Auntie Takes A Trip - an assortment from the King's Road, Chelsea

Auntie Takes A Trip - 

an assortment from the King's Road, Chelsea

In my last year at King's College School, Wimbledon in 1971-2, a new master was appointed to the History Department. [I wasn't taking history, as there was a choice between that and German for 'O' level, and I elected to do German, in deference to my father, who is a modern linguist and taught at the school. However, for obvious reasons, he ensured I wasn't in his classes, which meant I was taught, or rather not, by a dipsomaniac called Basil Carew-Hunt, who had a nicotine yellow moustache, an MBE for being the governor of a province in Allied Austria during the war, and spent a lot of his time sitting with a schooner of sherry at the bar of our local, The Hand-in-Hand, opposite the school on Wimbledon Common. And yes, it was my local when I was still in the fifth form.] Anyway, back to the new master, whose name was Paul Scutt, and who had just come down from Cambridge, after obtaining a double first in history, the only man in his year to do so. He was our form master for that year. Paul was an outsider, a maverick and brilliantly intelligent, and he fitted in to KCS like a star going into the round hole of a children's toy box. Many of my close friends got on well with him, but he and I struck up a real bond. Prior to the 'O' level examinations that summer, I had committed one too many atrocities at the school, and been expelled, but informed that I was allowed on the school premises to sit my exams, as long as I wasn't caught in the grounds more than fifteen minutes either side of them starting or finishing. [The day I sat the last of my 'O' levels was a gorgeous summer's one. School's Out by Alice Cooper was in the charts and blasting out from somewhere. It reached No. 1, but on consultation, I find that whilst it was in the charts then, it only reached No. 1 a few weeks later, and that what was actually in the top slot that week was Take Me Bak Ome by Slade, which is quite appropriate too.] Earlier that year, Paul Scutt had also fallen foul of the authorities for various matters of undue leniency with the pupils, including turning a blind eye to boys looking things up or at their notes, whilst he was invigilating examinations. The upshot of this was that he too had been expelled, or rather sacked, also with effect from immediately after the examinations — I presume despite everything, it still saved them paying out to drag someone out of retirement to cover Paul's share of invigilating duties. I expect you must be wondering what on earth any of this has to do with the King's Road, Chelsea. You are about to find out. 

Paul Scutt gave me his number and, a month or so after school was out for both of us, I gave him a call. He asked if I'd like to come up and visit him and his mother for tea, at their home in World's End. Now, from before I was old enough to shop for my own clothes, the one shop front of all the amazing independent boutiques in the King's Road that allured me, was Granny Takes A Trip. It was generally opaque, and they changed it periodically. At different times it had, inter alia, half a car body sticking out, and a mural of a Red Indian squaw in a headdress. As soon as I was old enough to shop for my own clobber, I was hanging out in Kensington Market and Biba, where my mum had let me have an amazing light blue/green felt fedora with a 3" wide black ribbon, to wear to my Uncle's wedding at St. John's Wood Synagogue in 1970 — it certainly put the older gentlemen's koppels in their place! Kensington Market, incidentally, was where in 1971 I first sold Xeroxed pamphlets of my poetry at 10p a pop, redolent with ethanol, as photostats were then. Soon after that, I ventured with great trepidation into Granny Takes A Trip for the first time, and was soon to be befriended by the proprietors, two of the coolest dudes I've ever met, Gene Krell and his co-owner Marty, both from San Francisco, the hippest place to be from back then. Well, along with Swinging London, whence they'd come.

Nothing in Granny's had a price tag — they priced everything according to the customer's pocket. The Rolling Stones used to shop in there and I have every confidence both that Gene would have charged Mick Jagger £200 for a pair of socks, and that Mick wouldn't really have minded. Whilst I, obviously, was at the other end of the fiscal spectrum. I remember once looking longingly at some shirts, asking Gene how much they were, and him replying that they were £35 each, a lot of money then. Realise, however, that there were only a couple of each design, they were in the most amazing glitter or cotton satin material, had darts in the back, ivory collar bones etc. My face must have fallen, and  Gene said: wait there a minute. He disappeared into the stock room in the basement, and soon returned with an armful of shirts, saying that they were seconds and I could have two for £20. A minute ago they'd been £35 each! The seconds only had a button missing or a tiny bit of crooked stitching — what a gent! 

