Soundtrack to My Life: "Geno" by Dexys Midnight Runners

Artist: Dexys Midnight Runners
Track: Geno/Label: Late Night Feelings R6033/Album: Searching for the Young Soul Rebels/Release: 26th July 1980/Highest Chart Position: 1

I thought for a long time that my father played the trumpet. In particular, the trumpet in Dexys Midnight Runners.

Stood next to the trombone player and just behind the singer, Kevin Rowland, there he was, my dad.

“Daddy, that’s you on the TV!” I pointed, jumping on the worn, corduroy couch my mother spent forever telling me not to bounce on.

“I can’t lie to you, Son. That’s me.”

He was lying though.

He was just humouring me, his five year old son, because thats what parents did for a semi-quiet life and I believed him because thats what five year old sons do when they were proud of their fathers. After all, there wasn’t much else for me to be proud of.

Looking back, he looked nothing like any of the band. He was a little older, a little fatter and had the facial hair of a Mexican bandit. Those of you who are familiar with the band, will know that they... don’t.

This is no joke. With his wisping black curls, he was very much akin to a pimp strolling down the streets of Brooklyn, it even earned him a nickname, “Pedro”.

In fact, I never even saw a trumpet or even thought to ask to see one. In my mind, I knew that he played one and who for. But to be fair, it was entirely plausible for a five year old to believe that his father was the trumpet player in Dexys Midnight Runners. As he spent a lot of time away from the house, I naturally thought he was on tour or appearing on other programmes around the world.

He wasn’t on tour though, he was never too far away at all. He was with one of his girlfriends or in the pub with the family credit in his pocket or more than often, in Ladbrokes on Redcar High Street with the other runners, at Epsom.

Like the proud marching working class vagabonds who I first saw on Top of the Pops that Thursday evening in 1980, this was just how my father dressed.

But my father wasn’t a working class vagabond though. The working class worked.

The woollen bobble hats, boots, braces and leather jackets were his every day uniform. After I saw them on TV and watched him in awe when he walked in, I did what five year olds who are proud of their fathers do, I wanted the same and would not let up until I got it. I begged my mother for Dexys Midnight Runners clothes. In the back of my mind I knew that they couldn’t afford to kit me out with the essential threads. All of the arguements in my house were about money and usually due to his reluctance to work. He was forever being sent out like some forraging pigeon to find (by whatever means possible) the next meal, so his two children could eat that day. He was inventive, I’ll give him that.

My father loved the idolising I gave him and so he should have. I made him feel like a rock star despite his shortcomings. In this, I strived to be like him and also adopt his dress. I already had the jeans and the hat, I just needed the boots and the jacket.

They eventually relented on the clothing front but I didn’t get my leather. Leather jackets were not cheap in 1980’s Cleveland but nevertheless I started begging and attempted to charm them out of my mother who seemed to be in charge of the bulk of all the finances.

This, I found out, wasn’t the case. I thought this because it was her that made the weekly trips with us to the local post office to cash the benefit cheques. That was, until he insisted on taking it all off her. It was my father who was very dominant with the finances and with this held her hostage with the money for many years, in fear that she would somehow get up and leave him. We were often dragged to a piss stained, public phone box late at night where my mum would call one of her parents in tears, begging for the opportunity to feed us. She wasn’t allowed any money of her own and was only given it to buy us what we desperately needed but never herself and this was only done under protest and arguement from my father. The rest he pissed away in the pub or in the bookies, which he was really bad at. He would often go out shopping for groceries on the first of the month and we would not see him for dust until he staggered in at 2am with nothing. The rows would then resume. He would be full of promises and apologies that the food was coming and would sort something out. He had spent all day buying lots of nice things for us and he left them on the bus or the train. She couldn’t believe that he could let his two children wait all day hungry, but it was the same more or less periodically.

Myself and my sister befriended the nice lady next door and she often fed us in her back yard. She was another that was subjected to giving away the odd loan never to hear of again but it probably broke her heart to see these two scruffy kids dressed in hand me downs moping out the back because they hadn’t been allowed to eat all day. The nice lady next door did more for us than we ever got to let her know.

We eventually came to a compromise over the clothes I wanted. My mother marched me and my sister’s pushchair (so really it was just myself doing the marching) to a charity shop on the seafront which stocked some army surplus, a good 45 minute jaunt.

Her mother ran a hardware store off the High Street and was usually the source of our finances when times were hard. Suffice to say, we did a lot of marching her way. My mum parted with funds to get me a second or thirty hand camoflage jacket and ankle high, lace up dress boots, making me promise that they would last me the rest of my life.

