been in a good choir at the Brompton Oratory, in London since the age of 8, and had been taught to play both the piano and the violin. I gave up the violin when I was sent away to school but continued with the piano and was forced by my parents to join the choir there.
I should say, at this point, that joining a choir at a boarding school, famed for its rugby, was suicidal and I knew it. Walking into mass on a Sunday, dressed like some strange child's drag act, in front of your sniggering classmates, is asking for trouble at an all - boys boarding school. I have often wondered, if they could only dress choristers in something a little tougher looking, something that didn't scream 'Beat me now!' whether more boys might just possibly want to sing in choirs at school. I used to sometimes imagine our form tutor, Fr Gregory, privately pissing himself laughing, as we all paraded into church, like lambs to the slaughter. Actually, he subsequently went to jail for being a nonce so maybe pissing himself wasn't what he was up to at all. Needless to say, I didn't stay in the choir for very long at all. As for the piano lessons, they turned into extraordinary history lessons.
Interestingly at school, my interest in listening to music, which has been pretty fierce from a young age, had entered into a weird state of hiatus. I wasn't into Grease anymore and I found some of the big bands of the time like Queen to be really dreary. I hadn't really got into punk and my experience of this hugely transformative musical and social phenomenon had been limited to going to the Kings Road on a Saturday with my mate Justin Goddard to watch the Teds give the Punks a weekly spanking, while Justin and I swigged from stolen beer. But this hiatus was short lived.
A girl I knew in London had told me about a band called Madness. Someone she knew their keyboard player Mike. For my 14th birthday she bought me the album One Step Beyond and everything changed forever. I shaved my head, I wore the clothes, I frightened my elderly relatives, I affected (what I thought was) a cockney accent and I was off. I could do the Madness ska dance too which, if you ever saw me dance since you would understand the study that went into doing that. At school I would play anything by Madness on my tape recorder whenever I could. I had one of those battered old tape recorders with the big, heavy, noisy buttons on them, buttons that one person alone could not possibly push alone, and this was now in use all day, to the extreme annoyance of my peers. And here's the thing, I didn't just like Madness, I wanted to be Madness.
That is where it all begins.
Back to the piano lessons.
My piano teacher was a man in his late fifties called Joshua Gruenfeld. He had been in Auschwitz as a child and had watched as both his parents and an elder brother had been led to the gas ovens. Here was a man who had had to adapt. He had been stripped, like so many Jews his age, of the things that another race or generation can take for granted, like a childhood or, for instance, that defining moment in your life, when you're older, and your parents first come to you for advice and you think 'Yes, I've made it – I'm a grown-up'. Above all, though, and I believe this to be the most impressive thing about him, here was a man whose life had been defined by the worst violence and prejudice imaginable, and despite all of that, and despite all that he had witnessed as a young boy, he had it in his soul to teach people to play music.
Or most people anyway. He spent most of our lessons together, at my request, talking about his time at the camp and how he survived, which I found both horrifying and fascinating, and he would warn me, rightly, I've always felt since, in tones that I couldn't possibly do justice to by description, of the dangers of allowing fascists the right to organise themselves ever again. Food for thought now.
When I was 16, someone played me A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall by Bob Dylan and everything that hadn't changed before, now changed forever.
I had up to this point assumed that pop music was all about jaunty beats, trends and uniform. Words had simply been the accompaniment to another process altogether. That was the process of identity. I wasn't just a fan of ska music, I was a Rude Boy, part of a select club, brave enough to shave their heads and learn how to dance like Chas Smash, but the day I heard Dylan, that all ended.
I had never imagined that a song could do this. Hard Rain was written back in 1962 when the world stood on the brink of the idiocy that is the nuclear nightmare. The Cuban missile crisis had so nearly developed into a nuclear war that Dylan wrote a song containing the opening lines to all of the songs he would not live long enough to write. The result is a masterpiece, and in me it evoked feelings of rage, passion, love and loss.
It was like listening to Mr Gruenfeld all over again, but this time it was in verse form and was set to music, and now I wanted to be able to this.
From this point on I set about learning to play the guitar. I had a friend called Mark Swindells, also a Rude Boy, who was an accomplished classical guitarist and, importantly to the story, had a guitar. He patiently taught me the basic chords so that I could learn to play and be like Bob Dylan. In doing so, he was also saying goodbye to a friend, because, and I think we both understood this, when I could muster enough basic knowledge, I wouldn't be a Rude Boy anymore and our club would be disbanded on the grounds that, when you're 16, you need someone other than yourself to be in a club. And I was leaving.
