Kevin begins to get a lot of notice on the London scene, and it's not long before Virgin Records decides to sign him. As Kevin likes his mates around, we all go along with him to witness his signing. Afterward we cross the road to the pub to celebrate this good fortune, and as usual with Kevin, we start to drink-and drink and drink. In a overly convivial mood I manage to down four vodkas, a beer, and a lager, which turns me into a drooling and mindless puppet. I can no longer walk or talk except in a garbled idiom somewhere between Chechen and Urdu, so it's thought best to drag me up the road to Richard Branson's house. We arrive at his front door and ring the bell. Richard opens the door with an inquiring smile as I lean forward and spew with great violence about fifteen feet down his rather nice Persian rug, to a great chorus of oohs and aahs, with poor Branson whipping back against the wall to avoid death by vomit. I'm then laid down gently on a couch and left to sleep it off. I wake up around two in the morning feeling like a piece of dog shit and shamefully creep out of the house, find the Dyane 6, and make it back to Shepherds Bush.
Despite this shabby rock-and-roll start, I begin to hang out at the Virgin offices on Portobello Road. This is still the early days of Virgin, and at least on the surface there is a loose hippie feeling to everything. I am able to wander around the buildings, getting to know a number of people in the offices: Jumbo, Simon, and Al Clark, a former journalist and now the head of publicity. Doors are literally open in this company, a mark of sharing and openness. A few short years before the corporate and MTV-ridden age begins, Virgin feels like the last holdout of the sixties. Mike Oldfield's hugely popular "Tubular Bells"-a cunning weave of Irish jig, dancing elves, goblin music, and all instruments played by Mike-is a phenomenon. It stays at an unassailable number one position for two years and basically finances the incipient Virgin empire. There are bands like Hatfield and the North, Matching Mole, Caravan, and Gong, all of whom have a wonderful English quirkiness and occupy a late-hippie world. For a moment there is a softness to everything, a placid surface, a lull while something new and aggressive stirs in the substrata.
Most afternoons I climb up the basement steps with a sense of deja vu and slump into the back of the van with the rest of the Coyne band. We greet one another with sardonic remarks, to the effect that we'll all be dead soon anyway, and then head off for the ferry to Holland, Germany, or Belgium or for the MI up to Birmingham. We play at the Paradiso or the Melk- weg in Amsterdam, sleep at the top of crooked little guest houses, eat boiled eggs and hard yellow cheese, drink beer and stare at the hashish dealers who sit in a little room with plastic packets of ginger and brown dope lined up like turds on a counter.. Kevin screams, bangs his wooden chair about, and wacks at his open tuning, and I whip a brass slide up and down the neck of my Tele. We adopt facial tics, weird mannerisms, and accents; mock our landlady, who complains that the streets of Amsterdam are too lumpy; and retire into various paperbacks: we are a band. We have a great drummer, a little guy named Peter Wolf, and I love playing with him. Zoot even joins the band, and it feels as if everything has come full circle.
In the confines of the van Kevin continues to regale us for hours with further tales of lunatics, manic depressives, pyromaniacs, dipsomaniacs, and schizophrenics. Every ten minutes he will sing out the name Doreen, a reference to a running joke that seems to sum it all up with the line "Doreen, Doreen, arch your back-gentlemen's balls are on cold lino." These tales of madness permeate everything until it feels as if we are no more than a mental ward on wheels. I compound this by reading Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre, getting carsick, and feeling a strong urge to hurl myself into the nearest Dutch canal. At night through the thin walls of whatever cheap accommodation we are in, our leader can be heard in his room, howling at the walls and moaning away to himself-some of this no doubt due to the effect of the extremely large amounts of alcohol downed prior to bedtime. But astonishingly, like a wind-up doll, he always makes it down to breakfast. He sits there like some creature that has been invented the night before in the lab of a mad scientist and always orders the same thing: a boiled egg and toast cut into soldiers. Like a man a hundred years old, he feebly swings at it with his spoon, trying to take the top off but missing by a few inches. He sighs deeply and buries his head in his hands. Maybe he's acting with brilliance, but it's hilarious and we have to stifle our laughter so as not to upset him. But maybe that's what he is after.
