Apathy for the Devil (36 page)

Both of them were damaged goods and bad apples and each saw in the other disturbing qualities they craved for themselves. Sid was initially drawn to Nancy because she was stronger, bossier, more abrasive and even more morally vacuous than he
was. Nancy glommed on to Sid because he was a rising star with a malleable, still-not-fully-formed personality that she quickly recognised she could exploit in a way that could help her realise her one burning ambition - to become a celebrity herself.

Heroin did the rest - tied them up together in nasty little knots and fabricated the love-dust they claimed to see in each other’s eyes - and now heroin had thrown them into my orbit too. Almost everywhere I stayed throughout most of 1977 Sid and Nancy would somehow end up there too. I crashed at Johnny Thunders’s Mayfair flat for two weeks that summer until the pair dropped by and never left. You couldn’t pass out around either of them because they’d start frantically ransacking your pockets for drugs and money whilst you slept. That was an occupational hazard for any socialising junkie in the seventies and I soon found a way to circumvent it - I’d Sellotape my drugs to my body when it came time to turn in.

Later that summer, Hermine found me temporary accommodation in a large Dockland warehouse complex also frequented by the sculptor Andrew Logan and film-maker Derek Jarman. My new living quarters were one large unfurnished room overlooking the Thames. It was an ideal place to lie low in, reflect on recent events and try and change my disastrous way of living. But then - just three days after I’d moved in - Sid and Nancy turned up without prior warning too and everything promptly turned to shit. I’d just been to the local shop and had arrived back in time to find Sid pissing against my front door. I immediately pointed out to him that if he’d just turned around and walked three steps forward, the stream of his urine would now be sailing into Father Thames instead of befouling my new hidey-hole, but he didn’t seem able to grasp the point I was making.
The evening we spent together was like all the others: Sid nodding out whilst Nancy sat around maliciously cursing out the rest of mankind for hours on end. Apart from Iggy Pop and Johnny Thunders, she never had a good word to say about anybody - and she had a real bee in her bonnet about Sid’s soul-brother Lydon. ‘He thinks he’s such a fuckin’ star - but he isn’t. Sid’s the real star in the Sex Pistols. Aren’t you, Sid?’ She’d then whack her boyfriend in the ribs, causing him to stir from his coma. ‘Yeah, Nance, you’re right,’ he’d mumble before promptly falling back into the arms of Morpheus.

Late in the night Nancy decided it was time for her and her intended to get some actual bedrest. There was only one bed available - the one I was using - but she bitched and moaned so much about sleeping on the floor that I let them pass out on it instead. The next morning I noticed the pillow had a rancid-looking yellowish substance stained all over it. I reached out to touch it and it felt moist and greasy. Sid noticed my growing consternation. ‘Sorry, mate,’ he said. ‘I didn’t have any hairspray yesterday so I stuck a bunch of margarine in my hair to get it to stand up. It must have melted when I was sleeping and messed up your pillow.’

How was one expected to react to situations like this? My solution was not to react at all. Just let them run wild until they find another strung-out fool to leech off. A couple of days later they’d vanished, leaving behind a touching memento: a torn plastic bag full of used, unwashed syringes that they’d hidden under the mattress. I’d tolerated their company for days and nights on end but I can’t say I ever enjoyed a single second. Sid had a certain goofy charm when he was on his own but let’s not kid ourselves here please - they were both supremely unlikeable people who
tainted every setting they stumbled into. Only twenty years old and already they had the smell of death in their young pores. That’s not something that deserves to be romanticised down through the ages.

Whilst I continued to languish in junkie-land, my relationship with the (relatively) straight world outside grew more and more tenuous. My visits to the
NME
throughout the year were infrequent at best. There had been changes afoot in my absence, none of them for the better. The office had moved from Long Acre to the twenty-first floor of a multi-storey high-rise near Waterloo station where it now shared space alongside all of IPC’s other printed outlets. This relocation led to a sharp dip in office morale that everyone involved was affected by in one way or another.

