Prison (2)

Prison (2)

On Sunday, 16th June 1979, The Damned tour on which The Ruts were supporting, and which I had been compèring and doing short support sets also, reached its terminus at the Bristol Locarno. It was a climactic end to the tour for a number of reasons. Dave Ruffy's girlfriend, Rachel Howard, the fantastic fashion designer and artist, then sixteen, had come down to Bristol to see the show — Ruffy introduced us, telling me she was an artist and would be up for designing the Auntie Pus logo I still didn't have, except in the jolly old mind's eye. [A couple of months later The Ruts seminal album 'The Crack' would be released with the now famous cover art picture of the boys at a party in the company of various other rock stars and notables, which was painted by Rachel's father John, soon to be a fellow Twickenham resident alongside me. Rachel's younger brother Olly, aka Bill Ellis, designed the cover art for my poetry chapbook Tears In The Rigging in 2017.] I duly described the drawing and lettering I could visualise to Rachel, and after a three month hiatus — you'll soon see why — she presented me with my finished logo, which couldn't have looked more like the one I'd imagined if I'd been able to draw it myself. Call it telepathy, serendipity, what you will, it was nothing short of miraculous and I used it for my badges, my single cover art, and the centre label of the record.

The Locarno gig was secondly remarkable because I inveigled Dave Ruffy to play a short rock 'n' roll set with me, accompanied by Shanne (from The Nipple Erectors, etc.) on bass. Shanne used to knock around with Captain Sensible in punk's early post-natal days, plus she came, as does Dave Vanian, from Hemel Hempstead, built like nearby Welwyn Garden City by a post-war government doing its best to hide the Roman splendour of St. Albans as deep in a concrete Hertfordshire countryside as possible. We'd played in Hemel Hempstead the night before — Vanian's parents attended the show, the only time I ever met them, and a less vampiric, more suburban couple one couldn't hope to meet. Shanne had come to the Hemel show too, and had decided to come on to Bristol for the tour dénouement the following day, as they'd be returning to London where we all lived straight after the show. It felt good having a powerhouse rhythm section, but I got no less stick from the audience than usual, and Shanne recalls it none too fondly to this day as being one of the more unpleasant and terrifying experiences of her life. Not only was it an honour to have Ruffy, probably one of the best drummers in the world — who in the interim before reforming Ruts DC went on to drum with, inter alia, The Waterboys, Aztec Camera and Prefab Sprout — playing with me but also he had, not five minutes earlier, come off stage with The Ruts, who were about to hit the big time, so not only had he barely had time to towel the last set's sweat off, but he was about to destroy his credibility by playing with me. A cliché I know, saying someone is a scholar and a gentleman, but let me tell you Ruffy — as well as being a loyal friend who has produced sessions for me, put me up, and told me loads of good jokes over the years — is both.

Thirdly, the Locarno show signalled not just the end of The Damned/Ruts tour — not to be repeated until 2013, apart from a few amazing and very emotional shows in July 1980 the week after Malcolm Owen had left us; talk about no people like show people — but the end of my liberty for three months or so. I had skipped bail on some shoplifting offences before the previous Damned tour a couple of months before, and was also on a suspended sentence so, as the fella in Trainspotting memorably says: I knew it was in the post. The net wasn't so much tightening as the holes in it if I was in London and off tour being noticeably smaller. The Damned were their usual charming selves all the way back up the M4 to London — even if you're a nice person not a tour bully, the last date of any tour is shrouded in a big looming comedown for any musician — and when we came off the motorway at Hammersmith and hit Earl's Court, I got Tommy Crossan, the tour manager, to drop me off at the earliest opportunity. It was about 1am, I had no money and nowhere proper to stay. [I think I abandoned the gob-splattered 'Puscaster' Top Twenty solid guitar The Damned had bought me in Chiswick on the way to the M4 out of town, when the tour had been setting off a few weeks before, in the tour bus. Whilst they had been making this kind gesture, I had been getting some tour support money releaving the next door branch of Woolworth's of four electric kettles.] However, I had the key to my old mucker Arthur Billingsley aka Arturo Bassick's bedsit above the Beggar's Banquet shop and record company HQ in the adjacent Hogarth Road, where I had been sofa surfing, or it being rather a lumpy old sofa, more like body boarding. There was only one snag, namely I had given the address as a bail address to the Kensington police, after being apprehended liberating one too many Kenwood Chefs from the electrical goods department of Barker's in Kensington High Street earlier in the year. [The shop assistant had been awaiting my next appearance, what was once a pyramid display of said items now being down to its bottom two layers.] I mounted the stairs to Arthur's palatial abode, where my none too ginger key in the door roused Arthur from the drunken slumber he'd just entered, June 16th being his birthday. I explained that I knew it was a bit dodgy, but that I'd set the alarm, grab a change of clothes and be off early in the morning. [To set the scene a little, the bedsit had white address labels at prominent points on the walls left there by Arthur's former room mate, Dave Allen — then Art's bassist and co-writer colleague in their band Pinpoint, but who would go on to produce The Human League and many others — saying, Cluedo style, 'bathroom' above the one sink, 'library' above the single bookshelf, etc.] I duly set the alarm for 7am and got my head down.

Bill Major used to talk about 'the luck of the nine blind bastards': 'What luck did they have, Auntie, blind and bastards?' and that was certainly what befell me the next morning. The newly come on six till two shift at Kensington nick were bored on a nice sunny summer's morning, so decided to have a little look in the warrant drawer and see if they could keep themselves amused executing a couple. Mine was top of the pile and so, half an hour before my alarm was due to go off, the door opens and in come two policemen. They probably would have burst in but the confines of the room were such that no-one was going to be bursting in, more the furniture and clutter of clobber and instruments was likely to burst out. [The clutter included a pile of crushed wire supermarket baskets at the foot of Arthur's bed, which were there because I used to go out and get breakfast and supplies from the Mac Fisheries mini-market opposite in the Earl's Court Road. I'd fill a basket up and then just leave with it, bypassing the tills, and take it back to the bedsit, where I'd dump it on Art's bed. Whereupon he'd sit up, inspect the contents, lick his lips, and get up. While he washed and dressed, I would put the shopping away, and then Arthur, being a shall we say well-built gentleman, would jump on the basket in his monkey boots and crush it, for ease of storage and to avoid having to return it.] One of the policeman prodded Arthur, asking: 'Julian Isaacs?' Art had no choice to reply that he wasn't and indicate me where I laid playing dead beneath a blanket on the settee. Arthur is still amused by the policeman's response of: 'Oh, we thought that was a pile of old rags.' So off we go, 'cuffed up, down the road to Kensington nick. I was only in the cells there briefly, before we were off again back to my home manor of Wimbledon, for me to appear before the magistrates who had imposed the suspended sentence of three months. Thus, where at 10pm the previous night I had been appearing rocking and rolling onstage in front of about a thousand wild young punk rockers, at 10am I was now on a far less appealing stage, appearing in front of the bench. A carpet is London slang for the number three, which derives from the fact that one stood on the carpet in front of the magistrates to be handed down a three month prison sentence. Well that was where I now stood, and three months was what I got.  

In those days, Wimbledon Magistrates' Court, had no cells beneath the court — one was escorted out the front of the court and over the road to the police station cells to await the prison van, if one had received a custodial sentence. As they walked me, handcuffed again, across the road, who should two other coppers in front of me be escorting to the same cells, but my using chum 'Gypsy Dick' Miles, originally from the Isle of Wight, but more recently resident in the Richmond squats where I used to hang out, who'd just been weighed off too. I called to him, and we were chatting as they were unlocking the cells. The custody officer that morning was a local PC called Joe Hillson, whose bicycle I had once inadvertently stolen from outside the Hand-in-Hand pub on a Friday night, mistaking it in the inebriated gloaming for my dad's bike, on which I had ridden up to the pub from our home in Wimbledon Park. Joe was there in a sorry attempt at plain clothes, to make an even sorrier attempt to apprehend a couple of people smoking dope, a plan doomed to failure as, helmet or no helmet, everyone knew he was the local bobby. However Joe took the bike incident in good heart, and that morning in the cells, asked if Dick and I would like to be banged up together, as we were both waiting on the same prison van to take us to HMP Brixton. They also sent out for some food for us, instead of forcing the station canteen crap on us, so we had quite a pleasant afternoon catching up, as I'd been off on tour for a while. To be entirely accurate, I knew the sentence was coming, as it was suspended and I had contravened the terms, but because my mitigation was primarily that of being ruled by my addiction, they remanded me for medical reports for three weeks, prior to imposing the sentence. Dick and I were thus remand, and not convicted prisoners. This made a big difference in those days, and in Brixton, if you had the contacts, you could have a daily visit where you could be brought a home cooked or takeaway meal, plus two cans of beer or a half bottle of wine, plus as many cigarettes as you wanted. Everyone that had these visits would invariably have two cans of Special Brew, the strongest option available. If you had any decent clobber, which Dick and I didn't, you were also permitted to wear your own clothes on the wing. 

