—
I’d found a rehearsal room in the basement of Eddie Ryan’s drum shop on Langley Street in Covent Garden through Chris Brown, a drummer I tried to get something going with, but I couldn’t even find the £17 a month to pay for it, and I was soon in arrears. I knew I was going to lose it if I didn’t find some readies soon.
I had a mate, a drug fiend who used to shoot up using the water out of public toilets, and I don’t mean the sink—I mean the toilet.
“Oi, Chris—come in and hold the door shut for me.”
She’d dump the contents of a Seconal or some bullshit she’d copped straight into a dirty syringe—no cotton, spoon or lighter for her, waste of time—and plunge the needle into the back of her hand while I tried not to barf. Nothing could satisfy her insatiable need, which cost money, but she was in no shape to get a job—too fucked up even to stand in line and claim the dole. She told me she went to an Arab for money. I didn’t ask what she had to do—she got the money. Not my first choice, but my options were getting thin on the ground.
I owed two months’ rent to Eddie Ryan. St. Martin’s only paid £7 a day, cleaning jobs no better. Think, think, think…I heard the payphone ring and flew down the stairs to answer it.
“Is that Chrissie?” the voice at the other end said. “My name’s Tony. A few people have told me about you and I thought you might like to come to my office and we could meet.”
Game on.
—
Tony Secunda was an entrepreneur and creative mastermind of the UK music scene. He had been involved with the Move, Marc Bolan, Steeleye Span and a bunch of others, and always lent a madcap bent to proceedings, guaranteeing publicity and raised eyebrows.
So when punk bludgeoned its way onto the sagging seventies music scene, I can only imagine how much it put his considerable nose out of joint not to be part of it. All the irreverent “up yours” mannerisms and ploys of punk had at one time been Secunda’s personal domain. But now he was on the outside looking in.
Well, that’s what happened when punk came along. Everything that went before got thrown onto the rubbish heap with no respect or apologies. So when someone told Tony about an American girl with a guitar and an attitude who’d been skulking about on the scene for some time to no avail, he must have thought it might be his way back in.
My problem—part of a long list—was that I did not want to be solo, a singer-songwriter on my own, in any shape or form, or do anything at all other than play guitar in a band, write songs and sing as part of a band setup. Being the sole focal point was not the plan.
I’d been about as far down in the food chain as you could go for long enough to see no reason at all to compromise my ambitions. As Dylan said, “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” Compromise was not a word that fit into my worldview.
Jake Riviera, the debonair smoothy and brains behind Stiff Records—“If it ain’t stiff it ain’t worth a fuck”—had even called me to say that Nick Lowe had played him an early demo I’d recorded of “Precious” and wanted to know if I’d like to join the Stiff roster.
“I’ll let you know when I get a band together.” I would have loved to have been part of Stiff—you bet I would—but on my own, under my name? No chance.
Tony Secunda had only heard me thrash out the chords to “The Phone Call” in his office on the little Spedding amp while staring him down with a defiant glare. He had not heard me sing, or seen anything that he could use to big me up to a record-company exec. To his credit, Tony humored me—he paid off the £40 I owed Eddie Ryan and took me around town in his little Fiat as his new protégée. Tony truly was as mad as a March hare, and would bypass traffic by mounting the pavement in his tiny car and to hell with any pedestrians who might be in the way. I liked his daredevil attitude and he liked to display it to someone who appreciated it.
Tony had plans to put me on the map. He pointed out a billboard that overlooked Shepherd’s Bush roundabout and told me my face would be on that soon. He loved grandiose, attention-grabbing, in-your-face stuff.
I was furious! I wanted to be in a band, not singled out. How many times did I have to say it? But the truth was something more than that. With his ambitions it seriously dawned on me for the first time that if I continued my quest, fame could follow in some form.
It’s one thing to admire rock stars and imagine how great it must be to live like them, but to really get inside the possibility of total exposure was daunting. I went back to my room, sat on the foot of my bed and cried. I saw my freedom slipping away.
