When I was 16 [almost 17] in the heady Easter period of 2001 I’d started to get a little dissatisfied with my lot, in the time honoured tradition of moody teenagers. Honestly I think I’d done quite well to get past the halfway mark without running away from home or doing any significant “I HATE YOU! I WISH I WAS NEVER BORN!” style screaming at my Mum in the bookcase section of an Ikea. I’ve always been fairly placid, by all accounts. My sister Samantha is more the firebrand in my family, with myself and my younger sister Riannah preferring to live in relative peace and harmony, watching The Simpsons [pre-season 9 when it was still good].

I’d finished 6th Form, by which I mean I’d gotten 3 months in, hated it with the passion of a Latino porn star poet, and by Christmas 2000 I was gone. I’d also quit my first job, working in the kitchen of Ma Hubbard’s Eating House in Underwood. Everyone at my school worked there when they hit 15. It wasn’t good money [£2.50] nor was it good hours [5pm till 10pm every night and all day Sunday] but it was a job. It was earning your own [paltry amount of] money. It meant independence from having to beg your Mum for cash to buy some trainers or a double cone from the Ice Cream van. Forget for the moment that it had been my Mum, via my Nan who was head chef, who’d gotten me the job in the first place. Nepotism only got me through the door. I’d remained unfired for almost a full year and that was down entirely to my own personal work ethic.

School was done. The job was done. I’d split up with my younger girlfriend, rather unwisely, just before I left 6th Form in order to re-start a relationship with a girl in my year, Bryony. I say it was unwise because I’d decided to make this life changing decision while drunk at a BBQ that Bryony was at but my girlfriend was not. She was my first real girlfriend back in year 11 [I’d been out with girls before that, but they were more like “You’re my girlfriend, see you in three weeks I’m off back to my friends” type deals] and I lamented the fact that despite once almost managing to, I’d never had sex with her. We were both 15 at the time and so I wanted more than anything to get laid and I think she just went along with it to keep me quiet. At the last moment [literally...] my morality kicked in and I shut it down. On this night though, at the BBQ, my morality hadn’t turned up and the more stubby bottles of French beer I got through the more I rued the day that I’d allowed common human decency to get in the way of an awkward teenage shag.

So I chucked my perfectly lovely girlfriend the next morning [outside the library halfway between my house and her house, because I’m buggered if I’m walking the extra mile to her turf] and immediately text Bryony to let her know I was single and interested. We got back together but as it turned out her desire to get fucked by me hadn’t increased at all, and after about three weeks we split up on the school yard in possibly the most amicable break up in the history of teenagers.

Bryony: So is this where we break up?
Me: Er... yes
Bryony: Fair enough. See you tomorrow

To fill the void I got a job at a Donnay [now Sport’s Soccer] selling trainers. For the first time I was spending my days with people I hadn’t grown up with, and it was weird. So weird in fact that I wound up getting a couple of my oldest friends, Dave and Moakesy, jobs there too. Just to take the edge off.

Still, despite populating the place with my mates and being offered a promotion to Team Leader [not bad for a 16 year old kid really. Most of them were just stealing golf balls] I was still unhappy. I’d been of the opinion that changing every single aspect of my life might buck me up a bit. Rattle my cage and create some interesting opportunities. All it did was get my Dad a speeding fine when he was late driving me to work one morning.

Getting rid of my job, my education and two successive girlfriends hadn’t made me happy. The only thing I didn’t change was my surroundings, and so in April 2001 I packed my case [and my stereo] and moved out to live with my Father for the first time since I was 4. He’d moved to Mallorca in 1997 to escape the tax man and also probably to do a little cage rattling of his own, and we’d visited once or twice, but as far as I was concerned this would be a permanent move. Why bother coming back to England? This country had only made me miserable and stupid [as it turned out I’d be back within about 3 weeks, but you can’t predict that sort of thing. Unless you’re my Mum, who is a sorcerer!]

Once in Mallorca nepotism had kindly stepped in yet again to secure me some employment [Total Jobs Achieved Due To Family Intervention: 6] and I’d gone to work for a company called Universal Nautic, an English outfit run by a trio of young lads and specialising in upholstering and carpeting yachts and boats. This was indeed the life. I worked 8am till 4pm [although more often than not until about lunch time, when the lads figured they’d over stepped the drunk mark a bit too far to be going back to work on the high seas] padding about on expensive vessels and getting paid a reasonable [in those days] wage of £150 a week. That sort of scratch went pretty far in the pre-euro days of Mallorca. We’re talking about 30,000 pesetas, so you’re beginning to see what I’m talking about. I gave my Dad like £30 a week for food and board and the rest was Gazz’s to do with what he will. I bought Linkin Park’s first album in Mallorca for the princely sum of 4,000 pesetas [with most everything having to be imported, entertainment media was and still is pretty dear].