When we got to Brixton, it was tea time, and by the time we had been processed through reception, where we had the standard bath with three inches of tepid water, and the medical where they ask you to cough and if you've ever had VD — in my case supplemented by bringing my addiction into the equation, unnecessarily as it happened as I was going to the medical 'F' wing, known as Fraggle Rock because of the dribbling, muttering nutters housed there, for my reports in any case —and were escorting us across the prison yard with our pillow cases full of rough starched bedding to the wing it was 9pm and nearly dark. They showed me to a single reception cell for the night, and told me I would see a doctor in the morning. It had been a long day and I was glad of the peace and solitude in which to rest as the sun went temporarily down over SW2 and the Auntie Pus career.

Sweet Temptation

Sweet Temptation

In 1971, the year I turned fourteen, my mother's yearning to escape the confines of our pebble  dashed three bedroom semi-detached house in anonymous Raynes Park SW20, and house the bargain Victorian furniture —the polished mahogany dining room table and chairs, for instance — she had been sourcing over the preceding few years at local antique shops and auction houses, in what she  accurately considered the more élite environs of Wimbledon Common or Village SW19, was to see fruition. Knowing my parents had been viewing houses in the neighbouring, and posher —at least up the Hill — postal district, some friends of my mother's, on coming round for dinner, tipped them off about a house in Dora Road, Wimbledon Park, whose owners they knew wanted a quick sale, and if possible a cash buyer. It was a four bedroom house with beautiful front and back gardens, containing a hundred and fifty rose bushes —documented in my poem '150 Rose Bushes' in my Wimbledon sequence —and the vendors wanted something unbelievable like seven thousand pounds for it, a ridiculous snip even in the early 70s. To this day, my father believes there must have been something suspect about it, but there wasn't from our end: my parents could raise the money and my uncle on my father's side, a successful partner in a completely straight West End firm of solicitors, acted for them in the purchase. We moved in the summer holidays, when I was just immersing myself in my earliest vice after nicotine, that of gambling on the horses. I had therefore nipped into Smith & Cane (Turf Accountants) in Raynes Park while the removal van was being loaded that day and put some bets on. I remember it being quite a grey day for midsummer. When we got to our new home in our white, two door Triumph Herald, registration UYN34F, the removal men were there waiting. In the course of them beginning by offloading a few of the smaller things that had been loaded last, as you do, I got the removal men to get my single bed and my desk chair — on which I am sat writing this — into my new bedroom overlooking the garden at the rear. Plus our portable 16" screen black and white television set. It was early afternoon by now, and I quickly got the TV plugged in, played about with the plug-in aerial, and got a good enough picture to watch the racing. [I forget the exact date but it must have been a high profile meeting to have been televised, so at that time of year probably the Eclipse meeting at nearby Sandown Park, or maybe the Ebor meeting at York.] Suffice to say that my parents were not best pleased at the delay in the removal procedure incurred by the removal lads noticing and being impressed that I had the racing on, and keeping on popping into my new room to check it.

We had some interesting neighbours in our new street: up the road was a television producer called Ben Rea, who was at the time producing the BBC police drama Softly Softly, and whose glamorous wife Angela used to come and babysit my younger brother, and hang out chatting about pop music with me whilst doing so, just at the time that glamorous women were starting to interest me. [Of little consequence is the fact that Softly Softly starred the actor Stratford Johns, who lived locally in Merton Park — near the old B-movie film studios, appropriately enough — whose daughter Frith was the first girl I ever had a kiss and cuddle with at a youth club dance.] Almost opposite the Reas at the top of the road lived a man named Johnny Placquet, a small time villain who owned a living flame fire shop in the town centre. Johnny was famed locally for when ordering a pre-dinner drink, asking for 'a pair o' teeth', and his wife, like Angela, was proper glam' and fetching, driving a Volvo P90 like The Saint on TV. Sadly they were not really my parents' sort of people, so she never came to babysit my little brother or hang out with me. A few doors down the road from us lived a well-to-do Bolivian family, a banker called Billy — well he was 'something' in the city at any rate — and his wife Yolanda, a stunning Latino with trademark long dark lustrous hair like Evita or Frida Kahlo with her plaits undone. They had a son and daughter a few years younger than me, both enrolled at local public schools, the son at my school, KCS, and the daughter at Wimbledon High School. Yolanda used to say that her family were part of a revolutionary party back home, and would alternate between positions in government with attendant luxury, and spells in prison when the revolution went the wrong way – all very Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Anyway, when in Wimbledon, Billy and Yolanda were more fond of house parties than political ones, although always quite low key. At one of which  parties a couple of years later, my parents told me the following day, they had been introduced to a mysterious man, taciturn with a hint of flamboyance, who had not stayed long, but after whose departure, Billy had 'let slip' was Carlos the Jackal, the infamous revolutionary. 

We now skip to the New Year of 1978, when I had retreated back home to my parents out of necessity for a few weeks; I was just about treading water in the wonderful world of punk rock, but kept surfacing and spluttering for air in the heroin addiction stakes. That New Year's Eve, Billy and Yolanda threw a party to which I was also invited. I was junk sick and shivering that day, but knew the drink would flow down the road, so at least I could hopefully get drunk enough both to take my mind off it and get a few hours sleep. My mother too looked very glamorous that night in a long black velvet skirt, although noticeably tipsy and well on the way to being noticeably drunk, swaying when she danced and flirting with other gentlemen guests. The combination of my feeling for my dad because of this, and my withdrawals, meant that I wasn't thinking straight, nor was I to think straight until the penny dropped many years later, as you will see.

Whilst plying his guests with wine, gin and tonics, champagne etc., Billy himself drank only mugs of tea with at least a quadruple vodka in each time, plus he kept disappearing upstairs to his little den, which I observed out of the corner of my eye, albeit with the penny still firmly stuck in the slot. Midnight came, as it generally does after 23.59pm; I think we had a champagne toast but no Auld Lang Syne, thank fuck. A little while afterwards, there was a ring on the bell, and Billy ushered into the front room, where I was sitting more quietly with just a couple of other guests —swerving the gaiety and music, drinking in morose contemplation, — a tall handsome black man with an equally tall (partly due to her porn star heels) and stunning black girlfriend, who looked like she'd just floated off the winner's podium at a beauty pageant. After getting them drinks, Billy introduced the guy to me as a fellow musician, none other than the great David Ruffin of The Temptations, brother to Jimmy. Shortly after, David left his girlfriend with her legs that went up to her hips flashing through the slit in her skirt, and disappeared upstairs with Billy for a while. When they descended, David Ruffin and his girlfriend soon left — I expect they had a driver outside and went onto Tramps or somewhere. Around 4am we went home to our house four doors up the road and, as luck would have it, while I was trying to force a boiled egg down for breakfast about midday, our 'phone rang, and it was Bill Major to tell me that I'd missed out the previous evening as, just before midnight the door of our local pub, The Hand-in-Hand on Wimbledon Common, had opened and a mutual friend had arrived with some bags of not half bad gear; however Bill, bless him, had saved a bag and was ringing to say we could share it. No-one got to say Jack Robinson, or anything else, before I had shouldered my Raglan camelhair Crombie and was hoofing it round to Bill's in Kingston Road — a half hour walk if you ran, as they say. Somewhere at the back of my chilly mind, that penny was still wedged in its slot.

David Ruffin's death in 1991, following overdosing in a crack house in Philly, passed me by at the time, and it was only on reading about it some years later, that it finally dawned on me what a famous soul singer and his model girlfriend were doing making a quick NYE guest appearance at a low key and outwardly sedate house party in Wimbledon Park. Just think, if that penny hadn't stuck, the Major and I could have been having a crystal speedball that New Year's afternoon.

The Elephant Fayre 1986

The Elephant Fayre 1986

In the middle of the week ending 25th July 1986, three separate elements conspired to my attendance and performance with two different bands at what was to be the last ever Elephant Fayre on the beautiful Port Eliot Estate in South-East Cornwall, just outside the village of St. Germans, and on the St. Germans or Tiddy River, as it curves towards Millbrook Lake and the open sea.

Firstly, a girl called Sue Bailey was at the time lodging with my partner Nina and I, who had co-opted herself into playing drums in my punk rock 'n' roll band The Black Devils. Sue had a drum kit, but struggled, to say the least, to find her way round it. Sue had a couple of years previously been (mis)managing my friends' cowpunk band Boothill Foot Tappers, by running them into the ground trying to live a rock 'n' roll lifestyle on their money. I ruined my own career doing exactly the same, but at least it was my career, not someone else's. [I only managed my dear friend Arthur's band The Lucky Saddles for a few months in 1981, and I didn't get them very far in life, but at least the accounting was above board.] Sue's barely rudimentary drumming made little odds as I had myself co-opted Nina into playing bass for the band. Nonetheless, this was slightly different as, although not a bass player, she loved soul music and her rhythm and timing was cool. [For musicians reading, most of the songs were in A, so I explained to her that if she lost her place on the neck, just to play the second fattest string open against A, the fattest under E, and the one the other side of the A over D. If all else failed she was to play the second fattest (A) string over everything, as it would harmonise with the other two chords and the rhythm would thunder relentlessly on. At least it would have done if Sue could drum.] However, Sue came from a musical family: her dad was 'Big' Pete Bailey, who had played congas for The Graham Bond Organisation and Pete Brown and His Battered Ornaments (as a poet and musician one of my favourite teenage bands), and her brother-in-law is Lew Stonebridge, the keys player in The Blues Band. 

