by Jeremy Reed
writing a poem about a wounded Kink,
the sky burning on mauve and pink and grey,
everyone alive believing they’ll never stop.
WHITE BOY BLUES
White Boy Blues
When Pete Doherty shimmied lugubriously into Red Snapper Books, 22 Cecil Court, his laterally synaptic thoughts time-slipping iconisation of punk kamikazes like Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten into the present, he’d inevitably want a third or was it thirteenth copy of Jean Genet’s The Thief’s Journal, the Grove Press first edition (1964), with the celebrated Jerry Bauer photo on the cover, of Genet as a delinquent outlaw, a skinhead recidivist, a reprieved criminal on life licence whose books unconditionally celebrated crime as a glamorised dopamine catharsis.
But I mean Pete’s voice is bona palare, a sort of scrunched retread of street singers’ ‘When I Went to Lunnon Town Sirs’ of ingenuous East End cockney music hall rag, 1880s D’Oyly Carte protégés at the Savoy Theatre, the gay slang polari grabbed from Romany and pie-and-mash docker speak, all the default of English pop; it’s an unstudied amalgam of all those genres of dubious probity licked like a Rizla paper roll-up into timeless update.
Breaking out of the poem or novel I was writing by hand at the time—cutting the page with a familiar violet Pentel Sign Pen—(multitasking is a faculty well developed in me) I’d stack a compact pile of books on the table for Pete: Burroughs, John Fante, J.G. Ballard and of course that diamond cold user’s novel, the smack-drenched Cain’s Book by Alexander Trocchi, in which a needle is used to intravenously pilot neurology as an opioid pathway into reprogramming sensory data. All dust jackets near fine, the physicals fastidiously maintained by our modern firsts’ specialist acumen, we’d dialect white boy blues, that is make language happen by provoking it into elliptical breakage—slang. Pete’s lyricism (and he is arguably the unrivalled inheritor to Muswell Hill’s Ray Davies, as the social pop commentator on London’s subcultural energies) comes from making streetwise slang (music hall lingo) into drawlishly phrased poetry—Babyshambles as dandified indie bandits spiking literacy with souf London gangsta.
The emergent white boy blues artist was a London phenomenon relay-filtered eclectically from hollering street costers (who’d got lingo from the 18th century saturation of ethnic blacks, and their 19th century scions, the Victorian Ethiopians of the street) to buskers, Piccadilly rent boys selling sex outside Swan & Edgar’s at Piccadilly Circus (where Oscar Wilde picked up not only rudimentary panthers but STDs from rough trade), through night club smoothies, gangster operations like the Nash, Richardsons and Krays—thuggish interlopers with their dandy apprentice rap—and again through Teddy boys in accessorised velvet-trimmed Edwardian drape coats, quiffed spivs, tearjerker crooners and rock ’n’ roll Elvis clones, to the raw meritocracy of sweaty R&B, like a viral strain of rock emerged from virulent Soho cellars—and to Pete; they materialise, the flagrantly anarchic Rolling Stones, the hoodlum Pretty Things like a sonic heist, the detonative pilled-up auto-destructive The Who, Pete inheriting their blues genre, and the Pretties, Phil May’s primal autonomy, ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’, 1964, stop and start as a howitzer confronting Gulf missiles.
I’m on my own, nowhere to roam
I tell you, baby, don’t want no home
I wander round, feet off the ground
I even go from town to town
I said I think this rock is grand
Say I’ll be your man
Don’t bring me down
And, Pete, you surf off that raw impacting degeneracy, proto-Lydon, Sid’s knife in the teeth, dyslexic piracy playing bass like he’s in an OD coma. And the Forest Hill South London sunglassed skinny Romantic focus Peter Perrett and the Only Ones, no predecessors as losers, no successors as winners, just the voice vertically dipping into the drop
‘Breaking Down Again’
‘Out There in the Night’
‘The Big Sleep’
‘Oh Lucinda’
‘Why Don’t You Kill Yourself’
the unparalleled depressants given semantic uplift by John Perry’s fluently scratchy guitar figures—howdya ever do that with three-chord compression, filling in time with the light-speed cyan sky—‘space travels in my blood,’ like light travelling at 186,000 miles per second, unrecognisable in its arrival, 8 mins time travel from the Sun, and because you’re full of it you don’t even know the info checking in. The difference between Ed Dorn’s cool hip epic Gunslinger, 1968–69, and the Only Ones is a molecular dissolve, the one unconscious of the other, but accidentally interrelating, Dorn’s hipster old West tradition cowboy manoeuvres in Black Mountain spatialised lingo find their counterpart in the indie punk Romantics The Only Ones, Peter Perrett with a shooter in the pocket of his Chelsea Antiques Market sixties fur coat, worn as a deliberately non-polarised fashion moment, as the androgynous sophisticate to Ian Dury’s invalided pub rock pulled from Upminster in the Essex badlands between Dagenham and Ockenden. If Dury’s fist-fight stroppy, geezered into verbal dexterity by his savvy as a cockney rhymester, then Perrett’s more intellectually refined elegies, as loser takes all, are Pete Doherty’s prototypes: users’ songs that put powders into language, opiates into streetwise palare, the way Ronnie Kray must have card-shuffled a wedge of crisply laundered camellia-pink fifties. At Red Snapper, we contemplated it through Colin, printing notes in nearby Soho as a form of serially numbered silver hologram strip poetry.
