Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography (18 page)

What none of us could get over was the way uptown girls used sexual language in a casual, direct manner that no female south of the river ever would and, much more startlingly, the frankly unbelievable habit ‘posh-lots’ had of, mid-party, suggesting a trip to one of the host’s bedrooms to have it off, after which they’d casually return to the fray. Working-class girls may have been just as sexually active, but they always factored in degrees of reluctance, furtiveness, intended commitment and delicious shame that their sisters across town seemed to have little time for. In all, I actually preferred the Bermondsey girls’ attitude to sex – mainly because I have always been a total push-over for a working-class accent on a woman. As Woody Allen said, ‘Is sex a big dirty secret? Well, it is if it’s being done right.’

Perhaps the boldest example of this I ever witnessed occurred one night during a party at my good friend Hamish McAlpine’s flat in West London. I had got to know Hamish very well through the shop and he lived at the time what seemed to me the most fantastically louche lifestyle, like one of the characters with whom P.G. Wodehouse peopled the Drones Club. Hamish was an extremely handsome and confident young chap who spoke in the poshest voice you can imagine, almost to the point of being unintelligible. He was also absolutely loaded, thanks to being part of the McAlpine construction family who seemed to be rebuilding half of London at the time. We got on fabulously and I would often wind up at his place on the perfectly named Hollywood Road, Fulham. The flat was on the roof of a branch of Barclays bank and had a large white-walled patio beneath which London’s beautiful people would glide past in their Mercedes. Hamish shared this space with one other apartment, owned by Rod Stewart’s manager Billy Gaff, and sometimes Hamish and Billy would have a joint patio party, both flats heaving with drink and food, which was served to guests by bow-tied staff. (My Bermondsey friend John Hannon once gave some money to a member of staff at one of these parties so that he might borrow his jacket and bow-tie for a few minutes. Then he walked out among the high-end guests with a tray of canapés and champagne, but whenever anyone reached for one he barked, ‘Fuck off, they’re all mine!’ or ‘Touch these and you’re going straight out that fucking window.’ It was voted a big hit. Eventually.)

On this particular evening it was just Hamish’s place that was hosting a soirée. Shortly before midnight a furious commotion could be heard from out in the hall. Now, anger and raised voices were par for the course at parties I attended on the estate, but I’d never known anything to turn ugly at this swanky end of town. It turned out that everyone was screaming at a giant of a man who had positioned himself on the flat’s stairway and was not letting anyone get past him under any circumstances. The problem was that the apartment’s only toilet was situated upstairs and at a heaving, alcohol-drenched gathering exclusion from this was always going to impact sooner or later. Super-infuriating the by-now bursting revellers even further was the refusal of the heavy on the stairs not only to budge, but to reveal why he was cutting off access to the magical chamber of ease. Ignoring the tumultuous complaints emanating from the growing mob, this guy stood his ground – and he was
huge
. So impressive was his bulk that his shoulders were wedged against either side of the narrow passage. Cross-legged and dying though they were, nobody was going to attempt to winkle him out of that stairway.

What on earth was going on here? Well, that became apparent about thirty bladder-swelling minutes later when, after receiving some unseen signal, the mountainous minder finally eased away from his perch and allowed the boss who had stationed him there to exit from above. It was Rod Stewart. And he was with actress Britt Ekland. This sensational romance would soon go on to fascinate the world, but that moment was the first time anyone had seen these mega-celebs together and, nobody having seen them arrive, the sight of them now swanning down the stairs acted as a high-octane thunderbolt to all present. The pair made their exit without a word of apology to any of the doubled-up guests they had put through agony. What had they been doing up there all that time? Well, one reading of the situation is that Rod had been at dinner with Britt nearby and had asked whether she would like to see the collection of gold discs that he kept at his manager’s pad. Finding Billy Gaff out, Rod had popped into Hamish’s adjacent flat, where it was possible to see into Billy’s from an upstairs window. From this vantage point he had been talking Britt through each of his hit platters after first placing security on the stairs so that the lecture would be uninterrupted. As I say, that is one reading of the situation. I heard some absolutely outrageous alternatives on the night.

