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.

Wanted But At Large On Tour October-December 1979

Wanted But At Large On Tour October-December 1979

My release from HMP Pentonville in September 1979 fell, as bad luck and worse judgement would have it, on the same day as a fellow junkie I'd been knocking about with inside, and we caught the the old Piccadilly Line Oxo Cube direct from Holloway Road to the front line at Piccadilly Circus. It being not yet nine in the morning, thus no-one having yet collected a prescription that day, we didn't linger in the old Subway 4, then labelled: 'Haymarket & Jermyn Street' and which now comes up in The Trocadero complex, where the action would be later, but headed straight for Hall's Chemists in Shaftesbury Avenue. In the doorway we found —not Marianne Faithful or Eric Clapton, though we could have done at that time — but an old emaciated junkie from the Channel Islands called Robin Le Page, who had been in the 'Ville with us for a fortnight a month or so earlier, having been collared for some unpaid fines. I scored a couple of Physeptone ampoules, not lingering to inject/ingest them in the underground station toilets, but jumping straight back on the Piccadilly Line to Barons Court, where Rat Scabies was living at the time with my mate Kenny Anderson, Kenny's partner Carol, and Rat's soon to be partner Viv. [I am delighted to report that over forty years later, both couples are still together.] I met Kenny when he was roadieing for my friends' Arturo Bassick & Dave Allen's band Pinpoint, but he had recently, or was just about to, defect to work for The Damned. I went to their bathroom and took my 'drug of choice', as it's known in treatment circles, whilst they had a line of speed for breakfast, not unusual in such circles in those days, after which I learned that said Pinpoint were rehearsing that day at Alaska Studios in Waterloo, so off I went to seek out my dear old mucker Arthur (Arturo), who would put me up, at least for the night, having recently made an upwardly mobile move down the District Line from his former run-down garret above the Beggars' Banquet record shop and record company offices in Earl's Court, to Turnham Green and a comparatively palatial ground floor bedsit in Marlborough Crescent, Bedford Park.

Things rapidly went from not too good to bloody dreadful again in my life. I was very soon apprehended shoplifting again, but got bail to stay at my father's flat in Wimbledon. However, I had to sign on daily at Wimbledon Police Station in order to retain the bail. The following Sunday, Rat Scabies invited me out for a drink with two quite classy American girls in Belsize Park. We went out and had a few, then went back to their lovely house. I got on ok with my potential partner, but I don't think I was famous enough for her, so after a good and a late night she put me up in their spare room. She was kind enough to lend me an alarm clock, that being the only way back then, apart from a BT landline alarm call, to get up in the morning, because I was due to report to the police in Wimbledon at 9am. Sadly, and truly, the alarm never went off. When I looked at my watch at 9.30am, knowing it would take me an hour to get there, I realised that there was probably already a warrant out for me, and that it was, to use a bit of villainous vernacular, all on top.

I am quite good at 'thinking on my feet', admittedly at various times bloody stupid thoughts, but this one was as near as I was going to get to a master plan. The night before I had been remanded to HMP Brixton on the 18th June previous, prior to being sentenced, I had played the last night of a Damned tour at the Locarno in Bristol, which was the tour on which they were supported by The Ruts. I had got on very well with all The Ruts, and that night in Bristol I had done a brief rock 'n' roll set with Dave Ruffy from The Ruts on drums and Shanne Bradley from The Nipple Erectors, who had come down with The Damned, on bass. The second week I was in Brixton, Babylon's Burning hit the charts and was banging out of every transistor radio on the wing. The Ruts were now, in early October, a few dates into their first UK headline tour as a proper big band. I didn't know where they were playing that night, but wherever it was, it would be out of town, plus I had an inkling they might even be pleased to see me.

