Apathy for the Devil (19 page)

1974 was the year when - glory be-I finally found my own voice as a writer. Before that, I’d been a wannabe, simply channelling whatever literary influences - Bangs, Capote, Wilde, Wolfe-I happened to be in temporary thrall to. But the apprenticeship I’d undertaken over the past two years had led me to adopt a very different perspective from my rock-lit peers on how to most effectively capture the sounds and sensations of pop life in prose form. Everyone else seemed to me to be writing about the ‘idea’ of rock as though it was some abstract concept. They liked to bracket the music’s practitioners off into separate competing movements and spent far too much space and energy dissecting their lyrics as though they were all W. B. Yeats with an electric guitar. Their stilted prose and sheltered thoughts were typical of a particular mindset: that of the bookish bedroom hermit with a sociology degree who doesn’t quite know what to do with the rest of his life. In other words, the kind of young adult I might have become had luck and the
NME
not sealed my fate.

My perspective was the polar opposite of theirs. I wasn’t writing about rock as an idea: I was writing about it as a full-blown flesh-and-blood reality - surreal people living surreal, action-packed lives. From what I’d learned coming up, rock writing was fundamentally an action medium that best came to life when the
writer was right in the thick of that action and yet removed enough to comprehend its possible consequences. The range of characters the medium offered was phenomenally rich. There was the lead singer with his monumental narcissistic personality disorders. The guitarists with their witchy girlfriends and ever-mounting drug-dependency issues. The managers feverishly working the money angle whilst secretly envying their wards’ success and pulling power. The roadies building their own thuggish power base. The audience - like the children of Hamelin - hypnotised and bug-eyed with communal ecstasy. It’s the convergence of human elements like these that made the form start to come alive for me. Some degree of windy theorising is always necessary - true - but only in small doses. Nothing longer than three or four incisive, well-worded sentences to establish a wider context and also pass judgement on the music actually being made. Then - back to the action.

The key trick, though, is to somehow create prose that flows with a distinct musicality all of its own. That’s what I finally hit on in ’74: the right tone and the right groove. Before that, there’d been something contrived about my writing as well as the literary persona I’d hastily adopted. But I’d toiled long and hard to find a style and approach that I was happy with. I took my evolving writerly skills very, very seriously during that whole period. I made a point of never taking any drugs just prior to and during the actual act of scribbling my texts out. I’d tried once or twice whilst on speed and it had screwed up my ability to focus and fuse together incidents to the best of my ability. And pot only befuddled my thinking whenever a deadline loomed. No, I really needed to be straight to do full justice to the talent growing within me.

That was one of the better aspects of my relationship with Chrissie Hynde: it wasn’t a drug-driven liaison. We’d take drugs in social situations when they were being offered freely to us but didn’t have any where we lived and rarely felt the urge to actually buy them. Chrissie was like me - she’d snort cocaine if she was given it but it invariably left her nervous and ill at ease. The best times we shared together were the ones when it was just the two of us, clear-headed and drunk simply on each other’s company. You don’t need drugs when you’re truly in love and on the same wavelength as your intended.

But romantic love - as the poets have often pointed out - is a multifaceted condition of the heart that can end up deeply wounding those who fall under its spell. Some can ride its giddy momentum whilst others become destabilised and start to come apart from within. That’s what was about to happen to me. The image I was trying to project out to the world was that of a self-assured, waspishly witty young sophisticate, but behind it I was emotionally still sixteen years old in the head: insecure and possessive - two qualities almost all self-respecting species of womankind have a built-in contempt of.

Meanwhile, weird scenes had been happening within the
NME
. Sales continued to increase throughout ’73, but then in the year’s final weeks the paper had been forced to cease production and go on strike. It was out of circulation for almost two months as I recall-a nerve-wracking time for its staff and contributors wondering if it would ever resurface. The strike coincided with our IPC paymasters taking umbrage at the
NME
’s new laissez-faire editorial policy regarding bad language. The word ‘cunt’ had lately cropped up in one feature and the higher-ups were mortified by this turn of events, threatening to shut the
paper down if further obscenities were committed to print. A compromise was duly arrived at. We could use ‘fuck’ in moderation, as well as ‘asshole’ and ‘bugger’. But any slang word for genitalia - male or female - was strictly out of bounds.

