The Nearest This'll Get To Tolstoy

The Nearest This'll Get To Tolstoy

Apart from Emile Zola having stayed at the Raynes Park Hotel when on the run after the Dreyfus affair, I don't think West Wimbledon, revolution and the great novel have a lot in common, but if you hang on in there, we will find another tenuous link.

In my first year of Senior School, I became friendly with a guy named Martin Beney. He was tall and quite well-built, but retiring or a bit removed much of the time. A couple of years older than me, a very intelligent man and a scientist, he was not himself a musician, but we had a mutual friend called Pete Keel. Pete played guitar in a school progressive rock band with some other friends of mine, called Zeitgeist, and in a funny kind of way, they were. Pete died about eight years later in a light aircraft or glider accident, and Jim Payne, who played bass on Halfway To Venezuela, in a hang-gliding accident a couple of years later. There used to be a joke about 'The Curse of Pus', and I am sure that's all it was, a joke, but the realisation of this dreadful coincidence is hardly reassuring. 

Working together with equipment mainly sourced by Pete, Martin and Pete installed a rudimentary 2 or 4-track studio in Martin's bedroom under the eaves of his parents big house at the end of a cul-de-sac called Durrington Park Road, off Pepys Road, Raynes Park, at the bottom of which my father still resides. I  was fourteen and had been writing songs for a year or so, and Martin said I could record a couple of them in his home studio and Pete would engineer. I promptly inveigled my dear friend Robin Bibi to play lead guitar on the session — I have inveigled Robin into many musical ventures over the last half-century or so, but I believe this was the very first one. Talk about setting a precedent, Robin and I are still collaborating, last time was when he played lead guitar for my London gypsy swing outfit, Douce Vitesse, a couple of years back. 

The session was duly scheduled for the following Saturday afternoon — I think we were supposed to have turned up for some sort of games at school on a Saturday afternoon; we didn't but we scheduled it for four o'clock to make it look convincing to our parents. On top of that I had had a barnstorming row in any case with my parents, and left home, or threatened to. This amounted to my turning up at Martin Beney's with a guitar and, as best I recall, a plan to leave school and join a rock 'n' roll band, a bit like Jim Maclean, played so well by David Essex in the film That'll Be The Day, which would be made two years later and the inspiration of which has never left me, did. He had a Ray Connolly script though - I didn't. As I recall my plan, such as it was, and what happened, was to do the session round at Martin's and then descend on my friend André Golay, whose parents lived in Devas Road, a couple of turnings down off Pepys Road, and ask to stay the night. Yes, the same André Golay I hit over the head with a lemonade bottle, leading to my expulsion and no money back on said bottle, not to mention the claret stained pavement all the way from KCS down Copse Hill to the Atkinson Morley Hospital, but that hadn't happened yet.

Robin is a couple of years older than me, so was sixteen and had a moped on which he turned up for our rendezvous at Beney Studios, his Fender Stratocaster slung across his back, like the highway chile he was. And still is. Robin told me afterwards he had either taken acid that day, or was recovering from taking it the previous night, I forget which. Anyway, we laid down two of my original compositions, both of which lacked any identifiable time signature, and Robin played  some great out-to-lunch Hendrix-y lead with lots of Cry-Baby wah-wah pedal, as was the fashion. Shortly after that Pete Keel, went up to university in Birmingham or Warwick or somewhere and obtained a part-time job or internship at BBC Radio Birmingham, which enabled him to get me an acetate 45rpm pressing of mine and Robin's session, which I still have...somewhere.

Martin Beney, like me, was quite into dope and more especially acid, but far from being a Bohemian household, like some of my friends' parents' houses, where I was lucky to hang out, Mr. and Mrs. Beney were, ostensibly, as straight as they come. His father was I think in insurance, wore a three piece tweed suit with a watch chain, and chain smoked about eighty Capstan Full Strength a day. It was a heavy smoking household, apart from Martin's mum, who from memory didn't smoke, but the passive smoking in that house from her husband, her son and his friends  — and we smoked pot as well as copious fags — must have meant she was on the equivalent of about thirty a day anyway. She was old-fashioned and frumpy in appearance, but with a very soft and caring nature. They had antimacassars on their parlour furniture, and in the fireplace an enormous teetering bridge-like structure composed of Capstan and Gold Flake packets. Martin smoked Gold Flake, whilst I in those days was a Players or Senior Service man, though when I was in the money I didn't mind a Sweet Afton or Passing Cloud from the posh tobacconist in Kingston — opposite Howard Conder's Music Exchange, where I went for strings, and where the first thing I ever bought after decimalisation was a top 'E' string. It was a lovely tobacconist, also a coffee and tea shop, where they sold loose camomile tea with flowers in.

