In 1987, a few months before I left home to hobo around Europe, Guns N’ Roses released Appetite for Destruction. The band and album seemed a complete fit with my mind, beliefs, personality, life and ambitions: the songs told a tale of travelling to a new life; nostalgia for better times and the search for more; partying excess; alienation from society; getting into trouble and paranoia.
The band seemed like the 1980s version of Jack Kerouac’s beats, who had inspired my travel ambitions with stories about their frenetic trips across the states to California in the 1950s. They’d also been running from what they saw as humdrum existences they could not fit into, but what most people see as normality.
My mind had also failed to settle, and just dreamt of escape while working at the mill where most other school drop-outs ended up. As with Kerouac and Axl Rose of Guns N’ Roses, boredom and booze in a small town had brought trouble, and my ambitions to travel the world became as much about mental escape as seeing the sights.
Experiencing the freedom of the road through hitching and sleeping rough brought amazing peaks and troughs, and this is described as lucidly as possible in the book. There were also exotic and beautiful locations, and both local and international people that provided an introduction to the myriad personalities and behaviour that the human mind manages to create.
As well as being the memoir of a rock fan who’d been inspired to travel by Kerouac and found recent confirmation through the songs of Guns N’ Roses, this book is also the first account as far as the author knows of the 1980s worker-traveller communities in Europe and the Middle-East.
Thatcher’s Britain was dystopian for those seeking freedom and fairness, and especially people hit by record unemployment. The unions had been crippled by the government planned miners’ strike and those who dropped out of society into the Peace Convoy had been attacked at Stonehenge and basically run out of the country.
Europe and the Middle-East offered employment possibilities close to home, although jobs usually only paid enough for survival or a ticket to the next destination. So, many people preferred to escape across the channel to live a freer nomadic life working and travelling with the seasons.
Life was anarchic and often messy in the worker traveller communities, as in the 1950s beat communes or 1980s LA rock clubs and parties. Level headed people wouldn’t have been impressed, but we thrived on the highs and lows; laughs and tears. We fitted in on the outside.