But being in Tony’s orbit was fun and he knew some of the coolest London movers and shakers. Keith Morris, the photographer, was one of his mates I especially liked, with his blue Lancia, his flat in St. Mary’s on Paddington Green and his general knowledge of all things interesting pre-punk. He was the guy who’d taken all those photos of Bolan in Anello & Davide pumps with the little strap (that Debbie Smith had tracked down and sent away for). I liked being with people older than me who didn’t live and breathe only punk—people from the sixties!
But despite Tony’s cool friends and all the larking about, there was something missing, and that something was coming from my end. I was all talk and no action; Tony had taken me under his wing and I could tell he believed in my potential, but so far I had offered potential only—where were the goods? He kept broaching the subject of a demo. How could I make a demo without a band? It would mean a session band, and that would be more solo than I was willing to bend to. Tony put it like this: how could he get interest from a record company if nobody—including him—had ever heard anything? Even I wasn’t sure what I sounded like. I had to concede to his logic.
I agreed to go into a small studio and record a few of my songs, and found a bass player and drummer to go in with me, with an engineer. One of Secunda’s pals, John Cale, former member of the now-defunct Velvet Underground, was in town and they were hanging out. I didn’t want anyone in the studio so I told Tony to stay away and let me get on with it. But I needed to record the “pips,” the sound you used to get on a public phone before you put your coin in: the sound you hear on the first demo and subsequent album version of “The Phone Call.”
I arranged for Tony to call me from a pub and, as if by magic, the pips fit perfectly in the intro of the song. Because Cale was with Tony when he placed the call, he told everyone that John had produced it—typical Secunda! Name-dropping publicity monger! It certainly sounded better to say “a John Cale production.”
So now I had a demo with “The Phone Call” and “Hymn No. 4” (a song inspired by Rotten’s dark moods and the Mighty Hannibal). Then I met Steve Strange.
He wasn’t called Strange yet, though. He was just some kid from Wales who accosted me one night in the Vortex—the club on Wardour Street that had taken over after the Roxy’s demise. He came over to where I was leaning on the bar with a bunch of song lyrics written out and paper-clipped together, and started singing his songs a cappella. I liked his shameless determination, singing like that with such unself-conscious belief. And the songs were good too; all about underworld gangsters, Al Capone, the Krays—famous English villains, mostly—and a stand-out little tune called “Free Hindley.”
The Moors Murders had happened before my time, my time starting in 1973 when I arrived in the UK, so I didn’t really appreciate the impact a song about Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, the serial child-killing couple, would have, with a chorus imploring the public to “Free Hindley.”
In nineteen hundred and sixty-four
Myra Hindley was nothing more
than a woman who fell for a man.
So why can’t she be free?
Free Hindley!
Brady was her lover
He told her what to do
A psychopathic killer
Nothing new
So why can’t she be free?
Free Hindley!
When Steve asked if I would help him out—play guitar on a few tunes for a showcas
e he was planning for some record-company guy—I was happy to get on board, mainly because he promised that, as we’d all be wearing bin liners over our heads, no one would know who we were. So I saw no reason to think that this little jaunt would in any way have an impact on my own plans—and I would get to play! Great!
We cooked up some songs in a shitty little rehearsal room under the Waterloo Bridge arches. My mate Jane Suck, who had taken over my room in Clapham and was writing for the NME, came along for a laugh. Jane had changed her name from Suck to Solanas in tribute to Valerie Solanas, who was the author of the SCUM Manifesto (Society for Cutting Up Men) and, more famously, the woman who shot Andy Warhol. The most memorable part of the rehearsal was that it was the only time I’d ever punched someone in the face. (Jane—after she threw lager all over my guitar.)
The showcase went all right, I guess. Steve introduced us, bin liners obscuring our faces, using alias names. Mine, unfortunately, was Christine Hyndley. The next week, we were on the cover of Sounds: The Moors Murderers—Chrissie Hynd, former NME journalist, and her band.
