by Mike Scott
Instantly the atmosphere changed. It was a serious phone call and clearly, from the tone of Patti’s voice and her choice of words, she was talking with a lover. At first I thought she’d take the call in her room, or else ask the rock journalist and myself – the only other people in the bar – to leave. But she proceeded to talk, hunched over the phone, wild hair in a curtain over her face, with the journalist and myself still present as she explained to the person on the end of the line why a male voice had answered the phone in her bedroom. ‘We’re all doubled up in the rooms at this hotel,’ she said, not convincingly. I sat frozen with embarrassment, listening to my rock’n’roll heroine lying to a lover across a transatlantic phone line. I saw the veils fall away and reveal her as a flawed, card-carrying, mistake-making, bullshit-capable human being, just like anyone. ‘You know my life begins when I hear your voice,’ she said pleadingly into the phone. I looked round at the journalist. We made eye contact for the first time and an agreement passed between us. We stood up simultaneously and left Patti to her man troubles.
I left a few minutes later to catch the train back to Scotland and never got to thank Patti Smith for everything she did for me. Organising and paying for my hotel room, taking care of me and fixing it for me to see her show were more than I had any right to expect – but what I really want to thank her for is the fast-track education I received; a series of priceless advance insights into the complexities of a life I’d lead myself a few years later.
Chapter 4: A Friend Called Z
The car stops and the engine switches off. Slowly I lift my slumbering head and open my eyes on an entirely unexpected sight: half a mile away, set against a green landscape is a vast, hulking grey structure. The thing is familiar, full of evocative power, stirring my imagination and emotions, and something more; a kind of racial memory. For even before I am conscious of what it is, I’m aware I’m looking at something familiar to every Briton.
All this dances through my mind in the brief, beautiful moment before my brain catches up with my eyes and I realise that I’m looking at Stonehenge. I’ve seen a thousand pictures of Britain’s most famous ancient monument, but to come upon the real thing suddenly and unexpectedly for the first time is magical; for a few seconds I’ve witnessed Stonehenge in all its enigmatic glory with my mind a blank slate, no preconceptions or expectations. Then a secondary realisation hits: my friend Z, sitting next to me, must have deliberately stopped the car without alerting me so that I’d wake naturally and encounter Stonehenge in this delicious way. He didn’t shake me by the shoulder a mile back and say, ‘Oi, if you don’t wake up you’ll miss Stonehenge!’. No, he allowed something else to happen and by doing so gave me a rare gift.
Z and I met at Edinburgh University in the autumn of 1977. He was just plain Ed then and we were new boys, freshers living in Pollock Halls, a sprawling student village beneath Arthur’s Seat, that curious elephant-shaped mountain that broods on the Edinburgh skyline. I noticed Ed one afternoon, a slouching, interesting-looking character in a shapeless sweater making his way across the lawn below my window, a punk rock album under his arm. Within minutes we were friends.
He came from a small town called Langholm in the Scottish border country, which accounted for his odd accent with its thick vowel sounds and melodies that curled playfully up and down over the course of each sentence. We had musical tastes in common and I enlisted him to write reviews for my homemade fanzine. Soon we were inseparable, going to every punk and New Wave gig that hit Edinburgh. And the timing was perfect for at that precise moment of the twentieth century, punk was exploding.
Edinburgh, with its castle, cobbled medieval streets and gothic monuments, was an unlikely backdrop for touring punk rock bands. The great gobby snarlers like Joe Strummer or Johnny Rotten belonged in gloomy Soho alleys, or under yellow-lit London motorway flyovers, or leaning against brick walls in graffiti-blitzed housing projects. Strummer, lurching unhealthily up the steep hill of ancient Cockburn Street on his way to an album-signing session in one of Edinburgh’s record shops, the green vista of Princes Street Gardens stretching airily behind him, was an incongruous sight indeed. Leather jacketed, grimacing, one shoulder hoisted insolently in a well-practised pose of defiance, brightly-coloured zips mysteriously sewn all over his trousers, and denuded of the camouflage of his native habitat, Strummer looked like a homicidal hunchback who’d found a sewing manual in a landfill.