‘He wouldn’t have got away with that round here,’ noted my mates the following day, while also agreeing that if they ever did get to have a gigantic minder on their payroll, that was a top use of his services.

Another member of Hamish’s circle was a gorgeous woman called Izzy, who had a sexy lisp, dead straight long hair, grey eyes and a father who owned most of Marks & Spencer. I squired Izzy about for a short while, and even took her to Millwall one rainy Saturday afternoon to watch the Lions’ always-desirable home game against Walsall. Luckily, a few seats were still available. At half-time she accompanied me to the Old Den’s meagre refreshments stall that leaned up against a wet wall at the rear of the dilapidated New Cross stands. Eyeing the chalkboard menu up and down – Hot Pie . . . Crisps . . . Slice Fruit Cake . . . Tea – she turned to me and in her crystal-cut tones said, ‘No. . .ooh, no. I couldn’t consume any of that. Is there another restaurant in the stadium?’

I told her that there wasn’t another restaurant in South London.

Later in the match I noticed her chuckling. I asked her what was so amusing. ‘Your friends,’ she chirruped, indicating the rest of the crowd. ‘They do like calling everyone
cunts
, don’t they!’

One day in 1975 John called me over and told me that he was thinking of leaving the record shop. Leastways, he was taking six months off to go travelling. ‘Will you be okay?’ he asked. I wanted to know in what way he meant that. It turned out that he wasn’t actually telling what passed for the head office of One Stop about his absence and, in effect, I would be doing his job too, though he would continue to draw wages. I didn’t mind. Rather that than some dreadful dreary prick of a new manager who might take the shop in a straight pop direction. John further lightened any worries by saying I could take on a new member of staff if I wanted. I straight away asked one of my closest friends, Paul Baldock, to get behind the jump with me in South Molton Street. His appointment was to provide some of the funniest working days of my life.

Under my stewardship, the shop’s always flexible opening hours became even more erratic, the little fiddles a bit more open, the shop’s style unfocused and slack. There was a growing sense we were actually sharpening the axe for our exotic golden goose. What clinched it was the fact that we were no longer the only game in town. Record sales were enjoying a huge boom in the mid-seventies and music retail outlets were getting to be as common as phone stores are today.

John did eventually return, but his heart was no longer in life at One Stop. His daily attendance grew erratic and his once notorious attention to detail diminished. By late 1975 the fizz in our champagne life was starting to go noticeably flat. Eventually John told us he was quitting for good and moving to the States, because the three One Stop branches were being absorbed into the ubiquitous and mundane Harlequin high-street chain. The days of exclusive stock, high-profile customers and John’s glittering gay circle were over. The new owners would be putting in their own manager, a stolid and square pipe-smoking Queen fan called Leo. The import van stopped arriving. The sounds through our speakers became mainstream and everything turned ordinary and normal almost overnight.

Suddenly it really was just a job in a shop. What now, Denise Essex?

Well, I had no way of knowing at the time, but John’s new appointment three thousand miles away at the Sire Record Label in New York would eventually, and through the slightest of chances, have an impact upon my life so bizarre and astounding that he may as well have stuffed me into a cannon and applied a torch to the fuse.

Now I was going to be famous too.

Tomorrow Never Knows

I
hung in there at the record shop for about another eight months after John left and watched the regulars and eccentrics drop off and drift away in direct proportion to the records that we stocked becoming more uniform and dull. Some of the casual staff they sent to work there thought the place odd and the rump of our old stock ‘way out’. DJs stopped their pilgrimages to our door and any scene that had centred around the life and sounds of One Stop Records dissipated and died.

The new owners were determined to knock any individuality out of what had once been London’s hippest store and make us another anonymous cog in the corporate machine. One morning two men arrived and took down the One Stop sign with its black-and-white psychedelic spiral logo; in its place they bunged up the orange Harlequin brand, complete with gurning jester motif. Next, a batch of huge, bright-red SALE posters arrived with orders to put them all in our window. They featured the names of popular but terrible chart acts surrounded by lots of exclamation marks –
The New Seekers!!!!! 49p!!!!!
– the sort of stuff that John and Ian would have burned the place down rather than admit they had it in stock, let alone advertise the fact.

