Apathy for the Devil (39 page)

And I no longer had to spend 80 per cent of my waking hours wasting time in increasingly dangerous hot spots looking to score a drug that was sucking up 100 per cent of my income. For the first time in ages, I had money in my pockets again. That winter I moved into a hotel in Kilburn and rented a cheap room there throughout the next twelve months. I started bathing regularly and taking better care of my physical appearance. Let’s just say that personal hygiene hadn’t been too high on my list of priorities during those hard-core junkie years. I started eating again
too. Before that, I’d been subsisting on a daily diet of bread and soup. When I could afford it, I’d sometimes buy a can of baked beans to tide my intestinal juices over, but now the prospect of eating from a plate full of warm, solid, nutritious food was a luxury I could once more afford. I must have felt like I was back in the high life again even though I was really still just chicken-scratching around in the outer margins of abject poverty.

If you’d been living in or even commuting to London during 1977, you’d have more than likely seen me promenading through its streets. Every postal code in the metropolis had its pathways stained by my shadow that year. I was always on the move, scurrying from one dilemma to the next. My presence often provoked verbal abuse from other passers-by-I may hold the seventies record for being called a poof the most times in public by complete strangers - but at least it had never escalated into the realm of actual bodily attacks.

But then in mid-December I found myself strolling alone through King’s Cross late one evening when I suddenly felt a sharp pain in the back of my neck. I turned slightly and realised someone was directly behind me holding a knife. As this sank in, three more individuals surrounded me, pointing their knives at my face.

There was a sort of open field next to where we were all standing - a dismal-looking patch of parched grass and brown rainy mud. They propelled me onto this stretch and began beating and slashing my skin with their weapons. They were more punk wannabes who wanted to do what Sid did. I’d never seen them before in my life. But boy, did they leave a lasting impression. They had this ritual of first cutting me and then kicking me in the same place their knives had just been. My face was such a bloody
pulp from the attack after three minutes I could barely see in front of me and strongly sensed I was about to be stabbed to death. Somehow I struggled to my feet at one point and screamed at them ‘Just kill me. Get it over with’ over and over again. It seemed to stun them momentarily. Then I felt a boot connect with the left side of my lower torso and, as I started to fall to the ground again, another boot drove into my skull, effectively knocking me unconscious.

When I came to, my assailants had vanished into the night, leaving me spreadeagled like a piece of human debris in the drizzling rain. For a while I didn’t have the strength to pick myself up off the ground. But at the same time I could feel my blood seeping into the mud around me and I knew that if I didn’t get back on my feet there and then I’d never ever be getting up again.

I managed to negotiate the several streets needed in order to collapse in a nearby drug house of recent acquaintance. A junkie girl living there bathed my wounds with a damp cloth whilst her boyfriend fed me with lashings of Valium, pain pills and reefer. An hour later, I was blissfully high and laughing out loud at some inane spectacle playing itself out on the tiny black-and-white TV they had in their room. A very, very bad thing had just befallen me but I’d not been left traumatised by its occurrence. This moment would stay with me because it was the moment I realised that whatever vile circumstances fate might still have in store for me, I’d somehow find a way to survive them all. Over the past two years, I’d been beaten by chains, stabbed with knives and had my very lifeblood drained by drugs and homelessness. All I needed now was to be visited by a plague of locusts and an outbreak of boils and I could have set myself up quite credibly as a seventies fop son of Job figure. But my recent travails had left
me stronger in spirit than I’d first imagined. I’d become battle-tested.

I was just counting the days now until 1977 reached its expiration date. I couldn’t wait to be shot of it. Rastafarians had put forth the theory that the year would be one of mighty, life-altering mystical portent. When the two sevens clashed - so they preached - an apocalypse would be ignited. Either that or some momentous messianic visitation-I was never quite sure which. But of course nothing remotely like that actually came to pass.