I was mortified. I don’t think Steve was happy, either. He was all set to garner the notoriety for himself. Then it got all over the tabloids. Steve was overshadowed completely by me, as I was already a known entity after my NME days. I was devastated—totally fucked off to have my cover blown after all the effort to keep a lid on my thing until it was ready. And it wasn’t even my band!
Tony, the master of outrage, was appalled when he saw me in the tabloids. Plus, as my manager, I could see how it looked like I went over his head on this one. I really had no inkling that I’d be implicated or even detected. I just wanted to play my guitar and have a laugh. But, for all intents and purposes in the eyes of the British public, well, I might as well have gone to New York City and started a band called Adolf Hitler and His Girl Commandos, featuring Christina Braun singing “Mein Führer—Don’t Let Him Be Misunderstood.”
Tony was so exasperated after an agitated conversation, during which I launched into some lame defense, that he put the phone down on me. And me being the badass with an attitude that I was, I wouldn’t speak to him again. “No one hangs up on me!” I thought. (Although a hundred boyfriends have over the years, and I call ’em straight back. Crying.)
Now I had no manager and was back to square one, though I was now armed with Tony’s demo, “produced by John Cale.” Ha ha.
—
“Ace Doran” was a name that Randall Lee Rose had seen written on the side of a truck in Ohio, and ever since wished he could use for something. So when I hooked up with him after a chance meeting on the King’s Road (he being the only other Kent, Ohio, escapee in London I knew) and he offered to manage my musical venture, what with Tony out of the picture, I agreed.
It was clear to me that I’d never get involved with the business side of anything—just not my bag at all. Take a tape to a record company and try to sell myself? That was never going to happen. I needed a manager to do that—and all the other dirty jobs besides.
Ace Doran worked in the rag trade so I started selling flannel shirts—old American lumberjack-type gear—at Portobello Road Market on weekends for him. Now I had a job and a manager; all I needed was a band.
Ace had been one of Kent’s get-down boys. In fact, he was one of the most stylish and well-turned-out guys I’d ever met, anywhere, so I was surprised to see him trying to flog that pre-grunge American stuff. But he was onto something—people bought it, just not from me. Whatever it takes to be a salesperson, I didn’t have it.
Ace had good ideas but wasn’t really coming from a music-business background. However, working in the rag trade meant that he met a lot of like-minded would-be managers, like Dave Hill.
Hill was working as an A&R man for Anchor Records, a small label whose offices were on Wardour Street, near the Marquee Club. He was always out and about on the market stalls, his interest being mainly Second World War flying jackets; he was fascinated with American things—from flannel shirts to Elvis to, well, soon me.
Ace played him my demo and Dave was interested. He’d started his own small label, Real Records, and had one band on it, Strangeways, some kids from Wakefield in Yorkshire. He was about to take on Johnny Thunders too, who had just left the Heartbreakers.
Hill was so impressed with the demo that he offered to manage me. Nothing else was shaking but the leaves on the trees—but something was about to.
26
LEMMY
I was still kicking around with my guitar, doing menial jobs and trying to write songs in between three-day marathons on speed in and out of some bikers’ clubhouse in Eltham, in southeast London.
I’d seen a girl in various toilets and clubs who always seemed to be wearing the same haircut and clothes as me. Her name was Jenny Money and she knew the Heavy Bikers and lived near their Eltham Clubhouse. We were so twin-like we fell in with each other naturally. We modified clothes from local Oxfam stores, writing free-association words with Magic Markers on tightly pegged white jeans and generally hanging out.
Other times we froze in a country house in Whitstable on the coast with a drug-ravaged countess and her makeshift crew of toothless ex-cons and aristocrats. They ran an amphetamine/sulphate lab and languished all day in soiled bedding among stray needles, when not organizing scavenger runs to rubbish dumps for discarded wardrobes and chairs to chop up and cast onto the fire, while the generator in the barn provided enough electricity to keep the lab going.
