Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography (21 page)

Two things. I can clearly recall the disgusting moment when somebody hurled a glass toward the stage but it struck a supporting column instead and shattered into a girl’s face, blinding her in one eye. I can hear the accusations and lamentations that followed her screams as the music stopped and everyone tried to figure out what had happened. I can remember the blue strobe of the ambulance light flashing on the stairway minutes later and of someone leaning into the club repeatedly calling out that it was here. I can also see the girl herself being cradled by friends and sobbing heavily, towels and bar mats being proffered to staunch her cuts. Happy days.

The actual gig itself – and I have never EVER felt comfortable with the word ‘gig’ – has become a thing of legend and a badge of punk authenticity. ‘Did you see the Pistols at the 100 Club?’ ask wide-eyed young – well, early forties – types who want to know what it was like To Be There. My answer is a genuine fudge in that it is Yes and No. Yes I saw the Pistols at the 100 Club, but NO, I didn’t really see them play.

Here’s how. The Sex Pistols, like all other bands, would stand around in a venue drinking with, if not exactly the audience, then their own crowd, before they fought their way to the stage and went on. You would perhaps find yourself at some point standing in the reeking toilets next to Pistols’ guitarist Steve Jones.

‘How’s it going?’ you might say.

To which he would reply, ‘Not bad. Better now I’ve had this slash.’

It was this sort of exchange that gave the Algonquin Round Table a run for its money. Anyway, on this night in which legend was created I saw the band take the stage, as usual to a mixture of sparse cheers and obliterated heckles, but before they could even launch into the first song a hand grabbed my elbow.

‘Danny – Seymour Stein. We met at One Stop. John works for me in New York now.’

Hooray! I’ve always liked Americans and Seymour was a really good one. As he said, he owned Sire Records in New York and we had had many a meeting, even a few drinks, when I was at the shop.

I was surprised to see him in town, but he said he had to check out what he’d been hearing back in New York about British punk. We began to chat intensely. And then the Pistols started up. Well, we gave our conversation a go but couldn’t hear a thing so adjourned outside to stand on Oxford Street and catch up and gossip about all sorts of things. One or two others eventually joined us – it was about two million degrees down in the club – and as often happens with these things, before long, the real action was happening away from the main event. I’m sure we all eventually went back inside to catcall the encores, but I have no memory of that. Seeing the Sex Pistols again was not going to be difficult – I thought – so detaching myself away from just another performance was no big deal. I expect any deserters at the battle of Waterloo had the same view of historic events; nobody tells you when you’re there.

One area where I could tell I was going to have a problem with punk rock was in the advertised dress code. Flying in the face of sophisticated thought, I’ve always found any uniform associated with a youth movement absolutely degrading. I may have peacocked a little during the glam years, but that was probably a happy coincidence and I certainly didn’t sparkle as a lifestyle. Anything overtly and rigidly mod or hippy or punk seems to me hopelessly empty; exhausting, too, I should imagine. On top of this there is the matter of cost. Punk was supposed to be all about do-it-yourself and make do and mend – even if you had to rip your jacket up first in order to mend it. However the people that professed this philosophy had actually been to art school or else owned happening clothes shops in the King’s Road. It was always a fine line between a daring, radical statement of street style and looking like you really did have the arse hanging out of your trousers. Nobody I knew wanted to look like they had the arse out of their trousers, and yet that’s how it would appear whenever we ‘dressed down’.

