No more heroes any more…

I was thinking about my boyhood heroes last night. I don’t know why, but suddenly I was trying to remember who they’d been.

It often pops into conversation, the boyhood hero thing. Names get bandied about over a few pints – Sterling Moss, Bobby Moore, Freddie Truman, and someone will invariably comment that whoever it is was his boyhood hero. They’re usually sportsmen these boyhood heroes that get spoken about in the pub.

Interestingly, or maybe not, I’ve never had any sporting heroes probably because my interest in sport has always been passing at best (as in my brief and glittering stint as a loose-head prop for South Oxford colts). Of course my friends all had sporting heroes. Most of them grew their hair long and staggered around after swigging a mouthful or two of cider in an attempt to emulate the footballing drunk who was George Best.

I of course drank the whole bottle and recited Dada poetry at the bar.

My heroes didn’t do much sport. My first were fairly predictable- Robin Hood, The Lone Ranger, William Tell, the three (or four) musketeers, Guy Fawkes. I’m not sure how Jimmy Clitheroe got into the picture or for that matter Johnny Morris, but for a short period of time they were my heroes too.

Later as I moved towards my teens it was film stars, but not the ones of the time, my heroes were from the past. The greats - Bogart, Cagney, Trevor Howard, Peter Lorre - even Bella Lugosi was there for a while, before being replaced by Vincent Price.

Weeks later, as I began to think about shaving or at least wearing the great smell of Brut (splash it all over), the film stars were followed by pop star heroes - Bowie, Ferry, Bolan, and Barry Blue. Yes – Barry Blue… Hot shot, what a luck, someone gonna make you stop – yeah. Hot shot, got a lot, wonder when you're gonna drop – yeah. La-la-la-lei-lei lei-la-lei-la-lei-la-lei ... sorry, got a bit carried away there.

Of course for a long as I remember there’s been Bosch, Breugel, Dali, Tanguy, Ernst - but I’ve always viewed them more as role models than heroes, which probably says something about how I view reality (reality, there is no reality - reality is whatever you want it to be) or something.

At sixteen, seventeen at latest and almost before it had begun, the whole boyhood hero thing was over. I didn’t have any heroes any more, or as the Stranglers so eloquently put it a year or two later I didn’t have ‘No more heroes any more’.

Just what did happen to Leon Trotsky I wonder? For those seven weeks of summer including a school run Christian holiday to Dorset back in 1972, Leon was my real hero - even though I knew practically nothing about him. And then he was replaced by Che.

Well, better to die standing, than to live on your knees.

Boyhood heroes - where do they go I wonder? Did I wake up one morning and find myself hero-less, or was it a slower thing - my experience of life and the gaining of knowledge stripping away all the glory clothes that heroes must wear in order to be heroic?

Where is that beret? My trench coat? When did I last paint a lightning flash, blue and red, down the centre of my face?

‘We’ll always have Paris.’ But of course we didn't.

‘You won’t fool the children of the revolution.’ But of course they did.

And as for Leon – well he got an ice pick that made his ears burn.

All for one and one for all?
No more heroes any more?

Well, at least I still have my friends.
After all - I have many a friend in Casablanca, but somehow, just because you despise me, you are the only one I trust.