Likewise Johnny Rotten. The Sex Pistols couldn’t play in Edinburgh because they were banned throughout the UK, but they came for radio interviews and to make an appearance at the local Virgin Records shop. Word spread like wildfire, even to Pollock Halls where Ed and I dropped everything and rushed downtown. Virgin was on Frederick Street, a noble thoroughfare just off the main drag of Princes Street, in the shade of Edinburgh Castle. Luck was with us for as we turned the corner there was Rotten crossing the road in black coat and flat Chinese straw hat, his lips grotesquely puckered outwards according to the strictures of punk fashion, his eyes narrowed into snake slits. But the apparition of Johnny Rotten and the tableau of Scotland’s capital didn’t go together; he looked like he wasn’t really there, as if someone had drawn a crude cartoon of him onto a colour postcard of the city.
Edinburgh nurtured a peculiar intellectual variation on punk. The best local band was The Rezillos, a shrieking gang of rubber-faced pop-art terrorists with great choruses and sheet metal guitars. And like the rest of Britain in 1977 Edinburgh was riven by the cultural war between New Wavers who understood punk and Old Wavers who didn’t and obstinately stuck to the ‘dinosaur’ bands like Genesis and Led Zeppelin. Even in the sheltered world of university the schism was starkly visible. Ed and I wasted no opportunity to wade into this conflict and to airlift people stranded in the Old Wave across to the New. Usually all we needed to do was take a university mate – a degenerate Eagles fan perhaps or a stubborn Tull-head – to a half-decent punk gig. Suddenly they’d get it: the excitement, the raw power of the music, the sense of everyone in it together, and hey presto – another convert.
Not all our efforts were so coherent. One of our favourite pastimes was to stand on the roof of the Pollock Halls refectory while our fellow students were passing in their ragtag hordes, and loudly sing ‘How Much Longer’, a punk anthem by a London band called Alternative TV. We altered the words to make reference to a randomly-chosen victim in the crowd, like this:
How much longer!
Will that guy wear! (the two us pointing gleefully at our victim)
Dark blue anorak! (or whatever our victim was wearing)
And normal hair! (or Old-Wave hair, or soul-boy hair, etc)
Well you don’t know nothing!
And you don’t really care, do ya?
You just don’t care!
This afforded us hours of moronic fun and somehow no one beat us up for it.
Before long I discovered that Ed was a resourceful chap with a knack for getting into bands’ soundchecks or the backstage areas of Edinburgh rock venues. This talent comprised persistence, brass neck and an easy affability; Ed could talk to anyone. Together we sought and found ingress to behind-the-scenes action at shows by The Clash, The Boomtown Rats, The Tom Robinson Band, The Skids, The Stranglers and many others. If it moved, Ed and I were there. By the time we were blagging our way into Joe Strummer’s hotel or Bob Geldof’s dressing room, however, I’d given Ed a punk name, Z, pronounced like the letter ‘Zed’. He reciprocated – amused by the pseudonym I’d assumed for my fanzine writing, Velvet Lanier, he unfailingly referred to me as ‘Lainay-er’.
Thus appellated we went on our myriad expeditions. We hitchhiked to concerts in Glasgow and St Andrews and expanded our operations to include lightning trips to London, where we learned how to get into the press offices of record companies by brandishing copies of our fanzine and saying we wanted to write articles about their acts. Rich pickings awaited: places on concert guest lists, snippets of privileged information, glossy photos, free single
s and albums. Through all of this Z was the main instigator, the canny operator with a eye on the main chance, for the way in, behind, or through. No surprise then that when it came time for me to become a professional musician myself, I knew who had to be my manager.
And Z had other talents that qualified him as a rock Svengali. He was incredibly tight with money. In that first year at university he once took it upon himself, as a kind of ideological challenge, to live for a week on eighteen pence. I don’t know why specifically eighteen pence but I kept tabs on him through the seven days, and he really did it. He bought some cheap fruit and made it last all week, walked everywhere, contrived to get in free to any concerts that were happening, didn’t drink (or at least didn’t pay for his own) and ate only the meals that were provided free at the university halls of residence. And not only was he canny with money, he had willpower of iron. Indeed, he had to be my manager. What’s more, he was forthright and fearless. Some might have classified this as rudeness, for example the American punk rocker Richard Hell, who’d been famously fired from the band Television by his ex-friend, now sworn enemy, Tom Verlaine. But this didn’t perturb Z who sat in Richard’s hotel bedroom the night we interviewed him, vehemently pronouncing Verlaine’s album Marquee Moon ‘a great masterpiece’.
