1975
The day after the Sex Pistols’ gig, Mick comes to my studio at college. He hovers in the doorway until he catches my eye. We lean against the wall in the fluorescent-lit corridor. He’s sought me out to ask what I thought of the band. I’m exultant. Inspired. I tell him, ‘I can’t even remember what they sounded like, what I got from them was, I can do this too. Not, this is easy and I can do it too, but this is GREAT and I can do it too. And I’m going to do it.’
Mick listens to me eulogising with a sulky expression – he was obviously hoping I’d say they were rubbish. He seems to think that me liking the Pistols is a criticism of him and his music.
Mick’s getting yet another band together – he’s found a bass player, a handsome guy called Paul Simonon. He can’t play bass yet, but Mick says it doesn’t matter, he looks good. He’s also found a singer, who’s not handsome but has a lot of charisma: Joe Strummer. Joe was in a band called the 101ers. I really liked their single, ‘Keys to Your Heart’. The rest of the 101ers are upset that Joe’s leaving them, they’re a very relaxed bunch of guys and think Joe’s selling out by joining a band managed by Mick’s dodgy friend, Bernie Rhodes. Bernie puts a lot of pressure on Joe to join Mick’s band, he keeps meeting up with him and saying that the 101ers are out of date and this new band are the future. Bernie eventually convinces Joe, and he joins up. They all try and come up with a name, the favourite at the moment is the Young Colts. I try it out by carving it into the wooden counter at the Acton dole office.
Even though he is aware of coolness, Mick would never change himself to be cool. If he likes something or someone, he sticks to his guns – that’s one of the best things about him. He’s the only one of us who doesn’t take drugs, won’t touch them, he’s adamant, just drinks lukewarm tea. He’s an independent thinker and won’t drop mates because they don’t look or behave right, like lots of people do. He’s loyal to the bands he loved when he was growing up too – no hiding LPs for him, like I’ve done, shoving Donovan and Sparks records in drawers when someone’s coming round, or taking them down the Record and Tape Exchange – Mick’s kept all his old records. He’s turned me on to a lot of good music too: Velvet Underground, the 13th Floor Elevators, the New York Dolls, MC5, Mott the Hoople. He doesn’t just play the records, he explains what’s good about them, points out nice harmonies or guitar riffs. He half-heartedly tried to teach me a few chords a couple of times, but once you’ve shagged a bloke he can’t really be bothered to teach you anything, he’s got what he wants.
I’m not going to let Mick Jones know I’ve fallen for him, not yet; I’ve got to get used to the idea myself first. I’ve never felt proper love before, I’ve just fancied a boy because he looks nice. Mick’s a whole different thing: he’s interesting, the smartest, funniest person I’ve ever met. But I still try to hide my relationship with him from other people. ‘I’m independent, we should only see each other when we feel like it, we don’t own each other,’ I tell him. It’s a constant battle between us, because he wants to be with me in a traditional, openly affectionate relationship. He’s a passionate, possessive person; it must be hell for him.
I’m meeting new and interesting guys every day. There aren’t many girls on the scene, so I get loads of attention. Mick’s always having to ward boys off. I don’t have sex with other boys but I do spend a lot of time with them. I’m not very reassuring either, I never say anything like, ‘Oh Mick, don’t worry, darling, I’m only here for you.’ More like, ‘I’m off. See you later!’
25 THE CLASH
1975
Paul Simonon, Mick’s bass player, hasn’t got anywhere to live so he’s moved into my squat. Paul is as handsome as a film star, like Paul Newman and James Dean rolled together, and he’s nice to girls, not chauvinistic. He’s a bit tongue-tied and bashful but he can afford to be, his looks do all the talking. It’s Paul who comes up with the new band name, the Clash, from a newspaper headline. Paul and I really like each other and he respects me, which always goes down well.