So now we get to the quasi-Tolstoy bit.  A year or so after our recording session, Martin got swept off his feet in a whirlwind romance, and was married to a girl called Mishka, after which they not so much set up home as carried on as they were, at his parents'. The first I knew of any of this was when my friend Martin Woloszczuk, who was also in Zeitgeist with Pete Keel, told me he'd been to Martin's wedding. We were all heavy smokers then, and Martin's mum — an upbeat alcoholic with a Morgan sports car - told me Martin had let himself down at the wedding, as she'd got him a nice suit, but he'd had a box of household matches in the pocket. Mishka's story, for that it could only have been, was that she was Russian, and suffered a terrible riding accident as a girl, and was now a practising psychiatrist. You couldn't make it up, as they say, but I'm sure she did. My gran also used to say: 'you wouldn't read about it', but you will.

I met Mishka soon after their wedding. She was slender, quite beautiful, about ten years older than Martin, and spoke with some kind of authentic Russian or East European accent. At that time, a combination of excess LSD and traditional teenage angst were leading me to question many things, on top of which I had, in the past, been sent to a Harley Street psychiatrist at the instigation of my school. I'm sure she just chatted me up and lured me in, but I ended up having a couple of free 'consultations' with her, at the end of the second one of which she presented me with a few yellow 2ml. Valium tablets. I imagine they must have been part of her own prescription relating to a different story she must have told her own doctor, these being the days when you could spin a doctor a good yarn, particularly a private doctor, and get a good prescription in return, the awareness and advantages of which were yet to dawn on me fully. 

Soon after that, Martin and Mishka were apparently making mad and passionate love when his bed collapsed, and she ended up in the Nelson Hospital in traction. The latter was certainly true because I visited her in there. Mishka's cigarette of choice — you could sit up in bed and smoke in hospital in those days — was a menthol St. Moritz, in keeping I suppose with the Mata Hari image, although a Sobranie Cocktail would have been even more so. Come to think of it, she occasionally had a packet of them too. When I visited her, I remember she had a hundred cigarettes on the bedside table, St. Moritz and Gold Flake, which she was also partial to, the alternating turquoise and gold packets achieving the effect of a lovely rainbow nicotine installation. Soon after recovering, Mishka vanished. I've no idea what happened to her, but I guess Mr. Beney probably caught her in the act, or planning, of some fraud or swindle. I saw Martin but once since, a couple of years after that, in The Swan in The Ridgway, Wimbledon. He had 'pulled it back', as they say these days, and was reading chemistry at one of the London universities, as he should have been. He had a new girlfriend, who was roughly the same age, quite plain, and clearly fearfully intelligent. I'd like to imagine they're still together now, huddled over a mutual experiment in a laboratory, like the Curies. 

So, there we are, maybe not so much Tolstoy as Dostoyevsky — the tale of a man who was far from an idiot, but someone tried to take for one.

Prison

(1)

I rather thought, whilst the country was locked down in the interests of public health, now might be as good a time as any to tell you about the brief times I was locked up in the interests of department store profit health. 

As it happens, the first time wasn’t for shoplifting, or hoisting as it’s known in the game, but prescription forgery. My friend Morphine Steve’s girlfriend Caz, who later went out with my other friend Motorbike Jim, showed me how to do it. She wasn’t an especially literate girl, but she knew the form, as you might say. 

