 
### Book One – A Quartet of Essays and a Stray Pastorale
Chapter One – Leitmotivs from an English Pastorale

One thing is certain. Paul Runacles had not been born into a typically privileged upper middle class family, and so by the time he arrived at his college, he was bereft of a frame of reference; unlike the majority of his fellow pupils, weaned on the gilded sports of the British social elite.

And he escaped from his college once...like some kind of hysterical gymslip schoolgirl...just the once it was...around '71 or '72...to avoid being punished for something stupid he did.

It was an utterly pointless exercise as it was the last day of term, but he just panicked and bolted, and kept on running...until he ended up wandering through some muddy field in the heart of the English countryside before simply giving up and sitting by the side of the road.

But he never did it again, and in later years, when he looked back at his time as a public schoolboy, he'd insist if he possessed a single quality that might be termed noble...such as patience, or self-mastery, or consideration of the needs of other people, then he owed it to his education, and not least the four years he spent at his college.

Yet, looking at the facts after his eventual exit, you'd be forgiven for thinking he'd simply picked up from where he left off before he collapsed in that muddy field in the heart of the English countryside and started drifting in circles again...leaving so many tasks unfinished he effectively wrecked his gilded destiny. But in fact this was far from the truth, for he was never without purpose; but simply...he lacked the go-getter's ability to turn his dreams to good account.

And looking back on all he'd lost in late middle age, he'd often weep silently to himself at night, at the end of yet another day spent doing really very little when he thought about it.

And there'd be times when certain pieces of quintessentially English pastoral music still had the power to evoke his strange and sudden flight, or rush of blood to the head, of over four decades ago. Such as Vaughan Williams' "The Lark Ascending", which bespeaks a passion for the Arcadian soul of England that verges on the ecstatic. And the same could be said for the opening sections of Mike Oldfield's "Hergest Ridge", which tended to convey to him a deep mournfulness silently existent beneath the picture perfect image of English privilege.

Any argument in favour of such a tragic element would be powerfully reinforced in his eyes by playing the music of the much-loved singer-songwriter Nick Drake, who was not so much handsome as beautiful in what could be called a classically English, soft, wistful, romantic, Shelleyan fashion, with seemingly perfect skin, full lips and a head of cascading curls.

And in some of his many photos, he bears an uncanny resemblance to the former Doors front man Jim Morrison; and like Morrison, he was a poet as much as a musician. But the likeness ends there, for while Morrison was able to conquer his natural shyness and become a wildly charismatic showman, Drake never mastered the art of Rock performance.

However, blessed with a precocious musical genius, he secured a recording contract with the Island label while still only twenty years old and at Cambridge University.

On the surface of things, he was destined for a long and happy life, but unlike his near-double, was unable to translate his enormous gifts into commercial success. And he became very seriously depressed as a result, dying mysteriously at the age of just 26, after having released only three albums in his lifetime.

Looking back from the vantage point of the early 2010s, Runacles couldn't help thinking that in any era other than that ushered in by the Rock revolution, Drake would have pursued a career more suited to his background and temperament. As opposed to one which, while ensuring his immortality, clearly caused him an inestimable amount of pain.

And he came to maturity in a Britain whose young were in active rebellion against the Judaeo-Christian value system on which the nation had been founded. So was perforce affected by the spiritual chaos of the times, which propelled him towards the endless night of worldly philosophy, deadly for a mind as litmus-paper sensitive as his.

And listening in late middle age to such perfectly English examples of pastoral music as Drake's "River Man", which bespeaks a passion for the Arcadian soul of England that verges on the ecstatic, Runacles became suddenly cognizant of a colossal compassion within himself.

But not just for the youthful Runacles... who ran away from his college once like some kind of hysterical gymslip schoolgirl...so much as for the privileged classes as a whole...those traditionally educated at public schools.

A somewhat unusual receptacle for the milk of human kindness, some might say. But the privileged among us are surely no less in need of consideration than any other social class.

For despite the fact that the vast majority of those who pass through the British public school system go on to lead full and successful lives entirely free from melancholy, social advantage can clearly be a heavy burden to bear for some. Such as Nick Drake who sang so devastatingly of "falling so far on a silver spoon" in the dark pastorale, "Parasite".

As to Runacles...he'd not been born into a typically privileged upper middle class family, and so by the time he arrived at his public school, he was bereft of a frame of reference, unlike the majority of his fellow pupils, weaned on the gilded sports of the British social elite.

Yet, a close connection existed in the shape of his paternal grandmother, born into what was once known as the lower gentry, in as much as her father was independently wealthy, and so had no need to work.

Yet, she left her first husband to live in Australia with a man she'd met in Ceylon while working on a tea plantation, a Danish citizen who'd allegedly once been a successful businessman, until a reversal of fortune reduced him to penury. The outcome was she was cast out into a kind of social exile, exacerbated by the Dane's slow decline and death from multiple sclerosis. At least, that's how Runacles saw it.

His mother, on the other hand, was the product of working class immigrants to British Canada from Ulster, Ireland and Lowland Scotland. And it amused him to think there was a good chance distant relatives of his continued to live in these regions.

But that was not the reason he had trouble adapting to public school life, for his brother positively thrived within it.

No, there was something intrinsically askew about Runacles himself. For after all, who thinks of running away on the last day of term without any purpose or aim, only to finish up collapsed by the side of a muddy field in the heart of the English countryside?

The truth is while public schools have long served as the traditional places of learning for future members of the British governing and professional classes, they have never done so in the capacity of pampering wet nurses.

And so not every child who finds themselves within the bosom of such institutions is able to develop along extraverted lines. For during Runacles' time at his own college, there were boys who responded to the intensely hierarchical nature of public school life with varying degrees of self-effacement. And not just initially, for most new boys are inclined to quail when confronted with this ancient way of life for the first time, but afterwards too. So that they remained relatively quiescent even while succeeding within the system.

Yet he himself was not among them, for while he could hardly be said to have thrived, he was yet happy in his own way, and enormously popular. What they used to call a character. So this strange flight of his was totally out of character...especially seeing as he was famous for his resilience, having been one of the most intensely disciplined pupils of his generation.

But he never ran away again, and in later years, when he looked back at his time as a public schoolboy, he'd insist if he possessed a single quality that might be termed noble...such as patience, or self-mastery, or consideration of the needs of other people, then he owed it to his education, and not least the four years he spent at public school.

Yet, looking at the facts after his eventual exit, you'd be forgiven for thinking he'd simply picked up from where he left off before he collapsed in that muddy field in the heart of the English countryside and started drifting in circles again...leaving so many tasks unfinished he effectively wrecked his gilded destiny. But in fact this was far from the truth, for he was never without purpose; but simply...he lacked the go-getter's ability to turn his dreams into good account.

Now, souls in thrall to the psychological persuasion might assert that failure in life is but the consummation of an underachieving childhood.

But the Runacles of the early 2010s had no time for theories of this kind, since pupils historically written off by their teachers via the medium of the school report have included the greatest Englishman of them all. No, not Runacles...Churchill.

While many might dispute this fact, and goodness knows Churchill has his detractors, few would go so far as to label him an underachiever.

And Runacles himself was offered multiple opportunities to turn his life around; so why didn't he do it...simply in order to prove to the world that while a failure on the surface, he'd been a success all along?

There's no sure way of knowing why...other than to have recourse to a theory earlier expressed in this piece, that there was something intrinsically askew about Runacles himself. For after all, who thinks of running away on the last day of term without any purpose or aim, only to finish up collapsed by the side of a muddy field in the heart of the English countryside?

And who knows how long he'd have sat there, had it not been for the fact that as he did so, his Divinity teacher happened to spy him while driving by before offering him a lift back to college.

And as might be expected, by the time he arrived, there was hardly anyone left; yet, he was summoned his housemaster, who assured him he'd not be punished, for after all, it was the last day of term, and school was over for a month or so, and he was therefore free to do as he wished within the limits of the law.

But there was no one to take him home, as his mother had earlier departed without him, as no one was able to tell her where he was. So he contacted his father, who then set about the hour-long journey from London to Berkshire to pick him up.

And he later heard from his friends about just how frantic with worry his mother been when, after innocently turning up to take her son home, she was informed he was nowhere to be found. One can only imagine what she went through. And looking back at this terrible afternoon from the vantage point of late middle age, it pained him deeply to think of her suffering.

But he never ran away again, and in later years, when he looked back at his time as a public schoolboy, he'd insist if he possessed a single quality that might be termed noble...such as patience, or self-mastery, or consideration of the needs of other people, then he owed it to his education, and not least the four years he spent at public school.

Yet, looking at the facts after his eventual exit, you'd be forgiven for thinking he'd simply picked up from where he left off before he collapsed in that muddy field in the heart of the English countryside and started drifting in circles again...leaving so many tasks unfinished he effectively wrecked his gilded destiny. But in fact this was far from the truth, for he was never without purpose; but simply...he lacked the go-getter's ability to turn his dreams to good account.

From the time he was about seventeen, he was desperate to succeed as actor, musician or writer, yet the evidence suggests that despite an enchanting and extrovert personality he was under-equipped for the task he'd set himself.

For instance, he refused to apply himself to developing as a musician, even when being taught by a true virtuoso, as was the case towards the end of the '70s...when a future member of a super group struggled manfully to motivate him. And he was incapable of finishing a single cohesive piece of writing due to his tendency to allow his teeming imagination to take him from one unending digression to another.

As to his professional life, if you can call it that...it was marked by a similar desultory quality. And in the summer of '77, he worked briefly for a sailing school on the Costa Brava, but lost his job after a matter of weeks; and ended up drifting along the sea front and elsewhere in all his Disco Punk finery.

And later that year, he spent a short period of time at Merchant Navy School, before serving as a salesman in a long-vanished jewellery store in suburban Kingston, and after calling in sick while working as a filing clerk early in '78, lost that job too. Still...he'd made a good friend on his day off in the shape of a pretty young Punk covered in safety pins who'd spied him wandering aimlessly around Kingston with spiky blond hair like his doppelgänger Billy Idol.

But by this time, he'd been accepted as a student at a prestigious drama school in the centre of London. Although when it came to his actual studies, he failed to convince the authorities he had what it took to succeed as a professional, so departed in the summer of '79.

What a hopeless case... but then what kind of person decamps on the last day of term without purpose or aim, only to finish up collapsed by the side of a muddy field in the heart of the English countryside?

For that it was he did; and he never forgot it, for those four years he spent at boarding school were his rosebud years, when everything was heightened in terms of its effects on his temperament which was at once happy go lucky and high strung, an unusual combination perhaps.

And one that saw him at once almost universally popular, and yet beset by tics and twitches. Such as the head-shaking habit he thought he'd never kick. But which vanished soon after he quit college at the early age of 16, at which point he which he mutated by degrees from a round-shouldered youth with a Chaplin-esque walk into a full-blown narcissus. But what an inefficient Adonis he was...he couldn't even cut it at acting school.

Although the '80s were a time of relative stability for him, and he worked as an actor for a time, before completing a degree in French and Drama.

But then he resumed his maundering ways. And perhaps it's significant that one of his favourite songs while at college had been "Ramble On" by Led Zeppelin, a band revered by many of contemporaries. But then the vast majority of these wasted little time in settling into conventional occupations. So why not Runacles?

Why did he ramble on way beyond his college days despite the philosophy of stability the latter afforded him? It's impossible to say for certain of course, but it may be that like self-styled poor boy and rover Nick Drake, he'd been blessed – or cursed – with the sensitivity of litmus paper. The upshot being that the messages being relayed by the counterculture penetrated more profoundly into his psyche than those of most of his contemporaries.

But that's not to say he was alone in this respect, and when all's said and done, he got off lightly.

But among those messages was a clear exhortation to drift, to wander, to rove, to ramble, which was one of the great leitmotifs of Rock from the outset. But, there being nothing new under the sun, its origins lay deep in the history of the avant-garde, which produced wanderers from life and art alike from the outset.

And its first stirrings could be said to have reached an apogee in the shape of the Byronic hero, who went on to exert such a powerful influence on French Romanticism. Which while the last, was surely the most powerful of the three great waves of Romanticism, for it was the true forefather of the avant-garde.

And Runacles became an acolyte of the latter from his late teens, falling in love with one of its icons after the other...Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Cocteau, Genet; and in time, he developed a taste for avant-garde nihilism, and its repudiation of all of the so-called bourgeois values, including sanity and health...even life itself.

He came to adore the idea of early death, and to resign himself to dying young himself, in fact not so much resign as commit himself. And it may be this refusal to settle into any kind of conventional existence was rooted in a desire to be one of Jack Kerouac's "mad ones", and so to "burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the sky".

And by the time he quit university in 1985, he'd been a devotee of this dark ethos for several years, so that his art was more important to him than his life; and he welcomed every experience, no matter how ruinous to his health, if it could serve as fuel to his creativity. And the art that fascinated him most was literature, and he longed to be a published writer, but most of what he'd attempted to write since his late teens remained unfinished

But at university he'd evolved into a magnetically intense stage actor. And he inspired many with his performances; as well as his larger than life personality, so he was likened by one friend to Hesse's Goldmund; by another to Don Juan; by still another to Buchner's Lenz. While one of his tutors informed him he had the makings of a heroic figure, if not as actor, then as academic...and even writer.

But Runacles would not have been true to himself had he not failed to justify their faith in him, and so following his eventual departure, he sought work as a deliverer of novelty telegrams. But not for the money, which was excellent, so much as for the sheer joy of showing off, which points to something awry at the base of his soul.

And by the time he did, he was well on the way to developing an alcohol problem, which in later years he'd at least partly blame on what he termed a negative identity. Which is not to say he was negative in his attitude to others, for contrary to what may be believed given the evidence so far, the effect he exerted on others was almost overwhelmingly positive.

Yet he deliberately chose such an identity as a means of making himself more interesting than he would otherwise have been...to shock, in other words. And his motives in doing so weren't entirely frivolous, for his attraction to the avant-garde was authentic, and rooted in a deep-rooted raging intelligence that also fuelled his constant, frenetic defiance of respectable society.

And looking back from the vantage point of late middle age, he'd muse that having foisted this nihilism onto himself for as long as he had, his litmus-paper mind had finally started to turn on him by the middle of the '80s.

To begin with, his empathetic powers started to recede, which caused him enormous distress, because he'd always found great comfort in his compassionate and affectionate nature.

And he started to drink as a means of restoring them. But what right did he have to them, when his negative identity included a corrosive cynicism of the type he so admired in his avant-garde idols? It's as if he wanted it both ways...to be loved for his personal sweetness...and yet reserve the right to rage like Rimbaud whenever he felt like it.

Yet, his inner turmoil proved an asset when it came to his acting career, and he provided some extraordinary performances in the second half of the '80s.

The first of these took place at the University of Cambridge, where he studied for a term in the winter of '86 as part of their teacher training unit, before typically taking off in the early part of the new year. While the second was at Notting Hill's famous Gate Theatre, where he received some fair reviews for his acting from various periodicals including the London Times.

But no sooner had he done so than our boy was on the drift again, taking a job as a teacher of English as a Foreign Language in one of several TEFL schools situated on London's teeming Oxford Street. But to be fair, he needed the work, for the acting profession provides little by way of remuneration for all but a small minority.

And by the time he did, his drinking was under control, but long-term tendencies had developed into full-blown Obsessive Compulsive Disorder so that his day was marked by an endless series of rituals:

He'd part his hair so that it went from his crown to a specific point above one of his eyebrows, and carry a tiny mirror on his person for the purpose of checking on it throughout the day...iron his shirts inside out with the seams inclining to the right, and touch every item of clothing including his belt with said iron... arrange the items in his jacket pockets so that they went from left to right in terms of importance...constantly wipe the insides of his boots before dousing them with water...and hold an intimate part of his anatomy for a set number of beats...

But if the physical rituals were tormenting, the mental ones were even more so. And every time he met someone, he became beset by a need to compare them to someone else, so that some kind of card index set to work in his mind, proffering faces until to his horror it stopped at one resembling the person in question. And he'd not rest until he'd calculated the significance of their names.

It was as if his mind had assumed a life all of its own and started producing thoughts independently of his will. But he came to view it with a certain morbid fascination; and if he drank enough at night, he was able to sedate it. It was a wonderful feeling.

And yet for all the turmoil of his existence, he remained almost manically elated by life, so that on Saturday mornings, he'd often be seized by a sense of joy so intense it verged on the ecstatic.

For all that, though, he was at all times aware of a need to keep depression at bay, for on those rare occasions he succumbed to the blues, they were so violent he could be moved to minor acts of self-harm, such as punching himself, or striking his head against any available wall.

But they were usually short-lived, and once they'd moved on, the elation returned. It was a wonderful feeling.

Yet, there may have come a time when the latter started being produced not so much endogenously, as through alcohol. For although he didn't drink on a daily basis, the effects of his nocturnal binges persisted throughout the day in the shape of a euphoria which he supplemented with endless cups of coffee.

But as might be expected, as a result of poor attendance and other issues, he lost his beloved job early in the 1990s.

And having found a degree of fulfilment in his post as an Oxford Street English teacher almost unmatched by any other means by which he'd attempted to make a living, he tried desperately to regain it. But his efforts were unavailing.

So by the summer he'd made a return to the stage, and despite the fact that his work was once more the object of justifiable acclaim, it was a short one. And by the end of the year, he'd embarked on another teacher training course...quitting this one before the end of the term. At which point, he set himself up once again as a peripatetic deliverer of novelty telegrams.

But the following winter saw him roving anew, ending up in Hastings, an English coastal town with a large London overspill population, a distinction it shares with several dozen towns throughout the UK, some new, some older towns like Hastings, expanded to accommodate the newcomers.

And once there, he set about taking a course intended to net him a TEFL certificate, entitling him to teach English as a foreign language on an international basis. Because, he still hankered after his days as an English teacher of foreign nationals, having effectively fallen in love with this vocation.

But if he thought he was going to pass the course, he had another thing coming, because although he was well-liked at Hastings, there were few who knew him there who'd not be of the opinion that something was troubling Paul Runacles.

Precisely what, they'd be at loss to say....but one things was certain...his mind had become such a chaos he was losing his ability to communicate normally with his fellow man. But he still only drank at night, and to such an extent there were times he lapsed into incoherency. It was a wonderful feeling.

Soon after returning to London with nothing to show for a fortnight's hard graft and a fairly hefty sum of money, Runacles' drinking assumed a lethal quality from early '91, although in truth it had done so almost a decade earlier. But there was a new recklessness to it in that it became diurnal as well as nocturnal. And perforce, in later years, he'd have little recollection of the rest of '91, and much of '92 to boot, and so struggle hard to recall precisely how he spent his time.

Looking back from the vantage point of the early 2010s, he recalled quite regular work as a television walk-on. And among the parts he fulfilled as such was that of a crime scene photographer for a long-running British police series.

He also saw a lot of a close friend from East London, performing with him for a few years from about 1990 as half of a musical duo in various clubs, pubs and restaurants, and even busking on one memorable occasion, which saw the two musicians being showered with cigarettes from an appreciative member of Leicester Square's homeless community.

And at some point in what may have been '91...or '92, he resumed his career as a deliverer of novelty telegrams for a third time.

While all throughout this period, he wrote...constantly...in a bizarre style replete with archaisms culled from various sources, some being ancient dictionaries, while one was a cheap facsimile of an ancient edition of Roget's Thesaurus.

In the summer of '92, he made one final attempt at passing the TEFLA certificate, but the strain proved too much for him, and he left before the course had finished.

While towards the end of the year, he was praised for his portrayal of Stefano in a production of "The Tempest" at Conway Hall in London's Red Lion Square. This despite the fact he was intoxicated from his very first rehearsal to the second he quit the stage after the final curtain call.

While a little later, he accepted a small part in a play based on the life of James Joyce's beautiful troubled daughter Lucia to be performed at the Lyric Studio, Hammersmith. By which time, he'd embarked on yet another teaching training course; and resumed his career as a deliverer of novelty telegrams for the fourth and final time.

And while his life was hectic, he lived it as if in a dream, which is to say in a state of near-constant elation occasioned by vast quantities of alcohol.

It's difficult to explain the appeal of alcohol taken in the kind of quantities characteristic of Runacles' intake towards the end of 1992 to all who are not nor have ever been alcoholic. But there is a theory held by several authorities on alcoholism that in certain alcoholics, alcohol comes in time to exert a morphine-like effect. Although how true it is it's impossible to say.

While another proposes that in common with other drugs, alcohol can ultimately tamper with the body's ability to produce the naturally occurring pleasure-inducing substances known as endorphins, such as serotonin and dopamine.

Certainly there came a time in Runacles' life when the thought of an existence without his beloved elixir filled him with the utmost horror, for what would he be without it, other than the most hopelessly dull and timorous individual? Which would not have been the case for the Runacles of about '82, who was the most incandescent individual even when sober...a natural extrovert whose warmth, while verging at times on the fulsome, was viewed with almost universal appreciation.

And while much of this warmth remained in late '92, it was being sustained by booze, in fact his entire existence was being held together by ethyl alcohol. So that when he finally did collapse under the strain of his responsibilities, it was a messy crash indeed, provoked first by alcohol alone, then by alcohol in cahoots with prescription medicine. And a few weeks after that, he suffered another crisis involving a potentially deadly combination of prescription medicines.

But by this time, he'd undergone a Damascus-style conversion to born again Christianity; so that his life from early '93 onwards was as tranquil as it had once been frantic. Not that it ground to a halt, but it certainly slowed down to a snail's pace.

Early in January 1993, while still attending meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, he received a call from a man who told him he was from an organisation by the name of Contact for Christ based near Croydon in Surrey.

He'd got in touch with Runacles as a result of a card he'd filled in on a British Rail train some months previously. He tried to put him off, before he knew it, he was at his door, a neat, dapper man with a large salt and pepper moustache and gently penetrating deep brown eyes.

He wanted to pray with Runacles, who promptly ushered him into his bedroom, where they prayed together at length.

Later, he found himself a guest at his house deep in the south western

suburbs where Runacles was asked to make a list of sins past requiring deep repentance. And once he'd done this, the two men spent a few hours praying over each and every one of these sins Runacles had made a note of.

The man was a Pentecostal of long standing, and therefore convinced that the more supernatural Gifts of the Holy Spirit such as Tongues and Prophecy are still available to Believers.

In this capacity, he opened Runacles' eyes to many facts of the Pentecostal world, including the magazine "Prophecy Today", then edited by the Reverend Clifford Hill, and the works of the late New Zealand Evangelist and writer Barry R Smith.

And to think there was a time Runacles viewed theories concerning the End Times, or Last Days prior to the Second Coming of Christ with rabid contempt. But he was changing on every level. In fact he was barely recognisable in the early nineties to the man of only a year or two previously, having become calm and sober, even sedate in manner.

But he'd not entirely lost his taste for underachievement, for in late '94, he failed his third and final attempt at qualifying as a teacher. Only to go on to secure a personal rave review from the London Time Out for his acting in a little-known play on the Fringe, which is the London equivalent of Off-Broadway.

And his acting triumphs persisted throughout the '90s, a decade throughout which it could be said Runacles survived on the minute amount of energy he had left over after his collapse. But it was hard for him; and in terms of impetus, he was running on empty.

And it may be his experiences with alcohol and prescription medicine, and the health crisis these produced, had left him at the mercy of some kind of depressive condition. But if this was indeed the case, it was one which while debilitating was yet relatively mild.

For he still had a great capacity for joy. But a joy born of the peace that comes from the promise of eternal life, which is infinitely purer and more profound form than any earthly joy born of a love affair with the fleeting pleasures of the world. But which doesn't necessarily preclude great suffering...for from the time of his conversion, he was engaged in a terrible struggle with what some Christians called the "old man".

And there had always been a dark aspect to Paul Runacles, but not in a romantic, Byronic sense, although this appeal was something he'd always coveted. So much as one that was in terrible conflict with his warmer, more affectionate side, which was no less seismically intense than the other.

It had once made him a ferocious critic of what he saw as the follies of humankind, while threatening to turn his once tender heart to stone.

But as a Christian, he no longer sought to condemn people, so much as seek their eternal salvation. So this aspect was something to be confronted and tamed, rather than fuelled by corrosively cynical writings, and then partially controlled by lavish quantities of alcohol.

And from the mid '90s onwards, he went to war against it, little knowing he had the most colossal fight of his life on his hands. For having been sidelined, it's as if it had assumed a terrifying new force, and was determined to win. And it manifested itself not just as depression, but intrusive thoughts that seemed to have a life and power all of their own, in so far as they had an ability to alter his mood and countenance for extended periods of time, which made him petrified of them, and so at all times inclined to permanent social seclusion.

The first phase came in '95 when Runacles made contact with a former pastor who ran his own ministry from a tiny little village in the south of England after reading an article he'd contributed to "Prophecy Today". And some time later, he travelled down to meet him where he laid hands on him in his capacity of what is known as Deliverance Minister. But this was just the first of several experiences of this kind, one of which saw Runacles being ministered to by a vicar in his ancient village church.

But nothing could cure Runacles of his restlessness, and, unable to settle in a single fellowship for any great length of time, he encountered a vast variety of churches throughout the '90s...affiliated to the Word of Faith; Vineyard, Baptist and Elim Pentecostal movements among others.

And in each one, he hoped to find a lasting solution to his shadow side, the darker Runacles who tormented him. And which he saw as a throwback to his pre-Christian self, incubated over the years through immersion in a decadent culture he now uncompromisingly rejected.

And as he did, he acted more or less consistently, notwithstanding a fairly lengthy period of office work, which stretched from about 1997 to 2000, by which time he'd performed in his final play for a long time.

He then made an attempt at launching a modest career as a session singer. And as such recorded a vocal in the style of chanson master Charles Trenet, which received some praise for its closeness to the original. In fact, so much so he was asked to record a second one in imitation of one of his favourite song stylists, Nat "King"Cole, which was rejected.

But while his session career floundered, his singing career was still in full swing, and he served as front man for a Jazz band for two years between 2000 and 2002. And yet when the latter folded, it was as if Runacles himself himself in a social sense.

But there was still some fight left in him. And in '03, he started taking himself seriously as a songwriter for the first time, before attempting to place some recently demoed songs with a music publishing company. But none were interested. So he turned to creative writing in early 2006. While at the same time, he set about recording a CD of popular standards, which finally saw the light of day in 2007. And while it received a rave review in the Musician's Union magazine the following year, it sold in pitifully small quantities.

But he'd achieved a degree of artistic stability nonetheless; and this was reflected in his church life, for towards the end of the 2010s, he tired of church hopping, and permanently settled in a Church of England fellowship in the south western suburbs of London.

And being both Evangelical and Charismatic, it was highly sought after, with up to four services taking place each Sunday...which meant Runacles could conceal himself within the congregation if he so chose.

And so it seemed he was definitively quieted...a bizarre state of affairs for one who'd once been among the most frenetically extrovert of souls. But if he found himself all run out...as had been the case all those years ago, when he collapsed by that muddy field in the Arcadian heart of England. Well, it was only a temporary situation in his mind, and one day he'd be in a position to quit the wilderness after so many years of languishment

And yet there'd be times when, looking back on his youth he'd often weep silently to himself in the dead of night at the end of yet another day spent doing really very little when he thought about it.

But he was being typically harsh with himself. For hermitic as he was, he was far from worthless. For instance, in his eyes, he'd seen many results from a powerful prayer ministry. And he continued to grow as a musician, planning a future for himself as a singer-songwriter despite being in the midst of late middle age. While he was able to make a modest living as a writer after more than five years of trying to set the world wide web on fire with his pen...and failing.

And there'd be times when certain pieces of quintessentially English pastoral music still had the power to evoke his strange and sudden flight, or rush of blood to the head, of over four decades ago. Such as Gerald Finzi's "A Severn Rhapsody", which bespeaks a passion for the Arcadian soul of England that verges on the ecstatic. And the same could be said for Elgar's "Elegy" which tended to convey to him a deep mournfulness silently existent beneath the picture perfect image of English privilege.

When he ran away from his college...like some kind of hysterical gymslip schoolgirl...just the once it was...to avoid being punished for something stupid he did. And it had been an utterly pointless exercise as it was the last day of term, but he just panicked and bolted, and kept on running...

And then there was a point he stopped, because he realised to his horror that he'd arrived back at his college. And he saw his mother's car. And it pained him to think what she'd been going through while he ran around the English countryside like some kind of demented faun, only to finish up collapsed by the side of a muddy field in the Arcadian heart of England.

And having become newly enmired, he despaired of ever being fully free again. But he searched for solutions on a constant basis. And he comforted himself with the thought that even if he failed to effect an escape, God was beside him, while four decades previously he had no faith to speak of, other than in the pre-eminence of might. For after all, is God's Grace not sufficient?

And he took courage from that fact, while continuing to plan for the time he'd find the strength to make good on the faith that had been placed in him by so many for so long. So when he looked back at memories of his youth, such as the time he ran away from his college on the last day of term without purpose or aim, it would be in peace not pain. And he might even return to the scene of his flight as if in atonement, and commune with the soul of his beloved England with a passion verging on the ecstatic, and then along with so many others, put the memory to rest for all time.
Chapter Two - The Coming of the Absaloms

Introduction

When it comes to the key events that helped to create the society that emerged in the American/Western World in the wake of the Second World War - arguably the most traumatic event in history - many would be inclined to cite the 1950s as the fulcrumic decade, and according to Charles Ealy, author of the article "Seeds of Change Sown in 1955", published in Nov. 2005 in The Dallas Morning News, that's especially true of its midpoint.

For all that, though, it's the mythic 1960s, with its Rock-Youth culture, and quasi-religious worship of sexual abandon and the use of mind-expanding drugs, that tends to be credited as the true decade of change, and with the reader's permission, I'd like to trace the evolution of the most revolutionary decade of the 20th Century, by briefly depicting the culture whence it sprang, and then - and at greater length - the decade that both preceded and birthed it, with special emphasis on its central year of '55.

The Coming of the Absaloms

Were they really so staid and conformist, those much treasured mom-and-apple-pie fifties? We've already established that they weren't, and that they didn't yield as if by magic to the wild, Dionysian 1960s...

The truth is that far from being a sudden, unexpected event, the post-war

cultural revolution, whose repercussions continue to be felt throughout a tragic broken West could boast historical roots reaching at least as far back as the European Enlightenment. Since that time, the Western World has been consistently assailed by tendencies hostile to its Judaeo-Christian moral fabric, and what happened in the 1960s was simply the culmination of many decades of activity on the part of revolutionaries and avant-gardists, especially since the First World War. Even Rock, a music which the celebrated American evangelist John MacArthur once described as having "a bombastic atonality and dissonance" was foreshadowed at its most experimental by the emancipation of the dissonant brought about by Classical composers of various Modernist schools.

Moving to the totemic year of '55, I begin with a day marked by an event which had a colossal if still largely unrecognised influence on the evolution of American and Western culture, that being the 7th of October, on which five major 20th Century figures, namely, Elijah Muhammad, RD Laing, Ulrike Meinhof, Oliver North and Vladimir Putin, attained the ages of 58, 28, 21, 14 and 3 respectively.

It was on that day that - at San Francisco's Six Gallery at 3119 Fillmore Street - about 150 people gathered to witness readings of poems by Allen Ginsberg, Phillip Whalen, Phillip Lamantia, Michael McClure and Gary Snyder.

All went on to be leading artists of the Beat Generation, a term which first saw the light of day in a 1952 article entitled "This is the Beat Generation", written for the New York Times by John Clellon Holmes, author of the proto-Beat novel "Go" (1952). Holmes had allegedly coined the term following conversations he'd had with Jack Kerouac in 1948 with regard to the disillusioned generation that had emerged in America in the wake of the Second World War.

Kerouac the self-styled "shy Canuck" from Lowell, Massachusetts, also attended this epochal clarion cry to the counterculture, but didn't read, preferring to cheerlead instead in a state of ecstatic inebriation. However, his roman à clef "On the Road" (1957) which centres on the mid-century wanderings he undertook in America and Mexico - largely with his muse and close friend Neal Cassady - remains Beat's defining work.

After the reading, the Beat movement, which had existed in embryonic form since about 1944, left the underground to become an international craze, with the Beatnik taking his place as a universally recognised icon with his beret, goatee beard, turtle-neck sweater and sandals.

'55 was also the year in which Rock and Roll assaulted the mainstream thanks to hits by Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard and others, although it's "The Blackboard Jungle", which, released on the 20th of March, is widely credited with igniting the Rock' n' Roll revolution, indeed late 20th Century teenage rebellion as a whole. It did so by featuring Bill Haley & His Comets' "Rock Around the Clock", over the film's opening credits. Originally a rather conventional blues-based song recorded by Sonny Dae and his Knights, Haley's version, which was remarkable for its earth-shaking sense of urgency, ensured the world would never be the same after it.

In August of the year, Sun Records released a long playing record entitled "Elvis Presley, Scotty and Bill", featuring the so-called King of the Western Bop who went on to become Rock's single most influential figure apart from the Beatles.

On the 30th of September, James Dean died in hospital following a motor accident aged 23 after having made only three films, the greatest of which, Nicholas Ray's "Rebel Without a Cause" emerged about a month afterwards. It could be said to be the motion picture industry's defining elegy to the sensitivity and rebelliousness of youth, with Dean its most beautiful and tortured icon ever. As such his image has never dated, nor been surpassed. The modern cult of youth was born in the mid 1950s.

However, Dean himself had been powerfully influenced by Montgomery

Clift and Marlon Brando, arguably the two foremost pioneers of the Stanislavski Method within the Motion Picture industry, who'd honed their craft in the late '40s at the celebrated Actor's Studio in New York City. The screen personas of Clift, Brando and Dean, in which vulnerability and defiance were fused to luminously magnetic effect served as prototypes of the neurotic and narcissistic individualism that went on to exert such a seismic influence on the evolution of the sixties counterculture in era-defining movies such as George Stevens' "A Place in the Sun" (1951), Stanley Kramer's "The Wild One" (1953), and Elia Kazan's "East of Eden" (1954).

Their mixture of incandescent beauty and sullen defiance was hardly new though, having been a feature of Romantic rebels again and again at least since the heyday of Byron and Shelley; and it could be said that their true spiritual ancestor was none other than King David's much loved yet fatally rebellious son Absalom, of whom it was written in 2 Samuel 14:25: "But in all Israel there was none to be so much praised as Absalom for his beauty: from the sole of his foot even to the crown of his head there was no blemish in him."

Again and again, 1955 is cited by cultural commentators as the year in which things started to change in America and the West. When it comes to Britain, there seems to be no doubt that within the space of a mere two generations, a spectacular rise in criminal violence from the low rates of at least the previous two centuries, occurred from about 1955. This same rise coincided with increasingly large-scale denigration of such traditionally sanctified Christian institutions as marriage, pre-marital purity and the two-parent family, which had always been seen as the enemy by various revolutionary tendencies within art and politics, while being respected by the majority, and affected every industrial nation apart from Japan.

As in Britain, so in the US, but given America's far greater size and complexity, the situation has of necessity been more extreme. Take a remarkable article written for the Fall/Autumn 1955 edition of the Trotskyist Fourth International entitled "Youth in a Delinquent Society":

Its author, one Joyce Cowley, was at pains to emphasize the general conformity of American youth in the mid 1950s, while also making it clear that cautious conservatism was far from being the total picture, and that there'd been a sharp rise in crime since the onset of the decade. She also stated something to the effect that the nature of the crimes committed during this period were of a shocking gravity that had been relatively uncommon in the US in more recent decades. To support her point, she alluded to various phenomena which are all too familiar to those of us who came to maturity in the 60s and beyond, including the abuse of narcotics, and acts of gratuitous cruelty and violence, from teen gang rumbles to the senseless sacrifice of innocents.

But does all this mean that civilisation, not just in the US and the West, but as a whole, is irrevocably doomed? Many Christians are indeed of the belief that these are the final days prior to the return of the Lord, of which He speaks in Matthew 24:37: "But as the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the Son of Man be." They may indeed be right, and there are many indications that this is the case. However, in the verse immediately preceding the one just quoted, Jesus makes it clear that when it comes to the precise day of the Second Coming, only God the Father knows: "But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only."

Thence, it may well be that if the nations of the West return to the Judaeo-Christian values on which they were founded, not half-heartedly...but with the kind of uncompromising passion for God that provoked the great revivals of history, like prodigals, broken and contrite in spirit, our great civilisation may yet survive.
Chapter Three – Weimar Shadow of Future Things

Introduction

Many cultures have made monumental contributions to the development of our great Western Judaeo-Christian civilisation, not least that of Germany, one of the most purely artistic, poetic, musical and spiritual nations in modern history. Yet it could be said that the greatest and most blessed nations are those most liable to decadence, a word which seems to seems to suggest both moral decline and a dark, sinister glamour; and few societies have been more associated with this latter quality than that of Germany between the wars, and that's especially true of its then capital city of Berlin.

The Weimar era, which came into being in 1919 and lasted until Hitler's ascent to the Chancellorship in 1933, has been likened by some cultural critics to the contemporary West.

Indeed, it could be said that much of what's happened to the West since the end of the second world war was to some degree presaged by the Berlin of the 1920s, familiar to millions through Bob Fosse's movie version of the Kander and Ebb musical "Cabaret", itself a descendant of one of Christopher Isherwood's two Berlin stories, "Goodbye to Berlin", penned in 1933, but referring to incidents that took place between six to eight years earlier.

Needless to say, the Weimar era was no isolated historical instance of a society in decline, having been significantly shaped by the culture which birthed it.

Germany was of course the birthplace of Luther and the Great Protestant Reformation that has exerted such a monumental influence on the evolution of Biblical Christianity. At the same time, by the dawn of the Weimar Republic in 1919, it had long been associated with myriad revolutionary and esoteric ideas.

For example, more than any other nation in the late 18th and early 19th Century, Germany had played host to Higher Criticism, a school of Biblical criticism which flagrantly attacked the authenticity of the Scriptures. Moreover, late 19th century Europe had witnessed a significant occult revival and of all its great nations, it was arguably Germany that had been most affected by this, even more so perhaps than France and Britain, and to the obvious detriment of Biblical Christianity, even while modernity thrived.

Thence, the legendary hedonism of the so-called Golden Twenties could be said to have arisen as much - if not more - from her spiritual legacy as the more immediate source of a long and terrible war and its aftermath, but it's this latter that we turn to now.

Weimar Shadow of Future Things

Despite the fact that the bona fide Weimar era was set to dawn in all its gaudy decadent glory in early 1923, Germany was yet a terribly ravaged and traumatised land as a result of a long series of crises leading back to the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm III and military defeat in the First World War.

Following on from the armistice, she was subject to still more bloody conflict in the shape of the German Revolution, which culminated in the Spartacist Uprising of January 1919, during which the Spartacist League and other leftist factions rose up in revolt in Berlin, only to be put down by paramilitary Freikorps consisting of volunteer soldiers, many of them on the extreme right.

The liberal democratic Weimar Republic was established soon afterwards, but Germany's post-war miseries had only just begun. During the debates in Weimar, a Soviet Republic was declared in Munich which was crushed by the Freikorps, resulting in the proliferation of far right movements throughout Bavaria. One of these was the German Worker's Party, and several of its key founding members went on to exert a powerful influence on a young war hero by the name of Corporal Adolf Hitler with their shadowy brand of nationalism.

To further compound the nation's woes, The Treaty of Versailles was signed on the 28th of June 1919. Of its many provisions, one of the most vital required her to accept sole responsibility for causing the war and so to agree to drastic military restrictions, as well as a good many territorial concessions including the surrendering of all her overseas colonies. She also had to pay heavy war reparations, the total cost of which came to 132 billion marks, or £6.6 billion.

The following month, while still in the army, Hitler was sent as a police spy by German Army Intelligence to infiltrate the ranks of the previously mentioned German Worker's party in the mistaken belief that it was Socialist in ideology.

The German currency was relatively stable during the first half of this year, but May brought the harsh London Ultimatum, which demanded reparations paid in gold or foreign currency, as well as 26% of the value of Germany's foreign exports. Hyper-inflation followed soon afterwards, which resulted in the Mark becoming all but worthless. By January 1923, defaults on payments had grown so serious that French and Belgian forces felt compelled to invade the heavily industrialised Ruhr Valley close to the Franco-German border, where they set about securing reparations in the shape of coal and other commodities.

Many Germans, including skilled workers, started working for the bare minimum necessary for the sustenance of life, as the nation started to become increasingly afflicted by unemployment, poverty, hunger, and even malnutrition, leading to widespread bitter unrest and resentment, one of whose expressions was the infamous Beer Hall Putsch of 8-9 November 1923. This was an attempt by Hitler's National German Workers Party, including paramilitary storm troopers under the leadership of Ernst Röhm, as well as future leading Nazis, Hess, Göring and Rosenberg, at a revolution modelled on the Fascist March on Rome of the previous October. Of all the putschists, it was World War I hero General Ludendorff who demonstrated the greatest courage under fire, but he was to subsequently disown Hitler. As to the latter, he spent just a little over a month in Landsberg Prison after the putsch was decisively put down by the Army, where he dictated his memoirs, "Mein Kampf" to his friend and fellow inmate Rudolf Hess.

Somehow, however, total economic collapse was halted under the chancellorship of Gustav Streseman - who was both charismatic and democratic, at a time when such politicians were in desperate need in Germany - by the replacement of the worthless Papiermark with the new Rentenmark, which was introduced on the 19th of November 1923. Streseman had earlier sought peace with Germany's enemies by calling off all passive resistance of striking German workers in the Ruhr Valley, an act which while having a beneficial effect on the economy, served also to fan the flames of nationalist rage. Millions of middle class Germans had been left ruined and embittered by the period of hyperinflation, with the result that they became susceptible to extreme right wing propaganda, while many workers turned to Communism.

For the time being, though, Germany - and specifically Berlin - became the supreme world epicentre of Modernism, of creative and intellectual foment not just in the fields of literature, architecture, music, dance, drama, cinema, and the visual arts, but of science as well. While she'd been a cradle of the Modern Impulse for centuries - a distinction she shared with several other Western nations including her closest European intimates, France and Britain - it could be argued that never before had she been quite so fiercely inclined in a cultural sense towards the radical and left-leaning, the experimental, the iconoclastic, the frankly scandalous, nor on so large a scale, as in the Weimar era.

Artistic innovation wildly thrived in Berlin in the years 1924-'29 in the shape of, among other phenomena, the painters of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement, such as Beckmann, Dix and Grosz, Berg's ground-breaking opera "Wozzek" (1925), as well as the staccato cabaret-style music of Kurt Weill, Fritz Lang's dystopian "Metropolis" (1927), the spectacles of cabaret queen Anita Berber and her enigmatic companion Sebastian Droste, and so on. The same applies to that lost city's notorious sexual liberalism, which still has the power to shock as seen in pictorial and photographic depictions of her cabarets and night clubs in which license and intoxication flourished unabated.

So much of what has become familiar to the West and beyond in the last half-century, from the philosophies that have dominated our academia for decades, such as Critical Theory and Deconstruction, all the way to the theatre of outrage that is the essence of Rock music pre-existed in some form in the Golden Twenties. But beneath the glittering carapace she carried within her the seeds of her own ruin, for despite the genius that flourished alongside the licentiousness, she was operating largely in defiance of the Judaeo-Christian moral values that have long formed the basis of Western society.

Given that several other European and American cities were hardly less hysterically dissolute than Berlin, it's little wonder that this key Modernist decade has been described by some critics as the beginning of the end of Western civilisation. In its wake came the Great Depression, the ineffable horrors of the Second World War, and the collapse of the greatest empire the world has ever seen, all of which were succeeded in turn by the dawning of the Rock and Roll era with its quasi-religious exaltation of youth...rebellion...sexual libertinism... and the universal use of mind expanding drugs.

Since the inception of this Social Revolution, many of its core values have supplanted the old traditional Judaeo-Christian ones - once damned as Bourgeois by artistic and political rebels - within the Western cultural mainstream. For some this might beg the question: Could a time be coming when the disasters that befell the once glorious Weimar Republic will appear to those of us still alive in the contemporary West to be little more than a dress rehearsal in comparison? For my part, I hope this will not be the case, but needless to say the future's not in my hands.
Chapter Four – Adversary and the Birth of the Beats

It would be false, indeed absurd, to suggest that the Counterculture of the 1960s was a unique historical event devoid of precedents and precursors. In fact, it was merely the latest in a long line of alternative societies that can be traced at least as far back as the 18th Century. In other words, by the time of the Hippie revolution, much of the groundwork had already been done, not least during the two immediate post-war decades.

