ROCKNROLLA
Thursday evening, the summer of 1979 and the Foster clan (Mum, Dad and four know it all teenagers), are in the lounge watching the highlight of the viewing week – Top of The Pops. Dad lets rip with a robust “phwoar” as a girl from Legs & Co, TOTP’s all female dance troupe, executes a nifty pirouette during which her skirt floats halfway up her thighs to reveal a flash of her knickers. The disgusted look on Mum’s face and her muttered admonition shames Dad into shifting his gaze away from the telly to the pages of his newspaper.
The tension in the room is obvious, not because my parents have sidestepped a possible row but because anticipation is eating into all of us. We want to know who has snatched the coveted Number 1 spot in the hit parade, but it feels as if the TOTP presenters are deliberately stringing out our agony. We’ve listened to records by people we’ve never heard of or songs so bad that the crime was recording them in the first place. Mercifully Art Garfunkel’s Bright Eyes, the irritating theme song to the movie Watership Down, is no longer Number 1 (It dropped down after six weeks, with Blondie’s Sunday Girl and Anita Ward’s Ring My Bell replacing it). We now have a new chart topper. What is it? Who is the new Numero Uno?
Mum looks up from her knitting and sighs mournfully.
“I quite liked Bright Eyes”, she says “It’s better than some of the junk you hear nowadays!”
Mum always had a thing about Art Garfunkel, especially when he was Paul Simon’s singing partner, and in her own quiet way she had been willing him to hang on to the top spot indefinitely. Thankfully the record buying public decided it was time to give him the elbow.
“Gary who?” she sputters in astonishment “And why’s he singing about the London Underground?”
Gary Numan Tubeway Army are the new number 1. Their single “Are “Friends” Electric?” with its synthesiser/bass fusion and lyrics about a robot prostitute, will turn its singer/composer into a cult figure. Did I know I was listening to something special when the pounding metallic drawl of the opening chords flooded the room? Nope! I thought it was interesting, although I wasn’t going to admit that in a house where David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, John Holt, and Bob Marley were the music kingpins. Numan didn’t stand a chance against them and I was far too much of a coward to risk having the piss taken out of me by owning up to liking him. So I laughed with the rest of the family when they joked about his bleached hair, the emotionless voice and the heavy lines of kohl around his eyes that made him look like an android. Yet for the generation of teenagers outgrowing punk, Numan was the real deal. He had busted his way through punk’s snarling chrysalis to forge his own unique sound, snippets of which would be sampled by the likes of Basement Jaxx and even the Sugababes. For legions of Numan fans like Martin Downham, their unwavering faith has been rewarded with a legacy of electro-pop brilliance.
Remind Me to Smile is Downham’s hilarious, irreverently funny leap into the 1970s when he was a “rude, insolent, indolent” teenager, to the man he is today: a happily married suburbanite with a vinyl record collection in his attic and a garden populated by a colony of well-fed stray cats. If life is a rock n roll drama then Downham’s doesn’t quite fit the script. His story starts at the age of 16 when he heard “Are “Friends” Electric?” on the Radio 1 chart show for the first time. The effect was – shall we say – electric: “The song absolutely floored me even though the words made no sense.”
The lyrics may have been incomprehensible but the “plaintive, yearning sequence” of synthesizer notes augmented by “relentless, unpretentious drums”, connected with a teenage boy mourning the death of his mother. The tragedy had plunged Downham into an “inarticulate depression” that saw him retreating both into himself and his bedroom. His father and older brother never talked about the death and in the absence of any professional counselling, Downham had to find his own way of coping. “Are “Friends” Electric?” with its references to desolation, emotional hurt, and the pain of loneliness brought clarity to an adolescent mind reeling with confusion. As Downham learned to re-engage with the world, he came out of himself and into the orbit of fellow Numanoids.
Despite those early years of suffering, Downham has never felt sorry for himself and the tone of the book is one of humour and relentless optimism. He’s had to endure his fair share of disappointments, including two years of unemployment, but he’s managed to soldier on and live without bitterness. What would be the point of that, and in the end things didn’t turn out too badly because after landing a job he met his future wife – who also happens to be a Numan fan! I’m not suggesting that Numan brought them together (and in fairness neither is Downham), but having him in common was a relationship bonus. What this book gets across extremely well is the idea that every life should be accompanied by a soundtrack. In Downham’s case Numan is the provider, although the author is careful not to read too much into those instances where the life of the fan overlaps that of the idol.
However, what the book doesn’t explain is why Numan managed to hold onto his fans even when the music critics (and most of the public) eventually turned against him. Downham is the first to admit that not everything he did was great, although that didn’t stop him going to the concerts. It’s a mystery how some fans struggled to keep the faith even when Numan’s sound placed him in an elite group of musicians who were almost certainly ahead of their time. I remember when one of my friends junked him for Motorhead and even she wasn’t entirely sure why she had defected because she occasionally listened to him. Downham’s own loyalty stems as much from gratitude as it does from respect, although he doesn’t allow his thankfulness to overwhelm the story telling. He does an excellent job of keeping Numan at a measured distance in the narrative, placing him in a position that is neither too close or too far away.
He pulls off a similar trick with his father who appears at the beginning of the book, then gradually disappears halfway before unobtrusively returning three quarters of the way in. Downham senior emerges as a patient, thoughtful man who knows more than he’s prepared to let on. When his son moves a girlfriend into the family home, he instinctively knows the relationship will end in tears. The messy break up gets even worse when Downham’s ex asks back for an expensive guitar she bought him as a gift. She never finds it because the father hides it in the boot of his car and plays dumb when she confronts him about it:
“Don’t worry son she was never going to get it back. Anyway, I may look daft sometimes but I’m not stupid!”
The father/son relationship is handled with a marvellous assuredness and Downham’s appreciation of the man whose presence he had taken for granted when he was a miserable, anti-social teenager, is genuinely touching.
There is so much about this book that’s enjoyable including the edgy humour and the consistency of Downham’s observations, all of which gives the reader a genuine sense of involvement in what is going on. No detail escapes his scrutiny and even the music stall owner in Kingston market, where Downham bought limited editions of Numan’s records, is brought to life with sparky incisiveness. He is “a Fagin like character” with a sheepskin coat, tinted glasses, “a not entirely successful perm” and a cigarette “clenched between a set of Terry Thomas teeth”. It isn’t hard to visualise his nicotine stained fingers rifling through the stock, or imagining the lingering stench of his smoky breath when he opens his mouth to negotiate the price of his goods. It’s obvious that Downham was being ripped off even when he thought he was bagging a bargain, although he won’t be the first or last person to get done over by an oily tongued salesman!
Remind Me to Smile is a book that is genuinely difficult to put down because it’s a cheerful reminder of a life journey familiar to people of a certain age. We argued with our parents, fell out then made up with our friends, battled our siblings in rivalry and even two timed our boyfriends or girlfriends. It’s all part of growing up, although I find that hard to believe when I look at some of my fifty something year old friends who are still acting like spotty, hormonally challenged teenagers. Maybe they haven’t found their soundtrack!
Reviewed by Juliette Foster
This article first appeared in Dante Magazine: http://www.dantemag.com