I had no doubt that they would and promised on her death that they would indeed last that long. I really meant it, although we both knew that I was still growing and they wouldn’t actually see the end of the decade, if not the end of the year. To be honest, I was more concerned about where the clothes had come from in the first place. But I wasn’t in the best position to become snobby about it. Still, I was grateful and I began to live in what I was given.

My new Dexys uniform stood me in good stead that winter when the annual nativity play came around. I went to a fairly religious school as primary schools go. Assembly in the morning and prayers twice a day, that sort of thing.

The school production allowed us to not only make our own costumes or wear whatever was suitable from home but also to choose the roles we were to perform. Naturally, the majority of the popular kids vied and debated their cases for the different roles. While they all rushed for the essential characters that make up the nativity scene, such as Jesus and the wise men, I was determined to choose the only role that would allow me to wear my imitation Dexys Midnight Army Runners clothes.

I chose to be... The Tree. My promising career in theatre casting ended there.

When it came to the day of the nativity and the parents and children filled the assembly hall where the teachers had carefully erected their tasteful set on the makeshift stage, we were all ordered into line outside the hall to be ready to take our position with bowel moving anticipation. The late starting of the play was down to just that. The nervous movements of the young cast. Including me.

I was feeling quite smug though as not only had I got out of rehearsals with my non-speaking role of what was essentially, foliage but I thought I would be the only one in this production that would keep his dignity and look relatively cool in the process. Looking down the corridor, I saw this was very much the case and the majority of my school chums looked very silly. Some of the parents had clearly gone to great lengths to humiliate their offspring with ridiculous attempts at costume design.

This was still before the age of the really competitive child rearing that we see today but they had definately still got the sewing machine out for the occasion, running up kaftans, head dresses, fake beards and togas. The richer, busier parents had clearly just hired something but they still looked as disconcerted as the others at what had been produced for them.

As I was readying myself to go onstage with my agreed tree costume, the wardrobe department (ie one of the teachers) thrust something into my chest. Looking down into my hands, I saw that I had been given two green and brown tissue paper pom poms.“

These aren’t for me...” I whined, handing them back. She glanced down at her clipboard.

“What are you playing?”

“I’m a tree...” I replied. She looked at me and sighed, annoyed.

“Guess what?”

She tossed the makeshift branches back to me and pushed me through the open door towards stage right. I had two choices. I could have thrown an almighty Celine Dion strop and marched off to my fictitious trailer where I would feast on the lavish catering and pet the Madagascan Swan I required to calm my nerves before each show or I could swallow my pride and climb onto the stage with my pom poms. In front of half of the school and all the children’s parents.

Being officially scenery, I had to go on first.

I shuffled my feet sheepishly across the stage, my head hanging in shame, tissue bushes in hand. On the Fonzie scale, even the pair of shades I chose to wear would not help me now. I took my place at the back of stage right followed by Gareth, one of my classmates and possibly one of the only kids less popular than I.

Gareth smelled of piss and soon adopted the name “Piss Boy” by everyone else, but he definately had earned the title. He once let go in the middle of class, before bolting for the door in tears and wet trousers, soaking the chair underneath him in the process. Poor Lisa on the table next to be vomited into her lap.

The day never really recovered from there.

When they eventually persuaded Piss Boy to face the giggles and return to the classroom, he was forced him to stand the rest of the period before lunch as there were no other seats available.

“Hows it going, Gareth?”

Poor Gareth look petrified. We both adopted the Jesus Christ pose to give our appearence of bark and leaves full effect. Gareth shook so much, it almost looked like his tree was blowing in a light breeze.

At least he would have done, if we actually looked like trees.

I could sense the ridiculing thoughts and gathering sniggers from the crowd behind the bright spotlight. My only consolation at this point was that my father, who I of course had told everyone was on tour, wasn’t there.

Even though there was a glaring beam in my eyes, I could make out my mother. The only person on her feet and camera in hand.

“Put the camera down...” I muttered to myself.

My mother was the most random photographer. Sometimes she would only be in the mood to take a few frames and others she would turn into a Japanese tourist in London. One thing she would never do is stop her snapping once she reached the end of a roll. When she was in the mood, she had to capture everything. She was notorious for leaving old photos awaiting to begin their lives in print for all to see left inside the camera. There were times when she would go through a particular non picture time and would perhaps only take one or two a month, either at a relatives or if we were caught doing something goofy in the garden with the dog.

