Carl Halling - Rescue of a Rock’n'Roll Child

Being a teacher at the Callan School of English was a dream job for me. It provided me with a social life on a plate, as well as enough money to finance the hours I spent each evening in the Champion public house in Wells Street where some time after 7.30pm after the final class’d ended, student and teacher alike would meet to drink and talk and laugh and do as they wished until closing time. I’d usually leave at about 10.30pm to catch the last train home from Waterloo, although sometimes I’d miss it and have to catch a later train. On more than one occasion I’d fall asleep on this train and end up deep in the Surrey hinterland. I can swear I spent one night wrapped in newspaper on a station bench. At other times, there’d be a party to go to, or the Callan’s disco, which’d be held on an occasional basis on Wardour Street.
Most of the teachers preferred to socialise with their own kind, butI favoured the company of the students, and at any given time it’d be almost impossible to extricate me from my circle of favourites from Italy, Japan, Spain, Brazil, Poland, France etc. This proved frustrating to my good friends Stash and Noddy when they were trying to organise rehearsals for a band we were supposed to be getting together. Thanks to me, this never happened despite enormous early promise: Noddy was a gifted guitarist from Brazil; Stash a brilliant singer-songwriter. He was also - like myself - a “resting” actor, in fact one of several among the Callan teachers. The latter were a fascinating diverse crowd, and I made many friends from among them, but closest of all was Stash. That is of course, apart from Rob who’d recommended Callan’s to me in the first place.
I spent my spare cash on clothes, cassettes, books…as well as rent during the months I spent as a tenant in Hanwell, a blue collar suburb close by to the more middle class area of Ealing, west London. My landlord Robin was a friend of my father’s from the London session world. He was a small bearded always nattily dressed Welshman especially gifted at Folk and Jazz,and an almost preternaturally glamorous figure with a Celtic wildness who was yet enormously warm and charming. Sadly this wildness was at least partly responsible for his early death in 2003, aged 54.
And then there were the hundreds I spent on a course in hypnotherapy which involved my learning the techniques of self-hypnosis at the hands of a distinguished Harley Street doctor, through which I hoped to find a cure not just for my drinking but the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder to which I was becoming increasingly subject in the late 1980s and which was a significant reason for its excessiveness. But it’d be false to suggest that I was anything other than blissfully happy during this period in my life. Any melancholy I affected - in my writings and elsewhere - should be viewed with great scepticism given that for me sadness was the ultimate mark of artistic and emotional profundity, and I coveted it with all the passion of one who was by nature essentially happy. Indeed it may be that it was this very tendency of mine towards carefree frivolity that prevented me really getting anywhere as an actor. It’s not that I didn’t fight, so much as I didn’t fight hard enough, or withsufficient ferocity. I’m not trying to suggest that I didn’t have my long dark nights of the soul, because of course I did, especially in the second half of the ’80s and beyond. However, even these may have been at least partially attributable to my obsessive need to appear to others as a fascinating melancholic. But looking back at my pre-Christian existence, the overwhelming impression I have is of a man whose primary emotional condition was one of utter exaltation and enraptured joy of life.
The piece below, “Strange Coldness Perplexing” provides some indication of my emotional condition during my time at Callan’s, including a tendency as I see it to veer wildly between the conscious effusive affectionateness I aspired to, and sudden irrational involuntary lapses of affect, as well as my intense devotion to my favourite students which was reciprocated by them with interest. It was forged using notes scrawled onto seven sides of an ancient now coverless notebook, possibly late at night following an evening’s carousal and in a state of serene intoxication. All punctuation was removed and extracts from the notes tacked together not randomly as in the so-called cut up technique but selectively and all but sequentially.

Strange Coldness Perplexing

the catholic nurse
all sensitive
caring noticing
everything
what can she think
of my hot/cold torment

always near blowing it
living in the fast lane
so friendly kind
the girls
dewy eyed
wanda abandoned me
bolton is in my hands

and yet my coldness
hurts
the more emotional
they stay
trying to find a reason
for my ice-like suspicion
fish eyes
coldly indifferent eyes
suspect everything that moves

socialising just to be loud
compensate for cold
lack of essential trust
warmth
i love them
despite myself
my desire to love
is unconscious and gigantesque

i never know
when i’m going to miss someone
strange coldness perplexing
i’ve got to work to get devotion
but once i get it
i really get people on my side
there are carl people
who can survive
my shark-like coldness
and there are those
who want something
more personal
i can be very devoted to those
who can stay the course

