CHAPTER:3

THE SMOKE

At one point during this psychedelic love-in period, I met Steve Sproxton and Kai Olsson, who were playing together as a duo. I think they must have heard about the flat, and they were curious as to what was going on. I heard them play and sing together, and they sounded great, so I said to Brian, “Why don’t we join up with these guys? With all of our harmonies and guitars, combined with their harmonies and guitars, it could be like an English Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young!” (Although Graham Nash was British, we still saw and heard them as an exotic American band with a California sound.)

We tried it out, and it worked. We started playing together and rehearsing like crazy. At first we couldn’t think of a name, so we just put our first initials of our first names together—Brian, Steve, Kai, Dave—and played some concerts as BSKD, which was a terrible name, but we didn’t care; we were experimenting. For a short period Kai and Steve moved in with Eddie and me, and it was madness, as we had one bedroom with four single beds in a row and we all had girlfriends—awkward, to say the least. Somehow we made it work.

Then Brian suggested we get a large house and all have a room each and share the rent. So we moved into a huge old Victorian house within walking distance of the town center. Pam and I took the front room overlooking the street.

What happened next was relatively fast. We sent a demo tape to London, and it got into the hands of Lionel Conway, who ran Island Music publishing for the founder, Chris Blackwell. There was a lot of interest, and we were invited down to London for a meeting.

But before that, Kai’s brother, Nigel Olsson (who was drumming with Elton John at the time), told us that he was coming to hear us play in the big house we all shared and that he was going to bring Mickey Grabham, the amazing guitarist from the band Cochise, so we were a little anxious.

By this time, we had started getting high quite often, smoking hash around the house. Nigel brought Mickey over around six p.m., and he brought a huge bag of the most astoundingly strong grass from Jamaica, which we were not used to. We were all crammed in Kai’s tiny bedroom, which was now blanketed with a London fog of lethal dope so strong that it wiped us out. We wanted to play for them, but we just couldn’t! We tried to tune up for about an hour and couldn’t even manage that. We couldn’t tell if we were anywhere near being in tune, we were so stoned.

It was insanely embarrassing.

Luckily they were as stoned and zoned out themselves that when they went back to London, they told everyone we were great!

I was eighteen years old in 1971, when Lionel Conway got our demos to Elton John’s record company, Rocket Records. They loved us! They thought we had good songs and strong harmonies and we all could play. And it’s true: when we weren’t too stoned, we could really play. So we got signed. Suddenly we had a record deal with Elton John’s Rocket Records, and we had a publishing deal for our songwriting, though none of us knew what that meant, really, except Brian, who suddenly had all this responsibility with three kids running around with money, guitars and weed. This was all heaven on Earth to me, and so was the move to London.

We signed with Rocket Records for recording and Chris Blackwell’s Island Music for our music publishing. Chris’s company also controlled Blue Mountain Music, Witchseason Music and many more. His roster of writers and artists became familiar faces to me in his offices on Oxford Street, which were situated above a groovy boutique called 2001: Cat Stevens, Nick Drake, John Martyn, Mott the Hoople, Traffic, Stevie Winwood and Bob Marley. I spoke to Bob on one occasion. It was interesting because he seemed to understand my northeast accent better than the Londoners did.

Island Music was the source of such great dope. I remember one payday, we were all sitting around in Island’s offices, getting stoned on the same Jamaican weed that Nigel had that we were getting used to, and Ian Hunter, from Mott the Hoople, got passed the last embers of a joint. He took a long drag and coughed, spluttered and said, “Fuckin’ hell, that’s a bloody Lung Dancer!” Meaning it nearly burned his lungs. We were laughing hysterically, and then someone said, “Longdancer, that’s not a bad name!” We had been searching for the right name for months. So our band had the perfect name—Longdancer—thanks entirely to the thick Shropshire accent of Sir Ian Hunter.

•   •   •

The Smoke was the name used for London by people up north at that time. Our local musicians, shop owners and artists were always saying, “Are you going back down to the Smoke?” And now we were moving there. We were a young and excited bunch of kids diving headfirst into the music business. The sixties were over and we entered what was to be a year full of bad news. Janis Joplin died of a drug overdose. Jim Morrison died supposedly of heroin and alcohol. Jimi Hendrix choked on his own vomit.