One particular disaster I had was with an olive green nylon boiler suit purchased from Jay’s, the Surrey Docks working-man’s outfitters, that I intended to personalize with slogans the way the Clash did. Naturally I had no idea that Clash bassist Paul Simonon was a gifted art student and that most of their crowd were up-and-coming style geniuses. I really thought the lads had knocked these out on their back porch while waiting for their tea. Taking a spray can I’d bought from the car spares place on the corner of Debnams Road, I took aim at the rear of the boiler suit and set about writing a slogan I’d seen on a thirty-pound shirt in Seditionaries, Malcolm McLaren’s top-dollar store up West. ‘Other Hands Will Take Up The Weapons’ it had said, and I obviously thought there was some spin on the ball there because I was about to nick it wholesale and thus extend the scavenger punk ethic. But have you ever tried to spray-paint anything on to a narrow nylon boiler suit? Or a forty-foot brick wall, come to that. The nozzle tends to send its cargo out over a radius of about eight inches, making any attempt at subtlety, nuance, and indeed legibility, laughable. I didn’t know that, but it became clear as soon as I tried to plant the initial O of the slogan on one shoulder and all I got was this dreadful giant blob that looked like I’d been hit by a balloon filled with gravy. Worse, the paint was too thin. It gathered in a pool and started running all over the nylon. I stared at this mess for a few moments and decided that if I did enough of these splurges perhaps it would pass as a bit of pop art, possibly a tribute to Jackson Pollock himself. Madly I started squirting paint at it in something of a frenzy. When I stopped, it just looked absolutely disgusting – and not in a good punk way but more in a sort of leaned-against-a-newly-painted-wall-like-an-idiot way. Also, the colour I’d chosen was supposed to be red, but it turned out to be more a dirty rust hue that, now smeared over the bottle green, made you want to be sick. The thing clearly was not going to dry out any time before the twenty-first century either.

I also tried tearing the shoulder out of an old black jacket and then securing the rip with six safety pins. Mark Perry had done this and had totally gotten away with it. My first mistake was to rip the jacket – which, to be fair, still had a lot of wear left in it – before determining whether we actually had six safety pins in the house. I asked my mother.

‘Safety pins? Where d’you think I keep loads of safety pins? Might have two, but I need those, they’re handy. What the bleeding hell you up to anyway? Don’t start going barmy on us – I ain’t up to it today.’

Sometime later I managed to rustle up about four pins, but they were all different sizes and three of them kept unpinning and digging through to my flesh. Simply left ripped, I looked, as my Dad best put it, like a soapy old down-and-out.

Shoes were another nightmare. I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but the shoes on leading punk rock groups of that period are quietly expensive or otherwise generally not the sort of scuffed up Saxone-brand generics you might have thought. Customized high Dr Martens boots in unique colours, and co-opted Teddy boy loafers were the market leaders, but elsewhere all sorts of wing-tips, chains and unusual fabrics came into play below the de rigueur narrow trousers. (While we’re here, does anyone recall one of Joe Strummer’s celebrated quotes of the time? Asked why punks hated flares he said, ‘Like trousers, like mind.’ I never understood what he meant there and thought it could only be construed that hippies were broad-minded, whereas punks were narrow minded. Obviously one of Joe’s famous scowls stopped any journalists asking the embarrassing follow-up: ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’)

I could never get the punk look right or even figure out what it was supposed to be. In photographs from 1976 I seem to be half-heartedly having a go, but really I never knew how to put any kind of ‘look’ together. Then again, the idea of Mohican-haired, razor-bladed aliens in bin liners is straight out of a
Two Ronnies
sketch and only became a reality a generation or two down the line. Look at any picture of an early punk concert crowd and try and drag your eyes away from the one or two show-boaters present. There are always plenty of mullets, tank tops and even beards among the pogo-ing throng. I know this because a lot of my friends came with me to the Roxy and the Vortex, and their concessions to the style revolution made me look like some sort of Leigh Bowery figure. Nobody minded, nobody laughed and nobody picked on them for being old school. Of course, it probably helped that most of my mates were clearly quite ‘handy’, as they used to say of blokes who relished a punch-up. And here I may as well bring you a story that, chronologically, I should be placing fifteen months hence but, as we’re just yakking, here goes.

On New Year’s Eve 1977 the Ramones played a triumphant date at the Rainbow Theatre, Finsbury Park. It was a three-line whip of the by now considerable punky hordes. Quite a few of my friends went and I had heard that Elton John was giving a party upstairs at the venue after the final encore. I hadn’t been in touch with the old South Molton Street crowd for a bit and had no real ‘in’ to this rather incongruous shindig, but I tried to get a message to Elton anyway via the grim security guards posted on the stairs. They were having none of it, and by the time my three mates and I decided the plan was a bust, much of the crowd had gone. As we left the theatre, there standing against the roadside barrier was Sid Vicious, holding drunken court to a handful of astounded admirers. Sid saw us coming out and decided, very unwisely, to stage a spectacular for his fans.

