Okay, so I was wrong. Strummer put the aggression in and the songs were better with me out. Good call, Mick.
—
Steve Jones had come up in the world. Malcolm, too. The Sex Pistols were getting gigs and people liked them. Malcolm was acting as their mentor/manager and, with Viv, he now had a band to dress and feed ideas to. Johnny Rotten (named after the state of his teeth) didn’t need much in the way of ideas; he had plenty himself.
They looked like Alex’s gang of droogs times ten. Steve was playing guitar and it was thrilling to see him finding himself—still a thieving delinquent at heart, but now with a creative outlet.
The Pistols got a studio and headquarters which doubled as Jonesy’s pad behind a shop on Denmark Street, home to most of London’s music publishers and music stores. I was round there one day, Jonesy and I having tea and a sarnie in the local sandwich bar, Batista’s, when I spied a flamboyant-looking character, Philippe Sallon his name, and on a hunch asked if he knew where I might find work. “Try St. Martin’s—the art college next door.” I did, and it got me through the next year or so.
I modeled regularly at St. Martin’s for the fashion department, in my modified street clothes, standing still for twenty-minute slots while looking longingly at my guitar stashed in the corner. Frustrating, but I could collect my £7 at the end of the day, enough to get a bus and have something to eat. (Those fashion students couldn’t even draw.)
My other job was cleaning houses, which was the first time I met someone from the “upper” classes.
“What should I call you?”
“Well, my name’s Christine.”
“Oh, that won’t do. My daughter’s name is Christine. Have you got a middle name?”
“Ellen.”
“Ellen! Oh, dear. I don’t like that. Elaine. I’ll call you Elaine. Elaine, you can start upstairs.”
—
There was already dissent within the Pistols. John tried to undermine Glen Matlock’s performance every show. Glen was a good bass player and helped write the songs, but Rotten was ferocious and intent on caving Glen’s head in with a mic stand. It was only a matter of time.
Steve was also wary of John’s malice, but Paul Cook, the best drummer ever to come out of Shepherd’s Bush, helped keep things in place. John had a few sidekicks but Sid was his protégé, and more of a doer than John—a doer of violence. Sid was always game for a spot of thuggery, the perfect entertainment for Rotten. Hence the title “Vicious.” It would take only a nudge and Sid would have a length of chain out, clearing a dance floor, a pinwheeling threat to anyone who was in the way (including Nick Kent). The formerly well-respected denizens of English rock were getting pushed aside by a bunch of punks. All that was missing was a score by Ludwig Van to complete the Burgess-prophesized scene.
Johnny Rotten was a strange brew. He looked like Steptoe crossed with Joni Mitchell, was a fan of Van der Graaf Generator, and his singing voice, if you could call it that, sounded always on the brink of tears—tears of mirth, pain, outrage and frustration. A mesmerizing presence onstage.
—
I moved into a squat on Caversham Street. Pride of place was given to the Japanese Les Paul copy Sasha gave me and a practice amp Spedding had lent me. I got a little padlock at the hardware store on Chelsea Green near Halsey Street, where I cleaned for another woman and her RAF husband. That cleaning agency would hire anybody: I even got Rotten a few jobs with them. Imagine seeing him come through the door to clean your house.
The little lock with the “R” on it offered no security to speak of—if you had a screwdriver you could pop it off like a bottle cap—but at least I’d know if someone had been in sniffing around my guitar and Spedding’s amp. Sid put the lock on a chain around his neck and I don’t think it ever came off again; not for sentimental reasons—he just didn’t take the key. He also never wore socks under his heavy engineer boots, and no shirt in the winter. Comfort didn’t seem to be his thing.
I got Sid to come along to St. Martin’s to model a few times, and the other pretty one, Alan Alan aka Alan Drake, was another face you’d see. We called him the Barbie Doll Kid because he was so pretty. Those fashion students got the cream. It would show up thirty years later when the influence of punk was revisited on the catwalk.