I don't think I had a penny in my pocket, but I jumped the tube to Victoria, thinking wherever The Ruts were on, there would probably be a coach from Victoria Coach Station going there at some point. However, there was no point finding out where until I had some coach fare. So, on alighting from the tube at Victoria, I made straight for Woolworth's, it being nearer than, for example, Peter Jones at Sloane Square, where it's true there would have been some more upmarket shoplifting opportunities. Good old Woolly's yielded up a brace of Black & Decker drills relatively effortlessly, which I promptly offloaded to an Evening News and Standard vendor at one of the station entrances. Yes, London had two evening papers just then, which was what the vendors shouted — not: 'Extra, extra, read all about it!' but: 'NEWS and STANdard, NEWS and STANdard!' Anyway, the nice chappy gave me a tenner each for them, so we were in business. Next stop, WH Smith's on the station to look at the gig listings in the back of the Melody Maker — without buying a copy, of course — and ascertaining that The Ruts were on that night at the University of Nottingham. There was a coach leaving for Nottingham in a couple of hours and  the score I'd obtained for the drills covered the one way coach fare and left some rifle range for a bit of scran. The only niggling doubt was: what if I got there and all they said was: 'Pus! What the fuck are you doing here?' 

I can't recall how I got to or found the campus but, believe it or not kids, once upon a time we could get to and find places without mobile telephones, using such old-fashioned skills as asking people the way. I had to persuade the security to show me the dressing room when I got there, but it wasn't too difficult. When I walked in Manna, The Ruts' roadie, was sitting there alone minding the dressing room, as the boys had either gone back to the hotel or for dinner. I walked in and he duly said: 'Pus! What the fuck are you doing here?' When the band came back with their, and later to be my, manger Andy Dayman, they duly said: 'Pus! What the fuck are you doing here?', but they followed it immediately with: 'Great to see you - do you wanna introduce us?' So I did, and watched their set with Manna from the wings, all the while wondering how it was going to go down when I explained the situation, and asked if I could come back to the hotel and sleep on one of their bedroom floors. However, all was more than well, as when they came off stage they went into a little huddle in the dressing room and then Ruffy, who although Andy was the manager, was often the spokesman and who is an amazing diplomat, not only asked if I'd like to compère and support them on the rest of the tour, which was only a few dates in, but then said they would give me a fiver a night and that most nights there was an odd number of road crew, meaning that I could have a spare bed in one of the twin rooms. Compared to Damned tours, this was like being offered a season in Las Vegas!

I won't bore you with the tour details, as it's all beautifully documented in Roland Link's book on The Ruts, Love In Vain. One gig I do particularly remember though was at The Kinema In Dunfermline, where Segsy sprained his knee jumping from the PA onto the stage. The next morning this was causing him some grief so we took a stroll into town after breakfast, and luckily found, would you believe a surgical appliance shop, I kid you not. Better still, not only did Segs obtain the necessary support bandage, but there was an old-fashioned gentleman's outfitters next door, which had a smashing olive green Trilby hat in the window, which I could both just afford, and was a perfect fit. The postscript to this little tale is that about twenty-seven years later, I was in a local pub in Plymouth, where I live, and got chatting to a Scotsman whilst having a cigarette together in the garden, an expedition we're now used to, but which was still offensive to smokers then. He had on a cool T-shirt advertising an American punk band from Texas, whose name escapes me. I remarked on it, and he replied that they were even better live, so I queried if he'd seen them  in Texas. He replied no, he'd seen them at the previous year's Rebellion, the annual punk festival held in Blackpool, which started in '96. Casually, I mentioned that I'd played at the first Rebellion, which was actually called Holidays In The Sun, and held in Morecambe. Logically, he asked: 'Who are you then?' When I told him him, he jumped and shouted: 'NO!!! I saw you at The Kinema in Dunfermline with The Ruts. You wait till I ring my mates at home and tell them!' which he promptly did. I'll leave the Grin & Bear It tour there, except to say it was a breath of air after The Damned tours, journeys from gig to gig being happy times of exchanging jokes, getting stoned and reading, something I'd never have been able to do with The Damned as one of them would always either set the book on fire, throw it out of the minibus window or, tear the end pages out and do one of those things to them. There were some high jinks with The Ruts — not one but two minibuses ended up in flames, but it was the buses, not me in flames, and it was a welcome change. The tour ended gleefully — I use the word selectively as The Ruts fan club, which I later ran, was called the Glee Club — at Tiffany's in Edinburgh on bonfire night. Andy Dayman treated the band to a flight back to London the next day, whilst him, Manna, and the two brothers, Long Bob and Long Chris who crewed for them, and I went back in the tour minibus. Fuck me, it was a long drive! There'd been a not inconsiderable after party the night before, we hadn't had a hotel as the lads had gone straight to the airport, and I remember Long Bob being so hungover driving he had to pull over and be sick in a couple of lay-bys.

