Chatham is a town of fisticuffs & whoring, working-class conservatives

 

pdf available over at the internet archive

 

“Then Thatcher came in and they told me I had to get a job. So I applied to art school again, and got in and I was supposedly there for a year and a half, but I wasn’t. I was playing music, mainly in Germany. I was doing poetry and painting from home, and my father went into prison for drug-smuggling, and any money that my mother got dried up. So I was expelled for bad attendance and refusing to paint any pictures within the college, writing what they said was ‘obscene’ poetry. And I was running my own little press, putting on our own gigs. My whole point was not to work. That’s why I wanted to be an artist and that’s why I wanted to be a student, and that’s why I wanted to play music – I didn’t want a real job. I worked for six or seven months in the dockyard, one day fruit-picking and four weeks in a mental hospital. Other than that, I did 15 years on the dole, two or three on the self-employed allowance scheme. I’ve never been forced into doing anything I don’t want to do. Every mistake I’ve ever made is my fault.”