Dressed from head to foot in denim, wearing Mickey Mouse earrings and driving a Neopolitan ice-cream-striped Volkswagen beetle, Tom Watkins got the impression he wasn’t deemed the coolest cat in the alley, the hippest manager on the block. But that didn’t concern him. He was an original. It was 1974, and he had made the switch from furniture design to a career in pop, where he could see real money to be made. He had vision and determination. He knew his time would come.
His influence can be seen all over the 80s and 90s pop-culture, on the album sleeves of Wham!, Grace Jones, Art of Noise and Frankie Goes to Hollywood, among others. He managed the Pet Shop Boys as they rose to fame, and he was the pop Svengali who gave the world teen sensations Bros and East 17.
Controversial at times, mischievous always; music-biz legend, marketing guru, designer and art collector, Tom Watkins is a rich, fat, gay, lucky bastard with a hell of a story to tell.
Music mogul, design visionary, businessman, cultural commentator and art collector Tom Watkins was born in post-war Blackheath, South-East London. He started his career working for Terence Conran and Rodney Fitch before taking his passion for design into music. His influence can been seen all over 80s pop-culture, on the album sleeves of Wham!, Grace Jones, Art of Noise and Frankie Goes to Hollywood among others. Tom is perhaps best known as the music manager and marketing genius behind the Pet Shop Boys, Bros and East 17. One of the pioneers of the boy band, Tom helped shaped pop music as we know it today. Tom has been working with Matthew Lindsay, a writer who has published articles in The Quietus and Mojo4Music.
Let’s get one thing straight (and it will be just the one thing). This isn’t a story about a ‘working-class boy made good’. Well, OK, it sort of is. I may hail from humble origins, but all that ‘rags to riches’ nonsense bores the pants off me. I am, pure and simple, a self-made, man-mad man. Scoff if you like, but I am truly one of the last pop moguls: one of a dying breed, the kind that did it in style.
Call me old-fashioned, but I was at the top of my game when it was still fun, before all those talent-show dullards started pulling the strings. I love art and money in equal measure. I loathe boredom and boring people. I’ve acted like a fool most of my life, and outsmarted most of them. If there is one thing I have always possessed, it is real charm. If one thing has eluded me, it is real love.
I’m Tom Watkins: Svengali; entrepreneur; designer. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to call me a living legend.
I was born Thomas Frederick Watkins on 21 September 1949 at St Alfege’s in Greenwich, London, which had just recently become an NHS hospital. The midwife held me up, turned to my mother and, in her thick Jamaican accent, said, ‘Lady, this boy is going to be something!’ That woman was not wrong, that’s for sure.
I grew up in Blackheath, a village nestled in south-east London on the borders of Greenwich and Lewisham. When we were at school, we always believed Blackheath acquired its name from all the bodies buried there during the Black Death in the fourteenth century. Apparently that’s not so. The moniker actually comes from the darker colour of the heath compared to the fields it overlooks by the Thames. I can’t remember much about the debris left behind by the Second World War, only that rubble from the bomb-sites was used to fill in the various holes on the heath that hadn’t been turned into ponds.
Despite being a rather posh ‘bucolic enclave’ in the city, Blackheath had a history riddled with rebellious troublemakers – a bit like me, I suppose. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the peasants were always revolting there. It was the stretch on the road from London to Dover that travellers feared, as many a highwayman would strike there. As a kid, I was regaled with tall tales of Dick Turpin in Blackheath. It was a place of adventure and infamy, perfect for yours truly to grow up in.
My mum, Patricia Daphne Diet, had fourteen siblings. There were so many of them that I can hardly remember all my aunts and uncles, except Ronnie and dear old Joyce. As a teenager, my mother befriended a woman named Rosie Truder, a member of a local entrepreneurial family in Greenwich. The Truders were a smart bunch and they had that neck of the woods well and truly stitched up with businesses.
Mum may as well have been part of the clan. She worked in their ice-cream factory and in their café in Catford. That was where she met Frederick Joseph Watkins, my father. Many years later, she worked the counter at Gambardella’s, a Truder-owned café that was used as a hangout by the local boys in Squeeze.
Dad was a man’s man, a no-nonsense grafter, ‘one of the roughs’ as Walt Whitman would say. He enjoyed racing pigeons, gambling and playing football for a team called Surrey Dockers. His mum, my Grandma Watkins, worked in Greenwich’s Slipper Baths, which were a life-saver for the locals without washing facilities in their homes (there were quite a lot of them).
Dad was originally what was called a lighterman, ferrying people back and forth across the River Thames on a flat-bottomed barge. He was always on the make, and sold his passengers meat sandwiches for snacks. Unknown to them, the meat was Chappie dog food. It was a practice more common than you might think. These were the days before health and safety. Nobody ever complained. Nobody, as far as I know, ever got sick. Everybody around me was always out to earn a few bob. We may have been poor, but everyone I grew up with was hungry for more from life. I guess you’d call us aspirational.
Having said that, Dad and I never saw eye to eye. He was hostile to what he saw as my arty-farty ways and used to call me a ‘big girl’s blouse’. Sadly, as I got older, the gulf only got wider. Let’s face it; I was no sportsman. And if I am brutally honest, I resented the fact that I came from such peasant stock.