So there I was, back in London, caught between the most devilish of rocks and a deep blue sea that was proper rough — viz I still had nowhere to live, no record deal, and was still on the run. I could either steal, with a touch of begging and borrowing thrown in, for as long as it lasted, or blag my way back onto the imminent Damned tour. I chose the latter as a way of at least stalling the inevitable. Off we jolly well went, and straight away it was back to hell on earth — being made to lie in the 'Pus Pit' of the van i.e. the sliding door well for miles on end, and being generally abused on a daily basis before it even started from the fans. The only redeeming feature was That Algy Ward, the most juvenile and vicious bully of all of them, had left and been replaced on bass by Paul Gray, formerly of Eddie & The Hot Rods, who I'm pleased to see is back playing with The Damned once again. Aside from being a blinding bassist, Paul is an old school rock 'n' roll gentlemen, not averse to the odd spot of hell raising, but a thoroughly decent chap. After a few days of said hell on earth, we pitched up in Brighton on 28th November, which was a Wednesday, to play the Top Rank Suite. I had never been so pleased in all my days to see anyone, as I was to see my old manager and dear friend David Scott burst into the dressing room with his chum, and partner in a car front, Phil Church, and their mate Johnny Nokes after the show. David and Phil had done a bit of promoting a couple of years before, running gigs at Hastings Pier Ballroom, and it was at one of their shows that I had first supported The Damned in July 1977. They had had a few but they still had authority and, to put it bluntly, The Damned were suddenly a whole lot less lairy. We had the Thursday off and the next show was at the Rainbow in Finsbury Park on the Friday. Dear David, when I detailed the hell on earth situation, said why not come back with him and stay in Brighton for a couple of nights, and then he'd drive me up to London on the Friday. Whoop, whoop, things were looking up, and within half an hour, we were safely ensconced in an after hours villains' watering hole locally, the gob was drying on my clothes, and the drink was flowing.

Now, when I first met David Scott in 1975, he was a millionaire with a country pile just outside Burgess Hill, but by then divorce had cost him very dearly and he had had to downgrade to an airy Victorian upstairs flat not far from Brighton town centre. I don't recall what we did on the Thursday; I imagine we got stoned, went out on the lash, and went for something to eat, as standard. Anyway, Johnny Nokes, whilst a semi-successful armed robber, having just done an eight and a five year prison sentence in relatively quick succession, had also downgraded, in terms of criminal activity, and was now doing the same as me for a living, namely hoisting. He was staying in David's flat, which they affectionately termed The West Wing, with his girlfriend, with whom he also 'went out to work'. Both Johnny and David were thus quite down on their luck, for them, and David wasn't even running a motor. This was compared to when I first met him four years earlier, when every time he'd come up from his home town of Brighton to his old stamping ground and my home town of Wimbledon, it would be with a different gang of interesting villains, lunatics, musicians, or sometimes all three, in a different motor — the two that stood out were a canary yellow 5.3 litre Ford Mustang, and a white Rolls Royce like John Lennon's, but minus the flower power insignia.

Coming back to the Friday morning of the Rainbow gig, John and his girlfriend and I woke before David, about 11am. They'd been sleeping on the living room floor, and I on the settee. After a quick cup of splosh and a wash, John announced that he and his girlfriend, who I assumed were coming to London with us, as John loved loud music, drinking and ligging — had to pop out to the bank. Not being entirely stupid, I averred that this meant they were popping out 'to do a bit of work.' About midday, David got up and enquired where they were. I told him what John had said, he raised his eyebrows, we exchanged looks, he sighed, and we sat down to wait. At about 3pm, John and partner never having reappeared and knowing John's 'previous', as one might say, David said to me very slowly, as one would address a child: 'Julian, did John say he was going to the bank, or going to DO the bank?' Come 5pm, with still a no-show from John, David made a couple of calls and got hold of both a motor and the money to fill it up with fuel. It later turned out John had indeed been captured, albeit not for anything very serious, though anything's serious if you're on licence, as John was. Off David and I went to London, getting our kicks on the A23, as you might say. I've got a few kicks on that road, as it goes. Come 7pm, we're in vaguely the right vicinity of North London, but more than a bit lost, not to mention a bit stressed after all the carry-on, and of course there's no London A-Z in the borrowed motor. David, being David, instinctively chose a second-hand car lot to ask the way. It was late but there was still a light on in the office, or portakabin that served as one. Fella comes out the office, walks over to the car, David winds the window down. David says; 'Excuse me, we seem to have lost Finsbury Park.' Fellow looks at him, says: 'Fuck me — David Scott!' They shook hands, he gave us directions and, as we drove away, David explained the guy was an old colleague from his teenage days, when he was dealing cars for his dad in the showrooms on Warren Street, and that this guy too had just finished a long prison sentence.

