About Me
..This profile was edited with Thomas' myspace editor™ V2.5 I was born upstairs at my parents house on a cold Sunday in January at eleven thirty in the morning. Having had three daughters, my father apparently vaulted the stairs four at a time to witness my arrival. It proved to be a rare moment of enthusiasm from an otherwise expertly apathetic parent. My Mom later told me that when the Austrian midwife finally dragged out all 9lbs 4ounces of me she had turned to my breathless Dad, a six foot four, seventeen stone West Indian, and in a thick Bavarian accent declared, Mein Gott! Outsize Farzer, outsize babee!It was the middle of the swinging sixties, 1964 to be exact. Only twelve weeks prior president Kennedy had been killed by gunmen in Dallas, Texas. 70 Springfield Road was an unremarkable Victorian terraced house utterly incapable of successfully accommodating a family of our size. Aside from my Mom and Dad I lived with four sisters, so there were seven of us living atop one another, filling the house with shouting because someone needed this or had lost that, or were telling someone about who did what. Usually when I tell people that I am the only boy of five they say Ooh, you must have been spoiled rotten as a child! The only exception to this rule is when I have shared this knowledge with another man who himself grew up amongst many sisters, in which case he gives me a knowing, forlorn nod, like when one war veteran meets another. You see girls are merciless tormentors. I suffered the indignity of being dressed as a pixie and locked in the garden for all my pals to see. Yes, you read it correctly; a pixie. To further upset my mental balance, on more than one occasion I found my precious Action Man dressed up in drag, courtesy of Barbies wardrobe. Spoiled? I barely survived with my sanity. Also living on our street were five or so West Indian and/or Irish families whose gardens backed onto each other. With most of the fences collapsed it was more like one huge garden and heaven for a whole mish-mash of multi-coloured kids. My Mom was great. She really understood kids, and she still does to this day. We had a whole room in our house dedicated to playing. Dont get me wrong, there was never any money for toys or trips but the fun we had with nothing was mighty. She used to take sheets into the garden and rig up tents for us or let us put the two armchairs of the three-piece suite over the sofa to make a comfy bunker. She would let us play for hours in the school playing fields beyond our garden, until the sun had gone down, when all the other kids had been called in. And thank God she was so great because she kind of made up for Dad. My Dad was a pretty loveless kind of man. I dont think he felt loved and I dont think he felt love. He wasnt bad or evil; he just had this hole right through him. When I was a kid I didnt give it a second thought. My Dad was my Dad. I knew that you didnt kiss Dad. You didnt play with him. You didnt ask him for new football boots when your toes started coming through the front of your old ones. When he came home from a shift on the buses, and filled the house with his huge black-uniformed presence, you jumped up out of his chair. When he came into the room and turned the TV over in the middle of your favourite show you stifled even the quietest huff. When he sent you down the road to buy a single Oxo cube in sub-zero sleet you didnt complain. When he called you came running. Performing some crude DIY psychiatry I would suggest that he is the reason I have developed a problem bowing to authority. Whether it be schoolteachers, the government or whoever making the rules my instinctive reaction is to challenge them. After the indiscipline of my formative years school proved to be an enormous inconvenience to me. It was just so boring and even as a child I felt I had more important things to do. I developed into one of those super annoying, smart-mouthed, clever kids who could make the whole class laugh at something the teacher had said. Yet, despite arsing about for most of the term, I was always in the top fifth at exam times. What a little shit I mustve been. I remember having an interview with a careers officer who fingered my form with contempt. Not surprising really when you consider that my three career choices read, in ascending order read: Television Personality, Astronaut and Pop Star.-Dont you think you should be a bit more realistic?- he sneered.-What, and do what you do?- I replied.The interview was short at least. He just put a pen right across the page.(And the funny thing is, I did have a brief pop career and I was a sort of television personality! Aha! Next stop Cape Canaveral!) We were raised as Jehovahs Witnesses and what a funny old thing that is. The religion regards birthdays and Christmas celebrations as pagan and they are shunned as evil, but knocking on doors, waking people out of their beds on a Saturday morning to buy a copy of the Awake! Magazine is a good thing? So anyway as kids birthdays and Christmas were simply non-existent. We were brain washed into believing that we were on the road to salvation and everyone else in the world was lost. We were told that when the end of this world came at Armageddon wed have the last laugh, as the non-believers were destroyed by a mixture of fire, earthquake and other assorted disasters. I remember often standing in the garden on Boxing day watching the other kids showing off their new toys thinking: You are the Devils children. Your toys are evil andwow thats the new Ricochet Racers game! We were taught that Jehovah wanted us to be to be no part of this world and to keep to that rule we had to stand apart. During assembly every morning at school I would be excused from the hymn singing and prayers and would sit in a classroom with a