It used to irk me that Dad toiled his whole life and never really got us out of our threadbare existence. He made money, but it never stayed around for too long. He was forever lending the wages to his mates who never paid him back. He was always late with the rent. Even when he tried his best, things went awry. One Christmas Eve when I was a little kid he tried to creep into my room with my gifts. Our pit bull was guarding me and attacked him. It was a harbinger of how doomed our relationship would prove to be.
After a few early years on a street called Armitage Road, we rented the downstairs flat of a house on Westcombe Hill owned by Aunt Joyce and her husband, Fred Wallington. Uncle Fred had bought the 1840s Victorian brick-built property for the princely sum of £1,050, making extensive renovations to it. Fred and Joyce were far better formative influences than either of my parents. They shaped so much of what I came to be. Without them, I don’t know if I would have amounted to much at all.
Mum was a gregarious and charismatic lady. Later in life, when I had made it big, she took full advantage of all the cultural pursuits that wealth affords you and became something of an opera aficionado. Back then, though, she was heavy-handed Pat, fastidiously clean herself but a stranger to housework.
The dirty dishes would pile up and Mum would be sitting on her chair in the backyard, feasting on crab. She would hold court to an endless procession of visitors, puffing relentlessly on a Guards fag and swigging a lager and lime. Let me tell you, it was not a pretty sight. But Mum had a magnetic personality – something I probably inherited from her. Joyce would wait in vain upstairs for visitors that never came, because Mum had diverted them into her lair.
Dad was by then done with working the river and had become a coal merchant based in offices just up the road. He would arrive home from a hard day’s work and have to scrub our scullery floors. He routinely attended to all the chores that Mum had neglected, as she entertained, oblivious to the domestic carnage in her wake. If anything, I felt contempt for Dad’s chronic inability to assert himself.
I had grudging admiration for Mum, though. There was a peculiar skill to how she could do so little yet be so commanding. She doted on me, although as I got older her overbearing manner made me wince. She was always down the caravans with my Uncle Ronnie, dressed up in gypsy garb like a caravan-site Carmen Miranda.
Our home was a few notches up from Dickensian squalor. It looked like it was furnished with bric-a-brac from a charity shop. This was because it was. Everything came from a Greenwich warehouse store called Lawrence’s and was bought on their tab, which was known as the tallyman. We got all of our furniture, household goods and clothing ‘on the tally’. In those days it was a big, dirty secret if your school blazer came through these means – as mine always did.
The shame shaped my life. From that early age, I made a vow to myself: whatever it took, I would crawl out of this humdrum, dead-end world of poverty and never be poor or in debt ever again.
Aunt Joyce helped my mum by hunting for clothes for me. In contrast to our grimy pit, Joyce and Fred’s apartment upstairs was a palace. They had wallpaper, and quality carpets. They liked nice things and worked hard to get them, then maintained them impeccably. Fred was the manager of the butchery department at the Co-op, in those days an enviable position. It meant that their place always had good cuts of meat on the table, rather than the daily diet of egg and chips that my mum served up.
My aunt and uncle were refined, cultured people. Fred was suave and Joyce was glamorous: she had even been Miss Ramsgate in 1947! They were working class but literate. Fred was an avid reader, especially of J.M. Barrie and Lewis Carroll. Through him, I developed an early love of literature. Historical novels were my passion, and I devoured the works of Geoffrey Trease and Rosemary Sutcliff.
Joyce was a skilled mathematician and particularly good at mental arithmetic. She took evening classes in bookkeeping and looked after the accounts wherever she worked. For a while, she had the best job that any boy could hope for a relative to have: working in Sidney Ross’ toyshop on Greenwich High Road.
This meant that I had all the latest gifts and gadgets: Hornby train sets, Bayko building sets, Triang scooters, stilts and roller skates. You name it, Joyce got it for me. I will never forget how she used to beam and grab my chubby cheeks, always delighted to see me, whenever I came into Ross’ shop.
One of my bizarre early recollections is dressing up as a clown on Sundays and making everyone sit on the lawn so I could perform for them. I told them I was going to run away and join Billy Smart’s Circus, which regularly appeared on Blackheath. Joyce used to put all my clown make-up on for me.
You know what? Nothing has really changed. I just don’t wear such heavy make-up these days.
I could read and write well beyond my years, thanks again to the tutelage of my aunt and uncle. They instilled in me a sense of pride about working hard and surrounding yourself with luxuries, the fruits of that labour. They also indulged my exhibitionist streak, enabling me to evolve into the larger-than-life character I most certainly became.
However, on a deeper level, they also provided me with a feeling of curiosity and wonder for objects that has never deserted me. That child-like excitement for toys persists in my inexhaustible thirst for art collecting, much of which, let’s face it, just looks like overpriced toys anyway. Most of the houses I have designed and built too just hark back to those early years playing with all the wonderful gifts that Joyce would bring home.
Let’s not forget that I have spent a lifetime styling pop stars and bands; not just dressing them but also presenting them to the public. It is often harder work than you would imagine, especially given some of the frumps I have had to make-over. Again, Uncle Fred was a man of exquisite taste and style, having a particular penchant for Italian tailoring. Suits, silk shirts and ties were all arrayed neatly in the bedroom. His belts and shoes invariably matched.