Bill Major, the man who first called me Auntie, having been aware that this knowledge had changed hands, happened to find himself in his GP’s surgery, whilst the doc’ had popped out of the room, with a prescription pad on the desk. It would have just been rude not to peel a few off. So whoop whoop, Bill’s your uncle, Pus is your Auntie, and away we went. It was July 1977, and two weeks after I’d been the front page headline story in the local rag, The Wimbledon News, with the headline: Public School Punk Rocks! This article, incidentally, was syndicated by my supposed mate Wensley Clarkson on said paper to the Sunday Mirror and Reveille, and I never saw a penny. Wensley has gone on to become a successful true crime writer, including an awful book on John Bindon which reads like Reveille and, not least, ‘Killer On The Road’ about Kenny Noye, in which he makes his subject out to be a psychopathic murdering thug. Well done Wensley, you were spot on — thing is, he’s just got out. Incidentally, Wensley was then going out with, and is still married to a girl called Claire Maconic, known locally as ‘The Parrot’, because she squawked like one.

Anyway back to the prescribing our own Diconal scenario — Diconal is a phosphorescent pink tablet manufactured with silicone, which one can crush up and inject, but carries attendant risks. It is an opioid but also induces visual and aural hallucinations and the Georgian coving and dado rail in my hallway are painted in the same shade of pink, for old times’ sake — like all good criminals, we knew when to stop, just we couldn’t, or didn’t. So the inevitable happened, and I cracked The Wimbledon News again, this time only on the inside pages, with the rather more inglorious headline: Punk rocker on drugs charge. However, this was after what, if I wanted to sound like a villain I’d call the trial, but was actually a hearing at Wimbledon Magistrates’ Court, where I pleaded guilty. 

To jump back to the bust itself, at my parents’ house in Wimbledon Park — I’d left home three years earlier but had to retreat back briefly — it could have been worse, because I’d burgled a chemist a few weeks before and also had large jars of Dexedrine, Diazepam, etc., in my bedroom but no Class A, as I’d failed to get the DDA cabinet off the wall. On actually gaining entry to the premises through the upstairs back window, there had followed an hilarious Laurel & Hardy moment when I had fallen through the false polystyrene tiled ceiling to the shop, and tumbled unceremoniously onto the floor in full view of the shop window, brightly lit with displays of nappies and lipstick. Anyway, whilst the police took said pills, that’s all they did and they were only interested in any remaining haul from the Diconal escapades, which was minimal, as they’re proper moreish, hence the recklessness.

My parents refused to stand bail for me: my mum was in Martini oblivion and my dad consequently at a low point anyway, and I think they thought a short sharp remand shock might work, if only because nothing else had. So off I went from the initial court hearing to Ashford Remand Centre in Middlesex. Although there were some big fellas there and it went off here and there, largely it was like junior school — you had meals in a dining hall, not off a tray in your cell, and there were young teenagers flicking peas at each other. I wrote to my dear friends the Sullivans, surrogate Godparents I might describe them, asking for a bail surety, and got the sweetest ‘no’ you’ve ever had. Anyway it was only two weeks, and I had one visit. Bill Major came to see me with another friend, Bill Wells who ran a British motorbike shop called Merton Motorcycle Spares. They brought me twenty Players’ cigarettes in two packets of ten, and the Major said they’d sort me out a lawyer. They did indeed sort me out a lawyer, who smoked dope and worked for Release and was cool. I only had one meeting with him, in a pub called The Horns by Shoreditch Church; it was a Monday lunchtime and they had topless dancers and strippers on. Anyway he might have been a cool guy, but the barrister he instructed was newly qualified and useless, and my uncle, a very successful solicitor still practising, though never really in criminal law, had to help me get a replacement.

So, moving on, after two weeks in Ashford, back I came in the meat wagon to Wimbledon Magistrates Court, where Bill Major and a couple of other pals had also organised someone to stand bail for me, an entertaining lunatic dipsomaniac Irishman called Mickey MacDonald who, all those endearing attributes aside — and I mean them to be endearing — ticked all the boxes, being a householder with no criminal convictions, or so he and we thought. However, when he went into court and took the oath, the police objected on the grounds that they had found a conviction from a few years before. This was when, in the company of a man named Mickey Friar, who was Oliver Reed, the film star’s, right hand drinking man, he had been charged with: ‘The attempted theft of a dolphin’. I was the one not laughing as the court wanted reports, and it looked like being shipped back to Ashford for a further three weeks. 