On April 10, 1970, the day we arrived in London, Paul McCartney announced he’d quit the Beatles, and that band was no more. That was the news we heard as we entered London with our guitars, sleeping bags, purple boots and heads full of dreams.

What happened next was that we went bonkers. It was like arriving in Neverland, and in fact, J. M. Barrie must have predicted rock and roll, as the Peter Pan effect does seem to exist in the minds of rock stars. The music business also has its own Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island, a cursed amusement park that Hunter Thompson described as “a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs,” adding, “There’s also a negative side.”

None of this concerned us one bit. We were in London, and we were getting paid to go in real recording studios and make music! We could walk down Chelsea’s King’s Road or go to Kensington Market and buy velvet trousers from heavenly, beautiful girls wearing floppy hats, patchouli oil and not much else.

For the first week I was with my mum again. I slept on her floor. By now she was living in Hampstead and sharing a house with a married couple and their three children. The mother met my mum and told her husband she’d met this vibrant and exciting woman named Sadie while doing further studies in London. Julian, the father, who was a Zen Buddhist, knew Sadie was coming to tea one day, so to make an impression on her, he marched up and down Rosslyn Hill with a sign, warning everyone about the ice caps melting, and saying, “We are all in great danger! For more information, ring this number!” He gave out a phone number very clearly with much volume.

My mum went strolling by, then stopped, turned around and said to him, “Excuse me. There must be some mistake; that’s my telephone number!”

Julian said, “Sadie, I’ve been dying to meet you!”

Years later Julian and his wife got divorced, and he married my mum. My dad turned up and gave Sadie away, in place of her deceased father. I always thought that my dad showed amazing strength and respect by doing that.

Next I moved onto the floor of a Swedish lady, Ann Zadik, who worked at Island Music. But soon I wanted Pam to join me, so the band found a small house in Bourne Road, Tottenham, North London, for us all to share.

I was eighteen years old. We were very young to be in London trying to understand everything, including finances. I don’t remember having a checkbook, and of course we weren’t eligible for a Diners Club card, which was the only credit card available in those days. We would be paid on a Friday by a guy called Steve, the accountant from Island Music.

Steve had long straight blond hair and dark glasses, and he was stoned all the time. He was a really nice guy, though, and he would pay us in cash, weed, hash or maybe some speed or cocaine. It was a tough decision as he laid out the weekly payroll on his desk: a square silver packet of Moroccan dope, a bag of the finest weed or maybe even a Thai stick (extremely potent grass from Thailand rolled around a tiny piece of bamboo), and occasionally a small, thin rectangle of folded paper that you knew could keep you awake for days, which is why we called it marching powder. We had to enter one by one and decide whether to have enough cash to eat for half the week or the whole week.

Being around Elton John was always fun; he was super flamboyant, always immaculately dressed. It really was like signing a record deal with the Mad Hatter. We were amazed at the amount of everything around him: the vast profusion of shoes, sunglasses, hats, cologne and much more. Everyone at Rocket Records always smelled amazing and wore beautiful watches. Elton was remarkably generous to everybody, always handing out piles of gifts the second he walked through the door. It was like walking into a very expensive private store, not a record label.

Rocket was based at 101 Wardour Street in the heart of Soho, only a few minutes’ walk from the Island Music offices, so we went back and forth between the two. Longdancer was one of the first signings to Rocket Records, and we soon discovered a whole new meaning to the phrase “over-the-top.”

By then, Elton already had four hit albums, back when a hit meant selling millions of vinyl albums: Empty Sky, Elton John, Tumbleweed Connection, and Madman Across the Water. We were huge fans like everyone else, and I still am. At the time Madman was the newest album, and we all adored it. It was never off our stereo. We got to hear his next album, Honky Château, before anyone else. He was an amazingly inspirational songwriter and performer. And also one of the sharpest wits I’ve ever encountered. He would always have us in hysterics by mimicking everyone from the Queen to Winston Churchill, and he could switch between the two in a nanosecond.

We were given a whole heap of money, advances from our label and from our publisher, and we went completely out of control. A couple of people from the publishing company came to visit us in our little Tottenham house, and just like before, we were stoned out of our heads and were just lying on the floor. There were many visiting friends lying around too. We had bought a pound of hash, not a sterling pound this time, but a pound in weight—a slab the size of a coffee table book. Not only that, but I had decided to buy mescaline in bulk, hundreds of capsules filled with blue powder that contained the very potent chemical trimethoxyphenethylamine, which is found in peyote.