With Paul Simonon, 1976
Because Paul now lives with me and Alan at Davis Road, the Clash have their band meetings here. Mick lives with his grandmother in Royal Oak, so they don’t want to go there, and Joe still lives with the 101ers. I wouldn’t mind the Clash all filling up the place but they close the door of the kitchen and have this very self-important air about them. I don’t take their meetings seriously, but Bernie does: you’d think he was planning World War Three. Bernie’s always the last one to arrive. I open the front door and he pushes past me, knocking me out of the way, and stomps upstairs to the kitchen, slamming the door behind him. Not a word spoken. I can’t stand him. He’s a vegetarian – not that that makes him horrible – he told me once he was brought up a vegetarian, and when he’s feeling rebellious he goes out and buys a burger.
The one thing Bernie and I have in common is what we think the Clash’s songs should be about. We both think it would be better if they stopped writing soppy love songs and wrote material that reflects their everyday lives. We bang on to Mick and Joe about it, they take it in and turn ‘I’m So Bored with You’ into ‘I’m So Bored with the USA’, and write more political stuff like ‘White Riot’, about confrontations with the police during the Notting Hill Carnival, and ‘Career Opportunities’, which refers to the time Mick worked at the dole office and had to open suspicious-looking letters that could have been letter bombs – the senior staff wouldn’t touch them.
Funny though, now my favourite Clash songs are the love songs: ‘Stay Free’, ‘Train in Vain’ and ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go’. Mick is a great love-song writer.
26 FIRST GUITAR
1976
There’s no such thing as a wrong note.
Art Tatum
I care what people think about me to the point of despair, am over-sensitive to criticism and lacking in self-confidence but I don’t let my negative feelings stop me from doing stuff.
My Swiss grandmother, Freda, dies. She leaves me two hundred quid in her will; it takes a huge amount of self-control not to dip into it and fritter it away. I’m sure I’ll never have that much money again. I’ve been mulling over what to do with it for weeks – there’s no way I’m going to save it, but what to spend it on? I was thinking of buying an old Norton motorbike, but since seeing the Sex Pistols, I’ve decided to buy a guitar.
Walking along Shepherd’s Bush High Street with Mick, on the way home from college, I say, ‘I’m going to buy a guitar. An electric guitar.’
The words come out a bit too aggressively because I’m secretly dreading him laughing at me – when I think about it, this is quite a ridiculous thing for me to say. I’m a twenty-two-year-old girl who’s never had a music lesson and never touched a guitar. Everyone I’ve heard of who plays electric guitar is male and has paid their dues by starting out on an acoustic, which I can’t be bothered to do. And electric guitars are very expensive, not something to mess around on, not a toy or a fad. But times have changed. Just for a second, the impenetrable iron door that is convention has been pushed open a tiny crack, and if I’m very quick and very bold, I might just be able to dart through to the other side before it slams shut again.
I steel myself for an onslaught of hilarity and derision from Mick – but after a pause he says:
‘Yeah! I’ve got a girlfriend who plays guitar!’
It has to be the guitar. The look, the size, the shape, it’s all recognisable to me – like when you meet someone for the first time but you feel like you’ve known them your whole life. I like the way the guitar weaves and chops through the other instruments. I know that I’m not grounded and steady enough to play bass, not outgoing and confident enough to be a singer. I need an instrument to direct my emotions through. A little distance. The size of the strings and neck suit my fingers and the frequency of the notes is familiar, near to the pitch of my own voice. The guitar resonates with how I talk. It’s all and none of these things really. It just feels right. No question. It couldn’t be
any other instrument.
Mick and I go to Denmark Street to choose a guitar. I’ve got no idea what to look for. I might as well be going to buy a semi-automatic weapon. The shop assistant is a bit sneery towards Mick, I can see he thinks it’s pathetic that this boy keeps asking his girlfriend which guitar she likes. When he realises the guitar is for me and I can’t play a note, he becomes very impatient. He watches with a smirk on his face as Mick tests guitars for me. We ignore him, we know a change is coming and we’re part of it. After he’s strummed away on it for a while, Mick hands me a little red guitar called a Rickenbacker. I hold it awkwardly.
‘John Lennon used to play one,’ he tells me.