Fred’s sartorial exactitude was awe-inspiring. I would sneak into their bedroom and gaze at his endless rows of shoeboxes, all systematically arranged, all labelled. I think the seeds were being sown right then and there for all my future endeavours in style and design. They had even inherited an Art Deco bedroom suite. It was certainly a refuge from the penurious world of the Watkins household downstairs.
Uncle Fred and Aunty Joyce didn’t just expand my intellectual horizons. They were always taking me out of the city to the seaside, to Margate, Ramsgate and Hastings. Fred had an aunt who owned a farm in Hastings, the town I now live so close to.
We might have been poverty-stricken but we were never bored. Probably because, to quote my later charges the Pet Shop Boys, ‘We were never being boring’ (there again, they nicked it off Zelda Fitzgerald, thank you very much!). From the ages of four to seven, I attended Invicta Road School. It was literally a stone’s throw from my backyard: I could even wave to all my relatives from the playground. At seven, I moved to Sherrington Road School around the corner until I was eleven. I was a precocious pupil and excelled at most subjects. So much so that I couldn’t wait to get out of there and pursue my own hobbies and interests, of which there were many.
I would buy my comics from Mrs Klein’s shop on Bramshaw Avenue. I loved reading Hotspur, Beano and Dandy. Then I discovered Marvel Comics, swiftly becoming part of the Merry Marvel Marching Club. I had a huge tin badge and wore it proudly, a fierce and mighty emblem of my allegiance to the great pantheon of super-heroes. There was Spiderman (that outfit was soooo tight!). The Incredible Hulk (I suspected that there was a strong family likeness). Howard the Duck (he was quackers, apparently). I loved all the giveaways from comics.
Years later, at a comic book convention in my late teens, I met the great Marvel Comics main man Stan Lee himself. I was with three mates, Barry Smith, Ian Gibson and my cousin Steve Parkhouse, who all ended up getting jobs with Marvel. Stan Lee signed my collectors’ book and I got a badge and a ringer t-shirt! This may have been where my early obsession with merchandising began.
On Saturday mornings as a kid I would go to the pictures at the Roxy in Blackheath. I loved all the legendary film characters like Roy Rogers, Tarzan and Flash Gordon. You had to be accompanied by an adult unless the film was U-rated, so we used to stand outside and ask grown-ups to escort us in. Can’t imagine that happening now, can you? To make a bit of pocket money, I sold the classified papers announcing the day’s football results in Blackheath on a Saturday night.
Looking back, it all seems like a dream, as I guess so many people’s childhoods do. Every season brought with it a whole slew of activities and adventures. In the winter, our neighbour Mr Russell built his son and me real sledges for tobogganing, making us the envy of all the other kids with their corrugated iron and tin trays. We would slide down from General Wolfe’s statue in Greenwich Park to the Naval College as snow blanketed the world around us, and our frosty breath hung in the air.
Mum told me that as a girl she had skated across the pond outside the Hare & Billet pub on Blackheath. Given my girth, I was never going to follow her lead. Even as a nipper I was a bit of a corpulent chap. It didn’t help that I often had two breakfasts: one at home with Mum and then another in a café with Dad. Pretty ironic considering that Mum’s maiden name was Diet!
What I did enjoy was toy-boat racing in the pond by another Blackheath pub, the Princess of Wales, on Sundays. That was always a laugh. And between Pond Street and Paragon Place lay wild marshland. We would often go on school nature walks through it. It was full of newts that we captured in our nets, put into jam jars and then made to ‘walk the plank’ across lolly sticks. Poor little buggers!
At Easter, Mum and Dad would man Truder’s Ice Cream Van at the Heath Fair as punters rode donkeys on the heath. The summers felt full of golden sunshine and went on for ever. I would spend hours up on the heath, feeling like I was on top of the world.
Autumn would find us in Shooter’s Hill Woods collecting conkers. Being, as my dad had informed me, a ‘big girl’s blouse’, I was initially petrified of the Guy Fawkes in November, although the Blackheath bonfire was a big deal locally.
I was far happier swimming in Greenwich Baths and buying a penny bag of chips afterwards. As it was just a short walk from the swimming bath, a few mates and I would kill time in the Maritime Museum. I was in awe of the scale of the place: the architecture, the history, the vistas and the streaming light. There were so many sea behemoths that dwarfed us and were often frighteningly huge.
There was a lot of Nelson in the museum. Then there was the Cutty Sark, with its history of fast voyages across the world carrying precious cargos of tea. Dry-docking and preserving this famous ship were prodigious feats of engineering. My visits gave me a passion for all things nautical that lasts to this day. Nowadays I co-own a restaurant that I also designed, the Ship, and its aesthetic is all about those boyhood afternoon museum visits, gazing at the relics of seafaring life. It was also the only interest I shared with my dad, who had been on the water himself in his lighterman days.
Viewed from today, my youth is a distant, far-off land. To young people it would seem like ancient history. The Blackheath of my childhood was still a place with a horse-drawn Dairy Express milk float; still a village that the rag-and-bone man wandered through. We had so little. Yet millions of pounds, mountains of cocaine and several ex-husbands later, it seems like so much to me now. It’s true: the past is a foreign country.
