In the summer of 1987 I left school and somehow landed a job within a couple of weeks in the City of London. An 'administrative assistant' at a major international bank. On receiving the offer in the post I felt conflicted. I’d spent most of the past six months listening to The The’s anti-capitalism infused Infected album. In taking the job I would be betraying my current hero Matt Johnson. The line from Heartland about bankers getting sweaty beneath their white collars kept popping into my head.
But accepting this position meant I would be able to save up and fly to Florida. Meeting my penpal Whitney would no longer be an impossibility. Within months there would be enough money to make the trip I had been dreaming of these past two and a half years. I took the job.
I suddenly had money. Not exactly rolling in it by any means, but I had disposable income. Was employed. Commuted. Wore suits. Shopped at Tie Rack. I was finally an adult! And with it came a new-found confidence. And hope. With my first pay packet I bought my first CD and a player on which to listen to it. Not a portable one - I wanted a proper stack system like my cousin Rob’s, so I ordered it through a catalogue which gave the option of spreading out the payments. The CD was Sting’s latest single We’ll Be Together – a sentiment that perhaps on a subconscious level reflected my fresh optimism about meeting Whitney.
The video to the song was shown a lot at the local pub – which having installed MTV, hung a neon sign on one wall and dropped the word 'Arms' from its name had magically rebranding itself as a bar. The promo was black and white and shot in a brassiere, with allusions to French New Wave cinema. Sting plays two parts: one an arrogant, drunken, brawling letch; the other a self-effacing sensitive arty type who ultimately ‘gets the girl’ - played by his future wife Trudie Styler. I hadn’t just purchased a CD single – I had bought into what the product represented, what it promised, the lifestyle the video purported to, to be part of the sophisticated, monied demographic depicted in the brasserie – the young urban professional.
The bank had taken on a glut of school leavers, and suddenly I was part of a new gang of four. We would spend every lunchtime at the pub where, aside from marveling at the fact that if you ordered a sandwich it came on a platter with a mountain of crisps and some chutney on the side (mind-blowing at the time), we would discuss such things as the charms of Lucy on the 10th floor, how Michael Jackson's Bad wasn’t as good as Thriller (how could it be?) and that our department manager was basically Windsor Davis' sergeant major from It Ain't Half Hot Mum in a pinstripe suit.
At the office one of the higher-ups would often come round and offer us free tickets to go to a West End nightclub that evening. They were encouraging us to go out and drink, to stay out late on a work night. We were still in our 3-month probationary period. Was it some kind of trick? To weed out the non-committed? We went anyway, to a tacky Stringfellows-type club on Regent Street. We were obviously the worse-for-wear the next morning, but never got in any trouble. We later found out that the club was one of the bank’s clients. By going we had been demonstrating our commitment.
That December I went to my first stadium-size live music event. The previous band I’d seen live had been indie darlings The Primitives at the cramped, grotty, faded-ballroom-style venue the Clarendon Hotel in Hammersmith. That was a random gig though. This was to be a concert – Sting live at Wembley Arena, part of the UK leg of his Nothing Like The Sun world tour.
When we had taken our seats, some two hundred or so metres from the stage (which didn’t matter as there were plenty of video screens) I became acutely aware of just how different this crowd was to the that of the gigs I was used to attending. There were plummy accents. People talking about dinner parties. Upper-middle class people. Rich, expensively-dressed people.
Amidst this slick, monied throng I spotted a group of skinheads. They seemed utterly out of place. Not just because you rarely saw skinheads anywhere at this end of the 80s, but because they were so at odds with the ocean of yuppies that surrounded them. They must have been there for the Police numbers – which they got, but in a style far removed from the three-piece originals. These versions were jazzified. They must have hated it?
I, on the other hand, loved the alternative takes on the Police classics and indeed the whole concert. From the exciting extended percussive intro to the Nothing Like The Sun album's opening track The Lazarus Heart which kicked off the set, to the meaty, pounding drum break from An Englishman in New York, and on to the spirited rendition of the aforementioned single We'll Be Together. It made me feel grown-up, sophisticated, successful. Briefly...
Who was I kidding? I was a fraud, no more on par with these Sloanes than those skinheads were. I spent most of my time filing in a Bishopsgate basement. I owned a Filofax but it had been given to me as a joke birthday present by my Mum and Dad and there wasn’t anything written in it other than my name. And aside what I paid my parents for keep, my earnings would go on CDs, drinks at the pub every lunchtime, nightclubs at least once a week, repayments for that stack sound system. Unsurprisingly, I hadn’t managed to save anything towards that all-important flight to the States.
What was to be a shock, however, was the reason why I still hadn’t heard back from Whitney...