Pete: My Story

CHAPTER ONE

A BIT OF A BAD START

I love my life, but it did get off to a bit of a dodgy start. I definitely wasn’t keen to come out of Mum’s belly. I probably felt safe and had a premonition of some of the stuff that was on its way once I hit the fresh air. I was about two weeks late popping out and Mum and Dad were sitting around in the hospital for a pretty long time, just waiting for me to decide I was ready to make my first dramatic entrance. Apparently there had been one giant explosion of a contraction and then just pure agony for Mum and no more action from me. I wasn’t going anywhere. I stayed stuck there for the next seventeen hours, just couldn’t get out, or didn’t want to. I mean, why would I want to? Pretty cosy and safe in there, I should think.

I was taking so long getting my act together Dad got fed up with waiting and went home for his breakfast. Probably a bit of an attention-span problem going on there. I can understand that. I always have trouble sitting still waiting for something to happen.

A couple of foreign nurses, without too much English between them, were keeping Mum company, just watching the clock drag round, waiting for their shifts to end. One of them was so bored she was cleaning her ears out with a matchstick and examining the results before wiping it on the bedclothes.

‘Ma babies all popped out like stones from peaches,’ the other one kept saying, as if Mum was being deliberately lazy and messing up their day on purpose. ‘Why don’t you push, dahling?’

In the end an Egyptian lady-doctor sauntered into the room to see what was going on, or not going on, and realized that Mum was close to death. Suddenly everything changed, alarms started ringing and she was rushed off to the operating theatre. A few minutes later I was brought out on to centre stage by Caesarean.

So there I was, safely delivered and ready for whatever life might want to throw at me. A healthy eight pounds ten ounces and glad to be alive from the first moment I drew breath. No reason for anyone to worry there, baby delivered, job done, let’s all go home. Mum put my surname down on the birth certificate as Bennett, because she believed Dad was going to marry her. To be fair to her he had asked, so she had every reason to be optimistic, but then he announced he was only joking. I suspect Mum didn’t exactly roar with laughter at that one. His name isn’t on my birth certificate at all because he didn’t manage to turn up in time to sign it, having had a bit too much cider in the pub according to Mum. She generally tells it like it is, does Mum.

Mum hadn’t realized she was pregnant with me till she was already five months gone. Apparently she’d been taking the Pill, but she had a dodgy Indian take-away one evening, and being sick must have shot the pill back up before it had done whatever it was supposed to do to discourage my conception. A bit of divine intervention there. I’ve always liked a good curry myself, and I am deeply indebted to the whole culinary species for my presence on Earth. If Mum had decided to have pasta or a McDonald’s that night I guess I would never have happened.

So there I was, a bit of an unplanned event, although Mum assures me she’d always wanted me. She probably should have guessed she was pregnant a bit earlier, like the day when she felt violently sick on the bus, jumped off and threw up all over the window of a carpet showroom, under the furious gaze of half a dozen disgusted shop assistants. Mum was a full-fledged, scary-looking punk rocker at that stage, so it must have looked like a bit of a political statement, spewing up over a bourgeois retail outlet. They probably thought she had done it on purpose.

Mum is a really brilliant musician and it’s not just me, her proud son, who thinks that. She went to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama for four years, studying to become a concert violinist. Despite all the piercings and the spiky, multicoloured hair, leather clothes and fishnets, she was always very serious about her work and her art. She was really good at the violin, won a scholarship and everything, and she loved classical music, but it was punk music she really loved to listen to – Billy Idol alongside Yehudi Menuhin. She must have stuck out among the other young prodigies like a septic finger.

There was only one other punk in the college, an opera singer called Anna, who was Mum’s best friend and Rod Steiger’s daughter. Steiger was one of the biggest Hollywood stars of his day (he was the one in the famous scene with Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, in which Brando’s character says ‘I coulda been a contender…’ He was playing Brando’s brother). Anna’s mum was the actress Claire Bloom, who had also trained at the Guildhall.

