Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography (19 page)

Now I don’t know what I thought my duties would be, but it was plain that this new vinyl supermarket was never going to replicate the kind of intimate personal vibe I associated with the working day. At 8 a.m. on the Saturday I was let into its cavernous interior along with about a dozen other staff. When I made myself known to the boss, this is what I was told:

‘Okay, Dave, um, look, sit on till four over there for a couple of hours, then I might need you and a few others to help out with the filing in the stockrooms, okay? Take your lunch at twelve and you’re entitled to a suggested track to play in the store, once in the morning and once before we close. Let Mark there know what it is and he’ll clear it with me, yeah?’

‘Okay, great,’ I said with a rub of my hands. ‘Let’s go! Listen, before we start, where’s the nearest sandwich bar? I just want to get a quick roll before we open.’

He gave me directions and I walked briskly out of the megastore, straight to the tube station and was home before nine. I calculate I was employed by Virgin Records for approximately ninety seconds. And that minute and a half was the last proper employment I was to have for the next two glorious years.

I had the most fabulous time during this period, particularly during the famously hot summer of ’76 when, for a couple of months, I lived in a series of holiday camps on the Kent coast. This perfect positioning for the record temperatures was achieved because a couple of friends of mine had secured jobs as maintenance men in a ‘resort’ at St Margaret’s Bay. As soon as they were designated a chalet from which to operate, they called the rest of us in London and we all piled down there to kip on the floor. At one time, the chalet – suitably out of the way and unobserved – had eleven blokes staying in its two tiny bedrooms. During the day we would avail ourselves of all the facilities that the site had to offer, though these were typically British and quite meagre: a heavily chlorined, cold and slightly shabby pool, a flaking crazy-golf course and, best of all, the bike hire shop. We would all zip up and down the hills and through the overgrown fields around the centre going from one pub to another in nothing but shorts and plimsolls. There are few times in your life when you know
in the moment
that this is as fantastic and vital as all existence can be and though I have had many, many contenders for this state of paramount awareness over the years, when the very daylight seems to shoot through you and a joyous energy seems to pour from your eyes in rays, making you gulp and gasp, I feel those totally carefree weeks careering about Kent in record-breaking sunshine alongside every single one of my best friends was the real pinnacle.

There was one supreme moment on what turned out to be the champion hot day among these scorching July statistics. Ten of us arrived at a little pub at the foot of a hill and decamped into the beer garden at the back. There were no other customers. The sky was a completely uniform piercing blue and the sun had somehow burned through its golden phase and now blazed platinum directly above. As we babbled and barked over each other among the high flowers, everything we said seemed light, right, idiotic and hilarious. It was one of those magnificent open-ended sessions where it takes two or more of you to do a drinks run, and even then there seems a constant relay of good friends walking toward you with trays laden with cold beer. After about an hour of this bliss, the governor of the pub came out to us and, rather than ask us if we might keep it down a bit, said, ‘Listen, lads, there’s an old tap at the back of the hedge there and loads of buckets. If you want to start slinging water around, I don’t mind – you’re spending enough money!’ Oh, it was wonderful.
Wonderful
. For the next hour or so all we did was pour water over each other in as many forceful, ridiculous and inventive ways as we could think of. So hot was the day that any time a fresh assailant singled you out for another drenching you’d welcome it literally with open arms. You’d be bone dry again in minutes. I can still so clearly feel the sheer joy I was experiencing while standing at that garden tap, weak with laughter, impatient for my bucket to fill so that I could get back into the childish fray. It is this silly and simple memory that in my jam-packed gallery of good times simply stands alone.

When the overcrowding at our maintenance chums’ chalet was eventually unmasked, they were asked to leave. Pooling our resources, we moved on to the next place and, sending in two of us to rent another chalet for a week, all piled in the back window once they had taken possession.

Where did we get our money from? Well, we’d all been planning to take the summer off for a while and had stockpiled a bit of spare to explode. It’s amazing how much free time you can rustle up to live wonderfully if you never commit to a ‘career’. And not one of us had a career – only jobs. My mates had saved a few quid from their time on building sites, window-cleaning rounds and such; I had begun seriously selling off my record collection; and families would always chip in if they knew it was for something essential like living for pleasure alone. Even as little as sixty quid could easily see you across a month of busy-doing-nothing under those endless azure skies.