Nick Logan - still the editor - started showing the symptoms of a looming nervous breakdown, whilst his former second lieutenant Ian MacDonald appeared to be engulfed in a mental meltdown all of his own. Ian had actually resigned from his assistant editor post in late ’75. In ’76 he decided to experiment with LSD for the first time. By 1977 he’d given up his worldly possessions and rented Maida Vale apartment and moved in with a Sufi commune living in a squat off Little Venice. (Two of his cohabitants had been the gifted singer/songwriter Richard Thompson and his wife Linda.) Later in the decade, he returned to his parents’ neck of the woods back in Gloucestershire, where I believe he remained until he took his own life in 2003. For me, Ian and Nick had been the best and brightest of the
NME
’s golden-age hierarchy. The three of us had been the ones in the engine room feeding the furnace and steering the train. But the stress and friction involved had finally drained us all and sent us spinning each into our own lonely orbit.

It was a sad way to end a winning streak, even more so because no one else in the paper’s then workforce had the requisite gumption to take over the weekly running of the enterprise with a genuinely inspired new game plan. The punk explosion then being detonated throughout the British Isles had rattled the
NME
writers’ cages too, leaving the majority of them scared and uncertain about how they ought to react. To better cater to this new trend, two new staff writers had been brought into the fold the year before. One was a young man who dressed much like Frank Sinatra had in the fifties - pork-pie hat, dark suit, white shirt with black tie hung loose around the collar. His name was Tony Parsons and even though he was only twenty-two or thereabouts, he’d already managed to have his first novel published-a tome entitled
The Kids
.

He talked like a young East End scrapper and looked like he could be handy in a fist fight, something that couldn’t have been said about any other male in the office. The other new recruit was a strange teenaged girl with a pronounced West Country twang to her accent, sullen eyes and a vibe about her that could best be described as ‘Myra Hindleyesque’. I liked the idea of Julie Burchill coming aboard - she certainly knew how to shake things up - but the reality was often hard to stomach, particularly when one found oneself in close physical proximity to the young woman. Soon enough they became an item and their romance speedily turned into one of those classic ‘you and me against the world’ kamikaze affairs. The repercussions of this union were felt clear through the London music industry in ’77 but most especially at the
NME
’s headquarters, where older staff members began developing stomach ulcers as a consequence of having to coexist alongside the Parsons-Burchill juggernaut. My so-called
colleagues still apparently bear the psychic scars from the time the pair decorated their combined desk space with barbed wire, dubbed the area ‘the kinderbunker’ and then basically declared war on the rest of the paper. I don’t recall personally witnessing that particular episode but, like I said, I made it my business to frequent the
NME
as little as possible during this period. I’d simply drop in from time to time and stick around long enough to steal as many albums as I could from the ‘reviews’ drawer and then go off and sell them at a local record exchange to get money for more dope.

But I had the misfortune to be lurking there the day Burchill goaded Tony Parsons into beating up Mick Farren, and that was an ugly and disturbing sight to behold. Farren was a friend of mine - one of the few non-junkies who still let me visit his apartment during my lost years. He and his then girlfriend Ingrid von Essen would often feed me and let me sleep on their cushions when I had nowhere else to go. Mick had been another punk pioneer - back in 1967 he’d been insulting audiences and generally inciting mayhem as the singer in a three-chord thrash act who’d called themselves the Deviants - but was now having a hard time connecting with this graceless new breed more than ten years his junior. He made the mistake of locking horns with Julie Burchill and - kaboom! - ended up getting his face flattened by Parsons’s fists of fury.

Looking back now it’s clear to me that amphetamines were at the root of this and most other outbursts of punk-related blood-letting. Bad speed was the stimulant of choice for London youth in 1977, specifically a product known as amphetamine sulphate, a white powder often fabricated in the bathtubs of provincial biker gangs that burnt nasal membranes, destroyed brain cells, promoted
paranoia and aggressivity and generally transformed its adherents into emaciated bug-eyed wack-jobs. When you inhaled a line of the noxious substance, your nose stung for a whole minute and your sense of smell was engulfed by a rank Ajax-like odour that left you temporarily cross-eyed with nausea.

It was cheap though and could keep you so wide awake you’d be grinding your teeth together until your gums started to bleed. Then, several sleep-deprived days and nights later, your bones would be aching and you’d feel like something a stray dog had just vomited up. You’d also have only the slightest recollection of what had actually transpired during the prior seventy-two hours. That’s why most reminiscences by UK punk musicians of the time are generally so unreliable: they simply don’t have the brain cells required to reactivate the past objectively any more. Thus the era gets rewritten and turned into a myth without due reference to the driving poisons - the mindless violence, bad drugs and Tin Pan Alley ponces - that would so quickly nip its momentum in the bud.