Through her dad, who lived just outside Camelford in Cornwall and was friends and muso colleagues with Rick Worthy, the festival organiser, Sue obtained us two slots on both the Saturday and the Sunday, to perform a gypsy jazz set with Auntie & The Men From Uncle, who the following year would become The Helen Moore Trio, after I met said amazing chanteuse, and a punk R 'n' R set With The Black Devils, who the following year went back to being Auntie & The Men From Uncle. Since he restarted The Port Eliot Festival on the same site about 20 years later, and my move to the West Country, Rick Worthy is now a friend and fellow guitarist, but I didn't know him then — strangely, it was him that told me a couple of years' back of Pete Bailey's demise. 

The second component to my going to Cornwall that weekend is that I was doing a bit of low-to-medium level dope dealing, moving a kilo or two here and there onwards and outwards, including doing a bit of work with two lovely Somerset fellas with 'convoy' connections, and we had a bit of business going down which, as luck would have it, we could conduct at The Elephant Fayre. Now, if you read the online historic recall of the festival, lots of people, including Rick Worthy, evidence the local St. German's village being vandalised by members of the so-called Peace Convoy, whilst at the same time acknowledging that it was the year following the famously brutal police v. hippies Battle of the Beanfield, and that identities were blurred. All I can tell you is that my friends, a soft-spoken curly haired slim guy called Pearl, and his hippy chick girlfriend Biff, from Frome, and Pearl's partner Ian, were all mild mannered people; further they were on the site all weekend, much of which we hung out together, and they certainly did no damage. Quite the opposite, they volunteered as litter pickers on the Monday, and Pearl told me it was the best job he ever had — they found rolls of money, ounces of cocaine, and all sorts in the mud. [It is true that Pearl once drove a car straight through a police road block in Wiltshire, but the car was full of dope, no-one was hurt, and it was an act of self-preservation, and not attempted injury to others.]

Thirdly, I was also working a bit with a Scotsman called John Mac', and he had a friend with a nice old yellow medium-size bus, about ten seats and a couple of bunks, who was going to the festival and had no-one in the bus but himself. Happy days. On the Friday afternoon, Nina, Sue and I loaded up our gear onto his bus, and off we set, arriving at the site around dusk, stopping only once for fuel and snacks, and again just outside the area, for the driver, whose name eludes me, to secrete his own hash stash in a hidden compartment just inside the fuel tank. On pulling up at the gate and attendant hut, Nina elected to get out and sort the passes out, whereupon she caught her foot in a cattle grid, and I had to take over. The first time I attended Port Eliot Literary Festival — at which I read poetry last year — about twenty years later, I think when my mates Alabama 3 were playing, I drove down the track to the estate with my girlfriend. As we drove down the track, the memory came back to me and I related it to my girlfriend Lesley. Sure enough when we pulled up at the entrance hut to sort out our passes that time, there was the very cattle grid, large as life, and I made sure not to twist my ankle in it. Back to 1986, we duly found our way to the camping spot for performers in the big marquee we were to play in, had a wander round, and got our heads down. All was well, and I was looking forward to Colin Delaney arriving in the jolly old green Mercedes in the morning, with our genius trumpeter Will Algar. During the early hours, it rained. Very heavily. This is crucial to the story.

Saturday morning the sun was shining, the ground was drying out, and I had a wander round. It was a while since I'd been to a full-on festival, and the atmosphere was fantastic, with loads of smashing food stalls etc., not to mention things that have sadly gone out of fashion, like tents with signs saying: 'Hot Knives - 50p' — you don't see any of them at Port Eliot Literary Festival — rather they have oyster bars and artisan gin. Thatcher was in full flow in 1986, sending the country out of the traps and on its way to the dogs. Within a short time, there was Colin and Will in the green Merc' weaving their way through the rutted and partly dried mud towards me. Colin was always what he called 'on the night shift', so he'd done a bit of mini cabbing to get some funds, picked Will up and driven through the night. Great, they'd made it, so I showed them where we were plotted up, and where we were to perform later, and set off circulating again. This time, it wasn't long before I came across Pearl, Biff and Ian, so into their tent, quick bit of business, and that was mine and Nina's indoor money for the weekend sorted out. 

After parting company, by which time it was around lunchtime, I was meandering back to our bus and tent, when who should I run into but my old mucker and top double bass player, Lloyd Gordon, who was hanging there with Simon Le Bon's brother — I think there'd been a bit of country house debauchery taking place recently, and who can blame them, I say? Anyway, Lloyd is a great player in any genre, and we didn't have bass in the jazz band, so I was delighted when, on asking if he'd got his double bass with him, he said yes. Good plan really, if you're a good player and got a ticket or pass to a festival, you're bound to be able to 'stage bomb' a couple of places. [Lloyd was also incidentally the bassist in Boothill Foot Tappers.] I told him where and when we were playing, he asked if I'd got chord charts for the standards we'd be playing, I confirmed I had, and arranged to see him at the marquee for the first set at 2pm. 

Now, remember the aforementioned precipitation in the early hours. Lloyd, who is a lovely fella but nothing if not a trifle unreliable at times, was there bang on time, I introduced him to Colin and Will, and off we went. Hot Club come to Cornwall — I think we even inveigled someone faintly competent (unlike Sue) chap to play some swing drums with us. We were going down great, the marquee was full, must have been a couple of hundred people, and I was in my element. Colin was no great crooner, like Bobby Valentino, but he could sing and took the vocals on a couple of tunes, and the audience loved it. About three numbers away from the interval, I realised that the rest of the lunchtime cans of Stella were bursting my bladder, and that no way could I wait ten minutes. As soon as that number ended, I stood up, lent my beloved Gibson ES120t against my beloved Ampeg Reverbrocket (both of which I am still using) and ran for the side exit/stage door/flap of the marquee to relieve myself, with Colin shouting after me: 'Auntie! Where the fuck are you going?' As I glanced round the tent flap to shout that I was just taking an unavoidable leak and wouldn't be a minute, a large section of the marquee roof, maybe two metres by one, collapsed from the weight of the rain that had formed a well in it. Whereupon, at least a couple of gallons of water flooded down, drenching the chair on which I'd been sat not a minute before, talking into a microphone and playing an electric guitar through a vintage valve amp with dodgy circuitry (since addressed). Someone wiped it down with a cloth, and we proceeded. Atheists take note. At the end of the second set, I shook hands with Lloyd and gave him a hug, telling him he'd been great and what a pleasure it was — both entirely true. Lloyd responded: 'Oh, that's good, I'm glad it was ok. Only I forgot I'd said I'd play with you, and about an hour before the show, someone gave me two tabs of acid. It was just as I was coming up that I remembered. I couldn't see the chord charts at all — they were just dancing in front of my eyes.' There you are, told you he was a good player.

In the interval between our jazz and rock 'n' roll sets, I went wandering again, meeting first Buster Bloodvessel from Bad Manners, who were on and whom I hadn't seen since 1980, and my old mucker from when he lived on my manor, Wimbledon, in 1975, the great jazz guitarist Jim Mullen. Jim was there to play a quartet gig with fellow Scotsman Bobby Wellins, the renowned saxophonist — I watched their set half spaced out and awestruck, but with one eye on my watch knowing there was still another gig to do that evening. The second set went down well too; it didn't matter about Sue's drumming — the people running that stage were family friends of hers and had spread the word that we were a special attraction sourced from London, and luckily they believed the hype.

Come the Sunday, the same thing on repeat, but minus the near-death experience. On the Monday we bade farewell to Pearl and crew, who as I said stayed to pick litter or mine gold, as the case may be, our driver swapped a chunk of his remaining hash with some other convoy types for a couple of gallons of scrumpy for the passengers to neck en route home to ease the comedown, as you do at festivals, and by nightfall we were home in East Twickenham. And dry!

Ibiza 1983 (4)

Ibiza 1983 

(4)

A few days later, in the middle of the following week, and the day before the ferry to Alicante that Colin and the Merc' were booked on was due to sail, he picked Nina and I up from the finca about 5pm, just as the shops were reopening after siesta, and drove us to a travel agent's in Es Cana, so we could buy tickets to get on the same boat. They told us that for foot passengers, there was no need to book in advance, and just to turn up at the ferry company's offices in Ibiza Port the following day at least a couple of hours before the sailing time, which was around 9pm. We duly returned to San Carlos and had a lovely farewell dinner with friends under the vines at Las Dalias, with lots of 'hasta el proximo' toasts. Sadly, circumstances conspired, as they say, and that next time was not to be for seven years, but the gap between my visits has rarely been more than a year since.