I once wrote a poem called ‘Flip-Side’ on the back of ten laundered fifties (and it’s in my collection Sooner or Later Frank) in a Cecil Court basement, sitting on a 60s lipstick-red Chesterfield, one muzzy overhung December lunchtime, the subterranean rumble of the city in my networking arteries, a Babyshambles Get Loaded as my soundtrack, and outside a slow rain printing polka dots on the court, dab by dab like a cold water beady nosebleed.
If you follow that trail through Dr Feelgood, Suggs’ Madness, Squeeze’s ‘Cool for Cats’, you’re getting to Pete, and it’s all outta the physical assault projected by London’s disruptively intransigent speed merchants, the Pretty Things as proto-punk, toxic as cholera in Soho’s underground blue ribbon, but seminal to London white boy garage, the rogue gene sourced in sweaty London rooms with the music coming off the walls like a thunderstorm caged in a cellar. What you got as compressed aggro was raw harmonica-whipped surges of defiant rock banditry drenched in southern blues—‘Midnight To Six Men’ (2.18) 1965, ‘Honey I Need’ (1.57) 1965, ‘Roadrunner’ (3.11) 1965, and those down-in-the-hole slouchy broken-hearted blues, ‘Cry To Me’, (2.49) 1965, the last two hitting places that poetry doesn’t usually reach, because the phrasing meshes with the music in ways the printed word can’t get, partly because it’s laid on the page. But the Pretties’ ‘LSD’ (2.23) 1966 gangsterises blues, and they’re years before ‘Pipedown’, ‘What Katie Did’ ‘Sedative’ ‘Fuck Forever’, as little tolerated by mainstream metabolism as Pete—a lawless incitement to explode social convention.
The thing about Pretties’ lyrics, like Pete’s, is that they’re invariably synaptic, they break out of linear cohesive order (like most non-mainstream poetry attempts) and get more real by the randomised associations that are like life pulled off the senses, rather than crunched into rational meaning.
White boy blues, it’s a coded gene, an individual neuron enhancer, a sort of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) binding to a molecular anchor called cannabinoid type (CB1): a sonic psychoactive. For the brain chemistry to interact with the music, there’s usually a drug to fire-up serotonin levels—speed for the Pretty Things in their mod affiliation and later coke for accelerated signals, and for Pete, rum, coke and smack—an OD cocktail.
As I write this at First Out café, St Giles, the cluster of hot yellow daffodils clenched into a glass jug, their orange fired up with fried egg-coloured centres, the real focus bringing a bunched sun into the room, accumulative Asian foot traffic outside for ASSA, with its crimson façade, my Denise text reads crazily, ‘jeremy did try Mayfair l
ast night, I’d say mount st C(church) day some nice guys (20s) on a fag break from posh club whiskey mist told me most poetry now so bad is it worth reading 10 bad to read 1 good. My guy agreed rap = poetry, beggar lol said south bank guy not reading poems selling poems coloured envelopes.’
In St
Giles now you don’t see Pete’s
dematerialising aura
like a molecular tiara
Dior suit, the banjo
and mister the fedora
and hey what’s the price
of being me baby,
my pineal’s hyper
my language like atomised
shattered kabala
White boy blues is a bonus to busking poetry on Mount Street: I used to write poems leaning in the smudgy blond Piccadilly Circus sunshine on the black railings some afternoons, you need some attitude for that, and they always came out right (one take only), and the punter sizing me up for configurated sex, said, ‘Hey what’s the price?’ And I said, ‘You’re too fat, mister, you’d be buying a 130 lbs 18 carat diamond.’ And he said, ‘I want you at the going price,’ and I replied, ‘The price of a poetry gene ain’t convertible like my personality, you don’t know nothing, mister. Slim down.’
