Apathy for the Devil (29 page)

The weeks that followed are grim ones to recall. They took my name off the
NME
masthead and acted as though I’d just vanished into thin air. Rumours started circulating throughout London that I was unemployable. Back in the seventies rock journalism wasn’t something the daily papers wished to incorporate into their pages, so career alternatives for me meant signing up with one of the lesser music weeklies - something I wasn’t prepared to do. So I did the only thing I knew how to do when placed in extreme, emotionally depleting circumstances. I went back on the smack.

A month passed before I was struck by a rare moment of lucidity. One night I managed to compose a heartfelt letter to Nick Logan protesting my innocence and generally giving my side of the story. Once he’d read it, he got in touch and asked me out to lunch. During the meal he invited me back into the
NME
fold under somewhat reduced conditions, and I agreed to return. But things were never the same again for me and that paper. Before I’d viewed the
NME
as ‘us’; now I saw it as strictly ‘them and me’. Any illusions that we were basically all on the same page and fighting the good fight together went straight out of the window.

I had one ace left up my scribbling sleeve - the Brian Wilson
story I’d been researching over the past months. I had enough material for a book but decided instead to have the 40,000-word text I was working on serialised over three separate
NME
issues. More people would read it that way and I’d be able to show the world, his wife and my in-house persecutors who the real ‘man with the plan’ was when it came to extending the paper’s cutting edge. I went to work like a soul possessed, which was handy as I only had a month to turn it around. The first 20,000 words were a dream: I’d sit there and the prose just flowed out onto the page. I could stay focused and scribbling for up to twenty hours at a stretch. But then - halfway through - something snapped inside my mind and I started losing momentum after that. I’d sit for hours struggling over a single sentence. By the end I felt utterly drained. Nowadays I’m inclined to think that this was because of all the heroin running around my brain and bloodstream but at the time I saw it as something more supernaturally catastrophic, a potentially terminal condition.

Real inspiration - particularly in so-called pop culture - almost always comes in notoriously short spurts. Even Bob Dylan enjoyed only three years as a bona fide creative ground-breaker (’63 to ’66). I’d enjoyed three uplifting years too. From ’72 to mid-’75 my writing talent had been on the rise. It reached its peak with the Wilson investigation. After that it went into free fall. I still contributed to the paper but I don’t think anything they printed with my byline attached during the rest of the decade was up to snuff. Partly it was the drugs, partly it was simple burn-out, but a lot of it was because I’d grown to actively despise the way the
NME
chewed up and then spat out virtually anyone of substance that came into its orbit - contributors and musicians alike. I no longer trusted anyone who worked there
and felt little affinity with their tastes and editorial policies.

As soon as my writing talent began to go on the blink, I realised I needed to start investigating new avenues of gainful creative endeavour, if only to help pay for the drugs I was now addicted to. I tried being a DJ for one night at a Camden Town club called Dingwalls but the bloke running the place told me I wasn’t up to the task because I hadn’t played enough disco. There was only one other halfway viable option open from that point on. I needed to get a group of my own together and make my living as a professional musician.

I’d harboured this particular fantasy from even before reaching puberty. As a child, I’d been forced to study classical piano and had actually learned how to sight-read music in the process. Then I’d fumbled through my teens groping to master simple barre-chord shapes and finger-picking techniques on a crappy acoustic guitar with strings like curtain rails I’d somehow inherited. By the time I’d reached nineteen, I could play both instruments - after a fashion. But I didn’t really know how to play what then constituted rock ’n’ roll in any way, shape or form.

Amazingly, this didn’t prevent me from recklessly offering my guitar-playing services to Iggy Pop the first time I met him back in 1972. That was my dream gig back then - to actually play in the Stooges. Thankfully he rejected my offer pretty much on the spot. I say ‘thankfully’ because had he arranged an audition for me in a rehearsal studio I’d have come out looking like a prize oaf: I’d never actually played an electric guitar up to that point in time. Later that same year the Flamin’ Groovies invited me to be their keyboard player even though I don’t recall us ever playing a note of music together. I was tempted but turned them down mainly because I didn’t want to relocate to San Francisco.