We had never had anything like a sale before and I wondered where all these very bad records were going to come from. I was informed we should collect the required supplies direct from Harlequin’s central stock warehouse in nearby Great Pulteney Street. The first time I walked into this vast storage hangar I was bowled over by the sheer tonnage of old shit these people were sitting on. Alongside legions of legitimate chart albums there would be hundreds of copies of Harry Secombe LPs and archaic collections of Dorothy Squires’ back catalogue. For every new Bowie record there would be ten by Percy Faith and his orchestra. Who was buying this stuff? Then an extraordinary thing happened. As we wandered the towering corridors of shelves piled with everything from Anita Harris to ZZ Top, one of the three shabbily uniformed security men in charge of the place mooched over. ‘Don’t know you – what shop you from, mate?’ he asked. I don’t know why, but I couldn’t bring myself to say South Molton Street, it seemed too much like a final capitulation, so I said Bond Street, the other nearest branch. ‘Well, do yourself a favour and say somewhere else when you book ’em all out. Nobody checks up and – woof, the records just disappear! Everyone does it. Get me a box of the new Barry White if you do. I’ll sort you out outside.’ And then he toddled off to do his securing elsewhere. Loading up the barrow with renewed interest I wheeled it to the front desk and said, ‘Tottenham Court Road.’ A disinterested woman wrote it all down and seconds later I was standing outside with my new friend again. ‘There you are, mate,’ he said, lifting off his twenty-five copies of Barry’s
Best Of
from my cart. ‘A tenner a box is the going rate. I mean, I’ve gotta earn too! See ya later. And don’t be greedy, eh? Put some of ’em on the shelves!’ With a throaty cackle he swiftly disappeared into the pub on the corner. How peculiar. How brazen. How convenient.

Now you know why Paul and I stayed on those extra eight months.

If I had left sooner, I probably wouldn’t have received the album package that, unusually for the shop, was delivered direct to the counter by an actual postman. I recognized the spidery scrawl on the cardboard mailer as John Gillespie’s hand, and it had arrived exotically by airmail from New York. I opened it. Inside was a test pressing of a record whose blank labels and plain white sleeve revealed no clue as to what it might be. I read the brief message on Sire Records notepaper that John had included:

Hi Danny,

I’ve lost your address so hope you’ve not yet quit your job as chief ballerina for the hideous Harlequin. I want a favour. Could you play this in the shop?
A lot
. Everyone’s going to hate it, but they hated the New York Dolls and we sold a lot of them so fuck ’em! It’s by a group called the Ramones and we’re releasing it next month. It’s not mixed yet but you will LOVE it. They look like a real gang – not very me but the frocks all fit with the sound. TURN IT UP.

Is that prissy queen Basil still doing the windows? Such hard work that one. Get him to do a display for this when it comes out.

Enjoy the noise and send me your address again.

John

He was right. Everyone did hate it from the very first 1-2-3-4 count on track one, and customers would look toward the counter whenever it was on with an expression on their faces as if to say, ‘What are you
doing
to us?’ Whoever Harlequin had assigned as manager would rarely make it through an entire side without asking me, ‘How much longer has this got?’ I absolutely loved it. The Ramones LP sounded thrilling, different and was solid, breathtaking, revolutionary fun for every second of its daringly brief playing time. Oh yes, here was something new. Yet I hadn’t an inkling at this point that this was a record that would literally change my life.

I walked away from One Stop (I never succumbed to calling it anything else) for the final time one Thursday evening in April 1976 with absolutely no idea of what I was going to do next. This precarious state of affairs was tactfully highlighted for me about an hour later by my dad.

‘Oi, you. Get another fucking job on Monday – don’t just start hanging around the fucking house.’

I actually went one better. Instead of waiting till Monday, I got up the very next morning and took the old number 1 bus to Oxford Street, this time to present myself at the recently opened Virgin Records Megastore at Marble Arch. Our shabby former rivals from above the shoe shop had come on quite a bit in the last three years and their new two-storey hyperstore was the talk of the town. And they were hiring! In fact, I was told to come back the very next day to help out with the Saturday rush.