Before I knew it, I’d been out of school for three years, been on the dole for a year, doing odd jobs, so I was like, What am I going to do? I can’t keep bumming around with no future, no hope. As I’ve said, growing up as a kid in Sheffield we never really travelled. Apart from the trips to Switzerland to see my cousin, we didn’t go very far afield. So when one of the lecturers at my college mentioned that some students were applying for this summer job called Camp America, it was about as far removed from my world as possible. Basically, Camp America organized summer camps for kids from underprivileged areas and they recruited overseas students to supervise and help the kids out. Some of the lecturers at college had already been and said it was a great experience. For me, it was like, Fuck, how bad can this be? I just felt like it was an opportunity, and something in me said to just go, to grab the moment. I saw a spark of something and leapt at it. At home, there was still conflict with my dad, so I think there was also an element of me thinking, Fuck you, I am going to America to do my own thing.
America itself was a big part of the attraction. As a kid growing up in the seventies and eighties, I watched a lot of American TV and movies, much of which was car related, Starsky & Hutch, Dukes of Hazzard, CHiPs, Smokey and the Bandit, Bullitt. I loved all that stuff. Of course, it’s not just all the car-related stuff; it’s Kojak, The Streets of San Francisco, it’s The Rockford Files, Paul Newman, Robert Redford and Steve McQueen, you know. Even though we might only have had three TV channels, everybody watched those iconic shows and movies. And, like millions of kids, I had one of those Evel Knievel motorbike toys and a rocket car as well. Americana was a pretty key feature of my childhood years, as it was for a lot of my mates.
By this time, my musical taste had expanded so that as well as all the British rock bands, I was also listening to American groups such as Guns N’ Roses and Mötley Crüe, as glam rock morphed with punk rock. Guns N’ Roses was about to become the biggest band in the world. I was aware of the Sunset Strip and the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle out in LA. Even further back than that, I’d heard about LA and the Doors, all that; you just pick bits up.
So that’s why when this Camp America opportunity came up, my gut instinct told me something that has been absolutely central to my entire life and pretty much everything I have done – How bad can this be? Going to America wasn’t a lifelong dream, I hadn’t even really thought about the idea, but now that the opportunity had presented itself I thought, They speak English, it’s a free flight, I’m fascinated by the culture, and the idea of breaking out on my own appeals, too. For me, going to America just seemed cooler and easier than staying in Sheffield, struggling to get by. Give it a go. So I applied to join, and for some reason they accepted me. Once I got my letter of acceptance, I literally packed a big duffel bag and off I went. In hindsight, thirty years later, that was the best thing I ever did.
Pretty soon after being accepted, I was on a train down to London, en route to Heathrow Airport for my flight on 14 June 1986. Looking back, that really was a leap of faith, quite literally taking me completely out of my world and into a totally alien environment. There were probably about five hundred people meeting up at the airport, all going to America but not knowing exactly where we were ultimately going to be stationed. You just got on a plane and off you went to New York for a one-night stopover, after which you were given your eventual destination.
I vaguely remember going out in New York with a bunch of complete strangers on that first night and that was a big culture shock. Remember, at this point I’d been to Switzerland with my family, competed in cross-country in Germany, been on holiday to Morocco with the air stewardess I told you about (because she got free flights) and down to London a few times, but I was hardly a globetrotter.
I was only in the Big Apple for twelve hours before I was given my final destination, which was at a camp in Michigan. The next leg of this journey was a big turning point for me, getting on a Trailways bus from Penn Station to Detroit, which is a long way. That was the start of what I would call my American road trip. I don’t even remember how many hours that journey was – it might have been a ten-hour drive – then we were picked up somewhere in Detroit and had another hour’s drive to this camp north of Detroit near Lake Michigan, in the middle of nowhere.
There were two types of summer camps – one for rich kids and one for underprivileged kids. Mine was not for the rich kids. By this point, I’m actually a little bit fucking worried and scared. Detroit is a real urban city. I’m almost the token white kid on the camp. It’s all inner-city kids. No one is into rock ’n’ roll. They’re all into Run DMC, LL Cool J and carrying these big ghetto-blaster boom-boxes. Remember, back then I’ve got spiky peroxide platinum hair, I’m tall, skinny and white. I’m looking like I should be in Mötley Crüe. They don’t know if I’m a chick or a guy. To make matters worse, everyone seems to know everyone else, there’s cousins, nephews, siblings – everyone seemed friends with each other already … all except this lanky white kid from Sheffield, England. Whatever their ethnic background, they were all pretty hard inner-city kids. Like I say, this was not a camp for rich kids, this was a ‘we can’t keep control of these kids so let’s ship them off for a few months of the year’ camp. I was completely out of my element. Let me tell you, it was a severe culture shock. I was like, Fuck! What have I got myself into?
