To mark LGBT History Month, 2013, Polari asked its contributors to recall a song that had an impact on their own stories.

‘Torment & Toreros’ – Marc and the Mambas
by Carl Stanley
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It’s nigh on impossible for me to pick a stand-alone song that changed my life; but there is one album which did: Torment & Toreros, by Marc and the Mambas.

It was the Sunday before Christmas, 1984. The last 24 hours had been my best ever – hanging-out with my best mate Rae-Marie and her boyfriend Saul in the various hang-outs where Birmingham’s Alternative crowd hung out; visiting a gay bar where I’d snogged some bloke for the first time; going to a nightclub for the first time where some stranger had given me cocaine for the first time; getting totally plastered; having sex for the first time – and Saul had just dropped me off, still tipsy…

Mom’s nose stayed buried in The Observer, no “Hi”, let alone a “Where’ve you been” when I walked in. Oh, so she ain’t talkin’ to me again? Well, that’s fine. Because, having acquired a taste for vodka, her disregard meant she wouldn’t notice me spirit hers to my bedroom. And I’m gonna smoke too. My older brother Aidan smoked anyway, so if she smelt it she’d suppose it was the stale hangover from his nasty habit…

Still smeared in yesterday’s make-up and stinking of sex and BO, yet super-soigné with Mom’s Smirnoff and my Marlboro, I browsed my records for something suitably dirty and urbane to play. Hesitating at Marc and the Mambas’ double LP Torment & Toreros, I’d only once played it in its entirety because … well, apart from a handful of foot-tappers I’d loved straight off, and that sleazy waltz riddled with ‘herpes’ ‘fucks’ ‘dick’ ‘whore’ and ‘masturbation’ which knowing Mom’d abhor I’d coerced myself to adore, the rest were turgid dirges I either didn’t have patience for or, with my limited life experience, hadn’t got. I felt worldlier today though, and it was definitely the dirtiest most sophisticated record I owned, so …

Acoustic guitars drifted in strumming no particular melody … after a few bars picked up by piano – its tango tempo as precise as the guitars’ weren’t … boozy violins … a tortured sax entered the fray, screeching shriller and shriller against the timpani thump-thump-thumping forth … an instrumental war of wills then POW! The overture collided into a prowling ‘Boss Cat’. I merrily miaow-oh-wow-wowed along, in the gaps between fanciful stories about matadors and fallen stars, ‘What you earn, heaven knows, it goes straight up your nose’, now I get it … sipping vodka.  There whumped an ominous BAM.

‘I was always a lonely boy’ confessed Marc, melancholy inching its spidery way upon my joy…    

I swigged some vodka…

‘I never acted like a boy’ mirrored me, Cindy dolls and princess dress-up, despising football and boys’ rough`n`tumble…

‘I noticed your eyes today, avoiding me today’ were Saul’s this morning. He’s playin’ it cool, I know he loves me or he wouldn’a done that I’d let it pass, eyeballing his expert lips.

My eyes wandered from wall to wall…

‘Thinking how lonesome I’ve grown, all alone in my room…’

`Til I’d met Rae these 2-D Siouxsies and Soft Cells and the Monroe and Harlow had been witness to my listless loneliness and might soon be again. I swigged more vodka…

‘So this is the big deal, the ultimate feeling’ rued Marc of his first time, guiltiness corroding the lustre of mine…

From the silence swelled a harpsichord lacerated with sadistic Hendrix thrashes, Marc seething ‘You forced me to love you’ like Saul had me with his forceful kiss, this baroque`n`roll masochism submitting to a ponderous saga of car crash suicide so sombre it could drive teetotallers to drink. I took another vodka swig then wilted on my bed…

‘And the clock on the wall…’

…watching my clock’s second hand tick slower than hours, slower than the song, willing myself into his psyche so he’d realize I was his destiny and `phone any second to tell me she was history…

At the phrase ‘you fake the kiss’ waves of what-ifs shivered my skin. I curled up…

‘A stupid fly, love’s little insect…’

Sucking my thumb as I did when feeling unloved and insecure, a synthetic snare drum hammered like a black heart…

‘Playing’ was Saul chancing lascivious glances over unsuspicious Rae’s shoulder.

‘Stealing the feelings’ was when he’d pressed me to admit “I love ya” just to claim it with a mute leer.

‘Pushing, your icy fingers’ were his pushy hands cold-heartedly groping my arse behind her back.

‘Your jealous mind so disapproving’ was the jealousy on his face as he’d said “Don’t kiss anyone else t’night” after I’d kissed that bloke.

‘And encouraged my fears’ by nourishing the insecurity I wore on my sleeve with his blow-by-blow boasts of older handsomer horse-hung conquests who weren’t virgins like me.   

‘You got your revenge for the love that I lent.’

Elegies to self-seeking eroticism and the torment of emotional manipulation reduced to embers any starry-eyed delusions I had that sex with Saul’d been the start of some grand amour, my eyes brimming at the realisation I’d been just a notch on his bedpost…

What if he’s at her’s tellin’ `er we did it, makin’ out it was me that came onto him?

…tears bleeding as ‘My Little Book of Sorrows’ recounted being bullied at school, flooding long after the overwrought climax to this torture-de-force, ‘Beat Out That Rhythm On A Drum’, had shush’d into thin air…

Too sapped to move, the stillness broken by sobs and the pht-pht-pht of the stylus stuck in the lock groove, I only dragged my corpse off the bed because Mom called “DINNER”. I wasn’t hungry. Toying with my food, parents who weren’t bothered about where their baby boy had been last night were oblivious to the tear-wrecked No7 staining his cheeks in zebra stripes, or that he was inebriated, or…well, Mom smelt nicotine but like I’d predicted she roasted Aidan for that. Then she turned on me.

“Just eat it, will you. I didn’t spend two hours slaving over a hot stove for fun. And hurry up, you stink, you need a bath!”

I scrubbed myself clean of Saul, holed my sad self up in my room, and other than venturing downstairs to eat, or out to the offie to blow the dough the Nans had sent me on Smirnoff, I stayed put replaying The Mambas’ miserablest moments all Christmas. I’d be fifteen in eight days, but if my spirits were as sallow then as they were now, I wouldn’t feel like celebrating the beginning of what’d undoubtedly wind up being a Rae-less year in this glum slog from womb to tomb…

Marc once described Torment & Toreros as ‘a nervous breakdown committed to vinyl’. Thirty years on, Torment & Toreros still invokes memories of that day – and sometimes even makes me shed a tear for the boy I once was. But having survived the bullies, having survived more heartbreaks than I care to remember, having survived drug and alcohol dependency and at least one nervous breakdown, today when I listen to Torment & Toreros, I can enjoy it is an album about survival. Thank you, Marc.

[Adapted from the autobiographical novel Kiss & Make Up by Carl Stanley.]