Boy Wanted on Savile Row E-Book

Timothy Everest

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 344

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

A DAILY MAIL BOOK OF THE WEEK 'Everest is truly dedicated to his profession… He deserves to be known as the Welsh Ralph Lauren or Giorgio Armani.' – Roger Lewis, Daily Mail The son of restaurateurs, young Timothy Everest wanted nothing more than to be a racing driver. This was not to be, but little did he know that a job he took at age 17 – as a sales assistant at Hepworths in Milford Haven – would set the trajectory for success to come. Boy Wanted on Savile Row is the remarkable story of Everest's meteoric rise in the British fashion industry. Starting in the 1980s and studying under Tommy Nutter, the rebel of Savile Row, while rubbing shoulders with the likes of Steve Strange and Boy George, he branched out on his own the following decade. Here he initially styled bands and pop stars, before spearheading the 'Cool Britannia' generation and becoming the face of the New Bespoke Movement. After earning over 3,500 clients, including Tom Cruise, David Beckham and Jay-Z, to name but a few, Everest turned his hand to tailoring for film, creating some truly iconic pieces for such franchises as James Bond and Mission Impossible. In this revealing memoir, featuring a wealth of famous names and celebrity anecdotes, Timothy Everest details the evolution of British tailoring that has shaped the way we view and buy our clothes.

Leseprobe

First published 2024

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Timothy Everest, 2024

The right of Timothy Everest to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 80399 390 4

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

For my wife Catherine andmy daughters Carina and Alyssia.

I’d like to thank everybody who has worked for usbecause without them there would be no me.

Timothy Everest

Contents

1 The Apex

2 Boy Wanted

3 Malcolm

4 Jogger Muggers

5 Go East

6 Build It and They Might Come

7Mission Impossible

8Vanity Fair

9 Paul Smith

10 Big in Japan

11 Saying Goodbye to Tommy

12 M&S

13 Oscars

14 DAKS

15 David Beckham

16 And Action!

17 Levi’s

18 Jay-Z

19 Rapha

20 MBE

21 Julian & James & Goatee

22 Teaming Up with Goatee

23 Start All Over

Author’s Notes – Peter Brooker

Resources

1

The Apex

The apex is the point at which you are closest to the inside of the corner, also referred to as the clipping point. Once you have hit the apex, you should be able to start increasing the throttle.

It’s very common for drivers to apex too early. The racing line apex is often out of view at the point of turn in or further round the corner than you expect.

Every Thursday, a tailor used to set up a stall at Canterbury Market and for £5 you could commission a pair of trousers to your exact build and fit. As I think back to the genesis of my burgeoning fascination with clothes, my Thursday jaunts to Canterbury were what they refer to in astrophysics as the singularity – a context within which a small change can cause a large effect. I was obsessed with trousers. At that time, high-waisted trousers, three-button jackets with patch pockets on the side, platform shoes and tank tops were all the rage.

I used to wear those high-waisted trousers – all the way up to my armpits. The rise was accentuated even further because of the platform shoes, my very long legs and disproportionately small torso. This earned me the nickname ‘Mini BOD’, which my father would call me whenever I walked into the room.

Fashion, along with the music scene, would move very fast. You could follow the looks of the day through the prism of the music. My taste in clothes was always informed by the music movements and what people would be wearing to the clubs. And the late 1970s were a great time for music. You had disco (the Bee Gees, Michael Jackson), you had punk rock (the Clash, the Stranglers), and electronica was really taking off (Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream). Part of going out was always dressing up and being able to put your look together. You had to be a chameleon. One night you might be wearing ripped Levi’s and studded jean jackets snarling ‘God Save the Queen’; the next, you’re wearing sequined jumpsuits and thrusting your hips to ‘Night Fever’.

I was living in Kent at the time, and with my education already going down the plughole, my parents had reluctantly resigned themselves to the fact I was going to be a dropout. Fashion and music aside, the only other thing that captured my attention growing up was the world of motorsports. Fundamentally, I had huge aspirations to be a racing driver.

A couple of my close friends and I saved up enough money and each bought the same silver CB 250N Honda Super Dream; the reason being, in a Honda Super Dream one could go from a 50cc to a 250cc straight away without having to take your driver’s test – thus, enabling the driver to go from 40–50mph to 100mph, which resulted in many unfortunate deaths.