So, fast forward twenty-four hours or so, we arrived at the port in Colin's car nice and early and adjourned to a bar, where I ran into a couple of people I knew who sold Colin a piece of hash for the journey. I think this must have been when the foreboding set in, though we didn't know it, as it turned out to be the only piece of rubbish hash I'd scored all summer. After a couple of beers, we located the ferry company offices and queued up at the ticket booth to be told the ferry was full. I think what had happened in Es Cana was that they had no franchise, or made no money out of selling foot passenger tickets, and thus just fobbed us off. I had espied a book of tickets behind the glass though, and the stakes being fairly desperate as Nina and I were potless, when the lady behind the glass turned round to address a colleague, I thought quickly but recklessly, grabbing the ticket book and tearing off a handful. Needless to say, the lady spun round at the crucial moment, and the Guardia were called. They didn't arrest me, just took the tickets back and, when we explained the situation, said there was nothing we could do but go away and return the following morning to board the daytime ferry, which was to Valencia, not Alicante. 

This being far from an ideal solution, we conferred with Colin, and agreed to try stashing our bags unseen beneath his stuff in the Merc's roomy boot [trunk for the American reader], and us lying down on the floor in the back under a blanket. I expect the Guardia had radio'd through but anyway, as Colin drew up to the checkpoint, the ferry official immediately opened the back door, whisking the rug off with a flourish, like a toreador. The good news in all of this is that the authorities, quite rightly, do not wish then or now, to detain troublesome tourists or visitors, but rather just to get them off the island at the earliest opportunity. Quite rightly, as it goes, though we were not chavtastic rabble rousers, just two hippy types who'd run out of money — nonetheless that still put us firmly in the undesirable category. Obviously, the Guardia Civil officers that attended Incident No. 2, were the same pair that had attended Incident No. 1. This was the first, and thankfully still — to date — the only, time I have ever been pistol-whipped. 

Our adventures on the high seas having been thus forestalled in dramatic Boys' Own style, they dragged us off to a small office in the port, where they confiscated our passports, thankfully without checking the validity of mine in the name of Martin Woloszczuk. Mind you, I don't suppose two people making the most unsubtle attempt ever to board a ferry unauthorised was high on the Interpol list. The Guardia then told us to return to the ferry company offices in the morning, buy our tickets to Valencia, and then present ourselves at the Guardia office in the port with said jiminy crickets, and they'd return our passports. They added a stern warning not to get into any more trouble in the meantime, though I think we'd had more than enough grief for one night. Colin had meanwhile been turned around on the entry ramp, and made to queue up again, meaning that by the time our little fracas had ended, he was one of the last vehicles to board the boat, which was just drawing up its anchor chains and puffing off. We could see him on the bow end of the deck, and I yelled to Colin to wait for us in Valencia, where our ferry would dock about 5pm the following afternoon. I'm sure Colin must have had other clothes with him, but that night he had on the same striped T-shirt and shorts as the night we'd met at Bobby's and, with his white shorts and white legs — he wasn't big on sunbathing — silhouetted against the twilit sky, he gave me a thumbs up.

More than a trifle nerve-racking was how I might describe the next twenty or so hours. We had barely any money, just enough for a couple of beers dragged out through the night hours, a coffee in the morning and, after getting the tickets and retrieving my false passport, a couple of warm beers, some water, and a sandwich that would have done British Rail proud, on the boat. The boat was packed, mainly with Spanish families consuming vast amounts of food and drink, and the air was really close inside. They had a tiny swimming pool on deck, which was also packed, but in which I remember trying to do a few lengths to tire myself out enough to have a kip. You'd think I'd have been spark out after spending all night wandering around Ibiza Town, but realise I'd only met Colin a few days earlier, and although I had a lovely vibe off him, I wasn't at all sure if he'd wait around for us for a  whole day. Coupled with this, he'd made it clear to me that he wanted to drive without any overnight stops right up to Calais, so as to make as much profit out of the boat delivery job as possible.Valencia is only about 100 miles up the coast from Alicante, though thankfully in the right direction; however anyone wanting to drive overland from the Costa Blanca to Calais without passing Go obviously aims at more than 100 miles in a day. I consoled myself with the thought that Colin had what I thought was some decent hash, so he could pull over and chill out as and when, or so I was hoping. He had all our stuff in the motor too, and we had nothing but the thin summer clothes we stood tiredly up in, so there was a fair bit of nail-biting trepidation involved, as to whether Colin would be in Valencia to meet us.

Nina spent the ferry ride outlining to me a proven, but singularly unappealing, Plan B. A few years before she had gone on an abortive smuggling mission to Andalusia, with our friend Big Bill Z., and an old Belfast cohort of Wee Johnny's called John Brennan, where they'd been despatched by an unseen mystery man to retrieve a parcel of dope, supposedly the size of a telephone kiosk, buried on a deserted Southern Spanish beach. Such is the myth of which Howard Marks books are made. [Incidentally many years later Nina went on a legalise cannabis march with Howard Marks in the West End —it was a cold wet day and she told me they filtered off from the demo' and went down the pub at the earliest opportunity.] On this expedition, her and Bill had been waiting for weeks in a pension in Estapona for a call from a guy called Enrico, who was supposed to have liaised with John Brennan in the solo 'beach party', following which they were to organise the shipment. They too had little funds and whiled away their siesta hours playing the game of lying perfectly still for as long as possible. When the call finally came, they were instructed to make their way to Madrid, where Nina was to wait on the steps of the Prado for this guy, within a certain daily time slot. Meanwhile, being unable to settle the bill at the pension, as they hadn't been wired any money, they had to break into the unfortified hotel safe and steal their passports back, which the pension had held as insurance, a common enough practice. Nina told me she sat for the same two hours for days on end on the steps of the Prado, until one day a guy looking as gangsterish as you like in a white suit, and with an old English sheepdog on a lead, turned up and identified himself, only to say it was 'all off' for now, leaving her and Bill high and dry. They therefore had to hitch, and partly walk, back to England through the Pyrenees, with virtually no money and only a denim jacket between them for warmth at night. You can see why Plan B. did not appeal.

I need neither a heart monitor to tell me how fast my heart was racing, nor the photograph I never took, to recall my joy, relief, and confirmation of how true to his word Colin was —there was never a man truer — as the ferry chugged into Valencia, and I saw his striped T-shirt with outstretched arm waving on the dock, as I shielded my eyes from the afternoon sun on the ferry prow. Apart from the swiftly imparted bad news that the dope was useless, it was all good news. We were soon on the road, and the green Mercedes powered its way into France shortly after nightfall. We were famished and I can still taste the crisp frites with homemade mayonnaise Colin bought us from a roadside caravan in the hills above Perpignan. Colin informed me that he was going to avoid the trunk roads, and thus the tolls, by taking the more circuitous route that guides you all the way from Marseilles, through central Paris, to Calais, which is denoted by a green arrow on roundabouts etc. He gave Nina and I the job of looking for the green flash, as we called it, at every roundabout or junction. Meanwhile Colin was keen to chat, in the interests of staying awake as much as anything else, and we bonded whilst talking of many things: not shoes and ships, but primarily a discovered shared love of Django and gypsy jazz — I'd only heard Colin strum a few chords, and was as yet unaware of his extraordinary talent as a jazz lead guitarist —and religion, Colin being a very spiritual man, and devout, though his devotion to what or whom was sometimes unclear. In over a quarter of a century I never got to the bottom of it, but whatever it was, it was the rock that got him through hard places after whatever had happened to him in New York.

Hardly crucial to the story, but interesting because you can't imagine such a thing happening in England, is that about 4am Colin, on approaching a garage that was closed for the night, it not being a busy stretch of road, said he'd thought he'd pull in and get a couple of hours' rest whilst waiting for them to open, as we were low on gas. I asked him if he'd rather press on if he could, to which he said that he would. My minimal French being better than both my minimal Spanish and Colin's non-existent French, I suggested I'd knock them up, as it was apparent the owners lived upstairs, and they could only say no. Madame duly appeared at the window in her dressing gown, and could not have been more accommodating, coming downstairs immediately and insisting on filling the tank herself. Colin asked if I could get some oil too, and she ushered us into the shop, which was also a small café, and asked me what ratio of oil we needed. The necessary translating being done, she asked us if we'd like a cup of coffee as we had a long journey ahead. We'd just got the lady out of bed, for goodness' sake — as I say, jamais en Angleterre!

Off we went again, and by the time we hit central Paris — which as I say, on Colin's chosen route was unavoidable — it was morning rush hour, horns blaring, and the game of 'find the green flash' quickly upped its ante at the Arc de Triomphe. After going round a few roundabouts, in a roundabout way, a few times, we duly emerged back on the road North to Calais. Martin Woloszczuk embarked and disembarked the ferry without causing any undue curiosity, and by early evening I was back in the mansion flat in East Twickenham, and on the yellow wall-mounted pay phone — in what we called the hall but strangely enough was like an entrada in a finca, in that it was a central room the front door opened into, with all the other rooms off it — to call my mate in Kingston and pick up a bag of gear. By the time Colin came round a week later to share the roast chicken dinner Nina had made to thank him for the lift, I had been to see the lovely Dr. Dally in Devonshire Place — who I think quite admired me for trying to knock it on the head as much as I quite admired myself — and got my injectable methadone plus Valium prescription back, and was more grounded, or so I thought. I showed Colin some of my teacher, Alf (Fred) Palace's 'secret' Django arrangements, which he made me swear only to share with 'family', and thus began twenty-five years or so of blissful gypsy jazz, were it not for the occasional  contretemps, as we were both quite highly strung; our guitars however, had exactly the action we wanted and the music they made together is woven into my history.