my soul is aching
for an impartial love of people
i’m at war with myself…

The Cult of Nowness

In early 1990, I lost my position as a Callan teacher. I begged for the return of my beloved job…not just in person, but by letter and through poor Rob, but the Callan authorities refused to be persuaded and I don’t blame them in the slightest. They’d shown incredible tolerance towards my insultingly slack approach to punctuality and other abuses of what was a very fair system for a good long time, until finally their patience snapped.
So…a happy time in the greatest job I ever held down for any length of time ended with the crazy eighties. And for me the closing of this decade of excess seems like the end of a golden age. It was the last of a triad marked by frenzied persistent social upheaval and artistic innovation, this taking place in particular within the two leading late modern forms of creative expression, namely the cinema and Rock music. Because Rock as I see it is far more than just a simple popular music derived from Rythym and Blues, Rockabilly, Boogie Woogie and so on. Rather it’s an immensely influential international subculture of varying artistic and intellectual substance which some cultural theorists have even gone so far as to describe it as a religion. And they have a point.
Rock has possessed a spiritual dimension since its inception, and an intellectual one since about 1965. And many would single the one-time Protest poet Bob Dylan out as the person who more than any other helped to invest mere Beat music with genuine artistic and intellectual substance. From Dylan onwards there’ve been many Rock artists who’ve looked to movements within artistic Modernism for inspiration - to the Romantics, the Decadents, the Surrealists, the Beats and so on - and it could be said that Rock has been the main engine of the avant garde impulse in the West since the late sixties, with the rebelliousness and nihilism this word entails.
That’s not to say however that Rock has been a wholly negative influence, because much of it has been positive and uplifting, and of considerable artistic value to boot. That said, more than any other art form in the last fifty years Rock has disseminated a culture of instant gratification throughout the West and so greatly contributed to the alteration of its moral fabric.
Those who like me were born in the mid 1950s, and so grew up in the sixties, were unavoidably affected on a deep and perhaps largely unconscious level by the post-war cultural revolution of which Rock was such an essential part; some of course more than others and I’d consider myself among these. I maintain that from quitting formal education aged 16 to coming to faith some two decades thereafter, I was in thrall to a cult of instant gratification that’s been growing progressively more powerful throughout the west since about 1955.
If what I say weren’t true, why would I not have countenanced a future for myself during those years? I mean in terms of establishing myself within a solid profession, starting a family, planning for middle age and beyond, and so on? Retrospect informs me that prior to my forsaking of alcohol, I viewed these concerns with an indifference bordering on contempt and it hurts me deeply to realise the extent to which I sabotaged my life through such a destructive worldview. Sometimes it seems to me that the only way I can deal with such bitter knowledge is to see myself as a social and professional misfit only by default. But to return to the post-Callan years:

Reluctantly delivered after almost two years from the shackles of a job I genuinely loved, I briefly revived my acting career thanks once again to the influence of my dear friend Astrid. She recommended me for the part of Feste for a production of “Twelfth Night” due to be staged shortly at the Jacksons Lane theatre in Highgate, north London. Somehow she knew the director Lesley, and after a successful audition, I set about re-learning Feste’s lines, and arranging the songs according to the original primitive melodies.
The songs were well-received, as was my performance, one woman even going so far as to tell me that I was the greatest Feste she’d ever witnessed. Once again, the Fool of Illyria served me well. In keeping with the festive spirit of the play, rehearsals and performances were followed and to a lesser extent accompanied by somep retty wild partying by myself and most of the members of the cast, and we were thick as thieves for a time, until the inevitable sad dispersal.
As the final decade of the 20th Century dawned, I was finding my public image as much a source of terror as exhileration, and possibly to a greater extent than had ever been the case. However, such was my abiding need to be noticed that I stubbornly refused to moderate my image. To be fair though it was tame in comparison to what it had once been, and the recently departed 1980s had been a decade known for its sartorial extremism and lapses of good taste, in the shape not just of the infamous mullet hairstyle, but frizzy perms, shoulder pads, leg warmers, ra-ra skirts, pixie boots and so on. Not that I wore any of these. But I did on occasion sport a bleached wedge of the type favoured by Princess Diana, George Michael and Green Gartside, as well as at various times, blue shoes, gold jeans, and turquoise earstuds.
Instead, I began to anaesthetize myself as never before against what I saw as nocturnal London’s ever-present aura of menace, which may or may not have been more intense than a decade previously. After all, I’d been attracting hostile attention for the way I looked since the early seventies. What’s more, years of hard living were almost certainly starting to take their toll on my nervous system. In addition to alcohol and nicotine, I’d been ingesting vast quantities of caffeine for years, although I may have stopped taking this in solid form by the onset of the nineties.
In early autumn 1990, I began another PGCE course, this time at the West London Institute of Education, now part of the University of Brunel, becoming resident in Road in nearby Isleworth. I began quite promisingly, and fitted in well, making a lot of friends, and as might be expected, excelled in drama and physical education. I didn’t drink during the day and on those rare occasions I did, it was just a question of a pint or so with lunch, and had mentally determined to complete the course. But as the following piece testifies, at night it was altogether another matter.
“A Letter Unsent” was first adapted in 2006 from a letter typed to an old Westfield friend Georgina, now a professional photographer in about 1990. When it was recovered, having never been finished, nor sent, it was as scrap paper, lost in a sea of miscellaneous mementos.