Mine was a TKT 314T. Our model numbers were sequential. My friends’ were 312, 313 and I was 314. We roared around with reckless abandon, tearing through the local parishes and pockets of small villages that encircled Kent, trying desperately to reach the magical 100mph down the Thanet Way. Always in vain, however, as Super Dreams would max out at 96mph.

Racing around like lunatics with my friends merited me a sense of freedom. I took great pride in my Super Dream and meticulously cared for its upkeep. As I sped (quite literally) through the barriers of adolescence into adulthood I developed an enormous sense of independence.

However, my burgeoning career as a juvenile delinquent was drastically truncated when my mother, bless her, gave me two weeks to get a job – or else. I went to work in a shop called Lenleys, a deconstructed department store composed of little shops scattered around the butter market outside Canterbury Cathedral. Lenleys were suppliers of fine furniture and soft furnishings. There was a gay couple that used to run the soft furnishings department and there was more innuendo dished out by these two filthy minds in a morning’s work, than in an entire series of Are You Being Served?

It was hilarious and I loved every minute of it.

The fun was soon curtailed as my parents decided it was time to move to Wales and start a new life running a restaurant. My grandfather, who was an underwater demolition expert, helped facilitate the move by transporting my Super Dream in the back of his van, along with all my other hopes and aspirations. Part of the deal of my parents buying the restaurant was securing a job for me as junior sales assistant in a company called Barretts, in Portfield, near Haverfordwest.

Six months later, it was an early summer’s day and I was out on my Super Dream, ripping down a country lane and speeding in my usual feckless manner when disaster struck. A local teacher in a quite beautiful gold Ford Granada was overtaking an Electricity Board van around an apex where all the grass had grown high.

What happened next was a blur of swerving, tyres screaming, and the horrible ‘GUTHUNK!’ noise that can only be made with the sharp impact of large metal hitting large metal at high velocity. The obligatory somersaults ensued as I was catapulted into the long grass, rolling ungracefully before coming to rest a foot from a lamppost. My Super Dream was in bits, its metallic guts splayed across the asphalt like one of those disembowelled badgers you’d see that had fallen victim to roadkill. The teacher’s car was also written off, I’d later learn, but assumed as much at the time. My knee suffered severe lacerations, and it must have looked pretty grim because when my mother arrived at the crash site, she took one look at it and burst into tears.

At the hospital they stitched me up. It needed fifty-two stitches in all. During the following months my spirits were high but my movements were quite restricted, to put it mildly. My knee and ankle locked up so badly it was as if the ligaments and thin tissue that binds the two had signed a secret treaty that an irreparable, implacable position would be for the greater good. To this day, I still have problems with my foot, but I’ve always considered myself fortunate to limp away from a crash of that magnitude. I’ve had friends who also believed themselves indestructible come off second best in those kind of situations with amputations or worse.

While I was busy doing very little but convalescing, I got a message through from my Great-Uncle Douglas that they were looking for a sales assistant in Hepworth’s. Hepworth’s was a thriving national chain of men’s ready-made and made-to-measure suits based in Leeds. Back in those days, if you were looking to purchase your first suit, Hepworth’s was one of the first places you would think to shop. Alongside the Fifty Shillings Tailor and Burton Menswear, Hepworth’s ruled the roost as far as accessibly priced men’s clothing was concerned for close to a century. They were beginning to reach the end of their rule, however, when I joined the business, and were to be absorbed entirely by Next plc by 1985.

Initially I thought it would be a bit boring. Tailoring in an old man shop? I’m not really into that.

‘They’ll pay you about £2.50 more a week than in your other job at Barretts,’ my great-uncle said.

‘That’s quite good,’ I replied, itching my ankle down the thin aperture of my ankle cast with a sewing needle. ‘That’ll buy me a lot of petrol for my new motorbike.’

‘Fine, just don’t repeat that crap to your mum. She’s scared you’ll end up like your Uncle Andy.’

My Uncle Andy had suffered a terrible motorcycle accident on the Guildford bypass twenty years before, breaking nearly every bone in his body. My grandmother was given the arduous and thankless responsibility of returning him back to Wales and nurturing his broken body back to health over the course of eighteen months.