These were kids from broken homes – you know, dad’s in jail, mum’s on welfare or the kids are living with their aunts because their mum’s working and can’t afford to keep them. They were only supposed to be there for two weeks, but a lot of them just kept getting dumped back there time after time. As a so-called ‘camp counsellor’, I had to get them out of bed at 7 a.m., get them to breakfast at 7.30 a.m. and at 8 they started doing art studies or swimming or going for a walk or playing basketball or some other camp activity. However, these kids didn’t want to listen to anybody, especially not some skinny white guy with peroxide hair and tight trousers; they just wanted to goof off and go run around. So I’ve got to somehow try and control them. Easier said than done. Almost immediately I was not really liking being in a log cabin with twelve kids aged from eight to fifteen where I’m supposed to be in charge even though I’m not that much older. I was essentially a babysitter, but I spent half of the time trying to make sure they were not drowning each other in the lake. Try telling them to clean their dorms or write a letter home or wash up … And lights out at 9.30 … yeah? Not gonna happen. It was kind of miserable, truth be told. I remember being pretty lonely, because that was not exactly a super-uplifting environment. It’s not like I could go out for a beer to relax – I was too young to buy a beer and too skint to afford one.
Big moments change your life. Looking back, that’s where I learnt to become what I like to call an ‘adaptive swimmer’. Dropped into this completely unfamiliar environment, not knowing anybody and, like it or not, it’s sink or swim. The instinct to survive was just naturally there; maybe it came from the cross-country running, you know, keep on pushing and don’t give up. I definitely got some of that from my parents, too, who worked very hard.
The kids would come for ten days and then there’d be two days off before the next lot arrived, and during those breaks you’d spend time with the other counsellors. As part of the deal, we were all given $100 pocket money for the summer, so you had to be careful how you spent that. There weren’t many English students doing this, so I ended up making friends with some guy that lived in a suburb of Detroit. One night we went into Detroit and that was a big eye-opener because that was a real inner-city town, you know, ‘Motor City’ and all that. At the time, Detroit was even worse than Sheffield. Sure, it was the home of the auto industry, but by the mid eighties that legacy was starting to crumble as quickly as the disused car factories. People had started leaving Detroit in the sixties and seventies, so by the time I visited, certain areas were just a ghost town. Like Sheffield, a lot of the steel plants and factories were closing down, there was a lot of unemployment and people were having a real hard time. That was unsettling to see, because even just from a rock fan’s perspective I knew that Detroit was a city with so much culture – the MC5, the Stooges, Alice Cooper, the proto-punk scene in the late sixties – but when I first experienced it in 1986, people were struggling.
I ended up finding this little area in Detroit called Royal Oak, which was a suburb where there were a couple of cool stores and something of a thriving punk rock scene. There was also a little area called Greektown and Trappers Alley that was in Downtown that was kind of cool. I remember going across the border into Canada and you can look back over the lake – Detroit looks great from Windsor. Despite everything I’ve said about people struggling and the city having a tough time, I felt a connection. Maybe it was the defunct manufacturing, maybe it was the history and the cars, I’m not sure, but there was something fascinating about that place. Standing there looking at Motor City as a nineteen-year-old kid, little did I know that ten years later the same punk rock stores would be selling my clothing range and thirty years after that I’d eventually make a video called Motor City Outlaw, driving one of my outlaw Porsches through Detroit.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Back in 1986, my life was very different. I met a local girl in one of the gritty clubs in town and she started coming to visit me in the camp, which brightened my days. Eventually, finally, the camp ended in late August. My cousin Oliver had arranged to fly over from Switzerland so we could go off on some travels around the States, my first American road trip. We bought ourselves a Trailways ticket each and caught the bus from Detroit to LA. For me it was always going to be LA, because Los Angeles is more of a music town than New York. At the time, I didn’t think much about the film business, but I had watched all those TV shows I mentioned and I clicked with that idea. As a heavy-metal fan, LA obviously also had the Sunset Strip/rock ’n’ roll/heavy-metal culture, too. So off we went on this bus from Michigan, LA bound.