Anyway, I was allowed to make a phone call, and I rang my friend David Wynne, the sculptor, who lived in a beautiful house called Rushmere, next to the alma mater that had disowned me, well until punk rock that is, and who had an amazing bohemian household where I used to hang out. David Wynne after that sculpted the Queen Mother Gates to Hyde Park, but at that time had sculpted inter alia, the Queen and The Beatles; also the Taylor Woodrow tug-o-war over the Edinburgh Gates to Hyde Park. When I rang that morning, not only did he say he would come to the court and stand bail for me, but he was in full throttle in his studio, and arrived at the court and took the stand in his overalls with marble or granite dust in his hair. On top of that he liaised with my parents to have me back for the three weeks until the next hearing, so I was released. The surety was £500 and, as we were leaving the court, David Wynne took me aside and said: ‘You might think I’m a rich man, but if I lost that £500, I won’t be able to take my family on holiday this year.’ I nodded and he added: ‘I’m sure you will turn up for court, and I’m sure as it’s more or less your first offence you won’t go to prison, so come up and see me afterwards and let me know how you get on.’ I managed to keep a relatively low profile and duly did turn up and get two years’ probation. When I turned up at David Wynne’s afterwards he handed me an envelope with £100 in, saying: ‘I knew you wouldn’t let me down. That’s so you can go on holiday too.’ What a gentleman — I left a couple of days later and hitch-hiked all the way to John O’ Groats and onto the Orkneys, then back via mine and Bills Major and Wells’ friend Ginger’s place down in North Devon, but that’ll have to keep for another time. Before I left David, knowing I was a William Blake fanatic, gave me a copy of Blake's 'Songs of Innocence and Experience' with a forward by the great Blake scholar and brother to economist Maynard, Geoffrey Keynes, who was a friend of David's. It is inscribed: from Geoffrey Keynes to David Wynne 5 Jan 1973, and beneath that: and from David Wynne for Julian Isaacs 8th July 1977. I still have it.

So that was Ashford Remand Centre. Oh, I forgot, my gran sent me a radio in, which was proper handy. Also she was a housekeeper and companion to an aristocratic lady called Frances Chenevix-Trench in Alexander Square, South Kensington, where at one time the film star Ava Gardner lived next door. My gran was permitted to have me to supper once a week, although we ate, not with Mrs. Trench, but in the kitchen downstairs. When I went on the week following my release from Ashford to see my gran, she asked me if I’d come up and say hello to Mrs. Trench, which was the standard procedure. I’d get offered a glass of sherry and we’d converse for ten minutes or so. Being aristocratic, she loved the horse racing like my gran and I, so there was always something to talk about. This time I queried the invitation, asking my gran if she was sure about it under the circumstances, and she replied that Mrs. Trench had said she would like to see me. I went up into the first floor drawing room, where Mrs. Trench sat in her habitual armchair, dressed in her habitual purple. Purple is traditionally ‘semi-mourning’ and she was a widow and traditionalist and never wore any other colour. I bade her good evening, and she asked me to sit down, then she said: ‘Your grandmother’s told me where you’ve been. I wouldn’t worry too much about it — one of my ancestors was hanged in the Tower.’ Next stop Act Two. Two Years Later. HMP Brixton and Pentonville.

Venues in Hammersmith c. 1978-81

This entry follows a discussion on social media of the sad demise of the Clarendon Hotel in Hammersmith, where I played many gigs in the Basement Bar with Auntie & The Men From Uncle c.1980-83, including a Monday night residency with my pals The Satellites, where we alternated as the headline band. A few days ago I came across a photo in my scrapbook of one of these nights, at which some over-zealous Satellites fans had debagged me. 

