by Nick Kent
Chrissie Hynde was with him - fresh from her native Akron to try her luck once again back in swinging London town. She didn’t seem too happy to see me again but McLaren immediately came to the point of why this visitation was taking place. He’d decided to extend his pop-Svengali instincts beyond the realm of the Sex Pistols and start a second band that he was fully intent on controlling with the same steely grip. Chrissie would be the singer and I’d play guitar. Mick Jones - then known only as ‘Brady’ - would be the bassist and a kid from Croydon called Chris Miller would be the drummer. The three of us - McLaren, Hynde and myself - even drove to Miller’s hotel room that same night somewhere on the outskirts of London to sound him out on the project. He seemed to be up for anything but was still taken aback when McLaren suddenly insisted that our group had to be called ‘the Masters of the Backside’.
The guy still couldn’t see past using musicians as glorified rent boys for his pimp-centric ambitions. The project was over for me as soon as he came up with that demeaning name. Plus Hynde and I were still far from comfortable in each other’s company. Time had not healed the old wounds that still festered between us. She came back to see me alone a few days later and our conversation soon degenerated into an almighty row that promptly spelt the end of ‘the Masters of the Backside’ before we’d even played a note of music together.
It was at this time also that my girlfriend Hermine discovered that her tightrope had been stolen. This was most inconvenient as she’d just been booked to walk it at a Women’s Lib festival somewhere in Cardiff during early May. Somehow this unfortunate state of affairs developed into a scenario where she would sing at the festival instead and I would back her up. It was then that Chris Miller turned up and offered to lend his musical support. He had two friends with him: a black-haired guitarist called Brian Robertson some years his senior and a maladjusted youth called Ray who’d spent much of his adolescence devoid of parental guidance, even sleeping on Brighton beach for extended periods. In a couple of months’ time, Brian would change his surname to ‘James’, Ray would reinvent himself as ‘Captain Sensible’, Chris would take on the daunting sobriquet of ‘Rat Scabies’ - and with a horror-film obsessive who called himself Dave Vanian also in tow they’d begin playing around London as the Damned.
But before that they committed themselves to two performances as the Subterraneans - the name came courtesy of a Jack Kerouac novel I favoured at the time - in my old stomping ground of Wales’s capital city. Half the show consisted of us doing the least liberating-for-women songs ever conceived in rock - nasty misogynistic numbers like the Stones’ ‘Under My Thumb’ and the Crystals’ ‘He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss)’. The other half featured brand-new songs, most significantly Brian’s composition ‘New Rose’, which was premiered for the first time ever at the two concerts we gave. Not that anyone noticed: there were only eight people present in both audiences.
Back in London, though, a fierce conflict was brewing between Malcolm McLaren and anyone he perceived to be threatening his pre-eminence as the Pygmalion of punk. Anyone operating outside of his personal radar was suddenly marked out for instant retribution. He’d lately become so caught up in his new-found power that he’d started a new trend at his group’s London shows: setting members of the audience up for a bloody beating.
Lydon - intimidated by the rest of the Pistols - had opted to bring some of his own hooligan cohorts into the group’s immediate entourage - proper bad boys like John ‘Sid’ Beverley and Jah Wobble. Watching their former school pal suddenly become the poster boy of late-seventies rock revolution had made them equally determined to make their mark on this new scene. At this exact moment their capacities for music-making were at best minimal but not to worry: little Malcolm conscripted them instead into his own private thug army. They could run wild at Pistols concerts, punching and stabbing and blood-letting with complete impunity.
When Beverley blinded a young girl during a show at the 100 Club that summer, few amongst the media chose to draw attention to the incident. McLaren had them all hypnotised like chickens. Some bright spark at Melody Maker had just come up with a new ‘punk’ manifesto. 1976 was ‘year zero’. The old rock ’n’ roll was dead. Punk was the new reality and anyone who disagreed was a walking fossil. A kind of mass hysteria was being conjured forth that threw the old music-industry guard based in Britain into a complete panic.
No one knew what to think of this new music for fear of being suddenly judged old and obsolete. And no one dared to directly address the savagery and barbarism of its protagonists. Like sex, physical violence isn’t something the English generally feel too confident about exploring. When it erupts before them, they tend to cower back, hide in the shadows and pretend that nothing untoward is going on. Thus it was that McLaren and his bully boys were able to terrorise London club-goers over and over again and still receive a clean bill of health from the city’s jobbing journos.