Now, check out a map of that journey and you will see that it is a pretty massive trek. Well, what they didn’t tell us was that they went via Memphis and Tennessee! The buses were the cheapest way for people to travel, so there were all sorts of ‘interesting’ characters on board. The trip was endless and made worse by the fact we had to stop every four hours or so at these pretty grimy truck stops in the middle of nowhere. Remember, I’m still looking all glammed out and punk rock at this point, so I was sticking out like a sore thumb. There was a bathroom on the bus, but it was kind of stinky. That was some journey. It wasn’t like we got off and went to Graceland and did the tourist stuff; we were just sitting or sleeping on this bus for what felt like an eternity. One particularly vivid memory is of my Sony Walkman running out of batteries so that the tape and the tunes were getting all wobbly.
Eventually, we arrived at Union Station in Los Angeles, less than a mile from where I sit writing this book right now. The bus must have come in at like 4 a.m. in the morning. I was so excited, I was thinking, Wow! We’re in LA. It’s going to be full of all the beautiful people, the movie stars, the rock stars, Baywatch … where’s Pamela Anderson?
Pamela never showed.
We fell asleep on a bench.
As Axl Rose once said in a song, ‘Welcome to the Jungle’…
I vividly remember getting woken up by a security guard at six in the morning, ‘Hey, you can’t sleep here …’ I told him we were going to Venice Beach or maybe to Hollywood to stay at a youth hostel, but he wasn’t interested and made us move along. Truth be told, we hadn’t got a clue what was going on, and we’d had two hours’ sleep at the end of a bus journey that seemed to take years. All we had was an idiot’s guide to LA, and of course there were no mobile phones or internet back then.
We just wandered around fairly aimlessly before finally getting a bus that took for ever to get to Hollywood, where we bunked up in the YMCA (and were sharp enough to pay for our own room, rather than one of the shared dorms). The reality had hit home pretty immediately that what I had seen on TV was not everyday life on the real streets of America. But hey, as a teenager, you don’t know that. Besides, once we’d dumped our bags, we went straight out exploring. Despite all the tiredness, the aches and pains and the lack of food, we were just excited to be in Hollywood and eager to look around. After a while wandering about, we found Hollywood Boulevard.
This is 1986. Back then, Hollywood Boulevard was just great because it was like Soho in New York meets the Kings Road or West End in London, but on steroids. It was a massive culture clash of sights, smells, people, music, tattoo parlours, crazy shops and all these peculiar but fascinating characters wandering around. It had everything: the sleaze, the pimps, the runaway kids, the people hawking change, the Chinese Theatre, the cheap, seedy rock ’n’ roll stores, the stripper chick stores. Everybody looked cool to me. Even though some cultural naysayers were shouting that it was the decline of Western civilization, to this kid from Sheffield, it was just mesmerizing.
Like I said, at this point I’m looking pretty glam – tight pants, spiky peroxide hair, all that – so I kinda fitted in. I was walking by this cheap clothing store and in the window they had these black PVC alligator pants for $9.99, so I bought a pair and took them back to the YMCA. They didn’t fit good, they weren’t skin-tight, just cut like a 501 or similar. So I bought a basic sewing kit and altered them, changed the seams so that they were real tight. I wore those customized trousers with a Meatloaf-style white ruffled shirt and a black jacket with my hair all teased up – it was kind of like ‘Robert Smith from the Cure meets Mike Monroe from Hanoi Rocks meets Ian Astbury from the Cult’. Oliver and I were a bit of an oddball couple. I was rocking the Hanoi Rocks look, but he was the total opposite. Olly was a Mod; he was into scooters and Lambrettas and dressing in Ben Sherman and Fred Perry; he had a parka and Sta-Prest trousers with his Jam shoes; he was listening to the Who, the Specials, the Selecter and all the Two Tone scene. So, yeah, we looked like a strange combination walking around LA.
A few days later, we headed back to Hollywood Boulevard, and I asked someone where all the cool clothing shops were. They told me Melrose, so we got a bus there, but of course we got off at the wrong end of what is a very long street. So it’s ninety degrees, I’m sweating buckets because I’m wearing PVC pants, that ruffled shirt and all that hair, and we have to walk over a mile along Melrose to get to the cool shops.
