Prison, A Prelude: Dolphins & Sureties

Sometime in early summer 1977, a pad of purloined prescriptions came into my possession. As luck would have it, my mate Morphine Steve's girlfriend Caz was able to show me how to fill them, so that they could then get filled by a pharmacist without arousing any suspicion: the necessary abbreviations and bits of Latin, etc. Ironic, as I'd got my Latin O-level prior to being kicked out of public school, and she most definitely hadn't; not being unkind, but I doubt she had an English Language one. 

[Steve had his eponymous nickname because he was the only member of our using gang who had an injectable morphine, rather than heroin or methadone, 'script'. He was a good lad, a biker who offered me a BSA Bantam and a George Doland maroon wool and mohair drape jacket, with black velvet trim and collar. I was far too scared to accept the former, and gleefully delighted to accept the latter, which I kept and wore for many years. He had 'morph' and 'coke' tattooed on his fingers, instead of the more ubiquitous 'love' and 'hate'. Caz later went out with another biker friend of ours, 'Motorbike Jim' Vine, who had a motorcycle shop on Haydon's Road, South Wimbledon.]

Anyway, to begin with everything went delightfully according to plan. Copious amounts of Diconal were acquired (a luminous pink synthetic opiate pill one could crush up and inject — very popular at the time. My hallway is painted in that colour now. A warped nostalgia possibly, but it's a lovely colour). Like all criminals, getting out while the going was good was not in my lexicon of larceny, and in due course the inevitable occurred. I'd been on probation already, and missed a good few appointments, so when my sweet probation officer, who had the air and appearance of a middle aged primary school teacher, came to visit me in the cells at Wimbledon Police Station, she apologetically told me that, as they say, was all she wrote as far as probation was concerned. I ruefully accepted it, was held overnight, and the following morning, my poor parents still reeling from the police coming to our house with a warrant — a chaotic lifestyle having forced me to retreat there to stay for a while — felt unable to stand surety for me, or to have me living there, so off I went to Ashford Remand Centre. My uncle, a solicitor, had come to court not to act for me, but to advise my parents, etc., and I think he'd brought me a couple of packets of Senior Service, which you were allowed to have on remand, and I didn't have much of a junk habit, so not too hard a landing on the landing, you might say. It was a funny place, they were nearly all little kids in for TDA (taking and driving away as it was then called), and inconsequential stuff like that. The screws were unbelievably racist, calling all the black kids Sambo etc., but there wasn't anything I could do about it. It wasn't particularly unnerving as I was one of the oldest 'boys' in there; I didn't really see any tear-ups and my cell mate was closer to my age. He was alright and liked a game of cribbage, as do I, and he showed me the ropes. 

I wrote a couple of unsuccessful letters trying to find someone to stand bail for me when I went back to court, the sun was out on the exercise yard, and the time passed quite quickly. Halfway through the second week, I got called for a visit, and it was Bill Major (the man who first called me Auntie), and Bill Wells (another bike man who had been out in India and also later had a bike shop in Wimbledon Chase). They'd come on one of Bill Wells' bikes; as they were nearly twice my age and Bill Major probably cast the kids in the visiting room getting visits off their mum, some menacing glances in my interests, I think that helped me get left alone too. They apologised for not bringing me any dope, but they'd brought me ten Player's each, and the Major said he'd get me a solicitor for when I went back to court. He duly did, albeit not a very competent one, but that still didn't solve the surety problem.

After the fortnight's sojourn had expired, on a nice sunny June morning, off we went bright and early in a proper grown-up meat wagon — not that that stopped the little bastards making as much racket as they could on the metal roof and compartment doors — and in due course I was deposited at Wimbledon Magistrates Court. As said solicitor had sent a barrister, I wasn't put in the cells across the road, but allowed to be in the lobby with him. He told me that some of my friends had found someone to stand bail for me, which was set at £500, and that my parents said I could reside there; I think they hoped I'd had a shock, and they were certainly far from heartless, though not about to risk £500 they didn't have. The gentleman who said he'd stand surety for me was a lovely lunatic Irishman called Mickey (pronounced Muckey) McDonald, who was the same age as the two Bills, had always grafted, and thus owned his own house off Wimbledon Broadway. [If you're a householder, you don't actually have to show the money for a surety.] However you do have to undergo a criminal record check. Muckey was aware of this, but to his knowledge had no convictions. He duly took the witness stand, only for the prosecution solicitor to tell the magistrates they had found he had a conviction for, I kid you not, the attempted theft of a dolphin a few years before. His partner in this escapade had been a fellow named Mickey Friar, a small time gangster and chum of the Krays' buddy Joey Pyle, who was based in nearby Morden. More to the point, Mickey Friar was a great pal and drinking buddy of local celebrity dipsomaniac Oliver Reed, so I guess that makes the dolphin episode a whole lot more believable.