The first time I saw ‘Sid’ Beverley was on the 27th of May, 1976. He was lurking around the backstage entrance of a Rolling Stones concert being held in the huge Earls Court exhibition show-room, unsuccessfully trying to chance his way into the venue. In an ill-fitting second-hand suit and electric-shock hair, he looked like a juvenile Dickensian chimney sweep.
The second time I saw him - just two weeks later at a Pistols show at the 100 Club - he left more of an impact. The atmosphere that night was tense in the extreme. McLaren was doing his puppet-master routine, setting up more dupes for a public thrashing. Two members of Eddie and the Hot Rods’ entourage - their logo designer Michael Beal and A&R man Howard Thompson - were in the house, and to the Pistols this was tantamount to a rival gang invading their turf. Just before his band started playing, McLaren stood on the stage alongside John Lydon and beckoned to ‘Sid’ to join them. They then pointed seemingly in the direction of the two interlopers and grinned conspiratorially. Sid pulled out his chain and immediately went to work. But I was mistaken: McLaren and Lydon hadn’t dispatched him to beat up the Hot Rods intruders. They’d sent him to beat me up instead.
Sid didn’t waste any words. He just lurched over and started kicking merry hell out of my seated frame whilst brandishing his bike chain just above my head. One of the Hot Rods guys intervened momentarily, only to have his face lacerated by the chain. Whilst this was happening, Vicious’s accomplice Jah Wobble materialised before me. He held an open penknife and was waving it no more than two inches from my eyes. There was dried blood on the blade and a look of pure sadistic delight in his piggy eyes as though he was about to experience an impromptu orgasm at any second.
Then he stepped back, allowing Sid dead aim at my skull. He took three or four bike-chain swings but only managed to connect with me once. I was so stoned that night that I didn’t even feel the blow. But I could tell that something potentially life-threatening had transpired because there was blood everywhere: on the wall behind me in a wide crimson arc and all over the back of my jacket. If two more of those chain-swings had actually reached me, I’d probably have been killed by the head trauma. And what was the audience doing whilst this was going on? Just standing there, afraid to react, taking it all in voyeuristically. Finally a bouncer grabbed ‘Sid’ from behind, disarmed him and dragged him towards the nearest exit. As I was being led out, Vivienne Westwood ran up and started apologising profusely for what had happened: ‘The boy who did that - he’s just this psychopath who’s fastened on to the group. We’ll make sure he’s never allowed into one of our shows again.’ Blah-blah-blah. McLaren told me the same thing when he phoned up a day later to try and mend fences.
Who did they think they were fooling? I knew they’d set me up, that it had all been pre-arranged and that my old buddies in the Sex Pistols were probably all in on it too. All my professional life, I’d been expecting this moment. But I’d always imagined it coming at the hand of someone I’d genuinely affronted. I never dreamed I’d be stitched up by people I’d helped and viewed as kindred spirits.
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br /> Still, I should have seen it coming. Only a year before, McLaren and Westwood had marketed a T-shirt they’d designed together. On its front was written ‘One of these days you’re going to wake up and discover which side of the bed you’ve been sleeping on’ and below were two lists of names. One list was a roll call of their chosen favourites, the other of their most despised enemies. My name turns up in the pro column right next to ‘QT Jones and the Sex Pistols’. Now I’d been shunted rudely over to the other side of the bed. That’s what happens when you find yourself mingling with the beautiful people. You’ve always got to keep your back to the wall. You never know when you’ll be their next sacrificial victim.
Did I tell you I’d become recently homeless? I was now entering the most brutal hard-core phase of heroin addiction - the phase where nothing else matters, not even a roof over one’s head - or loving companionship. Hermine had left me too. I’d become too toxic for her to waste further time on - at least for the moment. So I was out on my own and up to no good.
Drug addiction inevitably promotes a heightened sense of isolation within the mindset of its victims but that didn’t mean I was alone in my predicament. In May I’d spent time with the Rolling Stones and they were slowly unravelling too from all the chronic drug abuse around them. Their music had lost all of its primal momentum. Bob Dylan saw them live around this time and Ian Hunter later asked him what he’d thought of the group’s mid-seventies incarnation. ‘Apathy for the devil,’ he’d simply replied with a jaundiced sneer on his cocky little face.
