Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys.

by Viv Albertine

  You can only get to see porn films at special cinemas in Soho, and I wouldn’t waste the money just to have a laugh, I’d rather go round someone’s flat and play records. I’ve learnt a bit about sex from watching films like Last Tango in Paris, Andy Warhol’s Trash and Heat, and a Dennis Potter series on TV (I didn’t bother with Deep Throat or Emmanuelle, they sounded dull), but I know these aren’t average people in everyday situations, so I just watch them like I’m watching a nature programme, not sure what’s acceptable or not. (Butter up the arse?) When I was at school, a boy would sometimes bring in a magazine he’d found under his dad’s bed and flash pictures at the girls – I acted all snooty, like I didn’t have those bits on my body. It was the only way I could deal with the embarrassment. Things have changed over the last six months: all of a sudden, every guy you know is trying to get you to go down on him, in the toilets of a club, in an alleyway, in the bathroom of a squat. It’s not exactly presented in an appealing way, to make you want to do it, more like something to get out of doing. Blow jobs and hand jobs are considered acceptable because no emotional involvement or eye contact is needed. Full-on sex isn’t so popular, anti-emotion is the prevailing doctrine.

  John has no idea how inexperienced I am, or that it’s my first time giving a blow job. From the outside I look very confident and sexually experienced. I think to myself, I’ll give it a go. I’ve just got to lick it and suck it. How difficult can it be?

  I slide down to his crotch. He gets his willy out. He smells of stale piss. So do I. We all do. I like it – it’s familiar. That smell is nice and cosy to me. None of us wash before or after sex. It doesn’t occur to us. It’s not very spontaneous to hustle off to the bathroom and then present yourself smelling of Wright’s Coal Tar soap (Cussons Imperial Leather if you really want to impress). I’m not squeamish about bodily smells, I’ve grown up with them. I expect it to smell different down there and to be dark and hairy. Maybe even a bit crispy if you haven’t been home for a few days. That’s the whole point: it’s mixed up with, and close to, all your most basic functions. I may not have given a blow job before, but I know what smegma is. I’ve known that word since I was thirteen. I’ve seen it on almost every knob I’ve ever encountered.

  I tentatively start sucking.

  After a little while of licking away, I hear an imperious voice from on high, like Quentin Crisp and Kenneth Williams mixed with the Artful Dodger – you know, that nasal North London whine – ‘Stop it, Viv.’ I look up. What’s he want? I’m busy down here. ‘Stop it, Viv,’ he says. ‘You’re trying too hard.’

  I laugh, but I’m mortified. I wipe my mouth on the back of my hand and sit up. John zips it away and we go downstairs to join John Grey – did he hear everything? It could have been worse I suppose, he could have said, ‘Stop it, Viv, you’re useless.’

  I make us all a cup of tea; John and John drink it and leave. I cringe inside, imagining them laughing at me as they walk to the tube station.

  I’m still cringing now.

  Making tea at my Fulham studio. Rubber stockings and pink patent boots from Sex, Sid’s leather jacket, rest from jumble sales. 1976

  33 CHAINED

  1976

  At our first band meeting, Sid told me that his name is John Beverley but everyone calls him Sid Vicious because he’s got into a few fights. He tried spelling his name with a y (copying Syd Barrett) for a bit, but nobody took any notice and now he just writes it as ‘Sid’.

  Sid’s demeanour is sheepish and bashful; he stands with his shoulders hunched – like people who are embarrassed about their height, as if he wants to minimise his presence in a room. He talks like that too – although he has a deep masculine voice, he mumbles shyly, he’s almost coquettish. He acts the clown, the village idiot, like Ollie in Laurel and Hardy: he’s no fool so he must want people to underestimate him. Maybe he thinks it gives him an advantage. Sid’s whole persona is a mask, which is weird because he despises fakery and bullshit. He makes me think of that Jamaican expression, ‘Play fool, get wise.’ He’s watching everything and listening to everyone, but tries not to let on how clever he is.