A Letter Unsent

Dear Georgina
I haven’t been in touch
for a long time.
Sorry.
The last time
I saw you
was in
St. Christopher’s Place.
It was a lovely evening…
when I knocked
that chair over.
I am sorry.
Since then,
I’ve had not
a few accidents
of that kind.
Just three days ago,
I slipped out
in a garden
at a friend’s house…
and keeled over,
not once,
not twice,
but three times,
like a log…
clonking my nut
so violently
that people heard me
in the sitting room.
What’s more,
I can’t remember
a single sentence
spoken
all evening.
The problem is…

A Thrilling but Lethal Lifestyle

My Teaching Practice was due to take place the following term but I was desperately behind in my work, so provisionally removed myself from the course in order to decide whether it was worth my carrying on or not. The authorities were in agreement with my decision. In the event I decided to quit, and met with the head of my course to discuss this, and she was very agreeable, making no effort to dissuade me.
However, rather than immediately return to my parents’ home I stayed on in Isleworth in order to rekindle my five-year old career as a deliverer of novelty telegrams. I also continued to work as a walk-on artist for the TV series “The Bill”, based in the London suburb of Merton, Surrey.
Still in Isleworth, I became half of a musical partnership formed with Mark a wild young singer-songwriter from Greater Manchester whom I met through an ad in the Stage newspaper for acts for a movable variety show he was putting together at the time. A true Renaissance man - actor, comedian, songwriter, performer, writer, film maker and thinker - Mark and I remain close friends to this day. I wanted to call the band Venus Xtravaganza, but we settled for Mark’s choice of The Unknowns…if we were ever called anything. We began by busking together in Leicester Square, and then settled down for rehearsals in the hope of getting some gigs. Early on, our repertoire consisted largely of early Rock’n'Roll and Motown songs, but before long we started filling out our act with originals, one or two by me, but most by Mark.
In the winter of 1991 I took off to the seaside town of Hastings for a month or so to attempt to pass a TEFL course down there. How vividly I recall the thrill of seeing seagulls hovering over central Hastings soon after arriving at the station for my interview, which I passed, but I couldn’t say it went well. I constantly avoided my interviewer’s eyes until she virtually ordered me to look at her, then saying something like: “I said look at me, not stare”. This as if to emphasize her belief that I didn’t stand a snowball’s chance in Hell of passing.
Winter 1991 was subarctic in a way I haven’t known an English winter to be since. Not literally of course, but I can remember wearing several coats just in order to be able to bear a cold that apparently doesn’t exist any more in this country.
I worked like a trojan but I was struggling terribly, tormented by OCD and its endless demands on my time and energies in the shape of rituals both physical and mental. I didn’t drink at all during the day, but at night I was sometimes so stoned I was incoherent. Predictably perhaps I was failed. I asked the authorities if they might reconsider, but they made it clear to me that their decision was final.
It was a bit of a disappointment, but I’d loved my time in Hastings, a beautiful old town that’s since become a major London overspill area, even while continuing the search for some kind of spiritual solution to my mental torment. This led me to a “church” in Claremont Road which was far from the kind of I was ultimately to seek out.
My beloved mother wrote me a long impassioned letter during my time there, and the following extracts from her letter may serve as an indication of my psychological and spiritual condition when she did: “…I had a chance to look at your library…I could not believe what I saw. These very strange books, beyond my comprehension, most of them, and I thought what a dissipation of a good mind that thought it right to read such matters…I feel very deeply that you have up to your present state, almost ruined your mind. Your happy, smiling face has left you, your humorous nature, ditto, your spirited state of mind, your cheerful, sunny, exuberant well-being, all gone. Too much thought given to the unhappiness and sad state of others (often those you can not help, in any way)…I’ve said recently that I am convinced that anyone can get oneself into a state of agitation or distress or anxiety by thinking or reading about, or witnessing unpleasant things, and the only thing to do is to, asmuch as possible, avoid such matters, to not let them get hold in the mind. Your fertile mind has led you astray. Why, and how?”
