Monday, 9th January 1984
I hate school sometimes, I f***ing hate all the 4th years and the 5th years — especially all the girls who think their the real Punk Rockers of this school (Punk for a day!). They walk around with their “fake” spiked hair, dressed in black with crap “bought” chains and crap Punk badges, like they know all about Punk Rock. GOD I COULD KILL THEM!!!!
Who keeps a diary — who actually can be bothered to put pen to paper in order to document their lives and intimate thoughts on a daily basis?
I recently exhibited a group of hand-painted leather jackets in homage to my teenage obsession with the avant- garde band Siouxsie and the Banshees. First shown in the form of a fashion show, for this next outing they were pinned to the wall like a suite of Picassos in my studio in Hackney Wick.
Initially, I wanted to show the short film of the fashion show in the back room, but I couldn’t stop the daylight pouring through the Crittall windows from bleaching out the projection, so I was forced to move into a darkened corner leaving me with a blank wall at the 11th hour… but what to do?
In the end, after a sleepless night, I decided to print extracts from the diaries I kept when I was a teenage banshee in the mid-Eighties. I set about curating the relevant entries that highlighted me desperately wanting, but not being able to afford, a leather jacket — and descriptions of the multiple other leather things I appropriated while trying to save up enough money for said jacket, all threaded through with mentions of the band like a string of beads that beautifully held my life together.
Peppered throughout are stories of bunking off school, accepting lifts off strangers, sleeping on their floors
Thursday, 26th January
Crap day at school — I hate it — design project must be finished for tomorrow — F*** THEM! — I painted SIOUXSIE on my jacket instead. I’ll just have to get bollocked.
Peppered throughout are stories of travels up and down the country with Dave, Simon or Jason with the Mohican… bunking off school, accepting lifts off strangers, sleeping on their floors… or on park benches, after excessive amounts of alcohol or combinations of drugs and missing the last bus hundreds of miles from home, giving no thought whatsoever to anything other than getting to the gig on time.
It marks a time when we were god knows where with god knows who, without our whereabouts monitored on an app by our parents… oh the sex, drugs and the rock ’n’ roll of it all…
These diary entries are a testament to a time when we freely expressed our unedited selves, they were private thoughts, never meant to be shared, our dirty little secrets hidden under lock and key from our parents… or our best friends. It’s what we did in those days. We came home from school, locked ourselves in our bedrooms and poured out our feelings: if someone pissed us off, when we got a bollocking at school. Oh, and the endless unrequited loves.
Wednesday, 8th February
LONDON — Me and Jason skived off school all day to go down wonderful London for a doss and nobody knows! — met him at bus station at 8.45am. London is ACE! — got fantastic pair of red and black leather and suede boots — £21 — ACE! We got laffed at, pointed at, two people took our photos and I might be on the TV as I walked behind Steve Blackwell. Thumbed a lift and arrived home at 8.30pm. The bad news is that Will Redfern saw us on bus and he will report back to Martin that I’m going with JASON! — NO! please not — I love Martin, NOT Jason.
Who hangs on to these things in a world that has given itself over to the digitalised age? I imagine hundreds of personal documents have been marched to the tip along with many a coveted record collection because objects take up too much room in our tiny spaces and music can be downloaded and carried with us at all times within the comfort of our pockets.
What surprised me about the show was how affecting the extracts were for the people who visited the exhibition; they provided a moment of unedited nostalgia for those of us who lived through the Eighties. But I was genuinely surprised by the reaction of the younger generation — who seemed to appreciate a moment in time when one could be just themselves without hiding behind the edited masks that people use on social media.
In an age where individual thought is slowly being ironed out by Grammarly, it’s refreshing to hear your own voice declaring to the world that everything’s either “DEAD GOOD!!” Or “ACE!!”
