by Nick Kent
How comforting it must have been then to hear the love of his life soothingly inform him that he didn’t need to record another record or have any further contact with the music industry and the outside world in general. With her career in the avant-garde at something of a temporary impasse, Yoko Ono had become intrigued by the idea of launching herself as a businesswoman. She calmly informed Lennon that from now on she would be the family breadwinner and that he would simply concentrate on rearing their infant son.
It was evidently a sweet deal to his way of thinking because he fell into the new routine like a newborn babe into slumber. His fan base felt slighted and blamed Ono for brainwashing him into creative inactivity, but Lennon’s escape from the vanity factory of seventies pop was still probably the coolest move he made in that whole ten-year stretch. Suddenly he was no longer just a valuable commodity, he was a free man. But as we all know, freedom is a very relative concept and this was as true for John Lennon as for any other human being.
When Lennon saw how his wife deftly managed to quadruple his finances by decade’s end with a series of canny investment strategies, her word became law to him and he deferred to her judgement on all aspects of his life. That’s why he was sailing around the Bahamas in ’79 when he first tuned in to Bob Dylan crooning to his saviour: Yoko Ono - under the direction of several astrologers - had sent him out there without further explanation and he’d bowed to her wishes without question.
Listening to the radio on the vessel each day he felt suddenly compelled to start writing songs again for the first time in almost five years. At first he didn’t know what to do with these new compositions until one night he heard over the airwaves a record by a new group from Athens, Georgia, known as the B-52’s. The quintet had a distinctive danceable sound that was both artsy and garage-rock-friendly but what really piqued Lennon’s interest were the weird Yma Sumac-like female voices shrieking out through the mix. They instantly reminded him of a sound he’d once been all too familiar with - the wife at full vocal pelt. Maybe - he thought to himself - the world is finally ready to embrace Yoko Ono’s singular take on music-making with open arms. From that moment forward, his return to an active musical career became a done deal. But not as a solo entity. Lennon really wanted Ono to get the praise and attention this time around. He genuinely saw her as his superior and had even taken to referring to her as ‘mother’ at all times.
We all know what happened next. Lennon and Ono recorded their Double Fantasy album and Geffen Records released it on November 15th 1980 to generally lukewarm fanfare. Then on December 8th Lennon was returning home after having mixed a new track his wife had just concocted entitled ‘Walking on Thin Ice’ at a local studio when a deranged fan shot him to death in front of his family’s apartment building.
It’s quite tempting to play up his murder as a kind of definitive ‘death of the seventies’ moment but on closer inspection it doesn’t really hold up. Lennon was a spent force throughout much of the seventies anyway and had little direct influence on its ebbs and flows. No, his slaying felt far more like the death of the sixties instead, or at least the final nail in the coffin of the spirit of that now long-gone era of marmalade skies and endless possibilities.
I remember hearing the news whilst floating through central London. A radio announcement kept leaking out of all the shops along the way, followed by the eerie sound of Lennon’s own voice recorded in an interview just prior to his passing. Everyone around me in the busy streets had the same stricken ‘this can’t be happening’ look etched across their faces. Involuntarily my memory returned to the days of my youth when the Christmas season had always been soundtracked by the hotly anticipated release of a new Beatles album. When December rolled around, the shops would all be playing the record seemingly in rotation and the communal joy this music conjured up everywhere was both palpable and deeply infectious. But that was then-agentler, more enchanted time - and this was now, the era when ‘greed is good’ was about to become the mantra of the masses.
In due course, I arrived at the NME’s Carnaby Street offices, only to walk into a scene of utter desolation. The old-timers there were all teary-eyed and barely able to speak. One was so distraught he kept having to go to the toilet to throw up. Even the younger scribes were all choked up as though it wasn’t John Lennon but their beloved John Lydon who’d bitten the bullet in his place. But then how else were we all expected to react? It was a heartbreaker whichever way you looked at it: a gifted family man still nimble-witted and rife with rude health slain at the hand of some insane narcissist, a wife widowed, a young son left fatherless and a world robbed of the victim’s physical presence and future artistic contributions. It was such a senseless scenario that almost thirty years later we’re still trying to make sense of it.
But then again, maybe Lennon had received a momentary mental flash of what fate ultimately had in store for him back in 1970 when he wrote the song that became his second post-Beatles single release - ‘Instant Karma!’. ‘Instant karma’s gonna get you,’ he sang almost maliciously on the finished record. ‘Gonna knock you out of your head / Better get yourself together, darlin’ / Sooner or later you’re gonna be dead.’ People at the time thought these sentiments were directed squarely at Paul McCartney but Lennon could just as easily have been addressing himself. John Lennon knew a thing or two about karma after all. He saw it as the central guiding spiritual force in the universe.
As a young man he’d often behaved viciously and done his share of nasty, despicable things. But then LSD consumption had caused him to detach himself from his naturally violent temperament and become more peaceable and inward-looking. As his personality evolved so did his music and his quest for personal redemption from past transgressions. This he found with the arrival of Yoko Ono. But in strict karmic law the dark doings of the past have a way of impacting on the individual even after he or she has arrived at a state of some personal grace. And Lennon always had a scary knack for overstimulating the mad outer fringes of society, mainly because he was such an incorrigible weirdo himself.
