On the Road Bike Page 13

  Hi Ned,

  There’s a coffee bar called Kaffeine on Great Titchfield Street. Is that OK? Say 10.45 a.m.

  G

  It was indeed OK.

  Gary Kemp, chiselled, blow-dried, immaculate, had his hands full. He arrived at our meeting place with his baby son, Rex, in his arms, and was shoving a pushchair, from which a dozen different bags and straps were hanging, into the crowded über-hip coffee bar. His three-year-old son Kit was also part of the Kemp family’s ram-raiding attempt on Kaffeine, Kit’s preferred method being a scooter.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Ned.’ He was trying to park the buggy in a non-existent space, and prevent it from falling over backwards by standing on one leg and bracing his thigh against the frame. I wondered how long he could keep it up. ‘Lauren’s coming along any minute. I told her that this wouldn’t work. But she’s on the turbo, you know.’

  Then he was off, shaking a bottle of formula, in search of a bowl of warm water to bring it up to the right temperature for Rex. The pushchair fell back against our table. Young Kit looked at me.

  ‘Are you a doctor?’ he asked.

  We both looked at his toy medical set.

  ‘No, but I feel a bit sick.’

  When Gary and Rex returned, he found Kit repeatedly injecting me with a huge amount of some unidentified substance from an oversized blue plastic syringe. Then, with admirable diligence, Kit did my tests: temperature, heart rate, peering into my ears. Then, for the sake of thoroughness, he tried his own knee reflexes with a hammer. He wasn’t ruling anything out, the young Kemp.

  Gary and I attempted to get some adult conversation underway. But it was all in vain, as it often is when adults are surrounded by infants. Each opening gambit would be snuffed out by a small-voiced complaint or enquiry.

  ‘So what’s next for you, Gary?’

  ‘Well, I’ve got a few different—’

  ‘Didn’t want that one. I wanted one with raisins in.’

  Rex finally had his chops round the teat of the bottle and was guzzling away. Lauren arrived, looking a bit stressed by the sheer spread of the chaos we had invoked in the café. With apologetic smiles aimed at the staff, she then removed all the male members of her family, bar one.

  ‘Bloody hell, you must be thinking, this isn’t what you thought life would be like for celebrities!’ Gary took a sip of his coffee. ‘What do you want to know, Ned?’

  Very quickly, we were onto the New Romantics Ride.

  ‘Martin Fry’s joined us. He was out last Friday on the ride.’ I nodded. Martin Fry was the lead singer of ABC. So now, irritatingly, I had the refrain from ‘Shoot That Poison Arrow’ going through my head. It turned out to be the perfect accompaniment to Kemp’s everyday tale of pop star turned bicyclist, which it seemed, was not such an unusual metamorphosis.

  ‘You look back in the 1960s and it was very close to Mod culture. Bryan Ferry was into it, Paul Smith, Jeff Banks, all these old Mods. It was Continental, so it was sort of sexy.’ And then, quite rightly, he points out that ‘Kraftwerk famously gave up being in a band, basically so they could cycle all the time!’

  But the Kemp brothers and their peers were more interested in other things at the time, and all this bicycle nonsense had passed them by. ‘We’ve got a history of getting completely smashed and wrecked and creating fashions and making a lot of money selling records all over the world.’ And as Gary Kemp says this, I am reminded of quite how big they were during my childhood, and of how surreal it is to be sitting here with the man who wrote the soundtrack to my life. Or at least the bit which involved hanging around unrequitedly outside Jane Woolhouse’s front door on Chaucer Road.

  It wasn’t until Kemp hit his late forties, and was introduced to the expensive, monochrome aesthetic of Rapha that his head, with a ‘cap always at a jaunty angle’, was turned. He started to go online, sometimes at night, often furtively.

  ‘My wife thought I had some sort of homoerotic secret. Suddenly I was looking at black-and-white photos of stubbly blokes with shaved legs.’

  I laugh at this notion, and try to embellish it. ‘With massage oils and embrocation creams?’ I add, with a chuckle.

  ‘Yes,’ says Kemp, looking unengaged, and with a discreet glance at his watch. I am left with the sense that I have taken the joke a little too far.