  Sid swears a lot and spits all the time. Once when we were waiting for the night bus in Trafalgar Square we were bored so he tried to teach me how to spit. Not propelling the spit through the gap in your front teeth like skinheads spit, but coughing it up from the back of your throat, curling your tongue into a channel and blowing. It only looks good if you get a nice clean ball of spit and project it a long way. If any of it dribbles down your chin you’ve failed of course. I think it’s called flobbing. I was useless. Couldn’t do it. It made Sid smile to see me try. He never laughs out loud, just smiles or smirks. He doesn’t give away much about himself and he’s never completely relaxed; consequently I don’t feel relaxed when I’m with him, even though he’s always very polite to me. We go everywhere together but it’s a bit strained between us, overly respectful, and I always have a little knot of tension and anxiety in my chest. The conversation between us doesn’t flow, he isn’t a flowy sort of guy, he’s stilted and monosyllabic and seems to relish the awkward atmosphere. There’s a physical attraction between us but we never talk about it or act on it.

  With Sid in a pub

  One day we’re bored and Sid has the idea that we should handcuff ourselves together. ‘For a laugh,’ he says. Everything is ‘for a laugh’. It’s the only reasonable justification for doing anything. Any other reason is pretentious. It’s a good idea but I feel sick at the thought of it. I can’t be seen to be scared of anything, or worse still, embarrassed, so I agree. Now we have a mission, something to occupy us for the day. We travel to the depths of South London, to Queenstown Road, where there’s a hardcore gay sex shop called the London Leatherman. (There are rumours that this is where the Cambridge rapist bought his leather face mask.) We stand outside on the busy main road, lorries thundering past, honking their horns at us because we’re dressed in black leather with studs with spiky hair. Sid raps on the heavy wooden door. It looks like the door to a castle or a dungeon. It’s a door to keep people out. A little hatch slides open and a guy looks at us. He flicks his eyes up and down, giving us the once-over, then slides the hatch shut and unbolts the door. The guys in the shop look puzzled. They’re not very friendly but they tolerate us because we’re obviously outsiders too.

  We buy a set of handcuffs. Sid can’t wait to get outside so we can chain ourselves together. There’s a bit of a tussle between us on the pavement about who gets to hold the key. I insist it’s me but as he’s stronger, he wins the fight; he’s very smug about that. Once we’re chained together, we realise we haven’t got anything to do, nowhere to go, so we just get on and off buses, pulling each other up and down the stairs to the top deck, ignoring people who stare at us. We decide to go round Barry’s house (Barry Black, big record collector and runs the Roxy club) and sit there for a while listening to records. Sid drinks tea. I refuse the tea, I haven’t eaten or drunk anything all day because I’m very shy about bodily functions and would rather die than go to the bathroom in front of Sid, which is of course what he’s hoping for and smirking about. He loves to make people feel uncomfortable. He yanks me off to the bog and pisses in front of me. I stand half out of the room and don’t watch, I think he gets off on doing it, he doesn’t wash his hands afterwards. I’m so happy when the day is over. Life is a series of excruciating tests for me, and Sid enjoys putting me through them.

  Getting a minicab to the Speakeasy club in Soho one night, we are just about to leave my place when Sid goes, ‘Can I wear your jeans?’ My heart sinks; those jeans have an old period stain that I can’t get out, I didn’t wash them soon enough after it happened. I can’t possibly let Sid see that, he’ll never let me forget it. ‘You look good as you are. Anyway, they’ll be too short for you,’ I say. ‘Yeah,’ he says. Phew. We get into the cab but just as the driver is pulling away Sid says, ‘I’ve forgotten something.’ He nips out and runs back into the house. He comes out
a minute later, grinning all over his face, wearing my jeans. I could kill him. Now he knows why I didn’t want him to wear them. I stare out of the window for the whole car journey. He chats away, knowing he’s winding me up. He doesn’t tease me about the blood stain, that’s left unsaid.

