The curse of cool

One of the freedoms of later life, if you’re not Keith Richards, is that you no longer have to worry about being cool. Cool, far more than money, is the currency of youth, and as a teenager I knew who had it and who didn’t. But what was cool, all those decades ago? Who possessed it, and why did it matter?

There were various things that defined ‘cool’ when I was a teenager, and most of us in some way fell short. It was the ability not to get too excited about things. To feel enthusiasms but show them obliquely. To wear clothes that hinted at certain trends but never to copy anyone else’s style too slavishly. To hang out with beautiful women but not develop crushes on each of them in turn. It was a knack for never having anything foolish happen to you or, if it did, for showing the style and wit to minimise it quickly and carry it off.

But beyond all these things, real cool was something indefinable, an ‘it’ quality, a charisma that showed itself early. Some just had it and from the age of about ten had probably been wowing onlookers. The rest of us watched from the sidelines and tried too hard to achieve it – the very definition of ‘uncool’.

Most boys at my boarding school aimed at a kind of street cred. They put on mockney accents, played in bands, had Aswad posters on their walls, were rude to the prefects and worked a lot in the art department on vaguely ethnic-looking daubs. Some spoke agonisingly slowly or sotto voce, to make demand for their thoughts well outstrip the supply. They were the kids often in trouble for smoking or answering back, always teetering on the edge of expulsion. By the age of about 15 some of them had more sexual experience than many of their teachers would have in a lifetime.

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But the really cool were also usually well-travelled. They spoke other languages, knew what brioche or cassoulet were, and they were already au fait with foreign cinema – while we trogged along with Ghostbusters and Brat Pack films. They listened to Bob Marley and Django Reinhardt; we to Duran Duran, Elton John or (God help us) Howard Jones. At parties they danced effortlessly, or if they didn’t, knew how to skank with an endearing gangliness or economy of movement. If you weren’t cool, you could still befriend the cool, hoping some of the magic would rub off on you. But the differing planets from which you hailed would pull apart in late adolescence and the friendship, often riddled with unspoken condescension on one side and envy on the other, would usually founder.

Because it was difficult, if not impossible, to become cool. Many cool people were simply born to it. They had names like Mungo, Atticus or Tarquin, and a background to match. The druggie father of one organised an annual rock festival at his stately home in Cornwall. Another girl I knew had had, on the very day of her birth, a song written in her name to celebrate the event by a famous French crooner her parents were friends with. These things meant much, much more than money ever could.

It helped enormously if your family knew a lot of famous people, and the right ones. If your literature teacher was rhapsodising about the work of Tom Stoppard, you could just think: ‘What, Tom? Isn’t he that hairy bloke with the accent my parents had over to dinner last week?’ In the art department it was handy to be able to talk of ‘Lucian’ and ‘Francis’ and what they’d said to you as a child. This, if you were very cool, was done lightly and naturally and didn’t register as name-dropping. Name-dropping as such was desperate and an act of vulgarity, marking you out as ‘nouveau cool’ rather than born to it. It was the equivalent of bringing a pump-action shotgun to a pheasant shoot.

Their love lives looked easier than for others. They didn’t seem to get their hearts broken, or if they did, they knew to recover (or give the show of it) very quickly. Cool, they realised, was a kind of wealth they needed to protect; they were all, in a sense, carriers of Ming vases over a slippery parquet floor. This didn’t stop them developing drug habits, with weed or stronger substances – heroin addiction, before it covered you in acne or turned you into a shoplifter, could only add to the mystique. Occasionally there were suicides and sometimes nervous breakdowns, but these were always over existential matters and never from being unattractive or having no friends. Even their deepest neuroses had an air of Montmartre to them, of Simone de Beauvoir, not Victoria Wood.

It’s been interesting watching their progress in life. With names and pasts like these, they couldn’t go off and become chartered surveyors, and this was perhaps their curse. One’s now a world musician with a cult following in Paris, another runs a successful London art gallery, a third’s a famous actor. In the worst case scenario, they could simply run a shop (second-hand books/ antiques/Moroccan tagine dishes) and let the renunciation of the rat race become its own kind of cool. Why struggle to become someone when you were someone already?

Of course, life’s a great leveller in these matters. Cool, over time, can become uncool. We see it for the gawky self-consciousness it is, a kind of death force. Older people still trying to mythologise themselves or speak with a kind of gnomic languor just seem sad. Most people outgrow it – one of the reasons rock stars like Brett Anderson or Bowie tend to smile more in middle age, drop their mockney accents and admit to a liking for Abba or garden centres. No longer struggling to sound like gurus, they often have more to teach. Cool, a kind of stylish gaucherie, is strictly for the young.

Yet bumping into them in later life, we still feel the gulf between us. Even if we’re apparent equals now, they were once cool, and we were not. They’ll always be to the manner born, while we, however, will forever feel the insecurity of the upstart or interloper. Coolness, in my youth, seemed in the DNA, something you either had or didn’t, and one day, in frustration at the injustice of it all, I wrote a brief poem called ‘Louis’, which I hope is some small solace to the uncool (you know who you are) of the world:

Louis devoured Dostoyevsky
(I liked Jilly Cooper)
Louis cooled out to John Coltrane
(I, to ‘Super Trouper’)
Louis agonised over Existence
(I worried about being single)
Louis was draped in Joseph Pour Hommes
(I wore Pringle)
Louis’ Dad was a major poet
(Mine a minor cleric)
Louis’ name was ‘Louis Tarquin Jack Mungo de Selincourt’
And I am Derek.