Given that being aimlessly out of work was my family’s greatest sin, you may wonder why the old man didn’t blow up like Krakatoa over this. Well, I think mainly because he hardly ever saw me and figured I must be getting by somehow. Initially he insisted that I ‘sign on’ at the gloomy old labour exchange in Brunel Road every fortnight, warning me that anyone who didn’t could be summonsed for ‘failure to maintain yourself’ – a wonderfully curlicued faux-legal phrase that I’m sure he invented on the spot. I did this for a short time; indeed, everyone did this, whether they had a job or not. The queues in Brunel Road would be seething with impatient, busy people who had their cabs, window-cleaning vans and cars full of chums going to Kempton Park races blocking up the roads outside.

It must have been on one of the rare mornings when my social diary was less than full that my mother came into my bedroom and woke me. ‘Oi! Get up, y’lazy git. Your mate’s at the door.’

‘Mate, what mate?’

‘Not one of your pub lot, one you was at school with.’

‘School? School?’

I pulled on a pair of jeans and went down. Standing at the door was an old schoolfriend of mine: Mark Perry. We had been pretty good friends; both in the school football first XI, both fans of Zappa and Roxy Music (I still have Mark’s copy of ‘Virginia Plain’ with his handwritten
With M. Perry: Tambourine
on the label). That said, he had always been a quiet, underpowered member of the West Greenwich troupe and we had not really kept in touch since leaving. My greeting to him betrayed as much.

‘Yeah look, I can’t stop, I’m working today,’ he began in his light feathery voice and I noted his sober, if cheapish, suit. I’m also sure I felt my mother’s eyes snap accusingly toward me at the mention of his job. ‘But look, you always knew about music. I’ve done this . . .’

He held out what appeared to be the kind of cod magazine project kids collate as a game on long wet days during half-term; jokey efforts full of silly articles about family and friends and wrinkled with the glue applied to pictures torn from colour brochures.

‘What is it?’ I asked, totally perplexed.

‘It’s a fanzine. Sort of a newsletter thing. Up at Rock On [a record stall in Soho] they do one about concerts and stuff, so I’ve done one about new records and that.’

He handed me the twelve or so A4 pages held together by a staple in the corner. He had called his strange ragged pamphlet
Sniffin’ Glue & Other Rock’n’Roll Habits For Punks
– this legend scrawled amateurishly in felt-tip at the head of the cover.

My very first thought was that the title must be a reference to the Lenny Bruce sketch, ‘Kids Sniffing Aeroplane Glue’, which had been where I’d first heard about the cheap tacky high supposedly being jumped on by American teens in the late fifties.

‘The name of it’s a song by the Ramones,’ rattled Mark, seeing me trying to make sense of the thing. ‘Have you heard of them?’

For a moment I stared at the name of the band emblazoned all over the first page.

Boom. ‘Oh, the Ramones! I’ve had it months, Mark – I didn’t think anyone else had this. Brilliant! It’s a great album. My mate works for them in New York.’

My response somewhat pooped his vim. ‘Knew you’d say something like that. It’s only been out ten days, that’s typical of you. Anyway, have a look at what I’ve done there. I’d be interested in what you thought. I’ve done fifty of ’em. Run ’em off up at my bank when no one’s looking. I thought you could put some on the counter of your record shop.’

When I clued him in about my current state of employment, he just shrugged.

‘Well, I might be joining ya soon. Fucking working at Nat West, Dan, I can’t stand it. But me mum and that will go mad if I jack it in now. I’m hoping this might lead to something. You reckon?’

I looked again at the ridiculous DIY job he was punting a future on and murmured something about how promising it all seemed.