  Sid hasn’t got many clothes, none of us have much that is acceptable to be seen in, no shops sell what we like except Sex, and it’s so expensive we only have one or two things from there. Sid has two pairs of trousers: holey, faded jeans and a pair of red pegs – they’re wool and have a little silver thread running through them, zoot-suitish, pleated at the waist, wide-legged, tapering in quite narrow at the bottom. He wears them with brothel creepers, a bit David Bowie and a bit 1950s. Some of the boys still have this look, Malcolm McLaren and John Rotten wear it sometimes too – it’s left over from Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die, the teddy-boy shop Malcolm and Vivienne Westwood had before Sex. I never went there, didn’t know about it.

  One day Sid turns up in the peg trousers and they’re in ribbons. He’d sliced them up with a razor blade because he hated them so much but he couldn’t find his jeans so when he wanted to go out he had to stick them back together. He joined the rips with loads of safety pins, all the way down his legs, hundreds of them. That’s how the ‘loads of safety pins’ thing started amongst people in clubs: they copied it, but he only did it because he couldn’t be bothered to sew his trousers up.

  A while later Sid came round to Davis Road in a new pair of black bondage trousers, said he’d gone into Sex and Vivienne told him she couldn’t bear looking at him in those disgusting trousers a minute longer, she made him take them off, gave him a pair of bondage trousers for free and threw the red ones away. I’m really jealous, Vivienne must really like him to do that. She doesn’t usually give stuff away.

  Whenever Sid gets his dole money he treats me to a Wimpy burger and chips. He never has anything to do and wants to tag along to art school with me, but I say no because I know he’ll embarrass me. I love Wimpy burgers and I’m always hungry so when he says, ‘I’ll buy you Wimpy and chips on the way in, if you let me come with you,’ I can’t resist. It’s such a treat and we can’t usually afford it – everyone has their price I suppose. So we get burger and chips for breakfast and then he lumbers along next to me up Shepherd’s Bush Road to art college.

  He sits in on the lectures, they’re about warp and weft, knitting machines and pattern cutting, things like that. Sid slouches so low in the chair he almost slides off, long arms dangling by his sides, skinny legs stretched way out in front of him, foot shaking like he’s on speed. Not a discreet presence at all. Then he picks his nose and farts and burps loudly all through the talk. After this happens a couple of times, he’s banned from the college and I’m told by the head of year not to bring him in any more. This is actually a relief for me. Not that Sid will take no for an answer – I have to be very firm with him to make sure he doesn’t come to college again. Whenever we’re together, even if I’m a bit fed up with him and ask him to give me a bit of space, he won’t go away. He doesn’t care, he’s not hurt, he just does what he wants. He thinks it’s funny.

  I never see Sid with a girl. There’s a very young girl we call Wiggy, she wears a grey shaggy wig and has a sweet face, looks about fourteen years old and I think they fiddle about together sometimes. I think Soo Catwoman and him had a tryst, and that’s it. No flirting, no talking about girls, no interest shown. I think he’s shy and inexperienced: unless a girl grabs hold of him, he never makes a move.

  Often when Sid turns up at my place he rushes past me at the front door, races upstairs to the bathroom and looks for stray pubic hairs. I know it’s childish and shouldn’t matter, but it makes me want to die if he finds one in the bath or on the loo seat. If he does, he laughs hysterically and teases me about it for hours. That’s what it’s like with him: find a weak point in someone, then pull them to pieces. To help me stay cool and cope with the embarrassment I imagine it’s Alan’s pube, I act like it couldn’t possibly be mine and I don’t know what he’s talking about. There are times when the doorbell rings and I think with dread about the bathroom and sometimes I even run in there to check it before opening the front door. You never know who’s going to be at the door – if someone comes over it’s spontaneous, because we don’t have a telephone.

  The worst situation Sid ever gets me into is when we go to meet some aristocrat he’s come across somewhere. Sid thinks it’s amusing that this toff wants to hang out with us and buy us drinks at his private club in Kensington Church Street. We often get invited to things like this, as if we’re a couple of freaks to be paraded around.