During this brief 20-year period, the Existentialists, Lettrists and Beats became international icons of revolt... Britain's first major youth cult surfaced in the shape of the Edwardians or Teddy Boys...a cinema of youthful discontent flourished as never before, fuelling a desire among many young people to be identified as rebels and wild ones...and Rock and Roll took over the world with Elvis Presley as its first true superstar. But it was the Beats who were the true precursors of the Hippies.

Few today are aware of the existence of the Lettrists, that scandalous band of avant garde agitators who thrived in post-war Paris under the leadership of Isidore Isou, but their contemporaries the Beats continue to enjoy an exceptionally high profile. This may be the result of Paris ceding her time-honoured role as the world epicentre of the avant garde to New York City in the late 1940s, but whatever the truth, the Lettrists have been all but forgotten while the Beats have never been hotter.

It had been earlier in the decade...around 1943, in fact...that a disparate group of would-be poets and authors of Bohemian inclination had coalesced around a brilliant angel-faced young Columbia University undergraduate by the name of Lucien Carr. The first to gravitate towards Carr was a fellow Columbia student from nearby New Jersey by the name of Allen Ginsberg. Through Carr, Ginsberg was introduced to Arthur Rimbaud, the quintessential post-Romantic bad boy poet whose terrible yet beautiful visionary verse and frenzied rebellious rage has exerted an influence on the development of the adversary culture of the post-Romantic West that is second to none or close to it. Rimbaud went on to significantly inform the evolution of Ginsberg's own poetic vision.

Also through Carr, the bookish-looking poet met the boyfriend of future Beat biographer Edie Parker, who was another of Carr's Columbia friends. This was Jean-Louis Kerouac, known as Jack, who, from a French Canadian family from Lowell, Massachusetts, had until recently been a Football player of enormous promise. But soon after gaining a scholarship to Columbia, things had started to go awry for him.

First, he cracked his tibia during a game, and then repeatedly clashed with the coach Lou Little whom he accused of benching him to excess. The upshot was that he left Columbia in his sophomore year, and ended up drifting in New York City, where he met the two men - both through Lucien Carr - with whom he went on to form the nucleus of the Beat Generation, these being the aforesaid Ginsberg, and a friend of Carr's from St Louis, the patrician William Seward Burroughs.

In 1957, Kerouac emerged as the movement's undisputed leader with the publication of his second novel "On the Road", a fictionalised account of the cross-country wanderings he undertook between 1947 and 1950 with his close friend Neil Cassady...famously named Dean Moriarty in the novel.

Cassady, who bore a striking resemblance to the iconic movie star Paul Newman, was the son of an alcoholic whose early life had included the early loss of his mother, a childhood spent on Denver's skid row, a spell in reform school, and eleven months imprisonment for theft. So while Kerouac was the genius behind Beat's defining work, Cassady provided the inspiration as the Beat par excellence.

Oddly perhaps, Lucien Carr himself never went on to write anything of note, preferring to father a family and pursue a long career with the venerable news agency United Press International. It fell to his son Caleb, author of "The Alienist", "The Angel of Darkness"," Casing the Promised Land", "Killing Time" and "The Italian Secretary" among other works to be the novelist of the family...but his place in literary history is secure. As Allen Ginsberg once put it, "Lou was the glue" of the entire Beat Generation, itself

the most significant avant garde movement of the 20th Century, as the primary impulse behind the '60s Counterculture.

It was in about '64 , in fact, that Beat started to shift imperceptibly into the Hippie movement.

'64 was also the year the Beatles conquered America...but away from the mainstream, a certain Colorado farmer's son and former Stanford University student called Ken Kesey set off on his legendary cross-country trip from California to New York on a psychedelic school bus he named Furthur, with one Neil Cassady doing most of the driving. He did so in the company of a band of counterculture pioneers, writers, artists, students &c., known as the Merrie Pranksters. Once in the Big Apple, they met up with the New York Beats including Jack Kerouac who, deeply patriotic and a devout Catholic at heart, was allegedly repelled by the Pranksters' outlandish dress and appearance, and took no part in the coming psychedelic revolution, unlike Allen Ginsberg, who embraced it wholeheartedly.

The first of the infamous Acid Tests occurred a short time later in 1965, and during these LSD-fuelled events, there'd be slide and/or light shows and experiments with cutting edge sound technology, and bands such as the Warlocks - later the Grateful Dead - or Kesey's own Psychedelic Symphonette would regale the crowds with proto-psychedelic Rock.

Two years later, the Hippie, wild child of the Beat Generation, became an international media obsession, before setting about the piecemeal infiltration of mainstream society.

This slow co-option by the mainstream of the one-time values of the adversary culture could be said to be the ultimate triumph of the Beat Generation, and all the avant gardes that preceded her...but were Kerouac alive today...you can't help but think he might be weeping at the thought of it.

For it's as if he came to deeply regret the adversary culture he'd helped to foment; and yet felt powerless to control. And, instead of forgiving himself, effectuated a flight into the alcoholism that ultimately led to his dying at his mother's home from cirrhosis of the liver at just 47 years old.

And while he was ten years older than his hero Thomas Wolfe, another in a long line of writers of great and original genius destroyed by the thirsty muse, he was yet far too young to suffer such a terrible and painful death. While any Christian worthy of the name must surely weep at the thought of any sorrow that leads not to repentance and salvation, but the endless night of fathomless desperation.

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Chapter Five – From Avant Garde to Global Village

Introduction

It could justifiably be stated that we are currently living in a Western World whose moral world view owes much to values which until recently were associated with progressives operating within the arts, politics, philosophy, religion etc., and that this morality remains more or less constant, affecting everything from top to bottom in our society, despite sporadic shifts of power from the political left to the right. At the same time, traditional morality – founded on the West's Judaeo-Christian heritage – is being increasingly seen as harsh and exclusivist, where once it held almost total sway.

In order to come to some sort of conclusion as to how this situation came about, as good a starting point as any would be the early 19th Century, at a time when the Romantic Movement was birthing the concept of an artistic avant-garde on the cutting edge of innovation, not just in terms of creativity, but societal change.

Plausibly, the avant-garde worldview was the scion of a greater revolutionary spirit that had been impacting the West at least since the dawn of the Enlightenment, the great European move towards greater Rationalism regarding the key issues of life. The Age of Reason began towards the end of the 18th Century, lasting until about 1789, the year of the French Revolution, which was one if its earliest fruits.

Many theories exist as to what - or who - was the main driving force behind this spirit, but it's not the aim of this essay to attempt to unmask these, so much as to trace the course of the avant-garde throughout history, and so speculate on how so humble a tendency might ultimately have come to alter the entire fabric of Western civilisation through a process known as Modernism.

From Avant Garde to Global Village

It may have been the great English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley who, by asserting that "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world", was the first major artist to give expression to the concept of an avant-garde on the cutting edge of creative innovation. That said, the first actual use of the term in an artistic rather than military sense was probably made by the French socialist philosopher Henri de Saint-Simon in 1825 in his "Opinions Littéraires, Philosophiques et Industrielles" (1).

Whatever the truth, it's a recent development, fostered by the early, and especially German and English, Romantics, whose influence on the development of the notion of the Artist as Rebel cannot be underestimated. Yet, it found its first spiritual home in post-revolutionary Paris...which begs the question, why Paris?

It's impossible to say for certain of course, but what is beyond dispute is that of all the nations of Europe, few could lay greater claim to national genius than France...and that this genius is most encapsulated in her ever-enchanting capital city.

More particularly, though, by the 1830s, and following a long series of national traumas including the Revolutionary War itself, Paris had become the leading world incubator of the most charismatic originality of thought and behaviour. It was a uniqueness, moreover, that has tended ever since to verge on the downright bizarre when manifested by certain of her most gifted citizens, such as her celebrated poètes maudits (2), who have long been the ultimate apostles of the avant-garde.

It could be said that the first generation of these were numbered among the young men who – in the wake of the July Revolution of 1830 - congregated about such wild and brilliant youth as Pétrus Borel and Théophile Gautier, two writers of the so-called frenetic school of late Romantics. They did so with the purpose of enforcing the Romantic worldview in the face of widespread censure on the part of the despised respectable middle classes.

To the Gautier of the mid 1830s, this censure constituted a veritable Christian moral resurgence, which he rails against in the notorious preface to his 1836 novel "Mademoiselle de Maupin", the first known manifesto of the doctrine of Art for Art's Sake. Art in other words, as a religion in its own right.

These seminal avant-gardists have become known as the Bouzingos (3), although little distinguished them from the earlier Jeunes-France (4). They were originally members of a Romantic clique known as le Petit Cénacle (5) - allegedly founded by the sculptor Jehan du Seigneur, with Borel rapidly emerging as leader – whose role in the infamous Battle of Hernani at the Comédie Francaise theatre in February 1830 was paramount.

This took place on the opening night of Hugo's play, "Hernani", and was marked by violent scenes involving defenders of the Classical tradition, and Hugo's supporters, who flaunted long hair and flamboyant costumes in defiance of everything the former held dear. In addition to Gautier, Borel and Seigneur, they included Gérard de Nerval, Philothée O'Neddy and Augustus MacKeat, all of whom went on to be numbered among the Jeunes-France.

According to one theory, while the first Bouzingos were a band of political agitators who took part in the July Revolution in wide-brimmed leather hats, their artistic counterparts were wrongly named by the press following a night of riotous boozing which saw some of them end up in prison for the night. They too embraced radical political views, because for the most part, the artistic cutting edge has inclined to the left, while containing an ultra-conservative element.

Needless to say, perhaps, they owed an enormous debt to the earlier English and German Romantics, who did so much to promote the myth of the artist as tormented genius ever-existent on the fringes of respectable society, a Bohemian in others words. Akin to the Bohemian was the Dandy, and of the poètes maudits of mid 19th Century Paris, several were both Bohemians and Dandies, depending on their circumstances at the time. They included Charles Baudelaire, whose essay "Le Dandy" (1863) is one of the defining works on the subject.

The great Parisian Bohemias of the 19th Century were the Left Bank of the Seine as a whole - including the Quartier Latin and Montparnasse - and Montmartre, which exploded on an international scale towards the century's end, while the first literary work to officially celebrate the Bohemian way of life was Henri Murger's "Scenes de la Vie de Bohème"(6) (1851). It went on to form the basis of Puccini's opera "La Bohème" (1896), and the contemporary musical comedy, "Rent" (1996). Later Bohemias included London's Chelsea, and New York's Greenwich Village, but Paris remains Bohemia's true and eternal spiritual capital.

The first waves of the avant-garde, and the Bohemias in which they thrived, ultimately produced the Decadent movement of the 1870s and '80s, and a multitude of minor sects, such as the Zutistes of the early '70s, which for a time included Verlaine and Rimbaud, and the later Hirsutes and Hydropathes, and finally, the great Symbolist Movement in the arts.

However, the spirit of the avant-garde could be said to have triumphed as never before in the shape of the massively influential and truly international artistic and cultural phenomenon known as Modernism.

In an artistic sense, she existed at her point of maximum intensity from about 1890 to 1930, producing such earth-shaking works as Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" (1913), T.S Eliot's "The Waste Land" (1922) and James Joyce's "Ulysses" (1922). Mention must also be made of such Modernist schools as the previously mentioned Symbolism, as well as Expressionism, Futurism, Dadaism and Surrealism. It could be said that she represented the triumph of the avant-garde, anticipating her future at the very heart of the cultural mainstream.

Furthermore, whenever Modernism is discussed with regard to the arts, parallel iconoclastic developments by figures such as Marx in politics, Nietzsche in philosophy, Freud in psychology and Darwin in science must be taken into consideration. They all served to fuel the Modernist agenda, which - according to certain cultural critics – is intrinsically antichristian...and there is substance to their argument, although several major Modernist figures have been professing Christians.

Taking things further, it could be said that rather than emerging from the avant-garde, Modernism actually predated it, that is, as a spirit rather than a movement as such, having roots further back into the depths of Western history, beyond the Age of Reason, to the Renaissance and its revival of Classical Antiquity.

She seemed to undergo a falling away in terms of intensity in the years leading up to the Second World War, while the immediate post-war age brought renewed activity through the Existentialists and Lettrists of Paris, but more especially through the Beat Generation born in her new world epicentre of New York City.

Together, they helped to usher in what could be called an age of mass-modernism, although they weren't operating alone, because by the early '50s, the Modern had formed a strong alliance with the popular arts. In fact, this had occurred some half century earlier with the genesis of Pop Culture, which gave rise to the cinema, and one of the first true Pop music genres in the shape of Ragtime. However, these were minor developments in comparison to the cataclysmic events of the '60s.

The single most powerful weapon in the Modernist armoury has been Pop Culture, and in terms of its evolution, the influence of the Beat Generation was enormous. That is especially true of its role as the begetter of the Hippie uprising, which took place between about 1965, with San Francisco as its centrifugal city, and 1967 when it peaked, before ceding to the year of revolutions, which was 1968.

One of the keynotes of late Modernism and the social revolution it provoked, most notably in the 1960s, has been the progressive acceptance by mass culture of beliefs once seen as the preserve of Bohemians and avant-gardists, the most obvious being the so-called "free love" once promoted so forcefully by angel-faced atheist Percy Bysshe Shelley.

This process was considerably facilitated by the Rock revolution which, after having begun around 1955-'56, segued into the sentimental Pop music that reached its apogee with the Beatles. It then underwent a further quickening at the hands of harder, earthier bands such as those of the first British Blues boom; and so evolve into Rock pure and simple.

By the end of the '60s, Rock had become a truly versatile music, running the gamut from the most infantile hit parade ditties to musically and lyrically complex compositions owing as much to Classical music and Jazz as Rock and Roll. As such, it was an international language, with the power to disseminate values hostile to traditional Western morality as no other artistic movement before it, while the most powerful Rock stars attained – if only fleetingly - through popular consumer culture a degree of influence that previous generations of innovative artists operating within high culture could only dream of.

Yet, as the ultimate manifestation of mass-modernism, Rock has not functioned alone; in fact, from the outset, it was impelled by the cinema of youthful discontent of the early 1950s, whose magnetic icons, including Monty Clift, Marlon Brando and James Dean, could be said to have been Rock stars before their time. Furthermore, as the Rock revolution proceeded apace throughout the '70s, it was buttressed and enabled by a cinema finally freed from the shackles of the Motion Picture Production Code, which had been in force since 1930 but which was finally jettisoned in 1967, after at least a decade of declining efficacy.

At some point, it seems that Modernism's unrelenting drive towards permanent societal change reached a logical conclusion. Indeed, once the classic values of the avant-garde had begun to wholly dominate the cultural mainstream, the West entered a Postmodern phase. When this occurred is open to conjecture, but 1980 has been put forward as a likely date. Certainly, after 1980, it became impossible for artists to épater le bourgeois (7) as they'd once done, and even when they strained to shock a public all but impervious to outrage, originality eluded them. Others have insisted Postmodernism began as early as 1950, on the eve of the television and Pop Music revolutions.

What is certain is that things have changed beyond all measure in the West in the last half century or so to the extent that in the 2010s, the age-old dream of political and artistic radicals, and their allies within the realms of religion, philosophy, psychology, science etc., of a world united by humanitarian values could be closer to becoming a reality than has ever been possible up to this point in time. In the meantime, the old world, the Judaeo-Christian one bound by love of God, love of country, and love of family, has to all intents and purposes been cast out into the wilderness, as if there can be no place for its ancient certainties in the paradise about to be born.

Notes: 1) "Literary, Philosophical and Industrial Opinions" 2) Accursed Poets 3) Also known as Bousingos and Bousingots 4) Young- France 5) Little Cenacle 6) "Scenes of Bohemian Life" 7) Scandalise the Bourgeoisie.

### Book Two – Your Lethal Life and Other Versified Leftovers

1. It Wasn't So Long Ago

I shaped a heart outside her door

With the matches I'd procured

We had our season in the sun

Our romance when we were young

It wasn't so long ago

A new time may have grown

And so many tears have flown

But it wasn't so long ago

A melody plays from time gone by

All the years between them fly

I'm back in her tender arms once again

Embracing in the summer rain

It wasn't so long ago

A new time may have grown

And so many tears have flown

But it wasn't so long ago

Time rushes by like a hurricane

And leaves so much chaos in its wake

Run to the one you love tonight

Say something tender

Find it in your heart

Don't wait too long

Two lovers kissed on a summer morn

And a lifetime love was born

A love that makes a man a king

And a maid's heart start to sing

It wasn't so long ago

A new time may have grown

And so many tears have flown

But it wasn't so long ago

2. (Your Beautiful) Lethal Life

Shooting star

With a quicksilver mind

You deserve to go so far

Can't someone stop you

Before you ruin your soul

With irreversible harm?

Drinking all day

Every single day

Out of your head on booze

Is this the life

Is this the way

A gifted child should choose?

Your beautiful lethal life

My friend

Has sent you around the bend

Your foolish defiant

Dionysian dance

Could soon be at an end

But you don't care

Do you shooting star

As you drift in your blissful dream

3. Thoughts of a Forlorn Flâneur

Early days as a flâneur

I recall the couple

On the Métro

When I was still innocent

Of its labyrinthine complexities

Slim pretty white girl

Clad head to toe

In new blue denim

Wistfully smiling

While her muscular black beau

Stared straight through me

With fathomless, fulgorous orbs

And one of them spoke

(Almost in a whisper):

"Qu'est-ce-que t'en pense?"

Then it dawned on me...

The slender young Parisienne

With the distant desirous eyes

Was no less male than I

Being screamed at in Pigalle

And then howled at again

By some kind of wild-eyed

Drifter who told me to go

To the Bois de Boulogne to seek

What he clearly saw as my destiny

Getting soused in Les Halles

With Sara

Who'd just seen Dillon as

Rusty James

And was walking around in a daze

Sara again with Jade

At the Caveau de la Huchette

Cash squandered

On a cheap gold-plated toothbrush

Portrait sketched at the Place de Tertre

Paperback books

By Symbolist poets

Second hand volumes

By Trakl and Delève

And a blouson noir from

The Marché de Puces

At the Porte de Clignancourt

Métro taken to Montparnasse

Where I slowly sipped

A demi-blonde

In one of those brasseries

(Perhaps)

Immortalised by Brassai

Bewhiskered loup de mer

In a naval officer's cap,

His table bestrewn

With empty wine bottles

And cigarette butts,

Repeatedly screeched the name

"Phillippe" until a bartender

With patent leather hair,

Filled his wineglass to the brim,

With a mock-obsequious

"Voilà, mon Capitaine!"

I cut into the Rue de Bac,

Traversed the Pont Royal,

Briefly beheld

Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois,

With its gothic tower,

Constructed only latterly,

In order that

The 6th Century church

Might complement

The style of the remainder

Of the 1er Arrondissement

Before steering for the

Place de Châtelet,

And onwards...les Halles!

4. Wicked Cahoots

When he made

his first personal appearance

in the dirty alley

on someone else's rusty bike,

screaming along

in a cloud of dust

it rendered us all

speechless and motionless.

But I was amazed

that despite his grey-faced surliness,

he was very affable with us...

the bully with a naive

and sentimental heart.

He was so happy

to hear that I liked his dad

or that my mum liked him

and he was welcome

to come to tea

with us at five twenty five...

Our "adventures" were spectacular:

chasing after other bikesters,

screaming at the top

of our lungs

into blocks of flats

and then running

as our echoed waves of terror

blended with incoherent threats...

"I'll call the Police, I'll..."

Wicked cahoots.

5. The Woodville Hall Soul Boys

Soon after I'd paid

My sixty

0r seventy pence,

I found myself

In what I thought

Was a miniature London.

I saw girls

In chandelier earrings,

In stiletto heels,

Wearing evening

Dresses,

Which contrasted with

The bizarre

Hair colours

They favoured:

Jet black

0r bleach blonde,

With flashes of

Red, Purple

0r green.

Some wore large

Bow ties,

Others unceremoniously

Hanged

Their school ties

Round their

Necks.

Eye make-up

Was exaggerated.

The boys all had

Short hair,

Wore mohair sweaters,

Thin ties,

Baggy,

Peg-top trousers

And winklepicker shoes.

A band playing

Raw street rock

At a frantic speed

Came to a sudden,

Violent climax...

Melodic, rhythmic,

Highly danceable

Soul music

Was now beginning

To fill the hall,

With another group

0f short-haired youths...

Smoother, more elegant,

Less menacing

Than the previous ones.

These well-dressed

Street boys

Wore well-pressed pegs

0f red or blue...

They pirouetted

And posed...

Pirouetted and posed.

6. Spark of Youth Long Gone

Two days ago, I decided

To realise

Some cherished memories

Of my beloved little pueblo;

So I drank about five glasses

Of Monteviejo

In preparation for

The rediscovery of

The town of my heart.

Firstly, I sat in the bar

Where I used to meet

All my friends,

And was assaulted

By the prices of the drinks

And the volume of the music.

I searched the place

With my eyes

For the innocence and laughter

Of yesteryear, but in vain...

The young people are forced

Into tight little groups

So atmosphere

Is ponderous and alienating.

Where is the fun?

The wild and foolish socialising?

The comic local music?

All gone. I could cry.

Oh, these nerves, this living death.

I am so full of fear,

Lethargy and fury

I can hardly function.

There's a lack of innocence

Of simplicity

And is this change

From deep within me?

The freedom,

The spark of youth

Is gone

Or have I merely lost it?

Sophistication spoils

The city ravages

Senses refined

By knowledge and wine.

7. Some Perverse Will

I'm a restless man

I am never

Still

I'm always spurred on

By some perverse

Will

The grass is never

Green

No peace here

To find

Some demon

Of motion's

At work within my

Mind

No bed is too soft

That I won't

Abandon

It's sweet calm

And comfort

For a softer

One

I'm a restless man

I am never

Still

I'm always spurred on

By some perverse will.

8. London as the Lieu

Until recently, I had the impression

Of decaying

Along with the moral standards

Of contemporary Europe

With London as the lieu

To which all autoroutes lead.

In my room, I was surrounded

By debris

Of my existence,

Lacking the will even to clear

The carpet, whose colour,

Incidentally I came to forget.

I ceaselessly tampered with my hair,

Growing it long,

Having it cropped, hennaing it red,

Dyeing it blue-black, bleaching it near-white;

It fell out in bunches,

Dessicated and exhausted.

My face grew sallow and haggard,

With bloodshot, inflamed,

Glazed, blue-ringed orbs

And bitten, bloated, ravaged lips.

My body lost its athletic aspect,

And became shapeless and emaciated.

9. Lone Birthday Boy Dancing

Yesterday for my birthday,

I started off

with a bottle of wine...

I took the train

into town...

I had half a bitter

at the Cafe de Piaf

in Waterloo...

I went to work

for a couple of hours or so;

I had a pint after work;

I went for an audition;

after the audition,

I had another pint

and a half;

I had another half,

before meeting my mates,

for my b'day celebrations;

we had a pint together;

we went into

the night club,

where we had champagne

(I had three glasses);

I had a further

glass of vino,

by which time,

I was so gone

that I drew an audience

of about thirty

by performing a solo

dancing spot

in the middle

of the disco floor...

We all piled off to the pub

after that,

where I had another drink

(I can't remember

what it was)...

I then made my way home,

took the bus from Surbiton,

but ended up

in the wilds of Surrey;

I took another bus home,

and watched some telly

and had something to eat

before crashing out...

I really, really enjoyed

the eve, but today,

I've been walking around

I've had only one drink today,

an early morning

restorative effort;

I spent the day working,

then I went to a bookshop,

where, like a monk,

I go for a day's

drying out session...

Drying out is really awful;

you jump at every shadow;

you feel dizzy,

you notice everything;

very often,

I don't follow through...

10. All Through the Ages

All through the ages

I have faithfully waited

Now I'm ready

For you

To make this dream come true

All through the ages

I have faithfully prayed

You'd come and rescue me

You've been

So far away

All through the ages

I have faithfully kept

Myself so pure for you

Except a crush or two...

All through the ages

I have faithfully waited

Now I'm ready

For you

To make this dream come true.

11. Time Travel

Time Travel's set me free

And sunk its

Sharpest hooks in me

In disguise as a young man

In the city

But the bright young lights

No longer belong to me

I'm not a London man

I'm just a carbon copy

Doing some travelling

Time Travel's set me free

And sunk its

Sharpest hooks in me

Seeing faces that I knew in '77

When I was young

And in love with London town

But please don't ask me

Where those thirty years

Have flown to

They've just gone travelling.

Time Travel's set me free

And sunk its

Sharpest hooks in me

Lady, though your sweetness

Is such a blessing

Tender angel

Please don't lose your heart to me

For I'm a visitor

From a distant generation

Doing some travelling

Time Travel's set me free

And sunk its

Sharpest hooks in me

12. Toilers of the Sea

Come away with me

To toil upon the sea

Come away and see

How sweet sea life can be

I'll sing "Bonny Dundee"

Off the coast of Old Guernsey

You and me,

Are toilers of the sea, toilers of the sea.

Help me put that wrecked

Romance away from me

Help me understand

How it was lost at sea

It wasn't destined to be

She belonged to another not me

So I let them be

Whatever will be will be

For the salty old likes of me

For toilers of the sea, for toilers of the sea.

I can stand it if you're

There with me

For the solitary life at sea

Is enough to make you sea crazy

With the whales and gulls for company

We can ponder on

The ocean's mysteries

I'll unveil a few of

My old sea stories

You'll see how kind a tar can be

I promise you'll be safe with me

When we're out at sea

As toilers of the sea, as toilers of the sea.

13. A Song of Summer

Faith, where's your smile

Don't be a melancholy child

Can't you see

That the summer's come?

Stuck in your room

With your winter curtains drawn

While the suburbs

Are all bathed in sun

No more winter time lows

Only joy now because

We can shake off the blues

Faith, there's no time to lose

We can go for a cruise

Down the Thames

Or down the Ouse

Or just snooze under summer's sun

Find a village green

Watch some cricket,

Take some tea, as you please

Summer's made for fun

Get some sweet summer air

Feel the breeze in your hair

Forget that sad old affair

He's not worth all the tears

Cast you cares on me

I can set you free

Don't let me wait too long

Summer will soon be gone

No more winter time lows

Only joy now because

We can shake off the blues

Faith, there's no time to lose

We can go for a cruise

Down the Thames

Or down the Ouse

Or just snooze under summer's sun.

14. Stevie B and Me

Stevie, we were free,

Stevie, you and me,

On that golden day

Was it 68?

The decade's last few days,

The whole wild world was crazed,

But where we were was peace

For you and me at least.

If I stop for a moment,

I dream groves and country paths,

Green's "Albatross" is playing

In this our past,

Whole empires were falling,

The old ways were fading fast,

Things never last,

But you and I

Found pleasant peace at last.

We weren't friends for long,

These things aren't too strong,

We were far from home,

Together less alone,

We drifted far apart,

Hardened up our hearts,

We had so far to fall,

Four years took their toll.

We walked and talked

For many hours

Safe under Blue Berkshire Skies.

Stevie, we were free,

Like we'd never been,

On that halcyon day,

Stevie B and me.

The decade's last few days,

The whole wild world was crazed,

But where we were was peace

For you and me at least.

15. The Ones We Love

Though we fight every day

I can say Honey,

I do love you

With a love,

A burning love

A tender love

A kind of love

That's forever true

It seems that it's the truth

Between man

And woman

And age and youth

It's true that we do

Hurt most the one we love

So many times I've let you down

I've messed you 'round

And I still do

I know it's weird

It seems absurd,

But I never ever wanted to

You know it's often said

And I've seen it

Many times

In all the books I've read

It's true that we do

Hurt most the ones we love

You've got to forgive me, babe

Sometimes it's hard

To control the things

I do and say

I'm just a weak and sinful man

Yes I am

Trying to do the best I can

It seems that it's the truth

Between man

And woman

And age and youth

It's true that we do

Hurt most the one we love.

16. Like all the Moonstruck Do

If I fell in love with you

I would like to

Make my dreams come true

You could fulfil all yours too

So come on angel

Just one look will do

I'll lose my heart to you

Like all the moonstruck do

We could go all round the world

Just like other

Moonstruck girls and boys

So come on angel

Don't be scared

We are only young once

Say the word

I'll lose my heart to you

Like all the moonstruck do

Bali Frisco Rio or wherever

You may choose

The world's our oyster, angel,

There'll be no more bad news

We could escape tomorrow

I tell you we can't lose

We will soon be

Saying bye bye to those blues

If I fell in love with you

I would like to

Make my dreams come true

You could fulfil all yours too

So come on angel

Just one look will do

I'll lose my heart to you

Like all the moonstruck do.

17. I Let You Go

What was I thinking

I let you go

I wasn't drinking still

I let you go

Where was my head at to

Let you go

I can't accept that I just

Let you go

I wish I could make

Amends

So we could at least

Be friends

I have no real

Reason why

I let you say goodbye

Did I confuse you when

I let you go

Such a fool to have

Let you go

You were so precious still

I let you go

Worth more than jewels still

I let you go

I wish we could start again

I'd be quite a diff'rent man

I've learned quite a lot

Since then

I know how to keep a friend

We could meet up in the

Centre of town

And I'd explain my motivations

About how I came

To let you down

And all those other

Explications and complications

I'm not asking for

Romance

Just give me half

A chance

Cos' I got a real

Good heart

So how 'bout

A brand new start?

What was I thinking

I let you go

I wasn't drinking still

I let you go

Where was my head at

To let you go

I can't accept

That I just let you go

18. Time Was I Was (A Wand'rin' Star)

Time was I was a wandering star

With a restless quenchless soul

Time was I had an unquiet heart

And from dream to dream I'd roam

Well I thought I was a free bird

And I didn't have a worldly care

Till I found myself abandoned and

Alone I cried but you weren't there

Now all I really want is you is you is you

Time was I played the gadabout

Thought I did not need a home

Time was I thought I was so smart

I could do it all alone

Till it dawned on me that there would

Come a time when you would say: OK

If that's the way you want it, babe,

I'll leave you to go on your way

Now all I really want is you is you is you

### Book Three – Seven Chapters from a Sad Sack Loser's Life
Chapter One

Sometime in the early 21st Century, it occurred to David Cristiansen, and not for the first time, that he was a loser. In fact not just loser but a king-size loser, a loser among losers, a loser supreme.

The contemplation that he was the best at what he did afforded him some consolation at those times of the day when his status in life meant the most to him; such as in those last few hours before he turned in for the night.

Yet the fact remained he'd failed in almost every conceivable area of life. And so ended up living alone in an apartment adjacent to his parents' suburban home at the advanced age of 55, unmarried and childless, and without fortune, profession or vehicle.

As to the areas in which he hoped to succeed since he was a teenager with the world at his delicate feet, he had precious little to show for his labours but for a few baubles of which he was unfeasibly proud. But in the end, they amounted to very little; and deep down inside he knew that all too well, despite the swaggering attitude he affected.

And it hurt him terribly to realise he wasn't a genius after all, so much as a regular sad sack with delusions of grandeur; as actor, musician and writer.

"I'm not done yet," he'd boast to himself, or to anyone else who might listen, and to look at him, you might think he had a point. For despite his age, he still possessed a remnant of what was once a truly remarkable physical beauty; as well as a magnetic charm that drew others to him irresistibly.

Yet, many would insist David was foolish to lament all he had lost in terms of opportunities for fame, status and glory and all the wondrous things that accompany these. For after all, these are things one cannot take with us when we quit this earth, and life is short, so terribly short that it is described in the Bible as a "vapour".

And there were times his still handsome eyes failed to see this truth, as if they'd become clouded o'er by the tears he often shed at night for his wasted past, and for the pain he felt when he thought of all he had lost. While at others, it became manifestly clear to him, and he rejoiced as the most fortunate of men. Yet, it could have all been so different.

He'd been born at the tail end of the Goldhawk Road, a lengthy street within the limits of inner West London, while his first home was a little Victorian cottage in the long-demolished Bulmer Place in Notting Hill. And you'll search in vain for it in any London map, although you'll still be able to locate a Bulmer Mews, tucked away some yards

from the main road of Notting Hill Gate.

His brother Dany was born two and a half years later, by which time his parents had been able to afford their own house in Bedford Park in what was then the London Borough of Acton.

During David's boyhood it was still demographically mixed, yet well on the way to becoming completely gentrified.

Future Who front man Roger Daltry had relocated there from nearby Shepherds Bush when he was 11 years old in 1955 or '56.

And a few years later, he formed a group in the Skiffle style called The Detours, which would go on to shape-shift into The Who, whose furiously hedonistic music and philosophy would go on to make a permanent impression on the Western psyche; and help fuel the British Invasion of the American Pop charts.

David's father Pat had been born Patrick Clancy Cristiansen in Rowella, Tasmania, and raised in Sydney as the son of a Danish father and English mother.

At around eight years old, he won a scholarship to the Sydney Conservatory of Music, soloing for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra on a single occasion shortly afterwards.

And soon after his father's death on the eve of the second world war, he set off with his mother and two siblings for Denmark, his father having expressed a wish to be buried in his native land. And then on to London where he studied both at the Royal Academy of Music and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

He joined the London Philharmonic 0rchestra while still a teenager, and during the Blitz on London, served in the Sea Cadets as a signaller, seeing action as such on the hospital ships of the Thames River Emergency Service.

While David's mother had entered the world as Angela Jean Elizabeth Watson in the city of Brandon, Manitoba on the 13th of November 1915. However, while still an infant she'd moved with her parents and four siblings to the Grandview area of East Vancouver.

Many of Grandview's earliest settlers were in shipping or construction work, and largely of British origin. Indeed, Angela's own father was a builder and electrician from the little town of Castlederg in County Tyrone, Ireland. While her mother hailed from the great industrial city of Glasgow.

At high school, she came into her own in the Glee Club, thanks to a singing voice of rare beauty and quality. And in time was able to make her living exclusively as a soprano singer; while many of her greatest triumphs took place at Vancouver's famous Theatre Under the Stars in Stanley Park, which officially opened on August the 6th 1940.

After the war, she hoped to expand her career either in the US or the UK, but despite a successful audition for the San Francisco Light Opera Company, ultimately opted for England, a ticket to sail having become available to her.

And so she set off for the country of her forefathers laden with letters of recommendation from her singing teacher, as well as numerous press cuttings from her brilliant Canadian career.

And within a short time of doing so, she met Pat Cristiansen through their shared profession, and they married in the summer of 1948.

Seven years later, they decided to have their first child, but Angela was repeatedly informed by her doctor she might miscarry. In the event, David breathed his first on the 7th of October 1955.

While his first school was a kind of nursery school held locally on a daily basis at the private residence of one Miss Henrietta Pearson, and then aged 4 years old, he joined the exclusive Lycée Francais du Sud Kensington, where he was to become bilingual by the age of about four years old.

Almost every race and nationality under the sun was to be found in the Lycée in those days... and among those who went on to be good pals of David's were kids of English, French, Jewish, American, Yugoslavian and Middle Eastern origin.

His first two closest playground pals were Esther, the dusky scion of a successful Norwegian character actor and a beautiful Israeli dancer, and Craig, an English kid like himself, and for a time, they formed an unlikely but inseparable trio:

"Hi kiddy," was Esther's sacred greeting to her beloved blood brother, and David would respond in kind.

While not a typical Lycée father in his patched canvas trousers, David's father Pat was determined Dany and he enjoy the best and richest education imaginable, and to this end, he worked, toiled incessantly in the tough London session world.

And so that they be distinguished from the common run of British boys with their short back and sides they were dressed in lederhosen with their heads shorn like convicts. These boys would be different. And David certainly set himself apart from the outset not least though his physical appearance, whose remarkable thinness was enhanced by long-lashed blue eyes so enormous as to verge on the alien.

He was also the kind of child who'd remove a periodical from a neighbour's letter-box on Esmond Road, and then mutilate it before re-posting it...donate a loaf of ancient green bread to another by posting it over the wall...and destroy still another's brand new balsa wood fence while trying to retrieve a stray ball, going through one rung after the other with a sickly dull thud...thud...thud...much to the hilarity of his close pal Jacko. But the neighbour couldn't see the funny side.

The era's famous social revolution kicked in in about 1963, and yet for all that, seminal Pop groups such as the Searchers and the Dave Clark Five - even the Beatles themselves – were quaint and wholesome figures in a still innocent England. They fitted in well in a nation of Norman Wisdom pictures and the well-spoken presenters of the BBC Home or Light Service, of coppers, tanners and ten bob notes, sweet shops and tuppeny chews.

It was in '63 that Beatlemania invaded David's world, and he first announced his own status as a maniac at the Lycée in that landmark year; but within a short time, a single new group had started threatening the Beatles' position as David's favourite in the world. They were the Rolling Stones; although an initial reaction to what he saw as a rough and sullen performance of Buddy Holly's "Not Fade Away" on TV, was one of bitter disappointment.

But before long, he'd become utterly entranced by these martyrs to the youth movement, and during a musical discussion he had in about 1965 with some of the new breed of English roses, who may or may not have been flaunting mod girl fringes and kinky boots, David proudly announced his undying fealty.

One of the girls was a Fab Four loyalist and had the requisite seraphic smile, while another preferred a certain Geordie combo, and acted cooler than the rest, as if these British Bluesmen were somehow superior to mere Pop acts like the Beatles and the Stones. While David felt compelled to ask her a question about her favourite band, while casting aspersions upon the physical loveliness of one of their number, which provoked a flustered response from the apoplectic Pop fan.

During this golden era, David divided his time between the Lycée and his West London stomping ground, and from a very young age, took Judo classes in South Kensington. And it was there that one of his teachers, a former British international who'd fought in the first ever World Judo championships in Japan, once despairingly confessed:

"I always know it's Saturday when I hear Cristiansen's voice."

Later, he took classes in the somewhat rougher London suburb of Hammersmith. But if he thought he was going to raise Cain there he had another thing coming, given that its owner was a one-time captain of the British international team who'd served as an air gunner with No 83 Squadron RAF during World War II. He later held Judo classes in Stalag 383.

David resumed classes with him in the early '70s, this time in Karate, until he got it into his head that he no longer wished to have anything to do with anything martial, precious blooming aesthete that he was.

For all that, though, he was rarely happier than on those Wednesday evenings he attended the 20th Chiswick Wolf Cub pack.

Memories such as the solemnity of his enrolment, and being helped up a tree by an older cub to secure his Athletics badge remained with him for many years afterwards. As did the times he won his first star, and his swimming badge, with its peculiar frog symbol, as well as the pomp and the seriousness of a mass meeting he attended, with its different coloured scarves, sweaters and hair.

And then there was the Saturday afternoon when, following a soccer match between rival cub teams during which David dirtied his boots by standing around in the mud, and his elbow by tripping over a loose bootlace, an older cub offered to take him home. So they made their way to the bus stop through underground passageways teeming with rowdy kids, both white and West Indian, all shod in black plimsolls with elastic side strips...or so it seemed.

"Shuddup!" shouted David's new protector,

"Where exactly are you taking me?" David queried anxiously.

"The bus stop at Chiswick 'Oigh Stree' is the best plice, oi reck'n. You be awroigh' theah, me lil' mite."

David became convinced he'd never see his home again, and so started to loudly wail, his cherubic little face contorted into a hideous mask of anguish; and as they mounted the bus, faces both white and black suddenly turned towards him in concern, and what a strange sight he must have made, this tyke in distress, surrounded by a bevy of older wolf cubs.

After a few moments, David's new found friend, his brow furrowed with concern, as if he'd done his frail young charge some unspeakable wrong, assured him:

"Oim gonna drop y'orf where yer dad pu' y'on."

Then, David saw a street he recognised, and promptly left his seat, grinning uncontrollably:

"This'll do," he announced.

"Wai', Dave!" his friend cried out, "are you shoa vis is awroigh'?"

"Yup!" David replied him, as he stepped off the bus, which then moved on down the street and out of his life forever.

There was a point in the mid 1960s when David was dubbed "Le Général" by his form teacher, by which time he'd be found barking orders in the playground to a tight circle of friends. While in the classroom, he'd sit at the back, leaning against the wall with his cronies, while pretending to smoke a fat cigar like a Chicago tough guy.

Certainly he was not above organising elaborate playground deceptions; and one of these involved his pretending to banish one of his best friends, Bobby, from whatever activity they had going on at the time.

Bobby played along by putting on a superb display of water works, which had the desired effect of arousing the tender mercies of some of the girls. They duly rounded on David for his hard-heartedness, but he refused to budge, and of course it was all a big joke, and Bobby and he had never been closer.

If he was "Le Général" at the Lycée, back home he saw himself as the leader of the kids whose houses backed onto the dirty alley that ran parallel to his side of the Esmond Road.

One day, he crossed the road to announce a feud with the kids of the clean alley, so-called because it was concreted over rather than being just a dirt track.

Soon after the feud had thawed, Dany and he went over to pal around with some of the clean alley kids who he now saw as his allies, but there must have still been some bad blood because before long, a scrap was under way and he was getting the worst of it.

"Hit him, David," his brother urged above the chilling din of the clean alley loyalists baying for his hot young blood to flow, but the best he could manage was to briefly get his antagonist into a headlock. Finally he agreed to leave, and as he cycled off, one of the clean alley kids kicked his bike, so that it squeaked all the way home in unison with great heaving sobs.

But if David's good mate Paulie had been with him on that afternoon in the clean alley, it's unlikely he would have had to suffer as he did. He lived virtually opposite the Cristiansen family in Bedford Park, but was from another dimension altogether, a skinny cockney kid with muscles like pure steel who seemed to have been born to wage war on the bomb sites of post-war London. And when he'd made his first personal appearance in the dirty alley on someone else's rusty bike, screaming along in a cloud of dust it rendered all its denizens speechless and motionless.

"Davy!" He'd always cry when he wanted his treasured friend's attention, while their wicked cahoots included howling at the top of their lungs into random blocks of flats, and then running away, as their echoed screams blended with incoherent threats of:

"I'll call the Police, I'll..."

Yet, David's mum made a point of liking him; and he was always welcome to come to tea with the Cristiansen family at five twenty five; even though one of her closest friends, Helena Jacobs, expressed concern over David's association with Paulie, as if he might end up going to the bad. And incredibly, she was not alone in thinking this. For far from being some latter day Jack Dawkins, is it not fair to say David was just a lovable little imp causing mayhem in a leafy London suburb; and as one of those premature romantics who never go through a phase of detesting the fair sex, blessed with a naturally tender heart?

And if ever proof was needed that puppy love can be as agonisingly painful as its adult counterpart, it came in the shape of his adoration, as a fantastically skinny nine year old, of a young blonde girl of about his age with a strong London accent whom he met through no fault of his own in the midst of that most mythologized of decades of recent times.

It was the year of '65; and he knew this to be an absolute fact thanks to certain songs which, even when played in the early 2010s, took him violently back to the time of his love for little June Cassidy.

And each and every one of these tunes, such as the Fab Four's "We Can Work it Out" and Pet Clark's strangely bitter-sweet "My Love" stemmed from that most totemic of years when Pop started mutating piecemeal into Rock; and London was in mid swing with Carnaby Street as its trendy epicentre.

She announced herself to him with a radiant smile one afternoon while they were both attending classes at their local swimming pool soon after asking him whether his name was David. After he'd confirmed to her that indeed it was, she confessed her reason for having so unexpectedly entered his world:

"My mum knows your mum," she chirpily informed him, before explaining that her mother Maryanne had become friendly with David's own mother through their mutual attendance of a sewing class in what would have been a local education centre. She then turned to her friend and, still smiling, more or less reiterated what she'd told David:

"My mum knows his mum."

But if she was overwhelmingly friendly during that initial meeting, she was never so pleasant again, but the more David was ignored, the more he adored. And on one occasion, he may have tried to attract her attention by swimming ever so close to where she was sitting on the edge of the pool with a friend, only to get caught up in the splashing of her feet; but he could have sworn she smiled to her friend at this point, and he clung to the hope that this indicated some kind of affection for him.