Unfortunately for my dear grandmother’s ticker, Uncle Andy had the racing bug. Once he was back on his brittle feet, he went straight down to the racing track in his souped-up Angular, nicknamed the ‘Jangular’ (a hybrid of the Jaguar Angular). The Jangular was a 1100cc with a straight-six E-type brace engine. The only drawback was it lacked the torque and dexterity to manoeuvre efficiently, if at all, around corners. Uncle Andy would often be seen careering off the track at 100mph when attempting to apex the corner at a complete opposite lock.

His death wish was not exclusive to car racing. In 1973, Uncle Andy saw the film Live and Let Die and was profoundly influenced by the scene where James Bond escapes Kananga’s crocodile farm on a Glastron speedboat and is subsequently chased by Kananga’s henchmen through the watery plains of Louisiana. This proved to be a transformative encounter in his evolution of thrill-seeking adventures and, together with his mate Rob, he bought the same Glastron speedboat days after watching the film.

He would hitch the Glastron to his Plymouth Barracuda, which he sprayed white with purple pinstripes to match the colour scheme of the boat, and with me and his girlfriend in the backseat, we’d tour the west coast of Wales, the soundtrack to Shaft blaring out of his eight-track stereo.

Once that novelty subsided, he got into racing karts. Initially, Uncle Andy showed some reluctance because racing karts had the reputation of being something kids would be forced to do before they were old enough to race proper cars. While that has some semblance of truth even today, karting is one of the purest and most economical forms of racing. With karting, you get to race four times. Three of those will be rounds of heats, which will ascertain where you start on the grid for the final race. This extra time on the track allowed drivers to hone their craft, learn about understeer, oversteer and become one with the kart. When Uncle Andy upgraded to a better one, I bought his first kart from him. And once again, just like I had been when I first drove my Super Dream, I was hooked.

We raced both the long and short circuits of Donnington at breakneck speeds. Our lap times were so fast that we defeated even those set by racers on the Moto GP bikes. Sure, they could outsprint us down the straights, but we were quicker around the corners. As my Uncle Andy would say, we went like ‘shit off a shovel’. It was a great time, not only was I doing what I loved but it got me out of the doldrum of Wales as I travelled the country racing on different tracks.

With my newfound racing family we also lived fast off the track. Routinely, we’d spend all night out on the ale, returning to the track the next day with mind-crumbling hangovers and wondering why we struggled to get into the top ten, having qualified one and two on the grid the day before.

* * *

Back at the day job, I was finding my work at Hepworth’s interesting, but not in the least bit fulfilling. Selling clothes was the antithesis of all the excitement and exhilaration that I lusted for at the tracks or in the clubs. However, when the managing director of the company, Alex Perry, visited the shop and, in no uncertain terms, earmarked me as the future of the business, I felt a sudden rush of belonging. Even if it was to a job that I was ambivalent towards. They dispatched me to training courses up and down the country. Gradually, as I became familiar with the structure of the business, the modicum of structure the work lent me in my own life became a welcome incursion.

A month later, I was offered the job of relief manager, an unfortunate title that could be easily misconstrued if one was of an immature mind. The true definition of a relief manager in the world of retail meant that if any of the store managers in south-west Wales fell ill or were otherwise indisposed, I would have to go and step in.

In a turn of good fortune, my Saturday boy in the Carmarthen store turned out to be an RAC marshal. An RAC marshal grants RAC licences to novices, measured on the number of races and hours one spends on the track. I called him my Saturday boy – ironically, he was a man in his mid-sixties, retired, quiet and very withdrawn at work. However, if you ever saw Saturday Boy at the racetrack, he would transform into a little Hitler. A horrible sadist who was drunk with power, disqualifying drivers on tedious technicalities and forcing them to race and prostitute their talents until they met his inscrutable standards. Luckily, Saturday Boy was not so scrupulous with me, and thanks to him, I got my racing licence fast-tracked, much to the bemusement of my Uncle Andy.

The training courses in Leeds taught me many aspects of the rag trade. How to sew, how to sell, and most importantly, how to listen. Our listening course had two very charming tutors. One was a big, hairy bear of a man and the other was a diminutive Jewish guy with the most slick-perfect combover I’d ever seen. Naturally, my attention was strained as I was more preoccupied with what club I’d be going to that night and what I’d be wearing, as opposed to listening to my tutors.

‘You’re not listening to us, are you, Timothy?’ the tutors harmonised.