At eleven, I was interviewed for the local posh grammar school, John Roan. Mum and Dad came to the interview. My mum looked like an overdressed publican’s wife and my dad an extra from Steptoe & Son. I longed for Fred and Joyce to accompany me instead, and my dad could tell. After the interview, he scowled at me in the corridor, clenched his fists and said with real venom: ‘Tommy, you’re nothing but a spoilt snob.’
How right can a man be?
In any case, by then my sister Sally had been born (she was seven years my junior) and she was the apple of my dad’s eye. In a fight, my mother would invariably take my side and my father would always support Sally. They dressed her like a gaudy ‘Baby Jane’ in cheap clothes. Our squabbles were the usual sibling warfare. She would wreck my room and then blame me for it.
Years later, I would become Sally’s chaperone and we would be very close. So close, in fact, that it would cost me dearly.
I failed the interview for grammar school and ended up attending Raine’s Foundation School in Tower Hamlets. It was a charitable Church of England secondary school, reaching out to all creeds and walks of life. It had been opened in 1719 by old Henry Raine, a man of faith from Wapping who had made his fortune from booze. He wanted to give kids from lesser backgrounds, such as myself, the chance to advance and learn the three Rs.
Every day I caught the 108 bus from the Blackheath Standard into the Blackwall Tunnel and to school. Raine’s had a lot of Jewish schoolboys and I fitted in: they thought I was one of them. God knows why, but they did.
Two streets away from the school lived the Kray twins. We schoolboys were in awe of our local gangsters. I saw them a couple of times when I was buying fish and chips. I hadn’t fully explored my sexuality at this age but I felt attracted to them. The danger, the power, the bespoke tailoring: I have to admit it, even then I think I loved the idea of being a gangster’s moll.
Yet for now, my pursuits remained bookish. I was firmly entrenched in the realms of academia and not in the clutches of some nattily dressed underworld thug. Raine’s developed my enthusiasm for art history. I was intrigued by stuff like the change from the Arts & Crafts movement into Art Nouveau, all giving way to twentieth-century Modernism. There were such radical paradigmatic shifts in style, from the florid Victorian age to Art Deco/Modernism’s more pared-down, geometric forms. It was a major aesthetic overhaul to accompany the violent political turbulence of the new century, I guess.
Either way, my eyes and imagination were hooked. I fell in love with the order, clarity and sleek shapes of Modernism, particularly the work of the Bauhaus movement. In its way, it represented a leap from the vestiges of Victorian decay that defined my poor childhood. Even now I abhor the sight of Victorian architecture. It just reminds me of everything I ached to be free from.
A few years later, my sister Sally befriended a girl named Kim Moore. Kim was the daughter of one of the Krays’ henchmen, Ray, who I got to know a little bit.
Being a part of the Kray’s inner sanctum, Ray was feared and revered by all. Yet I knew a softer side to him. He loved how conversant I was in art and culture and would listen to me intently as I showed off all my knowledge. I sensed – I knew – that this erudition, combined with my ability to play the clown, would open doors for me. It would be my passport out of the land of dog-food sandwiches, grotty flats and the tallyman.
Unfortunately, things didn’t work out quite so well for Ray Moore. When he came out of the pub one night, someone pumped him full of lead.
I am a maddeningly contradictory character. I always have been. Even as relatively studious as I was, Raine’s was not a place that thrilled me for long.
Nor was my life outside education any more exciting. At home, every first Sunday in the month we would pour into my father’s Standard Vanguard Battleship-Grey Road Tank, or whatever the bloody thing was called, and head off to nearby Charlton to take late tea with Dad’s Great-Aunt Dolly. She was a cook at the local Angerstein pub so her culinary treats of shellfish, sausage rolls, trifles and red toffee apples were something to savour.
At these high teas, various distant members of Dad’s family would gather like a small clan. It was there that I first met my distant cousin Steve Parkhouse, who was only a few months older than me. He had an amazing ear for music and he was a fine artist, already making plans to go to art school in East Ham.
Steve and I kept each other amused by sketching and giggling together about anything and everything. He lived in Wanstead Flats, where I had gone fishing a couple of times, and when his family invited me over during half-term holidays I leapt at the chance. The prospect of adventure, of spending time with Steve and his musical collections and artistic drawings, was too tantalising to refuse.
Steve, as I mentioned earlier, went on to become a staff illustrator and storyteller for Marvel Comics. He was later to introduce me to an entire gang of future Marvel staffers. For now, over a couple of years we traversed the Blackwall Tunnel and spent many fun-packed hours together.
Steve told me that he and a couple of his mates were going to take advantage of a slightly off-season holiday at a Warner’s Holiday Camp in Hayling Island, Hampshire with the assurances of lots of girls and beat music in the camp club. Even by my early teens I knew my natural urges and the ‘girls’ bit filled me with dread. But I longed to spend extra time with Steve and his dreamy mates. I saved up like mad and, in fairness, my dad always gave me half towards most challenges that I set myself.
We all took our little brown suitcases on the coach to Hayling Island – Steve, of course, had a trendy duffel bag which I, of course, coveted. We were all determined to get a suntan, be rebellious and get laid (them by girls, me, I hoped, by them – fat chance!). Camp life was closely organised and the free time, as I called it, involved stripping down to our shorts and attempting to turn bronze instead of the milky white we all were. Steve had reddish hair and had to be careful not to burn. I simply roasted like a fine sow.
