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.