77 was a darker year than its immediate predecessors as I see it, it having been marked by the ascendancy of Punk, a musical and cultural movement which perhaps somewhat hampered Rock's uneven progress as an art form by dint of its DIY ethic, disseminating a mood of raw rebellious fury combined with an extreme and often grotesque sartorial eccentricity that was unique at the time, spreading deep into suburbia from its London axis and thence to other major British and international cities; although its true birthplace had been New York City, but that's another story.
I plunged into intensive social activity that seems on retrospect to have started with a long series of parties in various quarters of west and central London, held by one after the other of my old Pangbournian friends as they hit 21, as I had done the previous October...having recently renewed my friendship with them. This was particularly true of Craig, an up and coming businessmen who like me was a keen frequenter of parties, and night clubs filled to the brim with the fashionable and the beautiful. Together we set about attuning our respective images to that exhibited by many of the most voguish young Londoners of the day. Its most salient elements were short hair, typically worn with a college boy fringe, straight leg jeans or slacks, with or without cuffs, winklepicker shoes or boots, and a baggy shirt worn with small collar archly upturned. Shortly after the year's inception, I'd purchased my first pair of winklepickers, and went on to amass something of a collection, including a pair of imitation crocodile skin shoes, black Chelsea-style boots, and black shoes with sidebuckles, all with painfully pointed toes. By the spring of '78 or thereabouts I think I'd junked the lot as a means of sparing my feet.
This cutting edge London look might have been confused by some with Punk, but although like the latter it was adopted in reaction to hackneyed hippie-style clothing, it was a far more elegant variant, married to a love of Soul music rather than primitive three-chord Rock. When sported by working class kids, it was known as the Soul Boy look although I was not to discover that fact until later in the year when I started frequenting on one hand dances at the Woodville Hall in Gravesend while attending Merchant Navy college in nearby Greenhithe, Kent, and on the other the giant Global Village night club under the Arches near Charing Cross. The Global circa '77 was something of a magnet for working class kids from various London suburbs sporting this peacockish image, which consisted of such elements as the wedge haircut, often streaked with a variety of tints, brightly coloured peg-top trousers, and winklepickers, or beach sandals.
When the Soul Boy wedge was married to a passion for European designer sports clothing, it mutated into the so-called Casual style which exploded in the late '70s and early '80s on the football terraces, first allegedly in Liverpool, and then nationally, going on to influence a passion for casual sporting attire on the part of the youth of Britain and beyond that persists to this day.
For the greater part of '77, it was the trendy London look I aspired to rather than that of Punk, although I flirted with Punk too... that is once I'd become aware of the monstrous vagaries of attire that were regularly on display on Chelsea's Kings Road and elsewhere in the early part of the year. I picked up alot of my duds from an ancient shop in the more downmarket part of Kingston in south west London that had probably been a Teddy Boy, and then a Mod store some ten years or more theretofore, such as a pair of powder blue pegs, and a patterned Ted waistcoat.

To a profligate, youth is akin to riches there for the spending, and spend I did. By the summer I was squandering in Palamos on Spain's Costa Brava where I'd gone to work as a sailing teacher, and although I worked hard I lost my position after a few months, but stayed on in Palamos for a time, resident on a caravan site, and frequenting my favourite local night clubs, bars and dives. I was in thrall to a driving restlessness, an apparently quenchless thirst for whatever lay just beyond my reach. This might go some way towards explaining the fevered yearning for fame, as actor, writer, or Pop star, that was characteristic of my pre-Christian existence from about the mid-70s onwards.
In '77 I was yet relatively ill-equipped for my quest for celebrity, given that few if any actors become truly succesful on the strength of their looks alone, which is surely why there are so many more pulchritudinous male models than actors. I had not yet appeared in a single play, excepting a handful at Pangbourne, which elicited more hilarity than praise, consisting as they did of an elderly maid (twice), a flamboyant young psychopath, and an amorous madcap. In short, I was hardly a National Youth Theatre wunderkind. I had written a few songs, but my guitar playing was yet jejune and weak, even though I already had a good baritone singing voice. Still there was scant proof to date of any real ability or success of any kind. My future positively glittered before me.