Now my mother was a terrible snob, but also a great seamstress, and her clothes snobbery was quite acceptable — only the other day I was delighted to find two new Liberty silk squares of hers I didn't know I had.  When I would return from Kensington Market with a pair of £1.99 loon pants, basically two pieces of denim laid back to front and stitched together, and not very well at that, she'd frown and ask me why I was wasting my money on such rubbish. When I would come back with a shirt from Granny's that'd cost all my birthday money and three weeks pocket money, after going through the motions of disapproving of the extravagance, she would run her fingers over it, check the stitching, and reluctantly admit it was money well spent, due to the quality. I was out with my Jewish grandfather one Saturday when I was fourteen or fifteen, and he offered to buy me some clothes. His solicitor's office was on the corner of Noel Street and Wardour Street in Soho, funnily enough virtually next door to the Vortex club that wasn't called that yet, so he'd seen Carnaby Street spring into action, plus he was my paternal grandfather so probably enjoyed pissing my mum off by buying me something outlandish, which often backfired. This time I got him to take me to Granny's, where he bought me a lovely tight-fitting glitter shirt, which needless to say, he got charged full whack for — Gene and Marty being lovely people, but far from stupid. After all, they were  looking at a well to do middle aged Jewish solicitor, in a hand made suit from his own tailor in Berwick Street, Soho, where, for my 18th birthday birthday he let me get my first suit made. A lovely grey chalk stripe it was, three button, two jacket pockets on the right hand side, the works.

So now we come back to tea with Paul Scutt and his mama in summer 1972. Paul gave me the address, and off I set to Chelsea. I jumped off the bus at roughly the right place in the King's Road and started checking the street numbers. 494, 492...490 was the Sunlight Laundry on the corner of Langton Street...488 appeared to be Granny's? Check, check again, it was. I looked at the side door to the upper floors of the property and sure enough there was an intercom with the name Scutt. I duly pressed and down came Paul. Come in, he said, come up and meet my mum. Up we go to the top floor, and there, sitting at an electric treadle Singer sewing machine, just like my mum's, was Paul's mum, at work on a beautiful cotton satin shirt for the shop downstairs, such as the couple I owned.  Next to her was a wicker basket of off cuts and a roll or two of the material that cost about £5 a square foot once it was stitched up. Her name was Judy, she had a strawberry/cerise blouse on, a tight dark mop of curly hair, big glasses, as all us myopians had then, and was very interested to learn that I already shopped downstairs. We descended back down to their first floor living room, where I remember we had strawberries with soured cream, and Earl Grey tea with lemon. Paul was chatting away, while I listened in awe, about Mick and Keith from the Stones having been in the shop last week, and then he asked if I'd like to pop down and say hello to Gene and Marty. Well of course, when Paul and I walked in, they recognised me and we joined all the dots over a glass of white wine on their terrace out the back, where there was a beautiful tiny walled garden, which I never knew existed before, let alone having been out there. Well, if Gene and Marty looked after me before that, they did so even better afterwards. Granny's was the sort of shop where, even if you opened the door and it was deserted, you wouldn't walk out with anything, you didn't need to. Quite unlike Biba, which expanded to a mammoth department store and then folded, because the staff, never mind the customers, were walking out with so much. 

Paul Scutt, tragically, like many supremely intelligent men, had a severe nervous breakdown a couple of years later. Along with my friend from Wimbledon, Simon 'Cadbury's' Taylor, the Cad, he was one of the first people I ever visited in a mental hospital. There have been many such visits to many such people over the intervening years, some of which are too painful to write about, and I can only thank my lucky stars, it has only ever been as a visitor, apart from forty-eight hours in, not the hospital wing, but the actual hospital itself in HMP Wandsworth, but we'll come to that another time. I kept in quite regular contact with Paul, and hung out at his mum's for a few weekends, occasionally with a couple of other KCS alumni, and usually with a couple of guys I think he knew from Cambridge. Sadly, Paul was one man who should never have take acid, though I'm sure an alternative catalyst would have appeared anyway, and it was almost de rigeur then. LSD has gone out of vogue but bars never will, and by the same token there are some people who should never have a drink. Like a lot of people who suffer with their mental health who, en route to a breakdown, can articulate their 'mad' thoughts; just no-one listens, or if they do, because it's a dear friend or relative they don't know what to do, so could Paul. He told me one Saturday afternoon, that he had been having visual and aural hallucinations, and that in addition to myself and a couple of others who were physically present, he could also see Mick Jagger and Joseph of Arithmea. I don't suppose I could have done anything anyway, but I think I just regarded him as a visionary, like William Blake, not that I wasn't concerned.