On the white side of the tracks, though, the grim reaper had been hard at work. By year’s end, the obituary lists were overflowing. There was Elvis checking out on the commode and Marc Bolan the fatal victim in the passenger seat of a car that crashed into a tree. ‘Who’s dead this week then?’ Mick Jagger had asked me that summer over lunch in a Soho-based Chinese restaurant. ‘Hard to tell these days innit. Pop stars! They’re dropping like flies. Droppin’ all over the place, mate.’ He was being flippant but the point was still clear. That dark vortex he and his henchmen had helped open up in the Zeitgeist of a dawning decade was now reaching critical mass and getting darker and more omnivorous with every ticking second. Anyone who tells you 1977 was a bright and bountiful year wasn’t really living in the belly of the beast. Those of us who were deserve a medal for simply having stayed the course. Meanwhile, 1978 lay ahead, grinning like a lazy crocodile. Old Blighty was about to get royally pussy-whipped by Mrs T and her political enablers. To paraphrase Shakespeare’s Macbeth - what fresh hell was all this going to set into motion?

I’m stringing these last two years into one hold-all chapter because that’s the way I see them now - as one big hazy splurge of time. For me all the seminal seventies stuff occurred in the six-year period between the birth of Ziggy Stardust and the death of the Sex Pistols. What came afterwards was really just a prelude to the eighties.

1978 and 1979 were most emphatically ‘changing of the guard’ kind of years in Great Britain. Labour were slain by Margaret Thatcher whilst punk choked on its own vomit and new wave became its less menacing pall-bearer. The spivs had trounced the fops midway through the decade but now the spivs were being sidelined by a new breed - the yuppies. Yuppie rock was what tickled the public’s fancy all of a sudden. It had a little of the primal ‘short sharp shock’ dynamism of early punk but buttered things up with more sophisticated chord progressions, real singing and superior musicianship. The people who played it gave cursory lip-service to the so-called punk aesthetic but were generally more interested in upward mobility rather than dead-end-kid authenticity.

The Police were only one of many bandwagon-jumping outfits to make a big impact during this time frame. The trio was composed of musicians who’d been playing music separately long before 1976. The guitarist had worked with Eric Burdon’s Animals
and the Soft Machine in the late sixties, the drummer in a bush-league seventies prog-rock act called Curved Air and the singing bassist in a fusion-jazz combo working out of his native Newcastle. But they’d all managed to stay relatively youthful-looking with the help of a shared bottle of platinum-blond hair dye and were still clued-in enough to comprehend that a big pay day could result from upgrading punk’s root ingredients with steroid-like injections of a higher musical proficiency.

Their lucky break came when the drummer turned the bassist on to reggae. When punk bands tried their hand at aping the rhythms of Jamaica, it was usually a disaster, but the Police brought something new to the white reggae synthesis by making the ‘on’ beats generally more fluid, supple and rock-friendly. And the singer - nicknamed Sting - had it all: Aryan good looks, an instantly recognisable multi-octave-range voice, an eclectic songwriting talent and a limitless sense of personal ambition.

I interviewed him in early ’79 in between a couple of his group’s many arduous club tours of America. The money hadn’t started rolling in yet and he was still making ends meet in a dingy basement flat somewhere in London with his then-wife, the actress Frances Tomelty. Upon arriving at their address, it became apparent that all was not well with their relationship. Tomelty only stayed five minutes but made it abundantly clear in those minutes that she was seriously vexed at her husband, who sat forlornly in the living room like a scolded infant. I believe the couple broke up not long after this.

Sting was at a crossroads in his life anyway. Mega-success was suddenly there within his grasp after years of struggle and dreary straight jobs, and from the way he spoke, I sensed he wasn’t about to miss out on any of its many perks. He reminded me of
another Geordie go-getter - Bryan Ferry. There must be something about having once been poor and resident in Tyneside that really stimulates a status-seeking gene in some men. And yet Ferry was an oddity: he craved public adulation whilst feeling noticeably ill at ease whenever bathed in a spotlight. By contrast, Sting was an old-fashioned trouper who took to the spotlight like a swan to a lake. In this sense, he was far more of a Paul McCartney-styled old-school ‘beloved entertainer’ than a thorny new-school ranter like Lydon and Strummer. In fact, you could go so far as to call him the anti-Lydon of the late seventies. One was ugly and - relatively - shiftless, the other was an industrious pretty boy bent on self-improvement and self-empowerment. Charter members of the Bromley contingent all wanted to chop off Sting’s peroxide-soaked head and burn his band-mates like witches but the Police’s singles during this period were still a tonic for the times - infectious and upbeat without being air-headed and crass. They helped fill the post-punk void with a certain panache. But these guys certainly weren’t threatening anyone or anything like the punks had. Rock at decade’s end would become a much tamer place to eke a living from.