I had been told at school, by every teacher who had ever taught me, that I clearly did not enjoy academic work of any kind, and I agreed with them. Nevertheless, I had achieved all of the necessary qualifications using my particular skill for doing nothing but the bare minimum and, usually, getting away with it or failing that, using a gift of the gab and a worrying aptitude for changing and twisting things that were being said, to my own advantage, skills for which career politicians would kill. It did however mean that my life lurched from one crisis to another with the occasional sedentary periods in between that are so vital in terms of recuperation for a young life so at odds with its surroundings.
Simon Davy had arrived at my school in time for the sixth form, which is quite late, and took the same classes as I did. Simon was a big, tough looking guy with a slightly psychotic look about him and certain people tended to give him a wide birth because of this. Not me.
On closer inspection, however, he reminded me of Officer Dibble from Top Cat because he was low slung with short legs and appeared indolent to the extreme. His father was someone big in the army or intelligence, although I didn't know what at the time, and this had meant that the family had moved all over the world, finally returning to England in 1981 which is when he came to my school. Simon also had a guitar, which I have to say he was slightly better at playing than I was, and this meant that we became friends and allies, spending long nights playing each other the few tunes we knew and reciting the various anecdotes about our idols (his was John Lennon) that so often do the rounds in circles where teenage boys meet and talk shit to each other. Simon and I never really agreed about anything. Politics lessons were often disrupted by our animated arguments about Nuclear Disarmament, Northern Ireland and anything to do with Mrs Thatcher. On one occasion we had to be pulled apart by our teacher.
I was the class Marxist and he was my antithesis. Until Simon had arrived at my school I had been allowed to express my strong opinions, whenever I liked and without fear of reproach, although I imagine now that this had more to do with my classmates and teachers thinking to themselves that if they didn't look at me or talk to me then I would probably go away. When Simon arrived, I found an adversary worthy of my rantings. I became slightly more interested in lessons as a result of our heated exchanges, I suppose because they became a less passive experience. We had made each other the Kings of our own respective points of view and we now had a duty to represent these constituencies whenever the occasion arose.
The uniqueness of being the token school lefty at a public school was a burden that I bore with mixed results. It gave me a vaulted position in some respects, usually amongst the younger boys because you were different. My headmaster liked the fact that it made the school look diverse. It didn't do me any favours when, at the Monthly Headmasters Lectures, I was called upon to give a short rebuttal speech at no notice in reply to the guest speaker who was, in this instance, former Prime Minister, The Right Hon Edward Heath MP.
My mother, who was a fierce socialist harridan, had hated 'bloody Mr Heath' as he was always referred to in our house. For the 4 years he was in power, this three-word mantra was repeated so often that as a five or six year old I actually thought that was his name. It wasn't until I was put in the corner at school after answering the question 'Who's the Prime Minister?' that I realised his real name was Edward.
Suddenly sharing a stage with him brought it all back. 'Bloody Mr Heath' was smiling at me benignly waiting for what I had to say. I could feel all these phrases from my past coming back. 'Sodding three day week', 'Fucking Common Market'. Standing less than 10 feet from me was the man who inspired the first swearing I could remember. This was it.
All my teachers and peers sat in front of me, waiting to watch me use my golden opportunity to destroy this arch tory once and for all. Describing a former Prime Minister's 4 years in office as 'grim city' had surprised even myself. I could see my English teacher wince and I knew I'd blown it. My politics teacher, a founder of the Alliance Party in Northern Ireland, was openly laughing. I went back to my seat humiliated.
Bloody Mr Heath.
Despite our political differences, we became good friends. That's me and Simon – not me and bloody Mr Heath. Simon and I actually had a lot more in common than we imagined; neither of us really wanted to do anything more in life than play guitar and smoke, while our parents had bigger plans for us, or at least his did, and it made us uneasy. I'll always remember the two of us, aged about 16, climbing to the top of a hill near to our school late one night, just so we could look out over the valley at the tiny lights that made up our school and the neighbouring villages below us and imagining that they were in fact thousands of people and that we were on stage at Shea Stadium. This is the stuff that youthful dreams are made on. It isn't staring into the bathroom mirror on your own with a tennis racket guitar singing London Calling by The Clash. Not at all. I have always felt that it is these fleeting moments of ambition, however far-fetched, that you share with your closest friends, moments that themselves become a sort of oath or promise for the future. Having said which, being caught singing into the bathroom mirror by any member of your family, particularly your younger sister, is excruciatingly embarrassing, and may require an oath of a different kind: usually silence.
