THE LIFE I LEFT BEHIND
Seventeen convictions. Thirty-one offences. One hell of a fucking detour.
The cell was hot.

Not warm.

Not uncomfortable.

Hot.

The kind of heat that crawls underneath your clothes and sits there, sweating with you.

I was forty-one years old and sitting inside Jamaica's General Penitentiary in Kingston, staring at a concrete wall.

Somewhere outside, life was carrying on.

Cars were moving through Kingston.

People were going to work.

Women were hanging washing out.

Kids were going to school.

Music was probably coming from somebody's radio.

And me?

I was sitting behind a wall wondering how the fuck I'd managed to get there.

There was no dramatic soundtrack.

No wise old man appearing through the bars to tell me I'd finally learned my lesson.

No bolt of lightning from heaven.

Just sweat.

Concrete.

Iron.

And the slow, horrible realisation that every road I'd travelled had eventually led me to this place.

I thought about the boy I'd been.

Fourteen years old.

Big mouth.

Cold boots.

Full of anger.

Convinced the world owed me something.

That boy had first appeared in a courtroom in 1974.

Twenty-seven years later, here I was.

Kingston.

Prison.

Forty-one.

And finally running out of excuses.

THE NUMBERS
Let's get the uncomfortable bit out of the way.

I've got a criminal record.

A proper, thick-file Northern rap sheet.

Seventeen convictions.

Thirty-one offences.

Twenty-seven years between the first time I stood before a juvenile court and the last conviction in Jamaica.

If you put all those numbers on a sheet of paper, it doesn't make for pretty reading.

Burglary.

Theft.

Criminal damage.

Assault.

Driving offences.

Drugs.

And plenty of other stupid, reckless shit along the way.

The sort of record that makes a respectable bloke clutch his wallet a little tighter.

And I understand that.

I'm not looking for sympathy.

I'm not writing this to make myself sound like some misunderstood outlaw.

I've already spent enough of my life believing that particular fucking fairy tale.

The truth is much simpler.

I kept fucking up.

And for a very long time, I thought that was somebody else's fault.

1974
FOURTEEN AND INVINCIBLE
7 October 1974.

Newton-le-Willows Juvenile Court.

Fourteen years old.

Think about that.

Fourteen.

At that age, I should have been worrying about football, girls, school, getting home before somebody noticed I'd been out too long.

Instead, I was sitting in court facing a burglary and theft charge.

I remember the bench.

It seemed enormous.

I remember trying to look hard.

Trying to make out I didn't give a shit.

Inside, I was sweating.

I'd broken into somebody's house.

There is no clever way of saying it.

No romantic version.

No “I was just a rebellious kid.”

I went into somebody else's home and stole things that didn't belong to me.

I remember the damp smell.

The carpets.

The floorboards creaking underneath my boots.

The adrenaline.

Then the panic.

Suddenly the great adventure wasn't so fucking exciting.

Three months in a juvenile detention centre.

And that's where I began learning the first lesson I was apparently determined to ignore.

Actions have consequences.

The trouble was, at fourteen, consequences seemed a very long way away.

You think about tonight.

Tomorrow.

The weekend.

Next year might as well be 2099.

I thought I was rebelling.

Against the police.

Against authority.

Against school.

Against parents.

Against the whole fucking world.

I had no idea what I was rebelling for.

I just knew I wanted to rebel.

And there is a big difference between having principles and simply being a pain in the arse.

I was the latter.

Five months later, I was back in court.

March 1975.

Burglary again.

Conditional discharge.

Twelve months.

You'd think that might have been enough.

You'd think I'd have gone home, looked in the mirror and thought:

“Right, Tommy. That's enough now.”

Did I?

Did I fuck.

25 April 1975.

Chester Crown Court.

Four burglaries.

Another offence taken into consideration.

Another three months in detention.

By September, I was back at Chester again.

Another break-in.

Another theft.

Two-year supervision order.

I hadn't even properly started shaving, and already I was becoming a regular customer of the courts.

Court.

Sentence.

Detention.

Release.

Back outside.

Same attitude.

Same mates.

Same stupid decisions.

Then back in again.

I thought I was living some exciting outlaw life.

Looking back, I can see what it really was.

A conveyor belt.

And I was walking straight along it.

1976
BORSTAL
12 October 1976.

Chester Crown Court.

Threatening behaviour.

Assault on a police officer.

Another stupid night.

Another fight.

Another example of me believing that being aggressive somehow made me strong.

The sentence was Borstal training.

Borstal.

Even the word sounds like cold concrete.

It wasn't a slap on the wrist.