Sometimes pictures from Christmas were developed in the summer or as late as October. Sometimes the camera would go completely untouched for almost year, especially in those periods towards the end of her marriage when she had gradually less events she wanted to capture for posterity.

She insisted on sending her pictures in the mail to one of those developing places which were so much cheaper. They were cheaper because it was a lottery sometimes as to whether you would get your photos back. If you did and they weren’t of some family from Slough skiing, they would still take around two months to return them to you. Added to the time spent hoarding the odd photos, it was like we were treated to moments from the distant past when they were eventually shown to us.

Stood in my camoflage jacket and bobble hat, a la Kevin Rowland I began to sweat. Water began to seep from my neck and between my thighs as Jesus and Mary began to make their crossing on the desert on the two young boys dressed as a donkey. The heat from the spotlight onto the stage gave the atmosphere a Sahara type heat as I saw the other kids were sweating in their makeshift kaftans also.

A cross teacher hushed me from nearby stage left as I took a pom pom to my brow, momentarily taking the emphasis from Jesus and Mary and their crucial scene by the crib.

Then, I managed to completely transcend my motionless role.

I awoke to the image of three wise men looking over me. I was face up from behind the stage.

“Am I in heaven?”

I knew that this was unlikely as I had already been asked politely to not come back to Sunday School that week. The pastor told my father that I was asking to many questions and seemed disrespectful to the gospel, so the chances of me getting into heaven were probably quite slim.

I haven’t made the odds much better since.

“Mark, you just collapsed...”

“Like a felled tree,” someone chuckled.

The wise men and my teacher helped me into the bathroom where I had a glass of water to regain my conciousness. At that point, a five year old Kelly-Ann, the girl who had signed up for the Mary role, burst into the boys toilets in a rage followed by an exasperated and angry teacher,

“Everything is always about you!!” she shreiked and dashed into the corridor hysterical, reacting like I had destroyed her audition and her chances for LAMDA had been dashed forever. Quite what she meant by everything, I have no idea.

Horrified and abashed, I refused to come out of the bathroom until everyone went home.

Everyone didn’t go home though. After the play and the chairs were cleared away, there was to be a disco. When my mother appeared, I begged her to take me away and never to come back.

In an ideal world, she would have been enrolled somewhere different. Somewhere without all the praying. Somewhere I hadn’t made a complete idiot of myself by collapsing in front of the whole school, taking someone called Piss Boy with me and ruining their nativity play.

She wouldn’t take me home though. She made me stay. Told me not to be silly and to have fun with my friends. She was lucky I wasn’t older. By the time, I hit my teenage years, I had developed an acute sense of being able to stomp off somewhere far away for a couple of hours. That was until I was hungry and had to come back home. That would have shown her.

Home from my primary school was a five minute walk but when you are five years old, it’s the other end of the earth. I had to stay put. No doubt by this point, Kelly-Ann (as popular as she was) would have made the other kids laugh at me if I came out.

I decided that I couldn’t face that sort of humiliation. I knew what I was going to do. I could live here, I thought. I was already at school so it really wouldn’t affect my lessons. The teachers would come into bathroom and teach me here. Y

es, that’s what I would do. I sat on the floor and wouldn’t budge.

The teacher left me to wallow in my self pity. Even Piss Boy left me. He actually received some kudos from the other kids while I was sat there, it was cool that he was dragged down instead of being so weak willed that he fell down like me.

Yeah, I’m okay by the way guys.

I sat on that bathroom floor for a good hour. The odd smart alec kid would come in to make a comment but I ignored them. A skill I developed rather quickly and would have to make use of in many years to come.

Each of them asked after me and each of them I sent away. I listened to the songs start up in the muffled distance through the corridor, bouncing off the walls of hand painted pictures and collages made from egg boxes and milk bottle tops.

I wanted my dad. I wanted him to come and save me. Pick me up off the bathroom floor and rescue me. Take me on tour with him. To the countries all over the world. With his trumpet. Playing for other young boys and their dads on other music television shows. Or have him take me over to the shopping square on the Lakes Estate and let me help him eat his bag of chips while sat on the concrete steps to the flats.

That’s who I wanted. Who I wanted to be.

“Geno... Geno... Geno...” began the chant. All the kids were singing along. They were playing my song. Mine and my dad’s song. Then the brass section began their intro and it sounded through the school grounds. The stomping had started.

That could only mean one thing. It was time for me to join the party.