(In 1955, English politician Christopher Mayhew took part in an experiment for the BBC’s Panorama, in which he ingested four hundred milligrams of mescaline under the supervision of psychiatrist Humphry Osmond. Though the recording was deemed too controversial and ultimately omitted from the show, Mayhew praised the experience, calling it “the most interesting thing I ever did.”)

So when our benefactors arrived to hear some of our new songs, we of course couldn’t even talk. We were completely wasted. They were a little shocked, to say the least, as they were expecting to hear our new songs for the album. They could see we were spiraling off into the void, so they figured they had to get us back down to Earth and bring some kind of order into our lives. They booked a recording studio and brought in Iain Matthews from Fairport Convention (and later Matthews’ Southern Comfort) to try to produce us. He gave up after about a week, as we were so inexperienced and were way too stoned to comprehend the recording process. How we ever made our first album—called If It Was So Simple—I’ll never know.

But we did and it came out, and a ridiculously lavish release party was thrown for us. Elton hired an entire British Rail train and packed it with press, radio, TV, other artists and many hangers-on, who had heard this was going to be a blast. As soon as people got on the train, they were plied with champagne and hors d’oeuvres, and the party had already started when the train got on its way to Moreton-in-Marsh.

When we got there, everyone staggered off the train, and we were met by a magical band in colorful costumes, who paraded us off to the village hall for more food and drink, and a performance by Longdancer. The performance got so out of control that at one point I remember Muff Winwood onstage with us playing a folding chair with bleeding fingers! No expense was spared, and everyone left with handmade tapestry bags containing our album and beautifully designed T-shirts and little toy trains to remember the day. In fact most people can’t remember much about it, but it did go down as one of the most extravagant record launches ever. Had they spent all that money on promotion to radio, we would have done a lot better possibly. But it was a great party.

•   •   •

Pam and I decided to get married. I’ve no idea why we made this decision, especially as I was only nineteen and she was two years younger. Marriage seemed such an old-fashioned thing to do. But off we went up to Sunderland and tied the knot at the local registry office. By now we’d befriended lots of eccentrics and interesting people. And my mum, by then, had started living with Julian.

Our friend Tim Daly, who had just come out of prison for setting fire to the Imperial War Museum, was fast asleep on the registry office steps when Pam and I arrived with my dad. Tim was clutching an enormous samurai sword as a gift. I think Pam would have preferred a blender. My father took in all the proceedings as if it was just another everyday occurrence in the life of the Stewarts.

After the wedding ceremony at the registry office, Pam and I invited a few friends back to our friends Brian and Pauline’s house for a celebration. As the party kicked into overdrive, Dad simply shook his head, sighed and muttered, “Bedlam. Sheer bedlam.”

And it was bedlam. Longdancer now had roadies, and these roadies had met the Grateful Dead when the Dead came to London to play the Strand Lyceum. The Dead had with them some California Sunshine, which was LSD produced by the famous supplier Owsley Stanley. The drug looked like little orange barrels. I had one in my hand, and I realized within ten minutes I could feel it through the pores of my skin. This stuff was extremely potent and meant to be diluted in a glass of water for about eight to ten people.

But we all took a barrel each, far more than was sensible or safe—especially for the four people who had never taken acid before.

I realized very quickly that this was way too strong, and the last thing you want is feeling responsible for other people when you are about to pass into another dimension. It was at this moment that my young bride got trapped in the toilet and became convinced the door was breathing. That worried me, but only for a moment because like everyone else I was staring at the wall or reading the carpet.

Not only was I reading the carpet. I was convinced there was an article about us all in it!

With everybody hallucinating, I decided we should all go outside, and I led everyone into a small field behind the houses. We felt a lot better under the sky, lying on the grass in a circle with our heads together. We did that for what could have been ten seconds or eight hours. Time became meaningless. Suddenly we realized that though we were eight people, we could all see and hear the same thing, as if we shared one consciousness. We had all sorts of visions—chariots in the sky and such. And we watched as we gradually came down to Earth, like seeing ourselves in a mirror. It was the most full-on hallucinating I’ve ever experienced.