‘Oi, you,’ he said to my tall, wiry pal John Hannon, who worked as a cable puller on various building sites. ‘Gimme fifty pence, ya cunt.’

I promise you, ‘fifty pence’ was the ridiculous schoolyard sum he demanded.

John, who we’d all called Reg ever since the song ‘Johnny Reggae’ had been in the charts, stopped dead.

‘What did you say?’ he smouldered. I knew John and tried to ease him on, saying Sid was obviously out of it.

‘I said, you wanker,’ drawled Vicious, now walking directly in front of Reg, ‘I want fifty pence from—’

Pop! That was as far as he got. Reg simply hammered him square on the cheekbone, knocking the notorious rebel flat on to his leather-jacketed back. One of his boot-licking entourage screamed, ‘You can’t do that to Sid!’ but Reg was already strolling away, sweeping back his hair and eyeing the surroundings for any chip shop that might possibly still be open. There was to be no comeback other than a few shouts of ‘Wankers!’ once we were suitably far enough away. Since then I have had many other opportunities to observe that one of the biggest discrepancies between the entertainment world and the real world comes in what the former camp declares to be a ‘hard case’.

Meanwhile, back in 1976, a greater cultural tidal wave was about to hit me with, for my money, ten times the power and possibilities of punk rock.

Arriving at Hamish McAlpine’s place one day, he told me to sit down. Walking across to his, for the period, giant television set, he appeared to be fiddling with some sort of wooden suitcase. I thought it was maybe a way of playing sound from the TV through to his enormous Wharfdale speakers, each the size of an old-fashioned steamer trunk. I’d often wondered about that while watching
The Old Grey Whistle Test
.

‘Okay, Dan,’ he said in that uber-posh voice that would droop like an orchid. ‘What’s that TV programme you and I can, like, quote every line from? The Quentin Crisp thing . . .’

‘
The Naked Civil Servant
,’ I swiftly answered. It had been first on about nine months previously and we had both raved about John Hurt’s portrayal and resurrection of the grand old man. In fact, it had been repeated just that week.

‘Right answer. Wanna see it?’

I was nonplussed. See it? Is that what this box was? Some sort of projector that would cause a screen to descend and then beam a movie out? That would be very cool, but how had Hamish, even with his connections, secured some reels of
The Naked Civil Servant
? He hunched over the machine again and seemed to punch at some large chrome buttons. Suddenly, there on his
television
screen was the Thames TV logo, followed by the opening titles of this magnificent drama. I must have reacted much the same way as audience members did when Jolson suddenly started talking from the screen. My mouth hung open, my eyes darted around for signs of some trickery and then I simply tried to compute what was happening. It was barely midday. Television didn’t start until at least four in the afternoon, and then it was only children’s programmes and local news. How could this, a major landmark piece, be on TV now? By what Satanic contract had Hamish managed to break one of British societies most sacred rules? I babbled a few disjointed syllables and my eyes must have betrayed total confusion.

Smiling triumphantly, he broke the news: ‘It’s a video recorder. It can record the television and play it back as many times as you like. There’s only about a hundred in London. Costs a fortune, but I had to have one. Good, eh?’

Good? GOOD? This was science fiction, the actual stuff of my dreams. How? How could something capture a television picture, collect it, let you put it on your shelves? Would it last? Did the pictures disintegrate after a few days? Did it do sound as well, or did you have to tape that separately? This simply couldn’t be.

‘Watch this,’ he purred. At the push of another button, the picture vanished and I could hear a metallic whirring noise. Another click from Hamish and the film was back, but now many scenes further on.

‘You can move it forward or back, or erase it altogether and tape something else if you want. It’s unbelievable.’

It was. Totally unbelievable. And the next words he said really flipped my wig.

‘Do you want it? I just got this from a mate last month – it’s actually about a year old, and Sony do a better one now. I’m getting that tomorrow.’

Stunned, I managed to say that if I had such a machine I could control the lives of millions of people, leastways a good part of South London. I would be like the BBC.