Eventually, we made it down to the interesting end, and one of these cool stores was called Retail Slut (there was another similar one called Let It Rock). I’d visited London a few times previously, so I was familiar with places like Malcolm McLaren’s Sex shop on the Kings Road, and these seemed to me to be the LA equivalent. Retail Slut was the coolest, so we went in there. It was a heavy-metal store stocking Dr. Martens, Lip Service, Let It Rock shoes, all this rock ’n’ roll gear, and there was this guy working behind the counter with spiky hair, looked a bit like me, similar vibe. Turned out it was Taime Downe of the band Faster Pussycat. To this day, it’s a pretty common story for LA musicians to work in retail because the stores don’t open till midday, so these kids can be out till two in the morning rehearsing or gigging, then turn up for work the next day still hungover but it’s okay.
So this guy Taime goes, ‘Hey, man, cool pants,’ just like that. ‘Where you from?’
I tell him England and then he goes, ‘Where’d you get the pants from?’
Now, for some reason that I don’t really know, gut instinct I guess, I literally just said, ‘London. Why? You want to buy some?’
‘Yeah, sure, how much are they?’
Again, instinct … I just threw out a price for these $9.99 pants that I’d customized with a cheap sewing kit in a youth hostel round the corner.
‘Twenty-five bucks a pair. How many do you want?’
‘I’ll take eight pairs.’
Again, without overthinking it, just going with the flow, I said, ‘Okay, no problem, I’ll be back within the hour.’
We realized we didn’t have time to walk back to the cheap store where I’d bought these $9.99 pants, so we got a cab there, bought twelve pairs, took them back to Taime and he was good for his word and paid us $25 for each pair out of the till. Just sold them as is, didn’t even make them tight, didn’t take the seams in. Now I may not have excelled at maths in school, but I knew that twelve pairs at $10 was $120, and this guy had just paid us $200 for only eight of them. So I was $80 up and still had pants left to sell. That had made me more profit in one sale than I was earning in a week on a building site in the UK. This cheap store where I’d bought these PVC pants for $9.99 was literally only a mile away from Retail Slut on Melrose, but nobody went to Hollywood Boulevard because it wasn’t considered a cool place to shop.
None of this was planned. It was an opportunity that just evolved. The adaptive swimmer again, the ability to just go with the flow, make a decision when presented with what could be an opportunity, reacting quickly to a moment. This is an approach to life that has served me well and is an idea I will come back to. I didn’t buy the pants because I figured I could go and sell them on Melrose. It happened purely organically, by chance, but that sort of moment has happened to me half a dozen times over the years. Those organic happenings, opportunities, unexpected openings or whatever you want to call them are crucial. When they happen, I always try to say yes rather than no.
Well, later in my story I would come to start my own fashion label and you would be forgiven for thinking this was how it all began. Well, not really, no. After selling those pants to Retail Slut, I basically spent the next three or four months couch-surfing in LA. I sank myself into the club scene around Hollywood Boulevard, which at the time was fantastic. This is pre-internet, so everyone’s promoting their clubs or bands or venues on little flyers printed on neon paper, all these little dayglo scraps of ambition littered across the sidewalks. I’d go to these clubs and watch the bands, and pretty quickly I made some cool friends and found myself part of that scene. Olly had to fly back to Switzerland, but I stayed on and had a great time sofa-surfing and making new mates. I even spent a few weeks in San Francisco at a youth hostel near Fisherman’s Wharf with a girl I’d met at a club.
Like I said, this was pre-internet, no mobile phones, so staying in touch with my parents was pretty slow. I used to write to my mum quite a lot, and she has kept all those postcards. Those Hollywood streets, let’s be honest, were not exactly brimming with law-abiding citizens. Plenty of good people, of course, but also a fair share of shady characters. There was a scam going on where people were getting hold of stolen phone calling cards, so you’d see a guy hanging outside of the post office around the phone box and you’d go buy these ‘magic numbers’ – essentially it was a calling-card number. They’d only be good for say a day or two before they were stopped, but that’s how a lot of people were calling home. I couldn’t afford to be making four- or five-dollar phone calls to my mum, so once a week I’d call her on one of these phone cards. Sometimes you’d be mid-conversation and it would just be cut off, but it was always great to speak to Mum.