Suddenly we saw an older man and a lady taking a dog for a walk. Now, they might not have been there, but we all saw them, and they looked back at us, surprised I would guess by how we were staring at them. They said, “Oh, hi. This is our little dog called Jack. He’s a Jack Russell.” We just took it all in totally silent with eyes wide-open.

The man said, “This dog can do any trick. Give him a knife and fork, and he’ll eat his dinner!”

Of course, he was just joking, but it sounded very weird to us. So we wanted to go back to Brian and Pauline’s house, but we couldn’t find it. All of the houses on the estate looked the same. We felt a little panicked, eight people holding hands, freaking out, feeling like we were trapped in a maze. I knew I had to do something to help.

I suggested to Pam that we knock on a door, explain to whoever answered what had happened and ask them to help. By then, Pam was completely gone and didn’t understand a word I was saying.

We knocked on a random door. Pam was wearing a daisy chain and a long velvet cloak, but somehow she’d lost her wedding dress and she was naked underneath. The poor guy opened the door and saw a helpless stoned boy and a seminaked girl standing there, with our eyes as huge as dustbin lids.

I said, “Excuse me. My wife and I [which sounded weird, as we looked about fourteen] just took a very strong hallucinogenic drug, and we may need to go to hospital. Can you help us?”

He was a big guy, a manual worker, by the look of him, but he could tell there was something wrong and asked us inside. In the living room, his wife was pressing shirts on an ironing board. The whole room was covered with flowered wallpaper and a patterned carpet, which is pretty intense when you are tripping. When the wife found out what we’d done, she said, “I’ve heard about LSD—doesn’t that destroy your brain cells or something?”

Then, with true northeastern hospitality, she said, “How about I make you a cup of tea?” In England, we believe a cup of tea will cure anything and everything.

So the guy was looking at us strangely and trying to talk to us. Pam was sitting there, looking at the carpet, just completely out of her mind. I was thinking, God, we’d better get out of here.

The woman brought the tea, and Pam took the cup and just turned it over and poured the whole thing onto their carpet. I could see what she was doing, and it created these amazing patterns! But to these people, we just looked crazy. Needless to say, I hurriedly backed us out of their front door, thanking them profusely, only to find our friends still hiding behind the front wall, where we had left them, completely lost and bewildered.

After the wedding we returned to London, still shaken from our experience, only to be told our band was going to be opening for Elton on a couple of shows in the UK. Then we were off to Italy, where we would be supporting him on a few more shows in sports arenas. And so I was suddenly thrown into rehearsals, now a married man.

We were pretty hopeless on the road, totally inexperienced and undisciplined, but we had enormous fun. As well as being the support act, we enjoyed singing backing vocals during Elton’s set—on epic songs like “Rocket Man” and “Daniel.” The last night of the tour, we stayed at the Hilton Hotel in Rome, which at that time was very grand. Everyone was getting on great. Davey Johnstone, Elton’s guitarist, and Dee Murray, the bass player, were really friendly, and we had Kiki Dee join us; she was a real sweetheart who was about to sign to Rocket.

One night after a show, we were all invited to Elton’s enormous suite in the early hours. I was lying on top of the giant four-poster bed, reading American comics Elton acquired for me as a gift. The room was packed with a mixture of male ballet dancers, band members, Elton’s manager, John Reid, and assorted men and stunning girls. The food, drink and drugs were flowing.

At one point I decided to go into the bathroom, and came out dancing with a towel around my head and wearing a robe—anything to get attention, among all these fashionistas and glitterati. This small, intense guy in the corner of the room was watching, and he had two beautiful girls with him. They asked me to join them, so I did, and he told me these actresses were in his new movie called Diary of Forbidden Dreams, which, from what I gathered, was about male erotic fantasies. He asked me if I would appear in it. Sounded good to a juvenile delinquent from Sunderland.

I thought the least I could do was inform my wife. So I called Pam from the party to say I might have to stay on in Italy for an extra week because this director had offered me a part in his movie. No, I couldn’t tell her what the movie was about or even what the director’s name was, which must have made her deeply suspicious. The fact that she was on the other end of the line using the communal phone in the empty hallway of our drafty house while I was swanning about in a debauched decadent party in Rome wasn’t lost on her, I’m sure.