Sadly, the band comes to an end after a grueling eight-week tour of the Continent. This one was simply too much, and by the time we arrive back in England, we are frayed and suffering from temporary brain damage. The word comes a few days later from Kevin's manager, Steve Lewis, that Kevin is breaking up the band. He's had enough-never wants to tour again. I think it's a terrible decision on his part. The band is great-one of the best in the U.K. now-and I know that he will relax for a couple of weeks and then regret it, which he does.
Later I think I should have called him up and tried to talk him out of it. I don't, because another opportunity arises at almost exactly the same time. My old nemesis Kevin Ayers, the bass player from the Soft Machine, is putting a new band together. I am given his phone number and told by Al Clark to call him. It turns out that he is living on a houseboat in Little Venice with his American girlfriend, whom he has stolen from Richard Branson. Kevin is friendly and suggests in silky Noel Coward tones that I come over to see him at the cocktail hour. I have some mixed feelings but I am not really in a position to be choosy, so I agree to go. The appointed hour comes, and we sling back a couple of vodka martinis and with a warm glow put our less-thansuccessful history behind us. The next afternoon I am at a rehearsal with the rest of the band. In the intervening years Kevin has become an indolent sort of pop star in his own right, having some European success with the albums The Confessions of Dr. Dream and Other Stories and Yes, We Have No Marianas. The Ayers band has Charlie and Rob, the bass player and drummer from the original Kevin Coyne Band, plus Zoot again. I have no trouble fitting in, but now it's beginning to feel like a repeated joke, the bandleaders even sharing the same first name. I spend yet another year on the road in the Kevin Ayers Band, and although lacking the trenchant genius of Kevin Coyne, the year is full of daft adventures.
We are returning to England from Bremerhaven, Germany, via the ferryboat, and as we drive on we notice some equestrian types boarding with a horse trailer, and with them ... the royal personage of Princess Anne. After several ooohs and aaahs and a :Few typical musician remarks, we park our grotty van in the bowels of the ship and go in search of the bar. Later that night as we are making the crossing it turns out that we passengers will all be dining together. The supper is a generous-looking buffet served in a small dining room on the upper deck, and all passengers-should they wish an evening mealwill eventually arrive here. We crowd into the small room just as Princess Anne and entourage arrive and we delicately press back into the wall to let her pass by. Pressing back with our disheveled ensemble is a Scottish roadie by the name of Soapy, a man deeply appreciated for his perverse and ill-timed sense of humor. The princess begins to make her way around the buffet table with her lady-in-waiting. As they pick daintily at the food, they are followed closely by Soapy in his filthy T-shirt asking them questions about the items on display, a look of pure innocence on his face. As the responses from HRH and her lady-in-waiting become more and more tight-lipped, the rest of us sit in the corner of the room quietly cackling to ourselves. Shortly after the buffet it's time for the ship dance. Like some weird throwback to colonial England, it's held on a postage-stamp-sized floor, and all are invited. This is asking for it, and naturally the moment HRH gets out onto the floor to do the twist, Soapy and I follow and start in with a drunken shambles of a boogaloo right next to her. After a few minutes of serious getting down, a thuggish-looking and oversize military type appears at our side with the advice to get off the dance floor pronto if we know what is good for us. He looks nasty, and with Zoot right behind us, we hop to the edge of the floor, spy the exit door,
and stagger up the stairs. As we hit the upper deck, the tilt of the ship and the icy wind blasting from the fjords of Norway seem to worsen our crapulous condition, our grip of reality becoming a greasy blur. Zoot and Soapy, both laughing like Zen monks, think it will help me recover if they hold me upside down over the side of the ship. Bevied to the eyeballs, they somehow manage to pull me out from behind the life jackets and dangle me by the ankles over the rail, where I stare glassy-eyed and giggling down at the black and icy waters fifty feet below, where giant waves pound the hull; a drunken slip of the fingers would mean certain death. Finally they haul me back onto the slippery deck and we slide off in three different directions. I try to go back to my cabin but get hopelessly lost in the labyrinth of swaying metal corridors and fall into Kevin's cabin, where he is canoodling with his girlfriend. I immediately throw up spectacularly on the nearest bunk, sending Kevin and beauty shooting out the door in search of another cabin and leaving me to moan incomprehensibly at the rivets in the cabin wall for the rest of the night.