—
I invited Spedding to come with me to see the Pistols one night. He wanted to get in on the scene but was way too accomplished a musician to be able to downgrade to punk. His solo albums had come out at exactly the wrong time, just before punk kicked everything that came before in the teeth. The pop-rock sound of his records got flattened in the crush, although I was grateful for the chance to sing backing vocals on them. (I wasn’t a backing singer, but then I wasn’t a journalist, either. I’d blag whatever I could.)
The Pistols were playing the 100 Club and they did not disappoint. The whole show was chaos. John collapsed to his knees in tears while singing “No Fun,” then crawled off the stage, legged it up the stairs and ran out onto Oxford Street. Jonesy was so pissed off that yet another show had ended in one of John’s tantrums that he yanked all the strings off his guitar. When Rotten, after sneaking back in, realized that Steve was rendered unable to play, he jumped back onstage, grabbed the mic and announced the next song, fixing Steve with his inimitable evil stare. Now Steve was the one in tears. Rotten could be a real little bastard when he wanted to be. The show was over.
Spedding had watched in stunned silence as the audience merrily spat, or “gobbed,” as was the parlance of the time, at the band. It was nothing like a Roxy Music show, one of the bands he’d been playing in.
After the debacle John was desperate to get out before Malcolm got to him, so I told him I was with a guy who had a car and he, along with some other stragglers—Rat Scabies among them (that’s where the gobbing started: Scabies gobbing at Jonesy, Jonesy gobbing back and everyone joining in; the one thing I hated about punk)—all piled into Spedding’s Chevrolet Camaro.
Off we sped to the Last Resort all-night restaurant in Fulham. En route, we passed some poor sod bleeding on the pavement. There were always fights on the streets of London outside the boozers, like a sport—the old ultra-violence.
“Pull over!” I yelled, and Chris screeched to a halt. I bounded over and cradled the guy’s cracked head in my lap until an ambulance arrived, and then got back in the car and on we went to the restaurant, where everybody ordered tons of food and drink and left Chris with the bill. All in all, it was a good introduction to punk.
Eventually, Spedding ended up recording the Pistols’ demos. Chris Thomas, who I met while singing on two of Spedding’s albums, went on to produce Never Mind the Bollocks (and later the Pretenders). Rotten eventually went on to marry Nora Forster (the only lasting love story to come out of punk that I can think of), and Ariane, Nora’s daughter, went on to be the singer of the Slits.
So you see, that gig in Paris, the disastrous Fête Rouge, had legs after all. Funny how seemingly insignificant things sometimes turn out to be links you can’t see at the time.
—
I was starting to need more than links: my visa situation was now a constant source of high anxiety. But I couldn’t leave London, not now. What, and go back—to where? Paris was too rife with drugs and, anyway, I’d need to get a visa to stay there too. Akron? Oh, dear God, no. Cleveland? Just kill me now.
I was illegal, scrounging, suffering from severe band-deficiency and having real problems staying in the country. I knew they were no longer going to give me a “leave to enter” visitor’s stamp in my passport. The next time I went to leave, I might not get back in.
I’d been going to Paris on the hovercraft (a fiver if you were under twenty-six), borrowing some cash and returning a week later, getting a fresh “leave to enter” stamp. But the last time I’d tried it, after borrowing a couple hundred quid off Sasha, the customs official at Calais clocked me, saying, “Didn’t you come through here a week ago with £7 and a guitar?”
Imagine remembering me among all those travelers? I guess that’s what those guys are trained to do. I had to hitch all the way back to Montparnasse.
My situation meant I couldn’t get a job, so I was doing dumb shit to get by. Some girl I met in Paris had a plan to do a traveler’s check scam, so we hitchhiked to Amsterdam, went straight to the famous Paradiso club, met some guys who got us smoking smack with them, got real fucked up, stayed in the club all night, then thumbed back to Paris, where she reported the checks stolen. I thought it was all too much hassle and dropped out of the scheme. I didn’t want to be questioned and have to lie, or get turfed out of France once and for all because of some flaky girl. I also “lost” my passport and got another one, hoping to start over with no multiple-entry stamps to incriminate me.