  We meet Posh Boy and his posh mate at a pub on Kensington Church Street and I don’t know how it happens, but an argument starts. I’ve got a feeling I started it because I feel safe with Sid here; if I were on my own I’d be more cautious. I say something provocative to Posh Boy, he threatens me with violence, and the next thing I know, Sid’s whipped off his studded belt, wrapped it around his fist and smashed Posh Boy over the head with the buckle end. Splits his head open. (Sid taught me this move: wrap the tongue of the belt round your hand, use the buckle as the weapon, it’s important to lock your arm straight whilst you wield the belt, and do the worst thing you can think of first. That’s the only chance you’ve got.) We all leap up from the table, Sid legs it up the road and I’m left with Posh Boy, blood pouring out of his face.

  Posh Boy grabs me by the hair – a clump of it in his fist, like I’m an animal – and drags me up the road looking for Sid, to kill him. I’m a hostage. I am so humiliated: I’ve never been treated like such a piece of dirt before. No doubt Posh Boy feels the same after being smashed across the head by Sid.

  The three of us – Posh Boy fuming and covered in blood, holding me by my hair, me bent over and hobbling along in a subservient position next to him, and Posh Boy’s mate, scurrying to keep up – go raging up and down Kensington Church Street. No sign of Sid. Posh Boy lets go of my hair for a second and I dash into a boutique and ask the shop assistants to protect me. They aren’t too happy about it, but I refuse to go back outside. I hide at the back of the shop for ages until the posh boys go away.

  When I poke my head out into the street to check the coast is clear, there’s Sid, looking for me. I’m quite touched because most of the time he has no code of conduct. I apologise to him for putting him in a situation where he felt he had to defend me. I’ve learnt my lesson; from now on I’ll keep my mouth shut and not invite trouble. Things can get out of hand so quickly, especially with Sid around. I also decide never to wear heels again when I’m out with him. I go to Holt’s in Camden Town and buy a pair of black Dr Martens. (You can get them in black, brown or maroon, the skinhead boys at school used to buy the brown ones and polish them with Kiwi Oxblood shoe polish – this gives them a deep reddish brown colour, much subtler than the flat red of the originals. They also kept them pristinely clean and polished at all times.) I wear my new boots with everything – dresses, tutus – it’s a great feeling to be able to run again. No other girls wear DMs with dresses, so I get a lot of funny looks. (Skinhead girls only wear DMs with Sta-Prest trousers. With their boring grey skirts, they wear plain white or holey ecru tights and black patent brogues.) But as I wear them all the time to clubs and pubs, it eventually catches on with other girls and I don’t look so odd.

  Sid always says he isn’t a violent person, that he’s a useless fighter, he’d rather run away from a fight than confront someone, violence is a last resort. But ‘Sid Vicious’ is becoming a persona he can’t shake off, and he lets the myth build, plays up to it. After a while, because of his name and reputation, he’s getting attacked everywhere he goes: guys want to take him on. He doesn’t care. Everything he does he takes as far as he can. He detaches himself from fear, remorse, caring about his safety or his looks and just becomes a vessel for other people’s fantasies about him, like Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke. His attitude is, Let’s see how far this
thing goes. Test it to destruction.

  34 THE SHOP

  1976–1977

  We are going to inherit the earth; there is not the slightest doubt about that.

  Buenaventura Durruti

  I’ve got so used to my life being challenging and fraught with danger that I don’t question it any more. Whether I’m knocking on the door of a hardcore sex shop, walking through suburban streets being verbally abused and spat on, or being threatened on the tube, I don’t give in. I don’t dress normally to have an easy life. The pilgrimage down the King’s Road to get to the Shop (Sex: everyone calls it ‘the Shop’), the place I want to hang out and buy stuff, is one of the scariest things I do – running the gauntlet of teds who want to kill people like me – but nothing will stop me looking the way I want. It’s a commitment.

  I usually go with Sid or Rory, they know everyone in there, which makes it easier. We walk all the way down the King’s Road from Sloane Square tube station, but as we get closer to the Shop, Rory gets a bit agitated and says things like, ‘Do your bag up, Viv, there’s stuff spilling out of it. Looks messy.’ That’s from someone who hangs out with Malcolm a lot, he still gets nervous. If we make it without seeing any teds, we’re lucky, otherwise we have to dodge in and out of the shops all along the King’s Road and it takes ages to get to the World’s End, which is what the end of the King’s Road is called and feels like.