‘Of course I am!’ I blasted in quick defiance, with an eye-popping panic, as I was jolted back from future dancefloors into the sober orbit of the classroom.

‘Perhaps you’d care to tell us your thoughts on the matter,’ prompted the Bear.

A rush of blood swarmed over my cheeks and the synchronicity of head swivels and inquisitive eyes from my fellow classmates expunged small trickling beads of sweat from my temples. ‘Sorry,’ I folded with a sigh. ‘You’re right, I was distracted. I was thinking about the dancehall I was going to tonight, and what look I would put together.’

‘And where are you going, might I ask?’ asked Combover.

‘The new cocktail bar down the city centre. The name escapes me, but I can find out for you.’

‘Great,’ the Bear interjected, with genuine interest. ‘We’ll see you there at 6 p.m. For now, if you wouldn’t mind giving us the courtesy of your full attention, at least for the next twenty minutes.’

Later that evening, at 6 p.m. on the dot, I arrived at the Merrion Centre, our agreed rendezvous point. Bear and Combover were already in the bar, bookending two beautiful ladies who were laughing louder than their bright lemon pencil skirts. My presence at the bar brought an abrupt halt to the laughter. ‘Timothy, you made it!’ Combover exclaimed, placing his bottle of Red Stripe carefully on the bar behind him. Bear shook my hand and wrapped his arm around my shoulder. ‘Ladies, this is Timothy, the young man I was telling you about,’ Bear beamed, and the ladies smiled forcibly in tandem.

‘Timothy’s best asset, aside from his boyish good looks, is his listening skills,’ Bear said. Combover nodded in agreement, introduced the ladies, then he and Bear excused themselves without explanation. Their bottles were only half-empty, so I assumed they would return. But as I stuttered and fumbled my way through the initial exchanges with the ladies, I realised why this meeting felt so contrived. Bear and Combover had left.

I ordered rounds of dirty martinis, to relax myself more than anything and decided to let the girls do the talking. After all, Bear and Combover had just billed me as the great listener, not a talker. I listened to them talk about their boyfriend troubles for the next three hours, which was quite easy as I’m fascinated with relationship troubles, unless it spirals into idle gossip.

The key thing I learnt that night was that sometimes people will talk to you about their problems ad nauseum and, just by externalising them, will work out the solutions themselves. The girls didn’t need any advice from me – thankfully, as I had none to offer anyway.

It was quite the leap from talking to adolescent girls about wanting to be a racing driver to talking to grown-up women about their problems and issues. Turns out being a good listener is a life skill you can apply not just to woo girls, but in all walks of life. It was a skill I learned to hone very early on, and I still maintain it’s one of the most important skills of being a good salesman. But we’ll get on to that later.

As well as the listening courses, Leeds also served as a great station to set up base and hit the clubs on the weekend. My friends would also come up and we’d all hit Peter Stringfellow’s club, Cinderella’s. Or ‘Cinders’, as it was known to the locals. Next door was a 21 and over club called Rockerfella’s. You had Cinders on one half, which was commercial, composed of girls bopping around their handbags and guys lassoing their ties around their heads having seen Saturday Night Fever one too many times, and the other half, Rockerfella’s, was a little more exclusive and a lot more upmarket.

The exotic waitresses, seemingly poured into their bunny girl outfits, served as enough of a lure for footballers and celebrities alike. The rumour was that to keep punters there until the very end of the night, Peter Stringfellow always gave a bottle of bubbly away to any girl who would agree to getting naked on stage around closing time.

As I was only 18 at the time, the thrill of the night was always trying to sneak into the Rockerfella’s section without being spotted by the bouncers. I managed to slip in once through an unmanned interconnecting door and revelled in decadence for all of five minutes before being identified by a scrupulous bouncer and being chucked out.

Back in Tenby, I had also befriended some like-minded individuals who pursued the enjoyment of fashion and music with equal verve. We’d hang around and DJ in a club called Crackwell. We would follow the trends through magazines like The Face, closely monitoring new bands, new sounds and new styles.

During the summer, we’d not only have friends that would come down from Kent, Manchester, Birmingham and other places, but we met other kids on holiday who were really pissed off because their parents couldn’t afford to go to Spain, Italy or France. They had to go to bloody Tenby, of all places.