How many millions of mothers over the course of the centuries have asked this of offspring who’ve been inexplicably drawn to the shadowlands of life only to lose their way back to sanity? Only God knows. Most of course, succesfully make the journey back before settling into a normal mode of life, but the danger of becoming lost is always there, especially for those who remain in the shadows far beyond adolescence. Eternal adolescence is arguably one of the prime features of our era, facilitated by its exaltation of youth .
I recently read of a legendary Rock artist from the late seventies and early eighties born like me in the mid 1950s and about whom someone very close to him described as being obsessed by human suffering, both mental and physical despite being well into his twenties. His worldview, which also incorporated a preoccupation with the dark glamour of self-destructive genius, I see as remarkably akin to mine at the time I penned the words contained in the first paragraph of this piece, or when my mother wrote her impassioned letter to me. I was a puer eternus - which is to say an “eternal youth” - in my mid-thirties at the time, in thrall to the avant garde and its age-old love affair with antagonism and nihilism. It had already wreaked serious psychological damage, and physical and spiritual annihilation would surely have followed had I not been violently wrenched from its Svengali-like influence in time.
There are those who would insist that far fewer young people in the late ’00s are enthralled by the time-honoured avant gardist exaltation of self-destructive genius than in previous Rock eras. How true this is it is difficult to say, but what is certain is that the worldview still exists. Was it not a year or so back, that a certain angel-faced young Rock idol announced with apparent wistful regret that he’d destroyed beautiful things that were his for the keeping. Again I was reminded of the person I was a decade and a half ago, the eternal youth who romanticised self-destruction. That youth couldn’t be more different from the person I am today, who treasures and honours the things he loves, which are to a significant extent the simple things that nurture and sustain the individual and society. I can only pray that salvation comes to him as it did to me….I can only pray for them all…all the lost children of sad mothers.
The following summer of 1992, I made another attempt at passing the TEFL course, this time at Regent’s College in the beautiful north London park. But by this time I was drinking all day every day, and of course it was a disaster, even though I worked hard and even gave some good classes. I still have some video footage of myself giving a class and not for single second would anyone watching it believe that I was out of my head on booze.
It was a fabulous summer, and much of it I spent in a state of manic hyperactivity. Bliss it was to stride in the warm suburban evening sun to my local station with the Orb’s eerie “Blue Room” throbbing over and over in my head on my way to yet another long night of drinking and socialising to the point of ecstatic insensibility. I could have passed out on any one of these wild nights and awoken again in Hell, but that didn’t concern me.
The romantic decadence associated with the eighties was no longer even remotely current, and there was a new spirit as I saw it, a mystic techno-bohemianism which appeared to me to be everwhere in the early nineties. I wanted to visit as many clubs and venues as I could where it was being celebrated, but as things turned out I only ever went to one, CyberSeed in Covent Garden, which was poorly attended and only lasted a short time. However, had I not become a Christian, wild horses couldn’t have prevented me from further exploration.
Later on in the year I was attending yet another PGCE course, this time at the University of Greenwich in south east London. At this stage a reader might be forgiven for believing that I was actually addicted to courses. This one bore the suffix fe, meaning Further Education, which meant that I was training to teach pupils in sixth form colleges and other further education establishments.
As if all this weren’t enough, rehearsals for the play “Simples of the Moon” by Rosalind Scanlon had only recently begun. Again this was thanks to the kindness of my dear friend Astrid Hilne who was directing the play for the Lyric Studio, Hammersmith and through whom I had two small parts.
I felt so free back then…constantly on the go from six or earlier in the morning until well into the small hours and loving every second of my thrilling but lethal lifestyle. The following title piece serves to evoke it, and there’s a twilight mood to it, with the birthday boy performing his Dionysian solo dance in defiance of the ruin he’s so flagrantly courting.

Lone Birthday Boy Dancing