  ‘Cycling’s a cult for older men. I couldn’t do golf. I left that to Tony Hadley. He’s a larger man. I’m going to wait for my hip replacement before I get into golf.’

  Tony Hadley, striding around on a golf course in a black polo neck and black slacks. I could very easily imagine that. It was such a rich image that I was, temporarily, no longer able to think of anything else to ask. Fortunately, Kemp was on a roll. The words, as you would expect from a songwriter, came easily to him.

  ‘Where do I meet my old mates again? We don’t go out to clubs any more. And if we’re in the Groucho, we’re probably with our wives. I felt there was a vacuum. Cycling was the answer.’ I imagined them all sitting around a table in the Groucho club, as the conversation dries up. The men exchange knowing glances. The women excuse themselves and head en masse for the Ladies’ room.

  ‘Of course it does suit our addictive natures. Aesthetics meet endorphins. I love that thing.’ Album titles, or potential album titles seemed to spill from his every sentence.

  ‘I find the cadence very musical. That’s the rhythm, that’s the key. You’re in a song, and it’s hard and it’s fast. You can’t stop. You can’t slow down. I do find myself singing songs as I’m riding along. But it’s usually horrible stuff like “Brown Girl In The Ring”.’

  ‘Shoot That Poison Arrow’ was suddenly no longer the song I couldn’t get out of my head. As ABC took a bow, I welcomed Boney M onto the stage. Kemp continued, his flow uninterrupted, his verbal cadence, not skipping a beat. Tra-la-la-la-la!

  ‘I get the same buzz as I used to being in a band. Riding in a group is like being in a band. There’s this thing about living in the moment, which I love. With music, you’re thinking only about the next eight bars. And with cycling you’re only ever thinking about the next eight metres.’

  Suddenly, Gary Kemp paused. He looked down, thoughtfully, and then looked up with a sudden, fresh smile.

  ‘I should have said eight yards, because there’s a nice internal rhyme then.’ He looked wistful. ‘Missed that.’

  Our time in the café came to a close. Gary Kemp had things to do with his family, and I had to be somewhere else to do something much less rewarding than talking to a New Romantic about cycling.

  At a fundamental level, there was no difference between his passion for the sport, and anyone else’s. But his was wound up inextricably with a time and a place. I liked the idea that every Friday morning, come rain or shine, a clutch of men who did their bit to shape our lives are remembering themselves and reinventing themselves lap by lap around Regent’s Park. Even if I never joined them again, it was good to know that they would be there, for as long as they could be.

  ‘We think we’re really fast and really tasty. We’re a bunch of blokes in our late forties and early fifties. I mean, how fast can that be?’

  Faster than me.

  I thanked him for his time, and we left the café together, talking speculatively about collaborating on spurious TV projects that we both knew would never see the light of day.

  I had my bike locked up outside, and, as I fiddled ineffectually with the key in the lock, I temporarily lost my composure as I became aware, not for the first time, but with great clarity, that I’d finally pulled it off. I’d just spent an hour talking to Gary Kemp.

  We shook hands, and he walked off up Great Titchfield Street. My final words to him will haunt me for some time.

  ‘Bye, Martin.’

  CHAPTER 8

  GILLOTS AND THE THIRTY-FOUR NOMADS

  ‘HE’S ONLY GONE and pissed himself, Gill!’

  Ron Keeble points delightedly at the rapidly spreading damp patch on my shorts, mostly centred
around the waistband and crotch. Gill, a sprightly lady with slightly more finely tuned manners than her husband, glances down at the offending area, at first alarmed, and then with carefully concealed amusement.

  ‘Oh, leave him alone, Ron. Can I get you a cold drink, Ned? A Coke, an orange juice?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ I mutter, mortally embarrassed. ‘An orange juice would be very nice, thank you Gill.’ I have become twelve years old, and I am round my friend’s house in the kitchen.

  Ron, coming in from the garden and sliding the French windows closed, isn’t quite prepared to let it rest. Not just yet.

  ‘Looks just like he’s pissed himself.’

  ‘Don’t listen to him, Ned.’ Gill pours me a drink, and I manage to mumble my thanks.

  I cling to my two remaining scraps of dignity; I haven’t actually pissed myself. And I have climbed to the top of Alpe d’Huez. Sort of.