It wasn't somebody telling you off and sending you home for your tea.

It was discipline.

Rules.

Early mornings.

Hard work.

Cold floors.

Rough clothes.

Iron doors.

And screws whose job was to make sure young lads like me understood that the world wasn't going to bend itself around our fucking egos.

I went in.

I took my punishment.

Eventually, I came out.

And somehow I still believed I knew better.

That's the really dangerous thing about constantly fucking up.

You stop seeing yourself as the common denominator.

You start looking for somebody else to blame.

The police.

The courts.

Your parents.

Your mates.

The judge.

The system.

Anyone.

Anything.

Except the bloke staring back at you from the mirror.

Me.

It would take me years to understand that.

1977–1981
THE FUCKING CYCLE
October 1977.

Shoplifting.

Dangerous driving.

Traffic offences.

Back to Borstal.

July 1978.

Taking a car without consent.

I can still picture how stupid it was.

The ignition.

The engine coming alive.

That dirty little rush you get when you're doing something you know you shouldn't.

At the time, it felt like freedom.

It wasn't.

It was another fucking chain.

January 1979.

Drunk and disorderly.

Mouthy with it.

July.

Car theft again.

August 1980.

Commercial burglary.

Two hundred and forty hours of community service.

Compensation.

Then December.

Two more commercial burglaries.

Breaching the community service order.

Six months in prison.

Proper adult prison.

By then, something frightening had happened.

Prison had become familiar.

I knew the smells.

The routines.

The doors.

The keys.

The corridors.

I knew what it felt like when that heavy metal door slammed behind you.

It should have terrified me.

Instead, I'd learned how to do time.

That is when you know you're in deep shit.

When prison stops feeling like a punishment and starts feeling like somewhere you know how to live.

6 February 1981.

Another burglary.

Six months.

11 December 1981.

Attempted burglary.

Going equipped.

Nine months.

And still I kept going.

THE THING ABOUT BEING A REBEL
I used to call it rebellion.

That's what I told myself.

I was different.

I wasn't going to live by everyone else's rules.

I was hard.

I was independent.

I was nobody's fucking fool.

What a load of bollocks.

There is nothing rebellious about destroying your own future.

There is nothing brave about ending up in a cell.

Nothing strong about making your family worry.

There is nothing courageous about frightening people who have done nothing to you.

I wasn't fighting the system.

I was feeding myself to it.

And I was getting very good at it.

1982–1987
THE OLD TOMMY DOESN'T DIE
August 1982.

Obstruction.

Another confrontation with the police.

A fine.

April 1983.

Shoplifting.

Six months suspended.

Then something strange happened.

Silence.

Five years.

No convictions.

For me, that was practically a miracle.

Maybe I was growing up.

Maybe I was changing.

Maybe I was getting better at avoiding the police.

I don't know.

Life isn't as neat as people like to make it sound afterwards.

We like turning our past into a story with a beginning, middle and end.

Real life is more like a fucking skip full of broken furniture.

You climb out.

You fall back in.

You meet people.

You lose people.

You get lucky.

You get stupid.

You learn something.

Then forget it. 



Not long after I headed to London and stayed out of trouble, but a few years later I fucked up again.

1 March 1987.

Horseferry Road Magistrates.

Criminal damage.

Public order.

A beer-fuelled night.

A smashed window.

A mouth full of abuse.

Thirty quid fine.

The old Tommy was still there.

He hadn't gone anywhere.

He was waiting for an excuse.

Then came thirteen years.

Thirteen years can change a man.

You get older.

People you knew start dying.

Others disappear into drink, drugs, prison or whatever else life throws at them.

You travel.

You see the world.

You realise that being the hardest bastard in a pub means absolutely nothing once you step outside your own little postcode.

The world is enormous.

And eventually, mine took me all the way to Jamaica.

2001
THE WALL
October 2001.

Kingston.

Twenty-seven years after that fourteen-year-old boy first walked into court.

I was forty-one.

I should have known better.

But knowing better and doing better are two completely different things.

30 October 2001.

Halfwayree Resident Magistrates' Court.

This wasn't burglary.

This wasn't stealing cars.

This wasn't smashing a window after too many beers.

This was serious.

Class A drugs.

Possession.

Supply.

Attempting to export controlled substances.

The courtroom was suffocating.

Heat pressing against the walls.

Sweat running down my back.

Diesel fumes drifting in from Kingston.

And underneath everything else, fear.

Real fear.

The kind you can't drink away.

The kind you can't punch.

The kind that sits in your stomach and tells you you've fucked up properly this time.

The sentences came.

Possession.

A fine or six months' hard labour.