Those who gleefully recast the time as one long happy-go-lucky punky reggae party evidently weren’t present at the same events that I beheld. Or maybe it’s just that we come from such different perspectives. Take for example the Slits. Others viewed them as a bold and liberating feminist clarion call. I thought they were a bunch of talentless exhibitionists. Watching them in the early days shrieking and stumbling cack-handedly through their tuneless repertoire was as grim an experience as going to get my wisdom teeth removed by an incompetent dentist. How had this concept that you could legitimately stand onstage holding a musical instrument even though you couldn’t actually play the thing taken root and why was no one else viewing it as a musical
version of the emperor’s new clothes? The lunatics had now taken over the asylum that doubled as the late seventies’ rock landscape. The seditious youthquake that had started in the fifties with James Dean had ended up being co-opted into a wretched hail storm of spit, safety pins and bathtub speed: from
Rebel Without a Cause
to rebels without a clue.

The only old-school punk pathfinder to benefit from the generational tumult of 1977 was my old pal Iggy Pop, who pulled off a major comeback coup that spring. The last time he appeared in this book it was back in 1975 and we’d left Iggy languishing in a Los Angeles nuthouse. But then clear out of the blue he received a surprise visit. ‘I was in a mental hospital and Bowie happened to be there for another reason,’ he would later recall. ‘And he came up one day, stoned out of his brain in his little spacesuit, with Dean Stockwell the actor. They were like “We want to see Jimmy. Let us in.” Now the strict rule was never to let outsiders in: it was an insane asylum. But the doctors were star-struck [laughs] so they let them enter. And the first thing they did was say “Hey, want some blow [cocaine]?” I think I took a little, which is really unpleasant in there. And that’s how we got back in touch.’

When Bowie toured America in spring 1976, Iggy was his travelling companion. The former Stooge was also close by when Bowie made what appeared to be an ill-considered fascist salute to fans as he re-entered Britain via Victoria train station. Standing in the wings and watching the stick-insect Duke with his taut hair and stark black-and-white
Station to Station
stage show, Iggy later recalled feeling ‘miserable, lost, lonesome and nostalgic . . . [Yet] I had been offered an opportunity in that David Bowie offered me the chance to make solo records, basically with him as my
band. And at the time that he offered me that, the guy was a white-hot talent.’

In June, a month after the
Station to Station
tour had ended - without further incident - Bowie and Iggy began recording an album together at the Château d’Hérouville studios near Paris. Bowie wrote the music, played almost all the instruments, directed the vocal performances and suggested many of the several lyrical themes. ‘To work with him as a producer,’ Iggy now claims, ‘he was a pain in the arse - megalomaniacal, loco! But he had good ideas. The best example I can give you was when I was working on the lyrics to “Funtime” and he said, “Yeah, the words are good. But don’t sing it like a rock guy. Sing it like Mae West.” Which made it informed of other genres, like cinema. Also, it was a little bit gay. The vocals there became more menacing as a result of that suggestion.

‘He has a work pattern that recurs again and again. If he has an idea about an area of work that he wants to enter, as a first step, he’ll use side projects or works for other people to gain experience and gain a little taste of the water before he goes in and does his . . . And I think he used working with me that way also.’

Whilst completing
The Idiot
at the Château, Bowie began work on
Low
, the record that would become his follow-up to
Station to Station
. At exactly the same juncture,
Playboy
published a lengthy interview conducted by Cameron Crowe and dating from Bowie’s recent mad sojourn in LA. ‘I’d adore to be Prime Minister,’ the singer stated provocatively. ‘And yes, I believe very strongly in fascism. The only way we can rid ourselves from the sort of liberalism that’s hanging foul in the air at the moment is to speed up the progress of a right-wing, totally dictatorial tyranny and get it over with as fast as possible. People have
always responded better under a regimental leadership.’ And then came the punchline: ‘Rock stars are fascists, too. Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars.’ Seeing such sentiments uttered in cold print must have given David Bowie serious pause for thought. If they didn’t, he needed only to stand in front of a full-length mirror and study his skeletal physique to see that all was not well in his fame-insulated world.