Life was becoming one big hassle. Rotten offered to go to a registry office with me and do the unmentionable so I could stay in the country, but as the agreed date approached the Pistols had stirred it up something “rotten” on the nationally televised Today show, presented by Bill Grundy when they appeared as guests along with Siouxsie Sioux and other assorted punk rockers. Overnight, they were a household name and all over the tabloids. Jonesy had called Grundy a “dirty fucker”—among other things—when the hapless presenter had asked Siouxsie what she was doing later on that night. I say “hapless,” but Grundy was goading them, and they took the bait. It was a field day for the British press—everything they live for. Headlines said things like “Filthy Lucre”; I loved that—so British!
John was catapulted into the limelight as the band’s front man. He had expressed foreboding about the way things were heading, and now his premonitions had become reality: he was famous.
Fame was not the name of the game. I don’t think anyone particularly thought about it, let alone sought it. The idea was to make some noise and, hopefully, a bit of dosh, but fame was not the objective. Nobody was prepared for it.
So when I saw Rotten in the Roebuck on the King’s Road and asked if he was still up for our plan, he buried his head in his hands and groaned, “Oh, Gaaaaawwd.”
He was preoccupied with his new status as public-enemy number one. Sid, who hadn’t been party to the scheme, darted out of his seat and blurted: “What—what’s going on? You want to marry him ’cause now he’s a rock star you can have his baby and get his money!”
Everyone was shocked by this weird bit of conjecture. Sid sat back down slowly, surprised himself by his bizarre outburst. In an attempt to redeem himself, I guess, he offered to stand in: “I’ll do it! But there has to be something in it for me.”
I said I’d give him two quid and it was on. We had to go to Sid’s mum’s council flat in a high-rise in Hackney, east London, to get his birth certificate, as he was underage. I needed to have him stay at mine so I could make sure he’d get to the registry office in the morning.
There were three of us on my mattress that night, as he was intent on some girl he’d picked up somewhere along the line. All night, I kept getting jabbed by bony knees and elbows. It was like trying to sleep in a sack of ferrets, but I just had to hold out until the morning. I had to get a permanent leave of entry—it was a matter of life or death now.
(The thing about that house was that everyone who lived there was too cheap to leave a toilet roll in the bathroom—real student stuff; you’d have to take your own roll when you went. Chris, the sculptor, tacked an artful poster up in the bog. I couldn’t stop smiling later that week when I saw that Sid had torn off the corner to wipe his ass. Sidney!)
Morning came, and we arrived first thing to find the registry office closed for an extended holiday. Bollocks! The next day wouldn’t work, as Sid had to go to court for putting someone’s eye out with a glass.
A thousand people since have asked about my marriage to Vicious—it never happened.
—
Malcolm had another idea. He said he’d met a great kid, a drummer, at a party—although he’d never seen him play. The thing about Malcolm was that he really could tell just by looking at someone.
The idea was that I would be standing in the background, seen as a boy, not singing, just playing guitar, with two singers up in front, a blond one and a dark one. Sure. I’d do anything by then. The band was to be called the Masters of the Backside—probably not my first choice of name, but at least I was going to get to play guitar.
Malcolm and I set off to meet the singers. Even going on the train with him was something of an adventure, as he always saw things in an unexpected way. He told me about the singer we were going to meet, a kid he’d found working in a clothing store in the East End: David White, the blond one.
We got the Tube and walked to the council flat he shared with his parents and brothers. He looked the part, but the problem was that he didn’t want to sing or be in a band. That didn’t seem to bother Malcolm at all. Then we went to Euston and got the overground to Hemel Hempstead to meet the other singer: David Zero, the dark one. This one was more game, the opposite of the other David; he was dead keen on fronting a band.
Some rehearsals were scheduled in a church hall that Malcolm had found on Bell Street, off Lisson Grove. The drummer kid brought along a friend to play bass, who looked totally out of place with long, wavy hippie hair, but he could play. The blond David was a no-show but the other one turned up eager to get cracking. We worked up some songs, including a version of “You Can’t Judge a Book by Looking at the Cover,” on which I could display my Bo Diddley rhythm technique—my only technique.