Mum was always short of money and had to make as much cash as she could at the beginning of her career by busking around the streets of London, meeting very different types to the ones studying at the Guildhall, and loving it. There was a pub on the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road called the Tottenham, under the towering shadow of Centrepoint, where a lot of the alternative music people used to go at the beginning of the Eighties, people like Boy George who hadn’t yet made it big with Culture Club, and the girls who would later become the hit group Bananarama. None of them had become stars by then and hung around the pub planning their big breakthroughs. Mum and the other buskers used to meet in the Diamond Dive, a little spit-and-sawdust concert hall downstairs at the Tottenham, to take acid, play music and socialize. That was where she met my dad.

‘I was going in there one lunch time,’ is how she explains it to me, ‘and there was this gorgeous-looking punk standing outside, six foot two and like a cross between Adam Ant and Billy Idol, spiky black hair – the most gorgeous bloke I’d ever seen. So I pinched his leather-clad arse as I went past. I didn’t think I had a chance in a million of going out with him. “Hello Gorgeous,” I said and to my amazement he started chatting me up.’

They had a drink and Dad asked her if she wanted to go out with him for a proper date that night. They agreed to meet by the jukebox at 7.30, and when she got there she found another friend, a gay New Romantics fan called Scottish John, sitting at the same table. She was eagerly telling him about her date, and found out he was also waiting for a hot date. Both of them were in a state of high excitement and it wasn’t until Dad came strutting over in all his glory that they realized they were both waiting for the same bloke. It turned out Dad had a bit of a warped sense of humour and had been watching them talking from across the room. Scottish John wasn’t too happy to find out he was being wound up, because Dad wasn’t gay, but at least it meant Mum got her date that night. He was called Mark Bennett and the rest of the evening must have gone well because they became a couple.

Mum was living in a squat at the time, and Dad had a room in Brockley in south-east London, so it made sense for her to move in with him. He might have had a roof over his head, but Dad didn’t have much of a plan for how he was going to make a living, apart from having a strong belief that sooner or later a film producer was going to spot him walking down the road, would see his potential and turn him into a film star. Funnily enough, it did actually happen in a way when Derek Jarman, a famous avant-garde gay filmmaker of the time, did spot him in the street, took him home to his flat and got him pissed. Jarman had made a famous film about punks called Jubilee, starring Toyah Wilcox and Adam Ant, so this could have been the moment Dad had been waiting for. Unfortunately he had a bit too much to drink, puked all over the great director’s carpet and got thrown out, so he missed his big chance. (It did at least mean he preserved his honour, of course.)

He and Mum must have made a formidable-looking couple. They both loved to dress up and sometimes he would even paint a white stripe across his nose, making himself look even more like Adam Ant. He was definitely a man of his time, and a bit of a peacock.

Earning the money, however, was down to Mum, so she used to busk with her friends Gini and Carolyn around the tube stations, calling themselves Humouresque. Green Park was the best site and they took turns there with all the other acts vying for the attention of tourists, shoppers and day-trippers, trying to collect as many coins as possible before the end of their shift. Business wasn’t too bad, partly because they were really good and partly because the sight of three outrageous punk girls playing classical music was new. Years later Nigel Kennedy, the renowned soloist, told Mum he’d got the whole idea for his own famously scruffy image from watching them when they appeared on the Russell Harty Show.

I don’t remember anything about Dad at that time to be honest. Mum says he was a bit mental. He used to be able to talk in dozens of voices at once, like Robin Williams does in the Disney version of Aladdin, when he plays the genie. I can do that too, so maybe I take after him in more ways than just looking like him. Maybe Dad had a touch of the Tourette’s, even if he didn’t have the tourettey movements like I have. Once you start looking for Tourette’s you can end up seeing bits of it in pretty much everyone, especially men.

He certainly wasn’t much good at getting jobs in those days. He tried being a milkman, but gave that up. He did have a typewriter though, and used to put a lot of time into composing letters of complaint about products and sending them off to the manufacturers concerned in the hope of getting some offer of compensation. That particular business venture didn’t meet with much success and so Mum’s busking was still all they had to live on. And once I was born poor old Mum still had to fork out for babysitters out of her money because Dad was always mysteriously too busy to look after me for her.