As we dock at seven the next morning to begin the long drive back to London, I feel full of remorse, horribly fucked-up, and more ill than at any other time in my life. I finally collapse on the couch about midday, feeling like a victim of Crohn's disease, and pass out watching Emmerdale Farm.
One Saturday afternoon Kate and I return home to find that we have been robbed. Things are thrown about the steps that lead to our flat as if the burglar left in a hurry. In shock we walk through the place and note everything that has been taken, including valuable heirloom jewelry of Kate's. Oddly and symbolically, my Telecaster has not been taken but has in fact been played. It's propped up next to the little Fender Princeton amp, which hums quietly to itself, its red power light glowing like a watchful eye. I pick it up and play a couple of chords; it seems alright, but the word cunt fills my head anyway.
Soon after this event, having finally scraped enough money together, Kate and I move to a more spacious flat in Putney. Kate now works at Young & Rubicam as a copywriter and has written an award-winning ad for Smirnoff vodka, something along the lines of "Smirnoff won't make me an overnight sensation-that's alright, I'm busy tomorrow."
I sleep until eleven every morning, at which time Kate calls me and we exchange a few sweet words. Through Virgin, which seems to be our epicenter for everything, we make many friends and move in a crowd of likeminded people, in particular Martine and Anthony Moore from the band Slapp Happy. We become Tai Chi fanatics and go to the house of Master Chu three times a week, practicing "wave hands like clouds, single whip, needle at bottom of sea." Kate begins sessions with a Jungian analyst, and a few months later I follow; our conversations become laced with references to the shadow, archetypes, anima, animus.
We sink into London life and like most young couples gaze into the future, hoping for the best. Although some months it is a desperate struggle to get the mortgage payment, put up with the pissing rain, and struggle through dense traffic, it's okay because we are in the hub of the scene, surviving and surrounded by friends. We go on a package holiday to Tunisia and walk up and down the beach outside of Hammamet, talking about the future we want to share. But first I have to make it, break beyond this hired-gunplaying-in-bands mode. But it seems impossible. We walk back toward the hotel, kicking through waves and expanding our dreams.
A small burnoose-covered man approaches us, insisting that we buy his carpet, and we get into a huge wrangling match full of jokes that neither side understands. "You are sheepstich man," he keeps telling me. Eventually we buy his carpet and he goes off, smiling and waving, and we go back to the hotel dance for tourists. The whole place is so weird; we get drunk and perversely dance with as many goofy holiday packagers as we can rather than with each other and then spend the rest of the night in our bedroom, howling with laughter and spluttering, "Sheepstitch man," as we pass out.
Back in London, I importune people at Virgin to make solo albums, continue to cut tracks on my own, keep writing songs. But getting all the way over is proving difficult, and I feel a strong urge to scream-I hate the business of music.
By the mid-seventies England is in full recession, with unemployment reaching its highest figure since the 1940s and the standard of living crumbling. The "English way of life" is under attack; there are muggings, letter bombs, and public-sector strikes; and the country as a whole becomes masochistic and ripe for chaos. Beneath the hippie surface of Virgin and the dribbling end of the sixties, something is turning a corner. London suburbia is a place of cynicism and boredom, and with it comes the state that gives rise to expression of actual violence and the tendency to fall to the political right. A new generation has emerged, and some of them-already in pub rock hands-are against the music scene of the early seventies with its expensive producers, East Lake studios, and records swollen with ego and overdubs. The pub rockers are a new breed who have returned to a more rootsy rhythm-and-blues-based sound. Performed to rowdy pub audiences around London, this music is gaining ground with bands like Bees Make Honey, Kilburn and the High-Roads, Dr. Feelgood, and Joe Strummer's 101'ers. They are the precursor, the pre-echo of a howl that will go around the world.
Around this time an old word with a new connotation is beginning to be heard in London. The word is punk, and the genesis of its new meaning is a shop in the Kings Road by the name of Sex-a place that I have walked by many times, never suspecting that it is the crucible of a new movement and something that will change the world, for a while anyway. I occasionally run into the guitarist Chris Spedding and he tells me that he's involved with a group called the Sex Pistols and that they are great and are really going to shake things up-the guitarist really has something.