I’ve never held a guitar before. I look at it, the assistant looks at me, I can’t even hold down a chord. I’m beginning to feel a fool, I’m not sure I can keep up this veneer of confidence any longer but Mick isn’t embarrassed, so we keep going. Eventually I buy a single-cutaway sunburst 1969 Les Paul Junior. I love its simplicity, the two gold knobs, the single pick-up, the curves, like it’s got a cute bum. I think Mick did well there. He’s no idea what kind of guitarist I will turn out to be. He’s helped me choose a guitar the right size, shape and weight for me. It’s simple and classy. It’s a serious guitar. Mick has taken me seriously.
With my Gibson Les Paul Junior at the Stowaway club, June 1978
My new guitar costs £250. I can’t afford a proper case so they find a grey cardboard one out the back, it’s got an embossed snake-skin print stamped into it, and an ivory-coloured plastic handle. I carry my guitar through the streets of central London, prop it against the bus stop in St Martin’s Lane – without taking my hand off it in case someone tries to nick it – heave it onto the bus and sit with the case wedged between my knees, thinking to myself, ‘Nobody knows I can’t play it. At this moment in time, I look like a guitarist.’
I head down Davis Road to the squat, changing hands every few steps to give my arms a rest. For the first time in my life, I feel like myself.
27 THE ROXY
1976–1977
My insistence on Mick and I not merging into a couple is not just to do with being free to hang out with other guys, it’s also about wanting to be seen as a separate entity, rather than ‘Mick’s girlfriend’. Mick can play guitar, he’s been in bands before. He’s a bloke. He doesn’t have to prove himself like I do. I’m trying to be a musician in front of all these new people, a very bold move as I can’t play guitar and haven’t written any songs. Sometimes I think I might as well say, ‘I want to be an astronaut.’ I don’t even know if I can do it myself, why should anyone else have faith in me?
Mick still believes in love and romance whereas I’m questioning all my old beliefs and habits. He wants emotional stability. He was brought up by his grandmother, Stella, in a council flat in Royal Oak. I think he’s done well. I know lots of people who had a much more auspicious start in life who aren’t half the person Mick Jones is.
Every night of the week that it’s open, I go to the Roxy club. I’ve never got any money so I jump the turnstiles at Shepherd’s Bush tube station and jump them again at Covent Garden when I get off, then I blag my way into the club for free – the owners, Andrew Czezowski and Susan Carrington, are very sweet about us all doing this night after night – and we don’t buy any drinks either. I come here a lot because it’s the only place to go but sometimes it gets boring, talking to the same people all the time, just wasting a few hours then trying to get home again.
I hang around downstairs mostly, where Don Letts DJs. I first met Don when he worked at the clothes shop Acme Attractions on the King’s Road. He used to buy me a sandwich or give me my bus fare because I never had any money. My flatmate Alan and our friend Keith Levene (Keith lived across the road from Alan in Southgate. I’ve known Keith since he was fourteen) disappear into the bogs a lot to take drugs. Don plays reggae, lovers’ rock and dub. I stand by the DJ booth and try to dance. I feel self-conscious because I don’t know how to move. I haven’t seen many people dance to reggae, there’s no one to copy. It’s not the same as skinheads dancing to ska. Don’s friend Leo (later the bass player in Dreadzone) tells me to listen to the bass. Before he said that I was trying to dance to the rhythm of the guitar, which is double-time and off-beat. If Wobble’s here (when he became a bass player he added ‘Jah’), I watch him dance. I don’t know how he knows what to do but he’s very elegant and light on his feet and has a good sense of rhythm.
With Don Letts and my Hagstrom guitar
By the time the Roxy closes for the night, the tubes have stopped running and I’m stranded. I haven’t got any money for a cab and there’s no way I can go on a night bus dressed in black rubber stockings, a string vest and a leather jacket. Night buses are dangerous: full of skinheads and drunks, no girls travel on them alone. Also, it’s a long walk from the bus stop at the other end to my squat. I know this’ll be a problem every time I leave the house but it never stops me going out, I just hope things’ll work out. And there’s always Mick. He’s never sure if I’m going to go home with him or not but he waits until the end of the night when everyone else has faded away, then offers me a lift in a taxi back to his grandmother’s flat. He’s always looking out for me.