This also occurred at another venue in the locality, The Kensington in Russell Gardens where, the following week I believe, I saw The Stray Cats at their first ever London gig, when they were sleeping on Keith Altham - The Rolling Stones’ PR man, inter al. - 's floor, and yet to have a record contract. The debagging at The Satellites gig was when they were supported by a one off outfit, later to morph into The Blubbery Hellbellies, featuring four bulky boys, namely Arturo Bassick, who went on to form and run said Blubs, Derek Gibbs, The Satellites’ singer - aka Dr. Strangelove -'s dad Big Del, Pete Haynes (Manic Esso from The Lurkers), and Johnny Pi R 2, The Satellites’ bassist. They played a selection of humorously rewritten punk classics, such as ‘Curry Up Harry’ and ‘No Buns’. It was the first night I’d had a home for months, as I’d that day moved in with my friend Mick O’Dwyer, known locally as Weird Flex, on what Derek Gibbs refers to as the Acto-Chizz border disputed, or yards from where W4 becomes W3, or the other way round, if you’re coming from Acton, of course. It was only a camp bed in a room that also contained a five string banjo which I tried unsuccessfully to master, various motorcycle parts, and Mick’s own single bed, but it had a landline, quite an important thing in those days, both for people on the lower rungs of show business and part time heroin dealers, both of which I was. Anyway, such stability being a not inconsiderable achievement, I thought it rude not to drink a gallon of lager to celebrate. 

Hammersmith venues also included the teddy boy stronghold The George, where in the punk-ted wars Derek Gibbs was brutally jumped upon. Moving down King Street, we come toThe Salutation, which I think is still extant as a ghastly overpriced gastro pub. My long time friend and musical colleague of over fifty years, Robin Bibi - also an original Blubbery Hellbelly, despite being of slender build, as they needed an exception to prove the rule, plus he’s bloody fantastic on the guitar - used to play there with an Irish Country band called Pat & The Lamplighters, lovely warm hard drinking Irishmen, who had a Sunday night residency there. I went with him once for something to do, and was sitting there at the bar listening to the band and minding my own business, when the IRA bucket came round. Luckily I realised what it was, and luckier still I had some money to put in it. 

The Swan which was on Hammersmith roundabout by the Metropolitan line tube station, is still a pub by another name - I know that because I’ve ‘watered the horse’ in there a couple of times in recent years - where Robin also used to play regularly a couple of years earlier in a great funk band called Panties. The two singers in Panties, one of whom was Robin's then girlfriend Kim, whose dad was a famous British jazz sax player, and Maz, who went out with the Panties drummer, an ex-member of NYJO whose day, or rather night, job was playing in the house band at the Savoy Hotel, went on to be Paul Young's backing singers, The Fabulous Wealthy Tarts. I was there watching them once on a weekday evening with my pal Adam Cox, a man the size of my dear friend Arturo Bassick/Arthur Billingsley, i.e. six foot two, eyes of blue, and eighteen stone, who at that time had his blonde hair cropped and dyed pink and blue, and was dressed entirely in black leather, when the chap I had hit on the head with an R. White's lemonade bottle at public school, André Golay - after not inconsiderable provocation, I might add - leading to my expulsion from said school, walked in - he’d come as he had maintained contact with Robin and I think they’d written some songs together - but on glancing round and seeing first me, then Adam, swiftly egressed. The other guitarist in that band was a man named Pete Flaskett, who had a day job in Roka's guitar shop in Denmark Street, and who was not only a great player, but an hilariously funny man. The bass player in Panties was a good looking, smooth talking, top player called Sam Harley, who was in the rag trade by day and had a stall in St. John’s Wood market. He went on to be in The Lucky Saddles with both Robin and Arthur, inappropriately named after what chaps on building sites shout after beautiful girls on bicycles. I say inappropriately as everyone thought they were a country band, lots of people didn’t know the saying anyway, and they played Arthur’s beautiful, but quite weighty in content, home compositions. I managed this great outfit for a few months in 1981 but that, as they say, is another story.

Start It Up

Start It Up

I think I’m probably more of an ‘in medias res’ man, than a ‘to begin at the beginning’ one, but just for once I shall endeavour to start at the start. 'They' say, or was it Sherlock Holmes said: 'always expect the unexpected', but my dad didn’t until my mum was. My father was and is an Oxford Modern Languages scholar, and my mother was a society girl from Sydney, besotted with an archetypal Oxbridge Englishman. He in turn was equally in love with her.

I only found out I was ‘unexpected’ by chance when I was just coming up to my eighteenth birthday and working as a legal clerk, fishing about sometimes in the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, then in the Kingsway. As I was already well set on going off the rails, it was like a red rag or a green light or both, but we’ll come back to that. My two grandmothers, both of whom I trusted and was inordinately fond of, informed me when I confided in them, that I was very much wanted. My mother, seven years older than my father, was posh Aussie through and through and must have been much in love to have suffered damp, cold, smog, and the smell of fried or over-boiled food, which she refused to cook or consume. They had some rooms in Summertown in Oxford; it was the summer of 1957 and my father had not so much flunked his finals at Teddy Hall, as got a 2:2 when he was destined for a first, because he had other things, i.e. me, on his mind.