The actual gig at the Rainbow is also to be found elsewhere in the annals of punk history, so I won't go into much detail. Suffice to say the audience were not only more vicious to me than usual, but generally full of beans all round, which culminated in them tearing the seats up and throwing them on stage. [Why the venue left them in for a Damned show, God knows!] As it happened, it was while The Damned were on, so I was at no risk of serious injury and thought it was bloody brilliant — proper rock 'n' roll, just like Bill Haley, a quarter of a century earlier. After the gig, I think David dropped me at Arthur's in Chiswick or somewhere, and he went home to Brighton. When I turned up for the next gig after that a couple of days later, Captain Sensible said they didn't require my services any more, as I was always too out of it. All I can say is, I can't have been that out of it, or I'd never have remembered all this — and, believe me, I didn't make it up — plus anyone, with or without a drug habit, would have needed some kind of carapace to endure what I did. Anyway, it was getting more and more wintry and quite repetitive, so I wasn't entirely heartbroken. I think I have only ever done two more Damned gigs: the first was at Barrowlands in Glasgow, with the seminal Ruts DC, only a week or so after Malcolm Owen's death, when the atmosphere was amazing, and the Holidays In The Sun festival mentioned earlier.

I only did one more Auntie Pus gig that year, and that was supporting The Ruts at the Top Rank in Cardiff on the 16th December, which was with my band The Men From Uncle featuring Dick Taylor from the Pretty Things, and my old school chum Robin Bibi on lead guitars, Arturo Bassick himself on eponymous basic bass, and his ex-Lurkers colleague Esso on drums. Although, funnily enough, they are both once again in different incarnations of The Lurkers, at the time neither of them was, and it was an ongoing joke that they were 'ex-Lurkers for life'. It was a blinding gig, The Ruts were on fire, and we went down great because it was with a full band, and a bloody good one at that. We went down in Dick's trusty Jean Machine van, which he drove for a day job, and all that ruined the evening was that someone vandalised it and smashed the windscreen, and Dick had to punch a hole in it to drive back up the motorway to London. It was blowing a freezing gale too, but Arthur and I managed to get invited back to The Ruts' hotel to have a drink, kip on the floor, and get a lift home in their bus the following day. I have always felt guilty about this, but probably not guilty enough.

The Nearest This'll Get To Tolstoy

The Nearest This'll Get To Tolstoy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prison

(1)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Venues in Hammersmith c. 1978-81

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

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

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

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

Start It Up

Start It Up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ruts DC - The Fleece, Bristol - 9th March 2013

Ruts DC: well, I've always had a minor issue with the DC moniker - the boys said they chose it because da capo in Latin/Italian means literally 'from the head' or, in common musical parlance, back to the beginning. However, in music, it actually signifies going back to the beginning and playing what one's already played all over again, exactly the same, and this couldn't be further from what Ruts DC actually did, and are doing! What they really did, in my humble opinion, was reference their eponymous first single 'In A Rut', and being close to being in one, boy did they get out of it, and in incomparable and uninimitable fashion.

Events conspired against me even to get to this gig, but I'm a rebel and I in turn conspired against events. My lift to the gig having fallen through, as had my accommodation options in Bristol, 3pm last Saturday found me in my trusty Saab leaving my geographical home for my spiritual one. What - bloody Bristol, I hear you ask? No, dear reader, a Ruts gig! (Though I did have the old Mike Absalom lyric going round in my loaf: If she was French she'd be from Brest / I always did like Bristols best...)