I used the Martin Woloszczuk passport but twice more, in the February and April of the following year, when I joined my pals The Decorators on a couple of French dates. I shared a flat with Joe Cohen, the sax player, Mick Bevan the singer and rhythm guitarist, and their girlfriends in Churchfield Road, Acton, down the road from Lionel Bart as it happens, though I was historically more a lifter from shops than a picker of a pocket or two. In the February, the band had already left for Paris and Nina and I were sitting in the flat chatting with Joe's girlfriend Bareen — now an eminent surgeon, but then at Charing Cross Medical School — and she said she missed Joe and was thinking of surprising him, and did we want to come. Well, why not? The jolly old cardboard fake passport still had a few months to run, and I may as well get my full one pound's worth, after all. Our friend John Perivolaris who was Greek and rich, the latter being particularly handy, said he'd come along too. [John had a lovely sports car, the bonnet of which I was draped over, clad in black leather jacket and white rocker scarf — a myopic Gene Vincent — for a photo in Sounds music paper a few months later.] I had two good friends in Paris, who I didn't think would baulk too much at my unannounced arrival, as its was only for a night or two. So once again, there I was back in the Paris morning rush hour, this time ringing my dear friend Segs from The Ruts, then resident there with his partner Violon, with whom he was in a band. Violon answers — Segsy's gone to London for a few days! As my mentor Bill Major used to say: the luck of the nine blind bastards — and what luck did they have, blind and bastards? However my friend and other amazing gypsy jazz colleague Mark Sullivan also lived in Paris then, and he was home, as luck would have it, and in Clichy as it happens, where Henry Miller spent some 'quiet days'.

In the evening we met up with the band and the others and I compèred and supported The Decorators at their gig at a venue called Les Bains Douches, a former Turkish baths, which had none of the décor changed, candlelight twinkling and reflecting off the water in the marble baths, very Oscar Wilde or Walter Benjamin, just with a bar and stage installed. The following day we went for a mooch around Paris, including a visit to Shakespeare & Co., probably the most chaotic bookshop I've ever been in, and the church of my namesake, Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, which appears in Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, possibly my favourite novel ever. I had been in that church once before, as a boy on holiday with my parents, when my father had told me, because of my name, of the legend of the eponymous saint, as told by Flaubert. It was a bitterly cold Saturday afternoon, and John kindly lent me his lovely Chesterfield Crombie to combat the chill.  It was at least two sizes too big, but I was nonethelessless grateful. John is a great photographer, and I have a picture he took of me wearing that coat, with a traditional French white wedding coming out of the church, confetti in the air, the groom sweeping the bride off her feet, and me looking pinched but stylish, quiff to the wind. The band had another gig the next day in the South, and Nina and I caught the train with John to Calais. We strolled through customs at Dover but, to my horror, there were two CID doing spot checks the other side. They were all over us like the proverbial rash, but the passport stood its test. I made contact with John recently after a 35 year interval, and learned he is an academic residing in the Western Isles.

In the April, The Decorators were again across La Manche, doing a show in Paris at a different venue, and one in Rouen. Mick Bevan rang me and said they were already there but the guy who was supposed to bring some strings and sticks and stuff and do their sound had let them down. They could do their own sound, he said, but would I pop round to Ginger Baker's studios, Acorn Studios, where they rehearsed, bring the peripherals, and I could then compère and support again and have a hotel room, etc. Ginger wasn't there, else I'd have tried to pick up more than just the drumsticks, as I had a sneaking suspicion that Mick's master plan was to tap me up for some methadone, rather than a craving for my not inconsiderable performance skills. No matter, I had some for him, we played two cool gigs, and when I got back to London, I went back to being me again. Albeit a me that was still half-heartedly wanted by the police; very half-heartedly as inter al., I did plenty of gigs, had a  private prescription, and worked as a postman for a year, all as me. The next passport I got was not until 1988, a real one in my real name. I think it was Howard Marks that said you can go anywhere in the world without a passport [yogi and other holy men do] but you will be making life very difficult for yourself.

Ibiza 1983 (3)

Ibiza 1983 

(3)

Returning to the midsummer gig at the Las Dalias venue, Nina had befriended two smashing Spanish people, a hard core Basque girl named Ampero, and a guy called Tony the Astrologer, for transparent reasons. Tony spoke little English and Nina minimal Spanish but, by the time I arrived, they had struck up a friendship and understanding; I guess because all three of them were outsiders. Anyway, Tony had found Nina in the bar one evening and informed her he had told the venue he would make a poster for the gig, as he was a good artist as well as an astrologer, but had left it really late. Thinking on her little size fives, Nina picked up a copy of that day's Diario de Ibiza, borrowed a pair of scissors, or maybe, knowing her, just used her hairdressing ones, which she always carried with her, as a quick haircut on the beach or in the bar was bit of added income, and showed Tony how to make Sex Pistols ransom note style art. They made a great poster which, when Nina and I first returned to the island seven years later, was hanging framed on the bar wall. Tony lived in a tiny casita on the hill top across the road from Las Dalias — he had long frizzy hair and glasses, a touch of the Jerry Garcia about him. When I glance up at that hill top now, I wonder what became of him. Ampero, the Basque girl, lived at that time on the beach, but always looked immaculate with a crisp cotton skirt and fresh make-up. I don't know where she ironed her clothes, but she would come in Anita's of a morning, order up a café con leche, and retire to the ladies', to return after ten minutes with gleaming teeth and freshly applied lipstick. She is still on the island; I've glimpsed her at times, we have never reconnected but she still looks chic.

The now owner, and then son and heir of Las Dalias, Juanito, had also enjoyed my performance at the midsummer show so, a couple of weeks later, aided by my friend Helga who had the gallery there, I blagged a solo Saturday night gig, this time for the princely fee of 5,000 pesetas, or £25. Nina made another Mclaren-esque poster and they constructed a lovely stage by the brook under the palms.  You might even describe it as intimate. I spent the afternoon of the gig at Jenny's finca rehearsing Blue Suede Shoes —I even had some with me to wear — with her daughter Gypsy, Geri's daughter Esther; my soul sister, of whom much, much more later, Marianne's daughter Shalom, and another island girl named Shanti, as Marianne and Nina had devised a little dance routine for them. Aged between six and eight, the little girls were thus all up for prima donna-ship as much as the sisterhood, and there were a few fractious wobblers thrown in the July afternoon heat. Whilst we were in my room inside rehearsing the dance routine Jenny, being the wizard at a machine she is, having whipped round the girls' waists with a tape measure, was in the workshop running up four identical pale blue crêpe dresses. It was a gorgeous evening, Marmalade Freak went down alright even with the people who didn't understand the lyric, but predictably the girls stole the show, and people on the island reminisce about it to this day, I am told even at times when I'm absent.

Around that same time, there used to be a weekly Sunday night poetry reading in the gallery at Las Dalias, hosted by Helga's husband Martin Watson-Todd. The island has always been a magnet for artists in any medium, and there were some great contributors, Guardian journalists and all sorts, in whose company I was honoured to read. Martin won many battles with cognac but sadly lost the war, leaving behind an inspiring book of poems. 

Talking of Blue Suede Shoes, one literally blindingly sunny afternoon, I was sitting at the table in the front yard of the finca, playing some rock 'n' roll and singing at the top of my voice as I thought there was no-one about — I think it must have been a market day and the whole household was at the stall or school —as it was cathartic; despite the beauty of the island and the top people I was hanging out with, I was, let's face it living day to day, or hand to mouth. I always say, mind you, that there's nothing wrong with living from hand to mouth — it's when you have nothing in your hand to put in your mouth or buy something to put in your mouth, that you need to worry. So there I was in full throttle, when a girl came dancing down the track towards me in one of Jenny's white linen dresses, which were cut so they proper flounced. She had come to surprise Jenny and Rod, with the result of us surprising each other, and me being embarrassed about the singing. Her name's Christina — we've been friends ever since. The following Saturday, we went to a house party at her husband Chris's house in the hills, where I remember Bobby Schuck saying he'd make screwdrivers, and just pouring about a dozen bottles of chilled Russian vodka into a bucket, then squeezing fresh oranges by hand in a cocaine fuelled frenzy until it was faintly approaching a 50:50 mix.