I will never forget lying on the lawn, pungent with the fresh smell of impeccably mown grass, on a cheap tartan blanket, intended for the colder nights in our cheap chalet. A party of girls joined us. One, called June, stole Steve’s heart – and had a gleaming new transistor radio. One Monday afternoon as the sun beamed down, the radio crackled out a new song by a new band: ‘Love Me Do’ by the Beatles.
At that second, I knew exactly what I wanted from my life: music, art, fashion, boys and non-stop partying.
The world changed quickly. If my pre-teen years seemed torn from the pages of Enid Blyton, the emergence of rock and roll and my newly active hormones altered everything. Along came thrills, raised decibels and debauchery. It was an exciting time to come of age. It is often said that the world went from black and white to Technicolor in the sixties in England. It’s a cliché but it is true.
The pop music explosion in Britain coincided with my burgeoning sex life. It was all starting to happen as I entered my teens. I’ve always maintained that sex is what drives and sells pop music and I defy anyone to disagree. It was the case back then, it was all through my career and it’s still that way now.
Back then, rock ’n’ roll was really sexy. It wasn’t this twee indie-folk crap you hear now that sounds like it was designed to advertise insurance. It was dangerous. Elvis was my dad’s favourite, so he was automatically out of bounds for me. But the Beatles were great. Hearing ‘Love Me Do’ for the first time was a total epiphany. They were where it all began for me. Yet even they were tame next to the Rolling Stones, who quickly usurped them in my fickle affections.
In no time, I was heading out to gigs. I caught Georgie Fame at the Flamingo Club, Rod Stewart (in his early band, Steam Packet) and Julie Driscoll (with Brian Auger and the Trinity). I saw the Who on their home turf at the Marquee. At the 100 Club, the Pretty Things were the resident band and I loved them.
But nobody could compete with the Stones. I saw them loads at the Crawdaddy Club, which moved from the Station Hotel to Richmond Athletic Ground as their audience grew. I loved the fact that they represented rebellion and stuck two fingers up to the establishment. Where the Beatles were that bit too squeaky clean, the evil Stones were a true incendiary force.
Mick Jagger only had to twitch his hips to generate hysteria. He was just so sexual. His preening, effeminate presence enraged my dad – good! – and excited me. Here was how provocative sex and music combined could be! This epiphany would obviously serve me well later in life, but in the early sixties all I felt was a fierce kinship with these modern gods.
It was a brave new world and I plunged headlong into it. It was all about being glued to the chart show on Sunday afternoons, then the advent of pirate radio, then Top of the Pops. There were occasional galas at the Lewisham Gaumont, and all the big boys played there: the Beatles, the Stones, the Who.
Not that you could hear a note they played. The cacophony of the crowd’s cheers was almost terrifying, like mass hysteria. It felt as if my whole generation was having one collective, crazed orgasm! I heard that the Stones’ manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, even orchestrated some of the din himself – an early note-to-self about the power of hype.
Like every self-respecting teen in the sixties I briefly joined a band. We were called Plain Facts and we formed at Raine’s to try to raise money for church funds. The line-up was Paul Challenger on lead guitar; Martin Flatsman on rhythm guitar; Roger Dalliday on bass; some bloke called Dave on drums … and yours truly, Fatty Watkins, on lead vocals.
We were very much your identikit mid-sixties Brit-rock combo: a (very) sub-Stones mix of Muddy Waters and R&B covers. We played a gig in the hall and got a little mention in the school magazine for making the most money towards a new steeple, or whatever it was. I even got t-shirts with our name emblazoned on them. Even as a teenager, I was already well into merchandise and promotion.
Plain Facts also opened up exciting new avenues for me, if you’ll pardon the phrase. Every Sunday night, one of the band’s parents would go to the pub and I would take my maracas to his house for a supposed jam. We would end up shagging.
You wouldn’t exactly call it very romantic, mind you. A year after I had left school, I saw the bandmate again at the Blackheath Standard. I tried it on with him and he threatened to give me a right-hander and said he ‘wasn’t like that any more’. I couldn’t care less what he was like. I just wanted another shake of my maracas. After that, I never saw him again.
I also worked at our bassist Roger’s parents’ business. Dalliday’s wallpaper shop was a quarter of a mile from Raine’s and I would use my school bus pass to get through the Blackwall Tunnel on Saturdays. The Dallidays used to keep money in a paraffin can and sometimes I would nick some. They were an affluent bunch anyway, I figured.
My one other memory of the Dallidays was that they owned the first colour telly that I ever set eyes on. The first programme I ever saw on it was shown on Boxing Day 1967: the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour.
There were monthly gigs at Greenwich Town Hall. I was there the night that JFK was assassinated. Yet even this hardly impacted on me. Suddenly I was lost to the world; on another planet entirely. My family receded into the background.
All I wanted to do was tape the latest hits off the radio with my reel-to-reel tape recorder then play them back at deafening volume, much to the consternation of my family (and, no doubt, the entire street). Dad would burst in in a fit of rage, bellowing, ‘Turn it down, Tommy!’ He might as well have shouted at the clouds. In fact, ‘Get Off Of My Cloud’ became my personal anthem. When I listened to it, I felt invincible.