THREE SONGS FOR JAKE ARNOTT’S THE LONG FIRM
Suck Grease Off Fingers
Purple hearts, French blues, black bombers,
I’m Jack and I’m jerky fisting the lot
I’m Jack the hat
and I bite like a rat
in Soho’s Flamingo or blocked in a flat
I’ve got Ronny and Reggie hot on my scent
they’re suited and black Chelsea boot booted
I’m Jack the hat
with a baseball bat
both Ronny and Reggie do Dilly rent
You get Dot on the stage she’s drenched in gin
a diva with purple coloratura
I’m Jack the hat
I don’t stop at that
I’ll give you mouthwash with a loaded gun
I break up the club when the stripper comes on
a gangster dragging it like an artiste
I’m Jack the hat
and I scratch like a cat
and I’ve got your blood all over my fist
There’s a suitcase murder—a teen runaway
Harry’s on the case—criminals solve crime
I’m Jack the hat
and I’ll trash your flat
but there’s gold in my heart coated with grime
We cruise round the Dilly for info on Bernie
Harry bleeds Phil into telling the lot
I’m Jack the hat
and I’d leave it at that
if there’s grease on your fingers I’ll fry them hot
Vada the Mystery
When you’re a mod you’re up for three days
a dandified pill-head on SFK blues
and vada the mystery he comes in three ways
and dances to the mirror
on the cellar dance floor
There’s criminals, whores, aristos and queens
all doobed at the Scene in their tonic suits
and vada the mystery he’s a courier
he knows dealers and pop stars
and underground gay bars
When you’re a sharp-suited city boy
with an Ivy League or Cecil Gee look
and vada the mystery he’s a blond toy
you wait for his entrée
from Friday to Sunday
When you’re a mod you’re clean as good hygiene
you wear button-downs a black knitted tie
and vada the mystery he’s out on the scene
he don’t look in your eyes
as he’s heard all the lies
When you’re a Face you don’t mix with tickets
your college boy hairdo’s done to a T
and vada the mystery wears tight fitted jackets
and dances alone
as the untouchable one
The Casbah Lounge
It’s sharp mods bitchy queens
in rainbow shirts and white jeans
skinny teens—and me Terry
cherry-picked by a gangster
a cool hipster called Harry
in a sharp suit and red tie
and a look that’s so scary
you don’t dare meet his eye
I was drawn there by pills
and pop Johnny Leyton
Johnny Ray and his anguished
Hysterical emotion
I was looking for kicks
turning tricks in the bar
and bitching polari
bona vada bona riah
And Harry the extortionist
the torture gang boss
his hair black as his Daimler
a slick lick of gloss.
I went back to Sloane Square
the driver smelled of cheap scent
Harry’s cash made me trash
as disposable rent
Oh there’s no biz like show biz
when you’re tied to a chair
and the trickster’s a gangster
with slippery black hair
Harry Starks and the long firm
stitched me up with their rackets
handling contraband stolen
and still sealed in packets
Harry’s scam was a business
where you bought stuff on credit
sold the whole lot off cheap
leaving no one to debit
Oh there’s no biz like show biz
when you’re tied to a chair
and the fraudster’s a gangster
with black slippery hair
And I couldn’t separate
love from hate in my heart
fascination from attraction
it all tore me apart
Harry leaked into me
like a virus destroys
both good and bad matter
I was one of his boys
Oh there’s no biz like show biz
when you’re tied to a chair
and the mobster’s a gangster
with slippery black hair
When it all hit the floor
Harry got me for stealing
broke me up in a lock-up
but not without feeling
and I couldn’t get over
the long firm’s rejection
its corruption coercion
and also protection
Oh there’s no biz like show biz
when you’re tied to a chair
and the fraudster’s a gangster
with slippery black hair
Goldfinger—Remix of Jean Genet’s Un Chant D’Amour
LOVE SONG
Love Song by Jean Genet—(Goldfinger remix)
Honey, come down from sleeping on a cloud—
all I want for winter’s a black greatcoat.
If your cock’s still frozen beneath my breath
my tongue will gloss it like a satin dress.
Dawn’s like a glass of wine thrown on the sheets,
let’s open curtains, while you come alive
to love: the clouds stacked up like a film-set
and listen to Bassey’s impacted ‘Goldfinger’.
Your little ways dissolve me, like Shirley’s
drenched sassy bravura. I slip away
as though we’re pirates cruising an island.
My sadness comes up deep as a black bay.
Your hand brings the clouds down like two white gloves
placed on our eyes. The sky’s so glitzy blond
it’s platinum. Our breath’s an easy mix,
its confusion knocks you back into sleep.
It’s softness singles you out, a light touch
like November rain drizzled in your eyes.
Your balls are tropical like Africa:
my hand coaxes your sex into a snake.
‘Goldfinger
he’s the man with the Midas touch
a spider’s touch
such a cold finger’
A yellow leaf tangos through puffy mist,
the wind opens like a transparent flower.
My finger breaks frost on your banjo case:
a small jungle darkens your parted hair.
My beret’s badged with diamante paste
I’ve a flower placed like Billie at my ear.
You’re one of Shirley’s camp epigones
soaked in the luxury she sings for queer.
Touching your blue eyes like a vacant sea,
my sandal leaks near the degraded heel
as though I’ve walked across a beach. You grown
inside my hand like I’ve made a quick steal.
‘Golden words he will pour in your ear
but his lies can’t disguise what you fear
for a golden girl knows when he’s kissed her
it’s the kiss of death from
Mister Goldfinger’
A green pirate’s flag raised on the summit
stays permanent in a deep polar freeze:
Goldfinger’s songwriters, they’re the real deal
(John Barry, Tony Newley, Leslie Bricusse)
Billboard No. 8 UK No. 21
Your skin’s scented by Chanel No. 5
a drizzled opulence. Night dusts your skin
cyan, peacock, turquoise, a Pantone slash.
To climb naked again on the blue stairs
was it reality or in a dream
we did that raiding a mansion, your lips
tasting like mine, of rainy horizons.
Your naked arms contort, tear the night up:
I hear black horses crashing in a lake