Soon after my birth my father got a job teaching French and German at Bushey Grammar School and we moved to a house in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, which belonged to my paternal grandmother, following my father’s parents having bought it as a self-evacuating wartime sanctuary. It was, and still is, at the end of the Metropolitan line, so the first thing Sherlock Holmes would have found, if he’d hit the trail at Baker Street and then fallen asleep after a night on the pipe (in both senses) would have been me, or at least the nearest station to my house. Please note that Sherlock Holmes is fictional, unlike any events you read about here, although there's quite a lot of not expecting the unexpected.

In Amersham our neighbours on one side were a family called Padgham. The father, Charles, made and played keyboard instruments, such as clavichords, in the garden shed, and they had a son and daughter a couple of years older than me. The son, Hugh, went on to produce Genesis and, bizarrely, features in one of the bits in American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis, where the author uses the literary trick of diverting from extreme horror by bringing in something mundane, to accentuate the horror when we return to it, and talks about Genesis.

At Sunnyside, the name of the house at 16 Woodside Close, and the only residence I've ever had with a name, we were quite not poor but basic, and we had a horsehair sofa, which the stuffing was escaping from, and I remember my mother making a joke about it being all horse and no hair. We also had a lodger called Laszlo, a Hungarian refugee, whose appearance I cannot recollect at all, but possibly my first awareness of global goings on was when my dad told me about 1956, and how Laszlo and his family had been listening to Radio Free Europe until they announced they’d have to go off air as the Russian tanks were rolling down the street. I recalled this in the 90s when my friend Simon Tickner married his gorgeous Hungarian girlfriend called Wendala at Brixton Registry Office, and our mutual friend Roger Patron not only successfully hired a tank to take them to the registry office but also inveigled the police into closing Brixton’s one way system. It was an expansive and expensive gesture, but no-one had quite thought it through. Roger told me how it was only when Wendala’s parents arrived from Hungary on the eve of the wedding, that it dawned on him they were exactly the age to have witnessed the events of ‘56, and sure enough...

Not much else occurred in Amersham, other than my Australian grandfather sending the money for me to have a shiny new red and blue tricycle, and I remember excitedly but nervously awaiting the trunk call where I heard his voice the one and only time, and got, or was instructed, to thank him. He was a successful Sydney accountant, and a prominent occupant of the 19th hole at his golf club to the point of dipsomania, and came according to my late brother’s genealogical research from impeccable convict stock, an ancestor having been a Jewish jeweller in the City of London, who was transported after a forgery conviction. He died the following year, leaving my mum a bit of money and lots of addictive genes, if there are such things. The money helped us buy a house in Raynes Park, on the outer edge of South-West London in early 1961, after my dad got a better job at King’s College School, Wimbledon. As for the addictive genes, you will hear quite a lot more about them, whether there are such things or not. 

To complete the Australian maternal grandparents, my mum’s mum, Nell, came over to England to live, following not so much her husband’s death, but more their divorce. In fact, she might have already been here when he died. She is the gentile element on the maternal side making me three quarters Jewish but definitely not Jewish. She came from a Liverpool Irish family called Cooney, who emigrated in the 1860s from a Liverpool that was nearly as starving as Ireland, and landed in Melbourne, slap bang in the middle of the Ballarat Gold Rush, so happy days. My gran Nell arrived in England just in time to accompany me up to London on the train when we moved, my parents having gone in advance to wait for the removal van, as you do. I don’t remember the view from the window or the stations but I remember it being just me and her and my beloved bunny Barrington, whom I’ve had since the day I was born, sitting on the seat next to me. At 131 Grand Drive, the 1930s pebble-dashed semi that was our new abode, we were still quite but not poor, but now my mum had limited funds of her own and Ideas! So instead of a horse hair sofa losing its stuffing, we had a Victorian sofa, newly upholstered in gold velvet, on which we were only allowed to sit when we had guests.