But such hope was forlorn, for she never spoke to him again, and he was driven to distraction by her indifference, even to the point of looking up her mother's name in the telephone directory. And oh with what joy he saw it clearly written there, Maryanne Cassidy, and it restored some kind of control to him, so that the intensity of his love was somehow mitigated thereby.

In fact, it consoled him to realise that should he so desire, he could call her, and speak to her, but what would he say? After all, they weren't friends; in fact, she didn't even seem to like him, so he let it go, and in time, his love receded.

Yet he carried its memory far into adulthood, despite the fact that were she still alive, she might have grandchildren of the same age she'd been when she'd so enchantingly introduced herself to David in that totemic year of '65:

"My mum knows your mum!"

He left the Lycée in the summer of 1968...before spending a few months at a crammer called Davies so as to become sufficiently up to scratch academically to pass what is known as the Common Entrance Examination.

Taking the CE is a necessity for all British boys and girls seeking entrance into private fee-paying schools, including those known as public schools, which are the traditional secondary places of learning for the British governing and professional classes.

And the vast majority of those who go on to public schools begin their academic careers in preparatory or prep schools, and so for the most part leave home at around eight years old.

The school his father had selected for him was the Nautical College, Welbourne, and somehow, he managed to pass the CE, so that at still only twelve years old he became Cadet David Cristiansen 173, the youngest kid in the college, and an official serving officer in Britain's Royal Naval Reserve.

Founded at the height of the British Empire, Welbourne still possessed her original title in '68, while her headmaster, a serving officer in the Royal Navy for some quarter of a century, wore his uniform at all times.

However, in '69, she was given the name Welbourne College, while the boys retained their officer status, and naval discipline continued to be enforced, with Welbourne serving both as a military college and traditional English boarding school.

The Welbourne David knew had strong links to the Church of England, and so was marked by regular if not daily classes in what was known as Divinity, morning parade ground prayers, evening prayers, and compulsory chapel on Sunday morning.

Later in life, he felt indebted to her for the values she'd instilled in him if only unconsciously, even though, by the time he joined Welbourne, they were under siege as never before by the so-called Counterculture. While failing to fully understand the implications of the cultural revolution of the late 1960s, David was to passionately celebrate its consequences, and take to his heart many of its icons, both artistic and political.

Yet, from the outset, he desperately wanted to distinguish himself at Welbourne...and especially at sports, starting with the great ruffianly game for gentlemen of Rugby Football...and oh with what longing he gazed at the sight of colours on the blue blazers or striped blazers of those who'd earned them on the playing fields of Welbourne.

Traditionally awarded in public schools and universities for sporting excellence, colours weren't everything David desired; but for a few years they came pretty close.

But he'd not been born into a typical British family, and so attended a prep school...as has ever been the case for the vast majority of those destined to pass into the public school system.

Although, it would be false to assert that Welbourne was exclusively composed of the sons of the privileged, because she wasn't. And neither was she a narrowly Anglo-Saxon institution, because during David's time, he knew American, West Indian, Middle Eastern and South African cadets as well as British ones, and several of these were close friends of his.

What's more, she was supplemented in the autumn of '68 by cadets from a recently dismantled training ship, founded in 1885 by a wealthy businessman and keen yachtsman for the rescue of London slum boys who would then be trained for service in the Royal and Merchant Navies.

Most fitted in well, as indeed did David, but he was never going to be one of Welbourne's wonder boys...despite his having been kept back an extra year in the third form, which should have put him at an academic advantage; but didn't. And he may have done so partly in response to the meningitis he succumbed to in Spain during his first summer vacation. And which necessitated his being hospitalised for a time in Zaragoza, where he became the white-haired boy of several of the medical students, who hailed from such diverse regions of the Spanish-speaking world as Peru and Puerto Rico.

Yet, there were those teachers and pupils who insisted that while criminally idle, he was also intelligent...a bit of a fraud then, or what the French call a fumiste; but for all that, his behaviour did sometimes verge on the medically alarming.

On one occasion, for instance, he went for an eye test in the village, only to return to college without having taken it, before announcing that he'd forgotten why he'd gone into town in the first place. As for his hygiene, at one point it was so minimal that the bottoms of his feet were literally as black as soot, as if someone had painted them:

"Talk about 'Paint it Black', Cristiansen..."

"When did you last wash your feet?"

But he never stopped longing to be recognised as being good at something, even going so far at one point as to become a member the college boxing team. As such, he suffered punch-drunkenness at Eton at the hands - or rather fists - of an elegant young adonis with a classic Eton flop. He later commented on an especially cruel blow he'd inflicted on David with a certain degree of remorse...and how deceptively graceful he was, this flower of Eton...king of all public schools.

However, around '69, some time after having seen a TV programme about young revolutionaries who idolised Che Guevara, David became a Che acolyte himself, and one of the greatest accolades he ever received while at college came in consequence of a short story he wrote about a young man who becomes involved with Che in his revolutionary activities in South America.

And following on from his infatuation with Che, he came to fancy himself as a full-blown Communist, covering various items with the hammer and sickle, including at various times, a school notebook, and his own hand, which provoked an older, far larger boy into setting about him in a spirit of mock-outrage...but he'd fallen hard for the Hard Left and that was that.

In fact, his time at Welbourne coincided with the Counterculture being at its point of maximum intensity, which is to say between the infamous year of rioting and street fighting of 1968, and that, four years later, when the sixties really and truly came to a final close and which was defined in Britain at least by the artifice and decadence of Glam Rock.

And one sweet afternoon, David found himself longing to join the Hippie throngs he saw flocking in all their ragged multicoloured glory to the Reading Rock Festival from the window of a college coach. For rebellion was everywhere in a desperately imperilled West, and several of David's circle dreamed of a world of Bohemian freedom lying only just beyond the confines of their college, while intensely close friendships were forged in secret wooded places where they were united by a love of Rock music and its icons with their defiantly androgynous clothes and floating, flouting hair.

Yet, by the early 2010s, David would insist if he possessed a single quality that might be termed noble, such as patience, or self-mastery or consideration of the needs of other people, then he owed this blessing to his education. Within this sphere, he'd place the four years he spent at Welbourne, whose authorities extended him a fair and decent report following his premature departure in the summer of 1972.

They also gave him a good send-off in the college magazine, mentioning his time in the Boxing and Swimming teams, and his tenure as 2cnd Drum in the college band. And so he'd bless his old friend and sparring partner, and wish her a long life in her sylvan sanctuary deep in the Arcadian heart of the English countryside.

But some forty years theretofore, he moved back into his parents' home in West Molesey, a small industrial suburb close to the Surrey-London border where they'd relocated from Bedford Park at the start of the decade.

Their own street was quite gentrified, and their two closest neighbours, businessmen with roots in inner West London...Jack at number 12 being the son of a former boy soldier during the Great War; while Johnny at number 16 was the product of what he proudly called "abject poverty" in Shepherd's Bush.

He was still a hippie at heart; and yet 1972 could be said to be the year in which the androgynous seventies really began, as the excitement surrounding the Alternative Society and its happenings and be-ins and love-ins and free festivals and so on started to fade into recent history.

The golden age of the long-haired boot boy had lately come to pass, and every street seemed to David to be pregnant with menace in the Glam Rock nation he'd returned to, while so many of the songs were like football chants set to a stomping Glam Rock beat. It was as if the spirit of Weimar Berlin with its unholy mix of violence and decadence had been resurrected in stuffy old England.

Such a terrible time to be young; but for better or worse, it would be David's era, and he'd come to love it, lap it up...

And a change came over him in the summer of '72, which may have been caused to some degree by the prevailing zeitgeist, but which can also be traced back to a single defining incident.

This took place in a bar in the little former fishing town of Santiago de la Ribera, close to the Mar Menor, a large coastal lake of warm saltwater off Murcia's Costa Calida in southeastern Spain, where he'd been vacationing with his family since about 1968.

It involved a young man he'd idolised for several years, and who incarnated a kind of old-school Iberian macho cool. He was quite fair of complexion, as opposed to swarthy, as might be expected, and stocky, with muscular arms. And if he'd worn a medallion and identity bracelet, he'd have been typical of his kind.

By that summer, he was sporting collar length hair, which was still quite rare among Spanish men, as well as large-collared shirts, which he elected not to tuck into his trousers. The style of these meant that his hair would occasionally get caught between neck and collar, which necessitated his flicking it out with a sweep of his hand, and coquettishly tossing his head. This he did one evening in full view of Castilla's clientele.

While these gestures seemed perfectly in keeping with his swaggering machismo in David's besotted eyes, there was another of Castilla's patrons who was less impressed, and he duly muttered his misgivings. But rather than put David off, he came to covet the notoriety that had suddenly been afforded the young Spaniard.

Yet while this incident may have marked the beginning of the end of his identification with undiluted masculinity, his interest in the opposite sex was no less forceful than that of any other male in late adolescence. And if an attractive female happened to speak to him in a public place, he'd be in acute danger of falling in love on the spot. In fact, he didn't even have to be spoken to:

It was on the ship Patricia while travelling back from vacationing in Spain late in the summer of '72 that he fell in love by sight with a fellow passenger...a young Spanish girl he saw several times about the ship but was too frightened to approach. So he became obsessed by her, even to the point of roaming the streets of London for several days in succession in the vain hope of somehow bumping into her.

Two songs especially served as the soundtrack to this irrational spell of romantic insanity; and these were "Betcha by Golly Wow" by the Stylistics, and "Last Night I Didn't Get To Sleep At All" by the 5th Dimension. And like all the loves he'd ever lost, they'd remain with him for the rest of his inchoate life.

As would the vision of a seventeen year old, sauntering late one afternoon in the receding sun, his quest in tatters, yet, who is suddenly drawn to a girlish voice floating downwards from an apartment of a lofty dwelling in the heart of the ancient city of his birth, causing him to ponder, if only fleetingly..."could that be she?"
Chapter Two

Soon after returning from Spain in the summer of 1972, David Cristiansen was launched by his dad on an intensive programme of self-improvement.

Through home study and with the help of local private tutors, he set about making up for the fact that he'd left formal education at 16 with only two General Certificate of Education passes to his name, where a respectable amount would be no less than five.

He took Karate classes in Hammersmith, and among his fellow students were hard-looking young men – some of them flaunting classic '70s feather cuts - who may have been led to the dojo by the prevailing fashion for all things Eastern, such as the films of Bruce Lee, and the "Kung Fu" television series.

And while he enjoyed them for a time...in fact, far more than the swimming classes he attended weekly in Walton on Thames close by to his own little suburban village of West Molesey, they were destined to be short-lived.

This possibly due in part to his growing fascination with an androgynous way of life inspired by Glam Rock, which was yet quiescent in late 1972. While Classic Rock was still foremost in his affections if the earliest long players of his nascent record collection were anything to go by.

And he was successfully initiated into the basics of the Rock guitar solo by a shy and sweet-natured man of about 45 by the name of Gerry Firth, who gave lessons from a tiny little abode in an alley on the edge of Walton. For it was there that he lived in apparent content with his wife and golden-haired infant daughter.

While his profound love for the rebel music of Rock and Roll was wholly belied by an appearance which was almost militantly square, even by the standards of middle-aged men in those days. For he wore his salt and pepper hair in a severe short back and sides style, which he supplemented with shirt and tie and sleeveless sweater, and great baggy grey flannel trousers.

Was every inch the typical British seventies dad in other words; that is, on the surface of things, for the truth was infinitely different.

And on one memorable occasion, David tried to persuade him of the superior merit of Classical music on the basis that it's "well-played", which Gerry countered with:

"Well, isn't Rock Music well played?"

David was baffled by his argument, because despite his own preference for Rock, he had no great belief in its artistic merits.

Another thing that bewildered him about Gerry Firth was his admiration for Marc Bolan of seminal Glam Rock band T. Rex, a man he'd always derided as much for his pretty-boy appearance as his simplistic three-chord Pop.

As to Glam, while it was a genre that veered wildly between Pop chart stompers by Bolan, and the more sophisticated decadence of major talents such as David Bowie and Todd Rundgren, it was yet to make any kind of impression on David. For he still favoured the hirsute macho men of the Heavy Rock movement.

"Don't you find him effeminate?" David once asked him of Bolan, fully expecting Gerry to express due horror at the thought of Bolan's startling choirboy looks, while continuing to enjoy his catchy tunes. But Gerry trumped him with an answer that caused his adolescent jaw to drop:

"Not as excitingly so as Mike Jagger!"

"Mick Jagger", said David, correcting the older man as if in a trance.

"Mick Jagger", Gerry conceded, still with the same stubborn fixed smile on his face.

By the following year, he'd become a massive Bolan fan himself. But at the time he was aghast at what he saw as the older man's defence of what was still to him the indefensible.

Sadly, Bolan died in a car accident close to his home in Barnes, West London at just 29 years old. Yet, following his premature quietus, he underwent something a transformation both in terms of his persona and his music, both attaining classic status where they remain to this day.

For after all, Bolan must have had something to have so delighted Gerry Firth...to the extent of making a sixteen year old look square for detesting everything he stood for. Quite a blow struck on behalf of the old hipster guard in the generation wars that were still being fought back then.

Late in the summer, David signed up for five years service with the Thames Division of the Royal Naval Reserve based on HMS Ministry on the Embankment near Temple station. And not long afterwards, it became clear to him that he was attracting some attention by virtue of his budding pretty boy looks. But far from being offended by this development, he found it strangely flattering...as if a seed of vanity had been implanted within a boy who'd spent the last few years as a swaggering lout.

To a degree then, it was a case of an ugly duckling suddenly finding themselves to be a swan, and enjoying the resultant notoriety, such as that latterly conferred on the young Spaniard of the Bar Castilla.

Not that he'd ever been ugly...in fact, several of his mother's female friends had already commented on his looks; but he'd never seen himself as any kind of Adonis. In fact, with his twitching head, greasy lank hair, bony round shoulders and splayfooted walk, he was more like the adolescent from Hell.

Having said that, though, he had nurtured a sentimental streak throughout his teens that placed him somewhat at odds with his peers.

It also made him susceptible to such notorious tear-jerkers as Rodgers and Hammerstein's "South Pacific", whose movie version, which he saw at the flicks with his mother at about 15 years old, had a life-changing effect on him.

And the same applies to John Schlesinger's stunning screen adaptation of Thomas Hardy's "Far from the Madding Crowd", which may have initiated a lifelong love affair on his part with hopeless love and high romantic tragedy.

Yet, the softening process that took place in the closing months of 1972 was unprecedented in its sheer intensity, and can be at least partly attributed to the spirit of the times. For popular culture was changing, and hirsute Rock and Roll stars in scruffy denim flares were no longer the last word in cool. While the cinema was producing a new breed of film idol who was a far cry from the he-man of old.

It received a further boost when, towards the new year, he saw former Bubblegum band the Sweet on an afternoon Pop programme called "Lift Off With Ayesha."

The Sweet had once incarnated all he opposed in terms of commercial chart Pop, yet, watching them prance around in high heels and make up, pouting and preening like a quartet of hysterical transvestites, he underwent what was little short of an epiphany.

Then, several months later, veteran hopeful Rock star David Bowie appeared on the chat show "Russell Harty Plus" with his eyebrows shaved and a glittering chandelier earring dangling from his left ear, and so David's devotion to Glam became total.

Even David's mother was charmed by Bowie, when, towards the end of the interview, after Harty had made a joke about his dainty strap-on platform shoes, he referred to the chat show host as "silly", before flashing an impossibly innocent smile:

"Aww, he's sweet," said Miss Ann, who was also enchanted by the wit of Elton John when he appeared on Harty's show a short while later. But when she caught sight of the cover of the first New York Dolls album, which David had latterly ordered by post through his usual outlet, she told him that apart from the hardest hard core pornography, she couldn't imagine anything quite so repulsive to the eye.

Yet, Bowie's sphinx-like charisma was so potent that even some of the most unreconstructed of macho men were drawn, irresistibly, to his art, which combined the most seductive melodies with complex, deeply literate lyrics.

For the cult of androgyny was a powerful force in Britain in 1973, having been earlier incubated by both Mod and Hippie culture, and musical acts as diverse as the Stones, the Kinks, Alice Cooper, the Stooges and T. Rex.

Furthermore, it was reinforced in the cinema by several movies featuring angelically beautiful men.

And yet, you still put yourself in danger if you chose to parade around like a Glam Rock star in the mean streets of London or any other major British city in the early 1970s; and therefore few did.

But David fantasised about fame and adulation as never before throughout the Glam era, and he built an image based on his idol Bowie, spiking his hair like him, and even peroxiding it at some point.

And there will surely be those students of human psychology who will wonder precisely what effect the gender revolution exerted on young men such as David who came to manhood at a time some of the foremost male heroes of the culture resembled beautiful women.

And they did so of course in direct defiance of strict Biblical commands concerning sexual appearance.

Yet David had initially resisted the seductions of Glam, until its leading exquisites came to represent something quite deliciously taboo to him. And he sought to emulate them, resenting his adolescent stubble, which he smothered with concealer along with unsightly acne spots, and which he would soon enhance with subtle application of rouge.

And quite understandably perhaps, he didn't entirely fit in in his blue collar surroundings, unlike his brother who wasted little time in becoming part of a local youth scene centred mainly around football, traditional sport of the British working classes.

As to David, he came into his own in La Ribera, and it was towards the end of the summer of '73 that he finally started being noticed in a big way by the local youth, most of whom were from either Murcia or Madrid. He'd croon for crowds of La Riberan boys and girls, who'd make requests for their favourites:

"Oye, David, canta la de Gilbert O'Sulliban!"

"Conoces Cat Estebens?"

"Canta como Sinatra!"

An ever-evolving group forged an incredible closeness that summer that lasted for a full four years, and oh what magical summers they were for both Dany and David. They'd never forget them, nor be able to fully recapture the purity of the joy they knew in the still so innocent Spain of the final years of the Franco era.

Even later in '73, the minesweeper HMS Thamesis set out for Bordeaux in Gironde in the south west of France. It was David's first voyage as an Ordinary Deckhand with the RNR, and he was just seventeen years old.

He struck up a friendship with the most unlikely pair of bosom buddies he ever came across in the RNR or anywhere else.

One half was Mickey, aged about 23, and rumoured to be a permanent year long resident of HMS Thamesis. The other was just as much of a lad as Mick even though he boasted the patrician manner of a City of London stockbroker or merchant banker.

Mick took David under his wing with a certain intimidating affection:

"We'll make a ruffy tuffy sailor of you yet," he once promised him, even though both men knew he'd never be anything other than the most useless mariner in the civilised world. And there was one occasion when, during some kind of conference being held below deck, he was asked by an officer what he thought of minesweeping, and he replied:

"It's a gas!"

On another, after the ship had been prepared for a major manoeuvre, such as a jackstay transfer, and every hand was in their respective allotted position, he was found wandering about on deck in a daze, and when asked what he thought he was doing, casually told them:

"Just taking a stroll..."

And it was incidents like these that made him the object of much good-humoured banter onboard the Thamesis, where he served as a kind of latter-day Billy Budd. Although without a tithe of the young foretopman's seamanship.

Its crew spent its final night in a club in the southern port of Portsmouth, though it might just as easily have been Plymouth.

The main event was a hyperactive drag artiste who tried desperately to keep them entertained with cabaret style numbers sung in a high woman's voice, and bawdy jokes told in a deep manly baritone, but he was way out of his depth and the Thamesis salts subjected him to a savage barrage of heckling for his pains.

At one point - perhaps in the hope of seeing a friendly face – he turned towards David, and excitedly trilled:

"Ooh...you look pretty, what's your name?"

"Skin!" the sailors bellowed back, as in "a nice bit of skin", which may have referred to David's appearance.

A little while later, the tar with the beard who'd been seated next to David all night asked him to hold the mike for him while he performed Rossini's "William Tell Overture" on his facial cheeks. And he ended up passing out on the table in front of him after having collapsed face down with an almighty CRASH!

But he wasn't the only one to suffer such an undignified fate that bacchanalian night.

And speaking of bacchanals...as soon as he was back onshore, David resumed his growing passion for all that was louche, bizarre and decadent in music, art and culture.

However, increasingly from '74 onwards, he turned away from what he now saw as the old hat tackiness of Glam Rock, convinced that Modernist outrage had nowhere left to go. Instead, his devotion started to centre on the more refined corruption of the golden age of Modernism of ca. 1890-1930, and especially its leading cities, in terms of their being beacons of revolutionary art, and of luxury and dissolution. They included the London of the Yellow Decade, Belle Époque Paris, Jazz Age New York, and most of all, Weimar Republic Berlin.

At some point in '74, he started using hair oil or brilliantine to slick his hair back in the style of F. Scott Fitzgerald, sometimes parting it in the centre just as his idol had done. And to build up a new retro-style wardrobe.

This went on to include a Gatsby style tab collar, which he wore either with striped collegiate tie, or cravat or neck scarf. Over this, he might wear a short-sleeved Fair Isle sweater, a navy blue blazer from Meakers, and a belted fawn raincoat straight out of a forties film noir. His grey flannel trousers from Simpsons of Piccadilly typically yielded to a pair of two-tone correspondent shoes.

There were those artists in the Rock and Roll vanguard around 1974-'75 who appeared to share his love affair with the languid cafe and cabaret culture of the continent's immediate past. Among these were established acts, such as David Bowie and Roxy Music, and newer ones such as Steve Harley of Cockney Rebel; and Ron and Russell Mael from L.A band Sparks. Some of Roxy's followers even went so far as to sport the kind of nostalgic apparel favoured by Ferry himself, but they were rare creatures indeed in mid-seventies London.

As for David, he wore his bizarre outdated costumes in arrogant defiance of the continuing ubiquity of shoulder-length hair and flared denim jeans. And in the summer of '75, he would even go so far as to attend a concert at West London's Queen's Park football stadium in striped boating blazer and white trousers like some refugee from a Cambridge punting party.

While all the while he was surrounded by hirsute Rock fiends, including his professorial friend Jim, who felt moved to enquire of him:

"You're just taking the mickey, aren't you..."

But he was deadly serious. And even though the headliners were his one-time favourites Yes, whose "Relayer" album he'd bought the previous year, his passion for Progressive Rock was a thing of the past.

And he'd moved on since '71...towards a far deeper love of darkness and loss of innocence.

But there was nothing even remotely dark about the time he fell in love with Dutch beauty Marianna, while sitting his Spanish "O" level in June 1974 in Gower Street, Central London. Although she didn't look Dutch; in fact, with her tanned complexion and long dark brown hair, she was Mediterranean in appearance.

It was probably she who approached David, because he'd have never made the first move, and in all the time he knew her, he didn't have the guts to tell her how he felt. So, once they'd completed their final paper, he allowed her to walk away from him forever with a casual "I might see you around", or some other cliché of that kind.

For about a week, he took the train into London and spent the days wandering around the city centre in the truly desperate hope of bumping into her. One time he could have sworn he saw her staring coolly back at him from an underground train, possibly at South Kensington or Notting Hill Gate, just as the doors were closing. But he was powerless to act, and simply stood there as the train drew away from the station.

In time, his infatuation faded, but certain songs – such as "I Just Don't Want to be Lonely" by The Main Ingredient, and "Natural High" by Bloodstone – would continue to recall for him those few weeks in the summer of '74 which he spent in hopeless pursuit of a woman of whom he knew quite literally nothing.

It wouldn't be long before he'd forsaken his twenties style image; nor started to wonder whether Marianna had been slightly repelled by the vast expanse of white forehead that had been revealed by his slicked back hair, slicked back with hair oil or brilliantine.

Once he stopped styling his hair like Valentino, his romantic appeal started to swell by degrees...but this didn't return Marianna to him. She was lost to him forever, and whether he ever fully recovered from her loss is open to debate. The chances are...he never did.

In July, David's father decided that a week-long yachting course in the little village of Lymington on the south coast of England might help him develop some sorely needed moral fibre.

He was to reside for this period in a guest house owned by the gracious Mrs Edith Drummond-Smith, whom David came to see as belonging to a type of quintessentially English upper class widow native to the sailing-besotted villages and hamlets of England's south coast. To him, they were all charming if slightly aloof, immaculately spoken, kind, calm and considerate, and distinguished by the most beautiful manners imaginable; although for all David knew about them, Mrs Drummond-Smith may have been the only one to be so blessed.

For he knew little of the arcane secrets of heartland or rural England, his father and mother having originated from the commonwealth nations of Australia and Canada respectively, while his earliest months were spent in a tiny little workman's cottage in London's Notting Hill. His veins could boast English, Scottish and Scots Irish, and possibly also Danish and Irish blood. Yet, he dressed as a perfect English gentleman, or rather how such an individual might have dressed several decades theretofore, which rendered him an unusual figure in a Britain still dominated by long hair and flared trousers.

Also resident with Mrs Drummond-Smith were Gilles, a Belgian boy of about twenty, and Mr Watts and his teenage son Dylan, and while all were on the same course as David, they had different sailing instructors.

For example, David had been allotted the course director, Captain Peter St Aubyn, which was propitious, as he was an alumnus of his own alma mater of Welbourne College, a private school of military stripe situated in the wealthy county of Berkshire near London.

All four became firm friends, David and Gilles becoming especially close. As to Dylan, he liked to listen to David's theories on music and fashion, and was fascinated by his use of brilliantine, even going so far as to dab some in his own hair on one occasion. He did so in the hope it would make him resemble the man who was for him, an icon of "smoothness", a synonym for cool in those days. This being singer-songwriter Bryan Ferry who was also a favourite of David's; in fact, David's twenties-inspired wardrobe was remarkably similar to Ferry's.

On the first day of the course, David discovered who would be sailing with him for the duration of the week; namely Corin, a cool, tall, dark young man of 28 with a full moustache and typically sporting fashionably heavy spectacles, Tom, a sweetly genial man of about sixty or seventy, and Simon and Peg, a deeply pleasant young married couple. To say nothing of the skipper, a charismatic presence whose wryly solemn countenance concealed a warm heart and "pythonesque" sense of humour.

That evening, David dined in what may have been the clubhouse of that bastion of Englishness and English privilege and English exclusivity, the Yacht Club...perhaps even the Royal Lymington Yacht Club itself.

He did so in the company of Corin, who informed him of his humble origins and the fact that through natural resourcefulness and sheer hard graft, he'd ascended to a managerial position within his chosen profession. They'd become good friends despite David's bizarre affectations, and Corin's suspicion thereof...but Corin couldn't help but warm to the kid despite himself.

But uncompromisingly masculine men such as Corin were always a little perturbed by David, as Hemingway had been of his friend and fellow writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom he met in Paris in 1925. And in the essay collection "A Movable Feast", he describes Fitz as having "a delicate long-lipped Irish mouth that, on a girl, would have been the mouth of a beauty."

David loved to play the clown for those who both liked and despaired of him; and Corin certainly fell into this category, but then so did Captain Peter St Aubyn, as he was to discover once they'd finally set sail.

"Take the helm, David, steer 350," he ordered, and David duly did as he was told, before settling himself comfortably at the helm as the yacht meandered peacefully through Hampshire waters under a balmy midsummer sun.

"Mmm, he cooed, perhaps a little like the youthful Kenneth Williams, this is nice..."

"Oooh, you thing," said the skipper, causing David to lash out with a sneaker-shod foot, much to the good captain's amusement.

And then there was the time Corin goaded him for having wrongly plotted a course, and he snapped like a petulant schoolboy.

"Oh shut up," he hissed, "let's see you do better!"

And once again, the skipper came up with his catchphrase, but with even more glee than the first time:

"Ooh, you thing!"

On the second or perhaps third evening of the course, there was a large informal get-together at the clubhouse which included David, Corin, Gilles, Dylan and four or five other yachtsmen, the course's acknowledged wunderkind Daryl among them.

"He comes alive in the evening, this boy," Corin told the assembled yachtsmen, clearly referring to David's propensity for getting tight each night, and the shenanigans that inevitably ensued.

"I'm not an alcoholic," said David.

"You drink three pints to my one," Corin countered, "so you've certainly got potential."

At this point, David decided for reasons best known to himself to have a dig at easy-going course whiz-kid Daryl:

"Daryl," he said, "how long have you had long hair?"

"What...long hair?" said Daryl, "what's that got to do with anything...is my hair long...I don't know anything about that."

"Do you realise that twenty years ago with your hair as it is, even though it's only a little below your ears, you would have been hounded, persecuted, beaten, for being a deviant, a freak, are you trying to ignore that?"

"And you would have been accepted?" said Daryl.

"Oh yes," David replied, looking over his attire, "knife edge pressed flannels, blue blazer, white V neck pullover, open neck shirt and cravat, a bit sporty, I suppose, but utterly acceptable."

"How safe!" scoffed Daryl.

"Safe?" said David incredulously, "that's something I never am, safe."

"Well, quite frankly, I think you look ridiculous!"

Following this last statement of Daryl's, David could no longer contain his hilarity...but his laughter was like no other his new friends had ever heard, nor would hear again. For it assaulted the soft-carpeted clubhouse's quiet and respectable clientele as if it had proceeded from the depths of Hell themselves.

Daryl, struggling gamely to control his own mirth, had gone a redder shade of tomato, while Corin, quivering with glee, hid his face in an attitude of mock-mortification.

"I disown him," he gibbered, "he's insane, insane."

Gradually the hysteria subsided, and Corin decided it was time David had a taste of his own medicine.

"How do you get those bracelets on your wrist?" he queried, referring to the four or five bangles David liked to wear on one wrist in those days:

"Easily", David languorously replied, displaying his remarkably slender wrists, "I have very graceful wrists."

"Let me see," said Corin, almost in a whisper, and David duly handed him one of his bangles, before it was passed around the entire group, each member attempting, with considerable difficulty, to put it on his own wrist. Presently, it was back in David's possession, but rather than express his relief, he cried out in his distress, having discovered it had been cruelly mutilated by one or another member of his party.

"My bracelet," he hollered, "look what you've done to it...I entrusted it to you and you've gone and twisted and bent it."

The group stared as one at David, not knowing whether to look sincerely sorry for what they'd done, or merely laugh at his distress, and so settled for a nervous cross between the two. After several uncomfortable moments, Gilles broke the silence by requesting to see the injured bracelet.

"Let me see eet," he said, "I weel try to feex eet."

Everyone was hushed as the Belgian contemplated the bangle, touched it, turned it round and rattled it, and finally, with considerable calm, placed it on the floor. He scratched his head, as if trying to settle on a decision, and ended up extricating one of his shoes.

David looked a little concerned at this turn of events, but in a desperate attempt to preserve his cool, lit a cigarette, which promptly fell from his slim white hand when a terrible crack like a tree hit by a sudden flash of lightning echoed throughout the clubhouse.

Gilles was attempting to persuade the bracelet to revert to its original shape by raising his shoe, profuse with studs, before repeatedly bringing it down on the trinket with all the strength he could muster.

"Oh come on, it's not funny," David protested, reaching out to retrieve his precious bauble, which a grinning Gilles now held out for him, but which, far from being shattered beyond repair, was barely altered from its original slightly misshapen state.

"Ees all right, David," Gilles chuckled, "I was eeteen' zee floor wiz my shoe, not your brezlet."

David looked at Gilles, then he looked at the other lads, then his eyes began to sparkle, his throat to gurgle, before it all came out at once, that terrible infernal laugh:

"Hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi..."

"I'm not with him!" cried Corin

"We'll get thrown out!" said Daryl.

"He's insane...in-sane!"

"Come on, drink up, lads," David barked suddenly, having made a rapid recovery from his latest paroxysm, "let's go where the action is, let's go and find a party or something!"

"No, it's not worth it," said Daryl, "we're having a good time here. You're a real laugh, David, just so long as you don't go too far. We might as well stay."

"Not me," David announced, "I'm getting out of here. I need a change of atmosphere. Who's coming?"

"Yeah, might as well," Corin volunteered

"Yah, me too," the boy from Belgium followed suit.

So, the trio left the clubhouse, and before long, they were heading along a main road, although to precisely where they hadn't the slightest notion. David performed his manic laugh to each passing car, sometimes even going so far as to stand in the road as he did so, before fleeing at the final second. After a time, though, he tired of this lethal activity and took to chatting to Gilles, with whom he felt such a strong rapport.

"That Belgian girl in your group is nice, isn't she?" he said.

"Oh yes," said Gilles, "eef only 'er farzer wuren't weez 'er all zee time."

After a time alone, they found themselves being trailed by two pretty teenage blondes; and perhaps urged by Corin or Gilles, David turned around to confront them with an unlit cigarette in his hand.

"Can I have a light, please?" he said, looking intently at one, then the other of the two young women, one of whom was slim and petite, the other, far taller, and yet with the same long blonde hair. After he'd succeeded in getting his cigarette lit, he made an effort at conversation.

"So, what shall I do, stay here with you, or go back to my friends?"

"Stay 'ere," one of the girls mumbled, almost inaudibly, in a strong London accent.

"Pardon?" said David, and both girls answered him by smiling, so David bid them goodbye, and the trio then continued on its way, with the two girls in hot pursuit.

"Why don't you turn around?" Corin suddenly said.

"Why?" said David.

"They like you," Corin announced.

"Really?"

"Course they do. If you can't see that, you're more short-sighted than I thought you were."

So David returned to his admirers.

"What are your names?" he asked them.

"My name's Julie," said the smaller of the two, "and this here's Sue...what's yours, baby?"

"Why do you call me baby?" asked David.

"Because you look like one," said Julie.

"I happen to be all of eighteen years old," said David, feigning indignation.

"We thought you was abaht twen'y," said Sue.

"Really? Well I'm eighteen and my name's David."

"Wha's your name?" said Julie, gesturing towards Gilles.

"My nem eez Gilles," he replied.

"Where are you from?" Sue asked David.

"London. Why?"

"You sahnd Ameri'an or somefing."

"Well, I am half-Canadian."

"Oh, that would explain it," Julie resolved.

"Why," David went on, "where do you girls come from?"

"We come from London an' all," said Sue, "sarf London."

"What are you doing down here?"

"We're spendin' a few days on 'er dad's boat," Sue went on, pointing at Julie.

"Has your dad got a boat?" David asked, as if amazed these two cockney waifs should be associated with the super-posh world of yachting.

"A yacht!" cried Julie, "not just a boat. Don' come from any old family, I don'."

For reasons best known to themselves, the three young men set on their way once again, and once again, they were followed by the girls, who took to kicking a stray tin can around to make their point.

"I weesh Coreen were not 'ere," Gilles whispered into Shane's ear.

"Why?" said David.

"Eez prezence eez deesconcertin' zem."

As if to confirm what Gilles had just said, the girls suddenly turned a corner and left their half-hearted suitors to their own devices.

"See ya, then!" they cried.

"Bye, girls!" said David.

"Bye, David darlin'!"

And with that, they disappeared, doubtless feeling, quite reasonably, that they'd given David and Gilles every opportunity to demonstrate their romantic interest in them.

"I wonder where zey went?" Gilles wistfully enquired.

"I shouldn't worry about it," said David, "you've got your Belgian girl, haven't you?"

" 'Ave I?" said the forlorn Belgian. Perhaps he couldn't understand why David had behaved in such a cavalier fashion towards two girls who'd clearly been besotted with him on sight. But then Gilles was a normal young man, devoid of the loser gene that causes those such as David to waste and squander every good gift that comes their way.

It's as if they don't have enough to fight against, or fight for...perhaps a little like WASP prince Hubbell Gardiner, as played by Robert Redford in the romantic movie masterpiece "The Way We Were". For at the beginning of the film, a short story of Gardiner's, "An American Smile" is read out in class by his college professor in which he describes himself as "in a way...like the country he lived in; everything came too easily to him."

The Isle of Wight is separated from the mainland by a strait of the English Channel known as the Solent, and on David's penultimate day, a trip to this island county lying to the south of Hampshire took place, and the entire course was involved.

Lunch was in a public house in the port of Yarmouth to the east of the island, where tall, slender English gentlemen of the old school, clad in double-breasted reefer jackets and flannels or white duck trousers, were apt to take a tincture or two between sails. Some sported bow ties, and others, magnificent handlebar moustaches which appeared to betoken a former membership of the Royal Air Force. Their wives favoured large navy-blue pullovers, silk scarves and slacks, although by nightfall they'd be in full evening dress.

Back in Lymington for tea, David happened to bump into Sally, a fresh-faced young sailing ace, possibly in her early 20s, who typically scorned the use of beautifying products, but for whom David had a soft spot nonetheless.

"Hello," he said, "where are you going?"

"Back to my room," Sally replied.

"Oh", he went on, "hey, apparently there's a get-together of all the crews on the course tonight, you know, a few drinks, a bit of dancing, a lot of laughs, are you going?"

"I don't know, I..."

"Oh, go on," he urged, "I'm going."

"Well...okay," she said, "I suppose I'll go...uh...this is where I turn off."

"Oh. Well..."

"See you tonight then."

"Yes, bye...hey wait! Do you know my name?"

"Yes, of course I do, David, bye!"

"Bye, Sally!"

Back at the guest house, the clock struck five to find David dressed to the nines as was his wont, and taking tea with Mrs Drummond-Smith, who'd have been scandalised had anyone suggested he was anything other than a deeply likable young man with a single, glaring fault: forgetfulness.

She had a duty to charge her guests for the packed lunch she made for each of them every day, even if they forgot to take it, but never did in David's case, despite the fact he was the only one of her guests to routinely leave his lunch behind.

She seemed to have something of a soft spot for him, for he may have reminded her of the bachelor dandies of her youth.

A little later, David, Corin and Gilles set out together for the dance, briefly stopping off at a pub for some much needed Dutch courage, although David's was the greatest need by a hectare or three.

"Half of bitter, please," Corin ordered.

"Half a shandy, pleez," came Gilles' modest request.

"Double scotch for me please," said David...and a mere ten minutes later, he was ordering a second one, while Corin wisely passed, and Gilles ordered his usual half of shandy. Some ten minutes after this, David started up on the pints.

"Come on, David," said an exasperated Corin, "let's go".

"We mus' go," Gilles agreed.

"Drink up!" Corin went on, "we don't want you in a disordered state before the dance, now, do we?"

David swallowed his pint and the three departed the pub. Shortly afterwards, they arrived at the site of the evening's festivities which was a large hall filled with tables and chairs with a space left for dancing. But David's first concern was locating Sally.

He saw her sitting next to a slim, smart, casually dressed young man with fashionable light blond collar length hair and a neatly trimmed beard, and approached the apparently happy couple, perhaps half-expecting she'd quit her date just to be with him.

"Hello, Sally," he said.

"Hello," she replied.

"Do you want a drink?" he asked.

"Er, no thanks," she said, "but I will have one later on."

"Okay then," he agreed, before making his way to the bar.

"Double scotch!" he ordered...and then some ten minutes later, he ordered a second one, soon after which, things went a bit hazy for him. However, one thing is certain...the evening ended with his jumping fully-clothed into the filthy waters of Lymington harbour.

What happened is that Corin and Gilles had spent some time wrestling with him, pretending they were about to throw him in, and then, as if exhausted by their efforts, they relented. At which point, to their amazement, David launched himself in by his own volition, before spending some time in his soaking wet clothes discussing music with a coterie of hippies encamped nearby listening to "The End" by the Doors.

The final day of the course was a melancholy one for David. For someone had told him it was possible to catch a deadly disease from swimming in the waters of Lymington harbour.

Around lunchtime, Dylan's father Mr Watts found him gazing into the very part of the harbour into which he'd elected to project himself the previous evening, and set about reassuring him that in all probability he'd escape from his injudicious dip unscathed.

Soon afterwards, David set off for the final time for Mrs Drummond-Smith's elegant domicile in order to pack in anticipation of his father's arrival, expected later in the day. On the way there, he had a chance meeting with Captain Peter St Aubyn, who urged him to mend his ways in a spirit of paternal concern:

"David", he said, "stop the drinking and the chasing of the birds...it's a hard world out there..."

While he was touched by the skipper's words, he might as well have told him to stop breathing. He was only 18 after all.

That's not to say, however, that the vast majority of young people at any given time aren't equipped for success, because they are. It's just that the David Cristiansens of this world are never among them. For them, the party never ends, until it's forcibly closed down forever.

Soon after reaching the guest house that had been his home for the past fortnight, David discovered that his dad had already arrived. In fact, he was getting on famously with Mrs Drummond-Smith, with whom he was engaged in an animated discussion, whose central topic was: David himself.

"He is a little eccentric," he told her at one point, which caused the gracious lady to almost cry out in protest, as if it had been a mortal insult.

"Eccentric?" she exclaimed, "oh, anything but...but he does have one fault, I'm afraid to say....he is rather forgetful."

She then went on to tell David that Gilles had been looking for him earlier on in the day, and was sorry to have missed him. Of course, were this today, the two young men would have already exchanged e-mail addresses or cell phone numbers. But in those days, precious friendships and romances forged over extended periods of time were all too often discarded overnight to be lost forever. The reason being that the only way to stay in contact was via telephone or snail mail, which required a certain amount of dedication, and not everyone had the patience for it.

The words of singer-songwriter Carole King's "So Far Away", from her classic "Tapestry" album from 1970, "So far away, doesn't anyone stay in one place anymore?', could be said to be an apt description of social life in the mid 1970s for some people. You could say goodbye to a person you loved on any day of the week, in any month of any year, and never see them again as long as you lived.

Indeed, after the summer of '74, David never saw Gilles, or Corin, or Dylan, or Daryl, or Sally, or Captain St Aubyn, or Mrs Drummond-Smith, or the two blonde teenagers who'd tried so hard to elicit his romantic interest ever again. But he never forgot them, nor the events of that faraway summer of so long ago.

Chapter Three

The summer of '74 was one of the most blissful lifelong loser David Cristiansen ever spent at the beautiful little former fishing village of Santiago de la Ribera; and there were a good few of those.

Each afternoon, he'd meet up with friends both male and female on the jetty facing his apartment on the Mar Menor, which was more or less deserted after lunch, where they'd listen to Bowie on cassette, or Donny keening "Puppy Love" on a portable phonograph, and generally enjoy being young and carefree in a decade of endless possibilities.

To some youthful Spanish eyes back in '74-'76, David was an almost impossibly exotic figure from what was then the most radical and daring city in Europe, and he played his image up to the hilt. In truth, though, he was barely less sheltered and innocent than they, and how wonderful it felt for him to bask in their soft Mediterranean loveliness for a few brief seasons.

However, a change came over Spain with Franco's passing, and the birth of the so-called "Movida", which could be said to be the Spanish equivalent of London's Swinging Sixties revolution. So that, by David's last vacation in La Ribera in the summer of '84, it was he who was in awe of the local youth rather than the other way around. For they seemed so cool to him, dancing their strange jerky chicken wing dance to the latest New Pop hits from Britain.

By then, of course, most of his old friends had vanished into their young adult lives, and his time as the undisputed English prince of La Ribera long passed.

He returned to London in late summer '74 with a deep tan and his long hair bleached bright yellow by the sun.

Only days afterwards, he found himself on HMS Ministry, moored then as today on the Embankment near Temple station. This involved his passing through Waterloo mainline station, which wasn't tourist-friendly as it is today, with its cafes and baguette bars, but a dingy intimidating place complete with pub and old-style barber.

There, he was approached by an old sailor who kept going on about how good looking he was; but he was no predator, just a sweet lonely old Scotsman who wanted someone to talk to for a few minutes, and David was happy to oblige.

He even went so far as to agree to a meeting with him the same time the following week, but he had no intention of keeping it. Besides, it wasn't long before HMS Thamesis was on its way to Hamburg, second largest city of Germany and its principle port.

Once they'd arrived, one of the CPOs warned David not to wander around Hamburg alone, for fear he might end up being ravaged and dumped in some back alley, or worse.

He duly joined up with a group of about three or four other ratings on his first night ashore, and they headed straight for the Reeperbahn in the bewitchingly vicious St Pauli red light district, which was in such stark contrast to the leafy outer suburbs, where David found himself, possibly a day or so later, through a specially organised coach trip.

A gang of them ended up in a park where David had his picture taken on a bridge by a reporter for the Surrey Comet, before a group of breathless tittering schoolgirls asked him to join them in some photos.

On the way back to the ship, one of the sailors announced he'd been quite a hit with the Hamburg teenyboppers, while another wryly opined:

"It's cos 'e's blond, innit..."