The weekend before it turned out Nina and I were successfully to leave the island, after a few aborted attempts, something which had historical precedent, and therefore which neither us nor Jenny and Rod paid much notice to, Bobby had a big party at the villa he was renting in Jesús, just outside Ibiza Town. One reason for the party was to celebrate the arrival of Bobby's speedboat, now safely moored in Ibiza Port. Obviously, being a speedboat, it had arrived from England on a trailer and not sped across the Med'. This trailer is very important. It was towed by a green 1970s Mercedes 200, the ones with the stacked headlights, and driven from London, where Bobby had bought it at the Boat Show I think, to Dover, thence via ferry to Calais, overland to Alicante, and then by ferry to the island. Driving said Mercedes was its owner, Colin Delaney, a friend of Bobby's from old times in the music business, a very talented and often commercial songwriter, a former agent, one of the best guitarists I've ever heard, never mind played with, and we went on to play gypsy jazz together for over twenty-five years.

Before I met him, Colin had been involved in some project with Robert Fripp, and had flown to New York for a session. No-one knows what he might have ingested at a party there, but he came back a changed, and much more withdrawn man. Whatever it was, it never took his genius. The result of this was that driving Bobby's boat to Ibiza was a nice little earner, with a few days hanging at Bobby's before the ferry home, but that Colin wasn't the type of fella to get stuck into a full-on debauched island party. This was exacerbated by his being a non-swimmer and having had what he perceived as a near death experience in the pool that afternoon. However, as he'd come in the Merc', he had his  Fender acoustic guitar with him. In between necking cocktails and blagging lines of coke, I went for an exploratory stroll around the pool and grounds. Sitting on his own by the pool strumming, was a man in a navy and white striped shirt and white shorts. I sat down next to him, shook hands, and he carried on playing, and singing very sweetly 'Wherever I Lay My Hat'. When he finished, I said; 'Nice song. 's an old soul song ain't it?' I had been in Ibiza for over two months and, although we went to the disco and heard The Police and stuff, we were definitely way behind the English charts. So when Colin replied that yes, it was a Marvin Gaye hit years ago, but that Paul Young now had a No. 1 with it in England, it was all news to me. I was thus also unaware that his backing singers were the two girl singers from the soul band Panties I told you about before, Kim and Maz, now The Fabulous Wealthy Tarts.

Colin and I were chatting away in no time about all things musical; I played a tune on his guitar and, like most regular guys, he liked the guitar playing but was a trifle taken aback by the, shall we say, unorthodox singing. It's my spirit I'm told, that wins people around, and I think Colin felt that. We spent a lot of the next eight hours intermittently chatting and playing. This eight hours was also spent waiting for a supposed banquet of a whole sheep stuffed with apricots, almonds and rice, cooked in a pit in the ground that Bobby had dug. When about two dozen people sat down at four in the morning at an enormous outdoor table, the lamb was kind of cooked, as in some of it was tender and none of it was crispy, and none of the stuffing had cooked. I have an enduring memory of my friend Lance asking Bobby: 'Do you mean to tell me this is what I've waited eight hours for — a load of greasy old bones?' Lance is another long time islander, another artist, and yet another parent to an enormously successful offspring — his daughter, Charlotte Tilbury, is a millionaire with her own range of cosmetics that you will see in every department store. It wasn't long before everyone gave up the dinner and returned to more drinks and lines.

Shortly after dawn, about 6 am, I was standing around in the kitchen with Bobby, his wife Alex, and a few other people drinking and talking rubbish, when Bobby said he fancied taking the boat for a spin, and who was up for it. I for one was — any caution relating to getting in a speedboat with a man who'd been up all night partying and definitely shouldn't be driving to the port, let alone launching a boat — went directly into the wind, faced with a once in a lifetime chance to be in a speedboat on the Mediterranean on a summer dawn. Scott Fitzgerald here we come! Alex, needless to say, was none too keen on the idea, but two others were: Roger Middleton, a frightfully well spoken and frightfully rich chap, and a Notting Hill girl called Claudia, whose son Hopi recently married a Bollywood princess in a bejewelled ceremony. Maybe it's true, cocaine keeps you alert, but we drove safely in Bobby's car to the port, and duly launched the boat without much ado. Being a speedboat, in a flash we were out at sea and Roger had found Bobby's water skis, and was aboard them off the stern. Claudia and I dived off the side and had a swim, then Bobby said he'd like a ski, and would I like to take the wheel. I might have been off my head, but I grounded myself and remembered to remember never to forget driving a speedboat just off Ibiza across the Med' in the golden light. And there you are you see, I never have. 

When we moored back up again, we went in a bar in the port and had lots of Spanish sized gin and tonics and some eggs and bacon, being ravenous after the sea air and the unconsumed lamb. I recall Roger bringing a guy over to the table who he supposedly knew from the slalom in the Alps or something, a great big man, obviously very drunk but holding it together, who said he was a bobsleigh champion and bought us more G & Ts. When we arrived back at the finca it was about 11am and Colin, having grabbed a couple of hours kip or tried to, was back sitting by the pool playing his guitar. At some point during the previous evening, I had ascertained that Colin was driving the Merc' back to London in the middle of the following week and better still, we both lived West, him in Shepherd's Bush and Nina and I in East Twickenham. I now clinched the deal, determining that if we could get foot passenger tickets, we could come with him. That journey home was nothing if not an adventure, and will have to keep for next time.

Ibiza 1983 (2)

Ibiza 1983 

(2)

Coming back to my dawn arrival back at the finca, four hours later, I began Nina's job, which I did for a couple of weeks until she managed to get back to the island. It consisted of operating a studding machine to put poppers on cotton jackets and trousers, and ironing said jackets and trousers. Aside from Collette, Nina's other colleague was a Dutch girl called Geri, who was the pattern cutter, and extremely talented in that department; the following year she branched out on her own, sourcing fabric from South-East Asia and designing and making a collection of her own.

In addition to Collette and her son Pablo growing plants and trees in Canada, more testament to the creative inspiration of growing up on the island is that Jenny and Rod's two children, Jake and Gypsy, have both followed their father and become successful photographers and film makers, whereas Geri's son Joshua is a renowned classical guitarist, and her daughter Esther a best selling author in Holland, who lunched with Margaret Atwood the other year. Geri still lives in the same little house on the Agua Blanca road she was in then where, joy of joys, sixteen years ago she had electricity installed. All these children were schooled at the local Morna Valley School for children of various ex-pats. When I'd only been on the island a few days, Jenny and Rod had to go off to a parents' evening, and I learned there was a Morna Valley PTA — I have never since heard Jeannie C. Riley without singing along with the revised lyric! The then chair of said Morna Valley PTA was a big Englishman with a big character called Colin Casbolt. He is a fellow poet and has become a good friend over the years; he used to run a little bar called The Bolthole in Santa Eulalia which sold drink over the counter, poetry next to it, and a little something to fumar underneath it.

Working with Collette and Geri was a joy. They were super sensitive to how I must be feeling having made the effort to get all the way out there to see Nina, whilst obviously unaware quite how much effort re the forged passport and imminent withdrawals, and equally worried about what Nina was going through with her bereavement. Just before I'd left, and while Nina was already in Ibiza, I had made some shows for a pirate radio station my friend Danny Brunton was trying to launch, with the help of Joly Macfie from Better Badges, a good man to have involved if you want to subvert the system using technology. [He is still doing just that — I have just this minute seen a link to him doing it in the Big Apple, whence he fled from the VAT man in 1984, never to return as yet.] These were cassette mixes of rock 'n' roll, rockabilly, Chicago blues, etc., off my own 78s and 45s — same records I'm still spinning on the decks when I DJ now. I'd brought a couple of the cassette mixes with me, and we had a radio and cassette player in the workshop, where my selections went down a treat with the two girls. I lost touch with Danny Brunton, but looking at the rules etc. for a writing contest last year, there was one of those links you get to a video from last year's winner, and it turned out to be Danny. Here's hoping for a bit of osmosis!

One evening the three of us: Collette, Geri and I, went for dinner together in what is now also a restaurant, but was then just a local shop, called Josefina's tienda, but  where Josefina or one of her family would cook for you if you were local and knew them. The eponymous Josefina was a traditional Ibisenc widow, dressed entirely in black — back then if widowed women toiled in the fields in the heat, they were still always in black from head to toe. Collette told us, over dinner, that she had recently been looking for somewhere to live, and that Josefina had said she might have somewhere, as there were other properties in her family. Having turned up at the appointed time, Collette found two Americans Josefina was hoping to let a large finca to, there as well. After all four of them piling into the Americans' car — presumably the better option compared to Collette's Renault with the door hanging off — getting lost a few times, finding and viewing the large finca, there was no further mention of the property Josefina had in mind for Collette. It gradually dawned on Collette that, Josefina being a Catholic widow and old-fashioned, all she'd wanted was a chaperone so she could go out at night with two men, do some business, and make some money off them.