A whole universe opened up, filled with the vibrant energy of all this new music. I would hang out at the Coffee House in Woolwich, where they played lots of great stuff on Tamla Motown and Atlantic: James Brown, Arthur Conley, Eddie Floyd, Aretha Franklin – the list of greats seemed endless. I loved soul, it was cool, it always put a real wiggle on my stride.
Everything was up for grabs and everything seemed like a revelation. A specialist stall in Woolwich Market sold reggae. I still remember so clearly buying ‘Oh Carolina’ by the Folkes Brothers. I loved Millie’s early records, like the candy reggae-pop classic ‘My Boy Lollipop’, as well as all the Jamaican sounds coming out of Island and Trojan Records. There was just this great melting pot of soul, reggae, Motown and rock and roll.
I was not alone in this voyage of discovery. I had an accomplice, even if we made a slightly odd couple. I mean couple in the platonic sense of the word, as he was completely hetero.
Melvin Sharp was a younger friend of my dad’s (they were both into racing pigeons). Melvin was a real Jack the Lad. I always suspected that he was the son my dad longed for me to be. Melvin was a scaffolder by trade and became a constant presence in the Watkins household. As different as he and I were, he picked up on my love of what was going on, and began to take me to the epicentre of Swinging London.
Melvin and I bought clothes from Carnaby Street, including John Stephen’s famous boutiques. We were both dedicated followers of fashion and I became quite the dandy. There again, things went in very different directions when we hit the changing rooms.
Ever since I was a baby I have always been on the heavy side – it’s a combination of being what they used to call ‘big-boned’ and loving my food. Where Melvin had no problem fitting into the latest threads, it was a different story for me. I would stare at the svelte peg-legged trousers he would effortlessly slip into with an envy that bordered on resentment. How could an aesthete like me be doomed never to fit into the very clothes I was so desperate to wear?
Yet I was always a resourceful stylist and I found things that I could tailor to my, ahem, ‘larger’ dimensions. Naturally, my father took huge exception to my new flamboyant attire, which delighted me. Every time I left the house, Dad would roll his eyes to the heavens and utter his perennial put-down of his only son: ‘He’s nothing but a big girl’s blouse.’ He was far too dim to work out that his good mate Melvin was facilitating my peacock parade.
Melvin and I frequented the cafés, bars and clubs of Soho together. I’ll never forget speeding along on his ultimate Mod accessory: the Vespa scooter. Often it was in the dead of night, while everyone was asleep. Melvin and I would zoom off into the Smoke in pursuit of good times and good music. We always got both. My life suddenly seemed bohemian and cool.
Closer to home was El Partido, a great venue packed with both Mods and young Jamaicans, on Lee High Road next to the Sultan pub. It was over some shops, at the top of a vertiginous staircase, and I used to feel dizzy when I climbed up. But once inside, the sounds were the best in bluebeat, soul and Motown.
Bo Diddley played the Partido in 1965 and Jimmy Cliff the next year. To my eternal regret I never saw them but my own short-lived band, Plain Facts, also played a brief set there. We were so crap that they asked us to leave the stage. I’ll never forget how embarrassed I was afterwards, when waiting to collect our equipment.
Plain Facts soldiered on. We renamed ourselves Bo’s Children because of all of the Bo Diddley covers in our repertoire (not to mention the fact that, after the Partido debacle, our original name was now tainted with ridicule). However, my days as a frontman were numbered.
A lot of the Mods were Jewish boys that I knew. They reminded me a bit of Uncle Fred, with their impeccably coiffured hair and sartorial precision. Arbiters of general good taste, the Mods were forward-thinking and eclectic. Too much of later generations’ perception of Mod stems from the late seventies Quadrophenia-inspired revival. It was all a bit stodgy and narrowly defined. The original Mods were open to anything – including fooling around with other blokes.
There were whispers in Soho that a few of the Mod ‘faces’ were rent boys to affluent older gentlemen. Some of these faces went on to become famous. Britain may still have been repressed in those days but in little pockets of London, a world away from buttoned-up, uptight, mainstream England, the possibilities seemed endless.
Drugs were a big part of the scene. You would take a purple heart to keep you up and party all night, buzzed on the music at gigs and in the clubs. I was eager to try everything, so I just gobbled up anything that was put in front of me.
Outsiders like me found a haven in the rock and roll scene. Jewish and gay men were the movers and shakers behind the screens. The first major pop Svengali I heard of was Larry Parnes, who groomed a stable of talent that included Tommy Steele, Billy Fury and Adam Faith. Beatles supremo Brian Epstein was gay and Jewish, too.
In fact, the list of gay managers in the sixties was never-ending and included Robert Stigwood, Simon Napier-Bell and Kit Lambert. The fact that I had been to a school with such a large Jewish population made me feel even more at home. It would be a few years before I was to venture into the world of pop management, but I like to think the synergy between these star-makers and the rock bands I loved rubbed off on me. Even then, naïve and wet behind the ears, I knew that I belonged in that world.
I suppose my first real exposure to the music industry was Ready Steady Go!, the first major pop show on telly, and I was determined to be where the action was. I even found a pretend girlfriend to accompany me.