Something had turned distinctly rotten in the state of Led Zeppelin too that same year. In October I went to their newly instigated World’s End headquarters to interview Jimmy Page for the NME. They had a film coming out - The Song Remains the Same - accompanied by a live soundtrack album but both were deeply underwhelming approximations of what usually transpired at a Zeppelin live event.
Normally the film reels and live tapes would have been judged inadequate and left in a closet. But Peter Grant was not fully on top of the situation and had let them both reach completion in order to feed the record label with new product whilst the group stayed away from the touring circuit. Grant’s impending divorce had taken all the wind out of his sails and had sent him spinning into the throes of a full-blown drug-accelerated breakdown. I spoke to him on the phone for just five minutes that day: he sounded like a cross between a wounded bear and Darth Vader with a slight East London lisp. ‘I just want to know if you’re still our ally,’ he kept asking me. It made my blood run cold.
Page looked distinctly fragile when he finally arrived. It soon became clear he wasn’t too enamoured with the film and record he was supposed to promote either - and so our talk centred more on his recent adventures. He was particularly vexed about the Scorpio Rising film project and its director Kenneth Anger. He claimed he’d contributed the soundtrack music and even helped finance the editing, but that Anger was unable to complete the work and had generally been mistaking the guitarist’s kindness for weakness.
I wrote up Page’s comments only to find myself later having to confront Anger face to face. He turned up at the NME’s office demanding a right of reply. When one wasn’t forthcoming, he held aloft his right hand puckishly. ‘I just have to crook this little finger and Jimmy Page will automatically be transformed into a toad,’ he informed me with due theatricality. He was also strongly implying that he could do the same trick on me. But I was unmoved. That’s the one positive about being a homeless junkie: even witchcraft can’t intimidate you. You’re so far down the ladder anyway, nothing seems worse than where you already are.
What else was going on? Oh yes, the Clash. Bernie Rhodes had been McLaren’s boy - his gofer and general dogsbody. Rhodes had been heavily under his spell, working tirelessly for whatever mad cause Malcolm had drawn him into. But devotion has its limits and - seeing his mentor suddenly neck-deep in media attention - Bernie had started developing ambitions of his own. If McLaren could become a bona fide pop Svengali, then so could he.
In the late spring of 1976 he began consorting with Mick Jones and a strikingly handsome youth named Paul Simonon who’d been briefly employed by David Bowie’s Mainman organisation as a lookalike decoy to confuse fans when the star himself was out in public. Keith Levene-a prog-rock-besotted guitarist - was also in the picture as was a drummer called Terry Chimes. But they needed a frontman more than anything else - as well as a new musical direction. The latter they discovered the first time they listened to the Ramones’ debut album. Then they lured Joe Strummer of the 101’ers into their web.
Strummer was already a known quantity around London’s pub-rock circuit as the snaggle-toothed troubadour of the capital’s new bohemian squatocracy, so his sudden defection to the cause of punk was not without personal consequences. I saw one of the Clash’s first-ever London shows - again at the 100 Club. It was visually impressive but the players - still including Keith Levene - hadn’t yet secured a solid rhythmic foundation to build their sound from and were basically just making a bunch of shrill, overamplified noise. Afterwards I saw Strummer in a state of advanced inebriation and close to tears remonstrating with Bernie Rhodes. ‘I’ve sold out, Bernie,’ he kept saying over and over again. But it was only a fleeting moment of uncertainty on the singer’s part. As soon as the glowing reviews started getting published, the former John Mellor - the upper-middle-class son of a former British government diplomat turned self-styled king of the proles - knew he’d made the right decision when he ruthlessly rejected his old squat-rock cronies in order to throw in his lot with the new breed.
By the end of ’76, his group were out there on the cultural barricades alongside the Pistols and the Damned as part of the Anarchy package tour, getting banned and/or publicly demonised almost everywhere they played. The tour should have compounded a sense of genuine unity within this fragile punk community but instead only contributed to its ongoing fragmentation. The managers were all at each other’s throats and the groups began to get coldly competitive with each other. An even more divisive element had been imported into the mix: Johnny Thunders’s Heartbreakers had been invited over from New York to take part in the tour. Thunders’s arrival in the London punk milieu that winter would have grievous consequences. The guy was a walking advert for heroin and many impressionable young scene-makers were suddenly seduced into sharing the high with the guitarist.