It was an odd coagulation of disparate youth, pushing promiscuously against the limitations of the beautiful but limited harbour town of Tenby. Constantly and vociferously seeking out the best clubs, the best after-parties. One night, after all the clubs shut, my best friend Stephen and his two brothers hotfooted it down to Narberth, having gotten wind of a big house party happening at a wealthy farmer’s house.

As we pulled up to this huge Georgian building, seemingly unmoored from the rest of the houses in this small market town, I could hear the muffled thud of ELO’s ‘Showdown’ emanating from the back of the house. The disco lights embroidered the canopies of the surrounding oak trees. As we sauntered around, we were greeted by a banquet of refinement. There was a big marquee furnished with several bars populated by well-heeled but now intoxicated middle-aged farmers and their wives and, more importantly, their daughters. Beyond the marquee stood a long swimming pool that finished at one end with water cascading down neon-lit steps.

We congratulated ourselves on our discovery. Anything to keep the night alive and at someone else’s expense.

‘This is so cool,’ I beamed.

‘So cool!’ echoed Stephen. ‘And you look cool, Tim.’

‘Do I?’ I said bashfully.

‘Doesn’t he look cool?’ Stephen pointed to his brothers.

Collectively, they studied me up and down. I was wearing an oversized lemon tank top over an equally oversized white t-shirt and my cobalt blue pleated trousers were tapered down to my white Oxford canvas shoes. Continuously, I swept my peroxide blonde hair to one side with repeated strokes of my hand but had left my fringe to do its own thing.

‘Too cool,’ they agreed, almost in unison, eyeing the close proximity of the swimming pool.

Twigging the undercurrent of their compliments, I cautiously stepped back two paces to the lip of the swimming pool. With nowhere to go, they each grabbed a limb and with little grace tossed me into the pool, like a wooden crate onto a bonfire.

It was a great night, despite dripping my way through it. We caught the attention of a group of Brummies, whose parents also fell into the bracket of holidaying in Tenby because Spain was too rich for their blood. One of the guys, who we affectionately named Horse due to his massive overbite, informed us of this great club in Birmingham called the Rum Runner and that if we ever came to Birmingham, we should check it out.

Sure enough, accepting Horse’s kind invitation (although he never remembered inviting us to crash on his floor), the following weekend we set off for Birmingham. I chose the New Romantic theme, with my pedal pushers, pumps and socks and a tartan sash over my shoulder. Simon Le Bon was there, and I later learned that the Rum Runner was owned by a guy who eventually went on to manage Duran Duran. Simon and I clocked each other, acknowledging and appreciating the fact we both had exactly the same crimped fringe and peroxide-blonde haircut. Although I sensed I was considerably more elevated by that than him.

It was the briefest of nods but one that gave me a sufficient boost. Things were starting to happen for me. Here I was mirroring the same set of looks as Simon Le Bon, and he looked cool. Ergo, I must look cool. Before I was always on the outside looking in, a voyeur and a student of the club scene and the stars that studded that world. For that briefest of moments, I was now on the other side of the rope, and I was being pulled willingly and without compromise, into that ecosphere.

We were like a band in a way, touring the clubs around the country every weekend with our crazy hair and our out-there looks. It was only a matter of time before we hit London.

2

Boy Wanted

Performing the doughnut manoeuvre can be extremely hazardous. Strain is placed on the vehicle’s suspension and drivetrain, which may result in a mechanical breakdown with loss of control. In case of an emergency, you should always have people on standby.

Steve Strange started out doing artwork for Malcolm McLaren and the Sex Pistols, after being invited to London by Billy Idol. In the late seventies, he co-founded the Blitz Club, which gave birth to the Blitz Kids, who later morphed into the New Romantics. It was the perfect cocktail of music, fashion and glamour. Spandau Ballet played their first gigs there, and people were largely copying the Bowie look as he had just released ‘Ashes to Ashes’, the video of which was the most expensive ever made at the time and featured Steve Strange himself.

We forged our own set of looks, albeit heavily influenced by any given movement in music at the time. Fortunately, I was naturally curious about how fashion was intersecting with the club scene. Outside of what one might have gleaned from watching Top of the Pops every Thursday night or reading Face Magazine, the only way to absorb and garner inspiration for looks was by going to the clubs. There was no Internet, so no MR PORTER articles. You could buy elements of the looks on the High Street, Kensington, or the Great Gear Market on Kings Road, but you had to have the eye for it and curate your looks on your own. Those who didn’t work on their own looks or didn’t know how to put the looks together, those were the outsiders.