The following year I finally got my first electric guitar. Michael Karoli out of Can sold it to me-a flashy-looking Plexiglas affair that he’d picked up over in Japan and soon tired of. I strummed away on that until-a further twelve months later-I acquired the stolen Fender from Steve Jones. By mid-’75 my living quarters had become overtaken by the six-stringed buggers. You couldn’t move without bumping into a fretboard and knocking the thing to the uncarpeted floor. But my attempts to make music specifically for the public arena up until then had been tentative at best. There were a couple of sessions at Brian Eno’s home studio at Maida Vale. I’d also tried to work with a guy called Magic Michael - an acid head with his own unique personal magnetism who sang like Frank Sinatra and often performed in drag or stark naked. You can catch a glimpse of Michael in full deranged performance flow - replete with shrunken genitalia - in Julian Temple’s Glastonbury film. As you can probably imagine, we went nowhere fast. Michael went on to work as Can’s singer for a couple of months and even moved to Cologne for a while, before resurfacing in London and becoming one of the first signings to Stiff Records. He could have been a massive star but just didn’t have the focus and ambition to make the journey.

At one point, the
NME
started to take an interest in my musical dabblings. In early ’74 Nick Logan offered to set me up with some esteemed Tin Pan Alley Svengali who’d then be employed to groom me as a performer and recording artiste. His one proviso was that I write about the whole experience and then continue turning out copy for the paper even if my pop-star career were to actually take off. It sounded like a sad old caper to me. Pop stardom really wasn’t something I’d ever craved. And when he went on to suggest that my Svengali could well be Jonathan
King, I nipped that idea smartly in the bud without further forethought. The idea of being moulded and talked down to by some self-styled pop pimp was not one that I cared to entertain. So what did I go and do in the summer of ’75? Only link up career-wise with another glib-tongued shyster who dreamed of exploiting and then discarding impressionable young boys with stars in the eyes.

It had been eighteen months since I’d first encountered Malcolm McLaren in Paris and in that time I’d come to view him both as a cultural ally and caring friend. In my darkest hours following the Chrissie Hynde bust-up I’d poured my heart out to him and he’d always listened sympathetically and offered sound advice. But we’d spent most of our times together verbally plotting out the revolution we both recognised that rock music needed to undergo in order to be truly relevant again. Looking around sleepy London town in 1974 though we’d quickly concluded there were no authentically wild young stars-in-waiting to heed sedition’s call. So we turned our attentions to America and its two struggling punk-rock forefathers. I’d recently tried - and failed - to persuade the Stooges to regroup. During the same time line McLaren had moved to Manhattan in order to attempt to reverse the down-bound fortunes of his beloved New York Dolls. During the first six months of 1975 he took on the self-appointed role of being their personal style and image consultant. He dressed them in red vinyl costumes designed by him and then sewn up by Vivienne Westwood and also managed to coerce the group’s principals into writing a batch of new songs. But then he took up with the wrong-headed notion of persuading them to embrace Marxism and quote passages from Mao Tse-tung’s little red book during their live sets. Americans throughout the ages
have always taken a distinctly dim view of Communist propagandists and certainly weren’t about to tolerate it coming from a down-at-heel group of three-chord-playing cross-dressing drug addicts. Sensing their jig was well and truly up, the quintet splintered apart in the middle of a US club tour, leaving McLaren to pack up his tent and scurry back to London.

The day after his return - it would have been sometime in early June - he and Westwood came to visit me in my soon-to-be-vacated Archway lair (the landlord - distressed at my lack of domestic skills - had found a loophole in our leasing agreement and was booting me off the premises). For several hours he ranted at the expense of the lately departed Dolls. They’d vomited over the clothes he’d had made for them. They’d sniggered at the Marxist manifestos he’d tried to impress upon them. The singer was a social gadfly, the bassist a raging alcoholic and the lead guitarist and drummer were so junked up they were perpetually half-asleep. He’d started out with high hopes but the group had let him down at every turn. They’d run out of ambition and moxie and their individual shortcomings had turned them into failures who deserved to fail. He was well rid of them - or so he kept saying.

Trying to change the subject I asked McLaren if he had any projects or plans now he was back in London. That’s when he told me he’d decided to commit his future energies to shaping and guiding the group that our teenaged reprobate colleagues Steve Jones and Paul Cook - as well as his old shop assistant Glen Matlock - had been struggling to launch. They were young and malleable - unlike the Dolls - and could be counted upon to kick up enough of a storm to rudely awaken the sleeping metropolis from its post-hippie coma. I’d yet to hear them play and so was
initially sceptical. But he was already grandly scheming out their fate. He’d even come up with a name for his new wards whilst out in the States. He was going to call them ‘QT Jones and the Sex Pistols’.