This ‘girlfriend’, Myra Vosser, was introduced to me by another gay kid in Blackheath who used to collect antique silver snuffboxes. She was a Jewish East Ender and was Britt Ekland’s cousin, no less! Well, she said she was. Her mum and dad ran the Terminus café where the buses stopped on Commercial Road. I used to go and have coffee there all the time. Myra came from the same world as me and we hit it off.
We would eagerly stand in line outside the TV studio before the show and the audience ‘picker’ would breeze past us. But we weren’t going to give up that easily and we returned time and time again until they finally let us in. I think that the show’s choreographer, Patrick Kerr, took a shine to Myra. Before long we were regulars on the programme.
Myra and I would practise our moves in the Vossers’ flat on Stepney High Street. Myra could really dance well, and, despite my cumbersome bulk, I was a pretty nifty shaker, too. Once the show’s producers saw this, we were permanent fixtures. Deep down, I always felt like the odd ‘camp as Christmas’ poof with his gal pal. It was all very A Taste of Honey. I was the chubby Murray Melvin to her Rita Tushingham.
Naturally, we took dressing up for the show very seriously. Myra was a kindred spirit, a DIY merchant who could whip up something snazzy with scant resources. She would make us Mod outfits, adding big bullseye targets to my t-shirts and painting designs on my jeans. To these customised garments I added the latest fashions: bowling shoes and turtleneck sweaters, or Caravelle’s knitted three-button-necked fine sweaters. I bought this stuff with Melvin from Lord John in Carnaby Street.
What united a lot of the great British groups at the time was art school. So many came from that background. Pop art, the reigning aesthetic du jour, basically united my two great loves, and my leanings towards art and design came to the fore, galvanised by the sounds and visions around me.
I decorated my own room with ideas I had seen in current magazines and In Your Room, a very early forerunner of Grand Designs, the TV show that I would decades later feature on. In Your Room inspired me to get a huge Coca-Cola billboard and paper it on my wall. My room was a blank canvas and popular imagery was my palette. I had road lamps as bed lights and street signs on my wall. My bedspread had a big target on it and my ceiling light had a red bulb. Nowadays I suppose it would be dubbed ‘kitsch’, but in those days it felt like a breath of fresh air.
I was seizing the signs and symbols from the world around me (usually imported from America) to create my own little environment. My dad dismissed it as ‘a junkyard’. Sometimes, even today, I wonder if the energy I threw into creating and designing was primarily a strategy to protect me from his rejection.
Because I didn’t half feel rejected. My father seemed to contemplate my whole identity with disdain and disbelief. How could a son of his be this ‘arty’; this ‘girly’; this untutored in the rugged ways of his working-man’s world?
Around this time I bought a camera, and I loved taking arty photos and having the chemist develop them. I would drag my sister Sally and cousin Toni on to the heath to pose for zany fashion-style shots. David Bailey, eat your heart out!
Even then, sneaky pictures of the odd labourer crept in. I was, you see, like my father, a man’s man. I just extolled the virtues of masculinity in a rather different manner!
Not that anyone talked about being a ‘queer’ back then. Occasionally Mum might make an offhand remark about ‘turd burglars’ but that was about it. I knew that I was gay, but I never ‘came out’ to my dad. It wasn’t even a conversation that I could ever imagine having. A lot of people used to say that homosexuality was a symptom of an absent father. I felt that Dad was absent because he knew I was gay.
Homosexuality wasn’t even legal for most of my teenage years. The Wolfenden Report recommending the legalisation of homosexuality came out in 1957, but sexual acts between men over twenty-one weren’t legalised until ten years after that. By then I was eighteen.
Yet, as I say, I always knew I was ‘the other way’ and I already had a wealth of experience to show for it. I posed as a straight for a bit. Even before I met Myra, I used to take my neighbour’s daughter Brenda to the legendary Victor Silvester’s ballroom dancing classes upstairs at the Gaumont. As we foxtrotted across the floor I felt an enormous burden weighing down on me. It sure wasn’t Brenda. She was only a skinny thing.
Gay sex was hardly elusive. It was clandestine but it was everywhere. It happened in secret places, often very unlikely ones. My father had ventured into the motor trade by my teenage years. With his egregious brother Stanley, a loudmouth bully on his better days, Dad started selling and repairing cars. Soon he owned a fleet of delivery trucks with drivers. Quite how we remained so poor baffles me.
By now, we had moved out of Fred and Joyce’s, due to an almighty row between Fred and Dad over Dad’s inability to pay the rent on time. We didn’t go far – just next door, in fact. Anyway, unknown to my father, I began fooling around with one of his drivers. At the time it gave me a wry sense of satisfaction that I was having it off with one of dad’s sturdy blokes under his nose. But, looking back, I wonder if it was just a twisted way of seeking approval from him.
There were sailors, too, and men working on the ferries. I would pick them out at Woolwich Ferry terminal and relieve them. They used to give me a tanner (sixpence), the going rate for a wank. One sailor, who went on to captain a tug, had a wife who owned a café near East Greenwich Gas Works where my dad worked. He remembered me from my exploits down by the ferries (I didn’t recognise him) and he told my dad he’d let me steer his tug (as it were).
