Apathy for the Devil (34 page)

Who did they think they were fooling? I knew they’d set me up, that it had all been pre-arranged and that my old buddies in the Sex Pistols were probably all in on it too. All my professional life, I’d been expecting this moment. But I’d always imagined it coming at the hand of someone I’d genuinely affronted. I never dreamed I’d be stitched up by people I’d helped and viewed as kindred spirits.

Still, I should have seen it coming. Only a year before, McLaren and Westwood had marketed a T-shirt they’d designed together. On its front was written ‘One of these days you’re going to wake up and discover which side of the bed you’ve been sleeping on’ and below were two lists of names. One list was a roll call of their chosen favourites, the other of their most despised enemies. My name turns up in the pro column right next to ‘QT
Jones and the Sex Pistols’. Now I’d been shunted rudely over to the other side of the bed. That’s what happens when you find yourself mingling with the beautiful people. You’ve always got to keep your back to the wall. You never know when you’ll be their next sacrificial victim.

Did I tell you I’d become recently homeless? I was now entering the most brutal hard-core phase of heroin addiction - the phase where nothing else matters, not even a roof over one’s head - or loving companionship. Hermine had left me too. I’d become too toxic for her to waste further time on - at least for the moment. So I was out on my own and up to no good.

Drug addiction inevitably promotes a heightened sense of isolation within the mindset of its victims but that didn’t mean I was alone in my predicament. In May I’d spent time with the Rolling Stones and they were slowly unravelling too from all the chronic drug abuse around them. Their music had lost all of its primal momentum. Bob Dylan saw them live around this time and Ian Hunter later asked him what he’d thought of the group’s mid-seventies incarnation. ‘Apathy for the devil,’ he’d simply replied with a jaundiced sneer on his cocky little face.

Something had turned distinctly rotten in the state of Led Zeppelin too that same year. In October I went to their newly instigated World’s End headquarters to interview Jimmy Page for the
NME
. They had a film coming out -
The Song Remains the Same
- accompanied by a live soundtrack album but both were deeply underwhelming approximations of what usually transpired at a Zeppelin live event.

Normally the film reels and live tapes would have been judged inadequate and left in a closet. But Peter Grant was not fully on top of the situation and had let them both reach completion in
order to feed the record label with new product whilst the group stayed away from the touring circuit. Grant’s impending divorce had taken all the wind out of his sails and had sent him spinning into the throes of a full-blown drug-accelerated breakdown. I spoke to him on the phone for just five minutes that day: he sounded like a cross between a wounded bear and Darth Vader with a slight East London lisp. ‘I just want to know if you’re still our ally,’ he kept asking me. It made my blood run cold.

Page looked distinctly fragile when he finally arrived. It soon became clear he wasn’t too enamoured with the film and record he was supposed to promote either - and so our talk centred more on his recent adventures. He was particularly vexed about the
Scorpio Rising
film project and its director Kenneth Anger. He claimed he’d contributed the soundtrack music and even helped finance the editing, but that Anger was unable to complete the work and had generally been mistaking the guitarist’s kindness for weakness.

I wrote up Page’s comments only to find myself later having to confront Anger face to face. He turned up at the
NME
’s office demanding a right of reply. When one wasn’t forthcoming, he held aloft his right hand puckishly. ‘I just have to crook this little finger and Jimmy Page will automatically be transformed into a toad,’ he informed me with due theatricality. He was also strongly implying that he could do the same trick on me. But I was unmoved. That’s the one positive about being a homeless junkie: even witchcraft can’t intimidate you. You’re so far down the ladder anyway, nothing seems worse than where you already are.

What else was going on? Oh yes, the Clash. Bernie Rhodes had been McLaren’s boy - his gofer and general dogsbody. Rhodes
had been heavily under his spell, working tirelessly for whatever mad cause Malcolm had drawn him into. But devotion has its limits and - seeing his mentor suddenly neck-deep in media attention - Bernie had started developing ambitions of his own. If McLaren could become a bona fide pop Svengali, then so could he.

In the late spring of 1976 he began consorting with Mick Jones and a strikingly handsome youth named Paul Simonon who’d been briefly employed by David Bowie’s Mainman organisation as a lookalike decoy to confuse fans when the star himself was out in public. Keith Levene-a prog-rock-besotted guitarist - was also in the picture as was a drummer called Terry Chimes. But they needed a frontman more than anything else - as well as a new musical direction. The latter they discovered the first time they listened to the Ramones’ debut album. Then they lured Joe Strummer of the 101’ers into their web.

