I've known more Steves than I have Daves or Phils, which is saying something. Here are some Steves I have known.
Steve Hewlett exploded onto the Manchester University Student Union political scene like the latest high-tech weapon of war. The first time I remember him, he stood up at the back of the crowded Main Hall in cargo pants and distinctive red anorak, hands in his pockets and a cherubic face, a halo of blond curls and spoke forcefully, articulately and critically on whatever arcane point was being painstakingly argued for and against on stage. As he spoke, his legs waggled backwards and forwards, somehow adding to his charisma. We, the student union hacks, stared. Who was this upstart fresher who knew what he was talking about? Could we get him to join our party? As it turned out, no we couldn't, because he had already given his heart to a Maoist organisation called the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist), headed by Reg Birch. Later in life, this membership earned him a Christmas tree on the BBC's secret list of unacceptables.
But I did manage to get him to move into my house. I can't remember how that happened, just as I can't remember how he came to be called Bimbo, nor how such a considerable personality was stuffed into such a tiny room. He took the third 'bedroom', which in the USA would be considered a walk-in closet, and his snores resonated throughout the house. He soon moved on to more spacious accommodation, but remained my friend throughout until his untimely death from cancer of the oesophagus in 2017. His unfailing loyalty to friends, his wicked sense of humour and joie de vivre, his piercing researcher's intellect, all remain alive.
There were two other Steves that figured in my Manchester life, so long ago. TV Steve, so called because he moved into the room that had contained the TV in the large, rat- and cockroach-infested house we shared on Great Western Street in Rusholme. There were thirteen or fourteen of us in that house, a motley crew assembled from the vague friendships formed in our first year at University. Some went onto fame and fortune, like David Leveaux and Maggie Saunders, most of us faded into pleasant obscurity. Our locals were the Albert, with Jerry behind the bar and remarkably bad hamburgers, or the Whitworth Arms, and failing those, The Clarence, there were two curry houses on Oxford Road and one incredibly cheap one on Great Western Street itself and Sid ran the corner shop where we bought Rizlas and Cadbury's Creme Eggs.
Steve the Australian also appeared around that time. As I recall, he was the Australian because he had once lived in Tasmania, and mainly to distinguish him in our addled brains from TV Steve, and another Steve known as Steve Cowboy, because he wore cowboy boots. The Australian had a wide smile and a questing spirit, which led him around the world and back again.
1977 was the year everything changed. We went from flares to straight legs, from afghans to leather jackets, from Crosby Stills Nash & Young to Buzzcocks, from just dope and beer to pills and lines. Some of us scraped through University or Poly, some of us didn't. One of us died, of a fast-moving blood disease, and another went mad and shouted that drugs were the devil's work as he tore the medicine chest off the wall and threw it into the street. One of us tore the meniscus in her knee pogoing in a pool of beer to No More Heroes. We fought, or we thought we were fighting, apartheid, racism, the government. We laughed, cried, picked mushrooms in Heaton Park, carried each other home, watched the TV playing Pong all by itself, ate dry Shreddies and Angel Delight, were immortal. We had fumbling, lustful sex, and dreamt of love, swopped meaningful Dylan quotes, and worried about what would happen when we were no longer we.
Steve Taylor. My brother Tom's friend. A South Effrican, bruised and repelled to England by apartheid, a journo, a writer, a searcher and a pan-music buff. I liked Steve T. when I first knew him, and fell into something with him many years later at Tom's second wedding. Steve and I, ignoring all around us including his wife and my husband, spent a couple of hours delightedly compiling our dream playlist and marvelling that the one knew as many Dylan quotations as the other. Steve found me on Facebook, sent a friend request, and when I asked, rightly and suspiciously, if he could prove that he was the Steve Taylor that I knew, rather than some random Steve Taylor, did so by mentioning the pub where he, his wife Caroline, and my first husband Matthew had once met for a drink before he and Caroline took off for post-Ian Smith Zimbabwe and Matthew and I took off for a descent into hard drugs. For me, and I think for him, Steve is one of those paths never taken and never to be taken.