little orthodox Jew and a Christadelphian girl. It made me feel odd and like a bit of a loony, but the Witness propaganda worked a treat on my fresh young mind and, for the most part I was happy to stand apart. There were three meetings a week when we were kids. Two hours on Sunday morning, two hours on Tuesday evening and an hour on Thursday night. I spent the first eleven years of my life without ever seeing Top of the Pops! Now thats just cruel. We would troop off to a musty Kingdom Hall and learn about The Seven Days of Creation, Mans Original Sin and Life Everlasting in Paradise. There I was; a boy who found school a drag, so, as you can imagine the meetings held a special place in my heart. Being one of Jehovahs reluctant witnesses was a cloud that hung low over my head for years. True to my word I did go for my number one career choice the minute I left Moseley Comprehensive School. I borrowed some money from my Mom and Brian Travers, the saxophonist from UB40, (and a lovely bloke) and went to Woodruffs Music Store in Birmingham to buy a bass guitar. It was Friday July 11th 1980. I havent got a weird memory for dates or anything; its just that I still have my diary from that year. I just went to dig it out from a box to get that information. Its covered in a collage of pictures of new wave bands like The ComSat Angels, Echo and the Bunnymen, The Passions and The Human League. ( No, no, dont you dare berate them, The Human League were good until they went all pop.) I was obsessed with the idea of being in a band. The actual music in those days was secondary; in fact the music was a definite handicap for me, seeing as I had achieved the lowest ever mark in a music exam at our school.-Seven percent, Mrs Gates had informed me, just wasnt good enough.-More irony in action, as seven percent obviously was good enough for me to have a career, albeit temporary, in music. So, at sixteen, with my fingers constantly sore from playing the bass, I formed my first band, Lost Cause. We were kind of reggae, new wave and punk all rolled into one and had the kind of infectious enthusiasm that goes along with being 17 and following your dream. We had brief, limited success in those first few years and its been a long and rocky old road since then. To this day I have always had one or another musical project underway: Jazz Taxi, L Kage, Francis, Phony. My love of music moved into pole position quite some time ago, while the burning desire to be a pop star has long since faded to a distant twinkle. I cant make sense of the human condition and I have no idea why we are floating through this black space on this blue world, but when all is revealed in the fullness of time were going to discover that music has got a lot to do with it, I bet you. Historically I am one of those blokes who has always had a girlfriend. Ive spent my adult life going from one relationship to another, occasionally over lapping and learning lessons in love the hard way. Im a serial monogamist I think the term is. I put the reason down to the fact that I've never had much joy out of one-night stands and the alternative, that is, sexual arrangements based on convenience, inevitably get complicated. If I like a girl then Im serious and if Im serious then Im committed. There is nothing in between for me. Conversely if Im not committed then read that as: I dont like the girl. Harsh, but true. I think that this rule is quite prevalent in many relationships, but most people are reluctant to admit it. For this reason I have invariably gone from one girl I like to the next and so on, amassing a series of exclusive relationships. There is a hopelessly romantic theory out there that everyone has a perfect partner, a soul mate, a one in six billion, wandering around the planet, just waiting to bump into you. I used to heartily pooh-pooh this notion. Even in my most blissed out moments, curled up on the sofa with my arms around my current sweetheart, if pressed I would have admitted that in all honesty there was likely to be a Sonja in the Ukraine, a Stacey from Canada and a couple of Janes in Australia who I could just as happily spend the rest of my life with, if only we were to meet. That reality would have irked my sweetheart to bits, but back then I truly believed that there were a host of compatible mates around the world that I would simply never meet. How things change. When you meet your soul mate you start to listen to Cole Porter and Burt Bacherach through keener ears. The word corny just ups and vanishes from the dictionary, and personally I know Ive met my other half because Ive started to worry about death. Now that might sound dark and morbid but I dont mean it to. Its just that I feel like if either of us died it would be so hard for the one that was left behind. I know that sounds like stating the obvious, but I had honestly never thought about it before. I always knew that you lived a bit and then you died and that was that. Like the Rounders Game of Life: You have your go at bat, try and hit the ball as far as you can and then it is all over. Maybe you hit it out of sight or maybe it catches you on the thumb and lands at your feet but either way your turn is over. Like everyone on the planet you reach and fall, reach and fall. Once you meet your one in six billion however it feels like that arrangement cant be right. You dont meet someone and have this fantastic life together and then stop. Thats rubbish. When you meet that certain someone life starts to make sense and death simply does not. I met my wife Vanessa in Ronnie Scotts Nightclub in Birmingham. I was with a mate of mine and she was with her friend Heather. I had met Heather years before and had known her to say hello to, and on this night I said hello. The four of us sat down with our drinks and indulged in some idle