With each club having a different theme, one couldn’t survive on just one set of looks. The same disco ensemble that I’d put together for Dodo’s (which was a gay club) wouldn’t cut it at a psychobilly-themed club.

By the late seventies, the angst of punk rock had punched itself out, to some degree. Electronica, although in its infancy, was generally apolitical and didn’t necessarily have an identity with regard to looks anyway – that was, until rave came along. The New Romantic movement, spearheaded by the likes of Culture Club and The Cure, was still rife through the club scene. It had endured and absorbed some of the punk rockers who had wanted to jump ship.

Privately, I found the hot pursuit of dressing up, chasing girls and frightening them with make-up soon put an end to rebuilding the bottom end of a two-stroke engine on a Friday night. And every other night.

The Embassy Club on Bond Street was wall-to-wall celebrity, but you could get in if you knew the right people, preferably good-looking and reasonably well dressed. Also, in London at that time you had Camden Palace (now KOKO) plus Le Beat Route and White Trash. All of these clubs required different kinds of looks. It was a bit of a tightrope because you wanted to fit in to get in. But once you got in, you wanted to stand out.

When it came to putting our various looks together, we sourced the bulk of our clothes from a shop called Flip in Long Acre, Covent Garden. The theme of Flip was all-American clothing, conceived by a gentleman called Paul Wolf, who bought up loads of second-hand cheap jeans, baseball jackets, garish tuxedos and 1950s fleck sports jackets and shipped them to England. He had three stores in London, but we only went to the one on Long Acre. It was spacious but crammed with rows and rows of clothing. They set up shop in one those old fish market offices, so it didn’t have to do much to attract the flea-market crowd.

No night – and no look – was ever the same, but no matter the theme, we knew we could go to Flip and find something to work with. If it was a Psychobilly night, we blow-dried our hair right up, bought big-printed shirts, cut the sleeves off, rolled them up and paired that with workwear jeans.

For the New Romantic nights, we had our hair down, tucked under a little cap, à la Steve Strange. I procured a beautiful, oversized evening shirt that I dyed cerise pink. Often, I’d pair that with some high-waisted cashmere stripes that could have been tailored originally for a wedding. All finished with spats shoes and a neckerchief.

One night, we ventured down to the Star Bar in Camden Palace. You couldn’t miss me as I went dressed up as a white Rastafarian with white dreadlocks and a huge hat. Boy George came over and chatted me up. He was good fun and paid for all the drinks.

* * *

After a while, I caved to the wave of peer pressure and decided it was time to move to London. There were three of us who took the leap of faith: Stephen, who managed to get a job in a hair salon where my sister was working at the time, and Robert from the kitchen department in Hepworth’s. He managed to get transferred and has been in the kitchen industry for over forty years. And then there was me.

I responded semi-begrudgingly to an advert in the Evening Standard for an operator at a call centre in Clapham. One cold Monday morning, I shuffled myself drearily off the train, over the concourse and ventured towards the anonymous-looking building tucked away behind the back of the station. My insides were churning. A compost of panic and uncertainty. Did I even want the job? Well, clearly not, but moreover, did I really want to put myself through the emotional upheaval of moving to London?

My interview was successful and whether I wanted it or not, the job was mine. Unsurprisingly, it was a deeply hollowing, insufferable experience. In just one day, I stole a quick glimpse into the bleak, interminable abyss that was my future as an operator in that call centre. It was a cold, ruinous landfill of broken dreams – what physicists would describe as an event horizon, where not even light could escape.

It was cauterised, however, by the flourish of unreal excitement I got by merely being in London itself. It felt like the centre of the earth, and the words of Jack Smith, ‘Wilderness starts ten miles from the centre of London in any direction’, truly resonated. I quit that job but continued vigorously to try to find something else that would plant me back there.

While mining the job section in the Evening Standard, two vacancies caught my eye. The first was for a salesman needed at Bonsack’s Bonded Baths on Mount St. It was a very swanky shop that sold eclectic bathrooms and luxurious fittings, predominately in a period style, to the likes of hotels like Claridge’s and tenants of traditional London townhouses and apartments.