I waffled on about how important it was for me to branch out into another creative area. Pam listened patiently, then told me quite simply, “Get home now,” and hung up.

Twenty-five years later, I was having dinner at the Hôtel Costes in Paris with my current wife, Anoushka, and this chap came up to our table, interrupted us, and said, “Hey, aren’t you that kid from Elton’s room in Rome?” We chatted for about five minutes about that evening. Anoushka was impressed, and as he walked away, she said, “Wow, you know Roman Polanski!” I, of course, said yeah, but in fact I had had no idea who he was then or back in 1973, and even less idea why he wanted me to be in his film!

•   •   •

Longdancer had made one album, and we’d been on tour and played in England and Italy for Elton John. We also did our own shows in Holland, France and other places. But the band basically disintegrated in Germany. We were in Hamburg when Kai had a meltdown. We were all getting on one another’s nerves. It kind of all fell apart at the German record launch party, which was an absolute fiasco, with Kai walking along a parapet of a penthouse rooftop, threatening to jump in front of all the German press. I decided to retire to the bathroom and not be part of it. Instead, I lay in the tub. The door opened and several photographers snapped off pictures, so in terms of press coverage the event was a resounding success. And thankfully Kai didn’t jump.

Later we went to perform for the media in a Hamburg club, but it was not so successful, as we repeated our stoned tuning-up performance that got us the record deal in the first place. Longdancer danced on valiantly as a band for a little while longer, but basically, by then, we were done. It was over.

Life in London resumed. Pamela was working as a nurse, while I was working on trying all sorts of different drugs, but mainly LSD. I was probably taking it every third day of the week. After a while, this behavior really got Pam down. I was a complete nutcase. I’d even written my own language down on paper so we could speak it to each other. It was just gobbledygook. In fact, I saw some of it years later and it was just a load of scribble marks on paper and didn’t make any sense at all.

We were unlike a normal married couple at that time, as Pam was at work and I would be at home. The trouble was that I took too many drugs. She’d often come home and find me staring at the wall, or there’d be some other people around, all smoking Thai sticks. We were together still but becoming estranged. Pam was holding down a straight job, and I was anything but straight.

I started to sell records in a market at Camden Lock, one of the first people doing it. I used to go to a warehouse to get Trojan Records and imports like Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, stuff like that, all on sale or return. I would still listen to music but had stopped playing it completely. I had a record stall, the only one shrouded in marijuana smoke.

Then I got a stall in Swiss Cottage. One day, when the smoke cleared, I became aware of the guy running the stall next to me who was selling vegetables and fruit. He explained later that the veg was just the front; his main source of income was selling stolen jewelry, which he hid under the bruised parsnips. He was an interesting character, maybe ten or fifteen years older than me, and enamored by my weirdness. We were from completely different origins; he was from the East End of London and he had a criminal background. He’d even been to prison.

One morning he suggested we could go into business together and have an actual little record shop. It turned out to be the smallest record store in London. It was just inside the entrance to Kilburn tube station.

I came up with the name Small Mercies. I remember thinking then, for a moment, I’ll have a band called Small Mercies, and the record business will help finance it.

Soon, though, I felt like I was in the retail business. I had to open up the shop in the morning, be there all day and close it up at night. It became very popular, selling our reggae dub records. We had several Jamaican customers, so once again the whole place was shrouded in a fog of marijuana smoke, which didn’t go down well in a London Underground station, and even less with my partner, Ray, who was constantly avoiding the police.

The Jamaican customers and African musicians started to inspire me to play again. One very tall and handsome chap was from the band Osibisa, and he invited me to jam with them, so I picked up the guitar once more. That period working in the market where I stared at my Telecaster in the corner of the room was the longest period of my life when I didn’t touch a guitar.

Osibisa means “crisscross rhythms that lead to happiness,” and they did. I learned all these weird rhythmic ways of playing that later I would use on Eurythmics records. The members of Osibisa cooked amazing African food, and I delved into African and Caribbean culture, which expanded my horizons more than I could have imagined. It also gave me a whole new perspective on London.

The shop came to an abrupt halt, and so did I as the result of a massive car crash. It wasn’t my fault. I was driving the little minivan that we used for moving vinyl albums around. This guy just came straight out of a side street and banged into me in his Ford Zodiac, which was as massive and as heavy as a Sherman tank. I don’t remember much about the collision. All I recall is waking up in somebody’s garden and the police were already there. When I first saw all those helmeted, blue-uniformed bobbies, my first thought was they had come for Ray.