But was I really any better than him? Junkies are junkies, after all. Sordid people leading sordid lives. It’s the nature of the beast. I wasn’t consciously endangering others in my thirst for junk but in the past twelve months it had managed to turn me into a pitiful public spectacle. There’s one photograph that sometimes turns up in punk-related tomes that was taken at year’s end 1976. John Lydon is sneering triumphantly next to a high-spirited Brian James whilst I stand to their immediate left looking like I’ve just been liberated from Dachau concentration camp.
Even more alarming to behold were the few articles I managed to eke out during this spell. Reading them now is like watching a man trying to swim his way through an ocean of mud. At Christmas time I made my annual pilgrimage to visit my parents, who now lived in Morecambe, Lancashire. My mother burst into tears when she opened the door and saw the state I was in. That’s when I knew I was truly in hell.
Death-dealing druggies and psychopaths to the left of me. Chicken-hearted chicken hawks and yuppie violence-groupies to the right. Stones in my pathway every step of the way. I felt like I’d suddenly taken up residence in one of Robert Johnson’s most godforsaken compositions. ‘The valley of the shadow of death’ wasn’t just some grim reference from the Bible any more; it was my new postal code.
If I’d had my druthers, I would have been making radical New Year’s resolutions to redeem my situation, but I simply couldn’t summon the required willpower. The worst was yet to come.
1977
This is how 1977 started for me.
On the 28th December 1976 I left my parents an
d returned south in a state of some urgency. The drugs I’d taken there to tide me over the Christmas season had run out and it was only a matter of a few hours before I’d be feeling the withdrawal symptoms. I had no actual London home base as such to return to-I was still effectively sans domicile - but the dealers would probably still let me pass out on their floors and that was all the roof I needed over my head at the time.
Stepping back into the city I looked around and the streets seemed virtually deserted. Everyone had left to see in the new year with family and friends out in the provinces. I immediately made some phone calls and checked out some addresses but all my former drug connections were out of town as well. My bones were beginning to ache and my eyes were watering like a lovesick girl’s. In desperation I visited the surgery of a well-known London ‘croaker’-a registered doctor who was known to prescribe strong pain medication, tranquillisers and pill-form speed if the price was right. I told him my problem-I was a heroin addict on the verge of withdrawal - and he tut-tutted and played the armchair moralist for five minutes. Then he wrote out a script and handed it to me, though not before pocketing £20 of my dwindling personal cash flow. I took it straight to a pharmacy, only to discover that he’d prescribed me nothing for the physical pain I was about to experience, just some mood-altering medication I’d never taken before.
Now I had to attend to a second pressing concern: finding myself some form of temporary accommodation. I ran into a girl I’d sometimes seen on the smack circuit in the streets of Westbourne Grove and unburdened my tale of woe on her. She then took me back to her squat and said I could sleep in the spare room. Her boyfriend lived in the building too-a big Scottish guy, hard as nails. I think his name was Trevor. He’d been a well-known and justly feared fixture on the local junk scene for some time - shaking down users and dealers alike, stealing and swindling his way around the metropolis. But then he’d gotten addicted to a drug even stronger than heroin-a pink pill they gave only to terminal cancer patients the name of which now escapes me. It was manufactured in such a way that it was extremely dangerous to attempt direct injection. The chalk in the pills wouldn’t dissolve and would then be mainlined straight into veins as well as muscle tissue and bone marrow and start spreading disease. But this hadn’t stopped Trevor. He’d started shooting up the stuff in his left leg. Now he couldn’t walk. He just lay there in bed and got his girlfriend to do everything for him - cook his food, change his bandage, cop his dope. The first night I moved in, he showed me the infected leg; from the toes up to the knee, everything was swollen green. ‘Looks like gangrene,’ I muttered, albeit cautiously. ‘Aye, I know,’ he’d replied. ‘It’s only a matter of time before this bugger’ - indicating the infected leg - ‘gets amputated. I’m nae worried, though. I’ll get a ton of gear free off the NHS as a result - maybe a lifetime’s supply. Giving up a leg for a deal like that is the best thing that’s happened to me in a while.’