I carried on shopping at Granny's, and also concurrently acquiring a taste for 1950s rock 'n' roll music and fashion, and in 1974 I had noticed out of the corner of my eye as it were, and literally on the corner of the King's Road at the World's End bend, a new shop called Let It Rock selling that kind of kit, but hadn't investigated. When I was in Granny's one day that summer, I was chatting with Gene, and he said: You like forties and fifties stuff, don't you? Go down the road to Let It Rock — they got some great spiv ties, the guy there's called Malcolm, tell him I sent you and he'll do you a good deal. Off I popped the hundred yards or so up the King's Road to Let It Rock, and that is the one time I met Malcolm Maclaren, two years before the Pistols and punk. He was alright, he sold he a great 'What The Butler Saw' spiv tie — with a butler looking through a keyhole on the wide bit and then, once you'd tied it, the view of a girl's legs in stockings and suspenders through the keyhole on the narrow bit — and he gave me a good deal. I have lost the tie, but the same year I bought a royal blue hound's tooth wind-cheater, the same as the red one David Essex wore in the film That'll Be The Day which, as you know, exerted some influence on my reckless tendencies, and that jacket I still have. The other memorable experience I had in Malcolm Maclaren's shop was a few years later  in 1977, by which time it was called Sex. I think this was just before I supported The Ants at the Vortex, when Jordan, the Sex Pistols acolyte, sang for them, not Adam. I was browsing a rack of T-shirts, including the ever-controversial one featuring two cowboys with their dicks hanging out, and looked up at the shop side of the front window, where there was a pinboard with some full-on monochrome open snatch shots. When I turned to face the counter to enquire the price of a T-shirt, I realised that the girl behind the jump was also the girl in the photos, namely Jordan. Soon after that Granny's closed its ever changing doors and Gene, whose father is strangely a top cop in SF, followed Marty back home. However, he kept in touch with Malcom Maclaren and returned briefly to work for him and Vivienne Westwood in the late 1980s.

My other fond memory of the World's End area is when, in 1981, I had a temporary job as a messenger in the West End and, one lunchtime, bumped into an astonishingly beautiful French girl called Sophie. I had met her but once before, the previous year, when she was going out with my friend Robin Bibi, who in turn met her because he had recently been in a band in Paris with her ex', and we had done a recording session at our mutual friend Frank Andrews' studios, Ridge Farm, just outside Dorking in Surrey. We were there to record with our dear departed genius friend, Brian 'Fast Fingers' Holmes, some of his own compositions. [It was a fantastic session, Frank Andrews was an old friend of Brian's and it was free, Dick Taylor produced it, and bear in mind Brian's lyrics were so superlative that Ian Dury held him in awe. Ridge Farm was the first studio in the country to have a digital desk, and where The Slits recorded their album Cut, and of course had themselves photographed covered in mud in the grounds. They used to have amazing star-studded NYE bashes, of which I went to a couple, including a memorable one in 1975, when I went with Dick Taylor and his then wife Melissa, and all three of us squeezed into his black MGB, which had an inadvertent personalised number plate starting with the letters RMT, for Richard and Melissa Taylor.] 

Anyway back to Sophie. There'd been a definite flash of eye contact that day at the studios — she had brown eyes you could see yourself in — and as soon as I saw her that day in Marylebone, off the bulb went again. She gave me her number, and we had a fling for what for me was a deliriously happy few weeks. As it happened, she lived on the King's Road on the other (West) side, about a hundred yards down from The World's End pub, going towards Putney. We spent a cracking old school London pub night in that boozer, which was one of the last pubs to have a separate lounge, private and public bar, and a snug. Old ladies nattered in the snug, just like Coronation Street, and in the lounge there was a battered honky tonk Joanna, that on this as every Saturday, an old boy was thundering away on in shirt sleeves and braces,  with stainless steel shirt grips to keep said sleeves off the keys, whilst the packed bar joined in a raucous sing song. That's why, I guess, the then television 'retro' music hall show was called The Good Old Days — they were. 

I remember going with Sophie to see Dick play in the recently reformed Pretty Things at Dingwall's and how ridiculously proud I was to be with her. A humorous aside to this is that, just before we had our few weeks together Sophie, being an enterprising lass, put a postcard in all innocence in the window of a local newsagents, saying: French Lessons Given. Bless her, her English was near fluent but idiom is a minefield, regardless. So, as she told me, one day a chap rang up, booked a slot, came along and rang her bell. She asked him if he had a textbook or anything, and he said: What would I need a textbook for?!? At which point the penny, or centime, dropped. I saw her only once after that, in 1983, when I was having a wander with Joly Macfie down the Portobello Road on a Saturday afternoon — a lengthy wander as Joly knew every single shop owner, stall holder, and indeed passer-by — ands we popped into the shop his ex-partner in Better Badges was running. Sophie played bass guitar, and when we went down to the shop basement, there was a cool girl band rehearsing with her on bass. As proof of my not exaggerating how stunning Sophie was, a few years later, she was on the cover of ID, or rather i.d. magazine. A last peripheral is that, at the time I was hanging out with Sophie, she had recently split up with the great Anthony 'Anto' Thistlethwaite of Waterboys fame, and they were still good soul mates. We got on fine, and he did a couple of gigs with The Men From Uncle after that, including one at The Greyhound in Fulham, which Robin was also on. I remember thinking about the one thing we had in common apart from my band, and keeping quiet about it.

So there we are, at a time when it feels like it could be the end of the world, some happy days at World's End.