A few weeks later, he returned to ferry me over to witness a group rehearsal. We drove to a huge building somewhere in White City that had - until recently - been a functioning BBC studio. But the TV company had moved its staff, cameras and audio equipment to another location, leaving the old premises empty and guarded over by one none-too-vigilant caretaker. This caretaker had a son called Warwick Nightingale, who happened to be one of Steve Jones’s little gang and who’d been assigned the lead-guitar duties in his group. Warwick - better known as ‘Wally’ - had either persuaded his dad to let them turn one of the rooms into their very own rehearsal space or else he’d simply stolen the keys to the building and opened it up to his colleagues.

The four of them were lurking at the entrance as McLaren and I drove up. Then we entered the premises, walking through one spacious stripped-down room after another until we reached one that possessed a makeshift wooden stage on which several amplifiers were placed. I complimented them on their choice of equipment - it was all very state-of-the-art - and they told me it had all been stolen, every last stick of it. The microphones - they then revealed gleefully - had been heisted from David Bowie’s 1973 farewell to Ziggy Stardust concert. Jones and Cook had hidden under the chairs after the audience had left the London venue and stayed there for several hours. During that time, the onstage equipment had not been dismantled. Instead a roadie had been elected to keep an eye on it but he’d fallen asleep on a chair next to the drum riser. Jones and Cook eventually tiptoed around the
slumbering roadie onto the stage itself and stole the microphones by clipping them from their leads with a pair of garden pliers.

In due course they plugged their guitars in, Cook sat down behind the drum kit and the four of them performed their entire repertoire to McLaren and me. It mostly consisted of songs first recorded in the mid-to-late sixties by hit-making London-based pop groups of that era, like the Small Faces’ 1965 debut single ‘Whatcha Gonna Do About It’ and a lesser-known album track called ‘Understanding’, followed by the Who’s ‘Call Me Lightning’ and ‘Substitute’. After that their song choices became distinctly ill-advised. They struggled through a wooden rendition of ‘Everlasting Love’, the old Robert Knight soul classic that had also been covered back in 1968 by a UK act called the Love Affair, before segueing unconvincingly into the Foundations’ cheesy pop classic ‘Build Me Up Buttercup’. Contrary to later legend, they could play quite well. Matlock and Cook had already bonded into a tighter and more energetic rhythm section than the New York Dolls had ever boasted in their ranks whilst Jones’s singing style was a straight - but not unimpressive - copy of Steve Marriott’s classic larynx-strafing hollerings. But there was nothing remotely radical about them. They were marooned in a musical past they’d barely known.

But then - after some coaxing - they decided to unveil the only two songs they’d managed to write amongst themselves. One was called ‘Scarface’ and the other ‘Did You No Wrong’, and they were exactly the same piece of music with different words. ‘Scarface’ was about a gangster and boasted a lyric written by Jones’s profligate stepdad, a retired boxer. Steve pulled out a piece of paper at one point and showed me the verses written in their author’s own halting scribble. Almost every word had been
grievously misspelt. Still, I wasn’t looking to these lads for tips on good grammar. At this point I just wanted to hear them play something that sounded reasonably contemporary and ‘Did You No Wrong’ finally managed to fit the bill. It’s the only self-penned song from their early repertoire that they later went on to record for posterity and that later studio version - still available for all to hear - isn’t so different from what I heard that day. Sure, John Lydon’s recorded vocal is more sneerfully adenoidal than Steve Jones’s gruff, hectoring original delivery but the lyrics - written prior to Lydon’s arrival but still credited to him - are pretty much identical. Ditto the riff, chords, groove and sense of lurching unbridled menace. All I knew hearing it for the first time was that - in a year filled with cocaine muzak and pretentious sonic blather and smoke - it was like suddenly breathing fresh air after being trapped down a mine shaft. I hadn’t heard straight rock ’n’ roll sound this spry and impactful since the Stooges were still firing on all cylinders back in 1972. At the end, McLaren and I exchanged meaningful glances. The little red-headed bastard might actually be on to something here, I remember thinking.