We developed a routine of skipping the last lesson on a Saturday morning so that our classmates could actually get some work done and, more importantly, so that we could hitch into York and busk for a couple of hours. It was then and there that I earned my first ever money from music. It was good money too, or at least good money for a 16 year old to be making. Simon and I were hardly Simon and Garfunkel but we could easily earn up to £30 in a two-hour stint, singing and playing amongst the narrow, Elizabethan streets of York. Once we had reached our target cash total we would go to the pub and get drunk. Once we were drunk enough, we would go to Boots and buy two packets of dodos, (like pro-plus but stronger) and make our way back to school where we would take all these mega-caffeine pills and stay up all night playing guitar and ranting at each other.
It might not seem like a life, but we had few options. This quite often continued, down South, into the school holidays, because, like me, Simon lived in London, where we weren't any more imaginative about how we spent our time together. Simon and I were, however, in the process of building an alliance between us that lasts to this day.
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Chapter 1 part 2
There used to be a particular day in the school holidays that I dreaded. It was the day my report arrived. The routine was always the same. I knew what was coming, so did my parents and so did my brother and sister. It was always a bad day for everyone. Sometimes I would wonder if, just for once, knowing the devastating effects that these reports had on my ability to fully enjoy the school holidays, they would, perhaps, be more lenient. Maybe in the Staff Room at school, my teachers had been sitting around, about to write my report and said, "We can't do this to him, again. He's not a bad guy after all; he's probably got qualities we haven't seen yet. Let's give the kid a break for once." And that they had all agreed and written things like "Toby provides much needed colour in an otherwise grey world, full of academia." Or, "Toby's unerring mission, to gain cheap popularity, at the expense of his teachers, is both original and highly commendable". Hope can be a wonderful friend in an hour of need, but even I knew that this was unlikely. This was my teachers' only real chance to get back at me for all the cheap comments, for all the bad impressions that I did of them and for all the general insubordination and disruptive behaviour that had become my trademark. They weren't going to be nice; they were going for the kill and it was going to be a slow and painful death.
I would see the envelope on the floor by the door and a shiver would run through me. I would immediately go up to my room at the top of the house and light a final cigarette and lean out of the window, for fear of being caught smoking and thus adding to the considerable shit I was already in, waiting to be summoned. Next, my father would see it and he would take it grimly to my mother who was usually still in bed. About 20 minutes later they would both go downstairs and an uneasy hush would take hold of the house, usually only interrupted by my younger sister, Cressida, running into my room and telling me with a strange mixture of excitement and fear that my report was here. A short while after this, I would be called downstairs into my fathers study, where my parents did a good cop / bad cop job on me for about an hour, while I squirmed uneasily, unable to offer them even the slightest hope for something better in the future. My father was the good cop. He would try his hardest to see my side of the story, which must have been very hard because I didn't have one, and my mother would play bad cop, which she did very well indeed.
I could not have loved my mother more but she could sometimes have an expression on her face that reminded me of the faces in the paintings that were on the walls at church. Maybe it's a peculiarly Catholic thing, but I swear that at times like this, when all around was dark, brooding and portentous, she had a look about her of almost inhuman suffering, like one of the martyred saints we had seen so many paintings of in our youths. The thing is, however, that when parents try two different approaches, on the same child, at the same time, it invariably goes wrong for them and they just end up arguing with each other. At which point you can safely get up and say "Jesus, you two, you're always arguing!" and leave the room, indignantly, as if you just can't take any more of it. I learned to perfect a look that said, "Honestly, I've come all the way downstairs to have a mature discussion with you two about how we can move things forward, as regards my school work, and all you can do is shout at each other". Cheeky? Undoubtedly, but it was all I had. I would spend the rest of the day being very nice indeed to my brother, Rory, and sister in an effort to shore up support in the house, should things turn ugly again later, which they quite often did.
The day came, however, when this all changed from what I'd always thought of as youthful, jolly japes, into something much more serious. The report itself was no worse than usual, which meant it was bad but that I hadn't been expelled or anything, which to me was good. On this occasion, though, it was the last straw for my mother and she cried her eyes out in front of me while my father looked concerned but still as reasonable as he always did on these occasions.
A word about my father, Christopher Bourke. I once had the pleasure of reading the seminal book on the Irish legal Bar, The Old Munster Circuit by the late great Maurice Healey. Note – Munster, for those who do not know, is the province of Ireland comprising the 6 counties of the south west of Ireland. Cork, Waterford, Tipperary, Limerick, Kerry and (our current home) Clare. It is also the home of the greatest rugby team on earth, Munster Rugby, the only team to have ever nilled the mighty All Blacks (in 1978). In his book, Healey talks at length about my great grandfather Matthew Bourke, of Lonely Lodge, Banteer, Cork. Matthew was a KC and the last Recorder of Cork before we got our independence thanks to another cork man, and the description of him in this book is the description I would use of my dad.
