Apathy for the Devil (43 page)

By the end of ’79 I’d started rehearsing in earnest with a drummer named Chris Musto and an excellent young bass player known as James Ellar. Paying for the rehearsal space required me to keep contributing to the
NME
, though I was finding it increasingly hard to be in their general vicinity. Leafing through back issues from this era recently in order to further jog my memory, I was surprised to rediscover just how prolific I’d been in their pages during this stretch of time. The subjects I tackled ran the gamut from young hopefuls like a trio of teenagers from Crawley who called themselves the Cure to cantankerous old-timers like Al Green, Wilson Pickett and James Brown. But something was still evidently amiss with regard to the actual choice of words I strung together into article form to commemorate these encounters. True wit and illumination were still awfully difficult to detect within the sentences I was scribbling down. That’s why I was moving over more and more towards a career as a professional musician. I’d lost the talent to do my other vocation any kind of justice.

The other good thing about writing songs and making music - I quickly decided - was that my continued drug-taking didn’t impede the process in the way that it did whenever I tried to write journalistic copy. Methadone is generally viewed by the medical establishment as a chemical halfway house between heroin addiction and sobriety, but that’s only true when the substance is administered in steadily decreasing quantities over a period of no longer than six months. That wasn’t the case for me. The powers-that-be at my clinic provided me with strong daily dosages for an
indefinite period of time which eventually stretched on to slightly over ten years.

It was decent of them, all things considered, because if they’d forcibly weaned me off the drug before I was ready to do so myself, I’d have tumbled back into full-blown smack insanity like a dead crow falling from a tree. But methadone is a funny drug. It curtailed my craving for junk and gave me a nice soothing buzz for a few months but then it began to rub up against my central nervous system with all the delicacy of a Brillo pad, making me generally down at the mouth and subject to grumpy moods. A drug buddy recommended Valium as an antidote to my suffering and I started mixing the little yellow or blue pills in with my methadone supply as a way to calm my nerves. The combination worked only too well. In fact, I became so calm it was almost impossible for me to get out of bed. So I started taking uppers in earnest - cocaine when I could afford it, speed when I couldn’t - as a way to stimulate my depleted reserves of stamina. Factor in also that I’d started smoking reefer as compulsively as Willie Nelson and you’ll understand that I was now addicted not just to one vampire drug but to four separate extremely potent rogue chemicals.

A typical day? Wake up around midday. Glug back my methadone. Take a piss. Put on a record. Snort a line of speed in order to fully wake up. Take a 5 mg Valium to counteract the fierce amphetamine rush. Smoke the remnants of a joint. Wait for the various substances in my system to form their synergy of mood enhancement. Once this occurred - it usually took about two hours - step out into the London streets to pick up the next day’s methadone supply from the chemist’s in Edgware Road. Spend the late afternoon hours in some tentative form of work-related
activity. Skulk furtively around the metropolis as dusk is setting in. Make an impromptu call at places where drugs can be bought or scammed. Walk home after midnight. Play guitar alone in my room whilst smoking copious amounts of dope. Drop another Valium in the wee small hours before passing out fully clothed on an unmade bed. Wake up the next day and repeat process.

Looking back today from the perspective of a responsible middle-aged homeowner, taxpayer and parent, these days of advanced chemical refreshment and carefree floating feel like an odd form of freedom, but of course they weren’t. I was a lone wolf now - out on the prowl for anything that could make me forget who and what I’d really become - and my world was getting smaller and smaller by the minute. Hermine my guardian angel had lately bid a none-too-fond farewell to my toxic hide. It had been coming for ages - she just couldn’t stand seeing me fall further and further into the pit. She tried for a long time to wake me from my slumbers but I was beyond rehabilitation. Finally she snapped. It was either her or the drugs - the old ‘tough love’ ultimatum. I stayed with the drugs and she stayed with her husband. Without all the chemical interference we might have made it work, but I’d just become too pitiful for her to waste any further time on and by decade’s end our love affair was just another painful memory. I reacted as I’d always done - by getting so loaded that I could feel nothing beyond woozy numbness. ‘Drugs can break your spirit but they can’t break your heart’ should have been tattooed onto one of my scrawny biceps back then.