I applied, writing a nice letter saying how I had a welter of experience in selling brass ornaments. I thought taps would be similar, but they thought otherwise. They replied with a beautiful handwritten letter wishing me luck, but rejected my application on the grounds that it would be far too traumatic for a young man to move to London, crystallising my own thoughts and pre-empting my anxieties.

The other advert had a headline that said, ‘Boy Wanted on Savile Row’. Above the contact information read the name Tommy Nutter. As I did for Bonsack’s Bonded Baths, I wrote a letter to Tommy Nutter applying for the post of the boy wanted. I didn’t hear anything back.

Mike, my immediate boss at Hepworth’s, took immense satisfaction in the absence of any reply. He just wanted to provoke me, and at any given opportunity would inform me that my prospects of getting a job at Tommy Nutter would be laughable. The more he teased me the more I’d summon the courage to go to the phone box on the corner at the end of the street, stick in my 2p and call Tommy. Every time I called, I was rebuked with either ‘Oh Mr Nutter is very busy’ or ‘Mr Nutter is in a meeting’ or ‘No, Mr Nutter is in Brighton and couldn’t possibly speak to you’.

Eventually, after the constant badgering they relented, and I managed to get an appointment with Tommy. I marched up to London wearing my oversized cobalt-blue double-breasted suit made at Hepworth’s, manipulated from the made-to-measure block. Block colour was becoming very popular, and I had a broad range of block-coloured jackets made of lemon yellow, cerise and orange, all made one size or two sizes too big but very tight in the hip and paired with the obligatory high-rise trousers with pleats. My boss would agonise over my ensemble, ‘Why the hell do you want that?’ he bleated. ‘They look so old-fashioned!’ The irony of being lectured in style anachronisms from a man wearing a three-piece suit with flares in the year 1982 was not lost on me.

There were very few resources pre-Internet from which you could glean information about your potential employer. Safe to say, I knew nothing about Tommy Nutter before I met him at his tailoring house on Savile Row. I thought, ‘Savile Row? Tailoring? Boring.’ My ambition was to use this job as a conduit. Get a job on Savile Row, which would dovetail nicely into a job in fashion.

Tommy’s PA was a lady named Catherine, who I thought was very posh. I waited with her while we waited for Tommy. My eyes shifted around nervously. The shop had been owned and furbished previously by a very famous retailer called John Michael. The smoked-glass windows had echoes of the Savile Row of yesteryear. The point being the tailors didn’t want their customers peering in and seeing them at work. Ironically, it was Tommy Nutter and his cutting partner Edward Sexton who were the first to do away with those smoked-glass windows when they first launched House of Nutter on Savile Row in the late 1960s. Passers-by could see for the first time in full glory, beyond the window display of course, a Savile Row showroom.

I twitched my feet on the shagpile carpet and clocked the array of chrome fixtures that furnished the walls. It screamed 1970s. It screamed glamour. Sure, it would look terrific today as a shop-fit in a quasi-retro nostalgic way, but back then it was too on the nose and totally out of sync with what was going on at the time.

Tommy walked in wearing a sandy light tan double-breasted, three-piece flannel suit with a lovely burnt orange overcheck and little hints of blue. The shoulders were big, and it was slim through the hips – the archetypical Tommy Nutter silhouette that the whole world and I would later recognise. He had very baggy trousers finished with two-tone Maccabee shoes which I later bought off him because they were too big for him (I’ve still got them). He was in his late thirties but with the kind of cherubic features that could lead to a life of mischief. His hair was short and one length, modelled on the one Harrison Ford had during that time, which was simply referred to as the ‘no haircut’.

He was handsome but more strikingly, Tommy Nutter was very, very cool. Where was the crusty old guy with bifocal glasses in a pinstripe suit peppered with dandruff that I was expecting?

‘Do you know anything about me?’ Tommy asked bluntly, sitting across from me and folding his arms. I could sense immediately he was indifferent to my choice of attire.

‘Of course,’ I lied. ‘I know quite a bit about you.’ I fidgeted and didn’t elucidate any further.

‘You don’t know a thing about me,’ he quickly surmised.

‘You’re right, I don’t. Sorry,’ I blushed.

‘Catherine, can you get the press folders.’

Catherine dutifully disappeared and returned with several folders, all with cloth-covered jackets 3in thick. He slid them across the table like they were yesterday’s newspapers.