Bottom line, no bail through Muckey, but my brief got the clerk to ask the magistrates to put the case back an hour to give me the opportunity to try and find an alternative. I'd already had a 'sorry but no' from my first alternative whilst on remand, and racked my brains to think of someone else. In the end I rang my friend David Wynne, the renowned sculptor of The Queen, The Beatles, and later the Queen Mother Gates in Hyde Park, whose beautiful bohemian house was one of my main sanctuaries then. [I was friends with his stepson Johnny, who'd been the last person before me to get expelled from our alma mater; an amazing luthier.] I wasn't too hopeful, but whoever answered the phone went and got David from his studio, and to my relief, he said he'd do it and be at the court as quickly as he could. He was there in no time, still in his overalls covered in granite, or chalk, or marble, or something dust, and I can see him now standing in the witness stand like that. Bail was duly granted and outside the court, after chatting to my parents who were also friends of his, David took me aside and said that I might think he was a rich man, but if he lost £500 his family wouldn't have a holiday that year, adding that he had every confidence in me.  Now as well as the aforementioned, one of his most famous sculptures is the 'Boy With A Dolphin' one, for which the model for the boy was his son Roly, a tortured genius who died tragically young. So a bad luck and a good luck dolphin in the Free Auntie Pus campaign.

Meanwhile, whilst on the three week bail for reports, the burgeoning Auntie Pus career was about to go semi-stellar. During this time I first supported The Damned at Hastings Pier Ballroom: a great gig, little did I know that would be the best I'd ever go down doing a Damned gig. The court reports recommended a suspended sentence, so I was quite bright on my return to court. David Wynne had rung me up to say he was sure it'd all be fine, and to pop up afterwards and see him to let him know how it went. It was as fine as it could be inasmuch as I was at liberty, and I told my parents I'd promised to go and see David. A quick bus ride and I presented myself at his stunning house on Wimbledon Common, Rushmere. [It's next to the school Johnny and I had been unceremoniously dismissed from, and these days the headmaster's residence.] David came to the door, shook my hand, and gave me an envelope, saying: 'I knew you wouldn't let me down. I can go on holiday now, so I think it's only fair that you can. Here's £100 — get yourself away somewhere for a bit.' He also gave me an illustrated edition of Blake's 'Songs Of Innocence and Of Experience', knowing that I was a Blake acolyte. Not any old edition, but one previously given to him by his friend Sir Geoffrey Keynes, the prominent Blake scholar and brother of Maynard the economist, with an introduction by Geoffrey. I do not have to consult the court records to find the date, for it is inscribed, on the inner front cover: 'David Wynne from Geoffrey Keynes 5 Jan 1973', and beneath: 'and from David Wynne for Julian Isaacs 8th July 1977'. What an amazing man. The next day, I set off to hitchhike up North and just explore. Having taken the tube to Hendon Central to access the M1, I had a little browse in a shop that sold windup record players, and speaker horns, needles and other accoutrements, and then bought a copy of Record Mirror. Thumbing to find the gig review section, I found a glowing one of my gig with The Damned. As I jumped up into the first lorry that stopped for me, I rather thought it should have been a limo. Delusion's alright — it's when you delude yourself you're not deluded that you're in trouble.

The Vortex

 The Vortex

When I first played with The Damned at Hastings Pier Ballroom in July 1977, their agent Nick Leigh from the Derek Block Agency was there and, in the dressing room, told me that he'd enjoyed my set and that he promoted top punk venue The Vortex, as well as DJing there. [I have a good friend these days who's an academic; he's one of the world's leading experts on Wyndham Lewis, but as Vorticism goes, this was one maelstrom further altogether.] Anyway, Nick gave me his card and told me to contact him. 

When I rang he was good as gold and duly gave me a date at The Vortex on Halloween night to support The Ants — with Jordan singing back then — and Siouxsie & The Banshees. There was another band on before me; they were called The Void and I have no recollection of them, but about fifteen years ago, I was reading the memoirs of a posh boy junkie called Sebastian Horsley, who died not long after, and lo and behold, it turned out he was in The Void. So a posh boy junkie and not very posh boy junkie on the bill that night. Posh he might have been, but I'll bet he didn't arrive at the venue and see in the queue going round the block, a dozen or more of his friends who had come from the posh suburbs to support him. I will further bet even more money that no-one said, as they handed him a syringe loaded with morphine: 'There ya go, Jools, it's in the gun.' [I very responsibly kept it till after my set.]