Strummer was already a known quantity around London’s pub-rock circuit as the snaggle-toothed troubadour of the capital’s new bohemian squatocracy, so his sudden defection to the cause of punk was not without personal consequences. I saw one of the Clash’s first-ever London shows - again at the 100 Club. It was visually impressive but the players - still including Keith Levene - hadn’t yet secured a solid rhythmic foundation to build their sound from and were basically just making a bunch of shrill, overamplified noise. Afterwards I saw Strummer in a state of advanced inebriation and close to tears remonstrating with Bernie Rhodes. ‘I’ve sold out, Bernie,’ he kept saying over and over again. But it was only a fleeting moment of uncertainty on the singer’s part. As soon as the glowing reviews started getting published, the former John Mellor - the upper-middle-class son
of a former British government diplomat turned self-styled king of the proles - knew he’d made the right decision when he ruthlessly rejected his old squat-rock cronies in order to throw in his lot with the new breed.

By the end of ’76, his group were out there on the cultural barricades alongside the Pistols and the Damned as part of the Anarchy package tour, getting banned and/or publicly demonised almost everywhere they played. The tour should have compounded a sense of genuine unity within this fragile punk community but instead only contributed to its ongoing fragmentation. The managers were all at each other’s throats and the groups began to get coldly competitive with each other. An even more divisive element had been imported into the mix: Johnny Thunders’s Heartbreakers had been invited over from New York to take part in the tour. Thunders’s arrival in the London punk milieu that winter would have grievous consequences. The guy was a walking advert for heroin and many impressionable young scene-makers were suddenly seduced into sharing the high with the guitarist.

But was I really any better than him? Junkies are junkies, after all. Sordid people leading sordid lives. It’s the nature of the beast. I wasn’t consciously endangering others in my thirst for junk but in the past twelve months it had managed to turn me into a pitiful public spectacle. There’s one photograph that sometimes turns up in punk-related tomes that was taken at year’s end 1976. John Lydon is sneering triumphantly next to a high-spirited Brian James whilst I stand to their immediate left looking like I’ve just been liberated from Dachau concentration camp.

Even more alarming to behold were the few articles I managed to eke out during this spell. Reading them now is like watching a
man trying to swim his way through an ocean of mud. At Christmas time I made my annual pilgrimage to visit my parents, who now lived in Morecambe, Lancashire. My mother burst into tears when she opened the door and saw the state I was in. That’s when I knew I was truly in hell.

Death-dealing druggies and psychopaths to the left of me. Chicken-hearted chicken hawks and yuppie violence-groupies to the right. Stones in my pathway every step of the way. I felt like I’d suddenly taken up residence in one of Robert Johnson’s most godforsaken compositions. ‘The valley of the shadow of death’ wasn’t just some grim reference from the Bible any more; it was my new postal code.

If I’d had my druthers, I would have been making radical New Year’s resolutions to redeem my situation, but I simply couldn’t summon the required willpower. The worst was yet to come.

This is how 1977 started for me.

On the 28th December 1976 I left my parents and returned south in a state of some urgency. The drugs I’d taken there to tide me over the Christmas season had run out and it was only a matter of a few hours before I’d be feeling the withdrawal symptoms. I had no actual London home base as such to return to-I was still effectively
sans domicile
- but the dealers would probably still let me pass out on their floors and that was all the roof I needed over my head at the time.

Stepping back into the city I looked around and the streets seemed virtually deserted. Everyone had left to see in the new year with family and friends out in the provinces. I immediately made some phone calls and checked out some addresses but all my former drug connections were out of town as well. My bones were beginning to ache and my eyes were watering like a lovesick girl’s. In desperation I visited the surgery of a well-known London ‘croaker’-a registered doctor who was known to prescribe strong pain medication, tranquillisers and pill-form speed if the price was right. I told him my problem-I was a heroin addict on the verge of withdrawal - and he tut-tutted and played the armchair moralist for five minutes. Then he wrote out a script and handed it to me, though not before pocketing £20 of my
dwindling personal cash flow. I took it straight to a pharmacy, only to discover that he’d prescribed me nothing for the physical pain I was about to experience, just some mood-altering medication I’d never taken before.