After the clothes had been manufactured in white cotton, Jenny sent them off to various local women she employed to launder and dye them. This necessitated various trips to 'the washing lady' and 'the dyeing lady', a source of continual amusement as, when Nina had first arrived and Jenny announced they had to go to the dyeing lady, she had thought she was going with Jenny on a mission of mercy, unrelated to work. On one of the first days I was there, I went with Jenny on a trip to the dyeing lady, with the two kids in the car, and we got a puncture, which was a steep learning curve for me, Mr. Impractical who didn't drive. Jen' just said could I change the wheel and, whilst being hopelessly impractical, I'd like to think I could turn my hand to gallantry if needed. There I was on a country road in a strange country, with a woman, two children and a car full of clobber. Not only did I rise to the occasion with Jenny's guidance, but the wheel stayed on. There is now a by-pass or ronda that cuts out the centre of Santa Eulalia, but then it was still necessary to go over the narrow curving bridge, which has just a thin barrier at waist height between you, your car, and the fifty foot drop to the long dried up river bed beneath. There were multiple accidents at night, usually lunatic drunken turista standing up in jeeps, and there usually wrecks visible from the bridge. As we crossed the bridge that day, cliché or not, my heart was in my mouth.

Whilst we had been driving along we saw a guy of about fifty in an immaculate white suit and hat tapping his way along the hedgerow with a stick. Jenny turned to me and said: 'That's Blind George, a famous island character.' A bit like when I first saw Bill Major from my parents' car standing in the afternoon outside the Junction Tavern in Raynes Park — aside from the fact that my mother had stupidly warned me against ever talking to people like that, not the case here — I immediately wanted to meet this man, which I did a few days later. William Burroughs says that, if you visit a strange city or country, what he terms your 'junk receptors' will kick in and alert you to possible scoring areas, or people. He's right. Lo and behold, it didn't take me long chatting to Blind George — whose sight was deteriorating, though he could still get by as long as he took care — to find out he had some very nice opium. From then on, if I met Blind George, not at a party surrounded by other people, in George's case generally beautiful girls, at least one on each knee, a quick glance would be enough for him to reach in one pocket for his ball of opium, and in the other pocket for his knife. There is nothing untoward in my relating this as, if you look on the website his children set up to commemorate him after he died the other year, his having long since retired to Mexico, the sample page of his autobiography displayed there talks about his penchant for opium. 

On the subject of junk receptors, a couple of weeks after that, just as things were starting to get pretty rough on the withdrawal front, necessitating an even more copious intake of alcohol, I was sitting one afternoon drinking a beer outside the public lavatories by the kiosko in the centre of Santa Eulalia, when I saw a guy come up the steps with a giveaway trail of blood running down the back of his leg. He was with another fella and a girl; they were from Madrid and dodgy as they come, and were probably on the island to rob tourists. However, despite being a bit taken aback by the size of the razor sharp knife the one that held the gear used to dole out the appropriate amount, they were alright to me. I used to run into them after that in late night bars and clubs down our end of the island, and they always sorted me out.

A couple of days after Nina left for London, Jenny also took the kids back to England for about ten days, to see family and sort out some business affairs. In the evenings, there would just be Rod & I, and there was quite a bit of while the cat's away scenario, bar crawling, cocaine ingestion and the like, most nights after we'd been out to dinner. It was before the Euro, and although my wages were only 400 pesetas an hour — about £2 — I did seven hours or so most days, and you could get an espagueti bolognese in Anita's bar for an hour's wages, plus all the local bars would let you run a tab. Tres Carabelas cigarettes, which I liked —untipped, with toasted blonde tobacco like American cigarettes, not black tobacco like Ducados — cost about 40 pesetas a packet. The packet was dark red with a picture of the three carabelas, or sailing galleons, on it.

Meanwhile Nina was having a hard time back home. Apart from having to help her sister with her mum's funeral arrangements, she had to keep an eye on her dad who liked a bloody drink at the best of times. Coincidentally he was a linguist like my dad, though of Russian heritage, and his father in turn had hung out in Tehran with the poet Basil Bunting and his renowned ménage de goodness knows how many. Anyway, on top of all that, Wee Johnny was losing the plot a tad, chasing the dragon into every corner of his room, and drinking loads. Slightly concerning was that he'd gone to Richmond Post Office to send a parcel of hashish home to Belfast, illegibly addressed due to the condition in which he wrote the address. He had also, I don't know why, left a contact number, and he'd had a call at the flat, asking if he could come down and re-address the package. Obviously, this wasn't a good idea, so Johnny was hundreds of pounds down, and both him and Nina were a bit paranoid. Thankfully nothing came of it. 

Fortuitously, Jenny being also in London, put Nina in touch with Bobby Schuck, a friend of hers who lived in Stafford Court in High Street Kensington — the block with the blue plaque for the singer Alma Cogan — who was due to come out to the island with a party, one of whom had dropped out, so he had a spare ticket that he gave to Nina. Like David Scott, my first manager in the music business, Bobby was a millionaire when I first met him. Also, like David, he's lost it and made it all back more than once, finally hanging on to enough to be going on with comfortably. Rod kindly took me to the airport, where I met Bobby and thanked him for his generosity to Nina, who had come through customs looking like the drug smuggler she once was, in a fetching floral frock, with her sunglasses in what was left of the Boy George style extensions she had, having hacked them to a manageable length in the heat, shortly after first arriving on the island. 

We got Rod to drop us in Santa Eulalia. It was about 9.30pm, just getting dusk, the time the locals walk their dogs, the shops have just closed, the main drag is winding down and the clubs and late night bars are gearing up to go. We went in a little bar we always liked called the Stop Bar, got a vodka limon, and Nina gently asked, as one might ask a bear its lavatorial habits, if I fancied a line of coke, as Bobby'd given her a gram to welcome her back to Ibiza, and because she'd been having a rough time. We went in a few bars in Santa, having more vodka and a line in each, then hitched a ride to Las Dalias, two thirds of the way back to San Carlos, where the famous hippy market was and still is. The bar on non-market weekday evenings, even now, is often a quiet bar for locals, and the measures of drink then were enormous in there. Somehow we managed to stagger safely to the last port of call, Anita's in San Carlos. When we left there, we rounded the corner and then stopped for would have been a lingering kiss and cuddle after being apart, had we not fallen into the ditch at the roadside. I landed, like a chalk drawing of where the corpse was, full on top of Nina; thankfully no serious injury was sustained, probably the age old thing of not bracing yourself for a fall if you're drunk. The doorways in old fincas are very low, and I already had a few healthy bumps on my head from walking into them, usually not so much drunk as hungover going to the bathroom. when I got up the next morning, I had an even bigger lump, and quite a large gash. I remember Jenny saying: 'You need some alcohol on that Auntie,' and my replying: 'Jen' it's got alcohol coming out of it!'
  
The week following my arrival was Midsummer night, and there was a gig at Las Dalias organised, with a big stage in their beautiful garden, which has coloured lights and a brook with a little bridge running through it. One of the first people I had met on the island was a great German girl called Helga. Her and her husband had run a bookshop in Tangiers in the 1960s and William Burroughs and Bryon Gysin were at their wedding, but more of that later. At that time, she was selling antiques and paintings out of her gallery in Las Dalias, and she kindly helped me blag a slot on the bill. I had my Gibson, but no amplifier, but was told there was PA, back line, etc. Indeed there was, but the main band, all jokes about not mentioning the war aside, were both German and definitely small 'n' nazis. 'You vill plug in zere,' they said, in proper Rover and Wizard WW2 German. I did as I was told, did a twenty minute or so solo set, and lots of people I'd never met came up to me afterwards and said how much they'd enjoyed it, despite the bizarre subject matter and my far from pitch perfect singing, including a fairly famous artist called James Taylor. No, not that James Taylor, nor the other one, but this one was also a fantastic talent. Lastly, regarding Germans, I was staying about fifteen years ago with Helga in her lovely house in the Morna Valley. One evening, I was just getting in my hire car to go to the village for an aperitif, and I asked Helga idly if she ever went in Anita's these days. She replied that it was rare, it was 'always full of bloody German.' I said: 'But Helga, you're German.' She raised her eyebrows and I got in the car.

Ibiza 1983 (1)

Ibiza 1983 

(1)

In June 1983, the first international runway I touched down on was the airport and gateway to the magical space and place that is the Isla Blanca of Ibiza. All true, I'd flown only twice before — once when I was about ten, to Birmingham — and not the one in Alabama, though on a Chuck Berry note, Ibiza was like the promised land when I got there — to stay with a university friend of my dad's, and once when I was thirteen, and my gran had taken me on holiday to Jersey for a week.

My partner, Nina, was working in a little cottage, or finca, industry sweat shop there for the fantastic designer who was soon to become my dear friend to this day, Jenny Macrae. [Jenny's surname was Westwood at that time; her then husband Rod, a photographer, is related to Vivienne Westwood's first husband.] It wasn't sweat shop in either ethos, or hours spent at machine or ironing board, but it was situated in a small outhouse with a corrugated iron roof which, despite being painted white, generated plenty of sweat in the Balearic midsummer heat. Nor was it really cottage industry, as the turnover was quite high, supplying the two major hippy markets on the island, as well as a couple of chic boutiques in Ibiza town. Nina's job came with accommodation in the beautiful traditional white Spanish finca just outside San Carlos, that Jenny and Rod rented, to which the little factory outhouse belonged. 