I guess they were never a match made in heaven. They’d even got a bit pissed off with each other during the pregnancy and Mum had stormed off and got another flat with Gini, which immediately made Dad want her back. While I was turning into a full-sized bump inside her she was living in a room in Queensway, being harassed by a nasty Greek landlord who wanted to get her and Gini out. He smashed a plate glass window, poisoned the goldfish, put superglue in the locks and tried all the tricks he could think of to make life unbearable for them, but Mum was not one to be intimidated easily. She didn’t intend to be put out on the streets with a foetus inside her, so she wrote a letter to her MP and got allotted a council flat in Peckham. She and Dad decided to give their relationship another shot and he moved back in with her to be there for my arrival and to have a go at the whole happy families thing.

While she was waiting for me to arrive Mum wanted to call me Sebastian, after a line in a song by Cockney Rebel, but she changed her mind once I was actually there.

‘You’d been through such hell coming out and you seemed so calm about it all,’ she told me later, when I was old enough to understand. ‘I remembered something from my Catholic childhood about St Peter being called “the Rock”, so I thought I’d call you after him.’

So that was me, ‘St Peter, the Rock’, finally out into the world and ready to roll in Peckham, deep in the heart of South London.

CHAPTER TWO

ROCK AND ROLL BABY

It started to look like Mum’s career was going to save the family finances. Siouxsie and the Banshees, who were a big post-punk and goth band at the time (they had also starred in Derek Jarman’s Jubilee film), asked her and her friends to go on tour with them. Siouxsie, who came from the same Bromley area as David Bowie, had always been controversial, wearing bondage and fetish gear on stage and getting into trouble at one time for wearing swastika armbands. The Banshees were a huge influence on a lot of other acts that followed. This was a big-name group and they were going to pay Mum £490 for ten days’ work, which was a lot since Dad had so far only managed to get about £17-worth of vouchers out of all his letter writing. I was around nine months old by then, so Dad thought he might be able to cope with looking after me. He got his mum in to help him and, as far as I can remember, nothing drastic went wrong, although they probably wouldn’t have told Mum if it had.

Then Mum got a booking to play with Marc Almond and Soft Cell for a night at Drury Lane, having met Marc at the Batcave, a gothic club just off Carnaby Street in Soho, where a lot of the punk music people were choosing to spend their nights off.

Mum and Dad had a bit of a row over her paying for a babysitter for the night and it ended with Dad making off to the pub with the money allocated for the babysitter, leaving me rolling gently down the hill in my buggy with Mum running after me. I think that was probably the moment when Mum decided it was time to have a go at being a single mother. Not too sure whether Dad walked out or was kicked out, but he definitely wasn’t around any more after that. His disappearance didn’t have any great effect on me at the time since there were always plenty of other interesting-looking people lurking about in our lives to look after me and distract me from the spontaneous combustion of my nuclear family unit.

Mum and I spent a lot of time with Marc Almond back then because Gini ended up marrying Dave Ball, who was the other part of Soft Cell, and Mum started living with their manager, Steve Ø, who had lots of other successful acts on his books at the time as well. That particular relationship didn’t last that long, I think, although her friendship with Marc Almond has lasted a lifetime.

Despite the starry names she was working for, the gigs were only sporadic, not enough to ensure there was food on the table every day of the week, so Mum and her mates still had to keep going with the busking when the cash ran out. They used to take me with them sometimes, popping me in the buggy and letting me conduct along to the music in the hope of attracting a few more coins to fall into their violin cases. Apparently I was always happy and laughing as a baby and willing to go along with whatever was happening, so I was probably a bit of an asset in the ‘cutes’ department. There’s nothing like a cheerful-looking kid to get the donations flowing in. It was my first taste of performance art and I had no complaints about all the attention I was getting either.

I even went on the Russell Harty Show with them and had my picture taken with Pat Phoenix, who was the big soap opera star of the day, famous for playing Elsie Tanner in Coronation Street (sort of like the Barbara Windsor of her day). Anthony Booth, Tony Blair’s father-in-law, was on the bill too, being one of the stars of the comedy series, Till Death Us Do Part. Russell Harty was a sort of camp version of Michael Parkinson and his show was one of the biggest chat shows in the country, a bit like getting invited on to Jonathan Ross these days. The most famous moment was when the androgynous New York model and disco diva, Grace Jones, slapped him around the head on air for turning his back on her in order to talk to another guest.