Now I had to attend to a second pressing concern: finding myself some form of temporary accommodation. I ran into a girl I’d sometimes seen on the smack circuit in the streets of Westbourne Grove and unburdened my tale of woe on her. She then took me back to her squat and said I could sleep in the spare room. Her boyfriend lived in the building too-a big Scottish guy, hard as nails. I think his name was Trevor. He’d been a well-known and justly feared fixture on the local junk scene for some time - shaking down users and dealers alike, stealing and swindling his way around the metropolis. But then he’d gotten addicted to a drug even stronger than heroin-a pink pill they gave only to terminal cancer patients the name of which now escapes me. It was manufactured in such a way that it was extremely dangerous to attempt direct injection. The chalk in the pills wouldn’t dissolve and would then be mainlined straight into veins as well as muscle tissue and bone marrow and start spreading disease. But this hadn’t stopped Trevor. He’d started shooting up the stuff in his left leg. Now he couldn’t walk. He just lay there in bed and got his girlfriend to do everything for him - cook his food, change his bandage, cop his dope. The first night I moved in, he showed me the infected leg; from the toes up to the knee, everything was swollen green. ‘Looks like gangrene,’ I muttered, albeit cautiously. ‘Aye, I know,’ he’d replied. ‘It’s only a matter of time before this bugger’ - indicating the infected leg - ‘gets amputated. I’m nae worried, though. I’ll get a ton of gear free off the NHS as a result - maybe a lifetime’s supply. Giving up a leg
for a deal like that is the best thing that’s happened to me in a while.’

By and by, I retired to the room they’d let me crash in for a few days. Drab drawn curtains, one naked light bulb, no heating, one raggedy-ass mattress awash with the aroma of stale joss sticks. It was like taking up residence inside a Hieronymus Bosch painting. For two whole days and nights I lay there trembling, sweating and cursing. Upstairs someone kept playing the same record over and over again. It was a weird jazz instrumental with a free-form sax solo that slurred in and out of concert pitch, like a form of musical water torture. It was one of the rare times in my life when I genuinely feared for my sanity. I tried taking these mood-altering pills my doctor pally had thoughtfully prescribed for me but they only made things worse.

Now I was shaking so hard I was scared I’d go into epileptic convulsions, whilst my brain seemed to have suddenly turned to quicksand. I looked at the name on the pill bottle again: Tryptizol. I’d heard that name before. Then it slowly dawned on me. This was the same drug that had killed Nick Drake and he’d overdosed on just three of the treacherous capsules. I’d been given a potentially life-threatening drug by a registered physician without being advised beforehand on the quantity I was supposed to take. A year later, this same physician took on Keith Moon as one of his patients and prescribed him a drug called Heminevrin to combat the drummer’s alcoholism. Again, he failed to alert his patient to the dangers of taking too many and Moon died as a result. The point being - you had a hard road to hoe if you were a drug addict in the seventies. There was no Narcotics Anonymous or Priory-styled detox facilities to escape into. Most medical professionals wouldn’t touch you with a
bargepole. And almost everyone else treated you like a leper. It was all down, down, down. You’d think you’d hit the bottom rung of the ladder and then the ground would open up and once again you’d be in free fall, blindly grasping the air around you.

When would I wake from this nightmare? Not any time soon - that was for sure. I still couldn’t see any righteous alternative. The real world outside felt even more inhospitable than the junkie world I was trapped in. And just as insane. A power-crazy greengrocer’s daughter was about to take over the country. And Sid Vicious had just joined the Sex Pistols.

Glen Matlock was the one who informed me that January. He wasn’t well chuffed by the turn of events - as you can probably imagine. But Lydon - feeling threatened by Jones and Cook’s evil Siamese-twin-like closeness - had wanted one of his own bully-boy accomplices in the line-up to balance their internal chemistry out more evenly. And then McLaren had fallen in love with the idea of an authentic sociopath joining the group. No one bothered to question the musical wisdom of replacing Matlock - a powerful bassist and key songwriting source - with someone who could barely play a musical instrument and who was incapable of contributing to new material. Ever since the group had sparked a national tempest by swearing at a drunken oaf called Bill Grundy who was supposed to be interviewing them on the telly that winter, the Pistols had been trading on a policy of outrage over proficiency at every turn and the yield to date had been singular to say the least. Their name was on everybody’s lips but they were banned from playing live throughout England and kept getting signed and then abruptly dropped by record labels. Bringing Sid into their mix was like adding fire to a leaking pool of gasoline. A terrible explosion was bound to transpire as a
result. People would get badly injured, some would lose their lives. It was a disaster just waiting to happen and I was just glad I’d been exiled when I had; at least I was out of the eye of their latest hurricane.