All the wind had gone out of the punk movement’s sails in mid-January of 1978, when the Sex Pistols had splintered apart in San Francisco. Lydon had weathered the ensuing media storm by promptly moving into
NME
’s Manhattan office, which also doubled as the apartment of Joe Stevens, the paper’s photographer and a trusted amigo of the singer. Lydon apparently had no other choice - McLaren had just abandoned him in America with no money for a hotel. The Pistols were dead, punk was dead and Lydon’s career was dead too - at least for the moment.

It would come alive again later in the year once he’d recruited
two old mates of his as well as an eager young drummer. The two mates he chose to provide stringed accompaniment raised many eyebrows in the London community. The bassist - Jah Wobble - was known far and wide throughout the region for his sudden outbursts of violence whilst the guitarist Keith Levene was equally notorious for being an unreliable hard-to-work-with junkie. It’s like Lydon went purposefully looking to replace Sid Vicious in his affections by hiring the only two people he knew who were even more potentially disastrous to form a group with. The Lydon-Levene-Wobble axis managed to record two albums and perform a few iffy concerts but never quite managed to summon up the required get-up-and-go to really promote their cause. From what I’ve read, it seems like Lydon was plagued by an undiagnosed case of chronic ennui after the Pistols split that left him gloomy and withdrawn for the rest of the decade. The music he released during that time certainly seems to bear this out.

To his credit, Lydon never tried duplicating the four-to-the-bar hard-rock attack of his previous band. He and his dubious cohorts were looking to invent a new musical hybrid: post-punk art rock, do-it-yourself prog with reggae bass lines and krautrock in place of virtuoso noodling and ever-changing time signatures. This meant that the singer discarded the lyric-writing perspective he’d invented for the Pistols which involved picking a controversial subject and then railing against it with an over-intensity that was as comic as it was scathing. When it came to writing texts and then vocalising them for Public Image, Lydon replaced the comedy and pithy put-downs with obtuse impressionistic blather that he felt compelled to deliver in a strange adenoidal wail that hovered over the backing tracks like a wasp besieging a fat man in a deckchair.

When Lydon found a subject to stir his emotions - as was the case with ‘Death Disco’, a demented re-enactment of his beloved mother’s recent ordeal with terminal cancer - he was still a force to be reckoned with, but the artsy mood pieces his new group were bent on forging mostly forced him into asserting himself in pretentious and overreaching ways, and becoming pretentious was not ultimately a sensible career path for the former Johnny Rotten to wander down. Once he’d figured out which side his bread was buttered on, Lydon stopped trying to impress the chintzy art-rock set and went back to inhabiting the pantomime-horse role that would ultimately net him the most income from reality-show appearances and advertising campaigns.

With Lydon off cavorting with the avant-garde, it was left to the Clash to keep punk’s young dream solvent for the rest of the decade. Whilst the Pistols had been alive, Joe Strummer’s bunch had been very much in their shadow. But being second-best only made them work that much harder to create their own kind of impact. This in turn gave them a much greater shot at career longevity. The Pistols were like some blinding spectacle doomed to short-circuit at the earliest opportunity but the Clash had more staying power. And they also possessed the only other charismatic punk frontman in town: Joe Strummer.

I’d first encountered Strummer when he was still a teenager named John Mellor. In August of 1969 I attended the Plumpton Jazz and Blues Festival and on the Saturday evening had been one of maybe thirty people who’d chosen to leave the main-stage viewing area to step inside a makeshift tent at the side and witness an early performance taking place there by Robert Fripp’s breakthrough prog act King Crimson. A curly-haired youth I’d never seen before stood next to me throughout the set, shouting
enthusiastically when not swigging from a bottle of cider which he offered to me at one point. It was a young work-in-progress Joe Strummer, and we would have both been seventeen at the time.