For several years, in the mid 1980's, my family took our annual Summer holiday in the North Yorkshire town of Whitby. Known as the setting for the opening scenes of Bram Stokers “Dracula”, and sitting its splintered rocky coastline on the icy North Sea, it was obviously, a perfect place for a relaxing beach vacation. I'm being cruel for the sake of lols. It's genuinely a beautiful town, and one that I have much fondness for, for reasons I'll explain soon enough.
The Whitby Summer tourism schedule was tentpoled by two events, each a week long, which ran consecutively. The first was the Regatta – a fun and exciting week of boat racing, fireworks, airforce flybys, fake helicopter air sea rescues, and a fun fair that stretched all the way along the West side of the harbour. The second event, which happened right after the regatta, was the folk week, where the town would turn into a celebration of the traddest of trad folk musics. A banjo in every pub, and morris dancers on every street corner. No lie. So many morris dancers.
My parents, who, for the other 51 weeks in the year showed about as much interest in folk music as they did in wingsuit flying, for some reason, always booked us to go on holiday to Whitby for the folk week. We'd hire a poky little holiday apartment with a pull-down bed in the lounge for me and a mostly trustworthy balcony that looked out over the harbour. Which meant that every year, after a train ride from our house to Kings Cross station, another, much longer train ride from there, through several changes, to Whitby, and then a long slog dragging our cases up cobbled hilly streets to our little flat, I would walk out on the balcony just in time to see the regatta fun fair packing itself away into its trucks and leaving. There's nothing like starting your weeks holiday with a feeling of certainty that you just missed something fun.
This is not to say that I didn't find things to do during my week. Mostly, the things I'd find to do were inside the three arcades that lined the bottom of the West cliff. The only neon left after the funfair's departure, these were the places, shoddy and smelly and marvellous, in which I'd make my grandma's holiday money last. I loved these games so much. Still do. The early 80's were the heyday of classic videogames - a group of beatnik geniuses from California and Japan, filling painted wooden cabinets full of loud, glowing, throbbing electronic joy. There I'd be, leaning in, my wide eyes staring at the screens, my hands sticky on the controls feeling the heat of the electronics, the vibration of the sounds. In those waterside arcades I enlisted to fight on the frontline of galaxy-wide battles, I redlined screaming racing cars around tracks that didn't exist, I sent giant apes tumbling from construction sites. I jumped, skidded, punched, kicked and flew. I became other things. More heroic, cool, colourful and spectacular things. 10p by sweaty 10p, my motivation to get good was the prize of extending the contentment of my own company. I got really good. Still am. All I wanted was to be sucked into the screens like Flynn, and stay forever in that beautiful pyrotechnic world. But my 10ps would always run out, and I'd always have to step out of the warm, cacophonous palace and back out into the street, where it would usually be raining, there would usually be a stiff wind coming from the sea, and I'd usually have stayed out longer than I was supposed to.
And then, on the way back from the arcade, to lessen the slump, there were the fish & chip shops. You can't argue with a good chip shop on holiday. 50p kept back from the arcades for a large chips with scrappie. Scrappie being the slurry of bits of deep fried batter that gathers at the bottom of the fryer, shovelled on top of your chips, with way too much vinegar. There are plenty worse ways to put off the inevitable return to whatever my parents had decided we were going to do.
And mostly those things involved being taken on long drizzly countryside walks, or watching what my dad had decided was the best morris dancers. So many morris dancers. I wasn't massively unhappy, but, I wasn’t massively happy either, and like many teenagers on holiday with their parents before me, I was bored.
I wasn't allowed to go to the arcades as much as I wanted to. My parents were happy to tell me how it was the kind of garish rubbish that would surely rot my mind, so I'd usually end up curled up at one end of the sofa in the apartment scribbling ideas for my own videogames into my notebook while the sounds of bells on middle-aged mens ankles would drift through the window from the cobbled lane outside.
Once in a while, when I'd used up all my 10ps for the day, but was starting to feel stir crazy again, I'd find something in the Folk Week guide book to tell my parents I was going to go and watch. Very rarely did I actually go and watch these things, but picking out a show designed for young people was a pretty reliable way to escape my parents without being overly questioned. Early in one of the first weeks we spent on holiday in Whitby, I played this trick with a group of performers I'd found in the guidebook who were called “The Fabulous Salami Brothers”. They sounded, to me, like the worst kind of pretend-wacky children's show, but if my parents would buy that I wanted to see them, I'd be allowed out. Even better, they were performing at a pitch just around the corner from the arcades. Perfect. Little did I know they'd change my life completely, and forever.
I almost walked past them. They hadn't even started their show yet, but they were talking to the smattering of people who had got there early. Something made me stop and watch.
The Fabulous Salami Brothers were a group of street performers. Each one a member of the fictitious Salami family. Maxie Salami, Mussalami, The Great Salami, Ricardo Salami. They all played something musical, even if it was just banging a huge old drum, and they each brought a different turn to the show – feats of strength, escapology, fire eating, juggling. They could have been awful, but they were perfect. Dressed in vaguely matching waistcoats, but displaying perfectly matching brash charm, they grew that handful of people into a huge crowd, and did things that were, to my young eyes, magnificent.
But, like all great performers, it wasn't so much what they did, as it was how they did it. They felt like a punk band – dangerous, anarchic, cheeky. Whatever the style of theatre they were doing, it was something I'd never seen before. The shouted, sweated, ran around, climbed things, teased the audience, ate peoples chips, and did incredible tricks. The seemed, like all good circus and variety acts should seem, as if they were from a different place. That our rules didn't quite apply to them.
I watched their show. I clapped, cheered and sang along. I forgot that their show was just a ruse to get me out of the holiday apartment, and was soon back there, over-excitedly jabbering to my mum and dad about all the silly and amazing things they did, and how funny they were. Then I had the Folk Week guidebook, and I was using my dads green pen to underline all the other times they were doing shows. I didn't want to miss one.
That was the first year I discovered them. The second year, my dad applied to get the guidebook sent to our house before we left, and I was overjoyed to see that they would be back. All their shows underlined before we even got on the train.
By the third year, something had started happening in my head. I still went to see every show they did, and still adored them, but I'd started to think that perhaps I didn't just want to be their biggest fan. Perhaps I wanted to, somehow, be them. Or be like them, at least.
Ricardo Salami was my favourite. The juggler. Tall, cocky, quick with a joke. Not the best juggler in the world, but he could sell a trick like nobody's business. Slowly I realised: I wanted to be him. I wanted to be able to make people laugh, and clap. I wanted to have the confidence to stand in front of people, and be relaxed enough that they’d like me and I’d like them back. I wanted to be from a different place, where your rules didn't quite apply to me.
I went home from that holiday with that thought rattling around in my head. It just wouldn't go away. The next time my dad gave me £5 for helping him on his allotment, I went to the pet shop at the bottom of the hill we lived on, and bought three hard rubber dog balls. I started teaching myself to juggle.
Years later, when actors equity told me I had to choose a stage name, I just made my birth name a little more Italian and circus sounding, and in doing so, paid tribute to the man who inspired me first.
I never met Ricardo Salami as an adult. I never got to tell him any of this. He died a few years ago. I wish he was still here, so I could.
I still remember the jokes the Salami Brothers told, and the music they played. I will never, ever forget the feeling of being in their audience – it's all I ever want for my own crowds. And whenever I write my name, I'm also writing his, as a way of saying thanks for giving me a life, for letting me move to a different place, where rules quite didn't apply.
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