I Owe You Nothing. Luke Goss
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parents think their kid is too lazy to go to the toilet in the middle of the night. Let me tell you, no kid is so lazy that he wouldn’t walk the twenty yards to the toilet when he knows what will happen the next morning if he wets the bed. Nobody does it through choice, nobody. You wake up in the morning and you lie still, and for a moment or two you can convince yourself that you haven’t done it, and then you roll over and hit that horrible cold wet patch. It’s disgusting. You hate yourself.
I’ve seen Matt work himself up into a terrible state, chanting to himself before bed to try to make himself wake up, and yet he still wet. He went through hell. Mum bought a device with a buzzer that sounded the minute even a drop of water touched the sheet: many a night I’ve woken up, in the next room, to hear Matt’s buzzer going off and he was still sound asleep. I’d have to go in to him to wake him. Then he might climb into bed with me – and sometimes, before morning, he’d wet again, in my bed. It made him so utterly miserable. I’ve seen that panicky, frightened look on his face so many mornings and I’ve hated it.
You can try all the tricks that people suggest, nothing works. You can go to the toilet ten times before you go to bed, you can stop drinking five hours before bed, your mother can get you up and take you to the toilet when she goes to bed. Nothing works. You could be in a desert, seriously dehydrated, and you’d still wet the bed. It is not something you can control.
Tony had the idea of putting a chart up on the wall in our kitchen, with ticks and crosses for when we were dry or wet. Gradually my crosses changed into ticks, but Matt’s stayed as crosses: I don’t think that helped him.
I understand what a terrific burden it is on a mother, having to wash sheets every day. But as soon as the kid is old enough, I think the parents should get him involved in washing his own sheets. They should try not to see it as such a big chore that they end up taking their anger out on the child, giving him an even bigger hang-up about it.
It caused problems for Matt right through his childhood. He could never go away on school trips or stay over at a friend’s house – and I never did, either. We always made a joint excuse. I would never have gone without him, I always felt his problem was mine, too.
My Mum, Tony and I walked up to the counter of the music shop in Fleet, near our Camberley home. The assistant said, ‘Hello, Mr Phillips, do you want it now?’ He pulled up from behind the counter an electronic drum kit. I couldn’t believe my eyes, and I was so excited my legs were shaking. It was the best, the greatest, most wonderful present I have ever been given. My mum says I carried it to the car with such reverence, as if it were a crate of delicate china.
I was twelve years old, and they had scraped together the money to buy me a £400 kit, with eight pads. I had dreamed about owning a drum kit all my life, from when I was a toddler and drove Mum mad banging spoons against saucepan lids. I had been in trouble at school and at home for endlessly drumming rhythms with my fingers. I had fantasized about having my own kit, and now I did. It was a terrific gesture by Mum and Tony because they could ill-afford the money at that stage of our lives, after we had just returned from Cheddar. They had even been considering paying for it in instalments, but in the end had managed to put all the money down at once.
Matt had been given a saxophone, and lessons. He never progressed much beyond painstakingly picking his way through ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’, although if you hear Mum talk you’d think he was orchestral standard. I’m glad he never persevered with the sax because he might have ended up concentrating on that and not singing, which would have been a great loss. He used the sax to great effect to impress girls, but when they asked him to play something he usually had an excuse ready.
One of the nicest things about the present was that it was not for Christmas or a birthday, it was simply an extra loving gesture, and I know that Tony was the main force behind it, so I owe him an enormous debt. Looking back, they must have been mad buying a drum kit for a twelve-year-old, especially if they wanted to stay on friendly terms with the neighbours. But because I was so desperate to play, and because I worked so hard at it, it was no time at all before I could do it properly. Our first neighbours, though, did take the soft option – they moved. After that we had a crowd of young people living next door and they did not seem to mind. Mum and Tony insisted that I never played late at night, so I don’t remember too much friction. Mum knew how desperate I had been to have drums, and she appreciated that I had to learn, so she was my defender. When she said ‘Not now, Luke’, I stopped, however itchy my fingers were.
‘If Luke is interested in something, it doesn’t take him long to master it,’ she says. ‘I don’t blame the neighbours for moving, I think I would have too if I’d had a choice! But within a couple of months he was making professional-sounding noises on his drums, and it just got better and better. The most irritating thing was not the noise, it was trying to get him to do anything else.’
It is hard to describe the pleasure I had from owning that kit. Every time I went into my bedroom, I forgot whatever else I was supposed to be doing and sat down at the drums. When I woke in the morning it was the first thing I looked at, because it was a huge kit that filled half the bedroom, and for a few weeks I had to keep reminding myself that it was really mine.
There were times in those first few months when I felt so frustrated by the limits of my ability; when I felt like stabbing the drum kit with a knife; when my aching ankles would not do what they were supposed to do and when I could hear in my head what I wanted it to sound like, but I simply did not have the muscle development to produce that sound. But I worked at it every day, until my arms ached, my fingers bled and my head span.
I had one drum lesson at school in a lunch break, but it was simply a matter of banging sticks on a desk, and I was able to teach myself much better at home. Learning any instrument comes down to practice, practice and more practice, and because I enjoyed it I never found that a struggle.
What is the first thing a boy who plays the drums does? He forms a band. There were a group of other kids at school who were keen on the idea, but I was the main force behind it. Matt and I met Craig Logan, who was a year younger than us, when we started at Collingwood School. He came round to our house and we gave him a lift home on the back of one of our bikes; he decided we were completely crazy because we cycled across people’s gardens. Craig’s family were resolutely middle class – big house, two cars on the drive, so clean that you felt you couldn’t stand on the carpet – and Craig had been brought up to be more conventional, less rebellious than we were.
Craig had a bass guitar. Another mate, Peter Kirtley, played the keyboards. He was always known as ‘Little Pete’, which is ironic because he is now over six feet tall. He still plays, and his band has just been signed by a record company. His father was a jazz musician, so there was no problem about rehearsing at his house.
We called the first band Caviar. We didn’t know what caviar was, but it sounded posh. We dressed like the early Duran Duran: long hair, frilly shirts, earrings. With hindsight, we probably looked and sounded dreadful, but at the time we thought we were fantastic.
My hair and my slavish interest in music did not do me any favours with the teaching staff at school, and neither did my refusal to conform. We’d had a fairly gypsy-like upbringing, travelling about and meeting lots of different people through Tony’s and Mum’s work. We had never been treated like children, and we found it hard to fit into a vast school of 2,000 pupils where there was no scope for any individuality. I didn’t like school, I felt too old to be there and I desperately wanted to get on with my life. It did little to prepare us for the harsh realities of life ahead: one simple lesson about the difference between gross and net might have saved Matt and me a small fortune.
No doubt there were some kids who got what they wanted from that school, who enjoyed it and did well there. But I felt let down and betrayed by the whole system.
I could not understand – then or now – why there had to be such a formal gulf between teachers