Anyway, arriving in time for the sound check, after a brief meet and greet, as the yanks say, I was taken down a road of olfactory reminiscence. I don't know why, but for me certain styles of music have particular nostalgic triggers; for example I first saw Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Jimmy Rogers et al at the 100 Club in the mid-70s, which in those days had a doubtful Chinese restaurant outlet at the opposite end of the club to the bar, meaning that the whiff of MSG-enriched sweet and sour sauce often engenders thoughts of Chicago blues in me. In the same way, the smell of stale lager and cider in a darkened, empty venue makes me think of punk gigs. Well, The Fleece, bless it, as I'd observed when seeing and supporting The Members there the other year, definitely lives up to expectations in that department.

To cut to the chase, the set! First, some wonderful deep reggae. How do you know - you know nothing about reggae, I hear you ask? Well, maybe not, but (a) I know great music when I hear it; (b) who better than The Ruts to educate one in this department? (c) I challenge anyone last week to have popped down the road to St Paul's and got the most devout Rastaman they could find, and brought him to the show, not to have had the feedback that the only thing that denoted he wasn't in the tightest soundclash he'd ever been to, was the fact that there was only a band at one end of the hall. Shall I have a little Pus-style rant here? Why not? Damn the expense! Well, people, then and now, talking about punk rock, often cite The Clash - admittedly a great band of creative musicians - as veering from the punk thrash norm because they had a strong reggae influence/content in their material...the old heckles always rise at this, and I think: have these 'people' never heard The Ruts? So...one step forward...and...two steps forward...and, in the case of Ruts DC, no steps backwards now or ever. As is commonly known and told, The Ruts and Misty in Roots have always been close chums and colleagues. The very name Misty In Roots has pantomime undertones, and WHY NOT? An old criticism of The Damned was that they were a 'vaudeville band.' Why a criticism, I always wondered, surely a compliment? I maintain that a small strand of slapstick marbleing the rock face of serious music validates, not undermines it - it helps connect the punter to the product, and should never be knocked, so very nice it was to hear Segs put his tongue in his cheek inbetween numbers.

I'd like to say, after the reggae, what we'd all come for, but I'd be speaking for myself - I'm sure lots of people came for the reggae too, I know I met at least four of them in the pub next door to the gig! Between ourselves - and I hope there's thousands of us - I came for The Crack, and I wanted to hear it. And, guess what? Fucking hear it I jolly well did! Maybe I should have been a music journo, but I'm not, so I made no notes, and enjoyed it so much I can't tell you what order they played the tunes in. My back - not my bum, as we used to joke in the old days - was duly bitten, I was got with SUS, etc., etc. I am unable to report any highlights, as every word, note and harmony was a highlight.

Every song had a special souvenir, in the French sense, for me. Staring At The Rude Boys puts me in mind of a gig on the Grin & Bare It tour at an old civic hall somewhere in the Midlands, possibly I think the Victoria Halls in Hanley. The soundcheck was over, and the doors had opened. Punters were filtering in, and the soundman or DJ had some records on. Now the first Human League album had just come out, and Malcolm loved it. We were sitting in the dressing room having a little libation when in bursts Malcolm, shouting: "Guess what? I've just put the Human League on, and all these fucking skinheads are dancing to it!"

Babylon's Burning hit the charts during a little three month holiday I had with Her Majesty in the summer of 1979, thoughtfully scheduled by the constabulary between my joining the lads as support slot on the earlier Damned tour, and doing so again on their victorious post-hit Grin & Bare It tour on my release, and hearing it still gives me the same joy and warmth that it did bursting out of the old tranny in the cell. Typing that last phrase alerts me to its possible ambiguity, and I can just hear Segs and Ruffy saying: "You had an old tranny in your cell, Aunt? Well you are a dark horse!" Ha, ha ha...