Some years back, I was browsing through Mark Lewisohn’s Beatles: Recording Sessions doorstopper, which chronicles each and every Abbey Road session Lennon’s old group ever attended in impressively exhaustive detail, when a stunning hitherto unknown fact jumped out of the text to grab my attention. When John Lennon had recorded his vocal for ‘Come Together’ in 1969, the master tape revealed he’d prefaced the verses by repeating the words ‘Shoot me!’ again and again over the introductory riff. (George Martin had later wisely edited the phrase down to a spooky-sounding ‘Shoo’ that’s still clearly audible on the finished track.) What can you say about such a brazenly insane act except to duly note that eleven years later, someone actually took him at his word?
But enough fanciful conjecture about the karmic destinies of rock’s pioneer stock. Let’s turn to the fate of lesser folk instead. What was happening to poor, poor pitiful me during these two dreary endgame years?
Things could have been worse. I always had a roof over my head as well as one square meal a day in my intestinal tract. I was way more productive than I’d been in the two preceding years. I was writing songs now and even had two of them recorded one night at Island’s Basing Street studio, the place where I’d almost gotten into a fist fight with Bob Marley and the Wailers five years earlier. A friend of mine, Peter Perrett, played on the session and brought along two of his co-workers in the Only Ones - guitarist John Perry and drummer Mike Kellie - to further augment the line-up. Tony James from Generation X provided the bass parts. The finished tracks, ‘Chinese Shadow’ and ‘Switch-Hitter’, were never released - although someone told me they later briefly surfaced on a new-wave compilation released only in Japan sometime in the nineties - but I remember playing them to Iggy Pop shortly after their completion and him telling me they were good works and encouraging me to continue.
By the end of ’79 I’d started rehearsing in earnest with a drummer named Chris Must
o and an excellent young bass player known as James Ellar. Paying for the rehearsal space required me to keep contributing to the NME, though I was finding it increasingly hard to be in their general vicinity. Leafing through back issues from this era recently in order to further jog my memory, I was surprised to rediscover just how prolific I’d been in their pages during this stretch of time. The subjects I tackled ran the gamut from young hopefuls like a trio of teenagers from Crawley who called themselves the Cure to cantankerous old-timers like Al Green, Wilson Pickett and James Brown. But something was still evidently amiss with regard to the actual choice of words I strung together into article form to commemorate these encounters. True wit and illumination were still awfully difficult to detect within the sentences I was scribbling down. That’s why I was moving over more and more towards a career as a professional musician. I’d lost the talent to do my other vocation any kind of justice.
The other good thing about writing songs and making music - I quickly decided - was that my continued drug-taking didn’t impede the process in the way that it did whenever I tried to write journalistic copy. Methadone is generally viewed by the medical establishment as a chemical halfway house between heroin addiction and sobriety, but that’s only true when the substance is administered in steadily decreasing quantities over a period of no longer than six months. That wasn’t the case for me. The powers-that-be at my clinic provided me with strong daily dosages for an indefinite period of time which eventually stretched on to slightly over ten years.
It was decent of them, all things considered, because if they’d forcibly weaned me off the drug before I was ready to do so myself, I’d have tumbled back into full-blown smack insanity like a dead crow falling from a tree. But methadone is a funny drug. It curtailed my craving for junk and gave me a nice soothing buzz for a few months but then it began to rub up against my central nervous system with all the delicacy of a Brillo pad, making me generally down at the mouth and subject to grumpy moods. A drug buddy recommended Valium as an antidote to my suffering and I started mixing the little yellow or blue pills in with my methadone supply as a way to calm my nerves. The combination worked only too well. In fact, I became so calm it was almost impossible for me to get out of bed. So I started taking uppers in earnest - cocaine when I could afford it, speed when I couldn’t - as a way to stimulate my depleted reserves of stamina. Factor in also that I’d started smoking reefer as compulsively as Willie Nelson and you’ll understand that I was now addicted not just to one vampire drug but to four separate extremely potent rogue chemicals.
A typical day? Wake up around midday. Glug back my methadone. Take a piss. Put on a record. Snort a line of speed in order to fully wake up. Take a 5 mg Valium to counteract the fierce amphetamine rush. Smoke the remnants of a joint. Wait for the various substances in my system to form their synergy of mood enhancement. Once this occurred - it usually took about two hours - step out into the London streets to pick up the next day’s methadone supply from the chemist’s in Edgware Road. Spend the late afternoon hours in some tentative form of work-related activity. Skulk furtively around the metropolis as dusk is setting in. Make an impromptu call at places where drugs can be bought or scammed. Walk home after midnight. Play guitar alone in my room whilst smoking copious amounts of dope. Drop another Valium in the wee small hours before passing out fully clothed on an unmade bed. Wake up the next day and repeat process.