chitchat. Vanessa made a funny remark about the splendid 1950s comedy actress Peggy Mount and I was hooked. Id never before met a girl who could make me laugh like that. The closest had been my sister Mandy and obviously that didnt count. The conversation between us became more and more exclusive and when the night was over I was disappointed to be leaving her. At the time I was in a very serious relationship that was breaking through waves, but still afloat so, as I wasnt on the lookout, I wasnt simply drawn to Vanessa in a sexual way. It was much stronger than that. I met her a few weeks later at an open mic. night and we just carried on where we had left off. We sat in a corner on our own and got on like a dry timber cottage that had been doused in gasoline and torched during a heatwave in Arizona. My girlfriend, who had been away in Greece for six weeks during this period, returned and I told her that I had met this great girl (who I had nicknamed Vinny, as her surname was Jones) and that we were friends and we had been hanging out and there was nothing for her to worry about. And there wasnt. My girlfriend recognised the truth and was cool with the whole thing. Vanessa and I continued to see each other. We would play Trivial Pursuit together and watch telly and just have a laugh. It must have been a year or so later that my relationship with my girlfriend broke up. I was in San Francisco when it all ended and, once the finality of it hit home, I thought the oddest thing: I thought -I can go out with Vinny now-. Id like to report that it was all plain sailing from then on, but of course it wasnt. I was finding it hard to put my past to sleep, while inside a very loud voice was shouting, Go for the one who knows about Peggy Mount! I absolutely knew that Vanessa was the girl I should be with, but I had invested a lot in my old relationship, and while you can switch off a fan it takes a while for the blades to actually stop spinning. I remain thankful that Vanessa had the foresight and patience to stick with me. Eventually the rain stopped, the sun broke through the clouds, birds started to sing and its been blue skies ever since. Incredibly I have found someone who can put up with my untidiness and insane rants at the television. It all just seems to wash over her. She calls me Victor Meldrew and thats about it. We are that couple who make you want to puke we love each other so much. It even amazes us, still, after seven years together. We remind ourselves all the time that we are two of the luckiest people on earth. In some ways I would rather not admit this, but it seems churlish not to. In May 2001 I was accepted to take part in a then little known show called Big Brother. I was locked away in a house with 10 strangers and 22 surveillance cameras for 63 days, the whole thing, including visits to the loo and crying into my soup broadcast to the nation on Channel 4. I came third out of 11, polling around 250,000 votes, which does sound pretty cool, until you take into account that the shows eventual winner Brian got 7 million. My place in Z List celebrity-dom was cemented. In retrospect Big Brother caused me more problems than it solved, but it did what I wanted it to do. I learned a lot about the world and myself and my friends and it isn't everyday you get to learn something really important. I also met some great people by the way, who will be with me forever. After the show I stopped performing my music and went into a kind of self imposed exile. I had some kind of crisis of confidence and just felt I had to stop. I didn't want to be That Guy Out Of Big Brother Who Plays The Guitar. It was 3 years before I started up against in 2005, with a gig at the Cobden Club in London. That night, after about 30 seconds onstage I was reminded why most of my life had been spent with music. I've been working on an album for the best part of 18 months now. I'm calling it Nig Nogs Revenge, an odd name for an album, but let me tell you how it came about. When I was five, back in 1969, there weren't many black, mixed race or Asian kids at my school. In my class there were only myself and a Jamacian boy called Cecil White whose Patois, by the way, was so thick and unfamiliar to our teacher that I ended up translating for him for most of 1st grade. Anyway, in this fresh cultural soup rascism flourished and it wasn't long before some of the other kids were calling me Nig Nog, a quaint English derisory term, which, for some reason, always makes me smile when I hear it? At the time I was so naive that I thought I'd picked up a cool nick name and ran home to gleefully inform my Mom. She sat me down in the kitchen and tried to explain the nonesense that is racism. The boys calling me that werent being nice and didn't want to be my friend, she said, but I shouldnt worry too much as they were just ignorant. I often miss that little kid who ran home that day blind to the evils of this world. So that's why I'm calling my album Nig Nogs Revenge and some people will think that's unPC, and that's their vaild opinion. I hope once you've heard the story behind it you get it. If you like you can visit my Phonysounds space and check out some tunes what I wrote. (Just click on the banner below to be whisked over there.) Aside from getting back into music I have spent the last 5 years renovating a couple of houses, designing a kitchen product called the Teabag Bin, releasing a World Cup single (in the charts at 99 and straight back out at 99), revitalising my building career(!) and writing a book called 'Living In The Box' all about my adventure inside the television.(Order through www.amazon.co.uk) I joined MySpace to get back in the loop and meet some new friends. Feel free to message me and become my Cyber Pal. Until we meet again then -Live life and love love- x
