Alan Davies - Teenage Revolution: How the 80s Made Me

ALAN DAVIES

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First published as My Favourite People and Me 19781988 by Michael Joseph 2009

Published as Teenage Revolution in Penguin Books 2010

Copyright Alan Davies, 2009

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Going Underground Words and Music by Paul Weller Copyright 1980 Stylist Music Limited. Universal Music Publishing MGB Limited. Used by permission of Music Sales Limited. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured.

Start! Words and Music by Paul Weller Copyright 1980 Stylist Music Limited. Universal Music Publishing MGB Limited. Used by permission of Music Sales Limited. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured.

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The publishers will be glad to correct any errors or omissions in future editions.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-196451-5

Growing up, every year brings new people with attributes to admire or ideas to inspire. Remembering those times and looking back over the heroes and villains of my own younger life led me to consider why I thought the world of such and such a person when now I dont give them a second thought. Which of them were just passing through my world, while I was passing through a phase, and which of them had an influence that was lasting, for better or worse? Soon I started to arrive at a list of my favourite people, not all obviously heroic, just personal icons.

The process of evolving from an unknown figure, through the admirers first awareness, to icon status can be a rapid one, particularly if the person attributing that status is young, impressionable, and pink with navety. Before sharing my list I considered researching historical, political, cultural and sporting events to beef up the collection of heroes, to strive for a wider significance. A couple of things undermined the value of detailed research, in my mind.

One was the realization that the significance, to me, of one of the most important events of 1981, the attempted assassination of US president Ronald Reagan, was the recollection of my dads indifference when I called out to him in the kitchen:

Reagans been shot!

I repeated the shock news and when he came in to look at the television, he said:

Oh, I thought you meant Regan in The Sweeney.

Of course, John Thaws character in The Sweeney was pronounced Reegan, whereas the president went for Raygun. The point is that anyones memory of significant events is so couched in the where and when of their own life that there seemed no way of establishing the true influences on me by trawling through old newspapers and history websites. World events connect with individual lives unexpectedly and the connections that matter to me are those that are lodged in my mind still.

1978 was really the year when I started venturing out more, without adults, with other eleven-, twelve- and thirteen-year-olds. The year in which the accumulation of personal heroes accelerated.

1988 was the year I graduated from university to pursue the possibility that stand-up comedy could be an alternative to finding a job where Id have to do what I was told, something I was struggling with at the time. Stand-up would also afford me the chance to continue mimicking heroes well into adulthood and, in fact, might allow the postponement of adulthood altogether.

The second thing that happened that deflated my interest in research was an early attempt at just that. The first port of call for researching anything, now and for the foreseeable future, is the infernal interweb, accessed, more often than not, by the mind control device that is Google. I typed 1982 into my Google box and was predictably offered the assistance of the eagerly unreliable and peculiarly selective Wikipedia site. I scrolled down to August 1982 and these were the only six entries:

August 4 The United Nations Security Council votes to censure Israel because its troops are still in Lebanon.

August 7 Italian Prime Minister Giovanni Spadolini resigns.

August 12 Mexico announces it is unable to pay its large foreign debt, triggering a debt crisis that quickly spread throughout Latin America.

August 13 In Hong Kong, health warnings on cigarette packets are made statutory.

August 17 The first compact discs (CDs) are released to the public in Germany.

August 20 Lebanese Civil War: A multinational force lands in Beirut to oversee the PLO withdrawal from Lebanon. French troops arrive August 21, US Marines August 25.

Im not suggesting that the break-up of The Jam should have been noted as a world event twenty-six years later but, for me, August 1982 meant going to one of their farewell gigs at Wembley Arena before searching through Camden Market to find a bootleg tape of the gig. Ive lost the tape but I still have the poster.

I considered that to be the most important event of August 1982, until there was a knock on my front door only minutes after writing the above paragraph. A package had arrived for me, containing The Guinness Book of British Hit Singles and Albums that Id ordered the day before. I had been looking for my old copy, to check that some song or other had fallen between 1978 and 1988, only to discover that it not only fell apart in my hands, but had been published in 1978.

The new book shows that The Jam charted with Beat Surrender, their farewell single, in December 1982. Another search led me to www.thejam.org.uk which shows the farewell gigs also to have been in December 1982. It actually shows only one at Wembley when I know (or I think I do) that four extra dates were added.

So, I decided on a new policy: fact-checking, a safety net for my addled memory. Rushing back to Wikipedia, in case I had doubted it unadvisedly, I checked entries for December 1982. Unless youre a regular at Times Beach, Missouri, they are largely forgettable, apart from Marty Feldman dying in Mexico. Oh, and Greenham Common, but more of that later:

December 2 British comedian and writer Marty Feldman dies in Mexico.

December 3 A final soil sample is taken from the site of Times Beach, Missouri. It is found to contain 300 times the safe level of dioxin.