Whatever the truth, their simple unaffected joy of life must have seemed so touching to David, especially in the light of what girls barely older than they were subjecting themselves to a mere few miles away.

Some months later, in what was by then '75, David became a student at Prestlands Technical College which lay, then as now, on the fringes of Weybridge, an affluent outer suburb of south west London.

In semi-pastoral Prestlands, as in his beloved La Ribera, he learned to be a social being after years of near-seclusion, first at Welbourne and then as a home student. So, attention came to be a potent narcotic for him in the mid 1970s.

However, despite constant displays of flamboyant self-confidence, those who tried to get to know to know him on an intimate level found themselves confronted with a paradoxically inhibited individual.

The regular Prestlands Disco was a special event for David. And on one occasion early on in a Disco night, he got up in front of what seemed like the whole college and delivered a solo dance performance, possibly with white silk scarf flailing in the air, to a fiery Glam tune by Bebop Deluxe to frenzied cheers and applause.

On another, a trio of roughs who may have gate crashed the Disco only to see in David the worst possible example of the feckless wastrel student strutting and posturing in unmanly white, took him aside at the end of the night, doubtless intent on a touch of the old ultra-violence:

"Oy you, we bin watchin' you, you're a poof, ain'tcha..."

But David stood his ground, insisting that despite what they may have thought about him, he was just as straight as they. Apparently convinced, they then vanished into the departing crowds after muttering a few dark threats.

'75 again, and David's music, swimming and Martial Arts sessions were no more.

But the private lessons continued with Mark, a slim young academic with long darkish curly hair who lived alone but for several black cats in long time Rock star haven Richmond-on-Thames. For as well as being a private tutor, he was a successful session musician.

Specialising in the French Symbolist poets, he exerted a strong influence on David in terms of his growing passion for European Modernist art and culture. However, it was the less well known literature of Spain they studied together, from the anonymous 16th Century picaresque novel "Lazarillo de Tormes", and embracing Quevedo, Galdós, Machado, Dario and Lorca.

Mark was also an early encourager of David's writing, a lifelong passion that would degenerate in time into a chronic case of cacoethes scribendi; or the irresistible compulsion to write. As a result of this, he became incapable of finishing a single cohesive piece of writing until well into the eighties when he managed to complete a short story and a novel, both of which he went on to destroy but for a few fragments.

It was significantly through Mark that David came under the spell of the Berlin of the Weimar Republic of 1919 to 1933:

After he'd expressed interest in a copy, conspicuously placed in front of him on the desk they shared, of one of Christopher Isherwood's Berlin novels, "Mr Norris Changes Trains", Mark told him in animated tones that it had inspired the 1972 movie version of the Kander and Ebb musical, "Cabaret". In fact, while a work of art in its own right written for the screen by Jay Allen, and directed by former dancer Bob Fosse, "Cabaret" had been largely informed by Isherwood's only other Berlin story, "Goodbye to Berlin".

Seeing "Cabaret" later on that year was a life-transforming experience for David, one of only a handful brought about by a film, and the beginning of a near-obsessive preoccupation with the Berlin of the Weimar era.

So much that has become familiar to the West and beyond in the last half-century, from the deconstructive philosophies that dominate our academia, to the theatre of outrage that is the essence of Rock music, pre-existed in some form in the Berlin of the Golden Twenties, during which she existed as the undisputed world epicentre of the Modern impulse.

Under her auspices, great artistic freedom thrived in the shape of the painters of the New Objectivity movement, such as Beckmann, Dix and Grosz, the staccato cabaret-style music of Kurt Weill, Fritz Lang's dystopian "Metropolis", and the provocative dancing of Cabaret Queen Anita Berber, and her epicene companion, Sebastian Droste. And then there's the notorious sexual liberalism, which, through pictorial depictions of her cabarets and night clubs, has carried a power to shock even as far as the jaded 21st Century.

But beneath the glittering carapace, she bore within her the seeds of her own ruin, for despite the genius that flourished alongside the licentiousness, she was operating largely in defiance of the Judaeo-Christian moral values that have long formed the basis of Western society. Given that several other European and American cities were hardly less hysterically dissolute than Berlin, it's little wonder that the key Modernist decade of the twenties has been described by some critics as the beginning of the end of Western civilisation.

In its wake came the Great Depression, the unspeakable horrors of the Second World War, and the collapse of the greatest empire the world had ever seen, all of which were succeeded in turn by the dawning of the Rock and Roll era, and its quasi-religious exaltation of youth, which some critics see as the very triumph of Western decadence.

Decadence...that loaded word had a very special meaning and power for David Cristiansen in the mid 1970s...ever since his mother had used it, in fact, in reference to a series of photos of Germany's Weimar era featured in an edition of the Sunday Times magazine:

"Why do people want to be decadent?" She'd asked, as if genuinely concerned for those featured, which of course she was, having been raised in a Salvationist home in the idyllic Vancouver of the 1920s, and therefore imbued for life despite herself with a Christian worldview.

But to David Cristiansen, the answer was obvious, because in his Rock and Roll eyes, decadence was so heavy with the mysteries of the most forbidden sins that he could scarcely wait to become its incarnation; and while he would fall far, far short of his goal, he'd almost die trying to attain it.

David made no less than three sea voyages in '75, two as a civilian and one with the RNR, as well as spending a week with them docked at the Pool of London.

The first of these was to Amsterdam, via Edinburgh and St. Malo, on a three-masted topsail schooner TS Sir Francis Drake of the Society for the Training of Young Seafarers.

Among his shipmates were his 17 year old brother, Dany, several young men from Scotland and the north of England, some recent recruits to the RN, and a handful of older "mates" who'd been given authority over the rank and file of deck hands.

In overall charge, though, was the suave Ship's Captain, who also happened to be an alumnus of David's own alma mater of Welbourne.

It was an all-male crew, and David was well-liked at first, even if his popularity faded in time, with a few good pals remaining him...such as the small cherubic southerner with long dark hair worn shoulder length like the young Jack Wilde, who stayed loyal to him after they'd tried to impress a couple of girls together during a brief stay in St Malo, France.

He got on fine with a few of the others, but 'Jack' was a true prince who'd helped him out in his time of need:

What happened is that David had fallen hard for one of the girls, Françoise, and was wandering around in a mournful daze after having failed to pluck up the courage to ask her for her address:

"Oh, I really like Françoise," he whined, over and over again, but his misery was genuine. That is, until Jack handed him a piece of paper containing Françoise's address. It transpired she'd scrawled it down just before leaving them, and for a time, David was drunk with relief at the news, just walking on air, because there was the danger of his coming down with a serious case of lovesickness had she become lost to him forever, but thanks to Jack, he'd found her again.

There were heavy storms, and on at least one occasion, the crew were ordered out of their hammocks in the middle of the night to help trim the sails, and while David took no part in this, he did climb the rigging once, just before the Churchill docked at Amsterdam harbour.

Dozens of boys manned the yard arms, to which they were attached by their safety belts alone. David had been determined to make the climb, even though the experience made his legs shake throughout.

The Dutch capital was marked by the same kind of open sexual licence he'd witnessed only the year before in Hamburg, although it seemed to him to lack the German city's sinister vibrancy. Then - just as today - the sad De Wallen red-light district was filled to the brim with hundreds of little illuminated one-room apartments, each with a single woman sitting in clear view of onlookers plying her lonely trade.

As for Edinburgh, just before setting foot in the city for the first time, one of the lads, dressed to the nines himself in the trendiest seventies gear, warned David not to go strutting about Edinburgh town centre in a flashy boating blazer with his long white socks tucked into the same blue jeans he'd worn for sailing. But having only packed a handful of clothes, David was forced to ignore his advice, and, waltzing some time later into an inner city pub in broad daylight, a grinning hard man with long reddish curly hair asked him:

"Are you frae Oxford, son?"

Perhaps he was aware of the great university's reputation for producing flaming aesthetes like Brideshead's Anthony Blanche, and if so, it may have been touch and go for a while as to whether he was going to inflict some serious damage on David's angelic English face, but in the end he left him be. He may even have admired his chutzpah. But there was just something about David...something that repelled physical violence, some mysterious protective force.

Within a few weeks of returning to London by train from Edinburgh, David and Dany were off to sea again, this time as part of the Mariners Club of Great Britain, bound for the Baltic coast of Denmark by way of Germany's Kiel Canal. And while they were once more supervised by "mates" under the command of a Ship's Captain, the Mariners' utilised modern yachts rather than traditional tall ships.

The Cristiansens were quick to recruit a handsome young blond guy called Cy from the Stroud district of Gloucester as their best pal and confidante for the trip. It turned out they'd actually met him some ten years previously while passing through Calpe, Spain, either on their way to or from their grandmother Mary's home on the Costa Brava.

Soon after setting foot on Danish soil they got talking to a couple of girls who, as might be expected, had natural golden blonde hair, but their efforts at romance were wholly innocuous, despite the reputation Scandinavians had in those days for progressive sexual attitudes.

A less pleasant romantic episode took place towards the end of the trip, which saw David in pursuit of a pretty German girl called Ulrike. He was crazy for her, and she made it pretty clear she liked him too, and yet he'd senselessly sidelined her for the sake of a night of drunken idiocy with his brother and Cy, perhaps expecting her to run after him or something.

Suddenly, overtaken by sickly pangs of remorse, he set out to find her, and at some point during his quest, while walking along some kind of wooden pontoon, he lost his footing and fell fully clothed into the waters of what must have been the Kiel Canal.

He was a pathetic figure the next day, with his fancy dandy clothes all laid out on deck.

"What happened last night?" the captain breezily asked him.

"Well", he hazarded in response, "I was looking for this girl and..."

"You live in a dream world, David."

Indeed he did, and self-sabotage was fast becoming one of his specialities.

Also during that summer, David attempted to pass what is known as the AIB – or Admiralty Interview Board - with a view to qualifying as a Supply and Secretariat officer in the Royal Navy.

Up to this point, he'd not had any ambitions beyond becoming a celebrity, or rather major Rock and Roll star. And to this end, he'd made countless recordings of himself singing and playing his own simple songs on a series of portable cassette tape recorders. And all too often, these sessions culminated in a full-on tantrum, such as the time he hurled a newly purchased machine against his bedroom wall, totalling it instantly.

So he took the train from Molesey, first to the nearest big city of London, and from there to the port of Gosport on the south coast of England. For this was where he'd spend three days within the gates of HMS Stirling, a shore-based specialist training centre, attending various examinations and interviews intended to assess his potential as a future naval officer.

His father was delighted at this unexpected turn of events, little suspecting that in his desire to join the Senior Service, he was driven not by any selfless instinct to serve, so much as a vision of a privileged existence of refinement and elegance. And if this sounds distinctly Wildean for a mid '70s youth, then it was perfectly in keeping with what we've learned of David so far.

For as stated earlier, he'd never been anything other than a typical scruffy, sporty, ruffianly male until around about his 17th birthday, when he fell under the spell of Glam Rock as purveyed by artists as diverse as David Bowie, Alice Cooper, Marc Bolan, Rod Stewart, Elton John, the Sweet and the New York Dolls.

And about a year after that, he started to move away from the gaudiness of Glam towards a fascination for those artists whose rebellion against middle class respectability manifested itself as dandyism, or the tendency to ostentatiously over-dress. And this they invariably combined with that typical corollary of dandyism, decadence.

They included poets Charles Baudelaire, who affected dandyism in the Paris of the 1840s, Jean Cocteau, whose playground was the Paris of the so-called Belle Epoque, and the aforesaid Oscar Wilde, whose delight it was to scandalise the late Victorian bourgeoisie of the London of the 1880s and '90s.

Thence, David arrived at HMS Stirling as an immaculate aesthete. Doubtless complete with foundation style make up and some blusher and eye shadow, where most of the other candidates might have favoured standard issue jumbo collared shirts and great billowing flared trousers.

His foppish attire was compounded by a face that would have made him a perfect choice for a casting director scouting around for someone to play Dorian Gray in yet another celluloid version of Wilde's only novel. By the same token, he could have played Waugh's Sebastian Flyte with no less facility...or Highsmith's Dickie Greenleaf...or any number of kindred idle male beauties. But the role of a naval officer was clearly way beyond him, and it wouldn't be long before he'd provoked someone of a more serious cast of mind to intense irritation.

The "someone" in question turned out to be a northern lad with a little hint of a moustache who, finding David putting the final touches to his toilette before some assignment or another in front of a handy looking glass, felt moved to remind him:

"It's not a fashion parade, mate..."

He wouldn't be joining David at the disco that night, or any other night for that matter; but you couldn't fault his dedication, nor his powers of observation.

Two guys were eventually persuaded to keep him company, but their hearts weren't in it, and they sensibly returned to base for an early night, leaving David alone at the disco...where he befriended a shy young woman with short golden curls by the name of Shirlee, with whom he spoke about the AIB, and his fear of failing.

"Oh, you'll pass," she told him with a reassuring smile.

But if she'd looked a little closer at his wardrobe, with its boating blazers and striped college ties, and shoes fit for the Charleston rather than the Latin Hustle, she might not have spoken so confidently. For, far from bespeaking the status of the perpetual high achiever, they may have constituted a disguise, distinctly overdone, and donned daily by an individual who'd tasted failure too many times for one of such tender years.

When David finally returned to Stirling himself, he was shocked to discover that her main entrance had been locked and was now being manned by an armed guard.

As the young man set about trying to make contact with his superiors, he must have wondered what kind of person returns to base in the small hours, dressed to the nines, while in the midst of three days of tests and interviews that were supposedly vital to his future career. But he gave no indication of it.

And in time, his efforts were successful, so that shortly afterwards, a sheepish David Cristiansen was forced to pass through an officer's mess in order to reach his room. And after briefly exchanging pleasantries with its airily affable occupants, he retired for the night.

As might be expected, David failed in his noble attempt at passing the AIB, and never did get to wear a naval officer's uniform.

Perhaps he'd have stood a better chance if just for once he'd done the right thing and gone to bed early rather than rave it up at the disco in all his finery...but then again perhaps not. For after all, few if any naval officers have been historically selected on the basis of how good they look in a well-cut uniform.

Like all dandies he could be said to have partaken to some degree of the nature of the infamous Biblical character Absalom, about whom it was said in 2 Samuel 14: 25:

"But in all Israel there was none to be so much praised as Absalom for his beauty: from the sole of his foot even to the crown of his head there was no blemish in him."

And yet, Absalom's flawless beauty was ill-matched by a vain and reckless character which ultimately secured his ruin. As to David, despite exceptional artistic gifts, he'd spend much of his early adult life trying to find a place for himself in the world with little real success. And on those precious few occasions when those gifts came close to fulfilling his lifelong dreams of fame and glory, all too often, he mysteriously sabotaged his chances. It was as if despite his endless self-promotion, he felt that failure was all he deserved; and so failure became his destiny.

The summer of '75 also saw David spending a week with the RNR in the Pool of London, a stretch of the Thames lying between London Bridge and Rotherhithe.

Halfway through the week, he decided to attend a nearby club known as the Little Ship, which he knew for a fact to be hosting a discotheque. For oh how he loved to dance – quite alone - to the sweetest Soul music, for Soul it was still known in '75, as opposed to Disco.

And Disco he came to associate with a commercialised form he saw as closer to pure Pop than Soul. And which was epitomised at its best by the Bee Gees' soundtrack to "Saturday Night Fever", for which he had a lot of respect, and at its worst by the infamous novelty Disco tune.

And so dressed in a white open neck shirt worn sporting style with striped boating blazer and white trousers and shoes, he made his way to the Little Ship alone.

Once he'd had a drink or two, and the Soul had seeped through to his bones, he hit the dance floor possibly with a cigarette smouldering elegantly in his hand, and he was in his element. But within a short time of his having done so, the up tempo songs gave way to a long series of slow tunes, and he began to scan the departing dancers for a partner.

Soon his unfeasibly long-lashed blue eyes fell upon a slim girl with a head of bobbed curls of a striking yellowy blonde, who was frantically shooing her friend away in order to make room for David; and he walked up to her and asked her to dance. She agreed, and they danced, wordlessly, for what must have been a full half hour, until, exhausted, David's new found companion informed him she had to rejoin her friend, which she did, leaving David at a loss as to what to do next.

The bond had been broken. But then, as they'd not exchanged a word despite having been intimately locked together for aeons, there'd barely been one to begin with. And then he spied her at the bar, conversing with her friend, and he acted cool towards her, as she did him, and they made no effort to approach each other, and the moment was gone for good.

Perhaps David then returned to the floor to dance alone as he'd done earlier, like some kind of Mod, lost in a narcissistic reverie.

But David was no refugee from an age when peacock males were supposed to have been more interested in their beautiful images than any romantic experience with a woman. For later that night, while a power boat was ferrying him out to his ship in the glittering Pool of London, he announced to one of the officers onboard:

"I'm in love!"

At which point the officer, a tall languorously elegant man with a charming, approachable manner, graciously replied:

"That's good news."

But if he'd divined the condition of the handsome sailor's soul, he'd have spoken differently. Yes, David was in love, but his love was nowhere to be seen, and he'd returned from his night of dancing desperate to be reunited with the slim blonde angel he'd held so close for a blissfully brief thirty minutes or so, only to lose her forever.

But that was David, and he'd be back on that disco floor again before too long, risking his heart again before too long, dying a little of his solitude again...before too long. And oh how he loved to dance.

Since 1974, David had worshipped at the altar of those artists who had either immediately predated the age of Modernism or been part of its Banquet Years, and beyond into the Golden Twenties and so on.

However, in 1976, a gaudy new era started to influence the way he dressed and acted, and for much of that year, he dressed down in a workmanlike uniform of red windcheater, white tee-shirt and cuffed jeans as worn by '50s icon James Dean in "Rebel Without a Cause".

Dean had died a week to the day before David was born in late 1955, and the 20th anniversary of his death appeared to exert a strong influence on rising Pop stars such as John Miles and Slik's Midge Ure.

Slik were one of the biggest bands in Britain in 1976 with an image straight out of "Rebel" or a dozen lesser fifties delinquent movies. Sadly for them, though, and for many other bands who'd surfed the Glam Rock wave or emerged in its wake, they would be unjustly ousted by the Punk uprising.

As entranced as David was by the fifties, there were still times when he reverted to the old escapist dandy image he'd adopted in defiance of what he saw as the leaden drabness of post-Hippie Britain, while discovering Modernist giants such as Baudelaire, Wilde, Gide, and Cocteau for the first time.

One of these occasions came during the dying days of a famous long hot summer, when he wore top hat and tails and his fingernails painted bright red like some kind of hellish vision from Weimar Berlin to a party hosted by a friend from Prestlands.

It was mid-September, and David would have been at sea at the time, serving as Able Seaman David Cristiansen on the minesweeper HMS Kettleton.

A day or so afterwards, there was an accident involving Kettleton and a far larger ship, which resulted in the loss of twelve men, most of whom he knew personally. Of the twelve who didn't survive, David knew three quite well, and they were all men of remarkable generosity of spirit and sweetness of disposition, and it broke his heart to think of what happened to them.

He so wanted to comfort his shipmates for their loss, to bond with them and be part of what they were going through. He wanted to have survived like them; and he went over it all again and again in his mind, until he was driven almost insane with regret and grief. But he'd taken the easy way out, and this time it wouldn't be so easy for him to forget or explain away.

And the world took a darker turn for David Cristiansen...as the following year was marked by the irruption into the British cultural mainstream of Punk.

From its London axis, it spread like a raging plague...even infecting the most genteel suburbs with an extreme and often horrifying sartorial eccentricity, which, fused with a defiant DIY ethic and a brutal back-to-basics brand of hard-driving Rock produced something utterly unique even by the standards of the time.

David was assaulted for the first time by the monstrous varieties of dress adopted by the early Punks while strolling along the Kings Road the morning after a party in what may have been January 1977, and it would only be a matter of time before he too hoped to astound others the way they'd done him.

However, for most of '77, he dressed in a muted form which first took shape as a pair of cream brogue winkle pickers. And which he went on to supplement with black slip-ons with gold side buckles, mock-crocodile skin shoes with squared off toes, and a pair of black Chelsea boots. All perilously pointed; in fact so much so that within a year or so, they'd finish up being jettisoned into the murky black waters of the Thames.

His new look evolved by degrees at the endless series of parties he attended as one after the other of his old Welbourne pals celebrated their 21st in houses and apartments in various corners of trendy West and Central London.

Of all of these, he was perhaps closest with future oil magnate Chris, who was still finding his feet in London's most exalted social circles. These included Adrian Proust, a friend of Chris' from the north of England who forged cutting edge images for some of the most powerful trendsetters in Rock music.

David joined them a couple of times at Maunkberrys in Jermyn Street; and apart from the Sombrero in High Street Ken, it was the classiest club his suburban eyes had ever seen.

Being the rube he was, he thought the style that dominated London's club land was somehow Punk-related, but he was way off the mark. While it was the antithesis of the hippie look that was still widespread throughout the UK, it was deployed not as a gesture of violent social dissent, but for posing and dancing to the sweetest Soul music.

It was partly the realm of the Soul Boys, whose love of Black Dance music was a legacy of the Mods and Skins that preceded them.

Yet while the Soul Boys were largely working class hard nuts from various dismal London suburbs, some Soul lovers were in fact not Soul Boys at all, so much as elegant trendies. But with a penchant for floppy college boy fringes, plaid shirts worn over plain white tee-shirts, straight leg jeans, and the by now obligatory winkle pickers. And these were the kind to be found at such sumptuous places as the Sombrero.

The Soul Boys also favoured the wedge haircut...which could be worn with streaks of blond or red or even green, brightly-coloured peg-top trousers and winkle pickers or plastic beach sandals.

Speaking of the wedge, it was taken up at some point in the late 1970s by a faction of Liverpool football fans who'd developed a taste for European designer sportswear while travelling on the continent for away matches. Thence, the Casual subculture was spawned.

And its passion for designer labels persisted well into the 2010s, being manifest in every small town and shopping mall throughout the land.

By the summer, David was working as a sailing instructor in Palamos on Spain's Costa Brava, although he lost his job after only a few months. But instead of heading straight back to London, he chose to stay on in Palamos, parading around town by day, while spending most of his evenings at the Disco dancing to Donna Summer's "Love Trilogy".

As much as he loved the party life, what he wanted most of all was to enjoy it as a successful working actor like golden boys Peter Firth and Gerry Sundquist, both of whom found fame on the stage before branching out into movies and TV, although Firth had begun his acting life as a child star.

The problem was, he wasn't really cut out for the task. Granted, he had the pretty boy looks, but very few actors, or even musicians, become truly successful on the strength of looks alone, and this was especially true of the seventies, an age without MP3s or My Space or endless TV talent showcases.

He'd had no acting experience to speak of, except a handful of roles at Welbourne, all but one of which involved him wearing women's clothing.

The first was in Max Frisch's "The Fire Raisers", which saw him standing stock still as an old woman for a few brief minutes without uttering a single word.

The second, in a short play by George Bernard Shaw called "Passion, Poison and Petrifaction", saw him clomping around as a household maid in dress and studded military boots, and each time he spoke in the falsetto he'd selected for the part, the house erupted.

A third garnered some praise from one of the cadets for a convincing performance as a Holly Golightly style socialite; while his only male role was as psychopath Alec in a little known Agatha Christie one-acter called "The Rats", one of whose key lines was:

"Darlings, how devastating!"

And if the praise of the college nurse was anything to go by, it showed real promise:

"What are you going to do with your life, David? You're a good actor..."

But when all's said and done, he was hardly a National Youth Theatre wunderkind. And in terms of his other "talents", he'd written a few simple songs on the guitar, but he still couldn't play bar chords. Although he managed a passable take-off of Sinatra.

While as a would-be writer, he'd filled countless pages with endlessly corrected notes, but there was nothing tangible to show for it all. It could hardly be said then that his future positively glittered before him.

Chapter Four

David Cristiansen's final trip with the Thames Division of the Royal Naval Reserve came towards the end of the summer of 1977.

And while his best oppo Lofty O'Shea wasn't onboard, he had other mates to raise Cain with, such as Damon Cates, a tall redhead of about 26 who looked a little like Edward Fox in "A Day of the Jackal".

Like David, he loved music and fashion and the Soul Boy and Punk scenes, and they hit it off from their very first meeting back at HMS Ministry.

He later confided in David about his early life which had been marked by one family tragedy after the other; and his reserve masked a deep and complex sensibility. But he was not a man to flaunt it; nor an ability to handle himself in any situation. Such as the time an intoxicated sailor took a sudden, violent dislike to David in a south coast bar, and was clearly keen to do some serious damage to his pretty cherub's face. At which point Damon placed himself between David and his aggressor, before telling him to back off in no uncertain terms.

Doubtless, though, there were those who wondered how such a natural-born gentleman ended up on the lower deck...such as the guys from another division altogether, based far away from the fleshpots of London where a simpler, harder way of life prevailed, who sailed with them that summer to the port of Ostend in Belgium.

And when some of them were squaring up with some locals who had somehow offended them, Damon and David made it clear they had no intention of joining in.

Which prompted one of their number, a little waiflike sailor of about 16 or 17, to turn to them and ask, "What's wrong with youse guys?" with a look of utter bewilderment on his beardless face. But Damon simply didn't see the point of fighting for the sake of it. While a secret inner fortitude would eventually see him being commissioned as an officer in the Royal Navy, which had been his destiny all along; but not David's.

His time with the Thames Division, RNR, came to an end in late 1977 with a surprisingly positive character report. And if military life had never been for him, it became an important part of his identity nonetheless.

Even later in the summer, he joined the former Merchant Navy School in Greenhithe, Kent, as a trainee Radio Officer.

He formed several close friendships there; but closest of all was with Jayant, from Gravesend, a tough Thameside town in North West Kent with a large Indian community. And for a time, he and David were inseparable.

And it was through Jay that David started going to discos at Gravesend's Woodville Hall.

And pretty well every week for a while, a gang from the college would take the train to Gravesend, to be treated like visiting royalty by the - mainly white and Asian - kids, whose outfits stood out in such striking contrast to the industrial bleakness of their surroundings.

For English suburban life in those days didn't include mobile phones or DVD players, personal computers or the world wide web, and so was a fertile breeding ground for way out youth cults such as the Punks and Soul Boys.

There were girl in chandelier earrings, wearing evening dresses and stiletto heels, which were in stark contrast to the hair colours they favoured, such as jet black or bleach blonde, with flashes of red, purple or green. Some wore bow ties, while others hanged their school colours around their necks.

The boys favoured short hair, thin ties, mohair sweaters, baggy, well-pressed peg-top trousers of red or blue, and winkle picker shoes. And when they took to the floor to pirouette and pose, they could forget the ordinary cares of their working class lives and become superstars for a brief few hours.

David enjoyed his time at Merchant Navy School and made several good friends in addition to Jay, but ultimately had to realise it wasn't for him.

And soon after returning to London, he auditioned for a place on the three year drama course at the Silverhill School of Music and Drama in the City of London, which was really where he'd wanted to go in the first place.

And Silverhill took him on, which was a bit of a surprise to him to say the least, seeing as he'd already failed two earlier auditions for the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts.

Yet, it failed to prevent him sinking further into the nihilistic Punk lifestyle. And having been blown away by the hairstyle of one of a small gang of Punks he knew by sight from nights out in Dartford, he decided to imitate it a few weeks later:

It was spiked in classic Punk style, with a kind of a halo of bright blond taking in the front of the head, both sides, and a strip at the nape of the neck. And if you chose to chose to flaunt such a style in those days, you lived in constant fear of attack or abuse. For Punk's culture of insolence and outrage was extreme even by the standards of previous British youth cults; such as the Teds, the Rockers, the Mods, the Greasers, the Skins, the Suedeheads and the Smoothies.

And at the risk of being fanciful, it could be said that to some extent, Britain was a nation still under the sway of the moral values of the pre-war years, so that a cultural war was being fought for the soul of the nation. While the Punks were the avant-garde of a new Britain in a way that would be impossible today. And this may go some way towards explaining the incredible hostility Punks attracted from many ordinary members of the British public.

But David was determined to be part of the revolution. And to this end, he saw local Punk band Sham '69 in a hall above the Surveyor, a pub in the heart of the Molesey Industrial Estate some 12 miles from the centre of London.

This was shortly before they shot to fame after singer Jimmy Pursey was arrested on the roof of the Vortex Punk club in central London on the 23rd of September 1977.

Sham's very name had been derived from the legend Walton and Hersham '69, scrawled on a wall in Molesey's sister town of Hersham, referring to the year she topped the premier division of the long defunct Athenian amateur football league.

David already knew Pursey by sight, having seen him a year or so earlier miming to Chris Spedding's "Motorbiking" at the famous Walton Hop, supposedly Britain's first ever discotheque, which held mime competitions for Hop regulars at the height of its popularity.

Pursey was such a regular, and the same could be said to a degree of David and his brother Dany. And one evening, David and Dany and a friend considered taking part in the competition themselves; having selected "I Can't Give You Anything" by the Stylistics to mime to; but at the last minute, they changed their minds, as they hadn't even taken the trouble to rehearse.

While unlike the ditherer David, Pursey made it clear to all who witnessed his performances at the Hop he'd been born to be a star.

And sure enough, for a brief period, he was one of Britain's leading Punk heroes. While his followers, the Sham Army, consisting of skinheads on both the left and the right of the political spectrum, became almost as famous as him. But after a riot at the Middlesex Polytechnic in North London, the first frenetic phase of Sham's performing career came to a close. Although they continued having hits until in 1980, when they disbanded...until the inevitable reformation.

But 1977 was Punk's year zero in the UK, and a far darker one than those immediately preceding it for that very reason.

Around about this time, David was often to be found at the Surveyor on a Sunday night with Dany, and mutual friends.

On one occasion, the usual Disco or Pop gave way to a violent Punk Rock anthem which saw the tiny dance space being invaded by deranged pogo-dancers as if they'd been summoned by some malignant deity. On another, a Ted revivalist who favoured flashy fifties-style clothing, tried to start some trouble with him in the toilet, at which point Vinnie, another Ted who'd befriended him about a year previously when he looked like an extra from a '50s High School flick stepped in with the magical words: "He's a mate!"

Vinnie's intervention may have saved him from a hiding that night, because Teds had a loathing of Punks informed by their essential conservatism. To them, Punks probably seemed to have no respect for anything.

The Teds, or Edwardians as they were initially styled, were widely perceived as folk devils when they'd first emerged in the UK in about 1952, with a look purloined from a small minority of upper class Guards officers who'd adapted the Edwardian fashion in the late 1940s in defiance of post-war austerity.

However, in comparison to the later Punks, they were a model of respectability, and that was especially true of the '70s, when a brief revival resulted in battles between Teds and Punks taking place on West London's Kings Road all throughout '77.

They persisted into the '80s, only to all but vanish from the face of the globe with the passing of that last great decade of youthful eccentricity.

It may have been that very night that Vinnie the Ted almost imploringly asked him whether he into "this Punk lark", and David assured him he wasn't. He may even have added he still loved the fifties, which was true to a degree, but that wasn't the point. For the fact is he lied to him to look good in his eyes, which was a pretty low thing to do to a friend.

But given the times, young men like David were forced to learn certain survival tactics, such as the ability to flee at the first whiff of trouble.

Yet, by the time of the internet revolution, Punk had become just another exhibit of the Rock and Roll museum, itself just another branch of the vast entertainment industry. And the culture wars of the late '70s had long since been quieted, while rebellion had become more or less fully co-opted by the mainstream.

To give Punk its due, that this situation had come about in the first place was at least partly as a result of its utter ferocity. Which is to say of its first serious assault, which targeted a Britain still desperately clinging to the final vestiges of its Judaeo-Christian moral fabric. And while it was rejected by the vast majority of British people - indeed the West as a whole - its influence went on to be little short of cataclysmic.

Yet, declared dead by about '79, it returned to the underground, where it set about fertilising one rebel movement after the other throughout the '80s. And so, Post-Punk, No Wave, Anarcho-Punk, Industrial and Goth all benefited from its ethos, until finally in the early '90s, the Alternative Rock revolution brought it fully back into the mainstream.

Spearheaded by acts as diverse as Alice in Chains, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Smashing Pumpkins and above all, Nirvana, this movement could be said to have been Rock's final desperate outburst of sedition. And after its passing, Rock finally took its place alongside Classical, Jazz, Folk and World as just another music genre, where once it had been little short of a religion of youth.

While the sheer intensity of Nirvana's later music continues to startle, it's been wholly shorn of its iconoclastic power; and it's available for anyone of any age to access via the simple click of a computer mouse. And the same could be said of the Sex Pistols, whose one-time bassist Sid Vicious has emerged as Punk's leading icon, and the quintessence of Punk nihilism.

Is this development in some respects a fulfilment of Nietzsche's philosophy of the transvaluation of all values?

There are those cultural commentators who would insist that this is indeed the case, and that far from being a positive move towards universal tolerance, it's a tragedy beyond compare, although rather than Nietzsche, it's the Book of Isaiah they might feel moved to quote from:

"Woe to those who call evil good and good evil."

But there was a time that such a revaluation met with enormous resistance, and the British public's outraged reaction to Punk in '77 was a perfect example of this. As for the Teds, goodness knows they were no angels. But to them there was something uniquely rotten at the heart of Punk, while the Rock and Roll they loved possessed all the purity of a classic art form.

It was at the tail end of this Punk Rock Year Zero that David took Jay to a party in London's swanky West End. It was the last in a long series of celebrations he'd gone to throughout '77 mainly as a result of friends from Welbourne reaching the landmark age of 21. It was also one of the last times he ever saw Jay.

Before arriving, Jay and he met up as arranged with future oil magnate Chris, and as soon as the introductions were over, Jay saw fit to offer a solo display of his lethal street fighting skills:

"I'm suitably impressed", said Chris...and he was, although he was no wimp himself; but Jay was something else, and few would have benefited from crossing him...but they got on like a house on fire that insane night which at one point saw David pouring a full glass of beer over his head. What the beautiful dancer he'd spent most of the evening with thought of a nice guy like David doing a thing like that she didn't say.

In those days, David knew so many people who'd have done anything for him given half the chance, and yet his one true passion appeared to be the creation of endless drunken scenes, and a party wasn't a party for him unless he'd caused one, after which he simply moved on.

And indeed in the spring of '78, he was on the move again...this time to the city of Fuengirola on Spain's Costa del Sol; and with the intention of helping set up a sailing school with Adam, a young Englishman whom his father had recently befriended in London. But for some reason, the project came to nothing.

However, David stayed on, living first in an apartment Adam had kindly set him up in, then in a little hotel in town; and finally, rent-free with an American friend, Scarlett, one of a handful of US ex-pats resident in Fuengirola in the late 1970s alongside young people from Australia, Britain, Ireland, Germany, South America and other parts of the world.

It was a hedonistic scene, and David wasted little time in becoming part of it. He spent his nights at the Tam Tam night club, where he set about establishing himself as Fuengirola's very own Tony Manero...in Punk Rock attire.

It was his first year as a full-time Punk, in point of fact, and among the clothes he favoured were a black cap-sleeved wet-look tee-shirt, drainpipe jeans of black or green, worn with black studded belt, festooned with silver chain filched from a Spanish restroom, and kept in place by multiple safety pins, fluorescent pink teddy boy socks, and white shoes with black laces like the ones he'd seen on the cover of an album by London Punk band 999. At one stage, he even wore a safety pin – disinfected by being dipped into a drink – in his left earlobe, but removed this once his lug had started to pulsate.

After a few weeks, he became lead singer for the Tam Tam house band, and would typically wear so much make-up onstage that one occasion, the microphone became smeared in lipstick; but the patrons liked him, and he'd pose and pout and throw his spare frame about for their benefit.

He was always short of money, but could order anything he wanted from the Tam Tam bar, and when he was flat broke, his close friend Laura bought him toasted cheese sandwiches to keep him going.

Laura and he were rarely on the beach, but would sometimes hang out at the famous Campo de Tenis; although David spent a lot of time rehearsing with the band. And in the evening, he was often to be found at Laura's parents' house, putting on the slap, and perhaps even painting his nails a gaudy shade of red, before heading along to the Tam Tam to do his gig.

One night her dad, a charismatic former tennis pro, was disturbed by their antics, and upon spying the pair of them, with David possibly wearing more make-up than his own daughter, incredulously asked:

"What is this ****, Laura?"

However, there were those nights they preferred to get away from it all, and for David, it was a special joy to be alone with Laura, while brimful with anticipation, in the demi-light of the Disco, with the evening still in its infancy. And on one incredible occasion as they were making their way through Fuengirola by dark, possibly to or from yet another club, the legend that was racing champion James Hunt called out Laura's name before emerging from the shadows. They exchanged a few words; and then it seemed he vanished just as suddenly as he'd arrived.

Once David Cristiansen had started at college, he made it pretty clear than the nice clean-cut young man who'd auditioned the previous year had been a curve ball; as he was making no further attempts to conceal his Punk image.

This was compounded by a bizarre hyperactivity that occasionally verged on the downright outrageous, not to say, disruptive. It was as if he was determined to convince the world that he was an artist with a capital "A", and therefore entitled to incessantly attract attention to himself with aberrant behaviour and clothing.

And among the items he favoured were slim jim ties, drainpipe jeans, florescent Fifties-style socks, and white leather brothel creepers, but the pièce de résistance was a pair of tight plastic snakeskin trousers which he actually only wore the once.

As if all this weren't enough to cause eyebrows to raise among the authorities, he insisted on wearing make-up even in classes, although to be fair it was subtly applied, except for gigs and parties, when he really piled on the slap...foundation, eye shadow, blusher, lip rouge, the works. Talk about lipstick, powder and paint.

On one occasion, in the course of a class supervised by Den Denaghy, a brilliant bearded professional mime artist who'd been a regular on children's TV for a time, the compact he usually carried about with him for sporadic touch-ups fell out of an inner pocket of his jacket during an exercise, before hitting the floor with an embarrassing clatter. All eyes went to the compact, and there was a mortifying silence, which the manic Den mercifully broke by retrieving the offending article from the floor, and furiously daubing peoples' startled faces with glittery blusher.

Still, his days of wearing slap were numbered. It was as early as '79, in fact, that he developed some kind of allergic reaction to a certain brown eye shadow, which caused his eyes to become so swollen and sore as to verge on the porcine...yet, he'd only worn it a little time before, and suffered no ill-effects.

This was during that first gig, held in the basement of the nearby Lauderdale Tower a few days after his 23rd birthday as part of one of the Folk Nights held occasionally at Silverhill in those days. And he was singing for a band he'd named Narcissus, one of several he was involved in at Silverhill.

And through one of them, The Rockets, he was talent-scouted as lead singer for a guitarist of genius called Don Taylor, who was hoping to form a band himself, and clearly thought David would cut it as a front man. But for some reason, it never came to be.

Don went on to play and write for one of the world's leading Rock superstars, but at one point he briefly joined a Silverhill-based Jazz-Funk outfit with another then friend of David's. That band would go on to become one of the most successful Pop acts of the eighties, chalking up one hit after the other in a Britain in which Jazzy Dance music was favoured by flash boys in white socks and tasselled loafers. David was even invited to an early rehearsal, at a time when they might have done with a front man like himself...but of course, he didn't go.

Through Narcissus, he found only disgrace and humiliation, and not just the once. Narcissus played a grand total of two gigs, both of them fiascos.

The first time they played together was just prior to the forming of the Rockets, and although it had been a disaster due to his drunken upstaging of the other band members, piano player Perry was sufficiently impressed by him to ask him to front the Rockets.

And it was through the Rockets that he was offered the job of front man for Don's mooted musical project. However, rather than wait for the call from him, David went on ahead and re-formed Narcissus with original members Simon on guitar and John on percussion.

David piled on the make-up, and Simon and John followed suit, but being relatively untainted by personal vanity, the results were unsettling. Sweet-natured Simon painted his Botticellian features like an ancient pagan warrior, while gentle giant John saw fit to smother his with military-style camouflage. Not surprisingly, their set was accompanied by a riot of heckling which, although far from malicious, ultimately provoked David to irritation, and he ended up tossing his plectrum into the audience with a sarcastic:

"Here's to all my loving fans!"

This petulant outburst may have caused no end of harm to his reputation, because the chutzpah of the natural leader who demands and gets attention and respect through the sheer force of his personality was never among his gifts. Rather he was blessed with the seductive charm of the social climber for whom alpha status comes through the subtle exercise of exquisite manners. In this respect, he was a little like Julien Sorel, anti-hero of Stendhal's "The Scarlet and the Black" who despite humble origins, succeeds in ascending to the very top of the social ladder, only to allow a single act of madness to destroy all his good work.

David's final band was the '50s revivalist act Z Cars, which even won a small fan base for itself, its members being Carl Cool, the front man and chief songwriter who had a tattoo painted onto his shoulder, Robert Fitzroy-Square, the geek with the Buddy Holly horn rims, Dave Dean, the hard man of the band with the Sid Vicious stare, and Little Ricky Ticky, the baby at only 18. Things went wrong for them when they tried to deviate from their usual three-chord doo-wop or Rock with more complex songs, starting with a tightly arranged version of Arthur Crudup's "That's All Right Mama", complete with harmony backing vocals. Sadly though, they weren't up to the task, and disillusion swiftly set in. By this time, David had left Silverhill anyway, and it just wasn't the same.

There had been emotional scenes at his farewell party held in the depths of the Barbican Estate's Lauderdale Tower, and some cried openly at the thought of his leaving.

During the course of the night, a very dear friend of his, Tamsin, told him to contact Harry Creasey, a London-based impresario and agent well-known for offering young actors their very first positions within the entertainment industry.

David was to take her advice, and sauntering cigarette in hand into Harry's Denmark Street office a few weeks later, he was confronted by a dark slender man of about forty whose outrageously flamboyant manner was compounded by seismic levels of personal charm, but not before he'd made one of his final ever trips to Spain.

Yet, even though the guys from the band had so wanted him to reclaim his place as front man in Fuengirola, he'd chosen to go to La Ribera with his parents instead, and he felt a deep and overwhelming sense of exhaustion as he stretched out under the Costa Calida sun. It was as if he was already unconsciously aware that his acting career was destined to be a non-event.

Yet, shortly afterwards, he took up his very first official acting job as Christian the Chorus Boy - doubling as Joey the Teddy Bear - complete with furry ursine costume - in a pantomime tour of "Sleeping Beauty", all thanks to the infinite generosity of Harry Creasy, who wanted David to look as good as possible...

"...because he's pretty, all right?" he explained, and no one was going to dispute that.

Chapter Five

A few weeks after "Sleeping Beauty" had culminated at the Buxton Opera House over Christmas 1979, David Cristiansen appeared in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at both the Bristol and London Old Vics alongside legendary method genius and future Hollywood superstar Daniel Day Lewis, who played Philostrate; and brilliant character actor Nickolas Grace, who made a mesmerising Puck.

However, the cast as a whole was incredibly gifted and charismatic, and shortly before the opening night, David was lucky enough to see a BOV production of one of his favourite ever musicals, Frank Loesser's "Guys and Dolls", featuring Clive Wood as Sky and Pete Postlethwaite as Nathan, which provided him with more unalloyed pleasure than any other theatrical production he'd seen up to that point. Even seeing the London premiere of Sondheim's "Sweeney Todd" a few months later failed to top it.

After resuming his role as Mustardeed in the summer, his next acting job came early the following year courtesy of an old family friend, Howell Jones, who just happened to be the Company Stage Manager at the famous Phoenix Theatre on Charing Cross Road at the time.

A production of Petronius' "Satyricon" was already under way, and they needed an Assistant Stage Manager at the last minute, and Howell suggested David. He'd also be the show's percussionist, with primal thrumming rhythms opening the show, and featuring throughout.

Also in '81, David became a kind of part-time member of an initially nameless youth movement whose origins lay in the late 1970s, largely among discontented ex-Punks, but who were eventually dubbed Futurists; and then New Romantics.

Their music of preference included the kind of synthesized Art Rock pioneered by German collectives such as Kraftwerk and Can, as well as the highbrow Glam of David Bowie and Roxy Music. All of these elements went on to inform the music of Spandau Ballet and Visage, who emerged from the original scene at the Blitz Club in Covent Garden, and Ultravox, a former Punk band of some renown whose fortunes revived with the coming of the New Romantics.