Mercifully, this petty-minded contretemps didn’t put too deep a dent in ongoing office morale. Big changes were afoot in the
NME
’s Long Acre office space. Editor Alan Lewis chose this period to step down from his duties and hand the reins over to Nick Logan. This was a major step in the right direction. Lewis had been a canny opportunist, but Nick had the ideal mixture of sensibility and creative instinct to take us all to the next level, whatever and wherever that was. His first act as the journal’s captain was most inspired: he persuaded Ian MacDonald to take over his previous post as assistant editor. Ian wasted no time in bringing all his daunting intellect, boundless intensity and unshakeable thirst for excellence to the role he’d been assigned.

The pair immediately green-lighted a visual make-over for the paper. The first post-strike issue to hit the shops in January ’74 featured an arty full-length photo - of Bryan Ferry - taking up the entire cover. Before that, the paper had unimaginatively run their lead news story of the week in the same space. But now it looked classier, bolder and infinitely more pleasing to the eye. Pennie Smith was really coming into her own as a photographer, and Ian and Nick made sure her contributions were always laid out for maximum visual impact. Likewise, they knew how to get the best out of me and all the other writers on board. Thus began the
NME
’s true golden age. From that point on, we were truly a force to be reckoned with.

Of course, ‘new journalistic directions’ invariably require the constant hiring of new writers to keep the pot boiling. So it surprised
no one when word came through that two fresh recruits would soon be joining up to bolster our ranks. The first to arrive was a Bert Jansch lookalike called Andrew Tyler-a fine writer and all-round good person. The second choice took me aback somewhat. It was Chrissie. Ian and Nick had socialised with her on several occasions when I’d brought her to the office and Ian in particular felt she had the perfect attitude to become an
NME
contributor. He basically told her so until he’d convinced her to actually sit down and churn out some text. They evidently liked what she submitted because the next thing I knew she was interviewing Brian Eno for a centre-page spread.

At first I was happy for her. She could dump her dead-end job at the architects’ office and focus on matters that genuinely interested her for greater financial recompense. Suddenly she had her own profile on the London music scene apart from being my girlfriend. But her recruitment onto the
NME
masthead also left me distinctly wary. I felt the paper was pushing her into their big spotlight far too soon, that the editors should have allowed her to find her bearings as a music journalist before parading her in front of our readers.

One consequence of her being showcased so prominently so early in her career was that she always felt a terrible pressure whenever she had to turn out copy and found the whole process both taxing and deeply unenjoyable. That’s unfortunate because she possessed some talent as a burgeoning writer. Over the first six months of 1974 she managed to complete and get published interviews/articles on acts as diverse as Brian Eno, Suzi Quatro, David Cassidy (a teen idol
du jour
) and Tim Buckley. The best thing she turned in to the
NME
was a touching write-up of an encounter with one of her heroes, the zen-cool veteran jazzer
Mose Allison that took place during a spring residency the piano-playing US singer/songwriter was undertaking at Ronnie Scott’s Soho club. If she’d been given the chance to pen more low-key heartfelt pieces like that, maybe she would have continued longer in the profession than she did. After six months, however, she’d simply had enough and left the
NME
- and music journalism - to pursue other goals.

By that time, she’d found another avenue of employment for herself as a shop assistant at Malcolm McLaren’s King’s Road clothes store. Once again I’d first introduced her to McLaren and his clique, never thinking it would amount to much. I’d first noticed him in the spring of ’72. His shop was called ‘Let It Rock’ then and it catered exclusively to a fifties retro crowd: brothel-creeping Teds from the London suburbs with nicknames like ‘Biffo’ and ‘Crazy-Legged John’. He was a real fifties purist back then and I took a generally dim view of those who opt to live single-mindedly in the past.