Malcolm, Viv, Little Helen and a few other SEX-shop regulars showed up for our “showcase” to see what, if anything, we had to offer. Vivienne was impressed.
“Chrissie, you really can squeeze some chords out of that guitar,” she remarked in her ever-surprising Derbyshire accent.
In fact, the Masters of the Backside’s debut was probably just as well forgotten, and I never heard from the others again. But the next week, there was a new band in town. Chris Miller, the drummer kid, had changed his name to Rat Scabies. Ray Burns on bass had cut his frankly obnoxious hair (offensive even to the hippie in me) and was now wearing a nurse’s uniform and going by the name Captain Sensible.
David Zero manifested something you could describe as a Gothic-Elvis-meets-Nosferatu look—and changed his name from Zero to Vanian—and I’d been replaced by a good-looking guy who could play a damn sight better than me called Brian James. In fact, without me, they were probably the most musically accomplished punk outfit in town. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Damned.
—
Sid had only been playing bass for three days and was in a band with Keith Levene—the Flowers of Romance. One night, uncharacteristically deep in thought, he announced, “I’ve got really bad news. John asked me to join the Pistols.”
He couldn’t just walk out on Keith, could he? I mulled over the news for a minute and said, “But it’s like you already are in the Pistols.”
We looked at each other and didn’t talk about it anymore. He walked out on Keith the next day, because he already was in the Pistols.
24
DAYS OF PUNK AND POSES
The squat on Caversham Street in Chelsea was just a stone’s throw from Margaret Thatcher’s house on Flood Street. Mick and Keith both lived a few streets over, near the river on Cheyne Walk. Location, location, location.
Coming from the USA, I had never heard of a squat and was incredulous when someone tried to explain what it was to me.
“What, you mean you can actually break in and live there?”
“Yeah.”
“You can break the lock and move in and you won’t get arrested?”
“Yeah.”
“But what about the guy who owns it?”
“If it’s unoccupied, you can break in and set up the electricity and gas and live there legally, just paying the bills, and put your own lock on it.”
I was finding out that England had almost nothing in common with the USA. Unemployed yet able-bodied stud
ent types could claim welfare, called “the dole,” and anyone could break into an empty property, set up house and stay there protected by the law. You could also get medical assistance, including dentistry, for free on the National Health Service.
I was constantly imagining a couple of comic or sci-fi writers at the end of the fifties, stoned on weed and speed, trying to outdo each other with outrageous scenarios of the Beat world of the future. It was called England.
I would hear people complain about the trains running late—people who had never bothered to learn to drive and never needed to buy a car to get to work to pay for the car—or complain about waiting to get an appointment on the free health-care system. To an American, it was just unfathomable that these services even existed.
My dad’s voice, always a ghostly presence: “Christy—you don’t get something for nothing. That’s breaking and entering; don’t you know that?”
But to me, living in a squat was like winning the lottery. Anyway, it was a given that, whatever I was doing, my folks would disapprove—I only mention it to illustrate how vast the English–American cultural divide was.
A friend of a friend knew a low-key junkie who didn’t want any trouble. He let me in and showed me the empty room at the top of the house. I guess I passed inspection because no one asked me to leave.
There was a cool, very bohemian couple who seemed to be somewhat in charge: Billy and Rae. She was over six feet tall, a beautiful Australian, and he was even taller, a handsome American intellectual. They had a baby and went out every day to a free concert or exhibition, making the most of living in London with a copy of Time Out at the ready, opened to the free-events listings.
One day, there was a dispute in the house about something and the junkie was told to “Clear out!” by Billy. “You can’t tell me to leave—I have as much right here as you do!” cried the junkie, to which the tall American said, “Oh, yes I can, because I’m bigger than you.” And with that, the dispute was settled, law-of-the-jungle style. Normally, I would side with the scrawny underdog, but this time I liked the common sense of the quiet American.
Reckless : My Life As a Pretender (9780385540629) Page 18