The name arose as a result of their impassioned devotion to past eras perceived to be romantic, whether relatively recent ones such as the '20s or '40s, or more distant historical ones such as the Medieval or Elizabethan. Ruffs, veils, frills, kilts and so on were common among them, but then so were demob suits.

Several of the cult's more outlandish trendsetters went on to become famous names within the worlds of art and fashion. They stood in some contrast to more harder-edged young dandies such as the Kemp Brothers from working class Islington. Their Spandau Ballet began life as the hippest band in London, famously introduced as such at the Scala cinema by writer and broadcaster Robert Elms in May 1980. In time, though, they mutated into a chart-friendly band with a penchant for soulful Pop songs such as the international smash hit, "True".

David attended New Romantic nights at Le Kilt and Le Beat Route among other swishy night spots, and was even snapped at one of these by photographer David Bailey, believed to have served as model for the central figure of Antonioni's enigmatic evocation of sixties London, "Blow Up". But he was never a true New Romantic so much as a lone fellow traveller keen to experience first hand the last truly original London music and fashion cult before it imploded as all others had done before it.

Despite its florid decadence, it was always far more mainstream than other musical movements which arose in the wake of Punk, such as Post-Punk and Goth.

For this reason, several of its keys acts went on to become part of the New Wave, whose mixture of complex tunes and telegenic Glam image partly inspired the Second British Invasion of the American charts. This occurred thanks largely to a desperate need on the part of the newly arrived Music Television for striking videos, and went on to exert a colossal influence on the development of music and fashion throughout the eighties.

As '81 wore on, David's acting career lost momentum, with the result that some kind of family decision was reached to the effect that he should return to his studies with a view to eventually qualifying as a teacher. Thence, he went on to pass interviews for both the University of Exeter, and Leftfield College, London, scraping in with two very average "A" level passes at B and C.

He wanted to stay in London, so as to keep the possibility of picking up some acting work in his spare time, so in the autumn he started a four-year BA degree course in French and Drama mainly at Leftfield - but also partly at the nearby Central School of Speech and Drama - while staying in a small room on campus.

At first, he was so discontented at finding himself a student again at 25 that in an attempt to escape his situation, he auditioned for work as an acting Assistant Stage Manager, but he wasn't taken on...so he simply resigned himself to his fate.

A short time later, though, while sauntering around at night close by to the Central School, he was ambushed by a group of his fellow drama students who may have seemed to him to incarnate the sheer carefree rapturous vitality and joy of life of youth, and because of them and those like them, he came to love his time at Leftfield, which just happened to coincide with the first half of the last of a triad of decades in the West of unceasing artistic and social change and experimentation.

Indeed, the Playboy philosophy which exploded in the 1960s could be said to have reached its full flowering in the crazy eighties. Even if the vast majority of people whose salad days fell within its boundaries ultimately forged respectable lives following a brief season as outsiders.

As for David...as much as he loved being young in the '70s and '80s, by the 2010s, he'd come to bitterly regret the shallow narcissism that once caused him to scorn the trappings of status, security and respectability. And he'd find himself pining for it like some cruelly spurned lover.

But then, as he saw it, the flouting of all the elements of a contented life for the sake of a few seasons of joy had been tirelessly promoted in the West for over half a century. Not least through Rock music, the narcissistic art par excellence.

As to the society it had helped to create, it was akin in his eyes to the antedeluvian world, whose workings of the flesh survived the Flood to be disseminated throughout the nations to spell the end of one empire after the other, the Babylonian, the Medo-Persian, the Greek, the Roman...

And the older, wiser David saw himself as having embraced the libertine life for no good reason, having been blessed by every great gift a young man could possibly hope for, including a stable childhood and first-rate education.

Yet, as he'd come to understand it, our most treasured qualities, such as brilliance, beauty, charm and talent - which so often operate together - must be submitted to God, lest they become dangerous, as they so often do. While the gifted, being so visible, are also more susceptible than most to a multitude of temptations. And so all too liable to fall prey to Luciferian pride and Luciferian rebellion... which is why so many are drawn to the power offered by art, and especially music; the writer of the first song Lamech having been in the line of Cain.

Indeed, there are those Christians who believe that the Cainites were the first pagan people, and that they corrupted the Godly line of Seth through a sensual and wicked music not unlike much contemporary Rock.

Of course not all Rock music is flagrantly wicked, far from it. Much of it is melodically lovely. While in terms of its lyrics, its finest songs display the most delicate poetic sensibility.

The fact remains, however, that no art form has been quite so associated as Rock with rebellion, transgression, licentiousness, intoxication and death-worship, nor been so influential as such.

And while the David of the 2010s viewed this truth with the fiery eyes of a modern day Jeremiah, his '80s counterpart still desperately sought fame as a Rock and Roll star himself; and if not as Rock artist, then actor, or writer.

And as the former saw it, it was surely a good thing he never gained this pagan form of immortality because had he done so, he'd almost certainly have been used for the furtherance of the kingdom of darkness. And once he'd served his purpose, may well have died a solitary premature death as an addict. As has been the fate of so many men and women all too briefly inspirited by the magnetic charisma of the superstar.

And Leftfield in the early '80s was a seething hotbed of talent and creativity which provided David with almost unlimited opportunities for acting and performance.

Within days, he'd made a close friend of a fellow French and Drama student by the name of Sebastian Stockbridge.

Seb was a slim, good-looking, dark-haired charmer from the north east of England who, despite a solid private school background and rugby player's powerful wiry frame, dressed like a Rock star with his left ear graced by a pendant earring, and favouring skin-tight jeans worn with black pointed boots. Together, they went on to feature in Brecht and Weill's's "The Threepenny Opera".

David had two small roles, the most fascinating to him being that of petty street thief Filch, as he'd been played by legendary monstre sacré Antonin Artaud in one of two film versions of the play directed by G.W. Pabst in 1931, and Artaud, an example of the avant garde faith in extremis, was one of his most beloved cursed poets.

Through this production he went on to play jive-talking disc jockey Galactic Jack in the musical play "The Tooth of Crime", its director having been impressed by Seb and himself in "The Threepenny Opera", and so cast them in the lead role of Hoss, and Galactic Jack, respectively.

It's no coincidence that its author, Sam Shepard, has gone on record as having been influenced by Artaud in his own work, as the latter's concept of a Theatre of Cruelty has proved prophetic of much of the theatre of the post-war years, indeed art as a whole, with its emphasis on assailing the senses, and in some cases the sensibilities as well, of the public through every available means.

Before long, David was channelling every inch of his will to perform into one play after the other at Leftfield, while any real ambition to succeed as an actor receded far into the background.

When it came to his French studies, in his essay writing he often flaunted an insolent outspokenness perhaps partly influenced by his favourite accursed artists, but also reflecting his own exhibitionistic need to shock. And while some of his tutors may have viewed these efforts with a jaundiced eye, one came to thrill to them and await them with the sort of impatience normally accorded a favourite TV or radio series. This was the wonderful Dr Elizabeth Lang, born in Lancashire in 1924, as the only child of working class parents who went on to gain a place at Oxford University, before becoming a lecturer there, and then at Leftfield.

What an ascent...from humble northern roots to a lectureship at the most hallowed place of learning in history...little wonder she was so fragile, almost febrile as a person, but so kind, so single-minded in her devotion to those who shared her passionate view of art and life:

"Temper your enthusiasm," she'd tell David, "and the extremes of your reactions. You should have a more conventional frame on which to hang your unconventionality. Don't push people, you make yourself vulnerable."

Was she was trying to save him from himself, and from the addiction to self-destruction that so often accompanies extreme distinction, whether of beauty, intelligence or talent...as if it were the lot of some of the most gifted among us to serve as examples of the potentially ruinous nature of privilege when operating in a purely earthly realm?

For David so loved to play the accursed poet...and to scandalise by way of the written and spoken word. How close this carried him to the threshold of a terminally seared conscience it's impossible to say; but one thing is certain, his compassion would soon suffer, a process that would prove excruciating to him.

That's not to say he ever fully stopped being a caring person, because he certainly didn't, and he continued to be repelled to the core by those artistic revolutionaries who advocated actual physical violence. At the same time, he was slavishly devoted towards certain favoured artists who sought the total demolition of the established order, a consequence that inexorably results in increased crime and violence....not that this occurred to him at the time.

This nihilistic love of destruction kept uneasy company with a high and mighty dudgeon towards what he perceived as social injustice, and among its chief targets were dictators on the right wing of the political spectrum - in fact, the political right as a whole - and while he also opposed left-wing oppression, he reserved his real animus for the right.

The 1980s was a decade of protest and riot in the UK, and all through its years of raging discontent, David allied himself with one radical lobby after the other; including Greenpeace, CND, Animal Aid, Amnesty, and the Anti-Apartheid Movement which published one of his characteristically apoplectic letters of protest.

And he marched against the looming nuclear threat in London and Paris, and was a remorseless disseminator of rants, pamphlets, tracts, postcards, and whatever else was at hand as a means of spreading a message of social revolution.

He would ultimately contend that his was the self-righteous fury that is rooted in a false notion of the perfectibility of Man, that fails to recognise that oppression stems from the sin we all share, and that has no real satisfying motive other than its own existence. But at the time, he knew nothing of any of this.

In the summer, a faction from Leftfield, culled mostly from the Drama department, took Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" to the internationally famous Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and in their production, Shakespeare's Illyria was transformed into a Hippie paradise, with David playing Feste as a Dylanesque minstrel strumming dirge-like folk songs with a voice like sand and glue.

Most of the Leftfield players' male contingent couldn't have deviated more from the politely liberal norm found nightly at the Fringe Club on Chambers Street if they'd tried. Among the wildest were Massimo, a dashing Britalian of passionately held humanitarian convictions, who played Sir Toby Belch, David, the anarchic product of multiple social and educational influences, and Jez, a tough but tender Scouser with slicked back rockabilly hair, who played Malvolio in a mesmerisingly understated manner.

Jez was a fascinating, charismatic guy with a hilariously dark sense of humour who had been in a band in the early '80s at the legendary Liverpool Post-Punk club, Eric's. He and his girlfriend Gill, who'd designed the flowing Hippie costumes, and was also a very dear friend of David's, never stopped encouraging him nor believing in him:

"I think you should be one of the greats, David," Jez once told him, "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...!'"

Yet, while he was complimented by many at Leftfield, others betrayed their disquiet with their words, as if he had the power to remind them of the true tragic essence of sed non satiata:

"You give to everyone, but are incapable of giving in particular."

"I'm afraid...you're inscrutable. You're not just blasé, are you?"

"I'm afraid there's something really troubling you, that you don't want to tell anyone."

"There's a mystery about you...you change."

"I like it when you really feel something, but then it's so rare."

"Don't go away so long like that, David, it worries me."

"Disabused."

"Blind, deaf, indifferent."

David's relationship with Leftfield was one of the great passions of his life...and one destined to haunt him for the remainder of his days, as if he knew he'd never know such depths of intimacy again...and be increasingly prey to the torment of fading affect.

Then the following year...his second at Leftfield...he lived in an upper floor apartment in Golders Green with his close friends from the French department, Seb, a former Sedbergh School alumnus, and fellow northerner Stephen, whose alma mater was Sedbergh's age-old rival, Ampleforth, a Catholic college largely run by Benedictine monks.

Steve was an incredibly gifted pianist and guitarist who despite a misleadingly serious demeanour was a warm, affectionate, witty, eccentric character who endlessly buzzed with the nervous energy of near-genius. He might not have wanted to ape the way his flatmates dressed and behaved, but he was fiercely protective of them despite their social butterfly ways.

And David was determined to live like an aesthete, even if it meant doing so on a shoestring in a cramped little flat in suburban north London, which was hardly the city of dreaming spires; and to this end he organised what he optimistically termed a salon, which although well-attended didn't survive beyond a single meeting. For as aesthetes, David and co. fell pathetically short of the new Brideshead generation that was thriving at Oxford in the wake of the classic TV series.

But David couldn't have cared less...for self-doubt simply wasn't an issue for him in the early eighties and he was a truly happy person; in fact so much so that he may have exaggerated his capacity for depth and melancholia as a means of making himself more interesting to others.

In the final analysis though, what possible reason was there for him to be discontented, given that his first two Leftfield years were fabulous...an unceasing cycle of plays, shows, concerts, discos, parties set in one of the most beautiful and bucolic areas of London?

After the second year ended in the summer of 1983, David had a few months to spare before travelling to Paris to work as an English language assistant at a Lycée Technique in the suburb of Bretigny-sur-Orge in Essonne.

This spelled his exile from the old drama clique, and he'd not be joining them in their final year celebrations, and the knowledge of this must surely have affected him. He was, after all, severing himself from a vast network of gifted friends of whom he was deeply fond, and so losing an opportunity of growing as an artist in tandem with like-minded spirits. He could have opted for just a few weeks in France, but did he really want to be deprived of the chance of spending more than six months in the city he'd long worshipped as the only true home of an artist?

Earlier in the year, his close friend Madeleine, a brilliant dynamic woman of North African Jewish ancestry had told him something to the effect that while many were drawn to him, it wasn't just in consequence of any magnetic attractiveness he might have possessed:

"They sense death in you," she chillingly opined.

Cognizant as she was of the intellectual worldview of the great psychologist Sigmund Freud, who identified a death drive subsequently dubbed "thanatos", she may have divined some kind of will to destruction within him...or rather, self-destruction.

As things turned out, she was right in doing so, although this was barely embryonic in the early '80s, if it existed at all, but he would ultimately attribute its existence to a cocktail of intoxicants, namely, alcohol, the occult, and intellectualism, and to be of the belief that each exerted a terribly negative effect on his development as a human being.

It was not, he would contend, that intellectualism is evil in itself, but that intellectuals are more tempted than most by pride, rebellion and sensuality, and that the same could be said of those blessed with great wealth, great beauty, and great talent. He'd see intellectuals as among the most powerful men and women in history, and the Modern World as having been significantly shaped by the wildly inspired views of men such as Rousseau, Darwin, Nietzsche, and especially Marx and Freud.

To the man he'd become, their theories fanned the flames of a largely bloodless revolution in the 1960s, and rather than fade once the latter had been largely quenched, set about infiltrating the cultural mainstream where they became more extreme than ever. And so to enter the realm of the Post-Modern, while remaining the ultimate consequence of centuries of Modernist influence on the Judaeo-Christian fabric of Western civilisation.

However, David was never a true scholar like Madeleine, so much as someone who was both troubled and fascinated by the idea of hyper-intellectuality. Reading Colin Wilson's "The Outsider" in the early '80s, he especially identified with those intellectuals who were tortured by their own excesses of consciousness such as T.E. Lawrence, who wrote of his nature as being "thought-riddled".

As a child he'd been extrovert to the point of hyperactivity, but by the time of his late adolescence, found himself subject to rival drives of equal intensity, one towards seclusion and introspection, the other, attention and approbation.

In his quest for the latter, he subjected his body, the creation he tendered so lovingly at times, to a ruthless almost derisive work ethic, and to stimulate this, he consumed a variety of intoxicants, not just because he enjoyed doing so, but because they enabled the constant socialising that brought him the affirmation he so craved...what could be termed a narcissistic supply. How else to explain the sheer demented fervour of his endless self-exaltation?

That's not to say that he wasn't a loving person, because he was; but precisely what kind of love was it that he spread so generously about himself? One thing it wasn't was agape, the perfect, selfless love described in 1 Corinthians 13.

He was hardly less heartless towards his mind than his body, treating it as an object of research and experimentation. Little wonder then that he turned to drink as a means of pacifying it, although alcohol still wasn't a serious problem for him in the early '80s, when his exhausting daily regimen tended to be fuelled instead by massive quantities of caffeine tablets. That said, Madeleine didn't like it when he drank to excess, as if she'd already singled him out as someone who'd go on to develop a drink problem. In this as in other things she showed remarkable insight.

"Your friends are too good to you...it makes me sick to see them...you don't really give...you indulge in conversation, but your mind is always elsewhere, ticking over. You could hurt me, you know...you are a Don Juan, so much. Like him, you have no desires...I think you have deep fears...it's not that you're empty...but that there is an omnipresent sadness about you, a fatality..."

In the autumn of 1983, David took residence in a room on the grounds of his allotted Lycée in Brétigny-sur-Orge, a commune in the southern suburbs of Paris some sixteen miles south of the city centre.

It was during those early days in Paris that he became infected by a serious sense of self-disillusion, as a new darkness spread over his mind.

This sea-change marked the onset of a real drink problem that went way beyond the usual student booze-ups into the murky realm of drinking alone by day, and which David would ultimately attribute to a conscience that was starting to become calloused through repeated defilement. His well-being, however, remained relatively unaffected, in fact, for those first few months, he was happy, blissfully happy to be a flâneur in the city which had inspired so many great poets to write classics of the art of urban idling. He wrote of his own experiences, usually late at night, in his room with the help of wine and cigarettes, and while few of these notes survived, some incidents that may once have been committed to paper stayed fresh in his mind.

There was the time he sat opposite a same-sex couple on the Métro when he was still innocent of its labyrinthine complexities. "She" was a slim white girl, dressed from head to toe in denim, who gazed blissfully, with lips coyly pursed, into some wistful middle distance, while her muscular black boyfriend stared straight through him with eyes in which desire and menace seemed to be mixed, until one of them spoke, almost in a whisper:

"Qu'est-ce-que t'en pense?"

He came to recall the night he took the Métro to Montparnasse-Bienvenue, where he slowly sipped a demi-blonde in a brasserie, perhaps of the type immortalised by Brassai in his photographs of the secret life of '30s Paris. At the same time, a bewhiskered old loup de mer in a naval officer's cap, his table strewn with empty wine bottles and cigarette butts, repeatedly screeched the name, "Phillippe!" until a pallid impassive bartender with patent leather hair filled the old man's glass to the brim with a mock-obsequious:

"Voilà, mon Capitaine!!"

And then there was the afternoon when, enacting the role of the social discontent, he joined an anti nuclear march through Paris which ended with a bizarre street cabaret performed by a troupe of neo-hippies whose sheer demented defiance may have filled him with longing for a time when he treated his well-thumbed copy of the Fontana Modern Masters bio of Che Guevara by Andrew Sinclair as some kind of sacred text...

A day spent as a flâneur would often end with a few hours spent in a movie theatre, perhaps in the vast soulless Forum des Halles shopping precinct, and there was a point he started to hate the movies he chose, as he struggled more and more with fits of deep and uncontrollable depression. For the first time in his life, he was starting to feel worse after having seen a film than before, the result perhaps of creeping anhedonia, which is a reduced ability to enjoy activities found pleasurable by the majority.

He grew bored of watching others perform. What joy, he reasoned, was to be found in watching some dismal movie, when there was so much to do in the greatest city in the civilised world?

He'd never really been any kind melancholic up until this point but this situation may have started to change in his first few months in Paris. If his travels failed to produce the desired uplifting effect, he'd fall prey to a despair that was wholly out of proportion to the cause.

As a means of protecting himself, he started squandering his hard-earned cash on endless baubles and fripperies. These wholly pointless trinkets included a gaudy short-sleeved shirt by Yves St Laurent, a retro-style alarm clock with the loudest tick in Christendom, a gold-plated toothbrush which he never actually used, a black and gold cigarette holder and matching slim fit lighter, a portrait drawn of him at the Place de Tertre which made him look like a cherubic 12 year old, and a black vinyl box jacket procured from the Porte de Clignancourt flea market.

Mention must also be made of the many books he bought, such as the three Folio works by Symbolist pioneers, Barbey d'Aurevilly, Villiers de L'Isle Adam and Joséphin Péladan; as well as the second-hand books of poetry by such obscure figures as Trakl and Delève...part of Seguers' Contemporary Poets collection.

Could the kids who loved to wave and coo at him from all corners of the Lycée have guessed that their precious David who looked like a lost member of Wham or Duran Duran was a secret dark depressive?

Could they ever have known he was a collector of the literary works of late 19th Century decadents...and a social discontent given to recording snarling rants against the callousness of Western society on a cheap cassette tape recorder?

The simple answer is not in a thousand years...for he was leading a double life, perhaps even a multiple one. Little wonder, therefore, that he was starting to drink to try and make sense of what was happening to him, which was something akin to the fracturing of the personality.

It wasn't long before he tired of the solitary existence of the flâneur, but then becoming more sociable may have simply been the result of being in one place for a significant length of time and nothing more meaningful than that. In fact, he'd already befriended twenty year old Theresa "Tessa" Evans, English assistant in the neighbouring town of St-Genevieve-des-Bois, while they were both attending classes at the Sorbonne intended to prepare them for the year ahead. And they went on to see more and more of each other as their Parisian sojourn proceeded apace.

She'd been a close girlhood chum at convent school of his great Leftfield friend, Ariana Hansen...in fact, one of the first times they met up was with Ariana, when they saw "Gimme Shelter" in some dinky little art house theatre. This being, of course, the documentary of the Rolling Stones 1969 American tour which, culminating in the infamous Free Concert at the Altamont Speedway in northern California, marked the end of the Hippie dream of peace and love.

Another close friend was maths teacher Jules Cendrars, who was the rebellious son of an army officer, and a furious hedonist who worshipped the Rock and Roll lifestyle of Keith Richards and other British bad boy musicians. There was a vision that never left him...of Jules, tall, thin, dark, charismatic, with his head of wiry black hair, dressed in drainpipes and Cuban heeled boots, playing the bass guitar -but brilliantly - at some unearthly hour with friends following a night's heavy partying before rushing to be with a girl friend as the dawn broke.

His best male friend was metal work teacher Milan Curkovic, the son of Yugoslavian parents from the suburb of Bagneux, whose impassive manner belied the exorbitantly loving and unstable soul of a true poet. He fell in love with Tessa at first sight, and spent the whole night on a train bound for the south of France in a romantic delirium singing the songs of Jacques Brel. He referred to David's and Tessa's elegant swan necks as being typical of what he called "le charme anglais".

So many of the people of Bretigny went out of their way to make David feel welcome and content from the headmaster all the way down to the kids, some of whom staged near-riots in the classroom whenever he appeared. He felt so unworthy of their kindness, of the incredible hospitality that is characteristic of ordinary French people.

However, if he was much loved in the warm-hearted faubourgs, in Paris itself he was at times as much a magnet for menace as approval.

In fact, he was hysterically threatened in the streets of Pigalle only days after arriving in the city; and then verbally assaulted later in the year, this time on an RER train by some kind of madman or derelict who'd taken exception to his earrings and was furiously urging him to go to the Bois de Boulogne. But what he suggested he do there is too obscene to print.

And mention must also be made of the sinister skinhead who called him "une ******* anglaise" for trying on Tessa's wide-brimmed hat while travelling home by train after a night out with her and Ariana. But as ever, he was mysteriously protected against all the odds.

On a far brighter note, he spent a sizable part of the journey from Paris-Austerlitz to Brétigny with a self-professed "voyou" with chilling shark-like eyes, who nonetheless made no attempt to threaten him. He even gave him his number, telling him that unless he phoned as promised, he was merely what he termed "un anglais ***".

David left his beloved Brétigny without saying goodbye to so many people that it was painful to think of it afterwards, but frenetic eleventh hour socialising had left him exhausted. However, there was one final get-together, organised by Tessa and a few other friends. Milan was there of course, as well as well as several mutual friends of Tessa's and his. Sadly though, Jules wasn't, although he bumped into one of his girl friends, who, her voice dripping with incredulity, asked:

"Où est Jules?"

Seized by guilt for having failed to invite him, David phoned him at home to ask him to make a last minute appearance, but in a muted voice, he told him:

"Nah, I'm in the bath, man, it's too late..."

It was the last he ever heard of him. As for Milan, he and David were to talk on the phone once the latter had returned to London, but they never saw each other again. On the other hand, Tessa and he stayed friends until the early '90s, by which time she'd got married to a fellow church-goer and former Cambridge University alumnus called Peter, who also became a good friend.

His parents stopped by that night to pick him up on their way to La Ribera where they were due to stay for a few weeks before returning to the UK, and after a day or so spent sightseeing, they set off. Soon after arriving, it became clear to David that eight years after Franco's death, with Spain's beatific innocence long gone, his beloved pueblo had changed beyond all recognition.

In Murcia, while quietly drinking in a night club with some very dear friends of his from La Ribera's golden age, he found himself in the surreal position of being visually threatened by a local Punk who clearly objected to the bootlace tie he was wearing which immediately identified him as a hated Rockabilly. As he saw it, such a thing would never have happened ten years before; or perhaps even five.

As for the youth of La Ribera itself, where once they'd been so endearingly naive, now they seemed so worldly and cool that David was in awe of them, as they danced like chickens with their elbows thrust out to the latest New Pop hits from the UK, such as King's "Won't You Hold My Hand Now", which David endlessly translated for them.

Chapter Six

David Cristiansen returned to Leftfield College in the autumn of 1984, and it may be that it was soon after this that his recent past started haunting him for the first time. After all, was it not only a few years previously he'd known legends of sport and the cinema, mythical figures of the theatre, blue bloods and patricians, and they'd been kind, generous of spirit to this nonentity from the outer suburbs. Now he was nearly 30, with a raft of opportunities behind him, and a future which looked less likely than ever to provide him with the fame he still ached for with all his soul.

At first he lived off-campus, thinking it might be fun to coast during his final year as some kind of enigma freshly returned from Paris. But before long, he desperately missed being part of the social hub of the college, even though this was a virtual impossibility for a forgotten student in his fourth year.

His time as one of Leftfield's leading prodigies had long passed, and other, younger wunderkinder had come to the fore since his departure for Paris. They included the handsome young blond whom his long-time friend and champion Ariana described as being some kind of new edition of himself, due perhaps to the incredible diversity of his gifts. The first David saw of him, he was playing Gorgibus in Moliere's "Les Précieuses Ridicules", a part Ariana had originally earmarked for David, but he turned it down. The young man would ultimately find superstardom as comedian and character actor, and far more besides, while David persisted in the sweet, safe obscurity where he remains to this day.

He read incessantly throughout the year for the sheer pleasure of doing so. For example, while Eugene O'Neill's "The Iceman Cometh" was a compulsory part of the drama course, there was no need for him to wade through "O'Neill", the massive two-part biography of the playwright by Arthur and Barbara Gelb, but that didn't stop him.

He made this descent into the depths of O'Neill's tortured psyche at a time when he himself was starting to drink during the day at Leftfield. While his first can of extra strong lager would often be opened at breakfast time, he'd wait until lunch to get seriously hammered in the company of close friends. Such as Paul, from "Playing with Fire", and Adrian, a computer programmer who shared his passion for the dark romanticism of the Doors and Peter Gabriel.

Paul was still trying to persuade him to join forces with him against an indifferent world, he with his writing and David with his acting, but for reasons best known to himself, he wasn't playing ball. Paul had always sensed something really special in David, which was variously described as energy, intensity, charisma, but for all the praise he received from Paul and others, he didn't seem to have a very high opinion of himself.

It's possible that while he possessed the vast ego of the narcissist who requires constant attention and approval, he somehow also suffered from low self-esteem, which might indicate that he was a sufferer from actual Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Whatever the case, he was going through one of his showily perverse phases, affecting a world weariness he simply didn't have at 30, but which upset and alienated a really good friend. And it wasn't long before Paul was out of his life forever, leaving him to stew in his precious pseudo-cynicism:

"What an appalling attitude," he'd told him, and he was right on the money.

His principal final year tutor was his long-time friend and supporter Dr Elizabeth Lang with whom he'd study the works of French Protestant writer Andre Gide.

And while figures of unmitigated depravity are commonplace today in countless novels, plays, films etc., when Gide created his darkest monsters, such as the feral Lafcadio from "Les Caves du Vatican" from 1914, who commits a crime of terrible cruelty simply for the sake of doing so, they still had the power to shock.

Although to be fair there was far more to Gide, the deeply conflicted product of a pious Huguenot Protestant upbringing, than fashionable decadence. For his first work, "Les Cahiers d'André Walter", was an anatomisation of Christian self-abnegation, based on his troubled love for his devout cousin Madeleine, who went on to be his wife.

And a special favourite of David's by Gide was the novella "Isabelle", which appealed to his softer, more romantic side. Written in 1911, it's the tale of a young student, Gérard Lacase, who stays for a time at a Manor house in Normandy inhabited by two ancient aristocratic families in order to look over their library for research purposes. And while there, becomes bewitched by the portrait of the mysterious "Isabelle", only to discover that the real-life Isabelle is a hard, embittered young woman entirely distinct from the lovely vision in the portrait.

By the same token, his favourite ever play by O'Neill was another story of hopeless love, "A Moon for the Misbegotten", written in 1947.

Its leading character is based on Eugene's tragic yet infinitely romantic elder brother Jamie. And David became fascinated by him; and read all about him in the massive biography by the Gelbs.

Blessed at birth with charm, intellect and beauty, he was one of Father Edward Sorin's most favoured princes while part of the Minim Department of Notre Dame University, Indiana. And so apparently destined for a glittering future as a Catholic gentleman of exquisite breeding and learning. He was also potentially a very fine writer, although he only left a handful of poems and essays behind, and the owner of a beautiful speaking voice which ensured him work as an actor for a time alongside his father James. His one true legacy, however, is Jamie Tyrone, the brilliant yet tortured charmer who haunts two of his brother's masterpieces with the infinite sorrow of promise unfulfilled.

David left Leftfield for good in the summer of 1985, and discovered soon afterwards that he had achieved a lower second BA degree in French and Drama.

His first employment was as a deliverer of novelty telegrams, a job which brought him into many potentially hazardous situations, but which for him, was worth the risk, as he was getting well paid to show off and party, two of his favourite occupations at the time...but it was an unusual way of life for a man of thirty.

What he really wanted was the immortality provided by fame, and he didn't care whether this came through acting, music or literature, or any other means for that matter. But until his big break came, he was content to feed his addiction to attention through the novelty telegrams industry. He evidently had no deep desire to leave anything behind by way of children, nor for any career other than one liable to project him to international renown.

How then did he end up as a PGCE student at Coverton College, Cambridge in the autumn?

The truth is that once again he'd yielded to family pressure to provide himself with the safety net that's been dear to the hearts of parents of struggling artists since time immemorial, and yet despised by the artists themselves.

For David's part, he was so unhappy about having to go to Cambridge that just days before he was due to start there, he arranged to audition for a Jazz Funk band, and was all set to sing "The Chinese Way" by Level 42 and another song of its kind. But never made it, because, late, and desperately drunk on the afternoon of his audition, he simply threw in the towel and resigned himself to Cambridge.

From the time he arrived in the beautiful medieval university city, he was made to feel most welcome and wanted by everyone, and he made some wonderful friends at Coverton itself.

These included Donovan Joye, a poet and actor from the little town of Downham Market in Norfolk; Dale Slater, a singer-songwriter of dark genius from Yeovil in Somerset who eventually went on to become part of London's psychedelic undergroun; and stunning redhead, Clarissa Catto, whose beauty and charm belied the fact that she hailed from Slough, a vast sprawling suburb to the west of London perhaps most famous for having inspired a notorious screed by the poet John Betjeman.

When he made his first appearance at the Cambridge Community College in the tough London overspill area of Arbury where he was due to begin his period of Teaching Practice the following January, the pupils reacted to him as if he was some kind of visiting movie or Rock star. His TP would have been a breeze. Everything was falling into place for him at Cambridge, and he was offered several golden chances to succeed as an actor within its hallowed confines.

Towards the end of the first term, the then president of the Cambridge University Footlights Dramatic Club had gone out of his way to ask David and Donovan to appear in the sole production he was preparing to mark his year-long tenure. He was a Coverton man, and so clearly wanted to give a couple of his fellow students a break after having seen them perform a couple of Donovan's satirical songs for the club.

This was a privilege almost without measure, given that since its inception Footlights has nurtured the talents of Cecil Beaton, Jonathan Miller, Germaine Greer, David Frost, John Cleese, Peter Cook, Graham Chapman, Eric Idle, Stephen Fry, Emma Thompson, Hugh Lawrie and Sasha Baron Cohen among many others. David could have been added to that list.

As if this opportunity weren't enough to persuade him to stay put, a young undergraduate, renowned for the high quality of the plays he produced personally asked him to feature in one of his productions during the Lent Term. This after seeing him interpret the part of Tom in Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie" some time before Christmas. Someone then told him that if this young man took an interest in you, you were pretty well made as an actor at Cambridge. What more did he want? For Spielberg himself to be in the audience and discover him?

In his defence, though, he did feel trapped by the course, and was finding it heavy going. In order to pass, you had to spend a full year as a teacher after completion of the basic PGCE. That meant it would be two years before he was free again to call himself an actor and work as such. It just seemed an awfully long time, when in fact it wasn't at all, and two years after quitting Cambridge he was even further away from his dream than when he'd started off.

The truth is he left Coverton for no good reason, and the decision continued to pain him for the rest of his life, and these words from from Whittier's "Maud Muller" to tear him to shreds of utter nothingness: "For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: 'it might have been'". Still, within a matter of hours of the start of the Lent Term of 1987, he'd vanished, disappeared into the night in the company of a close friend he'd wheedled into helping him out.

Once he was free, he set about the task of resuming his career, sporadically commuting to London from a little village just a stone's throw from the coast near Portsmouth where he was resident at the time, although most days he achieved little.

What's more, he was hopelessly unsuited for the bands for which he chose to audition, whether the Jazz-Funk outfit from the massive outer London suburb of Croydon, or the Rock 'n' Roll revival band from Pompey itself. And mainly because of his ultra-cultured image, which jarred with the toughness of everyday working class life in Britain in the mid 1980s.

And highlighted hair and dinky twin ear studs hardly did him any favours, although he did try and tone down his image, which had become defiantly out of touch with the prevailing youth fashions by the mid 1980s. For he'd latterly favoured such bizarre sartorial items as a gold lame waistcoat, skin tight drainpipes and black suede winkle pickers with side buckles.

Although by '87, he could sometimes be seen in a trendy outfit of two-tone parka and tight grey corduroy jeans which he adopted in an attempt to better blend in with his surroundings. But he remained a fish out of water; beloved by some, contemned by others, until sometime in the summer he returned to London on a permanent basis to a minor flurry of creative activity.

First, he took part in a rehearsed reading at Notting Hill's justly reputable Gate Theatre of a Japanese play directed by Ariana. Then, at her behest, he served as MC for a week-long benefit for the Gate called "Captain Kirk's Midsummer Log" in the persona of one Mr Denmark 1978, a comic monstrosity created for him by Ariana.

Among those appearing on the bill were comedienne, Jo Brand, in her then incarnation of The Sea Monster; comedy satirist Rory Bremner; and Renaissance Man Patrick Marber, initially a stand-up, but best known today as an award-winning playwright and Oscar-nominated screenwriter.

The Denmark character went down so well at the benefit that he wrote an entire show around him based on the premise that winning a Scandinavian male beauty contest in 1979 had altered the balance of his mind.

Thence he'd became convinced of having been at the forefront of pretty well every major cultural development since the dawn of Pop, only to be cravenly ripped off by Sinatra, Elvis, the Beatles, the Stones, Punks, Rappers and so on.

And perhaps in its modest way, it helped to fuel the thriving comedic school of self-delusion which could also be said to include Steve Coogan's Alan Partridge and Ricky Gervais' David Brent. But then again perhaps not.

Later in '87, he started rehearsals for a Catalonian play centring on a mysterious decadent Marquis to be directed by Ariana. And while it's likely to have been originally set in pre-revolutionary France, Ariana updated it to the late 19th Century...possibly the Paris of Lorrain's "Monsieur de Phocas".

And it received some fair reviews...with David being singled out for some praise in the London Times among other periodicals. But rather than capitalise on this modest success, he decided to start work instead as a teacher at the Tellegen School of English in London's Oxford Street.

He did so at the behest of his closest friend, Huw Owen, the Swansea native who'd served as the model for Robert Fitzroy-Square in their Silverhill band, Z Cars, but who was now working at Tellegen's. Besides which, he'd already undergone a week's training with them and been offered a job.

And for David, being a Tellegen teacher was the perfect dream job...providing him with a social life on a plate, as well as enough money to finance the hours he spent each evening in the Champion public house on Wells Street, W.1.

Once the final classes had ended some time after 7.30, student and teacher alike would meet at the Champion to drink and talk and laugh and do as they wished until closing time. And David himself would usually leave around 10.30 to catch the last train home from Waterloo, although, sometimes he'd miss it and have to catch a later one which might see him stranded deep in the Surrey countryside. At other times, there'd be a party to go to, or the Tellegen disco at Jacqueline's Night Club in nearby Soho.

Most of the teachers socialised with their own kind, while David preferred the company of the students, although this situation was to become modified by 1990, when his friends were being chosen from among both the teaching and student bodies. But at night, it would be almost impossible to extricate him from his circle of favourites from Italy, Japan, Spain, Brazil, Poland, France...fact which proved irksome to his good friends, Stan and Noddy, at a certain stage in his short-lived career at Tellegen's.

For Stan, a Tellegen teacher and resting actor like David, and Noddy, a young student from the great city of Sao Paolo in Brazil, were trying to organise rehearsals for a band they were supposed to be getting together. But thanks to David's dilatory attitude, this never happened despite some early promise, as Noddy was a gifted guitarist, and Stan a potentially good front man.

But David continued to discard precious opportunities as if it were so much stinking refuse...little suspecting that he was shoring up the kind of heartbreak that stems from unfulfilled promise, and which caused Jamie Tyrone to quote from Dante Gabriel Rossetti in "A Long Day's Journey into Night", while clearly describing himself:

"Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been;

I am also called No-more, Too-late, Farewell;"

As well as the perpetual party lifestyle, he spent his spare cash on clothes, cassettes, books, and of course, rent. That is, during those brief few months he spent as a tenant in Hanwell, West London at the house of a friend of his fathers' from the London session world, Dai Thomas.

Dai was a small, dark, bearded, always nattily dressed professional fiddler, whose life, lived close to the edge, but with the absolute minimum of effort, incarnated a kind of preternatural Celtic cool that while alarming was yet deeply charismatic.

He also spent several hundreds of pounds being initiated into the art of self-hypnosis by a Harley Street doctor who specialised in hypnotherapy and nutritional medicine. This, in the hope of finding a solution not just to his alcoholism, but the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder to which he was increasingly prey in the late 1980s.

Yet, despite the drinking and the OCD, his primary emotional condition was one of utter exaltation and enraptured joy of life, which was what made it so hard for him to accept that he wouldn't be returning to Tellegen's in 1990. But it was his own fault, because he'd left without warning early in the year...and then decided he wanted to return, despite having refused an offer to do so from the school itself some weeks theretofore.

So, reluctantly delivered from a job he genuinely loved, he revived his acting career thanks once again to the influence of his dear friend Ariana.

She suggested he might like to play Feste for a production of "Twelfth Night", to be staged in the summer at the Jacksons Lane theatre in North London. And so after a successful audition for the director, Sandy Stein, he set about re-learning Feste's lines, and arranging the songs according to the original primitive melodies.

Yet, if the play itself was pure joy to be involved in, the same can't be said for the train journeys to and from Highgate for rehearsals. For it was during these lengthy trips across the capital that David started feeling the need to inure himself as never before against what he saw as nocturnal London's ever-present aura of menace.

It's likely that years of hard living were finally starting to take their toll on his nervous system. For in addition to alcohol and nicotine, he'd been ingesting industrial strength doses of caffeine for years, initially in tablet form, and then in the shape of the coffee cocktails he liked to swill one after the other before afternoon classes at Tellegen's.

This may go some way towards explaining the sheer paranoia which ultimately caused him to start drinking on the way to rehearsals, and then for the first time in his life as a professional actor, during rehearsals. However, he promised Sandy he'd not touch a drop for the actual performances, and was as good as his word. Although each performance was succeeded by some serious partying on his part...with most of the cast members joining him in the revels.

And his hyperkinetic performance was well-received, with one beautifully spoken Englishwoman even going so far as to tell him he was the finest Feste she'd ever seen...and what a pity she wasn't a passing casting director. But then serendipitous incidents of this kind may have happened to other people...but never to poor David Cristiansen.

Later in 1990, he began another PGCE course, this time at the former West London College of Further Education based in East Twickenham, taking up residence in nearby Isleworth.

He began quite promisingly, fitting in well and making good friends, and as might be expected, excelling in drama and physical education. And he was abstinent by day, while on those rare occasions he did drink, it was just a question of a pint or so with lunch.

He'd mentally determined to complete the course, and yet on the verge of his period of teaching practice, found himself to be desperately behind in his preparation. And so he provisionally removed himself in order to decide whether it was worth his staying on or not.

In the event he chose to quit, but rather than return to his parents' home, he stayed on in Isleworth to rekindle his career as a deliverer of novelty telegrams. At the same time, he continued to work as a walk-on artist, something he'd been doing on and off for over a decade. But specialising as a crime scene photographer for a long-running police series with its HQ in Merton, South London.

He also became half of a musical duo formed with a slim young Mancunian with reddish blond hair and brilliant light green eyes who rejoiced in the name of Maxie Coburg, although his true surname reflected his roots in Northern England. And while working as a singer-songwriter at the time, Max eventually evolved into a bona fide Renaissance Man, and not just as singer and musician, but actor, writer, comedian, performer, impressionist, film maker and esoteric thinker.

They began as buskers in Leicester Square, before settling down for rehearsals in the hope of getting some gigs, their repertoire a mixture of Rock and Roll and Motown classics, as well as a host of originals, mostly written by Max. But with one or two contributions by David.

He wanted to call the band Venus Xtravaganza, but in the end, they settled for Max's choice of The Unknowns, that is if they ever called anything at all. And unknown is what they remained which for poor David was simply business as usual.

Then, early in '91, he spent a few weeks in the beautiful seaside town and major London overspill area of Hastings, in an effort to pass a course in teaching English as a foreign language.

To this end, he worked like a Trojan; but he was struggling terribly, tormented by OCD and its endless demands on his time and energies in the shape of rituals both physical and mental. And while he didn't drink at all during the day, at night he was sometimes so stoned he was incoherent.

Predictably, perhaps, he was failed, and when he asked the authorities if they might reconsider, he was informed that their decision was final. It was a bit of a let-down for him for sure, but he'd loved his time in Hastings, even while continuing the search for some kind of spiritual solution to his mental troubles which led him to a "church" which was far, far from the kind he'd come ultimately to seek out.

At least part of the reason for his torment may be provided by the following extracts from a letter his mother wrote him during a fascinating but fruitless sojourn:

"...I had a chance to look at your library...I could not believe what I saw. These very strange books, beyond my comprehension, most of them, and I thought what a dissipation of a good mind that thought it right to read such matters...I feel very deeply that you have up to your present state, almost ruined your mind. Your happy, smiling face has left you, your humorous nature, ditto, your spirited state of mind, your cheerful, sunny, exuberant well-being, all gone. Too much thought given to the unhappiness and sad state of others (often those you can not help, in any way)...I've said recently that I am convinced that anyone can get oneself into a state of agitation or distress or anxiety by thinking or reading about, or witnessing unpleasant things, and the only thing to do is to, as much as possible, avoid such matters, to not let them get hold in the mind. Your fertile mind has led you astray. Why, and how?"

How many millions of mothers over the course of the centuries have asked this of offspring who've been inexplicably drawn to the shadow lands of life only to lose their way back to sanity? Only God knows. Most of course, successfully make the journey back before settling into a normal mode of life, but the danger of becoming lost is always there, especially for those who remain in the shadows far beyond adolescence. Eternal adolescence is arguably one of the prime features of our era, facilitated by its exaltation of youth. And while there are those who'd insist that far fewer young people today are in thrall to the dark glamour of self-destructive genius than in previous Rock eras, the worldview still very much exists.

For David's part, he came ultimately to view Rock as more than just a simple Pop music derived from various Folk genres, so much as an enormously influential subculture, even a religion, and to contend that those who grew to maturity in the sixties were spiritually affected not just by the music but the cultural changes brought about by the Rock revolution.

He'd insist that from quitting formal education aged 16, he was in thrall to a cult of instant gratification that had been growing progressively more powerful throughout the West since about 1955.

After all, he'd contend, he failed to build a future for himself, in terms of a profession, a family, financial security, and so on, having once viewed all these with an indifference verging on contempt. And it hurt him deeply to realise the extent to which he'd sabotaged his life with such a negative identity, so in his despair, he cast the blame on Rock.

