Pete Bennett - Pete - My Story

Mum is a really brilliant musician and it’s not just me, her proud son, who thinks that. She went to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama for four years, studying to become a concert violinist. Despite all the piercings and the spiky, multicoloured hair, leather clothes and fishnets, she was always very serious about her work and her art. She was really good at the violin, won a scholarship and everything, and she loved classical music, but it was punk music she really loved to listen to – Billy Idol alongside Yehudi Menuhin. She must have stuck out among the other young prodigies like a septic finger.

There was only one other punk in the college, an opera singer called Anna, who was Mum’s best friend and Rod Steiger’s daughter. Steiger was one of the biggest Hollywood stars of his day (he was the one in the famous scene with Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront , in which Brando’s character says ‘I coulda been a contender…’ He was playing Brando’s brother). Anna’s mum was the actress Claire Bloom, who had also trained at the Guildhall.

Mum was always short of money and had to make as much cash as she could at the beginning of her career by busking around the streets of London, meeting very different types to the ones studying at the Guildhall, and loving it. There was a pub on the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road called the Tottenham, under the towering shadow of Centrepoint, where a lot of the alternative music people used to go at the beginning of the Eighties, people like Boy George who hadn’t yet made it big with Culture Club, and the girls who would later become the hit group Bananarama. None of them had become stars by then and hung around the pub planning their big breakthroughs. Mum and the other buskers used to meet in the Diamond Dive, a little spit-and-sawdust concert hall downstairs at the Tottenham, to take acid, play music and socialize. That was where she met my dad.

‘I was going in there one lunch time,’ is how she explains it to me, ‘and there was this gorgeous-looking punk standing outside, six foot two and like a cross between Adam Ant and Billy Idol, spiky black hair – the most gorgeous bloke I’d ever seen. So I pinched his leather-clad arse as I went past. I didn’t think I had a chance in a million of going out with him. “Hello Gorgeous,” I said and to my amazement he started chatting me up.’

They had a drink and Dad asked her if she wanted to go out with him for a proper date that night. They agreed to meet by the jukebox at 7.30, and when she got there she found another friend, a gay New Romantics fan called Scottish John, sitting at the same table. She was eagerly telling him about her date, and found out he was also waiting for a hot date. Both of them were in a state of high excitement and it wasn’t until Dad came strutting over in all his glory that they realized they were both waiting for the same bloke. It turned out Dad had a bit of a warped sense of humour and had been watching them talking from across the room. Scottish John wasn’t too happy to find out he was being wound up, because Dad wasn’t gay, but at least it meant Mum got her date that night. He was called Mark Bennett and the rest of the evening must have gone well because they became a couple.

Mum was living in a squat at the time, and Dad had a room in Brockley in south-east London, so it made sense for her to move in with him. He might have had a roof over his head, but Dad didn’t have much of a plan for how he was going to make a living, apart from having a strong belief that sooner or later a film producer was going to spot him walking down the road, would see his potential and turn him into a film star. Funnily enough, it did actually happen in a way when Derek Jarman, a famous avant-garde gay filmmaker of the time, did spot him in the street, took him home to his flat and got him pissed. Jarman had made a famous film about punks called Jubilee , starring Toyah Wilcox and Adam Ant, so this could have been the moment Dad had been waiting for. Unfortunately he had a bit too much to drink, puked all over the great director’s carpet and got thrown out, so he missed his big chance. (It did at least mean he preserved his honour, of course.)

He and Mum must have made a formidable-looking couple. They both loved to dress up and sometimes he would even paint a white stripe across his nose, making himself look even more like Adam Ant. He was definitely a man of his time, and a bit of a peacock.

Earning the money, however, was down to Mum, so she used to busk with her friends Gini and Carolyn around the tube stations, calling themselves Humouresque. Green Park was the best site and they took turns there with all the other acts vying for the attention of tourists, shoppers and day-trippers, trying to collect as many coins as possible before the end of their shift. Business wasn’t too bad, partly because they were really good and partly because the sight of three outrageous punk girls playing classical music was new. Years later Nigel Kennedy, the renowned soloist, told Mum he’d got the whole idea for his own famously scruffy image from watching them when they appeared on the Russell Harty Show .

I don’t remember anything about Dad at that time to be honest. Mum says he was a bit mental. He used to be able to talk in dozens of voices at once, like Robin Williams does in the Disney version of Aladdin , when he plays the genie. I can do that too, so maybe I take after him in more ways than just looking like him. Maybe Dad had a touch of the Tourette’s, even if he didn’t have the tourettey movements like I have. Once you start looking for Tourette’s you can end up seeing bits of it in pretty much everyone, especially men.

He certainly wasn’t much good at getting jobs in those days. He tried being a milkman, but gave that up. He did have a typewriter though, and used to put a lot of time into composing letters of complaint about products and sending them off to the manufacturers concerned in the hope of getting some offer of compensation. That particular business venture didn’t meet with much success and so Mum’s busking was still all they had to live on. And once I was born poor old Mum still had to fork out for babysitters out of her money because Dad was always mysteriously too busy to look after me for her.

I guess they were never a match made in heaven. They’d even got a bit pissed off with each other during the pregnancy and Mum had stormed off and got another flat with Gini, which immediately made Dad want her back. While I was turning into a full-sized bump inside her she was living in a room in Queensway, being harassed by a nasty Greek landlord who wanted to get her and Gini out. He smashed a plate glass window, poisoned the goldfish, put superglue in the locks and tried all the tricks he could think of to make life unbearable for them, but Mum was not one to be intimidated easily. She didn’t intend to be put out on the streets with a foetus inside her, so she wrote a letter to her MP and got allotted a council flat in Peckham. She and Dad decided to give their relationship another shot and he moved back in with her to be there for my arrival and to have a go at the whole happy families thing.

While she was waiting for me to arrive Mum wanted to call me Sebastian, after a line in a song by Cockney Rebel, but she changed her mind once I was actually there.

‘You’d been through such hell coming out and you seemed so calm about it all,’ she told me later, when I was old enough to understand. ‘I remembered something from my Catholic childhood about St Peter being called “the Rock”, so I thought I’d call you after him.’

So that was me, ‘St Peter, the Rock’, finally out into the world and ready to roll in Peckham, deep in the heart of South London.