I was taken to the hospital in an ambulance, and of all the places to take me, it was the Whittington in Highgate, where Pam worked. On my way there I realized that my bag was filled with ganja, so I opened my jeans under the blanket and shoved the dope down the front of my underwear. When I was in the treatment room, two nurses came in and started cutting off my jeans. I was pretending to be really delirious and shouting a lot, trying to stop them from uncovering my secret stash. The police were trying to calm me down, saying softly, “It’s all right, son. It’s all right. The girls are just doing their job.”

At that moment, Pam walked in, one of the luckiest coincidences in my life. At first she thought I was shy about having my jeans removed, so she said, “It’s all right. They’ve seen it all before.”

I told the nurses and the cops that Pam was my wife and I’d like to spend some moments alone with her. Believing this might calm me down, they all left the room. I then pulled out all the ganja from my underwear.

She said, “Oh, bloody hell,” and started to stuff it in her nurse’s uniform pockets. I think that was the last straw with Pam. Here I was now bringing problems into her place of work.

After that, we started to drift apart. She had hit it off with another musician in our circle, Barry Dransfield, and I think I encouraged them to spend time together, even to the point of suggesting Pam sleep with Barry when we all stayed together in a country mansion. Barry was playing with his brother as the Dransfields and was becoming quite a well-known solo artist himself on the folk scene. I was happy for them to be together, if that’s what they wanted, as I was beginning to think we may have married a wee bit too early.

But one evening the three of us almost died at the hands of Barry. We were drinking in the Queens Pub in Crouch End, which at the time was notorious for drug deals. It was a rowdy pub with live music and people dancing on the tables. Barry and I had already been banned from the Railway Tavern just up the street for causing a disturbance, so this time we were quietly sipping our beer and keeping a low profile. Being so docile could also be explained by the fact that we’d taken Secanol, a drug commonly used to calm you just before surgery.

At one point we decided to leave and go back to Barry’s for a smoke, and I asked along my buddy Big Dave, a great saxophone player, but also a heroin and morphine fiend (well, any drug, actually).

As we were leaving, I saw Barry pop another Secanol. I told him he shouldn’t be driving on that cocktail of beer and pills. He said he was fine and it was only up the road anyway. We all climbed into the Dransfields’ Ford Transit van, Pam and me on the front bench seat, Big Dave in the back and Barry at the wheel.

Then all hell broke loose as Barry started the van up, put it into first gear and swerved into the road and immediately passed out at the wheel, with his foot jammed down on the accelerator. We took off with such force that Pam and I were thrown into the back with Big Dave as our seat snapped. Then we were tossed about like rag dolls as the van hurtled up Crouch End Broadway with Barry asleep, sprawled across the steering wheel. We were about to demolish the clock tower, but somehow I managed to push Barry away. I tried to steer standing up but couldn’t move his foot, which was now jammed between the accelerator and the clutch. This seemed like the longest crash in history as we zoomed off up Crouch Hill with Pam screaming and Secanol pills bouncing loose around the van. Dave, meanwhile, was eating them all. He later used the excuse that he thought we would all get busted.

I managed to navigate past the Railway Tavern and swerved, turning into Hornsey Lane. We crunched and grinded to a halt, plowing right into several parked cars along the way. The three of us escaped out the back door of the van. Barry was slumped at the wheel when police cars descended on us from all directions. Pam and I looked like innocent bystanders who were trying to pull Barry from the wreckage. Trouble was, just as two burly policemen came to help, Barry opened one eye and said to me, “Dave, we can still get away.”

I immediately looked confused and said, “He must be delirious, Officer,” and stood aside to let them assist.

By now half the street was full of pajama-clad residents, and as the scene became more confusing, Pam, Dave and I slipped away unnoticed. By the time we got home, Pam was shaking and went to bed, while I tried to get Dave to do the same. Around three a.m., we heard an awful crash coming from the kitchen, only to find Dave upside down, covered in plates, saucers and cutlery, trying to open a tin of beans sideways with a screwdriver. He smiled and asked me—“Want some?”