I worked Monday to Friday out in the sun, didn’t have to work when it rained, got my lunches paid for [probably because the lads felt guilty about not paying me very much, in real terms] and they even gave me a scooter with the Universal Nautic logo on it to tool around on. I only ever used it twice, to drive to the petrol station about 100 yards down the road to get some drinks. Another thing still true now about Spain, apart from the price of CDs, is that scooter driving is the civilian equivalent of Kamikaze pilot stuff.

Life was good.

On one particularly pleasant day things had been quiet in the office, usual for this time of year, and I’d been tasked with knocking up a rudimentary website for the company. Nothing to flashy, just to get the logo and contact details out there online. I’d already had two websites of my own by then [Drunk Club & DCNG had both been and gone] so I roughed up the site in about 20 minutes and spent the rest of the morning looking at free porn and occasionally deleting the browsing history. After a bit even that had started to get boring, especially considering I couldn’t actually crack one off in the office, and I asked around for something else to do.

Universal Nautic had purchased a boat of their own, just a small single birth type deal, which they’d fully re-upholstered, carpeted and sun-covered to show off their handiwork when they’d first started business. Without much need for it now the boat had fallen into slight disrepair and no one had really made any use of it for a while. To recoup some pesetas it was decided to sell the beast, but before they could show it to potential Captains it needed tidying up, and it turned out they didn’t mean giving it a bit of a wipe down and maybe a hoover.

The engine, such as it was, required completely repainting and sealing for safety. On top of that all the controls were filthy inside and out and the panel itself was in need of a lick of paint. They gave me a couple of sandwiches, a flask of tea and dropped me off at the dock. Good times people. At age 16 what were you doing to earn a living? Washing your Dad’s car? Mowing the lawn? Maybe you got a gig sweeping up hair at the local salon? Well this guy [*points to own face with thumbs*] was floating peacefully on a boat in the Mediterranean painting an engine and getting his tan on.

I’m your hero.

I even had a radio, but there in lies the problem. The aerial was bust so I couldn’t actually get any radio stations [something a blessing since they only played the same two or three songs over and over. Uncle Kracker, that was one of them] and the tape deck was also looking pretty ropey. You know when you put a cassette in and close the thing, but it doesn’t lock and just pops back out again? It was doing that. I never did find out what was on that tape. This left me with the CD player, thankfully in perfect working order but, crucially and upsettingly, there was but one CD.

Lenny Kravitz.

I didn’t care for Lenny Kravitz at the time. Fly Away isn’t a bad song but it was used on a lot of adverts and I’d gotten sick of it. Then there was his terrible cover of American Woman which had been so over-saturated the air was 4% Kravitz. The rest of his album ranged from bland and unremarkable to flat out cloying ear torture, and this was it for me. Kravitz or silence.

After two full play throughs of the album I opted for silence. I brushed and polished and sealed with only the music of the sea and my surroundings to get me through. You get sick of that after a while. Silence has never been my forte. It makes me extremely uncomfortable, even when I’m on my own. I tried humming some other songs to break the monotony, but Kravitz had permeated my subconscious and no matter how infectious a tune I tried to lodge in my brain [from I Get Knocked Down to the Tetris theme] they always came back to American Woman. Even now, writing this, I’m struggling to keep Lenny from the door. Out of sheer despair I did even go inside the boat and have that wank I’d been unable to have in the office.

Didn’t help. I was probably doing it to the rhythm of Fly Away.

6 hours I was on that damn boat, Lenny Kravitz’ every word hurled at me like bits of shale. Every chord he played on his damnable guitar was nothing more than bats flying one by one into a pylon. Six... fucking... hours. I wanted to turn it off for good, be content with the sounds of nature and the odd bit of furtive masturbation, but the silence you see... the silence was almost just as bad. It weighed on me, physically weighed on me. I felt crushed by it, but down the other road was that dreadlocked bastard with his stupid beard and daft sunglasses, gravelling his way through the same 12 songs over and over and over and over and over with terrible gruelling determination. Even now, some 9 years later, I can barely get two notes into a Kravitz masterpiece before I’m lunging for the radio to turn it off, knocked it off the shelf, melt it to bits ANYTHING to cease his throaty crooning!!

And that is why I hate Lenny Kravitz.

I Hate Lenny Kravitz - Brought to you by Gazz Wood -