  There is a hard core of hard men in and around British cycling in whose presence I merely shut up and listen. They are men who make little or no allowance for the fact that not everyone has been following the minutiae of their beloved sport for the past forty years.

  In their company, everything is different. Gone is that certain wide-eyed delight that newcomers like me and the Spandau Ballet chap can share and see mirrored in each other’s immature appreciation of the sport. Shortcomings, for newbies, are natural. Deficiencies in knowledge are acceptable, even if, in Gary Kemp’s case, the clothing has to be perfect. But not everywhere I look do I find such understanding. Sometimes it can be withering.

  During the last summer’s Tour of Britain (a race small enough for the teams, the organisation and the media to share hotels), I often found myself thrown to the wolves. Gathered together over a beer in the evenings, a wizened cast of cycling’s principal characters would recall races that had been won in dubious circumstances, riders who had overstepped the mark or team managers who had promised much and then disappeared into thin air. You had to know who the lead actors were. You had to be there.

  Ron Keeble was invariably there, loud, bawdy, sharp and funny, a vital presence over dinner and drinks at the end of every stage. He was, to use a cliché that covers a range of attributes, larger than life, or at least, larger than me. He drove the car for one of the race commissaries on the Tour of Britain, a macho job that is normally, and for good reasons, reserved for ex-riders. He had just the right amount of acquired wisdom and instinctive recklessness to weave an estate car in and out of a peloton along narrow country lanes.

  Such was his status that everyone assumed I knew him, and that he knew me, but no one had actually ever introduced us. After a few days the moment had passed where either of us could possibly have said, ‘Sorry. I didn’t catch your name.’ I found myself trying to sneak a glance at his accreditation, to no avail.

  So, we kind of drifted into a state of knowing each other through a prolonged period during which we were both playing for time, of referring to each other simply as ‘mate’, or still worse, ‘fella’.

  The 2012 Tour of Britain came and went, and we parted company as we had started, virtual strangers. All that I knew for certain of this sun-tanned, nattily dressed Londoner, was that once upon a time he’d been a rider, and that he was fizzing with obscure plans, pie-in-the-sky projects and business ideas, some of which sounded pretty plausible; like wrapping bike frames in customised vinyl to protect the paintwork, or a new pedal that would fit multiple different types of cleat. He was always onto something. I had taken a liking to him. He made me curious, too.

  A few months after the Tour, and because he’d invited me, I rang him up and went round to his house.

  ‘Bring your cycling shoes,’ he’d insisted. ‘You’re going to ride up a bloody mountain.’

  In Orpington? I thought. But I didn’t say anything. I just made sure I had my cycling shoes. If Ron told you to do something, then you were normally well advised to do it.

  The day had begun forbiddingly. I rode the ten or so miles from my place to his, misjudged the severity of the ride, and collapsed from sugar-depleted exhaustion at a Bromley petrol station on the way. One flapjack and twenty minutes later he answered his door, to find me and my (very humble) bike looking like something undesirable smeared across his doormat. He gingerly picked up my bike and stuck it in his shed, eyeing up the rust patches on the chain, and the worn out tyres with a simmering discontent he did well to contain. A neurotic intolerance of poorly maintained equipment is perhaps the only thing that unites every rider I have ever met.

  ‘It’s not about the bike, Ron,’ I quipped, merrily.

  ‘Yes it bloody is.’ We went inside.

  Ron and Gill had bought the house in the early 1970s. He led me through to the pleasant sunny kitchen while Gill left us to it. We could see through the French windows that autumn had just started to blow into the garden. We drank tea, and Ron doodled with a black biro as he listened to my questions. Very carefully, and with great attention paid to the shading, he wrote the word ‘Cyclist’ in a homespun, ornate font. That single word was it, really, that was the sole line of inquiry.

  Listening to him was like an immersion in an exotic language. The flora and fauna of the domestic cycling scene informed all his memories, a mystifying landscape of names and dormant institutions long forgotten. They tripped off his tongue: the Golden Wheel, the William Tell, the White Hope and something that sounded like the Wally Gimber, and probably was the Wally Gimber. And name after name of towering figures of yesteryear from a track scene so central to Ron’s life that he could barely conceive of a world in which they held little or no currency, men of the decimalisation era with names like Norman, Roy and Don. I could have stopped him and asked who they were and what the hell they were all doing in Kirkby that Tuesday night, but that would have got us nowhere. Ron’s narrative allowed for little deviation.