I was better off alone anyway - without emotional ties, drifting rudderless through the murk of old London town. I was well into
my ‘prince of darkness’ shtick by this stage of the game. I loved strolling around the city at dead of night dressed in a black fedora hat, a black Edwardian coat worn over the shoulders like a cloak, black leather jacket and strides and dagger-pointed Cuban-heeled boots. In my drug delirium I probably thought I resembled Count Dracula’s Limey stepchild. But the common man was generally less easily taken in by my dark cavorting. ‘Fuck me, it’s that cunt from the Sandeman’s Port advert,’ a drunk in a Maida Vale pub shouted at me as I stepped in to buy some cigarettes.

Shortly after that, a complete stranger collared me during some dismal music-industry function and told me I was the Thomas de Quincey of the late twentieth century. I didn’t argue with him - he was a big lad after all and flushed with booze. But many years later I read a biography on De Quincey entitled
The Opium Eater
and learned that - though separated by a full century and a half - we still had plenty in common.

De Quincey had fallen into active acquaintanceship with the two men he most admired - the poets Wordsworth and Coleridge - at the same age I’d been when I started consorting with the likes of Keith Richards and Iggy Pop. Like me too, he’d been drawn to seek solace through the consumption of hard drugs in his early twenties. I was slightly dismayed to discover that he’d been a good foot shorter than me and also that for most of his published writing career he’d been something of a shameless hack. But when I got to the parts documenting De Quincey’s unwavering struggles with creditors and chronic constipation, I immediately felt a strong mystical bond being forged between myself and the man.

In the autumn of 1821 De Quincey wrote a two-part essay,
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
, based on his own life and
drug history for the
London Magazine
, a literary monthly. The pieces were so widely read and commented upon that they were combined together in book form shortly afterwards and duly went on to become the author’s only timeless contribution to the written word. Over in France Baudelaire set about translating the text, whilst across the Atlantic a young Edgar Allan Poe fell under its wayward influence.

Hunter S. Thompson many decades later would declare that the real secret to capturing drug-inspired reveries in prose form resides in the writer’s own capacity for recalling all the salient details of his or her hallucinations whilst in an altered state, and De Quincey certainly remembered enough of his own ‘spectral visions’ to fill
Confessions
with credible accounts of his opiated voyages. His addiction to opium would ultimately cost him his physical health and seriously distort his powers of concentration but the drug still managed to fleetingly provide him with a genuine creative gift in the form of fiery visions that merged with his own natural dream-state to conjure forth the ‘confessions’ that would see him remembered - albeit notoriously - down through the ages.

I envied the man because heroin and methadone never bestowed any creative gifts on me whatsoever. I took them instead to erect an invisible shield around myself and to put me in a place where I could feel as little as possible. Coincidentally Pink Floyd released a song in 1979 entitled ‘Comfortably Numb’. It was supposed to be about Syd Barrett’s final days with the group in the late sixties but its dreamy languor spoke just as penetratingly to and about me and all the other ‘strung-out ones and worse’ littering England a decade later.

It’s about time to call last orders on the seventies. My tale is
coming to an end and I’m not sorry to see it reach its termination stage. I still get chills down my back when I remember too much from these final years. One thing I’ve learned from writing this book is that self-congratulation, self-justification, self-pity and plain old bitterness don’t really make it as motors for good autobiographical prose. You’re always better off playing up the comedic aspects of your past, blending the light in with the dark and turning grief into laughter. That’s something Hermine first indicated to me around the time she left me. ‘You think your life is such a tragedy but it’s more of a comedy. You’re a comedian.’ At the time I was mortally wounded but now I see she was right on the money.