The following summer of 1992, he made another attempt at passing the TEFL course...this time at a college set in one of London's most beautiful parks. But he was drinking all day every day, and even though he worked hard and gave some good classes, there was not way on earth he was going to pass.

Still, it was a fabulous summer, and much of it he spent in a state of manic hyperactivity. Bliss it was to stride in the warm suburban evening sun to his local station of Hampton Court with the Orb's eerie "Blue Room" throbbing over and over in his head on his way to yet another long night of ecstatic insensibility. He could have passed out on any one of these wild nights and awoken again in Hell, but that didn't concern him.

The romantic decadence associated with the eighties was no longer even remotely current, and there was a new spirit as he saw it, a mystic techno-bohemianism which appeared to him to be everywhere in the early nineties.

And he sought to visit as many clubs and venues as he could where it was being celebrated, even though in the event he only ever went to one, Cyber Seed in Covent Garden, which was poorly attended and only lasted a short time.

Later on in this final beautiful lethal summer of intoxication, soon after appearing as Stefano in "The Tempest" at the Conway Hall in Red Lion Square, he set out on yet another PGCE course, this time bearing the suffix "fe" for Further Education.

Its purpose was to train himself and his fellow students to teach pupils in sixth form colleges and other further education establishments. And while its base was the University of New Eltham in the tough outer suburbs of South East London, he divided his time between New Eltham, and Twickenham College in the leafy Royal Borough of Richmond on Thames.

While on top of all this study, there were the gigs with Maxie...the novelty telegrams...and who knows what else...and he loved every second of a frenetic lifestyle lived in total ecstatic defiance of the wholesale ruin of mind, body, soul, spirit...

The period embracing the autumn of 1992 and the first few weeks of winter may well have been the most debauched of David's entire existence.

He'd get up early, possibly about six, and then prepare himself for the day ahead with a bottle of wine, usually fortified, then he'd keep his units topped up throughout the day with vodka or gin, taking regular swigs from the miniatures he liked to have with him at all times. Some evenings he'd spend in central London, others with his new friends from the college, and they were a close and pretty wild crowd for a while. There were times in town when he couldn't keep the booze down, so he'd order a king-sized cola from MacDonalds, which he'd then lace with spirits before cautiously sipping from it through a straw.

He was a euphoric drunk and so almost never unpleasant...but he was unpredictable...a true Dionysian who'd cry out on a British Rail train in the middle of the afternoon, causing passengers to flinch with alarm...or perform a wild disjointed Karate kick into thin air on a crowded London street. One afternoon he tore his clothes to shreds after having arrived too late for an audition and a barman who served him later on in the day asked him:

"You bin in a fight then?"

And then there was the shameful night at Waterloo station - or was it Liverpool Street? - that he was so incapacitated by drink that he had to be escorted across the main concourse to his train by one of a colony of rough sleepers that were a feature of mainline stations in those days.

However, all these insane incidents came to a head one night in early 1993 in an Indian restaurant in Hampton Court close to the Surrey-London border. He'd been dining there with two female friends when, suddenly feeling like pure death, he turned to the lady who was next to him and asked:

"Do I look as bad as I feel?"

As soon as she'd told him that indeed he did, he got up from the table, walked a few paces and then collapsed as if stone dead in the middle of the restaurant. He was then carried bodily out into the fresh night air by two or three Indian waiters, one of whom set about shocking some life back into him by flicking ice cold water in his face.

"Don't give up," he pleaded, his voice betraying true concern...and in time thanks to him some semblance of life returned, and David was well enough to be driven home.

Yet, within two days he was drinking as heavily as before, continuing to do so virtually around the clock until the weekend. He then spent Saturday evening with his close friend from the restaurant, and at some point in the morning of the 16th, after having drunk solidly all night, he asked her to fill a long glass with neat gin and each sip took him further and further into the desired state of blissful forgetfulness.

He awoke exhilarated, which was normal for him following a lengthy binge. It was his one drying out day of the week, and so he probably spent it writing as well as cleaning up the accumulated chaos of the past week. One thing he definitely did was listen to a radio documentary on the legendary L.A. Rock band the Doors which he'd taped some weeks or perhaps months earlier.

He especially savoured "When the Music's Over" from what was then one of his favourite albums, "Strange Days" released in the wake of the Summer of Love on his 12th birthday, 7 October 1967. This apocalyptic epic with its unearthly screams and ecstatically discordant guitar solo seemed to him about living in the shadow of death, beckoning death, mocking death, defying death.

He powerfully identified with the Doors' gifted singer Jim Morrison...who'd been drawn as a very young man to poets of darkly prophetic intensity, such as Blake, Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Artaud. As well as those of the Beat Generation, who were themselves to a degree children of the - largely French - Romantic poètes maudits, whose works have the power to change lives, as they surely did Morrison's.

His philosophy of life was clearly informed by Blake, who wrote of "the road of excess" leading to "the palace of wisdom", while his hell raising persona came to a degree from Rimbaud, who extolled the virtues of "a long, immense and systematic derangement of all the senses" as an angel-faced hooligan in the Paris of the early 1870s.

After having spent the day revelling in his own inane notion of himself as a poet on the edge like his heroes, at some point in the early evening he got what he'd been courting for so long...an intimation of early death, when for pretty well the first time in his life alcohol stopped being his beloved elixir and became a mortal enemy, causing his legs to lose sensation and his life force to recede at a furious and terrifying rate.

In a blind panic, he opened a spare bottle of sparkling wine he had about the house even though he'd hoped not to have to drink that day. Once he'd drained it, he felt better for a while, in fact so much so that he took a few snaps of myself lounging around looking haggard and unshaven, with freshly cropped hair.

Soon after this macabre photo session he set off in search of more alcohol. Arriving at a local delicatessen, the Asian shop keeper nervously told him that the off-license wasn't open for some time yet. There was nothing for him to do but take refuge on a nearby green, where he lay for a while, still dressed in the shabby white cut-offs he'd been wearing earlier. Finally, the offie opened and he was able to buy more booze.

In years to come, one of the last things he remembered doing on Sunday evening was singing hymns in a nearby Methodist church as the tears flowed...tears of remorse, tears of fear, tears of desperation.

He had no further memory of what happened that hellish night, but there were many such nights ahead. At least one of these saw him endlessly pacing up and down corridors and stairs in an attempt to stay conscious and so - as he came to see it - not die...and each time he shut his eyes he could have sworn he saw demonic entities beckoning him into a bottomless black abyss.

He set about ridding his room of artefacts he somehow knew to be offensive to God from the night of the 16th or 17th onwards. Many books were destroyed...books on astrology and numerology and other mystical and occult subjects, books on war and crime and atrocity, and books about artists some call accursed for their kinship with drunkenness and madness and death.

He genuinely came to believe that for all the horrors he underwent, it was during that first night he came to accept Christ as his Saviour, and that had his violent conversion not come about when it did, he might have been lost forever, although whether one agrees with him or not depends on where one stands on the issue of predestination versus free will.

But he'd have surely immersed himself further in the new Bohemianism of the 1990s, which of course was not new at all, simply a revival of the adversary values of the sixties. Far from vanishing around '73, these values had merely gone back underground, where they set about fertilising new anti-establishment clans such as the Anarcho-Punks and the New Age Travellers who quietly flourished throughout the '80s.

Around '92, some kind of amalgam between these tribes and the growing Rave-Dance movement could be said to have taken place. And David was ready to take his place as a zealot of the New Edge; only to be delivered from its seductive grasp by a "Road to Damascus" conversion to Christianity.

However, if he'd been reborn against all the odds, he still had to suffer in the physical, if only briefly.

On the morning of the 17th of January, he somehow made it into New Eltham for classes at the University, but by evening he felt so ill he started swigging from a litre bottle of gin in the hope this would improve his condition. He also phoned Alcoholics Anonymous at his mother's request, and agreed to give a meeting a shot.

Next day, on the way to Twickenham, he got the feeling that his heart was about to explode, not just once but over and over again. Then, after that morning's classes, he tried taking a stroll around town but couldn't feel his legs, and was struggling to stay conscious, so he ended up ordering a double brandy from the pub next door to the Police Station. He was shaking so much the landlord thought he was fresh from an interrogation session.

Later, he was thrown out of another pub for preaching at the top of his voice, and, walking through Twickenham town centre he started making the sign of the cross to passers-by, telling one poor young guy never to take to drink like some kind of walking advert for temperance. The fellow nodded in assent before silently scurrying away.

Back home, in an effort to calm himself down, he dug out an old capsule of Chlomethiazole, a sedative commonly used in treating and controlling the effects of acute alcohol withdrawal, but dangerous, in fact potentially fatal, when used in conjunction with alcohol. He still had some capsules left over from about 1990 when he'd been prescribed them by his then doctor, which meant they'd long gone beyond their expiry date. For a time he felt better and was able to sleep, but soon after waking, felt worse than ever.

Later, at an AA meeting, he kept leaving the room to douse his head in cold water, anything to shock some life back into me, to the dismay of his sponsor Dan who wanted him to stay put, for the purported healing effects of doing so:

"What do you think I come here for," he asked him, "the free cups of tea?"

Wednesday morning saw him pacing the office of the first available doctor, and it may have been touch and go as to whether he was going to stay on his feet...or overdose on the spot and die on him.

It was he who prescribed him the Valium which caused David to fall into a deep, deep sleep which may have saved his life, and from which he awoke to sense that a frontier had been passed and that he was out of danger at long last.

Chapter Seven

David Cristiansen struggled on with the Post Graduate Certificate in Education throughout the earliest days of 1993.

And he did so while rehearsing for a couple of tiny parts for a play based on the life of James Joyce's troubled, fascinating daughter, the dancer Lucia Joyce, under the direction of Ariana, which premiered at the Lyric Studio, Hammersmith on the 4th of February 1993.

He also attended occasional drugs and alcohol counselling sessions at a church in Greenwich, South East London with Ellen, a lovely blonde woman of about 45 with a soft and soothing London accent and the gentlest pale blue eyes imaginable. The only time he ever knew her to lose her composure was when he announced over the phone that a matter of hours after deciding of his own volition to stop taking Diazepam, he'd reverted to Chlomethiazole:

"Why'd you do that?" She unceremoniously asked.

However, enough time had passed between his taking the capsule and calling Ellen for him to be out of danger; and she literally laughed with relief at the realisation.

Then, a matter of days after coming to Christ, he received a phone call from a counsellor for an organisation called Contact for Christ based in Selsdon, South London, by the name of Denver Cashe. Perhaps he'd half-heartedly filled in a form of theirs the previous summer while filled with alcoholic anticipation as he slowly approached Waterloo station by British Rail train with the sun setting over the foreboding South London cityscape.

Typically, he tried to put the caller off, but Denver was persistent, and before he knew it he was at the door of David's parents' house, a trim, dark, handsome man in late middle age with gently piercing coffee coloured eyes and a luxuriant white moustache. And at his insistence they prayed together.

Some time later David visited him and his wife Rose at his large and elegant house where suburb meets country just beyond the Greater London border. And on that day, David and he made an extensive list of aspects of his pre-Christian life requiring deep repentance, and they prayed over each of these in turn.

In addition, they discussed which church he should be attending, and there was some talk of his joining Denver and Rose at their little family fellowship. But in the end, Denver gave his blessing to Cornerstone Bible Church, now Cornerstone the Church, a large fellowship affiliated to the Word of Faith Movement, and based in the prosperous London suburb of Esher in Surrey, where David would soon be baptised by its pastor.

David had attended his very first service there even before becoming a Christian in late 1992. Drunk at the time, he'd sat next to a beautiful blonde woman of about 55 whom he later discovered to be a successful actress. Apart from an elder from the Jesus Fellowship, who'd laid hands on him at a meeting of theirs in central London, she was his very first Christian mentor. However, he was never to see or speak to her again as he didn't return to the church for several months, and by the time he did as a new believer, she'd moved to another church. Then they kept on missing each other, and she died in 2001. But David never forgot her.

In the early part of '94, David set out on the final phase of his PGCE, although he was ultimately to fail the course as a whole.

To their credit, though, his tutors at did offer him the opportunity of retaking just the Teaching Practice component, but he chose to turn them down. And if he was depressed, it can't have been for long because in September, he successfully auditioned for the lead role of Roote in Harold Pinter's little known "The Hothouse". This for a newly formed fringe theatre group called Grip based at the Rose and Crown pub in Kingston, a large suburban area to the south of London.

Written in 1958, "The Hothouse" is eminently Pinteresque, with its almost high poetic verbal virtuosity and inventiveness and dark surreal humour laced with a constant sense of impending violence, although it wasn't performed until 1980, when it was directed by Pinter himself for London's Hampstead and Ambassador Theatres.

From the auditions onwards, David gelled with the American director Ben Evans.

Most of the auditions he'd attended up to this point had hinged on the time-honoured method of the actor performing a piece from memory before a panel of interviewers. But Ben insisted his candidates read from the play in small groups, which enabled them to attain a basic feel for their characters; and so feel like they were actually acting rather than coldly reciting. For David, this was the only way to audition.

Once David had been told the lead was his, he devoted himself to Ben's vision of Roote, the pompous yet deranged director of an unnamed English psychiatric hospital: the Hothouse of the title. Ben demanded of him an interpretation of Roote which was deeply at odds with his usual highly Method-oriented, subtle, intense, introspective and yet somehow also emotionally vehement approach to acting. But Ben's directorial instincts were spot-on, as his production went on to receive spectacular reviews not just in the local press, but the international listings magazine, "Time Out", in which David's performance was described as "flawlessly accurate" and "lit by flashes of black humour". An amazing triumph for a humble fringe show.

A major agent went out of her way to express her interest in David, and asked him to ensure his details reach her, which he did...but he never heard from her again, possibly due to the shabby condition of his CV at the time. And he didn't pursue the matter further, which says a lot about his attitude to the push that is essential to success within the acting profession; more so perhaps even than talent.

In his defence one could say that since his recent conversion his priorities had shifted so that he viewed worldly success with less relish than he'd done only a few years before. Also, he badly missed the relaxation alcohol once provided him with following his work onstage; as well as the revels extending deep into the night during which he'd throw his youth and affections about like some kind of maniacal gambler. So, while he still loved acting itself, the process of being an actor had become pure torture.

He'd boxed himself into the position of no longer being able to enjoy social situations as others do, nor to relax.

This may have had something to do with the state of his endorphins, the body's natural feel-good chemicals. For a theory exists to the effect that these can be permanently depleted by long-term abuse of alcohol and other narcotics.

To further complicate matters, he'd started suffering from deep tormenting spiritual problems for which he'd ultimately seek a solution in the shape of what is known as Deliverance Ministry.

Within a short time of "The Hothouse" reaching the end of its two week run, Grip's artistic director Richard asked David if he'd like to audition for an upcoming production of Jim Cartwright's two-handed play, "Two". Naturally he said yes; and so after a successful audition, found himself playing all the male characters opposite gifted character actress Jean from Liverpool, who played all the female.

By the end of the run the houses were so packed that people were sitting on the side of the stage at the actors' feet, something David had never experienced before on the London fringe. Yet, he dreaded the end of each performance, which would see him make his excuses as soon as it was possible to do so without causing undue offence.

Release from a torturous dungeon of sobriety came while he was attending some unrelated function at the Rose and Crown a day or so following his final performance in "Two", when a guy he'd only just met offered to buy him a drink and he asked for a glass of wine. Apart from the time at his parents' house a few weeks earlier when he took a swig of what he thought was water but which turned out to be vodka or gin, this was the first alcohol to pass his lips since January '93.

This single glass of wine made him feel amazing, doubly so given the purity of his system. He cycled home that night in a state of total rapture, feeling for the first time in months that he could do anything. Over the next few week his drinking increased, reaching a climax in a pub in Twickenham where he met an old university friend who'd just finished a course at St Mary's University College in nearby Strawberry Hill, and where he drank and smoked himself into a stupor.

Cycling home afterwards, he took a bend near Hampton Wick and came off his bike, striking his head against a bus shelter. He stayed flat on his back for a while, abject and stinking of drink. He could have sworn he saw a shadowy figure running towards him as he lay there in the dark, but before long he was shakily resuming his journey home.

However, weeks of controlled drinking and one massive binge, possibly combined with the ill effects of a violent blow to the head, resulted in his becoming ill and virtually incapacitated for what might have been as long as a fortnight. Time and again during this awful period he'd awake from a feverish semi-sleep, dizzy, faint and nauseous, with his face a deathly yellowy pale, but each time a single further second of consciousness seemed beyond him, it was as if God breathed life back into him and the terror of dying subsided. All he could do was lie around, waiting, praying for a return to normality...and when this came, he determined never to drink again as long as he lived. But we swiftly forget our sojourns in Hell...

A few months after appearing in Jim Cartwright's bitter-sweet two-hander "Two", David performed in one final play at the Rose and Crown theatre, the character-driven comedy "Lovelives". Written entirely by the cast, it consisted of a series of sketches centring on the disastrous antics of a group of singletons who'd come together at a lonely hearts club in the suburbs. Perhaps then it chimed perfectly with the spirit of British post-war comedy and its characteristic celebration of banality and even failure.

Later in '95, he undertook two small roles in a production at the Tristan Bates theatre near Leicester Square of the famous Greek tragedy "Iphigeneia in Taurois", written by Euripides somewhere between 414 and 412 BC. These being Pylades, constant companion of the main character Orestes, and the Messenger, whom he played as a maniacal fool with the kind of "refined" English accent once supposedly affected by policemen and non-commissioned officers. Directed by a close friend of his, the houses were sparse at first, picking up towards the end of the run.

In January '96, he joined a Christian theatre company based at the Elim Pentecostal church in West Croydon, Surrey. They were known as Street Level, and he went on to serve variously for them as MC, script writer, actor, singer and musician with two other members, married company leader Serena, and 19 year old Rebecca from nearby Sanderstead.

Together, they toured a series of shows around schools in various - usually tough \- multicultural areas of South East London, and on the whole, were greeted by the kids with an almost uniform affection. And there was an incredible chemistry between Serena, Rebecca and himself...until things started to go wrong.

Towards the end of the summer, Serena asked David to write a large scale project for the group, suggesting a contemporary version of John Bunyan's classic Christian allegory "The Pilgrim's Progress":

"I'll put your name in lights," she promised him.

This he set about doing, and after some weeks of labouring over what turned out to be an unwieldy and often violent epic punctuated by scenes of dark humour that occasionally verged on the Rabelaisian, he started to have second thoughts about carrying on with Street Level.

The play, "Paul Grim's Progress", had left him in poor shape spiritually, and he didn't fancy too many more of the long and costly train journeys that were necessary to get him to Croydon and back. And so he began to withdraw.

And by the time of his final exit from Street Level, he'd already moved from his first spiritual home of Cornerstone to the Thames Vineyard Christian Fellowship, part of the Association of Vineyard Churches founded by John Wimber in the 1970s. This as a result of being told by a phone friend that the Vineyard movement contained members whose spiritual gifts were in the realm of the truly exceptional.

His curiosity aroused, he went along one Sunday evening and had a powerful experience which made me want to stay; and so he did.

As with Cornerstone he joined a Home Fellowship Group where he completed part of the Alpha course, which had been pioneered by Nicky Gumbel of West London's famous Holy Trinity Brompton.

He visited HTB at some point in the mid '90s, when it was at the height of the revival movement known as the Toronto Blessing. This being so called because it had been ignited in January 1994 at the Toronto Airport Vineyard Church by St. Louis Vineyard pastor Randy Clark.

Clark had himself received it from South African evangelist Rodney Howard Brown during a service at Rhema Bible Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, then pastored by Kenneth Hagin Jr., father of the Word-Faith movement, one of the major strains of Charismatic Christianity, with a controversial emphasis on "Positive Confession".

The Anointing spread to the UK in the summer of 1994 where it was eventually dubbed The Toronto Blessing by The Daily Telegraph. Its main centres included HTB, Terry Virgo's New Frontiers family of churches and Gerald Coates' Pioneer People.

Pioneer's centre at the time was a cinema in the Surrey suburb of Esher, which David visited a couple of times, when it was so packed he was forced to stand all throughout the service, a situation which was duplicated when he dropped in at the London HQ of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God one afternoon around about the same time.

Like many Charismatic churches, UCKG upholds the Fivefold ministry, and so believes that the five gifts referred to in Ephesians 4:11, namely Apostle, Prophet, Evangelist, Pastor and Teacher, are still in operation.

But to return to David's acting career...in the spring of '98, he started rehearsing for a production of Shakespeare's infamous Scottish Play, to be staged at Fulham's Lost Theatre in the summer. And despite the fact that his three cameos - as Lennox, the Doctor, and an Old Man - were praised by cast and audience members alike, to date, it remains his last hurrah as an actor. Quite simply, the passion to perform in front of a live audience that raged within him like a forest fire for more than two decades had long been extinguished, or rather turned to dread.

A few months later and the troubled, turbulent 20th Century gave way to the 21st to the sound of fireworks frantically exploding all throughout David's neighbourhood of West Molesey. Phoning his father that night to wish him a happy new year he discovered that his mother was desperately ill with flu:

"Some start to the millennium," he grimly told his dad.

It went on to occur to him that she'd become susceptible to the flu virus partly as a result of stress caused by his recent departure from yet another course; this time an MA in French and Theory of Literature from University College, London, which was one of the most prestigious of its kind in the world. In time though, her incredible Scots-Irish constitution saw her through to a complete recovery.

He'd found the course magnetically compelling on an intellectual level, despite an awareness that writing extensively about Literary Theory might come increasingly to disturb him, and perhaps even challenge his faith, given its emphasis on what is known as Deconstruction, a term coined by French philosopher Jacques Derrida. He withdrew on the advice of several spiritual advisers, but it was a decision that would haunt him for the next ten years of his life.

Subsequent to making it, he started playing guitar for Liberty Christian Centre, a satellite church of London's Kensington Temple, a large Elim Pentecostal church pastored by Colin Dye based in Notting Hill, West London. Then, shortly after agreeing to be Liberty's lone musician, he quit his position as a telephone canvasser for an e-commerce company based in Surbiton, Surrey, thus bringing a fairly lengthy period spent as an office worker to an end.

A real change in his professional fortunes came around Christmastime when he was made lead singer for a Jazz band formed by the versatile musician Barrie Guard, an old friend of his father's. And which was complemented at various times by his dad, a double bass player, a brace of drummers, and David. They went on to cut several demos with glorious arrangements by Barrie, with David crooning "Fly Me to the Moon", "Moonlight in Vermont", "The Days of Wine and Roses", among other standards of the Classic Pop canon.

In early '01, Liberty's Pastor Phil decided to dissolve the church, so David made yet another return to Cornerstone. While the following summer, Barrie's Jazz band folded in the wake of the 2002 Shelton Arts Festival, which was a real shame because they'd finally found the audience they'd been searching for all along, if the enthusiasm with which their performance was greeted was anything to go by.

Within days, David started working from home making appointments for a genial travelling salesman. And he was briefly very successful, until things started tailing off in the autumn; and he was let go. By this time he'd effectively left Cornerstone for good, although he was to make many subsequent sporadic returns.

This sudden exit came in consequence of a desire born of intensive internet research to seek out churches existing beyond the Pentecostal/Charismatic fold. These being Cessationist, which is to say they don't accept that the more spectacular Gifts of the Holy Spirit such as Tongues and Prophecy are still in operation.

For up until this time, any church that didn't encourage the speaking in other tongues David had refused to accept as being truly Christian. In fact, before 2003, which was his year of relentless internet research, he'd known next to nothing about the finer points of his faith.

Although he was fairly well versed in the subject of prophecy thanks to having been introduced to the same early in his Christian life by Denver and Rose. And specifically through various magazines and books, such as "Prophecy Today" and the works of Barry R Smith.

He had no clue as to the meaning of Calvinism or Arminianism, Predestination or Foreknowledge, Cessationism or Continuationism and so on...but he didn't believe that made an iota of difference to the condition of his soul, as people – as he saw it - are saved by faith alone, with true saving faith producing the fruits of repentance.

In a general sense the year 2000 turned out to be something of a turning point for David, not just spiritually, but in terms of his entire personality, which became more inward looking, even by the standards of the previous seven years.

Significantly perhaps, the previous year had been the first since he was about 17 that he faced the world with his hair its natural medium brown after having dyed it for nearly three decades. What prompted this was not a sudden loathing for the vanity of the bottle blond, but the fact that the peroxide-based streaking kits he favoured were causing him to have breathing difficulties.

At first, he missed being blond, but in time he came to prefer his natural colour after years of youthful blond androgyny. The fact is that throughout his twenties and for much of his thirties, he had remained in a state of extended adolescence, blond being after all the natural colour of eternal youth.

In his time, David had elicited a lot of admiration for attempting to take the romantic bohemian rebel existence to its logical conclusion when all around him were conforming at a furious rate. But the price for having done so was high, cruelly high, in terms of social and financial humiliation, leading David to become a veritable Jeremiah, in terms of his opposition to a lifestyle he blamed for ruining his life.

Yet, young people in the 2000s worshipped at the altar of romantic rebellion as they'd always done. But perhaps not to quite the same degree as those of David's poor generation, who came to maturity to a frenetic Rock soundtrack. And who can say what effect it had on them, this music...tailor-made to inspire a generation scornful of deferred gratification, a generation of hipsters.

To the David of the Christian years, Rock – far from being just another music form \- was a total art, involving poetry, theatre, fashion, but even more than that...a way of life with a strong spiritual foundation.

He fell under the influence of various Fundamentalist Christian critics of Rock music for a brief period in 2003, which made him feel inclined to destroy all traces of Rock music in his possession, even though he'd long lost any real taste for Hard Rock by then. However, by the summer, his attitude had mellowed to the extent that he was prepared to write about an hour's worth of Rock songs in response to a request from his dad for songs for a possible collaboration with the son of a close friend. But these were as far from Hard Rock as it's possible to be, being influenced by such relatively benign and melodic genres as Folk, Pop and Soul.

Some new, some upgrades of old tunes, they were recorded on a Sony CFS-B21L cassette-corder, and were generally well-received despite their humble origins. And so two of David's songs were recorded on a friend's computer using what may have been state of the art technology for 2004, with the resultant demo being sent to a music publishing company for assessment. But when their response was far from encouraging, it was back to the drawing board for David Cristiansen.

As if disillusioned by constant failure, David decided he wanted to write creatively as of January 2006, although the real motive for his doing so was altogether different. In fact, it was a period of sickness that spurred him towards a serious literary career.

This began with a panic attack in central London, which grew into a flu-like illness, but it wasn't until he developed a painful condition affecting a singularly delicate section of his tegument that he decided that he'd no further interest in maintaining optimal physical attractiveness, and so felt he had little to lose by writing.

The truth is that soon after becoming a Christian, David had destroyed most of what he'd written up to that point, and then wrote quite happily for a time as a Christian, until it seemed to him as if God was calling a halt to his writing. So, once again, he started destroying any writings he managed to finish...sometimes dumping whole manuscripts into handy dustbins, or dispensing with them one sheet at a time down murky London drains.

Then in about 1998, he more or less gave up altogether...that is, until he felt compelled to break his literary silence as a result of the aforesaid extended bout of sickness. Thence, he started posting articles to the Blogster web site, which went on to form the basis of his memoir, "Rescue of a Rock and Roll Child".

In terms of activities of note in the following year of '07, he rehearsed an album of popular standards with his father which was finally released in the spring of 2008, although it only went on to sell a handful of copies, the majority remaining firmly ensconced in the box in which they'd arrived from the recording studio, where it had been recorded at Pat Cristiansen's expense.

Later that year, he completed a first draft of his memoir after a full two years of labour.

Around about the same time, his former mentor Dr Elizabeth Lang died in her adopted village of Woodstock, Oxfordshire. The executor of her will, who was also the publisher of her final book, asked him to read one of the lessons at her funeral and deliver a eulogy in the capacity of a former student. This took place in the parish church of St Martin's in the beautiful village of Bladon, where Winston Churchill is buried, along with fellow members of the Malborough family.

It was such a sad experience for him to be reunited with Elizabeth in such a way after nearly a quarter of a century, while being unable to communicate with her as he'd have been able to had he thought to make contact...even a handful of years earlier when she was still a published writer. It made him realise how important it is to stay close to friends and family before a time comes when it's no longer possible to reconcile with them:

"Then it's too late," he thought to himself, "they've gone, and the world is always so much the poorer for their sudden absence and silence."

By the beginning of 2011, there were so many versions of his story that David no longer knew which, if any, was the definitive one, and he occasionally teetered on the verge of dejection, as if his image of himself as a writer had been terminally shot to pieces. And he saw himself, and not for the first time, as a loser, in fact not just a loser but a king-size loser, a loser among losers, a loser supreme.

The contemplation that he was the best at what he did afforded him some satisfaction at those times of the day when his status in life meant the most to him, such as in those last few hours before he turned in for the night. But when all's said and done, this was scant consolation to him.

Yet, is it not so that among those who ultimately come to faith to Him though Jesus Christ are men and women who would be judged failures in the eyes of the world, and yet having lost in life, have yet found a purpose that eludes life's victors...among whom they may once have been counted?

The answer is of course yes, and the ultimate example of a high achiever who became the ultimate loser once he'd given his life to Christ was the Apostle Paul, the former Saul of Tarsus born into the Tribe of Benjamin who as an impeccably pious high-ranking Pharisee was yet a ferocious persecutor and murderer of Christians.

Yet, as a Christian, he suffered losses that most contemporary Western believers have no experience or even conception of. For while he was mocked and despised for his beliefs, he was also flogged, beaten, stoned, starved and repeatedly imprisoned, before being ultimately put down as if he were a sick and aging dog.

But that is not to say that all Christians come to faith in Christ through a violent Road to Damascus conversion after having undergone some unspeakable loss, far from it, for many – perhaps even most - come gently to faith without having suffered in any dramatic way whatsoever.

Yet the Damascus converts are deeply valuable to the Body of Christ, for they serve as living proof of the fact that anyone can be saved, regardless of their background. And their testimonies are as precious as they are for their very relative rarity

It could be said then that David was foolish to lament all he had lost in terms of opportunities for great wealth and success, for fame, status and glory and all the wondrous things that accompany these, for after all, these are things that one cannot take with us when we quit this earth, and life is short, so terribly short that it is described in the Word of God as a "vapour".

And while for the most part his still handsome eyes failed to see this truth as if they'd become clouded o'er by the tears he often shed at night for his wasted past, and for the pain he felt when he thought of all he had lost, at other times, it became gloriously, brilliantly clear to him, and he rejoiced as the most fortunate of men.

Yes, he was a loser, and yet yes, he'd gained so much more than he'd lost.

Then in November 2011, a definitive version of "Seven Chapters from a Sad Sack Loser's Life" saw the light of day. Narrated in the third person, with the character of David Cristiansen doubling as himself, which is to say the author Carl Halling, the names of most of the other characters included were also changed. As were the vast majority of the names of institutions. While dialogue was as David remembered it, as opposed to being reproduced with 100% accuracy. Either that, or it was based on ancient informal diary notes, and then edited for inclusion in his writings.

And by the time it did, he'd finally gained some real confidence within himself as a writer...

"I'm not done yet," he'd boast to himself, or to anyone else who might listen, and to look at him, you might think he had a point.

Yes, he was a loser, and yet yes, he'd gained so much more than he'd lost.

Yet, it could have all been so different...

### Book Four – Where the Halling Valley River Lies

Chapter One – The Heroic Life of Phyllis Mary Pinnock

In the Beautiful Valley of Tamar

My paternal grandmother Phyllis Mary Pinnock grew into a remarkably beautiful young woman with dark hair and green eyes, and an exquisitely sculpted mouth.

She'd been born sometime towards the end of the 19th or beginning of the 20th century, possibly in the Dulwich area of South East London. And given her father had been what is known as a gentleman, which means he forswore all labour, it may have been she was a scion of that part of the upper middle class known as the lower gentry.

And according to my father's account, her first true love David was a scion of the Wilson Line of Hull which had developed into the largest privately owned shipping firm in the world in the early part of the century.

But like so many young men of that dutiful generation, immortalised in cruelly beautiful poems such as Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth" which speaks to us of "sad shires" decimated by an inexplicable conflict, he died young during the First World War. And she subsequently married an officer in the British army, to whom she bore two children, Peter Bevan and Suzanne, known as Dinny.

When her children were little more than infants, she elected to join her husband as a tea planter in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. And it was on that breathtakingly beautiful island, in a tough and typically isolated environment that she met the two men, tea planters like herself, who were destined to become her second and third husbands.

They were a British engineer by the name of Christopher "Chris" Evans, and my Danish namesake Carl Halling.

Carl had evidently once been a successful businessmen within the linoleum industry before some kind of reversal of fortune found him on the famous tea fields of Ceylon, which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle once described as being "as true a monument to courage as is the lion at Waterloo".

Mary's third child, my father, was born Patrick Clancy Halling in Rowella, Tasmania, in the beautiful Tamar Valley, but raised as Carl's son in the great city of Sydney.

And according to Pat, Carl and Mary eked an existence in various fields of endeavour, including fruit farming, gold prospecting and real estate. While Mary was at some point a primary school teacher, and another, a journalist for the Sydney Telegraph. But it was a hard life according to Pat, especially after Carl contracted the multiple sclerosis that would ultimately kill him.

One blessing being that all three children were exceptionally gifted musically, Patrick as violinist, Peter as cellist and Suzanne as pianist; but of all of them Pat was the greatest prodigy. For while little more than an infant, he won a scholarship to the Sydney Conservatory of Music where he studied with Gerald Walenn, soloing for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra on a single occasion when he was still only eight or nine or ten. And one can only imagine the effect it had on his childish nervous system. However, he reserved his true passion for the water, this love of the sea and ships and specifically sailing being a legacy from Mary, who spent much of her adult life by the sea.

Carl died around about the time of the abdication of King Edward the VIIIth which took place in 1936, soon after which Mary and her family set off for Denmark, Carl having expressed a wish to be buried in his native land. And then all three children stayed behind for some time while their mother went valiantly on to London to look for somewhere to live on a permanent basis.

And it was in London that Pat studied both at the Royal Academy of Music and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, under the tutelage of Rowsby Woof and Max Rostal respectively.

He joined the London Philharmonic Orchestra while still a teenager during the Blitz on London.

And at the same time, he served in the Sea Cadets as a signaller, seeing action as such on the hospital ships of the Thames River Emergency Service, which, formed in 1938, lasted for three years, using converted Thames pleasure steamers as floating ambulances or first aid stations.

But some years prior to Mary settling back in her native London with her children, she'd evidently received a significant sum of money as an inheritance. And it could conceivably be said that doing so resulted in a reconciliation with her hallowed social class, although this suggests some kind of rupture, which may not actually have happened; at least in a spiritual sense.

But what is true is that she was convinced she was descended from a lost branch of an aristocratic family. For when I was a young man, my father would occasionally speak to me of it as a means of boosting my morale, as if I was born for the life of a scholar and athlete of distinction befitting blue-blooded origins.

And in this one respect, I was akin to the great movie star Montgomery Clift, whose extraordinary beauty and magnetism could be said to constitute the very quintessence of the aristocratic WASP Prince. For despite being born into a fairly humble middle class family, Clift was a scion of the southern aristocracy according to his mother Ethel "Sunny" Clift.

So Monty and his twin sister and elder brother Brooks were raised as if to the manor born, and educated by his mother and private tutors in both Europe and the US, learning to speak French, German and Italian in the process.

But I never fully believed Mary's story until one day in the 1980s, while my family was being paid a visit by her younger sister Joan, together with her husband, my great uncle Eric, I surreptitiously placed a cassette tape recorder close to the dining table during lunch or supper.

And I did so in the belief that one or another of my parents would quiz her as to the veracity of Mary's longstanding boast of distant blue blood.

If my memory serves me aright, among the truths she revealed about our family that day was that Joan and Mary's paternal great grandfather had been a coachman by trade who'd been left an enormous sum of money by a grateful employer. And this act of philanthropy introduced money into the family for the first time.

Another was that her maternal grandmother's maiden name had been Butler, which allegedly links the family to the Butlers of Ormond, a dynasty of Anglo-Norman nobles named after the Earldom they went on to rule in Munster, Ireland.

And the Butler saga begins in earnest with the Norman Invasions of Ireland, which took place in 1169 on the orders of one Dermot MacMurrough, King of Leinster, one of five kingdoms of pre-Norman Ireland.

The Mystery of Ormonde

But who precisely were these Normans who went on to create one of the most powerful monarchies in Europe and whose territorial conquests would ultimately include not just Ireland, but England, Scotland, Wales, Southern Italy and the island of Sicily?

Unsurprisingly, they are largely Nordic, although believed to have been of mixed Viking, Frankish and Gallo-Roman stock, a mixture which apparently produced an instinct towards elitism and dominance.

And the Norman conquest of England was famously sealed with William the Conqueror's success at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 AD, which introduced a new aristocracy into the country. Which means that the Normans replaced the Anglo-Saxons as the ruling class of England, while becoming part of a single French-speaking culture with lands on both sides of the channel.

And this explains her fierce rivalry with mainland France, as well as the 1842 poem "Lady Clara Vere de Vere", in which Tennyson makes the valid point that "Kind hearts are more than coronets, And simple faith than Norman blood." Which of course inspired the movie "Kind Hearts and Coronets".

And what the poem was alluding to was the specifically Norman nature of the English aristocracy. But back to the travails of the Emerald Isle...

By the fateful year of 1169, Ireland, a land once given over to the ancient Celtic faith of Druidry and the worship of the Sidhe or Faery Folk, was profoundly Christian, despite a remnant of paganism.

But an invasion had already been authorised as early as 1155 by the first and only English Pope Adrian IV, decision which occasioned centuries of English dominance and Irish misery. While MacMurrough had been forced into exile in 1166 by a coalition of forces led by the High King of Ireland Rory O'Connor, and had fled...allegedly to Bristol first...and then to France.

There are various accounts of what happened next, but it's certain he asked Henry II, first English King of the Norman House of Plantagenet, for help in regaining his kingdom. And after Henry had pledged his aid, began recruiting allies in Wales, with Richard de Clare, known as Strongbow, foremost among them. So Ireland was earmarked for invasion.

In 1167, he returned to Ireland with a small army of mercenaries, but it wasn't until '69 that a full-scale invasion by the Anglo-Normans and their Welsh and Flemish allies got under way. And while contemporary accounts refer to the invaders as English, they have also been described as Anglo-Norman, Cambro-Norman and Anglo-French. With the Flemish contingent recruited largely from those Flemings who'd arrived in Britain with William the 1st... and had settled in Wales...only to be perceived by the hostile Welsh as English.

And also believed to have taken part was one Theobald Walter, patriarch of the Butlers of Ormond.

Two years afterwards, Henry II set foot in Ireland, the first English King to do so, and so High Kingship was brought to an end, to be replaced by over 750 years of English rule.

Henry was an ancestor of future generations of Butlers, and a grandson of William the Conqueror, which may provide a kinship with the mysterious Merovingian dynasty of Frankish Kings.

And when his son Prince John arrived in Ireland in 1185, it was in the company of the said Theobald Walter, whose father had been Butler of England; and so he was appointed Butler of Ireland and given a portion of land in eastern Munster that would become known as Ormond. Thence the name, the Butlers of Ormond.

Around 1200, he married Maud le Vavasour, purported inspiration for Maid Marian, wife of the mythical outlaw Robin Hood, himself allegedly based on Maud's second husband Fulk FitzWarin.

And they had one son together, Theobald le Botiller, 2cnd Baron Butler, who, by marrying Margery de Burgh, a descendant of both Dermot McMurrough and the legendary Brian Boru, brought royal Gaelic blood into the Butler bloodline. While their sole and only son...also known as Theobald, took Joan FitzJohn as his spouse; and from their union came eight sons, the second of which, Edmund Butler, married Joan FitzGerald of the ancient FitzGerald dynasty.

It was for their eldest son James that the earldom of Ormonde was created for the first time.

And his appointment came in 1328, only months after his marriage to Lady Eleanor de Bohun, beautiful grand-daughter of Edward the 1st of the House of Plantagenet, known as the Angevins from their origins in Anjou, France.

Dubbed The Hammer of the Scots, Longshanks was that Anglo-Norman king who'd had Scottish noble Sir William Wallace executed in 1305 for having led a resistance during the Wars of Scottish independence.

While among James Butler's descendants was Anne Boleyn, whose father Thomas, a Butler by matrilineal descent, became Earl of Ormonde in 1528. This having occurred when Piers Ruadh Butler resigned his claim by orders of the king; only to have the earldom restored to him ten years later. Act which heralded the title's third creation.

And by this time, England had become a Protestant nation, and Anglicanism established in Ireland as the state religion, despite the vast majority of the population being Catholic.

And much to Ireland's misfortune, the Butlers became involved with some vicious feuding with their long time rivals the FitzGeralds in the late 1500s. And when the so-called Black Earl Sir Thomas Butler vanquished his own mother's family at the Battle of Affane in 1565, it helped provoke the Desmond Rebellions of 1567-73 and 1579-83, the second of which was bolstered by hundreds of papal troops.

But these were defeated by the Elizabethan Armies and their Irish allies, soon after which the first English Plantations were carried out in a devastated Munster. While the first plantations in Ulster, Ireland's most purely Gaelic region, remained yet in the future.

Of the Supposed Superiority of Nobility

In 1609 the first Ulster Plantation came into being in the wake of the Nine Years War of 1594-1603, which was largely fought between the Kingdom of England and its Irish allies and an alliance of Gaelic clans led by Hugh O'Neill and Hugh Roe O'Donnell. While the latter would ultimately include

6000 Spanish soldiers sent by Phillip II.

The routing of the Ulster Earls led to the famous Flight of the Earls to Europe, the end of the Gaelic Clan system, and the colonization of Ulster by English and Scottish Protestants.

While the next conflict to involve the Butlers of Ormond was the Irish Rebellion of 1641, which was an uprising not of the Catholic Irish, but the Old English, composed of Catholic gentry who'd become more Irish than the Irish themselves. And while the fifth Earl, James Butler, was placed in charge of English government forces based in Dublin, the Old English were led by his own cousin Richard Butler; with the Catholic rebels prevailing.

But in time it mutated into a war between the native Irish and the newly arrived Protestant settlers from Britain...which resulted in the massacre of thousands of Protestants, the precise number being a matter of much debate.

While a year later, James Butler was involved in yet another conflict in the shape of the English Civil War. And being a Royalist sympathizer, he despatched an estimated 4000 troops to England to fight for King Charles the 1st against the Calvinist Roundheads under the leadership of Oliver Cromwell...only to be made Lord Lieutenant of Ireland by Royal Appointment in 1643 for his pains.

But by 1649, Ireland had become a stronghold of support for the King; with Ormonde in charge both of the Royalist forces and the Irish Confederation of Old English Catholics and native Gaels; and this had the effect of attracting the hostile attentions of Cromwell and his New Model Army.

And when Ormonde attempted to thwart the English Puritan invaders by holding a line of fortified towns across the country, Cromwell defeated them one after the other, beginning in 1649 with the Siege of Drogheda.

While in the summer of 1650, following a long series of humiliating defeats for the Irish, Ormonde, having been deserted by Protestants and Catholics alike, was urged to leave the country by the Catholic clergy, which he promptly did, seeking refuge in Paris with the exiled Charles II.

Yet, on the Restoration of the Stuart Monarchy in 1660, he was showered with honours by the new King of England, Scotland and Ireland; and was made Duke of Ormonde in the peerage of Ireland in the spring of '61.

But eight year later, he fell from favour as a result, allegedly, of courtly intrigue on the part of Royal favourite James Villiers, the 2cnd Duke of Buckingham. While in 1671, an attempt was made on his life by an Irish adventurer by the name of Thomas Blood; but Ormonde escaped, convinced that Buckingham had put him up to it, although nothing was ever proven.

Then in 1682, he became Duke of Ormonde in the peerage of England, dying four years later in Dorset. While soon after his death, a poem was published that celebrated an essential decency that was never compromised.

One of his sons, the 2cnd Duke of Ormonde, commanded a regiment at the Battle of the Boyne under William of Orange, and took part in the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715. While his own son was the third and final Duke of Ormonde.