I was at the time living at my gran's flat in Holland Park. My friend Adam Cox, another posh junkie, who had close-cropped blonde hair with red and blue dye in, and was dressed that night from head to foot in studded black leather, so at about eighteen stone and six feet, an imposing character, came to call for me and, guitar in my hand, we hopped on the Central Line into town. I can't remember if we alighted at Oxford Circus or Tottenham Court Road, as Wardour Street is equidistant between the two, but guess the former as it comes first.

When we got to the venue, they were indeed queueing around the block, and I was amazed to see so many of my pals there, including Bill Major, the man who'd called me Auntie in the first place, and who never left our manor, unless to see an American bluesman at the 100 Club. He had on his signature green and white striped rugby shirt, but luckily in view of the crazy pogoing that ensued inside, he had by then swapped the leather Indian sandals he always used to wear, for a pair of twelve hole Dr. Marten's. Also there were my pal Bob Wilson [known as Watson, or sometimes Sonny Boy, because once when under the influence he had been trying to talk about Sonny Boy Williamson and had inadvertently said Sonny Boy Watson], who was right down the front when I was playing and dancing like a maniac, whilst another punter set his hair alight on the floor next to him; my dear friend Robin Bibi, who would play on my single the following year, and with whom I've been playing on and off ever since; with Bill was a fella called Bob The Bins (for obvious reasons) —he had been a semi-respectable sales rep about four years earlier but had fallen into bad company i.e. us lot in the pub, and rather gone adrift. He was the one who handed me the works. My pal Glenn Mason, known as Coco for equally obvious reasons, was in attendance too.

My manager David Scott had also come up to Brighton with some pals to support me, and do some networking; it was David who had promoted the Hastings show, and I think his partner in crime Phil Church was with him. Their main income was from a car front they had — I don't know what motor they were in that night, but he always turned up in something eye-catching; the best was a white Rolls Royce like John Lennon's. When I got inside, one of the first people I saw was my other dear friend Arturo Bassick from The Lurkers, who was in conversation with Jimmy Pursey from Sham 69. I don't think they were pals, although the Sham bassist is a friend or ours, rather just two people in up and coming punk bands. Anyway the fact that I had known Robin since we were in our early teens at my public school, and Arturo since the school I went to after that one expelled me, made seeing them both there all the more emotional. As an aside, they didn't meet each other (through me) until 1980, but after that they played together in my band The Men From Uncle, and in Arthur (Arturo)'s bands The Lucky Saddles and The Blubbery Hellbellies.

I can't tell you much more about the gig — I was high as a kite on nerves beforehand, elated afterwards and don't remember much of the main bands, except for Jordan's amazing coxcomb hair, and Siouxsie's whole look. The following year I saw The Banshees at Kingston Coronation Baths and they were magnificent, and more enjoyable for me because I wasn't distrait and floating on air. I don't even recall shooting the morphine up — I think I might even have kept it till I got home to Holland Park. Nick Leigh paid me the kingly sum of ten pounds, and Damned tours and downhill slopes beckoned.

The Posh Boys' Blackboard Jungle (1)

I began attending King's College Junior School, the preparatory school attached to KCS Wimbledon, the public school, at which my father was a modern languages teacher, in September 1965, having sat the entrance examination a few months earlier. Within what was seen at the time to be my outstanding and precocious  academic prowess, lie the roots of my downfall, my road to hell lined with good intentions, and any number of other proverbial clichés. In short, my marks were so high that the KCJS Headmaster, Mr. Peter Gibbs, approached my father and said that they thought I should be placed straight into the second year. [Less than three years later, he'd be saying to my father that I needed the services of a good psychiatrist, and that he could recommend just the fellow. But, as the narrator in G.F. Newman's The Corrupted says, there I go, getting ahead of myself. Good narrative device, Mr. Newman, please take it as a compliment.] In all fairness, I can see why my dad, a very intelligent man, must have seen this as an accolade, and delighted in his first born son being being a chip off the jolly old block. Sadly, I was a chip soaked in paraffin due to ignite shortly. The initiating tip of the fulcrum the wrong way was that, the logistics of the combination of being born in August, and the academic year starting in September, meant that I was twenty-three months younger than the eldest boys in my glass. As I'd just turned eight, that meant they'd already lived nearly a quarter of my life again. The obvious compensating factor would have been if I were any good at sport. I am not and never was. I like a jolly old politically incorrect football chant, and I have always adored Test Match Special, but I have been short-sighted since I was six and, throw a ball of any size anywhere near me, and I either duck, flinch, or both and more besides. The only minor redeeming factor was that we played association football in the first year, so I had to wait until the following year to have my ears rubbed raw in the rugby scrum, between two boys two years older, and at least two stone heavier, whilst having all the skin taken off my knees, as they rubbed on the ridges of frozen mud beneath. The only difference from Ypres was there were no shells. However, I recall no birdsong either. So there you are, I started life at KCJS as a rising star, but one on the old hiding to nothing and, akin to my career in show business, also destined to be up and down from then on, with a lot more declines than inclines.