Drugs was a path I went a long way down, but clambered back up again. At the end of 1979, the USSR entered Afghanistan to offer 'logistical support' to the Afghani People's "Democratic" Party. The mujahideen, covertly supported by the Western powers, and eventually to morph into the Taliban, fought back. Their efforts were in part financed by the conversion of cannabis fields, which once produced some of the finest black hashish in the world, to opium poppies, and by 1982 Europe was flooded with cheap brown smoking heroin. Chasing the dragon, we called it, and I can still remember the burnt caramel scent and the seductive warmth that crept through my body.
In January 1983, with Chris, the wife of my heroin supplier, I enrolled in a t'ai chi class run by Islington Council. Chris dropped out after a term, and dropped out of my life as did Mick, her husband, who ended up in prison, Zoë, their daughter, who would be 40 now, heroin, and eventually Matthew. In truth, Matthew did not drop out of my life, until he dropped out of life altogether on the day after St Patrick's Day, 1988. T'ai chi taught me that I had a stark choice. Whereas Matthew, who was once described as a 'round, white, swallow it' drug abuser, was no more or less attracted to heroin than he was to the whole panoply of mind-altering substances including alcohol that were on offer, heroin was my drug of choice. As soon as I slipped into its warm deathly embrace, I knew I had found home. But I couldn't chase the dragon and do t'ai chi, so life won. I left Matthew, who died of alcohol poisoning five years later. I still do t'ai chi pretty much every day.
Stéphane Riquier is the master baker in Lourmarin, where I lived for twenty-five years. He considers himself a pâtissier, not a baker, but a baker he is. He is also a master salsa dance, or so I believe, a biker, an archer, and a man of good sense and cheer. One of the highlights of sitting outside the Café de l'Ormeau at 7:30 in the morning sipping coffee and idly leafing through La Provence was seeing Stéphane in Provençal-patterned boxer shorts sipping his own coffee. The shorts, you see, provide just the right amount of air circulation for a man sweating over choux pastry at 4:00am. If the wind was blowing just right in Lourmarin, I could smell the pains au chocolat when I stepped out of my front door.
When I first moved to Lourmarin, the boulangerie was run by a couple called the Fiolettis who made very bad bread and pasty, unpleasant croissants. Two or three years later Stéphane and his then-wife, Isabelle, she of the large breasts and even larger voice, took over. At first, the village was suspicious. This was change, after all, and who likes change in a village? We were soon seduced by the bread, and the viennoiseries. It's true, you had to brave Isabelle's loud and indiscreet manner and her impressive décolleté, all out of proportion to the tiny shop, but it was worth it. Gradually Stéphane branched out into exciting breads like Le Viking, and the daring Tarte Lourmarinoise as well as the traditional gibassier, the queues outside grew longer and he was taken into our hearts. Isabelle left, Stéphane stayed, his sons Antonin and Ronan grew up, and he opened a new outlet on what can be grandly called the Lourmarin ring-road the better to capture passing trade. Stéphane is a man of vision and action, a kind and good-humoured soul, and a tireless worker. As Bob Dylan once said about Alicia Keys, there's nothing about that man I don't like.
And now there's another Steve. He knows who he is.
And some bonus Steves for you. One I know, the others have left their mark.
TV Steve here, Liz. I can vouch for what you say about that house. But hey it was fun. There’s a dispute over whether that house or another, Heald Place, just a few doors down, formed the basis of Ben Elton’s classic sit com, The Young Ones, but I know for sure that Ben and Rick Mayall both attended the orgiastic parties thrown there. It was at one of those, I maintain, at which about 60 of us, including a couple of the Steve’s pogoed so madly to the Sex Pustols that the bay window of your room fell out into the garden... or am I confusing the fictional account with reality...
ReplyDeleteYour version was confirmed by many yesterday. It is understandable that I have no memory of the occasion, given what else went on in that room in those days. That house truly was a pit, but salubrious, apparently, compared with Heald Grove.
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