I was aghast when I turned to the first page and saw cuttings of The Beatles in full Tommy Nutter regalia.

‘Oh my god!’ I said, genuinely astonished. ‘The Beatles, what did you do with them?’

‘Oh, I dressed them,’ Tommy said casually. ‘Not in this store. I used to have another studio just down the Row. That’s where I’d hang out with them.’

I turned the page and saw a cutting of the famous Abbey Road album cover.

Tommy reached over and pointed, ‘They’re all wearing my clothes except for George Harrison. He was always difficult, George. But we did make for him too.’

On another page was a photo of Mick and Bianca Jagger sheathed in Tommy Nutter on their honeymoon in Venice. It started to sink in. Tommy was really fashionable. This was a really good job.

He began telling me his life story, and I listened with rapt attention.

Tommy had lost his business in the early 1970s. He started again backed by Alan Lewis, who had bought the Illingworth Morris Group, originally a fully vertical Victorian company which used to farm sheep, shear them, spin, weave, then make and sell through brands.

Alan acquired the Illingworth Morris Group off Pamela Mason, who was James Mason’s wife and who Alan was having an affair with. Alan bought the whole empire for £2 million with the intention of doing a Gordon Gekko-esque asset strip then investing that cash into other new projects.

A week after the Illingworth Morris Group, he sold the Salts Mill, which was the golden goose in the company’s portfolio, for a cool £1 million. Salts Mill was the world’s biggest textile factory when it opened in the 1850s, and the founder, Bradford’s very own textile tycoon Titus Salt, built an entire village to house his workforce.

At the height of its production around 3,000 people worked in the woollen mill, before it finally shut its doors in 1986. It was bought the following year by Bradford entrepreneur Jonathan Silver, who wanted to create a permanent exhibition of artworks by his friend, local lad David Hockney. Today, the Salts Mill is a thriving art gallery, retail and commerce space and restaurant complex that attracts visitors from around the world.

Alan was always keen to make a quick turnaround and he was well known for taking some wild punts. He bought a forest the size of Wales in Russia only to discover later down the road that he didn’t own it at all. The money he made from the asset strips would be taken out to Russia to do a deal by a guy called Chalkie, who worked for Alan. The money came back because it was marked. Sadly, Chalkie did not. He got blown up in a 4x4 somewhere.

He had his own bank, the Anglo-Manx Bank – that’s how far-reaching Alan was – and he was only 40 at the time. He had his own bureau de change (a business where people can exchange one currency for another) down on Edgware Road. Alan’s approach to business felt very scattergun and, at times, seemed quite nefarious.

Still, despite his mercurial ways, Alan was a very enterprising man. Before the likes of creative directors like Tom Ford made a name for themselves, you had purely business-minded moguls like Alan, who knew nothing about clothing, but knew the machinery of business intimately. He was savvy enough to know he needed a recognised name in the fashion world to be a face for the brand.

He reached out to Vivienne Westwood, and he’d spoken to Paul Smith, who was in ascendance at the time but not the global powerhouse he is today. They both turned him down flat.

Alan also spoke to designer Tom Gilbey, aka ‘The Waistcoat King’, who earned that nickname because of the flashy waistcoats he made and wore in his salon on Sackville Street. Gilbey was always seen wearing pink cashmere jumpers, driving around in an ivory Morris Minor with red leather interiors. He was the first type of travelling tailor before trunk shows became a rudimentary arm of any tailoring business. Gilbey partnered with a lady called Serena Kelsey and toured around with a team of girls. Together, they made a fortune, until eventually Kelsey and her team became self-aware and ditched Gilbey, realising that they could actually do it themselves.

Alan eventually hired Tommy and gave him top billing with the understanding that someone of Tommy’s creative calibre and connections could help develop the brand.

I thought it at the time, and I still maintain the view that Alan wasn’t a very good person for Tommy. He hadn’t afforded Tommy a budget for a shop refurb other than the shop sign and a small cutting room at the back. They didn’t invest in any product. He simply assumed that slapping Tommy’s name over the existing stock and having Tommy’s name above the door, ‘Tommy Nutter, Savile Row’, would be all that was needed to make the place a success.

* * *

When I started working for Tommy, I was hidden downstairs with the tailors and the cutters. One of the first things I learnt was how to press a jacket properly. It was quite a menial and repetitive task, but I appreciated that I had to begin somewhere.