28 MICK AND VIV
1976
We’re taking a short cut through the car park behind the Hammersmith Odeon. It’s dark. Slinking out from between the cars come the skinheads. They surround us.
Skinheads don’t like ‘punks’ but they don’t hate us as much as teds do.
Coming across me and Mick tottering through the car park on high heels, dressed in pink and black leather with our blonde and black spiky hair, is good luck for them and bad luck for us. We must look like two exotic insects wafted into their territory on a rogue breeze. I think, Oh no, Mick’s going to be absolutely useless, why did I pick such a weedy bloke to go out with?
One of the skinheads swears at us, the rest gather behind him, a sea of bobbing baldies. Mick stays calm. He’s used to this kind of thing. The swearer gets more aggressive, taking the piss out of Mick’s clothes. Then he turns to me and hisses, ‘Next time I see you, I’m gonna fuck you.’ Without any communication between us, Mick and I take this as an invitation to leave. We walk away together. My back is burning. I tell my legs to stop shaking and my feet to hit the ground steadily. Walk with confidence, Viv. I pray they won’t come after us. As we get further and further away and there’s no thundering of Dr Martens on gravel, I dare to believe they’ve let us go. Every day something like this happens, or is likely to happen. We’re always on edge, always on our guard. It’s exhausting.
Danger comes in all sorts of guises and I’m often in trouble because of my own stupidity. On Friday nights we all go to the dances at the Royal College of Art. Tonight, Steve Jones, the Sex Pistols’ guitarist, is flirting with me, even though he knows I’m with Mick. I’m fascinated by Steve, not just because he’s attractive in his own way, but because he’s so different, a ‘bit of rough’. Callous and very sexual but with a vulnerability underneath the bravado. John Rotten calls him the Coalman, because he looks like a labourer. Steve and I wander outside together, and he says, ‘Come down here.’ He leads me down some stone steps into the basement of a big white Kensington house. I don’t know why I go with him, I know it’s wrong. Then he says, ‘Go down on me.’ No nice flirty chat. I shake my head. He keeps on at me to go down on him, I keep saying no. He tries another tack. ‘I’ll go down on you then.’ God no. What was I thinking coming down into this dark hole with him? I suppose I thought we might kiss, but Steve is the most sexual person in our group, he’s always shagging, of course he’s not going to want to kiss. I’m getting scared, I’m out of my depth and can’t see a way out of this. I’ve got a feeling that if I run off it might get worse, might excite him.
‘Viviane!’
I look up from the basement and see Mick’s head poking over the top of the black wrought-iron railings. He must have followed us out, he’s
always watching me. I know I’m in trouble, but I don’t care, I’m so relieved and happy to see him. I race up the stairs. When I get to the top, Mick looks at me and says, ‘It’s over.’ And stalks off.
As I watch Mick walk away from me across Exhibition Road, I realise I don’t want to lose him. I’m worried that if I let him out of my sight, I’ll never get him back. I run after him and try to explain that I wasn’t going to do anything. I beg and plead for his forgiveness, but nothing I say moves him. He hails a cab and I scramble in after him before he has time to slam the door. He doesn’t speak to me or look at me all night but I follow him everywhere like a devoted puppy. I jump out of the cab and chase him into the lift of his grandmother’s block of flats, stick close to him at the front door so he can’t shut me out and sit on the floor of his bedroom amongst the piles of records whilst he gets ready for bed. I lie, fully clothed, next to him on the bed as he pretends to sleep. About ten in the morning, Mick forgives me. He says I’ve shown how sorry I am and how much I care for him. I think he’s surprised how much I want him. What an idiot I am. Nearly lost the guy I love.
After ‘The Steve Jones Incident’, I accept that Mick and I are serious boyfriend and girlfriend. Our relationship is very volatile, we have huge rows, but we love each other and it’s a relief that he doesn’t mind my fiery temper. Most guys can’t stand it. It’s the reason I get chucked usually. But Mick sees it for what it is, a quick flare-up. I can be myself with him and am loved for it, not in spite of it.
With Gibson Les Paul Junior, now sprayed metallic black (sacrilege)
29 SOMETHING IN THE AIR
1976
Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. Page 8