Others might have thought him aggressive, like the queue jumpers in the overnight line to buy Bob Dylan concert tickets in Glasgow in the summer of 1978, at whom he snarled, ‘Oi! Cut the crap!’ Yes he had to be my manager! And soon he was.
We went to see Dylan play at Earls Court in London. Bob transcended all the Old or New Wave stuff just like David Bowie, and nothing would have kept Z and me from attending his first British concerts in twelve years. And somehow, despite having been way back in the queue for tickets, we’d scored front-row seats for the first night. Only we didn’t know it. The tickets said ‘Row A’, which we took to mean something like the first row of the third upper circle in some dim distant balcony of the arena. But when we arrived at the vast barn of Earls Court, Bob already on stage and into his first number, the steward walked us to our seats not up the metal stairs or round the cavernous flanks of the venue but straight down a wide walkway through the middle. We followed him, getting ever closer and closer to the front, our disbelief and delight growing with every step. Finally he indicated our seats in the first row, right in front of Bob.
To two young sprogs from Scotland, being so close to Dylan performing on stage was like being in a beautiful, impossible dream. We copped every grin and gurn Bob pulled, hung on his every tattered poetic word, dug his band, grumbled to each other about his backing singers, got the goose bumps when he sang ‘Just Like A Woman’, and looked in mystification on the cabaret-style lightning flashes embroidered down the sides of his out-of-fashion flares. The show was slick, good rather than great, and a long way short of the brilliant Rolling Thunder shows he’d played in America a few years previously (which we’d heard on bootlegs), but it didn’t matter; we were seeing Dylan!
After the show we decided to try our usual meet-the-band tactics, though we knew Bob’s security arrangements would be a little different from those at Edinburgh punk gigs. We waited outside Earls Court as close to the artists’ entrance as security would allow. Soon a great wheezing steel gateway opened and a single-decker bus rolled out. Its inside was lit and we could see members of the band, their heads framed in the windows. And there was Bob! He had shades on, looked just like one of his mid-sixties album covers, and was looking round quizzically. We waved to him and he waved back. Z wrote ‘Good luck Bob’ on his concert programme and held it up. Bob waved again, with a nod of thanks. The bus wheeled past us and out onto the streets of west London. We stood dazed, recovering from the shock of having communicated, even wordlessly and through glass, with Bob Dylan. Then we looked at the disappearing bus and noticed it was moving slowly; the streets were jammed with all the cars leaving the concert. The same thought struck us simultaneously – we could follow the bus on foot and see Bob in his hotel!
This unlikely plan worked. The bus proceeded, mostly, at such a snail-like pace that we were able to always keep it in sight. Forty minutes later, out of breath and with very sore legs, we saw it come to a definitive halt in the semi-distance outside a massive brightly lit building at the far end of Kensington High Street. A few minutes later we caught up and discovered this was the Royal Garden Hotel, a swanky joint on the corner of Hyde Park. And there was the bus outside, now empty. We ascended the steps to the hotel doors, suddenly conscious of our ragamuffin appearance (both in punk uniform of motorcycle jackets and ripped jeans), wondering whether we’d be allowed in.
We found ourselves in a cathedral foyer of glass and marble. Looking up and down its length we saw at the open doors of the hotel bar and headed towards it, feet sinking into the plush carpet. We peered in: the bar was full of wealthy-looking people enjoying shorts and cocktails at low-lit tables, jazzy music playing over a hubbub of conversation. Our hungry eyes scanned this tableau and swiftly found their quarry. Bob was sitting, hunched in conversation, with a few people at the far end of the room. As if drawn by a magnet our feet started moving towards him. We drew closer and closer. We were going to meet and shake hands with him!
Two thirds of the way across the room, a couple of dark shapes sprang from either side of us, barring our way. One of them, a heavily built bearded gentleman in a black bomber jacket, said to us with a kind of pleading sadness in his voice: ‘Bob’s done his job. He’s given everything. Let him relax now and have his peace.’ Z and I, though sympathetic to this argument, still thought Bob might have just enough time and energy left to say a short hello to us, but there was no dissuading these guys. The game was up. As they escorted us out of the bar I asked the bearded man if he was one of Bob’s roadies, but he just shook his head sadly and ushered us out of the bar. In the corridor two silent security guards took over and deposited us back on the pavement where we belonged. A few years later I saw the burly gentleman on TV. He was Harvey Goldsmith, the biggest rock promoter in Britain – and I’d asked him if he was a roadie!