'Although far from an old man, he was a survivor from another world. He still employed the polished oratory of the 18th century; he was a well-read scholar and his reading supplied ornament to his judgements. Not by any means lacking in humour, he, nevertheless, reserved his smile for the more classical jest ... a touch of pomposity only served to endear him to us'.
Every time I read this I shudder because these men are the same man.
Christopher Bourke, like his father and grandfather, was also a judge. He was kind, patient and always had an ear open to the underdog. He used his position endlessly for good rather than power. He refused to fine prostitutes, insisted that the police referred to trans people by their chosen names and ruled against the admissibility of computer generated evidence in the conviction of poll tax defaulters, an act that not only derailed every pending poll tax default hearing in the UK but subsequently earned him the title 'Poll Tax Grave Digger' in his obituary in the papers. All of this in the 80's and very early 90's too. He never ranted about anything but maintained a path of righteousness without any self-satisfaction. He's gone now and I miss his old world just and reasoned manner every single day.
Back to my report (never thought I'd say that).
I had not really seen my mother cry since I was about 11, when my granny, her mother, had died. Back then, she cried for days, even weeks, and I wondered if this would be what happened now. I suppose I believed that, while children cried because they were in some physical pain of some description, the things that were awful enough to make grown-ups cry would make them cry for days or weeks at a time. And this time it would be my fault too. I felt terrible feelings of remorse and guilt, which I hadn't really felt before and I so desperately wanted to give her a hug and reassure her that I would be alright, to try and assuage her tears and make her happy, knowing full well that she didn't want a hug from me at the moment or for the foreseeable future. I had stepped over the line and, in doing so, I had hurt the person I loved the most on the entire planet.
"I'm going to be a rock singer and I've taught myself to play the guitar, which I'm really good at. Simon lets me use his guitar at school and I want to get my own one now and then I can show you both".
Now, there had been several options open to me. I could have said sorry, for a start. I could have implored her not to be upset and used my considerable skills as a bullshitter to make both my parents see how penitent I truly was. Whilst 'I'm going to be a rock singer' was certainly original and was one that even I had not really expected to use, it didn't help at all. My mother's tears stopped at least, but the look on her face changed to one of deep offence. My father looked a bit more confused than he had before and an eerie silence took hold of the room for some time until he asked me if I could play any classical guitar tunes, like Julian Breem, who, I must say, I'd never heard of. He too had a few options open to him as to what to say to me, and I was certain that this hadn't been one of them. I was right. His question bought the stiffest of rebukes from mother and their argument had replaced the one they were having with me.
A point had been made though. I had finally said that I definitely wanted to be something specific, which I had not done since I announced that I was going to play rugby for Ireland as a seven year old boy.
The only other thing that I had ever wanted to do, and then I was even younger than seven, was to be a dinosaur and then (more plausibly) a palaeontologist. I was mad about dinosaurs as a kid and had an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of them, or at least of all the stuff that kids were allowed to know about them. My father would take me to the Natural History Museum, which was close to where we lived, every week just so that I could marvel at all these amazing monsters. This obsession ended, however when I discovered that none of the dinosaurs in the museum actually ever lived in South Kensington, let alone died on the Brompton Road. For some reason I was absolutely gutted about this. Maybe I had always hoped that one day soon I would dig up a Brachiosaurus myself. All the dinosaurs turned out to have been found in somewhere called America and, believe me, when you're five and you live in London and you're still not allowed to cross the road alone, where the fuck's America?
My father, though, seemed to have taken a funny interest in the whole bit about me playing guitar as well. In the weeks that followed he would play me records of his favourite guitar music, including the beautiful requerdos d'Alhambra, as played by Breem, and I really enjoyed it too. I especially enjoyed seeing my father so happy that he had found someone with whom he could share his love of classical guitar music, which was something that I had been previously unaware of. It seemed to provide a bond between us that, for the first time, went beyond that of father and son. Daddy didn't care much for sport so the rugby thing was a bond I had with mum because her father had been a good rugby player and had played to a senior level in Ireland and so my enthusiasm had been lost on him.
This guitar moment became a defining watershed in our relationship. We were Breem Boys now, and this was our club. And it was turning point too because this new bond between my father and I, forged much to the annoyance of my mother, without her prior knowledge or consent, led one grey spring morning, completely out of the blue, to Daddy taking me out of the house, down to the local music shop and buying me my first
very own,
brand spanking new,
guitar.