Before I ever developed a carapace of eccentric style, I was always unusual. I think it came from my mother, who certainly was. Anyway, being unusual is the worst possible outcome for any school pupil, and even more so pre-teen ones. It wasn't long before I began to be, not so much physically bullied, but taunted, mocked, and picked on. I was singularly inept at dealing with any of this — usually I'd react by trying to draw attention to myself by taking my shoes off, throwing them at the culprit, and then throwing myself in a playground puddle or something. One lunchtime — I don't think I was being harassed, I just felt entirely alone — it all got too much, and I ran back to our empty classroom, found my desk, the old wooden ones with the inkwell in, flung the lid up, and started to howl. Then I thought of Amersham, Buckinghamshire, where we lived till I was three and a half, and the horses in the field I used to feed on the way home from nursery school. When I rubbed my eyes a few minutes later, there was that black puppy in my desk, sleeping softly. I can't tell you the date, but I can tell you that was the day a switch flicked in my life.

————————————————————————

Not long before starting at King's, I had been with my dad to watch a school cricket or rugby match, and my dad had introduced me to a man called Tony Hein, then in charge of the first form at KCJS. He was a young guy, about thirty, roughly contemporary to my dad, ginger haired, smiling and lively. He told me he looked forward to having me in his class. Due to my jumping that year, this was unfortunately never to be. However, Tony Hein is indeed a lovely guy, a keen rugby player, who was extremely popular with the boys. In I think my second year, he married a glamorous French girl. 

Cue: Vintage Sports Car digression #1

After Tony Hein's wedding, the Assistant Head of Music, Walter Taylor, drove him in his vintage Daimler convertible in a lap of honour around the quad, while all the boys lined the perimeter and cheered. [We will come, in due course, to the issue of pederasty. How could I write a memoir of life at a boys' public school and not mention it? Anyway, suffice for now to say that said Mr. Taylor was a fully paid up member of said society.] This interlude has the happiest of endings, in that Tony Hein and his wife are both still thriving, and I recently made contact with both him and his daughter via social media.

The other happy thing that occurred in the third form was that my dear friend Jason Steger came to the school. We hit it off straight away — both inveterate readers, and Jason managed to be cool whilst still having a great big heart and never mocking me. He soon took me home to meet his parents — his father was an Austrian aristocrat and his mother an intellectual Englishwoman, with a rich county accent — in their beautiful house in Wimbledon Village. Jason's mother Joan, was very academic and also a great reader, whose one weakness, or nod to popular culture, was a liking for the soap opera Crossroads on TV. A bizarre coincidence: she herself reminded me a little of Noele Gordon who starred in it. Jason and I have never really lost contact — he has for decades been the Literary Editor on The Age in Melbourne, and we've had a couple of reunions over there. Give me  three more decades, I'll tell you. Suffice for now to say that the Stegers extended to me acts of generosity in the face of adversity, that far exceeded the hand of friendship. Allow me to get ahead of myself again a touch. Next door to the Stegers lived the Tubbs family, the two sons of which, James and Jonathon, are friends of mine too, though we didn't meet till Senior School. Cue:

Vintage Sports Car Digression #2

James, the older Tubbs brother, acquired in his teens, a beautiful vintage Alvis convertible. One balmy summer's night a couple of years after 'leaving' school, when our local — the Hand-in-Hand on Wimbledon Common, opposite our school — closed, and we extinguished our jazz cigarettes, the guitar pickers packed up their instruments and headed back to someone's gaff for more drinks, music, and obviously jazz cigarettes, a rich young guy I barely knew called Roderick invited me along with James and a couple of girls back to his parents' house in St. George's Hill, Weybridge. And off we went, in James' Alvis with the top down. We lived in a lovely Victorian house in Wimbledon Park then, in a quiet tree lined street, and with a lovely garden with over a hundred rose bushes, so not too shabby, but we didn't have George Harrison for a neighbour. I think we only stayed a couple of hours, and just smoked a couple of joints, played some albums, and had some snacks. However I was about sixteen and all the others three or four years older, and it felt proper sophisticated. I don't know remember if there were any stars twinkling over the stockbroker belt, but it felt there were. There were no iced swans, nor any frolics in or around the pool, not even a cheeky line of Charlie but, when a couple of years later, I fell in love with F. Scott Fitzgerald, on reading The Great Gatsby I thought of that excursion. I also confess, en passant, that I didn't mind the film they made of it a couple of years down the line, with Mia Farrow and Robert Redford, which was generally critically dismissed.

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.