One last parting shot then of life moments before the eighties ate us up. The scene: another London music-industry reception, this time in a club somewhere close to Curzon Street. It could have been for Ian Hunter or for Pete Townshend - both were present and taking ample advantage of the free-drinks policy at the bar. The rest of the big room was littered with fledgling new-wave luminaries, grumpy old punks and the usual gaggle of record company and media human flotsam and jetsam. Everyone was split up in tight little groups partly obscured by copious clouds of cigarette smoke, all of us engaged in poring over the usual Tin Pan Alley tittle-tattle of the hour.

I’d been a spectator at these kinds of functions for practically all my adult life and had discovered early on that they tend to lose their charm unless you happen to be a trainee alcoholic. So why I was actually there in the first place is something of a mystery to me now. Maybe the venue just provided temporary shelter from the winter cold and a crowd of familiar faces to melt into. Whatever the reason, it turned out to be the wrong one.
Before I knew it, I was book-ended by two surly youths looking for a fight. They just started in on me from both sides, drilling me with their double act of vindictiveness. ‘You’re a parasite,’ one would begin, and his mate would echo the words. ‘You’re a cunt.’ ‘You’re scum.’ ‘You’re a worthless piece of shit.’

I’d been attacked countless times over the previous three years but this was the only time it really cut into me in a deeply wounding way. The Sid incident at the 100 Club had at least been relatively brief, as had the stabbing in King’s Cross. But this - devoid though it was of physical violence - seemed to go on forever and it was also a highly public spectacle. Everyone in the place saw me getting ripped apart, which only accentuated the humiliation. Finally Cosmo Vinyl, the Clash’s Robert De Niroobsessed spokesman, came over and drew my assailants away from their prey.

After that I just remember weaving around the room like a punch-drunk boxer. There may well have been tears in my eyes. Everyone else was looking at me with pity in theirs. And then - out of nowhere-I felt someone grab me and sweep me off into a less populated corner of the place. It was Chrissie Hynde. She held me in her arms whilst I wept like a baby.

I can recall staring directly into her eyes and seeing a glimmer of the love and tenderness she’d once felt for me before things had gone so terribly wrong for us. I’d waited five years for that moment and that glimpse because though I was no longer technically in love with the woman, I’d never fully recovered from the way we’d ended up hurting each other the way we did and yearned for some sense of emotional closure to prevail between us. There in her embrace I felt safe for a second, as though the past six years of chicken-scratching my way through a world of
hurt had been a bad dream that I’d suddenly woken up from.

But reality always has a way of butting in and pinpricking the air out of our pipe-dream thought balloons. After consoling me sweetly, Chrissie took her leave and moved over to the celebrity side of the room. Both Pete Townshend and Ian Hunter wanted to have photographs taken with her, and the pop paparazzi present were all anxious to oblige. ‘I’m public property now,’ she’d remarked ominously just as we were parting company. I watched her glide over to be engulfed in rock-star bonhomie and flashing light bulbs. It was a humbling spectacle to behold.

When the auld lang synes had all been sung and 1980 freshly minted into existence, Chrissie and her group the Pretenders would be sitting pretty right at the very summit of the UK charts with their third single ‘Brass in Pocket’. The chart fireworks would repeat themselves over in America shortly after that. From that point on, she became a global superstar. There was a new decade dawning and Chrissie - with her fierce attitude, wellcrafted, commercially viable songs and keen young supporting players - was destined to become one of its most successful artistes.

My musical career meanwhile was fated to quickly go the way of all flesh. In 1981 my group the Subterraneans would record an album’s worth of original material and a single was picked for release. Actually ‘released’ is the wrong word: ‘escaped’ was more like it. Without radio play it sank like a stone. No manager would work with us because of my ongoing reputation as an unrepentant druggie. And I’d made far too many enemies in high places during my high-profile
NME
years to ever think I was going to get a fair break as a jobbing muso from the London-based music industry. It was all going to hell in a hand-bucket in other words
- and it would stay that way for a further eight long will-sapping years.

And the worst of it was-I mostly had only myself to blame. Do you want to know what the essential problem with the seventies really was? Too many flaky people. I should know. I ended up being one of them.