  He spoke in a code, even when asked the most superficially comprehensible question.

  ‘Where did you meet Gill, Ron?’

  ‘Ah.’ He looked up from his doodling towards the kitchen door behind which Gill was playing with one of their four grandchildren.

  ‘Well,’ he started, with great portent. ‘We was down Gillotts, and it had the Thirty-Four Nomads.’

  A Dictaphone, placed between us, recorded that sentence. I have listened back to it seven times, now, hoping to understand it. But there it is, in all its naked, impenetrable glory. Gillotts. Nomads. Thirty-four of them. You know.

  Ronald James Keeble was born just over the water from the Houses of Parliament, less than a year after the end of the Second World War. He grew up in the Elephant and Castle, an area that has consistently failed to acquire a satisfactory identity in the landscape of South London’s town planning.

  Some years after Ron came into the world, they turned the area into a vast network of dual carriageways and roundabouts, with subterranean passages and brutal shopping precincts that would define the location for half a century. Only now has the Elephant’s extraordinary proximity to Westminster been reflected in the potential of its real estate value, and the developers have started to land grab en masse. Gone is the archetypal Heygate Estate that flanked the arterial New Kent Road with its endlessly long, endlessly forbidding façade. Going is the pink-clad Elephant Shopping Centre, complete with indoor market and best remembered for housing the public enquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence.

  But, in Ron’s childhood, in those years of austerity and making do, Elephant and Castle remained, at least in part, resolutely flattened; scarcely a priority for the Greater London Council. Besides, the Luftwaffe had left its calling card in the shape of a series of burnt-out shells and buildings reduced to crumbling collapse. So it came as no surprise to me when Ron, nursing another cup of tea into which Gill had slopped one healthy teaspoon of sugar, suddenly remembered where he’d got his first bike from.

  ‘In a bomb crater, it was. The forks were bent, but I got that sorted.’

  It’s not quite tr
ue, of course. By now I was beginning to establish that such childhood memories often required visiting and re-visiting before the layers of obfuscation and fabrication are eventually peeled away. Before Ron had found that bike in a bomb crater, he’d already written off another one. A friend had lent him his, so that he could ride over to Millwall and visit a girlfriend who went by the appropriately post-war name of Sheila Mellish. On his way back from his liaison with Miss Mellish, he lost control of his mate’s bike. ‘I was coming down Blackheath Hill and I went under a lorry.’

  Blackheath Hill is very steep.

  I am struck, not for the first time, by the casual way in which riders recall life-threatening accidents. A few years later, and by this time he had become a proper rider, fate picked up where the lorry left off. Ron was lucky not to have been killed. ‘I smashed my back up. I was told that I wouldn’t walk again.’

  He was at the front end of a hotly contested points race at a track meeting at Earls Court.

  ‘I was going round Graham Webb for a point, and he lost it. And he took me up into the banking.’ The track at Earls Court was a temporary structure, installed just for the meetings and then dismantled. Health and Safety wasn’t a priority.

  ‘Well, I went over the top of the banking, fell down into the stalls that they’d made, and then fell through them down to the floor.’ When he opened his eyes and looked up, all he saw was the criss-cross geometry of the wooden scaffolding that supported the seating. In his concussed state, he assumed that he was lying at the bottom of a gas holder, looking up at the sky.

  A hard man, then. That’s what I think he is. But, it appears I am wrong. Ron Keeble smiles self-deprecatingly back at me.

  ‘I was soft. I don’t mind admitting it. I was a soft southerner. I never ever went abroad [to live]. I was a mummy’s boy. If, like now, they’d said you’ve got to go and live in Manchester, I wouldn’t have liked it.’

  And so Ron Keeble, unlike others more discontent with their lot back at home and dreaming of adventure, never really chanced his arm in the big bad world. Unlike so many who went before, he remained resolutely wedded to the British scene, the world of the Six-Day track meetings (sponsored for many years by Britain’s worst ever lager: Skol) and domestic honours. Not for him the privations of life on the road, he wanted his home comforts too keenly.