However, the Earldom lasted until the end of the 20th Century, becoming dormant in October 1997 with the death of James Butler the 7th Marquess of Ormonde, who had two daughters, but no sons.

And it may be I'm a distant relative of theirs...and if so, also related to many, perhaps even all of the most blue-blooded families not just in Europe but the entire world.

In the end though, the facts of history entirely fail to attest to the natural superiority of nobility, even though the Bible upholds the authority of parents and the instruments of the state. For God has implemented these as a means of controlling Man's innate depravity, while appealing to his hierarchical instincts and deep-seated desire for order and structure.

But all hierarchies erected by Man in order that one section of society might feel superior to another, whether on the basis of class, race, skin colour or some other false distinction, are antichrist, because all human beings are created equal in the sight of God.

And there is a theory that those blessed by nobility of birth are in fact less likely to turn to Christ than those from backgrounds of brokenness or poverty. While great beauty or wealth or intellectual distinction can fill its possessors with a sense of self-sufficiency which can lead to a refutation of God.

But my beautiful grandmother Phyllis was ever attached to the notion her family boasted blue blood in spite of a life of unending hardship...much of this attributable to sheer ill fortune. For instance, having married Chris Evans soon after the death of her second husband Carl, she lost him in '49 while they were both out sailing together, the victim of a fatal coronary.

I first met her in the early 1960s when I was still just a small child, by which time she was living on a yacht in the south of France, possibly Nice, or Cannes, a striking figure, slim and tanned, with a magnificent head of the purest white hair. But by about the middle of the decade, she'd moved into her own house, Chartley, named after her former house in Sydney. And situated near the little town of Cambrils in the province of Tarragona on Catalonia's Costa Brava.

And for several years until about '68, our family vacationed with her at Chartley every summer, often with Peter's family, who lived opposite us in Bedford Park, West London.

Photos of her from around this time reveal a weather beaten woman with wiry white hair, habitually clad in old and even patched trousers; but she could be sweet when her heart was touched.

She was a fantastic spirit, given to what could be called Celtic whimsy, which may have proceeded from Cornish origins, which her maiden name of Pinnock certainly suggested. Although the Anglo-Saxons are hardly less inclined to this quality, for after all, did they not produce such icons of nonsense as Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll?

By the early '70s, ill health forced her back to Britain, where she lived until her passing in 1973, sometimes with us, and sometimes in her own little cottage in Berkshire. While her constant companions were two mongrel dogs whom she'd rescued from the beach towards the end of her Spanish sojourn.

These were Charlot, who was sandy-coloured and looked a little like a whippet, and Phillippe, who had long pointed ears like those of an Alsatian.

She was an altogether different person in frail old age, much mellowed and desperately vulnerable, writing desolate poetry for my benefit, or watching old movies with me on TV. Such as the sentimental Rodgers and Hammerstein musical "Carousel" which she initially dismissed as "slush". But the famous climactic tune of "You'll Never Walk Alone" has a tendency to touch all but the most stoical of hearts, and Mary's was not exempt.

For my part, I'd left the room, possibly to weep softly to myself in some secluded part of my parents' house, only to return to find her in tears. I've never forgotten it.

There were times I was able to share some tender moments with her, but looking back, I wish there'd been more, and oh how she'd have welcomed them. But I was young and strong and thoughtless, with little concern for the trials of the elderly, fact which saddens me today.

For does not the Word of God say in Matthew 25:40, "Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me"?

Now I'm almost the same age she was when we first met, and I've come to honour the memory of a brilliant tragic woman, and to feel for her in a way I was never capable of during the brief few years of our acquaintance.

A little before her passing, Phillippe vanished under mysterious circumstances into the English countryside. So Charlot came to live with us on his own in '73; and was subsequently renamed Charlie. He proved a gentle, faithful and loving pet, but with a strong character akin to that of his doting mistress, dying himself in 1983 following a short but valiant battle with declining health.

Chapter Two – Miss Ann Watt Had Stars in Her Eyes

The Scots-Irish Sept of Watt

My father Patrick Clancy Halling joined the London Philharmonic 0rchestra while still a teenager during the Blitz on London. And during this time, he served in the Sea Cadets as a signaller, seeing action as such on the hospital ships of the previously mentioned Thames River Emergency Service.

Following his time with the LP0, he played with the London Symphony Orchestra with his cellist brother Peter, before going on to specialize in Chamber music.

His chamber career included eight years with the Hirsch quartet, led by Dublin- born violinist Leonard Hirsch, and the formation of his own Quartet Pro Musica in 1955, with Roger Raphael, Peter Sermon and his brother Peter, while Ernest Scott and Gwynne Edwards joined at a later date. And three years later, this resulted in an extraordinary event taking place in the Recital Room of the Royal Festival Hall.

On the 2cnd of November 1958, the Quartet convened to take part in a reading of TS Eliot's "Four Quartets" by four giants of the arts including the then poet laureate Cecil Day Lewis, together with his wife the actress Jill Balcon, fellow actress Maxine Audley, and Shakespearean scholar George Rylands. By which time, Lewis' and Balcon's son, future Hollywood superstar Daniel Day Lewis, would have been a little over a year and half old. And this was interspersed with a rendition of Bela Bartok's Sixth Quartet.

He also played with the Virtuoso Ensemble, whose distinctions are believed to have included first UK performances of works by major British 20th Century composers, such as Elizabeth Lutyens, Humphrey Searle, Peter Racine Fricker and Mátyás Seiber.

And among his recordings from the late 1950s currently featured on the internet are "The History of Music in Sound, Vol. VI: The Growth of Instrumental Music (1630-1750)", on which, with Richard Hadeney on flute, Basil Lam on harpsichord and Terence Weil on cello, he interprets Vitali's "Trio Sonata in E Minor, Op. 2, No. 3", Legrenzi's "La Cornara" and Jenkins' "Fancy in G Minor".

In June 1949, he wed my mother, the Canadian singer Miss Ann Watt, who through marriage became Mrs Ann Halling, thereby substituting a Scottish surname for a Danish one.

In Ireland, the Watt surname is exclusive to Ulster, home province of my grandfather James Watt, having been carried there by the Scottish and English planters of the late 1600s. It's common in the Scottish Lowlands, especially in the counties of Aberdeenshire and Banffshire.

As might be expected it's affiliated with that of Watson, and both are what is known as septs of the Forbes and Buchanan clans. A sept being a family that traditionally followed a particular chief or clan leader in the Highlands or Lowlands of Scotland, either through being related by marriage or resident on his land, and so helped to make up a larger clan or family.

Kindred septs include those of MacQuat, MacQuattie, MacQuhat, MacQwat, MacRowatt, MacWalter, MacWater, MacWatson, MacWatt, MacWatters, MacWattie, Vatsoun, Vod, Vode, Void, Voud, Voude, Vould, Walter, Walterson, Wasson, Waters, Waterson, Watsone, Watsoun, Wattie, Wattson, Wod, Wode, Wodde, Woid, Woide, Wood, Woyd and Wyatt.

She'd been born Angela Jean Elisabeth Watt on the 13th of November 1915, in the city of Brandon, Manitoba, the youngest by 7 years of the six children of James and Elisabeth Watt from Ulster, Ireland and Glasgow, Scotland respectively, and the only one not to be born in Britain...the others, Annie-Isabella, the eldest born ca. 1897, Robert, James, Elisabeth, who died in infancy, and Catherine having been born in Glasgow, except Cathy, who was born in Ireland.

While still an infant she moved with her family to the Grandview area of East Vancouver.

Grandview's earliest settlers tended to be shopkeepers, or tradesmen, in shipping or construction work, and largely from the British Isles, such as James Watt himself, a builder by trade, born in the little town of Castlederg in County Tyrone, Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

Grandview underwent massive change following the First World War when Italian, Chinese, and East European immigrants moved in, and still more after World War II with a second wave of Italian immigrants. Today it's part of the Grandview-Woodland area of East Vancouver.

Ann's mother was from the great industrial city of Glasgow, having been born there to an Englishman from either Manchester or Liverpool; while her mother was Scottish. This means that my mother is of mixed Lowland Scottish, Ulster-Scots and English ancestry, not that any real difference exists between these three ethnicities.

As to my maternal grandfather...he was almost certainly a descendant of the Planters sent by the English to Ulster in the 1600s, many of them originally inhabitants of the Anglo-Scottish border country and the Lowland region of Scotland.

According to some sources, Lowlanders are distinct from their Highland counterparts, being of Anglo-Saxon rather than Gaelic ancestry, although how true this is I'm not qualified to say. Certainly, the region straddling the Scottish Lowlands and Anglo-Scottish Borderlands, is one traditionally perceived as Sassenach, which is the Gaelic term for Saxon, or person of Anglo-Saxon origin.

Whatever the truth, the sensible view is their bloodline contains a variety of kindred strains including - as well as Anglo-Saxon - Gaelic, Pictish, Norman and so on, depending on the exact region. Moreover, all Caucasian inhabitants of the British Isles - including the independent sovereign nation of Ireland - partake of a fairly homogenous ancestry, which certain experts are claiming to be more Iberian than anything else. In the end, though, are we not all of the same single human race created by God? As a Christian, I can't believe anything else.

The Ulster Scots emigrated to the US in the 1600s, and their descendants are to be found all throughout the country. But most famously perhaps in those regions which are culturally Southern, which is to say those states situated beneath the Mason-Dixon Line. Indeed most of the original European settlers of the Deep and Upland South are widely believed to have been of British and especially English and Scots-Irish origin. Today, many of them describe themselves as merely "American", while others continue to claim either English or Scots-Irish ancestry.

The Theatre Under the Stars

By the time he'd moved his family to Grandview in the autumn of 1924, my grandfather James Watt had abandoned the severe Presbyterian Calvinism of his Ulster boyhood and youth for the more open - Wesleyan - theology of the Salvation Army. Yet, in keeping with the Army of that time, his approach to Scripture was what would be described as fundamentalist today; and he was accordingly opposed to worldly pleasures such as dancing, the theatre, and movie-going. Alcohol was nothing short of the Devil's own elixir, while even the drinking of tea and coffee was frowned upon.

Some years after moving to Grandview, James Watt built his family a house in Kitsilano on the city's West Side, but a reversal of fortune in terms of his business meant that the family was forced to return to Grandview.

Then at the age of 14, Angela joined her friend Marie and Marie's mother on a car trip just beyond the US-Canadian border into the state of Washington, where she saw her very first movie, a romantic civil war picture entitled "Only the Brave" starring Gary Cooper and Mary Brian. Its effect on her was little short of seismic, as by her own admission it introduced worldly ideas into her psyche for the very first time.

Despite an intensively Christian upbringing, from then on, she became consumed by the glamour of the movies and show business. In other words, she'd allowed the camel's nose into her life, and it only remained for the rest of the camel to follow.

At high school, she'd been a diligent but not exceptional pupil; and her sole and only sporting distinction consisted of being part of her school track team. While her closest friend, the universally popular Margaret Stone, was an exceptional young sportswoman. However, Angela came into her own in the Glee Club, where presumably she first started using her beautiful singing voice beyond the confines of the Army.

When she was 17, her father became very seriously ill and she was forced to take time off school to do her share of looking after him. She spent long periods of time by his bedside, weeping for a man who when she was still only a little girl had a habit of affectionately flicking the back of her hair and she'd scolded him to make him stop. She was off for so long that Margaret Stone had come calling for her with another friend, concerned by her protracted absence. James Watt died after a short illness, and Angela, utterly heartbroken, wept openly at his funeral.

In her final year at high school, she learned short hand and other tools of the secretarial trade, while working part time at F.W. Woolworth's on Commercial Drive.

After leaving, she started work answering telephone enquiries on behalf of a laundry business by the name of Pioneer Laundry, where her sister Cathy ran a branch specialising in the washing and starching of men's collars.

And it was during her time at Pioneer that Angela received her first big break, when one of her co-workers, presumably after discovering Angela had ambitions to sing professionally, suggested she accompany her to a singing engagement at a gentleman's club in the city.

Angela promptly took her up on her offer, and as a result of having done so, was tendered details of a singing teacher by the name of Avis Phillips by a member of the club.

Soon after having made contact with Avis, Angela became her pupil, and ultimately also her friend.

And this association brought her into contact with Avis' regular accompanist, Phyllis Dylworth, whose uncle just happened to be regional head of the Canadian Broadcasting Company. And it was through this family tie that Angela secured her first professional engagements as a soprano, indeed her entire singing career.

And many of its greatest triumphs took place at the Theatre Under the Stars, one of Vancouver's most famous musical theatres, which officially opened on August the 6th 1940. And where Miss Ann Watt played the lead in such classic operettas as Oscar Straus' "The Chocolate Soldier", "Naughty Marietta" by Victor Herbert, with libretto by Rida Johnson Young, and "The Student Prince" by Sigmund Romberg, with libretto by Dorothy Donnelly.

And for the CBC with full orchestra, she broadcast many popular classics. Such as, to the accompaniment of Percy Harvey and the Golden Strings, two songs by Victor Herbert with the baritone Greg Miller, viz., "A Kiss in the Dark" from "Orange Blossoms", and "Sweetheart".

As well as "'Neath the Southern Moon", another breathtakingly romantic song by Herbert, "Strange Music" from "The Song of Norway", adapted from Grieg by Wright and Forrest, and "Can't Help Singing" by Kern and Yarburg from the 1944 movie of the same name.

Such was the of her voice, to say nothing of looks so glamorous she was likened to Betty Grable, she became something of a sweetheart of the Canadian Forces. While her irresistible vivacity and charm caused both audiences and press to fall in love with her not just in Canada but parts of the northern US as well.

Among the Classical songs she broadcast during the North American phase of her career were "Dedication" by Schumann, "The Vain Suit" by Brahms, "Les Filles de Cadiz" by Delibes, "Mandoline" by Debussy, "Before My Window" by Rachmaninov and "Silent Noon" by Vaughan Williams...with all liede rendered in English due to wartime restrictions on the German language.

After the war, she hoped to expand her career either in the US or the UK, but despite a successful audition for the San Francisco Light Opera Company, she ultimately opted for England, once a ticket to sail had become available to her.

She left for Britain laden with letters of recommendation from Avis Phillips, as well as numerous press cuttings from her brilliant Canadian career.

She'd been led to believe that once in London, she'd effectively take the singing world by storm, at Drury Lane and elsewhere. Sadly though, soon after arriving, she failed an audition for the internationally famous Glyndebourne Opera House, home of the annual festival of the same name.

However, she did land a small role in the Ivor Novello musical, "King's Rhapsody" which opened at the Palace Theatre on the 15th of September 1949, with its author one-time matinee idol Novello in the title role. It ran for 841 performances, surviving Novello who died in 1951.

And she broadcast for the BBC, with "De Fleurs" from Debussy's "Proses Lyriques"; "Stars in my Eyes", an unutterably poignant love song by Fritz Kreisler with lyrics by Dorothy Field; and the popular Harry Ralton standard "I Remember the Cornfields", with lyrics by Martin Mayne, being among the songs she performed for them.

She also appeared in an early television show called "Picture Post", of which there remains no record.

Sadly though, it wasn't long after her arrival in London that she realized her voice was deteriorating - this being especially true of her top notes - possibly as a result of sleeping difficulties; although she was a smoker.

And she had enjoyed a somewhat hedonistic lifestyle at the height of her fame in Vancouver, when she was Miss Ann Watt. And a fairly wealthy young woman at that, with a passionate love of beautiful clothes and shoes.

She went from one singing teacher to the other in the hope that her once near-perfect voice might be restored to her but little came of her efforts; although one of her tutors, who just happened to be the great German soprano Elisabeth Schumann did offer some hope.

Schumann suggested that once her time in England was over, for she was recording her final liede 78s in London with the British pianist Gerald Moore, she accompany her back to New York City, where she'd been resident since 1918.

However, my mother turned her down, perhaps feeling she'd already spent enough money on lessons. And besides, she'd only been married to my father, the London-based musician Patrick Halling, since June 1949, and uprooting would not have been easy.

Pat and Ann spent the next seven years living the vie de bohème in a peaceful post-war London and on the continent, travelling by car or motorcycle, just happy being young and in love in that relatively innocent period between the end of the Second World War and the onset of the Youth Culture of the sixties. After which things would never be quite the same again.

Chapter Three – And So the British Blues Explosion

The Riddle of the British English

The first son of Patrick and Ann Halling was born Carl Robert Halling at the tail end of West London's Goldhawk Road, which is the sole and only part not to bisect the traditionally working class district of Shepherds Bush. And while it's officially in Hammersmith, it's far closer to the more bourgeois area of Chiswick.

My first home was a small workman's cottage in Notting Hill, but by the time of my brother's birth on the 2cnd of May 1958, the family had already moved to nearby Bedford Park. Which while also in Chiswick according to its postcode, is nonetheless part of the Southfields ward of another tough part of West London, South Acton. And presumably was then too.

One thing is certain is that it was part of the obsolete Borough of Acton, which was scrapped along with the County of London in 1965 to make way for the Greater London Council, which exists to this day.

Carl was the name of my paternal grandfather, and Robert that of my mother's brother Bob, and I came into the world very much as a Briton as opposed to an Englishman. Which is to not to say I don't consider myself English, because I do; but my origins are British as opposed to strictly English.

By this I mean English, Scottish and Scots-Irish Canadian through my mother, and English and Danish Australian through my dad, with a possible Cornish admixture coming through my paternal grandmother.

For her maiden name of Pinnock is a common one in Cornwall, and therefore of possible Brythonic Celtic origin...the word Brythonic having served as the origin for more modern terms such as Britain and Briton, as well as British.

To explain...there have always been two distinct strains of Celtic people, which is to say, the Brythonic and the Goidelic, or Gaelic. And while the Welsh, Cornish, Manx and Breton peoples are of the Brythonic strain, the Scottish and the Irish are of the Gaelic.

It could be said therefore that I partake of both Gaelic and Brythonic Celtic ancestry. Confused? You should be.

Whatever the truth, I'm proud of my roots in Ulster and Glasgow, both of which possess long-established proleterian traditions, and the same applies to Wales and the north and midlands of England. The south, on the other hand, is widely seen as an affluent, middle class region, and that's especially true of the so-called home counties, which are those adjacent to London.

Needless to say, though, poverty does exist in these regions, and even the great metropolis of London contains no less than fourteen of the nation's most deprived twenty boroughs. Yet it remains one of the most powerful urban centres in the world.

And according to certain authorities, it's easily the most powerful, being the financial heart of a still existent British empire.

Others would refute this theory out of hand, but it attracts strong support nonetheless. For my part, I view it with a characteristic mix of open-mindedness and scepticism.

What's more, while Glasgow is home to a massive urban working class, with clearly defined Catholic and Protestant communities, Scotland's capital city of Edinburgh has a reputation for great gentility. Yet, in common with other affluent cities throughout a nation of striking extremes of wealth and poverty, she also contains areas of enormous deprivation.

One of these, Leith, is the setting for the controversial novel "Trainspotting", which was made into a successful movie in 1993.

I'm also proud of more overtly Anglo-Saxon ancestry coming through my father, who although born in Tasmania and raised by a Danish father in Sydney, New South Wales, is English through his mother Mary. For having established my quintessential British credentials, England is the nation I identify with in spirit.

Indeed if anyone incarnates the riddle of what it is to be both British and English, it's me. For lest we forget, Britain is less a nation than a sovereign state of four nations, four countries, four peoples...England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Yet, for all this talk of earthly nations, in the end there will only be one state remaining..."another country", in the words of the famous British hymn, "I Vow to Thee My Country", in which all distinctions of ethnicity and class will be a thing of the past, and all conflict consigned to the Lake of Fire to burn forever and ever.

And so the British Blues Explosion

My first school was a kind of nursery school held on a daily basis at the home of one Miss Pierce in Bedford Park.

But as the sixties were about to dawn, I joined the exclusive Lycée Francais Charles de Gaulle in South Kensington, where I was to become bilingual within a matter of months. While it was early in the totemic decade of pop and youth culture that Pat Halling moved into the tough London session music world...where he was to record for film, television and the new popular music that had been recently sired by the Rock and Roll revolution.

And for much of the time he spent within this lucrative sphere, his main role was that of principal violin, or leader or concertmaster, traditionally in charge not just of the string section but the entire orchestra, and so answerable to the conductor alone. But he also served as the fixer contracted to recruit the players for a particular session.

In the meantime, Miss Ann Watt's musical life was put on hold while she concentrated on being the mother of two small boys, while supporting her husband in his various passions.

For example, she faithfully crewed for him for many years at the Tamesis Sailing Club in Teddington, West London, where he was a member for much of the sixties, winning several racing trophies initially in Firefly number 1588, while his career as a session player thrived.

According to what Pat has told me, he worked on early sessions for British musical sensations Lulu, Cilla Black and Tom Jones, as well as with superstar producers Tony Hatch and Mickie Most.

Hatch wrote most of Petula Clark's hit singles of the sixties, some alone, some with his wife Jackie Trent, and she went on to become a major star in the US as part of the so-called British Invasion of the American charts. And the same was true of several acts produced by Most; such as Herman's Hermits, whose angelic front man Peter Noone ensured his band were briefly almost as popular as the Beatles stateside.

Pat became close friends with both Most and composer-arranger John Cameron, the two men who helped turn Scottish singer-songwriter Donovan into an international superstar. And among those session musicians who played for Most in the early to mid '60s were Big Jim Sullivan, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, who also arranged for him.

And guitar virtuoso Page went on to join seminal British Rock band The Yardbirds, which had been initially managed by the impresario Simon Napier Bell, before being taken over by Most's business partner, Peter Grant.

When the Yardbirds collapsed in 1968, the two remaining members, namely Page and bassist Chris Dreja, set about forming a new band, the New Yardbirds, also to be managed by Grant.

While the super-talented Terry Reid, who was among those constituting what could be termed Page's first team of potential lead vocalists, turned him down, he yet recommended a 19 year old from the midlands of England by the name of Robert Plant for the job.

Page duly travelled to Birmingham with Dreja and Grant to look the youngster over, and was impressed by what he saw. He then invited Plant to spend a few days with him at his home, the Thames Boathouse, in the beautiful little Berkshire village of Pangbourne for initial discussions related to the band.

And all this took place in the summer of '68, just months before I joined the Nautical College situated a few miles from the village itself.

So the New Yardbirds were born, but before long they'd mutated into

Led Zeppelin, one of the most successful Rock bands of all time, and second only to the Rolling Stones in terms of legendary darkness and mystery.

It seems incredible that a force of such seismic power and influence as Led Zep should emerge from the relative innocence of the London Blues and session music scenes of the sixties, but then a similar thing could be said of British Rock as a whole.

So what was it that transformed an interest among young men of largely middle class origin in the bleak brooding music of the Blues into a musical movement that took the world by storm all throughout the '60s and beyond? That's not an easy question to answer, but I'm going to give it some sort of a go.

The Blues themselves may provide something of a solution to the puzzle, for in the shape of the British Blues boom they constituted one of the dominant tendencies within the Pop explosion of the 1960s.

Yet, far from proceeding from the Pop revolution inspired by the Beatles, the British Blues came long before it. In fact, they emerged from the Traditional Jazz revival of the late 1940s, although most Trad devotees decried the Blues as simplistic in comparison to Jazz.

The most beloved and fearful form of the Blues was the Delta Blues, whose spiritual homeland was the Mississippi Delta, a region lying between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers, and stretching all the way from Memphis in the north to Vicksburg in the south.

With lyrics reflecting the sensuality, isolation and anguish of lost souls victimised by life and alienated from God, she found fertile soil in the still repressed United Kingdom of the late 1950s and early sixties. And especially in the affluent south among such passionate young men as Brian Jones from the spa town of Cheltenham in Gloucester; Eric Clapton from Ripley in suburban Surrey; and Jimmy Page from nearby Epsom, also in Surrey.

However, it's none of these legends, so much as a certain guitarist of Greek and Austrian ancestry by the name of Alexis Korner who's been called the Founding Father of the British Blues. And justifiably so, for more than anyone, he was the incubator of the British Blues Boom which was one of the great cornerstones of the entire Rock movement.

Korner began his musical career in 1949 as a member of Chris Barber's Jazz Band, but his love of the kindred but then lesser known music of the Blues led him to form Blues Incorporated in 1961. And he did so with several future Rock superstars, including Jack Bruce, most famous for his tenure with Blues-Rock legends Cream, and Charlie Watts, future sticks man for the Stones, both from a Jazz background. As was Brian Jones; for this was not unusual for the first generation of British Rock artists.

And in addition to those already mentioned, the list of future Rock and Roll stars who were drawn to Korner's regular Rhythm and Blues night at the Ealing Jazz Club in the early '60s included Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Ginger Baker, Jimmy Page, Rod Stewart, and Paul Pond.

Pond, a tall, elegant Oxford undergraduate with the chiselled good looks of a Greek god, had been Brian Jones' first choice as lead vocalist for a projected Blues band, but apparently convinced the Blues had no future, he turned the young Cheltenham Welshman down.

He later resurfaced as Paul Jones, front man for former Jazz outfit Manfred Mann, one of the first generation of British Blues bands to achieve mainstream Pop success. And alongside Jones and Mann were Mikes Vickers and Hugg and bass man Dave Richmond...soon to be replaced by Tom McGuiness, who'd begun his career in the Roosters with Eric Clapton.

While Clapton himself found fame with the Yardbirds which, like the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Who and the Spencer Davis Group surfed the first wave of British Blues and R&B all the way into the Pop charts.

But British Rock was fuelled not just by the Blues, but an effervescent fusion of Rock and Roll, Skiffle, R&B, Doo-Wop, Motown and Tin Pan Alley known as Beat. And Beat emerged principally from the tough industrial midlands and north of England to form part of the great Pop revolution of '63 to '64, although it's doubtful the great record buying public had any notion of the difference between Beat and the Blues.

Yet there were those Pop musicians who clung doggedly to the Blues ethos, despite spectacular chart success. Such as Brian Jones of the Stones; and Eric Clapton, who forsook Pop stardom to seek refuge in Blues purist band Bluesbreakers; whose John Mayall played host to a veritable plethora of future Rock superstars at various stages of his career.

Another vital component of Pop that threatened to subvert Rock's evolution as an exclusive offshoot of the Blues was melody; which was the very element the Beatles made central to their music. And as the Rock revolution proceeded apace, it came to play as important a part in its music as rhythm.

And this was significantly attributable to the Beatles, who, in thrall to the nascent sounds of Motown, a form of R&B that had been heavily infused with a Pop sensibility, sought to emulate its exquisite romantic tunefulness.

They also imbued their early music with the sentimental sweetness of both Vocal and Latin Jazz and Canzone Napoletana; while all three songwriters were admirers of Classical Music.

Thence the Rock explosion emerged from several incredibly divergent areas to produce a veritable musical Babel. But lest we forget, it did not begin with the Beatles, for even the term Beat was first used in relation to Pop music as early as 1961.

For instance, in "The Big Beat Scene" by British writer Royston Ellis, Beat is used to describe the music of the first British Pop stars to emerge in the wake of Elvis. While the term Rock is used as shorthand for Rock and Roll in the selfsame tome.

In fact, by the time of the Beatles first hit record in 1962, Rock had existed in Britain for at least five years, birthing a host of early superstars. Among these, song and dance men Tommy Steele and Joe Brown had brought a music hall element to the music; while Cliff Richard and the Shadows had preceded the Beatles as the quintessential British guitar band.

In other words, an entire spectrum of British Rock and Pop music had been established even before the Beatles had recorded their first hit record. But this is a truth that history has failed to sufficiently emphasize.

This Thrilling New Art Form

The Beatles are seen by some as the inventors of modern guitar Pop. While this is of course untrue, they are without doubt the best known and most successful Pop group in history. It was they who consolidated and perfected British Pop, thereby laying the foundation for the entire Rock revolution.

Yet, while they began very much as a Pop group, in time, having resisted being typecast as mere Pop, they could be said to have birthed a special type of Art Rock founded on a vast variety of genres, including Classical music, Music Hall, Tin Pan Alley, Rock and Roll, Country and Western, Folk, Jazz, Motown, Soul and the Blues. But no less removed from pure Pop than the Blues-based Rock of their chief rivals the Stones.

While this might lead one to conclude that it was largely through their influence that Rock became the ultimate musical smorgasbord, this was only partly true, as I've already made clear.

Yet, during their brief few years of existence, they informed the development of Rock to a greater degree than any other group or solo singer. And that includes the Rolling Stones, for while the Stones' primal proto-Punk went on to constitute the basis of all forms of Hard Rock, even these have benefited from the unrelenting melodic inventiveness of the Beatles.

In addition to those already mentioned, another of its chief sources was the Brill Building Sound, which thrived in that brief period between Elvis's induction into the US Army and the onset of Beatlemania. And during this era, the music's initial threat was neutralised by its co-option by teenage idols who, while heavily influenced by Elvis visually, had nowhere near the same devastating effect on the moral establishment.

Brill Building was named after the very building in New York City where many of its songwriters were housed and which since the '30s had been a centre for Pop music, a term allegedly coined as early as 1926.

Its music could be described as traditional Pop informed by the Rock and Roll revolution; and as such it exerted a massive if largely unsung influence on the evolution of Sixties Rock, with the Beatles covering several Brill Building songs in the early phase of their career.

Yet, while the Beatles remain indelibly associated with modern Pop, by the totemic year of '66, they were as much a Rock as a Pop group; and their lyrics had started to acquire a marked intellectual dimension. And this was in no small part attributable to Bob Dylan.

For Dylan was a consciously intellectual figure who, in the fallow years immediately preceding the British Invasion, had mined the ancient American art of Folk Music for inspiration.

By so doing, he'd gained an international reputation as a poet-minstrel in the Protest tradition, and largely thanks to him, Pop had acquired a certain gravitas by the mid 1960s. And one which was strikingly at odds with the innocent and sentimental music of the early Beatles. Yet, the Beatles outgrew the Beat era with ease, while Beat itself was rendered obsolete by the depredations of Rock.

This thrilling new art form developed not just as a result of Dylan's influence as the first great poet of Rock, but an increasing musical complexity, possibly allied to a greater spiritual darkness. And while the Beatles led the field in terms of the former, the latter could be said to have arisen from a tougher element introduced into the music.

This came courtesy of such Blues-based outfits as the Stones, the Kinks, the Yardbirds, the Pretty Things and the Who, and the term Rock was somehow perfect in describing their powerful primal sound. However, when this moved in to supplant Pop as the critic's term of choice, it's impossible to say.

One thing is certain is that as soon as it did, Rock became far more than a mere music form.

In fact I'd go so far as to say it was a way of life from the outset; a philosophy; even a religion, and as such, one of its prime tenets was rebellion against the traditional Judaeo-Christian values of the West. So it's not surprising its spiritual homelands were Britain and the USA, given these are the nations most associated historically with the rise of Evangelical Christianity.

For despite having been inextricably linked to Pop since its inception, Rock is clearly more than just another form of popular music. And while it possesses very little ability left to shock, its rebel spirit, and the sexual and social upheavals it once spearheaded have altered the fabric of Western society, possibly beyond all hope of recovery.

Chapter Four – Rock and Roll and the Western Soul

The Burgeoning Generation of Love

The highpoint of Patrick Halling's early Pop career was undoubtedly his leadership of the string section for "All You Need Is Love", transmitted live at the height of the so-called Summer of Love on July 25th 1967.

The programme, entitled "Our World", was the first satellite broadcast in history, and it secured an audience of 350 million, which was unprecedented at that time. And among those taking part were such legendary figures of the swinging sixties as Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Eric Clapton, Keith Moon, Marianne Faithful and Donovan.

But this was not Pat's first involvement with the burgeoning Love Generation.

For the previous year of '66, he'd taken part in the recording of Donovan's "Museum", destined to see the light of day on the "Mellow Yellow"

Album, which reached the number 14 position on the Billboard Hot 100. Although it failed to secure a UK release due to contractual complications.

Also involved with the "Mellow Yellow" sessions were close friends Mickie Most, who produced, and John Cameron, who did most of the arrangements, as well as session guitarist Big Jim Sullivan, and future Led Zeppelin members Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones.

A year later, he worked on a project that was as much a concept album as any of the Beatles' records of the same period, Ken Moule's superb "Adam's Rib Suite", which fused elements of Jazz, Pop and Classical music to recount the history of womankind from Eve to Cleo Laine.

Needless to say though, it was infinitely less successful than any comparable record within the Rock genre, Rock being at the vanguard of popular culture in a way that Jazz had once been, but no longer was. However, by the turn of the decade, a reconciliation between the two alienated factions was well under way, with Jazz-Fusion coming from one camp and the more populist Jazz-Rock from the other.

In '75, Pat served as leader for Mike Gibbs' "Only Chrome Waterfall Orchestra", an unsung classic of British Jazz fusion, which was finally released on CD in 1997. Adam's Rib followed it on CD exactly ten years later.

By the time of his involvement with "Adam's Rib", Pat had already moved into the worlds of film and television. And his early career included solos for the 1960 movie "Exodus", produced and directed by Otto Preminger, with music by Ernest Gold...as well as for much treasured British sitcom "Steptoe and Son" (1969-'74), whose incidental music was composed by his close friend Ron Grainer.

He also served as concertmaster for the great Johnny Green on Carol Reed's version of Lionel Bart's "Oliver" in 1968, and for John Williams on three movies beginning with the musical version of James Hilton's "Goodbye Mr Chips".

And going on to include "Jane Eyre" (1970), directed by Delbert Mann, and "Fiddler on the Roof" (1971), by Norman Jewison.

Directed by Herbert Ross in 1969, "Chips" featured a screenplay by no less a luminary of British literature than Terence Rattigan. And as he was the author of such quintessentially English tragedies as "The Browning Version" and "The Winslow Boy", both centring on the English private school system, he was the perfect choice.

Sadly, though, for all its virtues, including a lovely score by Leslie Bricusse, it was not a critical success, although it was nominated for several major awards, and has gone on to enjoy something of a following on the internet.

Also in '69, he worked on David Lean's "Ryan's Daughter", a visually beautiful epic set in rural Ireland during the First World War, which was another film that has grown in stature since its initial release. Written by playwright and screenwriter Robert Bolt, with music by Maurice Jarre, it was poorly received by the critics, although today, it's considered by many to be among Lean's finest works.

In addition to Williams, Green and Jarre, he's served as concertmaster for a panoply of major 20th Century musical figures working within the media of film and television, including Dimitri Tiomkin, Nelson Riddle, Georges Delerue, Wilfred Josephs and Christopher Gunning.

But to return the world of Pop, which mutated into Rock, possibly some time towards the end of the late 1960s, while retaining a Pop subsidiary; and became known as such to many of its devotees, presumably as a means of investing it with some respectability as an art form:

As the '60s ceded to the '70s, Pat's close friend Mickie Most was poised to enter the second phase of his glittering Pop career, having been briefly involved with the nascent Rock movement through his management of the Jeff Beck Group. And yet, even at that, he'd sought to turn guitar virtuoso Beck into a major Pop star...while apparently remaining impervious to the star quality of his one-time front man, Rod Stewart.

And it fell to business partner Peter Grant to prosper within Rock music, first as co-manager of the Yardbirds with Most; then as sole manager of Led Zeppelin, who went on to become the ultimate Rock band; and second only to the Rolling Stones in terms of legendary darkness and mystery.

And by the time of the Zeppelin's conquest of America, the face of Western society had been altered almost beyond recognition by the Rock and Roll revolution.

Yet, in all good conscience, responsibility for this transformation can't be laid exclusively at the feet of Rock.

For, after all, tendencies hostile to the Judaeo-Christian fabric of the West can be traced at least as far back as the Enlightenment of the 16th and 17th Centuries.

Much of the groundwork had already been done in other words, and that's especially true of the forties and fifties.

It was in these two immediate post-war decades that the Existentialists and the Beats became international icons of revolt, while lesser groups such as the Lettrists of Paris served as scandal-sowing forerunners of the Situationists, believed to have played a major role in fomenting the Paris riots of May '68.

At the same time, Britain's first major youth cult surfaced in the shape of the Teddy Boys, and a cinema of youthful discontent flourished as never before. Movies such as Stanley Kramer's "The Wild One" and Nicholas Ray's "Rebel Without a Cause" fostered a desire among millions of young Americans to be identified as rebels themselves, reacting against the stifling conformity of Eisenhower era America.

For all that, though, none of these phenomena enjoyed a tithe of the influence of Rock in terms of its effect on the Western soul.

Glam and the Gender Revolution

My Pangbourne years coincided with the rise of Rock, which was Pop transmuted into an art form, while somehow including Pop as its less intellectual counterpart. And the music we listened to as self-styled lads had "lad value"; and we called it Underground for its shadowy exclusivity, while at some point it became known as Progressive.

But as I recall...it included both Hard Rock and Soft Rock, and the sophisticated Art Rock of acts and artists as diverse as the Beatles, Frank Zappa and the Doors. And for me, there was no real difference between the experimental Hard Rock of Deep Purple, and the out and out Prog of Yes or Emerson, Lake and Palmer.

For Rock was split into two categories...Underground...and Commercial...a term we tended to spit out like some kind of curse, as this was pure Pop, whose domain was the despised hit parade featured weekly on British TV show Top of the Pops.

The Underground, on the other hand, was composed of acts and artists who made music largely for the growing album market. And there were those among them, such as Led Zeppelin, who never graced the singles chart despite earning fortunes through concerts and album sales. And from about '69, the Zep constituted one of my prime facilitators into the murky depths of the Underground.

But by the time I quit Pangbourne in 1972, a new Rock revolution was underway in the shape of a heterogeneous mix of Rock and Pop allied to an outrageous androgynous image...and known as Glam.

Glam had begun to infiltrate the British charts as early as '71, while making little impact on the US, despite the fact that many of its pioneers were American. While its true roots were to be found in the Blues and early Rock and Roll, more of which later.

But it had been carried into the mainstream by one Marc Bolan, born Mark Feld in 1947 into a Jewish family of working class origins, who had been featured in 1962 in a magazine called "Town", as one of the Faces, or leading Mods of Stamford Hill in East London.

Although by then he'd moved with his family to a council house in Summerstown in West London.

He went on to achieve major success as one half of the acoustic duo, Tyrannosaurus Rex; the other being multi-instrumentalist Steve Peregrin Took who, like Bolan, was a leading figure of London's Hippie Underground centred on Ladbroke Grove.

But In 1970, Took was replaced by percussionist Mickey Finn, who shared Bolan's love of old-time Rock and Roll. And as T. Rex, they had their first top 5 hit in the shape of "Ride a White Swan".

And by the time of their first number one the following year, T. Rex were a four-piece band, with Bolan the biggest British teen sensation since the Beatles. While the Bolan phenomenon was dubbed T Rextasy by the British press...and all throughout the land, bedroom walls were adorned with Bolan's fascinating fallen angel's face.

However, for the true roots of Glam one must return to the very earliest days of Rock and Roll. And specifically to a certain Rhythm and Blues shouter by the name of Little Richard.

As a boy, Richard had attended the New Hope Baptist Church in his native Macon, Georgia, and sung Gospel songs with his family as The Penniman Singers. And aged just 13, he joined Gospel legend Sister Rosetta Tharp onstage in Macon after she heard him singing before the concert. And he had serious ambitions of becoming a full-time minister of the Gospel, while demonstrating extraordinary gifts as a boy preacher.

By 1951, however, the world had begun to beckon, and he won a talent contest in Atlanta that led to a recording contract with RCA Victor, but the four records he subsequently released all flopped. While around about the same time, he came under the sway of an outrageous Rhythm and Blues musician by the name of Esquerita, who shaped his unique piano style.

Esquerita is also believed to have influenced his increasingly flamboyant image, although self-styled King of the Blues Billy Wright, who piled his pomaded hair high on his head and wore eye liner and face powder, was also an influence in this respect.

Real success came for Richard in 1955 with "Tutti Frutti", which has been cited as the true starting point for the Rock and Roll revolution; but within two years, he'd quit the business and returned to his faith. And as a Christian myself, I can only hope that for all his struggles, the good Reverend Penniman is a saved Christian man, and there is a good deal of evidence he is.

For few Rock stars have been as vocal in their condemnation of Rock and Roll as he has been.

Yet, in his wake, androgyny went on to become one of its major features; and this was true of several of its earliest pioneers. And that includes the single most influential phenomenon in Rock and Roll history with the possible exception of the Beatles, Elvis Presley.

For as masculine as Presley was, he was as much a Glam pioneer as Penniman with his early use of make up, and the flamboyant outfits he'd worn even before he found the fame that proved a mixed blessing to a boy raised in the Pentecostal Assemblies of God.

And the mantle was taken up in the mid to late sixties by such pioneers of Glam as the Kinks, Barrett era Pink Floyd, early Soft Machine, the Rolling Stones and Alice Cooper. But the decade as a whole witnessed an extraordinary explosion of androgyny on the part of the Western male, which served to pave for the way for the '70s.

And Glam swept a host of musicians who'd been striving for major success since the early '60s to fresh levels of stardom in the UK and elsewhere. Such as David Bowie, Elton John and Rod Stewart. For all three had first appeared on record as part of the British Blues Boom...Bowie and Stewart in '64, and John in '65; and despite being idolised at the height of Glam, they continued to be admired as serious album artists.

For there were two major strands of Glam in its hay day of 1971-'74, one being allied to the consciously artistic tradition of Progressive Rock, the other, to the purest pure Pop. And among those acts and artists affiliated to the former were David Bowie, Roxy Music, Mott the Hoople and the Sensational Alex Harvey Band; while the latter embraced T. Rex, the Sweet, Gary Glitter, Slade and Wizzard. While there were many more who either flirted with the genre from within the confines of Prog, such as the Strawbs, or existed on its fringes, such as Silverhead.

As to stateside Glam; pioneered primarily by Alice Cooper, it went on to include such cult icons as Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, the New York Dolls, Jobriath and Brett Smiley; as well as singer-songwriter, Todd Rundgren, a serious candidate for the most gifted Rock artist of all time. While several major acts were briefly touched by it; such as Aerosmith and Kiss, but it would not be until the 1980s that Glam entered the mainstream in the shape of Glam Metal.

Also among those who leaped on the Glam bandwagon was the band that effectively invented the genre, the Rolling Stones. Although they didn't adopt its more flagrant trappings until around 1972, the year they released the album which is widely considered to be their masterpiece, "Exile on Main Street".

Initial sessions took place in the basement of the Villa Nellcôte, a 19th century mansion on the waterfront of Villefranche-sur-Mer in France's Cote d'Azur, which had been leased to Keith Richards in the summer of '71. However, several tracks had already been recorded at Mick Jagger's country estate, as well as at West London's legendary Olympic Studios.

Originally a theatre, then a film studio, Olympic was converted into a recording studio by the architect Robertson Grant, while his son Keith Grant – a very close friend of Pat Halling's - completed the acoustics in tandem with Russel Pettinger. It went on to become the virtual nerve centre of the British Rock movement.

Much has been written of the "Exile" sessions, which saw various icons of the counterculture passing through Nellcôte as if to lay blessings on the decadent antics taking place therein, which stand today as the very quintessence of the benighted Rock and Roll lifestyle. While less than a decade had passed since Rock's true inception at the hands of the clean-cut Beatles, Western society had already been altered almost beyond recognition within that short space of time.

Yet, responsibility for this transformation can't in all good conscience be laid exclusively at the feet of Rock, given that tendencies inimical to the West's moral fabric can be traced at least as far back as the Enlightenment of the 16th and 17th Centuries. So, how had society come to be so successfully and swiftly revolutionised by Rock?

Part of the answer lies in its sheer popularity, itself arguably born of its extraordinary eclecticism. Yet, in purely artistic terms, its decline was so rapid that by '72, it was already wholly jaded as an art form, even though it remained creatively vibrant for a further decade and a half...but little more, despite sporadic flashes of the old genius.

It's as if it carried within it the seeds of its own destruction as a result of its reluctance to embrace progression, and persisting returns to the simple rhythms whence it sprang, and worship of those who've refused to transcend these. Many would cite the Rolling Stones as foremost amongst these, and yet this has not always been true, far from it.

For all throughout the '60s, thanks to the extraordinary musical versatility of founder member Brian Jones, they were among those who sowed the seeds of the Progressive movement to come.