Once Mark had toddled off to his dreary desk job I leafed through his barely legible rag. It soon became clear I would never be able to tell him my opinion of it – because I hated it. I was embarrassed for him. I thought it was a pointless rank-amateur exercise in desperate thick-ear doggerel. What
was
this shit? What did he mean about ‘punk’? Punk was a minor genre that had flourished in the States for a few years in the sixties. It was the name given to a certain type of cheap, snotty loser-rock that wore insolence and failure as a badge of honour. It was camp and fun and had been best collated on a tremendous double album called
Nuggets
, compiled by future Patti Smith guitarist Lenny Kaye and released in 1972.
Nuggets
had been a big seller at One Stop, and one track in particular, ‘Moulty’ by The Barbarians – a song which told the true story of how the band’s drummer came to have only one arm – had been a major favourite of John the manager. But punk seemed so niche, passé even, by 1976. And what was the deal with having the Blue Oyster Cult written in large letters on the cover? Blue Oyster Cult weren’t punk by any stretch of the imagination. There was even a piece about Kiss, for God’s sake! What was Mark thinking? And who were all these unknown pub bands he was apparently name-checking? I’d never heard of any of them, and if
I
hadn’t heard . . .

With a shudder, I could imagine Mark sending a copy to the
New Musical Express
for their opinion too. This would be too much. The
NME
was my weekly channel into everything I considered vital, the absolute last word in creating and cementing the zeitgeist. Indeed, the only reason I
knew
the word zeitgeist was because the
NME
used it so often that I eventually had to give in and look it up. What would they, the writers, my heroes in these matters, make of this
Sniffin’ Glue
? I knew what they’d make of it: they would guffaw and sneer and rip the piss out of it. They would read sections out loud to each other in gormless voices and adopt parts of its deathless syntax as injokes in some of their reviews. Why should I worry about that? Well, I had long held a fantasy that one day I might somehow meet one of these Gods from the World’s Biggest-Selling Music Paper – a Charles Shaar Murray, a Nick Kent, an Ian MacDonald – and this thing could scupper the whole carefully worked-out mise en scène that I had long ago formed in my head, should such a magical moment arrive.

I might be doing really well amid these infallible and razor-minded writers, holding my own while dropping good references like Lowell George, Fred Neil and Annette Peacock –
Nuggets
, even! – and then one of them, let’s say a troublemaker like Max Bell, suddenly says, ‘Hold on, I don’t for a moment suppose you know that dreadful crumb Mark Perry, do you? Oh dear God, you do! Then you MUST be partially responsible for that calamitous explosion of balderdash
Sniffin’ Glue
! Come on, chaps, let’s de-bag the perisher!’
That’s
what would happen.

There would be no time to tell them that this boss-eyed hopeless aberration only came about because my friend – well, actually more of an acquaintance really, barely an outer satellite of my true circle –
all of whom really know their stuff, by the way. I mean, some of them even went to that Weather Report gig recently!
– was probably dropped on his head as a baby and also had malaria once, which makes him do the most bizarre and silly things. No. As I attempted to tell them that I wasn’t like him at all and really did know my sixties sub-genres, they would simply point to the door and eye me with silent disgust as I slunk out, now sans trousers, to a life in unhip ignominious Squaresville. Yeah, thanks a lot, Mark.

Of course, what really
REALLY
deep down worried me was that the exact opposite scenario would unfold. That this rough-and-ready two-bob enterprise was actually new, clever and radical enough to find favour with some of the rock writing elite and it would be Mark, and not me, who would squeeze through a gap in the cultural door and out into the glorious uncharted land beyond. How dare he know about the Ramones? This usurping of my assumed role of maverick trailblazer among my friends truly unnerved me and so I sat down to go through his – what did he call it? –
fanzine
again.

About half an hour later, having read for the second time every word and weighed each bawling sentiment Mark had Xeroxed – I decided
Sniffin’ Glue
was actually worse than I had initially believed and contemptuously chucked it under my bed. By way of centring myself, I put on Steely Dan’s
The Royal Scam
LP and felt pretty secure once I was washed over with its stylish and ordered groove. Steely Dan – to this day my favourite band in the world after the Beatles – were named in reference to the giant sex toy which appears briefly in William Burroughs’
The Naked Lunch
. See, that was smart, subversive even. And now there was poor old Mark, needing a similar joke childishly spelled out for him by some noisy pub group called Sex Pistols. Lots o’ luck with that, fellas!