Pam and I decided to move out of our flat and into a squat in London. It was all getting increasingly scary for her, and things were just too unstable. We didn’t have any money, and London prices were exorbitant, so it was my idea to move into a squat to save money on rent.

Just before we moved, Pam announced she had some savings and was going to America to visit Ann Zadik, the girl from Island Music who’d moved to Laguna Beach and married an American. When Pam went there, she quickly realized how rough and tumble her life in London was compared to Laguna and the California lifestyle. She fell in love with the idea of moving there, especially as we had already started drifting apart.

While she was in the USA, which seemed to be for ages, she met somebody new, and so did I. Her name was Katy, and she inspired me to start writing songs again, the first in a long while. One of the songs I wrote was about her, and that night she stayed with me. In the morning—while getting in the car to drive her to work—I was nabbed by the police, who were waiting right outside my front door. I had some grass in my bag, and they arrested us. I explained that Katy knew nothing about it, so they let her go. I, however, was well and truly busted and had to go to the police station and later to the magistrates’ court.

Pam returned, and although our relationship had obviously gone sideways, we moved in with the poet Tim Daly and his girlfriend, Pauline. They had a flat, and we had one room in it. Now we’d gone from sharing a house and having our own apartment to one room in somebody else’s flat. It was totally claustrophobic.

Around this time I was approached by Transatlantic Records to see if I would work with a band of theirs called the Sadista Sisters. I had met Jude, the lead singer, along with Teresa D’Abreu and Linda Marlowe. At first they were a formidable lineup of nine women. I’d never seen or heard anything like them, because they weren’t like any group I’d ever experienced. Not rock and roll, not soul, not folk. They were an underground feminist theater group that played music. Jude’s style was kind of prepunk. The developing fringe theater at the time had little to offer women in terms of roles, or even as audience members; the Sadista Sisters was formed as a direct response to the male-dominated establishment theater of the early 1970s.

Jude had been a trapeze artist in California, worked in a Grotowski-based company called KISS in France and was a member of Steven Berkoff’s first companies playing in Vienna and London’s Roundhouse. In fact, Teresa and Jude had formed Sadista Sisters as a direct response to working with the brilliant but misogynistic Steven Berkoff. Jude was five months pregnant when she signed the album contract with Transatlantic Records. She didn’t know she was pregnant and was horrified when she found out. They received a lot of great press when they played a season at Ronnie Scott’s club. Jude’s baby was practically born on the stage.

Jude was maybe five or six years older than me and had truly been through a lot. A few years before she’d been to America and landed a role in a movie, but the night before the first day of filming, her nightgown caught fire as she was making toast. When her roommate came home, he stood and watched, frozen, as he was tripping, and once had watched his father’s house burn down. He didn’t understand that this was really happening. Jude had third-degree burns and was told her arm was going to be amputated. But there was nobody there to sign a release from her family, so she had to have painful skin grafts.

As she told all of this (and the stories got stranger and stranger), she became more and more fascinating to me. I fell for Jude big-time. It was one of the first times I’d encountered a female artist who was extremely strong, sexually provocative and anarchic at the same time. She had a well-defined idea of what she was going to do and how to achieve it.

I went flying into this relationship. But I was stupidly naive to have jumped into a relationship with her, knowing she had a two-year-old daughter named Amy. I had no grasp of the responsibility that comes with having a child. But I was besotted, totally under her spell, sexually intoxicated. I had no idea about theater or why an all-girl feminist troupe would hire male musicians; evidently the label forced them into it.

I must admit I was confused most of the time, but it seemed crazy, edgy and stimulating, and after rehearsals Jude and I would have passionate sex anywhere and everywhere. I was crazy about her and willingly agreed to go on tour with the Sadista Sisters and the whole entourage.

The first tour we did was interesting, to say the least. After the extravagant Elton days of touring, this was hard-core hand-to-mouth survival. At first we stayed in what seemed like an army camp in the woods in Holland. I can’t remember much apart from sleeping with Jude on the floor of a cabin every night, and it seemed very romantic in an impoverished-artist kind of way. When we eventually played shows they were haphazard and maybe the worst-organized tour I’d ever encountered. Because none of us had any money, we even took to busking in the street.