But then the New York Dolls returned to London at the end of November ’73 to perform a concert there and promote their critically acclaimed debut album. On a day off, they’d gone shopping and had trooped into Let It Rock together. The moment McLaren saw them, a major man-crush ensued. Suddenly the seventies came alive for him and he began obsessively following them around.

In December I flew to Paris to see the group play at the prestigious Olympia concert hall. The concert itself was a musical nightmare highlighted by guitarist Johnny Thunders abruptly leaving the stage in mid-performance at least twice to vomit behind the amplifiers. But afterwards there was a celebratory dinner at a ritzy restaurant and I found myself seated at a table with
David Johansen and McLaren. The latter was animatedly talking about a pet project of his: a filmed documentary of his hero, the gifted but physically frail UK former rock idol Billy Fury that he was struggling to find financial backing for.

I’d actually met Fury just a month earlier. Someone had convinced him to make a tentative comeback and so he’d duded himself up in a pink leather suit and Rod Stewart feather cut and started performing a greatest-hits repertoire in a Northern working men’s club. His voice still sounded great, his face remained flawlessly beautiful and he was as thin as a whippet. But he was also far too sweet-natured and trusting, and lacked the gumption and physical stamina needed to sustain a career in the seventies. He also had a serious heart condition. I mentioned all this to McLaren and he was most impressed. It was the start of our very first conversation and it continued long into the night.

He revealed a lot about himself during that chat. He talked at length about his Jewish upbringing and his childhood living under the influence of a mad meddlesome grandmother who instilled in him the innate belief that he was so special he could achieve absolutely anything in life, no matter what obstacles were placed before him. He also mentioned his many years spent as a mature art-school student during the sixties. He hated that decade with a venom that would have been shocking had it not been so comical to hear about. He became apoplectic when he began railing against the Beatles, hippies and the whole peace and love movement of the time. The very idea of anything even vaguely spiritual and uplifting filtering into youth culture automatically filled him with nausea. At one point I got into a heated argument with him over who had been a more influential force in popular music - Bob Dylan (my choice) or Johnny Kidd and
the Pirates (his). Kidd and his cohorts were an early-sixties English rock band of merit with one indisputably seminal recording to their credit - the original version of ‘Shakin’ All Over’. Dylan by contrast had over one hundred timeless songs under his belt and had been a far-reaching creative trailblazer whose name still inspired millions with awe. There really was no contest. But he still waffled on ardently about how Dylan was a talentless fake who’d influenced nothing and no one whilst Johnny Kidd - who’d been killed in a car crash back in 1965 - was someone who’d left a deep and lasting impression on the mindset of twentieth-century youth.

His own mindset was still hopelessly trapped in the late fifties as far as rock ’n’ roll and pop culture in general were concerned. Gene Vincent - the sweet-voiced hillbilly psychopath - was his ultimate musical reference point, the figure that best summed up his vision of rock as something truly untamed and seditious. But then the New York Dolls walked into his life and he’d instinctively sensed that - behind their tacky transvestite outward appearance - something equally untamed and seditious lurked within them too. It turned out to be his very own ‘road to Damascus’ moment. For one thing, he got to hear that night for the very first time the fateful phrase he’d later claim he single-handedly invented - ‘punk rock’. It either came from my lips or from one of the New York Dolls.

The upshot of this first encounter was that we stayed in touch back in London and he invited me out one evening in January. I took Chrissie along and she quickly bonded with McLaren’s girlfriend, a feisty Northern lass called Vivienne Westwood. They shared several pointed character traits. They were both aggressively forthright in voicing their opinions in any given situation,
used bad language liberally and liked nothing more than initiating confrontations with complete strangers when not driving their own boyfriends to distraction with their nagging ways. I liked Vivienne - she was a tough old bird who’d lived a tough old life prior to becoming McLaren’s personal Eliza Doolittle - but I was also wary of her because I could detect something unhealthily malicious lurking behind her eyes. That’s probably why McLaren and I grew close. We both shared the same sorry romantic predicament.