Supply.

Admonished and discharged.

Attempting to export.

Three years' hard labour in Jamaica's General Penitentiary, plus another fine or additional time.

That was the last conviction on my record.

30 October 2001.

End of the line.

And then came prison.

The General Penitentiary.

Heat.

Concrete.

Overcrowding.

Violence.

Disease.

Survival.

Whatever bullshit I'd told myself about being a rebel finally died there.

Because you can pretend you're hard when you're outside.

Inside a place like that, nobody gives a fuck about your mythology.

You're just another man behind a wall.

WHAT THE PAPER DOESN'T SAY
Seventeen convictions.

Thirty-one offences.

1974 to 2001.

On paper, it's tidy.

Dates.

Courts.

Charges.

Sentences.

A file.

A number.

But paper doesn't tell you what happens to the people on the other side.

It doesn't tell you what it's like for somebody to come home and find their door kicked in.

It doesn't tell you what a shopkeeper feels when they see their window smashed.

It doesn't tell you about the fear.

The anger.

The sleepless nights.

The families.

The victims.

Paper reduces everything to words.

Life doesn't.

And that is something I understand now that I didn't understand then.

When you're young and full of your own importance, you think you're the centre of the universe.

Your anger matters.

Your mates matter.

Your money matters.

Your next drink matters.

You don't think about the damage.

You think about yourself.

Getting older has a nasty habit of removing that bullshit.

You stop looking at what happened to you.

You start looking at what you did.

That's a much harder thing to face.

NO FAIRY-TALE REDEMPTION
I eventually wrote much of this story down in the prison diaries that became Nightmare in Jamaica.

Going back into those memories wasn't some wonderful healing experience.

It was fucking grim.

You open doors you've spent years keeping shut.

You smell things.

Remember faces.

Hear voices.

Remember fear.

And perhaps worst of all, you remember yourself.

There was nothing glamorous about that life.

Nothing.

No glory in a cell.

No glory in handcuffs.

No glory in disease.

No glory in wasting years of your life.

No glory in building a reputation that only impressed idiots and frightened decent people.

I used to think I was an outlaw.

A rebel.

A man who didn't give a fuck.

The truth was much less romantic.

I was a fucking liability.

To myself.

And to other people.

Eventually, I had to accept that.

Then life changed.

The bricklayer's trowel gave way to band management.

I found myself in London.

Notting Hill.

Music.

Gigs.

Musicians.

Characters.

Steve Dior.

Big Alan Clayton.

Rainbow George.

All the rock 'n' roll lunatics and West London characters who somehow became part of my next chapter.

It was a strange journey.

From prison walls to backstage doors.

From courtrooms to music venues.

From being the bloke people crossed the road to avoid to becoming the bloke standing on a stage helping put gigs together.

But I never forgot where I'd come from.

Because you don't get to erase your past.

You only get to decide what you do next.

THE TURNING POINT
People like a dramatic turning point.

They want a moment.

A revelation.

A religious experience.

A book that changed everything.

A woman who saved you.

A sunrise.

Some fucking Hollywood nonsense.

That wasn't me.

I just got tired.

Tired of prison.

Tired of looking over my shoulder.

Tired of lying.

Tired of making excuses.

Tired of seeing disappointment in people's faces.

Tired of being a middle-aged bloke with a thick criminal file and not much else to show for years of stupidity.

Mostly, I got tired of myself.

That was the beginning.

Not redemption.

Not sainthood.

Just exhaustion.

I didn't suddenly become a different man.

I started making different decisions.

One at a time.

Walking away from arguments.

Saying no when easy money came knocking.

Taking responsibility.

Admitting when I'd fucked up.

Learning that strength isn't always about throwing the first punch.

Sometimes strength is refusing to throw one.

THE LIFE I LEFT BEHIND
I can't change 7 October 1974.

I can't unbreak the doors.

I can't undo the fear I caused.

I can't give people back things I stole.

I can't pretend those years didn't happen.

And I won't.

Because that would be another lie.

The past is written.

But the future isn't.

That's the strange thing about life.

You can spend twenty-seven years walking in completely the wrong direction and still, eventually, turn around.

It doesn't erase the miles you've walked.

It just means you stop walking the wrong way.

For years I thought the hardest thing a man could do was stand his ground.

Never back down.

Never show weakness.

Never admit defeat.

I was wrong.

Sometimes the hardest thing a man can do is stop.

Stop fighting.

Stop blaming.

Stop pretending.

Look himself in the eye and say:

“You fucked this up.”

Then turn around.

And walk the fuck away.

That's the life I left behind.

And thank fuck I did.