The sergeant-at-arms of the London chapter of the Heavy Bikers (I guess you could say he was my boyfriend) asked if he could store something in my room. Don’t ask me how I hooked up with them after all my troubles with the club in Cleveland. Unlucky I guess. Drugs.
I ended up with a stolen Trident motorcycle engine in the corner of my room with a blanket thrown over it for two months. (The Home Office would have loved that.) He used to take me for rides on his chopper (whenever it was uncharacteristically on the road), which had no passenger seat so he tied a sponge to the back fender for me. The things I’ll do for a handsome man!
I felt like public loser number one. The one good thing about hanging out in the gutter was that there was always someone worse off, so I was staying in the middle, or at least low down in the middle. It’s all relative, after all.
—
Lemmy was built like a brick shithouse. He was big, hard and looked like he could only belong to one of the world’s more savage motorcycle clubs—except he didn’t. He played bass in a band. Pretty much everything a girl like me was looking for.
“Lemme a quid.”
The first time I clapped eyes on him was in a shop on the King’s Road. We exchanged no words at all. He eyed me up and down, moved in close, dipped the silver tube he wore on a chain around his neck into a plastic bag of white powder, shoved it up my snout, then turned around and walked out. I was up for three days.
Motörhead was the name, and bleeding ears was the game. On-your-feet-or-on-your-knees loud! You’d better believe it. It was no surprise that he too hung out with—a mascot if you will—the Heavy Bikers’ Windsor chapter.
I’d lost no time in rooting out anyone who wouldn’t be out of place on an S. Clay Wilson greeting card in Limeytown. Why did I do that? By accident, really; I didn’t go out of my way to look for it. I must have had some heavy karmic debt and was still making payments. There I was again, making myself as available and useful as an oily rag. It was as if I had come across them instinctively. Or maybe I should say they came across me.
Lemmy and I liked bikes, music and drugs. In this case, the bikes were more often than not off the road; the music was omnipresent, and the drugs were too—and then some. Drugs now permeated everything—it was just a fact of life. A life without drugs was unfathomable: tranqs, speed, downers, smoke, smack too. Cocaine was so expensive that we assumed it must be good—the oldest con in the book.
Lemmy was hip to the trip and didn’t touch anything except amphetamines, smoke a
nd Jack Daniel’s. Clean living. We liked the same things—we were mongrels with an appreciation for the finer things in life. He was a Beatles fan at a time when the Beatles were like a throwback to a distant, almost forgotten past. He was far more musically knowledgeable than anyone who ever saw Hawkwind or Motörhead would have suspected. He kept it well hidden.
We started, for no reason that I can remember, a game of seeing how long we could reel off dog names until one of us faltered; a momentary lapse meant defeat:
“Champ!”
“Charger!”
“Silky!”
“Window!”
“Bootsie!”
“Fugsley!”
“Alfie!”
“Pronto!”
“King!”
“Princess!”
“Smokey!”
“Shadow!”
“Molly!”
“Mazie!”
“Bruno!”
“Brutus!”
“Lassie!”
“Luna!”
“Sport!”
“Scout!”
“Carl!”
“Hang on, you can’t call a dog Carl.”
Game to Lemmy.
Lemmy and his band of pirate lookalikes, sexy Latvian shop assistants and Ladbroke Grove goons of all shapes and persuasions snorted lorry-loads of powder and stayed in bed until well into the afternoon, watching cartoons. Lemmy, being the intellectual of the lot and having an interest in the Second World War, would read Mein Kampf while cartoons ran with the sound down.
True to the ethos of rock, Lemmy was forever unchanging. It’s one of those inexplicable phenomena inherent to rock stars, the opposite of reinvention. Give him a line, put him in front of a one-armed bandit, stand a pretty girl next to him and time stands immovably in the exact place it was two hours or twenty years ago. Wherever he may be, he remains in a pub off St. Luke’s Road, the actual location totally irrelevant. Not so much time travel, as untravel.
Reckless : My Life As a Pretender (9780385540629) Page 20