However, once Jones was no longer able to significantly contribute to their music, the Stones made a conscious effort to return to their roots in the Blues, and this process reached an apogee in the shape of "Exile on Main Street" in 1972.

In that selfsame year, Pat Halling was involved with an album that was greeted with little of the ballyhoo of "Exile". This being "Slides", by the great Irish actor Richard Harris, who'd launched a Pop career on the back of Jimmy Webb's 7 minute Pop tour de force, "MacArthur Park".

In 2005, it was released on CD with "My Boy", receiving very high ratings from Amazon reviewers both in Britain and the US.

However, as the '70s progressed, Pat became involved with several far more successful projects on the fringes of Glam, more of which later.

Rock and Roll and the Western Soul

When such Glam acts and artists as David Bowie and the Sweet had first appeared on British television in full make up around 1972, there were those unreconstructed British males who were perforce moved to revulsion and rage. Yet by about '74 Glam could be said to have shed much of its revolutionary potency.

But by the time it had done so, it had effectuated a minor sexual upheaval by making male androgyny more acceptable than ever before. And it did so in defiance of the Bible's strict delineation of the sexual roles, and prohibition of any form of cross dressing.

And one can only wonder what effect it had on the psychological development of young men such as myself, who'd already been weaned on the ferocious rebel sounds of Rock, only to swoon at the feet of the gorgeous androgynes of Glam.

But while it had entered the mainstream as teeny bop Pop, an avant-garde form persisted in the shape of a nostalgic love affair with Europe's immediate past. And it was shared by acts and artists as diverse as Bowie and Roxy Music; as well as newcomers Sparks and Cockney Rebel, who were lavished with critical praise in some quarters of the British press. While Roxy were especially indebted to the decadent café and cabaret culture of pre-Rock Europe, when Modernism was at its point of maximum intensity. And the persona Bowie adopted in 1976, and which he enigmatically termed "The Thin White Duke" was the apotheosis of this romantic Europhilia.

But little of this was in evidence in the happy world of Pop which continued to mine the Glam Rock craze for all it was worth, propelling a multitude of entertainers into the charts in the process. Such as one David Cook, a startlingly handsome young cockney Londoner of Irish Traveller extraction who as David Essex became a major star on the fringes of Glam.

But rather than Rock or teeny bop Pop, he did so largely through acting. And it was his own song, "Rock On", that really put him on the map as a major heart throb in 1974 when it became a major hit on both sides of the Atlantic, due in no small part to its distinctive string arrangement, featuring one Pat Halling as concertmaster.

Its follow-up, "Stardust", was the title of the hit movie of the same name, a salutary tale of a young Londoner who achieves his dreams of superstardom, only to end up holed up in some Spanish castle as a drug-addicted recluse.

Like its predecessor, it had been produced by New Yorker Jeff Wayne, with whom Pat worked both on "Rock On" and his own "Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of the Worlds", widely viewed today as a masterpiece.

That same year of '74 saw the release of Cilla Black's "In My Life", produced by David Mackay, and "The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper's Feast" by Rod Edwards and Roger Hand from an original book by William Plomer, both with orchestra led by Pat.

While he was still a close colleague of Mickie Most, who was enjoying the second phase of his glittering Pop career. For as previously stated, he'd been briefly involved with the burgeoning Rock movement in the shape of the Jeff Beck Group, which had been formed in early '67.

But in time Most bequeathed the band to his friend and business partner, Peter Grant, and under Grant's aegis, they went on to enormous success in the US. And by so doing, they anticipated the mega-glory of another Grant-managed band led by a one-time member of the Yardbirds.

I'm referring of course to Led Zeppelin, a band second only to the Rolling Stones in terms of legendary darkness and mystery, if you'll excuse the leitmotiv.

While Grant went on to take the US by storm with Led Zep, Mickie set about turning RAK, which they'd formed together in 1969, into one the key Pop record labels of the '70s and home to several classic Glam, Pop and Teeny bop acts.

These included Disco-Poppers Hot Chocolate which had been formed as early as 1969, and former Detroit native Suzi Quatro, both of whom Pat worked with on several occasions with Mickie at the helm; as well as Mud, Arrows, Kenny, Smokie and Racey.

Quatro benefited from the brilliance of songwriters Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman, who also wrote for the Sweet, Mud, Arrows, Smokie and Racey, and for a time was one of the few female stars of the Glam-Glitter genre.

But Pat's work in the mid 1970s was by no means restricted to the purest pure Pop, far from it.

There was a major movie project in the shape of "The Day of the Jackal", directed by the great Fred Zinnemann, whom I have always admired enormously.

I was fortunate enough to be introduced to him by Pat. And he was the second of two legends of the cinema I met around about that time, the first having been the great Charles Chaplin, and they were both quite delectably charming to me.

Pat was the concertmaster, serving under the Frenchman Georges Delerue - whom I also met – who both composed and conducted the music.

In terms of recorded music, Pat became caught up in the final stages of the Prog Rock boom when he served as leader for Jethro Tull, for despite himself, he'd been part of the growing Rock movement from the outset.

And notably through his association with the Beatles, who by '67 were at the forefront of the Rock revolution; although their Rock was ever replete with beautiful Pop melodies.

But the same could be said of Tull, one of the most purely artistic bands of the genre, which yet achieved both commercial and critical success on both sides of the Atlantic. And the first of these projects, "War Child" from 1974 could be said to be the quintessence of Rock as an art form, whose earliest expression was the aforesaid Prog.

For by fusing elements of Classical, Folk and Rock, the Prog phenomenon created a music that at times amounted to high art, as in the case of Tull.

But it was Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention who effectively birthed the genre; although the notion of Rock as art had evolved by degrees in both Britain and America, with both the Beatles and Bob Dylan being especially influential in this respect.

Yet while both Britain and America served as the cradles of Art Rock, Prog was characteristically British, with King Crimson, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Yes, Gentle Giant and Genesis serving as early exemplars. And in keeping with its position within the rebel music of Rock, its lyrics often inclined to a darkness of tone which was characteristic of much of the musical Underground of the late 1960s.

Speaking of which...from about '73, Prog set about returning to the Underground whence it emerged. And from there, informing a vast variety of genres, including Glam Rock, Jazz Rock, New Wave, Post-Punk, Alt Rock and Indie...in fact, one might go so far as to say it's been ubiquitous ever since.

So that as things stand, several of the most successful acts in the world could be said to be Progressive in varying degrees. While at the same time, its arch-enemy Punk languishes on the sidelines as little more than a fashion concept.

But by '73, pure Prog was already starting to look stale in comparison to the Art Rock of figures such as Todd Rundgren and David Bowie, who were operating as progressives within the Glam Rock genre.

And in that selfsame year, Pat worked on two concept albums that were nowhere nears as commercial as anything by these two innovators, namely "Cosmic Wheels" by Donovan; and Johnny Harris' "All To Bring You Morning", for which he led the strings. And which featured no less than three one-time members of Yes, who just happened to be recording next door at the time as Johnny and friends, and were great admirers of his work.

He went on to work on a series of Art Rock projects which while not as successful as international best-sellers by the likes of Tull have received fresh critical acclaim through the internet.

They include "Beginnings" (1975) by Steve Howe, "Octoberon" (1976) by Barclay James Harvest, "Visionary" (1976) and "Perilous Journey" (1977) by Gordon Giltrap, "Donovan" (1977) by Donovan and "Woman in the Wings" (1978) by Steeleye Span lead singer Maddie Prior. While a very early Progressive project of Pat's was "Definitely What" (1969) by Brian Auger and the Trinity.

But for Pat, involvement in the rebel music of Rock and Roll was ever but a means of earning the amounts of money necessary to support a home and family. While in my case, it was entirely voluntary, and one after the other I immersed myself in its messages of revolt.

Which is not to say that all Rock music is overtly dark or iconoclastic, far from it. For much of it is relatively innocuous, and there is much beauty to be found in all forms of Rock, both musically and lyrically, as I've already made clear. Yet from a historical perspective, it could be said that few art forms have been quite so effective in challenging the Judaeo-Christian foundations of Western culture as Rock.

And for a time, it was as if a civil war was being fought for the hearts and minds of the young. And that's especially true of the '60s, where in both Britain and America, the conflict was quite extraordinarily fierce...and this persisted into the '70s. With the result that the British Punk insurrection provoked a reaction from ordinary members of the public which would be inconceivable today in a West that has become so utterly inured to outrage.

While by the '80s it could be said to have started to wane, as the values of the counterculture started percolating the mainstream. And while this was concurrent with a famous conservative backlash, the latter hardly constituted a wholesale return to traditional values. For these were still in terminal recession, and fighting desperately for their very existence. And the backlash was but an expression of this desperation as I see it.

And to those who disagree, I can only say they have failed to realise just how deeply embedded into our society these values once were.

While today, they are merely the province of a minority, and a relatively powerless one at that. So for the time being, it could be said that the culture wars of the past half century or so have been won...and that Rock and Roll stands tall among its victors.

Chapter Five – A Halling is a Halling Wherever He is

Incidents from an Infamous Year Zero

As the '70s proceeded apace, both Prog and Glam receded in terms of influence, although they'd experience periodic rebirths. Glam, for example, would be revived in the '80s through American Glam Metal, and the British Goth and New Romantic movements; and still exists to this day. However, given the extent to which the West has become inured to outrage, its power to shock has been reduced to zero.

By '77, it had been supplanted by Punk, a movement which, if it were at all possible, was even more scandalous.

While some years earlier, Soul, a melodic fusion of Gospel and R&B which had made a massive impact on the Pop charts, birthed a mutation known as Disco. And one of its major hallmarks was the liberal use of strings often played in a staccato style.

Thence, Pat was involved in several major projects at the height of the Disco era, including the international hit album "Symphony of Love" (1978) by Miquel Brown, which was produced by British composer Alan Hawkshaw. And another Hawkshaw production, "Again and Again" by Love De-Luxe, from the following year.

Pat also worked with Alec R Costandinos's groundbreaking "Love and Kisses", who produced three albums between 1977 and '79, which were massively successful at the time, yielding several US hit singles and helping to define the Disco sound.

And both Pat and Costandinos had worked with another French Disco pioneer Jean-Marc Cerrone on his hit album, "Love in C Minor" from 1976, produced at a time when Disco had yet to truly enter the mainstream.

While Pat played on several other Costandinos records, including an acknowledged Disco masterpiece, "Romeo and Juliet" (1978), which has to be lauded for its subject matter. For while Soul in the seventies was as extensive as Rock; and every inch as sublime at its most artistic, Disco had a greater tendency to fixate on the pleasures of the flesh. And so was the ultimate music of the mid 1970s, at a time the values of the permissive society were seeping into the mainstream. Yet at the same time, there were many exceptions, and Disco could be no less artistically exalted than Soul.

He also appeared on "Look Out" and "Ordinary Man" for Bad News Travels Fast, both from '79, and Costandinos' own "Sphinx" from '77, and "Winds of Change", also from '79. As well as Melaphonia's "Limelight Disco Symphony" from '78, a Disco tribute to Sir Charles Chaplin, who'd died the previous Christmas Day, produced by Franck Pourcel and Alain Boublil.

Boublil went on to write the libretto for the musical "Les Miserables" with composer Claude Schonberg, with John Cameron arranging.

And Pat was involved with the London production of "Les Miz" for many years as the leader of the orchestra, one of several highlights of a concert career which has seen him work with Pop legends as diverse as Ella Fitzgerald, Perry Como, Tony Bennett, Tiny Tim, Barry Manilow and Boy George of Culture Club...and tour with Tom Jones and Barrie White.

But it's his participation in Bing Crosby's final tour that is perhaps the dearest to his heart, as a personal fan of the Old Groaner's.

In September '77, Bing, his family, and close friend Rosemary Clooney began a concert tour of England that included two weeks at the London Palladium. He recorded an album "Seasons", and a TV Christmas special with David Bowie and Twiggy, which featured a famous duet with Bowie.

And Pat actually managed to wangle an autograph from Der Bingel during what may have been a final recording session at Maida Vale studios. But the great man had initially objected to Pat helping himself to a piece of his sheet music, before relenting with the words, "he seems like a good man", and signing the music into the bargain.

His final concert took place at the Brighton Centre on the 12th of October 1977. For two days afterwards, following a round of 18 holes of golf on a course near Madrid, he died from a massive heart attack. And his passing came at the end of a year that had claimed a string of cultural giants including Groucho Marx, Joan Crawford, Maria Callas, Marc Bolan, Elvis Presley and Charlie Chaplin.

And amidst all this tragedy, Punk's inexorable ascent to international notoriety showed no signs of abating. Yet while the London variant thrived, New York failed to capitalise on its initial promise as Punk's true spiritual capital.

For lest we forget...Punk's origins lie in the US among the so-called Garage bands of the 1960s. And their attempts to emulate the rougher acts of the British Invasion, themselves heavily indebted to American Rhythm and Blues. But it was the distinct New York variant of the early '70s that exerted the greatest sway on British Punk, and largely through the influence of a young entrepreneur by the name of Malcolm McLaren.

McLaren was born in London as the son of a Scottish father and Jewish mother, and raised by his grandmother, the daughter of a Sephardic-Jewish diamond merchant.

As an art student in the late 1960s, he was drawn to the subversive ideas of the Paris Situationists, believed to have played a part in fomenting the '68 riots, and were themselves offshoots of the post-war Lettrists.

Formed by the charismatic Isidore Isou in the late 1940s, the Lettrists were very much precursors of the Punks, and one of their number, Jean-Michel Mension, became infamous for scrawling slogans on his trousers as early as 1953.

In 1971, he and his then girlfriend, Vivienne Westwood, opened an outlet specialising in '50s style Teddy Boy clothing designed by himself and Vivienne at 430 Kings Road, Chelsea. It exists to this day as "World's End", part of Dame Vivienne's global fashion empire; but in '71 it first saw the light of day as "Let it Rock".

Four years later, he became the manager of the disintegrating New York Dolls, who'd created a sensation in the UK at the height of Glam with a combination of exotic image and corrosive three-chord Rock.

He designed some red leather outfits for them in tandem with a new pseudo-Communist image, but it was too late to save them, and they folded soon afterwards. But while in New York, he came across a former Sandford Preparatory student from Lexington, Kentucky, by the name of Richard Hell.

He'd taken his name from a famous prose poem by Arthur Rimbaud, and was at various times a member of several key New York Punk Rock outfits. And McLaren was especially impressed by his unique image of torn tee-shirt and spiky unkempt hair, allegedly inspired by the famous tousle-haired photograph of Rimbaud by Etienne Carjat, and so before long he'd decided to take it back home to London and promote an anglicised version.

Some time afterwards, he renamed his Kings Road boutique "Sex" and set himself up as the manager of a group formed by three denizens of the Hammersmith area of West London, allegedly at the urging of their guitarist, Warwick "Wally" Nightingale. And there is some evidence they were called the Strand, after a song on the second Roxy Music album "For Your Pleasure".

McLaren agreed to be their manager, but only on the condition that founder member Wally, be ejected from the band; and so he was. Sadly, he died from complications related to substance abuse in 1996.

He was replaced by Johnny Rotten, a young London Irishman born John Lydon in London's Finsbury Park in 1956. And with Rotten onboard as front man, the band was renamed the Sex Pistols; and so began the most infamous Punk odyssey of them all.

As I've hinted earlier, Punk in the UK could be said to have been a final furious stand-off between the old-style Victorian values of the 1950s and the new values that had been ushered in a decade later. But while these had at first seemed to be comparatively benign, by the end of the sixties, they'd curdled into something far darker.

However, no sooner had Punk taken off, than it was slyly supplemented with those very elements it was reacting against; as a generation of musicians sought to fuse the attitude of Punk with the artistry of Prog.

And so the New Wave was born in the shape of a vast variety of acts and artists who while progressive in the truest sense, were content to ride the Punk bandwagon all the way into the Pop charts.

While New Wave threatened to supplant Punk at its crudest, other genres competed with it for the hearts and souls of the sybaritic young. Such as Reggae, which was Punk's most serious rival as the music of choice for Punks themselves; and Electronica, which had been pioneered all throughout the '70s mainly by so-called Kraut Rock acts such as Can, Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream.

But Disco was its true competitor, even though it was still known as Soul for the most part as I recall; but then I was just a rube from the 'burbs.

One thing is certain is that I was as much a lover of Soul as Punk circa '77, and dressed more like a Soul Boy for much of that year. In fact, it was only in its final few months I started affecting the more flagrant trappings of Punk; such as spiked and dyed hair and drainpipe jeans.

So for me, '78 was my own personal Punk Year Zero; and it was in that year, at the very height of Disco, that "Central Heating" by Heatwave, a rare classic of British Soul, was released.

Produced by former teen idol Barry Blue, and with arrangements by John Cameron, with Pat Halling serving as his concertmaster, it was a massive hit on both sides of the Atlantic, ascending to number 10 on the Billboard 200. And yielding two hit singles in the shape of "The Groove Line" by Englishman Rod Temperton and "Mind Blowing Decisions" by American lead vocalist Johnny Wilder Jr.

Temperton went on to write for the best-selling album in musical history, which is Michael Jackson's "Thriller", produced by Quincy Jones in 1982.

He also wrote for Quincy on his own hit album "The Dude", with singer Patti Austin sounding remarkably like Jackson; as well as for Patti herself. While George Benson's "Love X Love" was blessed with the same kind of stardust that helped turn Michael Jackson into the most famous Rock star on the planet.

Then towards the end of the '70s, Pat played what was possibly his most memorable ever solo for a television program. And this was for the stunning opening and closing theme to BBC's "Life on Earth", composed by Edward Williams and conducted by Marcus Dods.

As a solo it was so breathtakingly beautiful that Pat was compared by one devotee of the violin to Jascha Heifetz, whom many believe to have been the greatest violinist of them all. Quite an honour for the boy from the Tamar Valley.

From New Pop to Rap in the Crazy 1980s

The '80s was a potentially tough decade for session musicians such as Pat Halling as the synthesizer started threatening the world of recorded music as never before. And one of the fruits of this putsch was the so-called New Pop that arose in the wake of Punk.

And New Pop could be said to be a more purely commercial variant of the aforesaid New Wave; itself an offshoot of Punk. Although the term was only ever used in the UK, while the US continued to favour that of New Wave to describe the explosion of British synth-driven bands that invaded the Pop charts on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the '80s.

For several New Pop acts took part in the so-called Second British Invasion, which saw British bands dominating the American Pop charts to a degree unknown since the hey day of the Beatles. And this was largely due to a demand on the part of the newly launched MTV music channel for glamorous

videos which enabled British acts such as Culture Club, Duran Duran and Eurythmics to score massive transatlantic hits.

But for many, this resurgence of Pop was a negative development, despite the musicality of many of its proponents, so that it fused the commerciality of Pop with the virtuosity of Rock. And it could certainly be said that such phenomena as Glam, Punk and Goth witnessed a certain taming throughout the '80s; so that by the end of the decade, they had been shorn of their ability to shock.

But for all the ballyhoo created by the rise of Electronica, Pat Halling's career was barely affected.

And in 1980, he worked again for his old friend John Cameron...this time on the movie "The Mirror Crack'd", based on the Agatha Christie novel, with music by JC, and featuring a roll call of Hollywood legends. Pat even had a small non-speaking cameo in the movie as a World War II bandleader.

And in that same year, he led the orchestra for "Man of the World" by Greek superstar Demis Roussos, which while produced by David Mackay, featured another close friend Barrie Guard as conductor.

He also found time to lead the orchestra for the distinguished composer Wilfrid Joseph's theme to the 1980 BBC TV series of Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice".

In 1982, he was back with John Cameron for a further star-studded Agatha Christie movie, "Evil Under the Sun", helmed, as in the case for "Crack'd" by Bond director Guy Hamilton, and produced by Lord Brabourne and Richard Goodwin, who became a close friend.

For Richard's wife, Christine Edzard, he served as the soloist for "Biddy" in 1983...working again with Christine, with Richard producing, on Dickens' "Little Dorrit" in '88, and two years later on "The Fool", written by Christine with Oliver Stockman. And all three movies were scored by French composer Michel Sanvoisin.

For Paul McCartney, possibly the most lauded Rock and Roll musician in history, he led the orchestra for the soundtrack to the '84 movie "Give My Regards to Broad Street". And while it sold well, the film itself performed poorly at the Box Office; although it benefits from a good deal of affection from contemporary McCartney fans.

A year later, he was concertmaster for his old colleague David Essex on the album version of the musical "Mutiny", based on "Mutiny on the Bounty" by Nordhoff and Hall. And in that same year, played on three tracks from Jazz musician Barbara Thompson's album "Heavenly Bodies".

And then a year after that, he contributed to "To Go Beyond II", final track from the hugely successful "Enya" album by Irish superstar Enya Brennan. As well as "If" for Hollywood Beyond, featuring singer-songwriter Mark Rogers. And tenor saxophonist Spike Robinson's "Gershwin Collection".

In 1988, he and Richard Studt served as orchestra leaders on Elaine Page's "The Queen Album", produced by Mike Moran, while in '89, he worked with yet another Rock legend, Pete Townsend, serving as leader on his concept album "The Iron Man - The Musical", based on the novel by Ted Hughes.

Interestingly, Pete's father Jazz saxophonist Cliff Townsend had been a colleague of Pat's during their time together on the famous BBC television chat show "Parkinson", named after host Michael Parkinson.

Then in 1990, he appeared on John Williams' album "The Guitar is the Song", having earlier worked with the great Classical guitarist on "John Williams plays Patrick Gowers and Scarlatti" (1972), and "Portrait of John Williams" (1982).

But briefly returning to film and TV, television projects on which Pat worked throughout the '80s include "Hold that Dream" (1986) based on the novel by Barbara Taylor Bradford, with original score by long time friend Barrie Guard, "Tears in the Rain" (1988), from a novel by Pamela Wallace, with music again by Guard, and "The Darling Buds of May" (1992-1993), based on the novel by HE Bates, and with music by Pip Burley and Guard.

His recording career in the '90s included work for acts and artists as varied as British Indie band Cud and French singer Dany Brillant ("Nouveau Jour") from 1999).

And on a larger scale, the '90s witnessed the fading of such once provocative cults of Glam, Punk and Goth to make way for the far starker cult of Grunge, as well as the facelessness of Electronic Dance. But the greatest success story of the decade was Rap, which many would contend is not a Rock music genre at all, but an entirely different form of music, as distinct from Rock as Rock once was from Jazz.

While others would insist all offshoots of Rock's first forefathers that have in some way benefited from the Rock revolution are perforce forms of Rock and Roll. And by forefathers I'm referring primarily to Rhythm and Blues and Country and Western. And I'm inclined to side with this view.

A Halling is a Halling Wherever He is

Moving into the Noughties...and Tiny Tim's 1968 concert at the Albert Hall finally secured a CD release in 2000 through Rhino Handmade Records as "Tiny Tim Live! At the Royal Albert Hall". And conducted by Carpenters producer Richard Perry, with Tony Gilbert as leader, and Pat among the first violins, it was revealed as a neglected masterpiece that had remained unreleased for nearly two decades. Yet within two years of its recording, Tim's legendary appearance at the Isle of Wight Festival would secure a standing ovation from the assembled flower children, with the Beatles and the Stones among them.

And between 2000 and 2002, Pat played violin for a band formed by his good friend Barrie Guard, and featuring his son Carl on vocals.

And together with bass player John Sutton, they recorded a series of demos at Barrie's home studio in Esher, and even went so far as to record a pilot radio show; but to no avail.

They gigged sporadically for about a year and a half to limited response, until a final concert at the 2002 Shelton Arts Festival brought them into contact with the kind of intimate cultured audience they should have been aiming for all along...and they all but brought the house down. But dispersed soon afterwards after barely eighteen months together.

On a brighter note, there's a fascinating tale attached to singer-songwriter John Dawson Read for whom Pat served as leader on his two classic albums from the '70s, namely "A Friend of Mine is Going Blind" from '75, and "Read On" from a year later.

Sometime around 2005, fellow singer-songwriter Michael Johnson included an MP3 of Read singing the title track of his first album, "A Friend of Mine" on his website, and many Read fans began communicating through the site as a result.

His subsequent re-entry into the music world after nearly thirty years of relative inactivity, resulted in a third album, "Now...where were we?" being released that same year.

Until quite recently, Pat served as leader for the longest running comedy series in television history, Roy Clarke's "Last of the Summer Wine". And working alongside Pat was harmonica maestro Jim Hughes, whose playing it was that made Ronnie Hazelhurst's gently pastoral theme tune so distinctive.

From about 2005, Pat began work on an album of popular song standards featuring Jim on harmonica, his son Carl on vocals, Judd Procter on guitar, Dave Richmond and John Sutton on bass, and John Dean and Sebastian Guard on drums.

The album was produced by Pat and arranged by John Smith. And largely engineered by sound recordist Tony Philpot, with contributions by Keith Grant of West London's legendary Olympic Studios. To be finally released in 2007 as "A Taste of Summer Wine" by James Hughes Carl Halling with the London Swingtette.

And as things stand, Pat plays in two quartets, the Leonardo, formed in 1993, and the aforesaid Quartet Pro Musica. And the quartet's recent projects have included the 2007 world premiere of "A Poet's Calendar" by long-time friend Derek Wadsworth, with whom Pat first worked in the '70s, such as on Alan Price's "Metropolitan Man" from '75

As well as performances of Quartets 1 and 2 by Jazz drummer and composer Tony Kinsey; and a string of concerts organised by Pat's youngest son, Dane. The first of these taking place at London's Cadogan Hall in the spring of 2010, and featuring works by Haydn, Debussy and Purcell. To say nothing of the world premiere of "Tara's Brooch" by faithful colleague John Cameron, which features on a CD of theirs released towards the end of that year.

In addition to his music, Pat continues to be a keen dinghy sailor during the season at his local club, Aquarius Sailing Club, where he races to win every Sunday; and to paint under the handle he once rejected, Clancy.

Also, for several years he's attended functions organised by PPL, formerly known as Phonographic Performance Limited, a music licensing company which collects and distributes airplay and performance royalties on behalf of record companies and perfomers throughout the UK.

At one of these, the Fair Play 95, which took place on behalf of the Fair Play for Musicians campaign at the Stanhope Hotel in Brussels in April 2009, he played a medley of Tony Hatch's "Downtown" and the Beatles' "All You Need is Love", before inviting flamenco guitarist Manuel Espinosa on to the stage for a short duet.

There seems to be no end to the man's almost preternatural energy and force of will.

And although there's no hard and fast evidence that Pat has Scandinavian blood, research related to the Norwegians who emigrated to the American Midwest from about the mid-19th Century onwards reveals that one of the purported characteristics of the Hallings of the Halling Valley in Norway's Buskerud County is firmness "in thoughts and beliefs", so that he would "rather break than bend". This in the words of the Norwegian-American writer Syver Swenson Rodning, who allegedly took first prize in an essay set by a man called Hallingen in 1917 called "A Halling is a Halling wherever he is", the Hallings themselves settling primarily in Spring Grove, Minnesota, where traces of their dialect and subculture survived into the 1930s.

Perhaps then, alone among the three children born to Phyllis Mary Halling, Patrick is a true Halling with roots deep in the Hallingdal where the Halling Valley River lies.

And what of the music that has dominated his days and nights for so many decades?

The truth is it has never been more accessible thanks to the miracle of sites such as Spotify and You Tube. Sites where one might access a degree of music inconceivable to those of my generation, who as late as the late 1990s could only ever hear as much music as they were able to afford via the medium of the long playing record, Compact Disc or Musicassette.

And of Rock...surely the most revolutionary music form in history, it could be said it has been tamed at long last. And quietly taken its place alongside Classical, Jazz and Folk as just another facet of the massive music industry. But then is that not its final victory?

### Book Five – Beachcombings from the Halling Valley Riverbank

Chapter One – Bouzingo and Other Versified Remnants

1. Bouzingo – The Gathering of the Poets

The boy was aged about eighteen,

Pale and pensive,

Weary and frail in appearance.

He could have been

Goethe's Werther,

Senancour's Obermann

Or Chateaubriand's melancholy hero,

Embraced by a generation

And about whom Sainte Beuve said:

"René, c'est moi."

Tortured by a new mal du siècle,

He sought refuge

In the Club Bouzingo.

Two young poets,

One dark, the other fair,

Drifted past. The first,

Whose black hair

Hung in ringlets over his shoulders,

Wore a small pointed beard,

Black velvet tails,

A white linen shirt

Loosely fastened at the neck

By a thin pink taffeta tie;

The second wore a tight coat

That opened onto a silk crimson waistcoat

And a lace jabot, white trousers

With blue seams,

And a wide-brimmed black hat, and

In one of his hands

He carried a long thin pink-coloured pipe.

They were soon joined

By some of their dandified companions.

The music had stopped playing, and

The poet-leader in cape and gloves,

Dark and pomaded

With a Théophile Gautier moustache,

Took to the stage,

Where he proceeded to declaim

Selections from his subversive verses

To delirious cheers,

As if sedition was imminent;

Only the boy-poet remained silent,

His pale cheeks

Soak'd by the freshest tears.

"Après nous le déluge,"

He said under his breath,

"Our leader preaches revolution

But provides no solution

As to the fate of coming generations,

Should the infant be cast out

With the bath water that is so filthy

In his sight

That, intent on doing right,

Gives no thought to the future,

Nor to what might supplant

The society he claims to despise."

The boy was aged about eighteen

Pale and pensive

Weary and frail in appearance.

He could have been

Goethe's Werther,

Senancour's Obermann

Or Chateaubriand's melancholy hero,

Embraced by a generation,

And about whom Sainte Beuve said:

"René, c'est moi."

Tortured by a new mal du siècle,

He sought refuge

From the Club Bouzingo.

2. Oh My My My (Call the FBI)

Couldn't b'lieve my peepers

When I first saw you

Couldn't b'lieve the beauty

Of your baby blues

I knew I had to ask you if you'd

Like to dance

I knew I had to take heart and to

Take that chance

First you resisted me you said

You couldn't leave

Your friends alone

But after our first dance you said

You thought they would be

Ok to find their own way home

Oh my my my

Call the FBI

I think I lost my pride

I think I found my bride

Couldn't b'lieve I'd ever

Find a girl like you

Couldn't b'lieve we'd bond

As if by superglue

I knew I had such tender feelings

In my heart

I knew that I could fix it so we'd

Never part

First you resisted me you said

You weren't ready

To fall in love

But after our first dance you said

You thought you'd give

This crazy swain another chance

Oh my my my

Call the FBI

I think I lost my pride

I think I found my bride

3. Some Romantic Afternoon

Some Romantic Afternoon

I will hear that haunting tune

The one that I would softly croon

By a lagoon

We'd go sailing to Cadiz

For a while it seemed like bliss

Now it alls seems just a myth

Like Brigadoon

Took a boat to southern Spain

Just to see her face again

She had gone forever

Not to return there

I could not control the tears

How they burned my eyes

As I look'd back at those lost years

Some Romantic Afternoon

I will hear that haunting tune

The one that I would softly croon

By a lagoon

4. For More than a Million Dreams

Keep on chipping

Right away at my heart

Because you touched it

Right from the start

If you were to leave me

And then

We were to part

It would really tear me apart

Don't stop now,

Darling you're getting to me

Don't quit now

That you're ahead

Don't stop now

You've made an impression on me

Now there's no getting you out of my head.

Keep on tearing

All my defences down

Because I feel that

They're all going to fall

Keep on keeping up with

All of your charms

Because I feel

I'm going to give you my all

Don't stop now,

You lit such a fire in me

Don't quit now

Because that would be cruel

Don't stop now

Darling, don't tire of me

I'd feel such a fool and so confused

You're the one

I have longed for you

For more than a million dreams

You're the one

I have been strong for you

You don't know how hard it's been

Don't stop now,

Darling you're getting to me

Don't quit now

That you're ahead

Don't stop now

5. Melancholy Girl

Melancholy Girl,

With your pre-Raphaelite curls

You don't seem quite of this world

Such a strange and a sad-eyed girl

What happened to your smile

How came you to be so full of guile

Your eyes seem to stare for miles

For such a sweet and a tender child

There's someone you've got to meet

The truth can set you free

Eternally

Enigmatic babe

The way you live is a shame

Life is more than a game

Freedom's found in just one name

I'd like to show you another way

Where the dark can't harm you

Night or day

Melancholy Girl,

With your pre-Raphaelite curls

You don't seem quite of this world

Such a strange and a sad-eyed girl

6. My Travels

My travels start

Right here

Deep in my mind

My travels take me just where

I please I don't have

To leave my warm room

My travels start

Sixteen sun

Beating down

Sinatra's crooning Jobim

And I'm just dreaming of my

Great romance to come

I don't need a little ticket

Tells me I can take the train

I don't even to risk it

There's no blistering sun

Or driving rain

And it's here that I remain

My travels end

With a sweet

And peaceful time

I've found such sense deep within

No more will I feel

The need to go travelling again.

7. Some Sun Drunk Day He Said

Emotions war against sense

And his mind remains

A pot pourri,

And thoughts in his head

When he lies in his bed

Would make Dorian Gray

Appear pristine.

He wishes to moralize

On a corrupt example

Yet from the wicked cup

He hath supped a sample.

He appears to think in extremes;

He is beau-laid and realist

Whose inspiration stems from his dreams.

"Life is a beautiful strain for me,"

One sun-drunk day he said,

"But I pray I say what my soul needs to

Before the heavens decide me dead."

But his mind is a disorderly drawer

Full of confused categorizations;

He has that Scott Fitzgerald illness

For dates, times, rhymes and quotations.

"I have a clear flowing mind

But I cannot foretell

When the clogging black clouds will arrive,

For they will arrive.

Live with the love, then bear the pain

Recurrent like the monsoon rain."

He is afraid of happiness

For the inevitable despair that must follow it;

Afraid of happiness

For its cruel impermanence.

Like Zola, the seasons in life, for him

Are inevitable.

"All artists," he says, "are at once alike and unique

One day, it's clear,

The next, hazy, like a beery vision

The fulfilment that they seek."

Misty dreams of sweet-smelling roses

And swaying streams

Bring him chills and pains in his soul and being;

He lives his life through a melancholy tragedy

And has an ever-yearning mind.

8. Gallant Festivities

It was my evening, that's

For sure

"It's your aura..."

For sure -

At last I'm good

At something

"Spot the Equity card..."

"When are you going

To be a superstar?"

Said Sarah

That seemed to be

The question

On everyone's lips.

At last, at last, at last

I'm good at something...

And so the party...Zoe

called me...I listened...

...To her problems...

References

To my "innocent face"...

Linda said:

"Sally seems Elusive

But is in fact,

Accessible;

You're the opposite -

You give to everyone

But are incapable

Of giving in particular."

Madeleine was comparing me

To June Miller...

Descriptions by Nin:

"She does not dare

To be herself..."

Everything I'd always

Wanted to be, I now am...

"...She lives

On the reflections

Of herself in the eyes

Of others...

There is no June

To grasp and know..."

I kept getting up to dance...

Sally said: "I'm afraid...

You're inscrutable

You're not just

Blasé,

Are you?"

I spoke

Of the spells of calm

And the hysterical

Reactions

Psychic Exhaustion

Then anxious elation...

9. The Wanderer of Golders Green

I awake each morning

With fresh hope

And tranquility;

I might go for a saunter

Down quiet London backstreets

Soon my aimlessness

Depresses me,

And I realise

I'd been deceiving myself

As to my ability

To relax as others do.

I decided on a Special B

Before the eve.

I bought a lager

At the Bar

And chatted to Gaye.

Then Ray

Bought me another.

I appreciated the fact

That he remembered

The time he,

His gal Chris,

And Rory Downed

An entire Bottle

Of Jack Daniels

In a Paris-bound train.

A tanned cat

Bought me a (large) half,

Then another half.

My fatal eyes

Are my downfall.

I drank yet another half...

My head was spinning

When it hit the pillow;

I awoke

With a terrible headache

Around one o'clock.

I prayed it would depart.

I slowly got dressed.

I was as chatty as ever

Before the exam...

French/English translation.

Periodically I put my face

In my hands or groaned

Or sighed -

My stomach

was burning me inside.

I finished my paper

In 1 hour and a half.

As I walked out

I caught various eyes

Amanda's, Trudy's (quizzical) etc...

I went to bed...

Slept 'till five...

Read O'Neill until 7ish...

Got dressed

And strolled down

To Golders Green,

In order to relive

A few memories.

I sang to myself -

A few memories

Flashed into my mind,

But not as many

as I'd have liked -

It wasn't the same.

It wasn't the same.

Singing songs brought

Voluptuous tears.

I snuck into McDonalds

Where I felt At home,

Anonymous, alone.

I bought a few things,

Toothpaste and pick,

Chocolate, yoghurts,

Sweets, cigarettes

And fruit juice.

Took a sentimental journey

Back to Powis Gardens,

Richness

And intensity,

Romantic

And attractive...

Sad, suspicious and strange.

I sat up until 3am,

Reading O'Neill

Or writing (inept) poetry.

Awoke at 10,

But didn't leave

My room till 12,

Lost my way

To Swiss Cottage,

Lost my happiness.

Oh so conscious

Of my failure

And after a fashion,

Enjoying this knowledge.

Chapter Two - So that it Remain Perpetually Inchoate

Being a somewhat convoluted explanation of how the various strands of "Where the Halling Valley River Lies" came to be concocted.

And which we begin with the leading text from Book One, "Leitmotifs from an English Pastorale", whose nucleus came about some years ago when I attempted to write a piece about the pastoral tradition within English music, before realising I'd set myself a monumental task. But I rambled on regardless, only to lose what I'd written so far when my computer crashed beyond all hope of repair. As for reasons best known to myself, I'd not ensured its continuing existence by way of a duplicate.

I think I then attempted a re-write with the singer-songwriter Nick Drake as its main feature, which I enhanced with references to various examples of English pastoral music, such as my own personal favourite, "A Lark Ascending" by Vaughan Williams.

Ultimately it was given the title "From an English Pastorale – For Nick Drake"; but I only ever saw it as a makeweight. That is, until I decided to expand it into "Leitmotifs from an English Pastorale".

I can't even recall why I made the decision to include the leitmotifs or recurring themes, which were of course originally used in music rather than in writing, although ultimately co-opted by literature. But it was a risky one, lest readers think I was inadvertently repeating myself. But then the piece as a whole is pretty "lawless", which is what the French writer André Gide proposed a novel should be.

Although "Leitmotifs" is hardly a novel; and Gide's shorter works were far from lawless.

It's based on fact, and predictably so for anyone who's in any way familiar with what I optimistically like to call my writings. And while partly original, it's also rooted in a network of autobiographical pieces I've been concocting since 2006; having destroyed most of what I'd written up to that point.

But it's not a memoir as such, at least, not as I see it, but then in the end, it's not up to me to say what it is. In fact when all's said and done, I haven't the first idea what it is other than something I wrote. But by naming the central figure Runacles, I'm able to distance myself a little from him, so that Runacles is a version of me as opposed to the completed article.

And so we move on to the quartet of essays that complete Book One, "A Quartet of Essays and a Stray Pastorale".

The first of these, "The Coming of the Absaloms" was fashioned from an early section of "The Gambolling Baby Boomer", first chapter of my memoir "Rescue of a Rock and Roll Child". Or should I say memoirs...for it exists as two versions, one being a direct memoir, the other, similarly direct, but with many names changed.

And while "Absalom" has since been enhanced, the similarities still very much remain. While the second was derived from another chapter from "Rescue", "The Triumph of Decadence". As to the third, it was based on "The Riddle of the British English"which while still available online has to all intents and purposes been shelved. While the source of the fifth, "From Avant Garde to Global Village", was "A Final Distant Clarion Cry", final chapter of the aforesaid "Rescue of a Rock and Roll Child", more of which later.

Which brings us to Book Two, "Your Lethal Life and Other Versified Leftovers" which as the name suggests consists exclusively of versified writings.

And these begin with "It Wasn't So Long Ago", a lyric written in 2003 for a song I roughly recorded onto cassette, some years before it was transferred onto CD. And thence onto You Tube...together with "Toilers of the Sea", "A Song of Summer", "Stevie B and Me", "The Ones We Love", "Like All the Moonstruck Do", "I Let You Go" and "Time Was I Was".

While "Time Travel" was written and recorded in '99; with "All Through the Ages" emerging perhaps a year later, while never making it onto CD.

As to "Your Beautiful Lethal Life", it was written only a matter of weeks ago from an earlier lyric I'd based on a collaboration with a close friend, dating from about twenty years ago...when my own life was both beautiful and lethal.

"Wicked Cahoots" and "The Woodville Hall Soul Boys" stem from stories written in the late 1970s, while they first saw the light of day in versified form in 2006, before going on to form part of the memoir which came ultimately to be titled "Rescue of a Rock and Roll Child".

While "Thoughts of a Forlorn Flâneur", a relatively new work in its present form, is based partly on a story written in about 1987 and subsequently destroyed, and partly on material written specifically for what became "Rescue".

"Spark of Youth Long Gone", "Some Perverse Will" and "London as the Lieu" all also date from the '80s. Indeed "London" first existed in prose form as part of the same story that inspired parts of "Flâneur". While "Spark" pertained to a different tale entirely, and "Some Perverse Will" existed in versified form from the outset. Although it's since undergone some modification, like so much of what has ended up being included in "Where the Halling Valley River Lies".

Shifting to "Seven Chapters from a Sad Sack Loser's Life", its origins also lie in the "Rescue". For out of the latter came two kindred pieces centring on one David Cristiansen, namely, "The Tormenting", which is told in the third person with many names changed, and "The Testimony", which is even more bowlderised than its sister piece, if that's at all possible.

And "Sad Sack" is effectively "The Tormenting", with elements of "The Testimony" added to it. Such as several autobiographical narratives which, deemed ineffectual as shorts, were shelved along with both longer works. While "Rescue" was relegated to what might be called a second team of writings.

Which is where Book Four once existed...that is, until it was recently upgraded and completed. But its evolution was even more labyrinthine than that of "Sad Sack".

What is certain is that it first emerged in the wake of "Rescue" as a second memoir, only to vanish from the writing site I'd initially used to store it...having failed to benefit from the safety net of a back-up copy.

And as a result, I was forced to re-write it; and it emerged in embryonic form as a vast diversity of writings. And some or all of these are still available to read online. Yet, it was ultimately fine-tuned in order that it focus on my father, Patrick Halling, as well as the successive musical and cultural climates in which his career took place. And tendered the name "Where the Halling Valley River Lies".

While many, perhaps most of the elements pertaining to myself would be destined to end up in "Sad Sack".

Which brings us to "Beachcombings from the Halling Valley Riverbank", of which this finale is an integral part, together with versified pieces not considered of sufficiently high quality to be included in "Lethal Life", such as the opener, "Bouzingo – The Gathering of the Poets", whose origins lie in an unfinished tale, possibly dating from around 1979.

And which centres on a club situated in an imaginary small town in Southern Spain, in which fashionable young men and women are wont to nightly congregate as a means of fulfilling their wildest romantic fantasies. Is in other words, entirely fantastical, unlike most of my writings.

While "Call the FBI", "Some Romantic Afternoon", "For More than a Million Dreams", "Melancholy Girl" and "My Travels" were all originally song lyrics dating from 2003.

So, where precisely do "Some Sun Drunk Day He Said", "Gallant Festivities" and "The Wanderer of Golders Green" fit in?

Well..."Sun Drunk" has the dubious honour of being the only slice of juvenilia contained within the entire book, having been conceived as some kind of poem in about 1976. And as such, it provides a certain insight into the psychological condition of the dandified figure from chapter two of "Seven Chapters from a Sad Sack Loser's Life".

While "Gallant Festivities" and "The Wanderer of Golders Green" were versified for inclusion in what ultimately became the "Rescue", having been based on notes made in the early 1980s. While like all my autobiographical writings with the exception of the title piece, personal names were changed for the sake of privacy, while it was no less motivated by a spirit of truth and integrity to the best of my ability.

And this short coda finishes things off quite neatly. But that's not to say "Where the Halling Valley River Lies" has attained its definitive state, because by its very nature, it can be added to ad infinitum. So that it remain perpetually fluid and perpetually inchoate. And in perpetual evolution.