By the end of 1975, after the Sex Pistols have appeared on the nationally televised Bill Grundy show and called him a fucking totter, punk has exploded onto the national consciousness and is emerging fast to shake the music industry to the ground. The Union Jack rises upside down to the top of the mast, and the kids of England become rotten. But this year, in which North and South Vietnam reunite, Mao Tse-tung dies, Jimmy Carter becomes president, and on television we watch Rising Damp, Porridge, and the Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin, punk bands proliferate like a swarm of locusts. We hear the names of the Clash, the Damned, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Generation X, the Slits and X-Ray Spex. Toward the end of the year a club called the Roxy opens and becomes the place to see and hear punk. It lasts for about three months and then is replaced by the Vortex. Playing around Europe with Kevin Ayers and out of the country half of the time, punk feels like only a slight threat, a roar in the distance.
In this brief mid-seventies moment, punk, prog rock, pub rock, glam rock, and disco all coexist. In New York the Ramones, Television, Blondie, the Talking Heads, and Patti Smith are playing at CBGB's. In London in the stifling summer of 1976 punk Fashion is everywhere, and sweeps through the city with spiked hair, ripped T-shirts, black leather, pogo'ing, and sulfate am phetamines. The Sex Pistols and their manager, Malcom McClaren, are at the front of the new dispossessed as they storm the gates and attempt cultural access. McClaren, with his art school background, clothes design, and partnership with Vivian Westwood, has constructed this new scenario partly as a way to sell his (or rather Vivian Westwood's) clothing designs, partly out of his "political interest" in the Situationist International, and partly because he is a born entrepreneur/snake oil salesman. Inspired by the New York Dolls-as was the pre-glam David Bowie-McClaren had seen them on a trip to New York and attempted to manage them but after a series of mishaps they disintegrated and he returned to the rag trade until the arrival at Sex of Steve Jones, who gets him interested to try again. I had seen the Dolls at the Whiskey in L.A. just before returning to the United Kingdom and thought they were fantastic and definitely the progenitors of a new scene-or at least the latest version of punk, which has its own precedents in the United States with the Stooges and the MC5, the Velvet Underground, and Devo and writers like William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerou
ac.
At first the whole thing, with its gobbing, violence, and nihilism, seems faintly repellent to me. Coming from another era and still foolishly embracing bourgeois values like wanting to be able to play your fucking instrument, I think it's just the latest model of rage and fury that signifies nothing, looseness mistaken for a political concept. But this new movement hasn't come out of a vacuum. The peace and love of the previous generation did not accomplish, any real change: corruption and capitalist propaganda continue, and a lot of kids feel it. What is there to do but get numb and stay numb or rage and spit against the machine? There is a part of me that identifies with them because I also have a tendency to mouth "Fuck you" when faced with any kind of authority. We all want the power to shake the world and despite being one generation earlier, I think they are doing what youth always does-it's just wearing bondage gear this time. But then I have another problem because I have a whole other set of musical values that are foreign to the punk credo, and joining the ranks is not an option. As I have always held the core belief that music is a spiritual force, an agent for change no matter how angry or aggressive, spitting on it is counterintuitive. But rage and aggression can be the elements of productive tension. As nice as Virgin and the soporific "Tubular Bells" are, music needs a hefty kick in the ass-and these bands, clawing their way into the public imagination, are doing it. This is rock and roll.
In October 1976, at the opposite end of the spectrum, Virgin Records asks me if I would like to play the guitar in a performance of "Tubular Bells" with the Newcastle Symphony Orchestra-Mike Oldfield can't make it on the appointed night. His album is still dominating the charts, so despite misgivings about "Tubercular Balls," I agree. Standing in the middle of the orchestra and playing all the famous guitar parts under the baton of David Bedford turns out to be fun, and for an hour or so I have the spotlight. There is an intermission spot that will be filled by a local band called Last Exit, a jazz fusion group. They have a bass player named Sting and are supposed to be quite good, so I decide to watch them. I stand at the back of the hall and watch for about five minutes and then wander off for a cheese roll and a cup of tea.
One Train Later: A Memoir Page 19