West One (Shine On Me) is a strange dichotomy: from the day of its release, through melting at watching a YouTube clip of Segs singing it at last year's Rebellion festival, right up until last Saturday radiates, pulsates and glories in Malcolm shining on. It never fails to move me, and I would quite possibly find it unbearably heart wrenching, were it not for the levity injected by the fact that I used to labour under the misapprehension that the lyric 'inside it's only me who's straight' was 'lost in a bar somewhere in sunny Spain.' Well, Malcolm's stunning model ex-missus Rocky had moved to Ibiza, things'd definitely gone downhill after she left, and I reckoned he missed her, quite probably correctly!

I find it very hard to say anything about the insuperable guitar, keyboards and harmony vocals. The best way I can find to express it is that they were so wonderful and so appropriate, that they managed to be simultaneously uplifting, driving and undetectable. It might seem a bit off the subject, but I love the Rolling Stones, and the best way Mick Taylor and Ronnie Wood could ever find to be Brian Jones was by being themselves. I had a lovely chat with Leigh Hegarty, Ruts DC's great new guitarist, after the show and he confided in me that he worried he "had some big shoes to fill." I could only respond, and I echo this here, that he has no shoes to fill whatsoever. Ruts DC are a renaissance not a re-creation, and he needs to be very proud of his contribution which underscores, fills, cuts and rocks! He exemplified how to acknowledge and reference a great influence whilst being simultaneously innovative, and without descending to the depths of tribute band territory. To quote Ruffy, in a recent Louder Than War interview: "He'€™s a monster player. We could never find anyone to do that job as well as that. He nails it. He knows exactly what it is."

To finish, as is traditional - one can't rail against every tradition, ha ha - the encore. (Another musical misnomer, as it's French for 'again', and not 'more.') The first single, released on People Unite records all those years ago. Vraiment, the people united last Saturday in Bristol! In A Rut: "You're in a rut, you gotta get out of it" - when I first heard and worked with The Ruts, how I liked to deceive myself into thinking this meant: you've got to get out of it. It took me nearly a quarter of a century, but finally the proverbial penny dropped, and it dawned on me that it meant I should get out of the rut, and not my head. Similarly, with H-Eyes, what harder way to rebel than by demonstrating that they weren't going to fuck my brain?

(Why is it that, when famous people have a tragic demise, they are remembered for this and not their creativity and humour? Take the great Tony Hancock, for example - sad that he died alone in an Australian hotel room, but he made and is still making a lot of people laugh, me included, and jolly loudly too. Now I never met or knew Jim Morrison, but I've read virtually all there is to read in the public arena about him, and as well as liking girls and getting off his head, he was clearly an extremely lively, and funny person. Well, let me tell you, so was Malcolm Owen, who also liked dangerous drugs, pretty girls, and left us at R 'n' R death age. I'd like to take this opportunity to tell the world, already I trust aware of his singing and songwriting genius, quite how amusing his husky idiosyncratic humour was. No, no quotes, I've told you and that'll do - but I like to recall Malcolm, a man who never possessed a driving licence, swinging the band Transit through the goalposts of a college gig football pitch in Hull with Segs and I beside him in the front seat, and a couple of terrified groupies screaming in the back, as the open doors swung to and fro, with a smile on my face, not a tear in my eye...)

To conclude, without wishing to over personalise, and thus render inaccessible, what started off as, and was supposed to be a gig review, I need to tell you that this band has been instrumental in precipitating most of my major life achievements e.g. the release of my first record, travelling the world, and showing hard drugs the door. I'm sure that the lads were as glad as I am that I didn't pitch up at their gig destitute, homeless and wanted by the forces of law and order, necessitating them taking me on tour with them for the combined reasons of subterfuge, compere duties and true love. However, the latter is ever present for me at the very mention of the word Ruts and, wishing to communicate the poignance this show resonated for me, rather than to be unnecessarily corny, I could still feel it in every note! Delighted as I was to be thankfully neither destitute nor homeless - though still penniless, the ongoing plight of most musicians - and having a lovely Georgian flat in Plymouth calling me back down the M5, I knew in my heart that there was a place in theirs for me. I can say no more than that this is forever reciprocated. As I write these words, the boys are about to take the stage at the Middlesborough Rock Garden revisited, where the promoter told me in one breath that I was a living legend since my performance there thirty-four years ago, and in the next breath that I wasn't welcome on the bill. Plus ca change! Well, give 'em hell lads, 'cause that's what they gave me thirty-four years ago!