I invented myself as a new character who could remember anything, any date, any name, all at the click of my fingers. I became Memory Man, except the whole joke was that I couldn’t remember anything. In Stuttgart I managed to get a slot before the striptease act came on, and the guys in the club were really mad because they were told I was Memory Man and they wanted strippers. I’d come on and always have a plant in the audience, who would say, “Who won the World Cup in 1962?” And, of course, I would not remember anything and slowly have a nervous breakdown onstage and get carried off. And that was my act.

(Years later I turned my adventures as Memory Man into a graphic novel called Walk In, the term used when the original soul leaves a person’s body and another soul “walks in.” It often occurs around an accident or trauma. I often wonder if this has happened to me and that somehow when I was at death’s door, another spirit entered my body. One of those experiences happened, I’m sure, at the beginning of our next tour.)

Jude and I had slowly cut ourselves off from the rest of the band, and there was a lot of tension in the air. I decided to ask Eddie, my friend from Sunderland who had previously worked as a roadie with Longdancer, to come on the road and help us. Because Jude and I were together, the band was getting fractious, so we decided to have a separate car from them. I rented one and drove it from a seaport in Holland, where we picked up Eddie, all the way to Germany, where we switched drivers.

Eddie got in the driver’s seat, and with one fatal turn of the wheel, he pulled the wrong way onto the Autobahn, headfirst into the oncoming traffic. It was late at night and cars were doing about eighty miles an hour. For a second everything went in slow motion. Then I screamed, “Wrong way.” But it was too late. A car hit us full force, and we went spinning around. I don’t remember much about it. I don’t remember hearing any noise. I just remember glass shattering. I was so freaked-out, because baby Amy was in the back and got thrown out of the car. Amy miraculously survived without serious injury. Jude suffered serious internal bleeding, and I was bruised and banged up. It was a terrible crash. It was on the front page of the German national newspapers because it caused a pileup. It really was a miracle that no one died, but there were a lot of very badly injured people.

We had to go to a hospital in Wilhelmshaven, and we couldn’t understand anything the doctors or nurses were saying and there was just one person there who could interpret English. It really was a nightmare. Then we were taken in an ambulance all the way to Hamburg. It obviously really messed up my relationship with Jude, because the first thing that happened, after embarking on this adventure together in our own car was, boom, a crash.

Then we got stranded in Hamburg because the label refused to help. We survived only because of Jude’s longtime friend Heidi Gudrun, the Bahlsen biscuits heiress who lent us two thousand deutsche marks and let us stay in her flat in Berlin for two weeks. Gudrun had driven through East Berlin to pick up Amy because Jude was in the hospital alone with internal bleeding for a week, and couldn’t sit up to nurse her. Gudrun also smuggled Amy through the Iron Curtain with no papers like in a John le Carré novel.

That was the end of my relationship with Jude. We didn’t meet or talk after we returned to England. It all seemed like an amazing acid trip that had suddenly gone horribly wrong. I liked her so much and respected her as an artist and wanted us to get back together but I knew that dream was well and truly over.

•   •   •

It was 1975, and I was on my own for the first time since I was seventeen. There were strikes and power cuts. Margaret Thatcher replaced Edward Heath as prime minister. People drank Blue Nun wine at dinner parties and finished with Black Forest gâteau. Punk musicians were about to challenge all the millionaire rock stars who lived in stately homes. I would go walking up the street in Crouch End from my mother’s miniature apartment. It was a tiny little room with a bright purple carpet and a section for the kitchen sink with large black-and-white tiles, which was not good for hallucinating at all.

One day, on one of my strolls, I ran into Paul Jacobs, a friend I hadn’t seen for a while. I used to know him when he worked at Camden Market, where he also sold records. He was opening a shop called Spanish Moon after the song by Little Feat. He didn’t explain it to me until later that he wasn’t renting; it was a squat, the whole house. He just moved in and made it look like such a legitimate shop that people assumed it must be official, like a bona fide record store.

So when Paul saw me walking up the street, he knocked on the window and invited me in. He had a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, so we had a nip or two while we explained to each other what had been going on since we last met. It was about six o’clock in the evening and he said, “Oh, you must come and meet this girl,” because he knew I was a musician and crazier about music than anything else. He said, “I’ve just met her. And she can play and sing on a harmonium, an old harmonium. And she’s really got a great voice.”

And I said, “Yeah, okay, I’d like to meet her.”