A week before the Dylan shows I’d left university, dropping out after a first year spent attending almost zero lectures and countless punk gigs. And the following autumn, still in Edinburgh, I started my first serious band, Another Pretty Face, which comprised myself and three pals, all veterans of my teenage bands in Ayr: John Caldwell (talented, dour, handsome guitarist, and my co-writer in the band), Jim Geddes (still a scarf-toting Stones fan) and Crigg (still a wiggy mod drummer).
As I’d intended, Z became our manager and quickly succeeded at his first job, finding us a rehearsal room. Well, it was a cave really – a rectangular cube hewn from damp stone in the maze of medieval catacombs under Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. The place was run by an owl-faced entrepreneur called Ian McCain who lived, unbelievably, in a flat in the catacombs with his wife and kids. To get to our cave we had to haul our gear along numberless fetid tunnels, past the sounds of a dozen other bands rehearsing in the same subterranean purgatory as ourselves. It was Dickensian, unhealthy and probably illegal, but we didn’t care. It was where our music lived.
Then Z started booking us shows. He was good at it from the start, finding it easy to be business-like with agents and promoters, securing us support slots at the Edinburgh venues of the day like Tiffany’s Ballroom or sending us further afield on jaunts to Glasgow and Aberdeen. Next he formed a record company for our first single, a piece of spunky doggerel called ‘All The Boys Love Carrie’. He named the label after a Richard Hell song, ‘New Pleasures’ (reparations, perhaps, for his Marquee Moon gaffe), and by the spring of 1979 our little record was being played regularly on the John Peel radio show and was Single of the Week in the NME. We were off!
The next six months were exciting. Doors opened and obstacles crumbled, local audiences grew and the world, it seemed, was ours for the taking. In the wake of the ‘Carrie’ single we were wooed by several record companies, and after our firs
t show in London that September a number of A&R men sidled up to us and spoke sweet nothings in our ears. My tendency to be argumentative with these guys, especially when they got our song titles wrong, was compensated by Z’s diplomatic skills and soon he’d sewn up a tidy eight-album contract for us with Virgin Records, at the time an edgy, hip and newly chart-successful label.
And then he walked out on us. On me. The ink on our contract was still glistening when Z announced out of the blue that he was giving up managing to spend a year going round the world with his girlfriend, with no promise that he would come back to the job after that. I was shocked and could do nothing to change his mind, but I’d found the Achilles heel of Z’s managerial skill set. He got bored quickly. Eager to keep our momentum going, we hired a fellow traveller on the Edinburgh music scene, Johnny Waller, as a replacement. Johnny was a great character and a good friend but a terrible manager. He specialised in unpredictable, shit-stirring wind-up antics, such as getting a skinhead haircut with the band initials APF shaved into the side of his skull the night before we left for a tour. In the 1979 Britain, a couple of decades before a number-one crop became the norm for footballers and businessmen, this was a seriously anti-social statement. A shaved head meant only one thing: bovver, and Johnny’s fashion statement resulted in us being instantly banned from hotel after hotel by terrified staff.
Added to this was the band members’ not inconsiderable youthful arrogance, with myself the prime offender. Always convinced of the rightness of our actions, and without Z’s ameliorating influence, we led our genial and decent Virgin A&R man, Arnold, a merry dance, ganging up on him and generally reacting to his perplexed ministrations as if he worked for an evil empire. Our attitude was based on the absurd premise that despite giving us money, wanting to release our records and trying to make us successful, the record company was our enemy. We played silly psychological games with Arnold, for example ensuring a different band member or my punkette girlfriend Mairi answered the phone every time he called so he could never progress in whatever the argument of the day was. We were a regular group of horrors and unsurprisingly we fell out with Virgin and were kicked off the label, one not-quite-finished and not-very-good album later. This taught us tough lessons about the consequences of our actions as well as the capricious nature of success – having lost our record deal, no one was interested in us anymore. I returned to Edinburgh to contemplate my follies, lick my wounds and, soon enough, make another more effective and sustained assault on the mountain of stardom. Meanwhile Z was in East Africa. Our paths didn’t cross again until two years later.