Looking back today from the perspective of a responsible middle-aged homeowner, taxpayer and parent, these days of advanced chemical refreshment and carefree floating feel like an odd form of freedom, but of course they weren’t. I was a lone wolf now - out on the prowl for anything that could make me forget who and what I’d really become - and my world was getting smaller and smaller by the minute. Hermine my guardian angel had lately bid a none-too-fond farewell to my toxic hide. It had been coming for ages - she just couldn’t stand seeing me fall further and further into the pit. She tried for a long time to wake me from my slumbers but I was beyond rehabilitation. Finally she snapped. It was either her or the drugs - the old ‘tough love’ ultimatum. I stayed with the drugs and she stayed with her husband. Without all the chemical interference we might have made it work, but I’d just become too pitiful for her to waste any further time on and by decade’s end our love affair was just another painful memory. I reacted as I’d always done - by getting so loaded that I could feel nothing beyond woozy numbness. ‘Drugs can break your spirit but they can’t break your heart’ should have been tattooed onto one of my scrawny biceps back then.
I was better off alone anyway - without emotional ties, drifting rudderless through the murk of old London town. I was well into my ‘prince of darkness’ shtick by this stage of the game. I loved strolling around the city at dead of night dressed in a black fedora hat, a black Edwardian coat worn over the shoulders like a cloak, black leather jacket and strides and dagger-pointed Cuban-heeled boots. In my drug delirium I probably thought I resembled Count Dracula’s Limey stepchild. But the common man was generally less easily taken in by my dark cavorting. ‘Fuck me, it’s that cunt from the Sandeman’s Port advert,’ a drunk in a Maida Vale pub shouted at me as I stepped in to buy some cigarettes.
Shortly after that, a complete stranger collared me during some dismal music-industry function and told me I was the Thomas de Quincey of the late twentieth century. I didn’t argue with him - he was a big lad after all and flushed with booze. But many years later I read a biography on De Quincey entitled The Opium Eater and learned that - though separated by a full century and a half - we still had plenty in common.
De Quincey had fallen into active acquaintanceship with the two men he most admired - the poets Wordsworth and Coleridge - at the same age I’d been when I started consorting with the likes of Keith Richards and Iggy Pop. Like me too, he’d been drawn to seek solace through the consumption of hard drugs in his early twenties. I was slightly dismayed to discover that he’d been a good foot shorter than me and also that for most of his published writing career he’d been something of a shameless hack. But when I got to the parts documenting De Quincey’s unwavering struggles with creditors and chronic constipation, I immediately felt a strong mystical bond being forged between myself and the man.
In the autumn of 1821 De Quincey wrote a two-part essay, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, based on his own life and drug history for the London Magazine, a literary monthly. The pieces were so widely read and commented upon that they were combined together in book form shortly afterwards and duly went on to become the author’s only timeless contribution to the written word. Over in France Baudelaire set about translating the text, whilst across the Atlantic a young Edgar Allan Poe fell under its wayward influence.
Hunter S. Thompson many decades later would declare that the real secret to capturing drug-inspired reveries in prose form resides in the writer’s own capacity for recalling all the salient details of his or her hallucinations whilst in an altered state, and De Quincey certainly remembered enough of his own ‘spectral visions’ to fill Confessions with credible accounts of his opiated voyages. His addiction to opium would ultimately cost him his physical health and seriously distort his powers of concentration but the drug still managed to fleetingly provide him with a genuine creative gift in the form of fiery visions that merged with his own natural dream-state to conjure forth the ‘confessions’ that would see him remembered - albeit notoriously - down through the ages.
I envied the man because heroin and methadone never bestowed any creative gifts on me whatsoever. I took them instead to erect an invisible shield around myself and to put me in a place where I could feel as little as possible. Coincidentally Pink Floyd released a song in 1979 entitled ‘Comfortably Numb’. It was supposed to be about Syd Barrett’s final days with the group in the late sixties but its dreamy languor spoke just as penetratingly to and about me and all the other ‘strung-out ones and worse’ littering England a decade later.
It’s about time t
o call last orders on the seventies. My tale is coming to an end and I’m not sorry to see it reach its termination stage. I still get chills down my back when I remember too much from these final years. One thing I’ve learned from writing this book is that self-congratulation, self-justification, self-pity and plain old bitterness don’t really make it as motors for good autobiographical prose. You’re always better off playing up the comedic aspects of your past, blending the light in with the dark and turning grief into laughter. That’s something Hermine first indicated to me around the time she left me. ‘You think your life is such a tragedy but it’s more of a comedy. You’re a comedian.’ At the time I was mortally wounded but now I see she was right on the money.
One last parting shot then of life moments before the eighties ate us up. The scene: another London music-industry reception, this time in a club somewhere close to Curzon Street. It could have been for Ian Hunter or for Pete Townshend - both were present and taking ample advantage of the free-drinks policy at the bar. The rest of the big room was littered with fledgling new-wave luminaries, grumpy old punks and the usual gaggle of record company and media human flotsam and jetsam. Everyone was split up in tight little groups partly obscured by copious clouds of cigarette smoke, all of us engaged in poring over the usual Tin Pan Alley tittle-tattle of the hour.