Off we went as the captain took me up the river. In his cabin he came on a bit too forcefully so I rejected his advances. He got the hump and dropped me back early, warning me never to speak of it.
And I never have.
Until now.
With the money that I made from these encounters, I would furtively creep into the dodgy newsagents by the port and buy Health and Strength magazine. Finding a secret spot, I would rip open the shrink-wrapping and eagerly flick through the pages of male nudes with Herculean physiques. The models looked like otherworld deities: foreign, perfect and utterly inaccessible. Just the sight of the images filled me with intense feelings of longing. I passed them around certain boys at school, sometimes selling them for 6p.
Like I said, sex sells!
But school started to bore me as I progressed through my teens. The rules and regulations were stifling. There was no challenge to my advanced capabilities. I might have been arrogant, but everything that was going on outside of school was so much more stimulating and offered a more useful education.
I was an autodidact. I picked things up easily and school just seemed of no use to me. I wanted more: sex, money and rock and roll. School wasn’t a route to any of these so I just stopped going. My record cards show a decline in attendance with each passing term. I would get up in the morning, leave the house and catch the bus and head into town. Once there, I threw myself into sexual adventures with other lads. I first had anal sex on top of a tower block. My high-rise induction into sodomy was a bit grim, but I knew I liked it a little rough.
Full gay sex was something I knew I had to get out of the way and so I just dealt with it. In any case, before AIDS homosexual sex was such a flippant, reckless thing. In the sixties it simply seemed to have no consequences whatsoever.
I didn’t struggle with my sexuality or feel any of the tedious guilt and shame that afflicts others when they grapple with being gay. I knew I had an insatiable appetite and it needed feeding. It was as simple as that.
Or maybe my early rampant promiscuity was a way of exorcising the pain of never feeling I had a father who cared for me. Who knows? In retrospect, my journey from innocence to experience seems far too brisk and brutal. It did mean that I very quickly grew a skin that was as thick as a cow’s hide. My feelings were a thing to be kept locked away – and that only got worse with the passing years.
Ultimately this premature emotional alienation was to prove more of a blessing than a curse. The music industry is no place for cheap sentiment (even if that is the product that it peddles!). I guess that my early years were the perfect apprenticeship for my later career.
It was the swinging sixties, London was a Day-Glo playground of thrills and sounds and school was a dull distraction. Just my daily seventy-minute journey to Raine’s bored me rigid – but thankfully my time at the school was about to crash to a halt.
We used to wind up the supply teachers in German class something rotten. German is a very guttural language so we used to take the piss out of the teachers by repeating the words again and again. One day one of them lost it and whacked me around the head. Looking back, I can’t say I blame him.
I stormed out of the class and went straight to Mr Broughton, the deputy headmaster, to make a formal complaint. He was not to prove a sympathetic audience. Fixing his eyes on me, he bellowed, ‘Watkins, in all my years of teaching at this school I have rarely been confounded by a pupil so adroitly gifted yet utterly contemptuous of authority as you. You may be smart but you are a blot on the good name of Raine’s!’
Fair enough. I felt that Raine’s was a blot on my backside. Mr Broughton called my parents in to see him and suggested that I leave at the end of the summer term or right after I sat my first wave of GSEs. I did no revision and failed the lot – except for Religious Education. That subject had been so relentlessly drummed into us that it was inevitable I would pass.
Who cared? I told myself I knew better than the dour old teachers anyhow. It wasn’t learning I deplored; it was conformity. I wanted to explore my passions and not have some staid curriculum forced upon me. A voracious reader, I scoured the libraries for books on art and architecture. Everything modern, slightly anarchic and bold captured my imagination.
At this precocious age, all of the various strands of early twentieth-century art transfixed me: Dadaism, futurism, Bauhaus, De Stijl. It was deeply serious but often playful. I picked up a ceramics restoration manual and started repairing Art Nouveau vases I had picked up in markets. My chubby fingers were never idle.
Nevertheless, after my exam failures the unwelcome spectre of work reared its head. Dad suggested I went to work in the butchery department in the Co-Op as I had done Saturday shifts there and Uncle Fred had prospered there. Naturally, I was allergic to any kind of daily grind: it just seemed like a dead end. But I knew I had to do something.
I landed a job as a filing clerk at the South Eastern Regional Hospital Board in Paddington: I lasted three months and hated it with a passion. I spent my time impersonating the other clerical staff and got caught mimicking my immediate boss’s lanky, quirky walk. The day’s highlight would be doing the Daily Telegraph crossword with one of the old-timers.
At lunchtimes and after work I’d call at a local vintage store called Hicks that was teeming with exotic artefacts. I purchased a snazzy zoot suit there. When I got it home, everybody laughed at me – but it was to change my life in the near future.
The Hospital Board had a field office in Greenwich, just a stroll from my house, and I set my sights on getting a job in the architecture department there. Art and buildings felt like my future so getting transferred was a major goal. Eventually I succeeded – only to find I was no more than a gofer there.
Realising I had made a terrible mistake at school, I set about retaking my O levels. Luckily, the department gave me a day release to study at Woolwich College. I re-sat Art, English Language, English Literature, History and Liberal Studies and got them all.
See – I could do it when I tried.