Nina and I had been together just over a year, and the time we got together coincided neatly with my getting my first decent private methadone prescription, from Dr. Paddy O'Connor at 108 Harley Street. Dr. O'Connor spoke in a lilting Southern Irish brogue, and was a former Air Commodore who had been decorated during the war. He was quite lax in his practice, as was customary, and would often come out with lovely off the cuff things. I have never been particularly enamoured of amphetamine and so, unlike with many of his other patients, to me he didn't prescribe the amphetamine Ritalin — now of course renowned as the drug that supposedly counteracts ADHD, but then popular with junkies because you could crush it up and inject it with your methadone ampoules, for a speedball effect. Being a posh junkie, or so I liked to think, I preferred some cocaine in my amps, when I could afford it. Anyway, one day he glanced up, in the middle of writing my prescription, looked at me over the top of his glasses, and remarked rhetorically: 'You've never really been a Ritalin man, have you?' in his soft brogue. I just let it pass, glancing over to the picture on the wall which, I'll always remember — it had a little brass plate as in a gallery, to tell you — was entitled 'Peat Bog', by Bingham McGuinness. Aside from this being such a quintessentially Irish title from an artist with such a quintessentially Irish name, the oil painting itself did what it said on the jar, being an indistinguishable, featureless blur of burnt umber and camouflage green, a bit like Turner in the undergrowth. That was in May 1982, and in mine and Nina's first year together, we consumed a lot of drugs, and sold a fair few too, not that I wasn't gigging, but I wasn't world famous either and a couple of gigs a month on the London pub rock circuit could not finance my new penchant for private medicine, never mind restaurants, clubs and other things I've always liked. Nina herself at that time refrained from getting her own script, and by June the following year, by which time I had migrated for my script to Dr. Ann Dally, in nearby Devonshire Place, she had had enough, or like many people before and since, told herself she had. 

Nina's friend Åsa, who had travelled with Jenny in the 60s in Southern Spain, and who also worked in the fashion and props industry, suggested that she could get Nina some work for the summer with Jenny, so after detoxing round at Dick Taylor's house in Twickenham off Nina went to Ibiza, leaving me and Wee Johnny Molloy from Belfast, her old friend and ex' and now our lodger, resident in her mansion flat by the river in East Twickenham, where we were bang at most things it's possible to be bang at, aside from people trafficking or living off immoral earnings. The snag, or fly in the ointment, in the masterplan was that Nina and I were really in love, so when she rang me from the little wooden kiosk in Anita's Bar in San Carlos, the only method of telephone contact back then, the finca having no landline — the kiosk is still there, though rarely if ever used these days — I realised she missed me as much as I missed her.

By the time she rang again the following week, being the impulsive and impetuous chap I am, I announced to her that I'd bought a charter flight to Ibiza for the following week. These were the days before budget airlines, where to get somewhere in Europe cheaply, you bough a return charter flight that came with a fictional holiday. If you wished to stay longer than the week or two the fictional holiday purportedly lasted, you simply advertised the return half of your ticket in a local bar, and then when you did want to return home, answered a similar advert' yourself. Charter flights, whilst often delayed, as they would be relegated to the bottom of the runway queue behind any scheduled airline flights at busy times, weren't too bad —you got a couple of free drinks and a plastic airline meal. 

Nina was, whilst pleased, more than a bit taken aback at the announcement of my imminent arrival, as I'd just gaily assumed that it would be cool for me to stay at Jenny and Rod's, not knowing that she was staying in a tiny box room that also housed Jenny's clothing stock. We arranged for me to call back to the little wooden kiosk in a few days, so as she could broach the subject with her employers and landlords, who were still very new friends. Bless them, they're top people and they acquiesced immediately, and Nina told me when I rang that they had said they would move her into a larger side room in the finca that opened onto the garden, not that they really had much choice, my inbound flight being a done deed. However, they couldn't have been nicer about it. Nina's final words, having said she could pay a friend and colleague in the sweat shop to drive her to the airport to meet me, were: 'There's no dole out here, Auntie. Everyone has to do something — you'd best bring your guitar.'

Now, I had no clear plan whether I was going to give up methadone or not, but I missed Nina like crazy, and Ibiza sounded beautiful — it was and is. Groves of oranges, lemons and avocados, and carobs and figs just falling on the path or road, far from any alcohol and ecstasy fuelled mayhem, but you can read all about that anywhere, well, as long as you read the right articles or books. I also knew, quite rightly, and as I proved when I successfully gave up methadone twenty years later, that it's a simple matter of perverse determination. Without that, the clearest and most concrete plan can go awry, such as the tried, tested and failed ones of burning one's address book in the fire, isolating oneself at one's parents' for a week, or even moving abroad. 


Part of my no clear plan — no clear, not nuclear, that's just what it wasn't — was taking the rest of that week's script with me, and seeing if I could get over it when it ran out. I therefore landed with a nice hit for Nina and I knowing, love or no love, that's half the reason she was looking forward to seeing me — we were addicts after all — and enough Physeptone tablets to 'hold me' for a week or so. I also went to the unnecessary bother of smuggling a piece of Wee Johnny's nice red seal black hash, unaware that the island was a smuggling haven, and awash with good fresh Moroccan hash. After I'd been there about ten days, Nina received word that her mum was terminally ill, and we managed to get her on a flight home, ironically the day before I should next have picked up a prescription, if I didn't burn my boats. Well it didn't last, but for two and a bit glorious months I burned my boats, bridges, the lot. I did the decent thing though, inasmuch as I said I would do Nina's job for Jenny while she was gone. We got a lift to the airport, and Nina's plane home took off at about 3am. I had no money left, which was ok because I now had a job and a place to live, but right then also no cab fare, so it was about 5am and dawn by the time I'd hitched and walked back to San Carlos. 

Back to my arrival ten days earlier, at 1am on a still, humid night. I'd barely been on a plane before, and hadn't been anywhere hot except Provence on holiday with my parents about thirteen years before, in fact exactly thirteen years before — it was 1970, the year Chelsea won the FA Cup, and I watched the winning replay in a café in Périgeux. After waiting ages at Ibiza airport after everyone else had gone for my guitar to emerge on the conveyor belt which, having my underpants full of drugs I could have done without — it was simply that they put the flight case in first and it came out last but...The other reason I could have done without it was that I had had to travel out there on a false passport, being technically wanted by the police. However, this had been the case since May 1980, and it was for historic shoplifting offences, so it was really just a case of not falling foul of the law for something else, and I wasn't exactly what the Flying Squad term 'active'. 

Applying for a passport, though, was definitely not a bright idea. However those were the days when, with one piece of proof of identity, you could get a one year passport in any main Post Office for £1, which enabled you to travel anywhere in Europe. My, how things change! Now this was one of the more inspired instances of thinking on my feet. I had a good friend at and after school, a fellow musician called Martin Woloszczuk, whose date of birth I could recall. I was also aware of his mother's maiden name, a key fact in being able to bespeak a birth certificate, which I knew how to do from my days as a legal clerk. Furthermore, I knew this because Martin's mum had recently got divorced, and they both hated his dad, so he'd reverted to his mother's maiden name of Hickey alongside her. Therefore: conscience clear, I could get a passport in his name because he wasn't using it any more himself. Best of all, who would forge a passport in a name with such a spelling? So, up to St. Katharine's House in Kingsway, where the Registry of Births, Deaths, and Marriages then was, back to Twickenham Post Office, job done, a pound well spent, possibly plus the fee for the birth certificate, but I probably told them to bill my grandfather's solicitors' firm. 

Walking out of the Ibiza arrivals hall with Nina, I smelled for the first time the now familiar smell of red clay earth and pine, and heard the crickets rubbing their little legs together in what I took to be a welcoming chirrup. Nina was with her, and very soon our friend Collette, a great girl from Canada. Her car was a battered maroon Renault 5, and the back door was held on by a bunjy, the first time I'd ever seen this. Strangely enough, a friend gave me a lift recently in his car where the door was also similarly affixed, and it brought that night right back. I was in wonderment as the pine wafted in on the warm night air and the crickets sang. The power of the island is such that I have now done that drive scores of times and the wonder never ceases, despite my now knowing what I'm anticipating. When we got to the bright lights of Santa Eulalia, the girls had a quick conflab, it was 2am, Collette had a three year old son who she'd left with a babysitter, covered by Nina's taxi fare — that's Ibiza for you, no-one was earning, no-one was losing out, just two people helping each other — and Nina asked me if I fancied a drink. Collette was living then in a Berber square-shaped yurt on a piece of land outside San Carlos. Her son Pablo now runs a successful plant nursery in Canada and Collette works with him, so maybe that gives you an idea of the inspirational power of Ibiza; that's why so many great painters and sculptors have always gravitated there. Anyway, the girls took me to a bar called La Villa with a lovely garden full of big palm trees and what Nina always calls 'expensive sounding pebbles'. 'This is only because it's a special occasion, Auntie' they said, 'we can't afford to go in places like this usually.' Well, I had ten weeks of special occasions, each one special in a different way, most of which I can remember, and some of which I shall tell you about.