Mum and her group would do a lot of street entertaining in Covent Garden as well. She used to dress up as a bee to play ‘Flight of the Bumble Bee’ and stuff like that. When there was a competition to find the ‘Busker of the Year’ the only people who were better than them were a six-piece band called The Vulcans, who used to wear white coats and clown around singing funny songs. Mum and I used to go everywhere with them and I became like their group mascot. They would use cardboard boxes as a drum kit and I would hide inside one of the boxes so that I could spring out at the end, like Marilyn Monroe coming out of President Kennedy’s birthday cake. The audience loved it and I loved their applause and their laughter. One of the Vulcans used to do a song about a thick bloke called ‘Neanderthal Man’, while playing a ukulele and wearing a silly hat. One day, hungry for another dose of the limelight, I climbed on to his foot and clung to his leg like a little monkey as he dragged me around behind him, still singing. It went down so well with the crowd that they kept it in the act. I was carving out a career for myself before I even knew what a career was.

When the guys in the Vulcans found out that Mum and I were going to be on our own for Christmas one year they invited us to spend it with them in Portsmouth. We drove down to the coast in the back of their van, singing songs and bouncing around on blankets, since there weren’t any seats. We all went on an outing to the torture museum on Christmas Day. There was an implement for screwing down a woman’s tongue so she couldn’t talk – a bit harsh, I thought, but very interesting!

Another day we all watched a video of Grease together, three times in a row, singing along to the songs. It immediately became my favourite movie. It was nice to sing some new songs because most of the time Mum and I would be pogoing round the flat on our own to Billy Idol’s Whiplash Smile album. ‘Dancing with Myself’ had been both Mum and Dad’s favourite record even before they met, and constant exposure made it mine too.

Mum had another interesting friend called Johny, who was in a goth group called Band of Holy Joy. He stole a gravestone, complete with stone angel, and gave it to Mum as a birthday present one night. Neither of us was too keen to have it in the house, so we smuggled it back into the graveyard together the next day.

When I was three or four, Mum was invited to join a theatre company called Impact and travel to Italy with them. Apparently the Italians are very into fringe theatre. The organizers said I could come too because there were going to be a couple of other small children in the troupe and so they were planning to take a childminder with them. Mum leapt at the opportunity and we spent six months touring around the north of Italy in the summer. I learnt to climb trees and they had an old broken record player that I was allowed to mess around with. We all lived together in a communal house in the middle of some lettuce fields. I wish I could remember more about it, it sounds like the most idyllic childhood summer possible when Mum describes it, but I have to rely on her version because my memories have mostly been blown away by events since then.

I always loved watching Mum on stage. She appeared in something called The Magical Olympic Games at the National Theatre on London’s South Bank, and she did a lot at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Pall Mall, just down the road from Buckingham Palace. I was constantly boasting about her to anyone who would listen; still am, as you may have noticed. No one else I knew had a mum who did such great stuff or hung out with such weird and famous people. Every kid watched Top of the Pops in those days, but not many could point to one of their parents on the screen.

She was really versatile, appearing with Paul Weller at Wembley one day and playing with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra the next. She could play anything. She was always having themed parties, like gypsy or Spanish, where all her friends would dress up and they would play music that went with the food, raising money for charities. She was often on Top of the Pops or The Tube, playing with The Cure or Texas or the Smashing Pumpkins. They don’t let kids into those television recordings, something to do with insurance, so I used to have to watch her on the telly just like everyone else. It made me so proud.

Carolyn, the other member of Humouresque, went off to play with Fun Boy Three, and then Mum got hired by the Communards, who were big at the time, having had ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’ at number one in the charts for weeks. Their lead singer was Jimmy Somerville, who was one of the first gay pop stars to come out of the closet and had a really distinctive falsetto singing voice. I loved hanging out with him and used to call him ‘Auntie Jessie’. Mum had to take me with her on one of their two-week tours because her childminder let her down, and the coach driver, John, used to look after me while the rest of them were on stage performing. The bus was always full of lesbians and poofs and the band’s cloney friends, and I was always the centre of attention. I mean, how cool is it to be on the road with a rock band even before your first day at school?