I had a great time, but there was no real progress in terms of making money or getting a job. When my temporary visa ran out I didn’t even have enough money to get a ticket home. I was totally skint, I’d grown tired of couch-surfing and, to be fair, my friends’ patience was understandably wearing thin. I had no choice: I had to fly home and head back to Sheffield. I even had to rely on a girlfriend to give me the $150 to buy a one-way flight back to Gatwick. It had been fun while it lasted, but it looked like my American dream was over.
It’s funny, isn’t it, how music can sometimes make you feel like you are somewhere else in the world. When I was still in Sheffield, I would listen to some of the hair-metal bands from LA and I could almost feel like I was in Hollywood. Yes, it was six thousand miles away from the north of England, but those bands could make that distance seem irrelevant. Well, let me tell you, travelling back to Sheffield that winter with my tail between my legs having run out of money and ideas in LA, it felt like a fucking long way home. To make matters worse, there were no seats at all on the train back up north, so I had to stand for hours. Bear in mind I’m still all glammed up, my grubby washing stuffed into my bag, a skint, washed-up, exhausted and depressed alien who’d just landed from the west coast of the USA, heading back to the harsh reality of Steel City. Don’t get me wrong, I love Sheffield, it’s a great place, but at that point in my life, the idea of going back to face a few cynical local people who would have a wry smile on their faces as the local boy slunk back home from his American travels was not one that filled me with joy. When I got accepted into Camp America, that was the first big achievement I’d enjoyed. Sure, I’d had some minor success with running, but at school I’d obviously not done so well, which wasn’t something that I was proud of. Going to America was a big deal for me, it meant I had succeeded at something … you know, I told a few of my buddies, ‘Yeah, I’m going to America, I might never be back …’ Now I was back. I was really pleased to see Mum, always, although relations with Dad were still somewhat strained. I moved back in with them in Bents Green, straight back on the dole.
Fuck.
I’d had this taste of freedom, of this lifestyle in America, but nothing had changed at home. Obviously, it was great to see my family, but apart from that it was just like, What the fuck am I going to do? It was not a good time. Immediately, I got back into the old habit of going down to Rebels and the other rock clubs and pubs around Sheffield. However, this time it was different, because now I was restless.
Dejected, I reapplied for Camp America in the May of 1987, but they declined my application. Door shut. Shit.
Then, a few weeks later, I suddenly got a letter one Tuesday from Camp America saying there was a place after all, but I had to fly out that Saturday.
American Dream Part II.
I left England on four days’ notice. This second time I flew out for Camp America, they stationed me in New Jersey. It was essentially the same type of set-up as Detroit – inner-city, underprivileged kids, more of the same rap, LL Cool J, Run DMC and me still cast as the outsider. However, this camp was a little better because it wasn’t as hectic or as big. I was actually somehow appointed swimming instructor and lifeguard, so that was a little bit easier, too. Best of all, crucially, this camp was only a forty-five-minute train ride from New York.
A few of us from camp used to go into New York for one or two days every fortnight, and it was a great time to be around the Big Apple. We would go to the usual rock ’n’ roll haunts such as CBGB, and there was a club we found called L’Amour in Brooklyn. New York was very cool, it was the epicentre, gritty; I really liked it. I was a year older and wiser, the camp was easier, New York was nearby, everything felt pretty good. Then, around the last week of August, I got a job as a lifeguard over Labour Day weekend on the housing estate next to the camp, and that paid pretty well. The camp paid better this time, too, so by the end of the summer I had about a thousand bucks in my pocket. And there was only ever going to be one place I went to with that … back to LA.
I’d kept in contact with all the people in bands and from the club scene that I’d met on my first trip, so when I went back to LA second time around I was a little bit more hooked up. Initially, I ended up staying with a pen pal, another girl I’d met. One of her friends was dating a guy who was in the Cars, and through her we ended up getting invited to an MTV awards party one night at Universal Studios. It felt crazy, such a swift change from standing on that train back to Sheffield only a few months earlier, depressed and skint, to suddenly being at a glitzy music-biz party in LA. I was like, Fuck! How did I get here?
That night I met a musician called Johnny who was in a band named Johnny Outrageous. He thought I’d be great in his band, but although I wasn’t quite talented enough to do that (I never really learnt more than three chords on the guitar), I started hanging out with him anyway, and I ended up staying in his little spare bedroom for about nine months. He was very good about it, you know, ‘You can stay with me for a little bit,’ and even though a few weeks became a few months, he stayed pretty chilled.
Within a few weeks of landing back in LA, I had met quite a lot of people who were in up-and-coming bands on the LA scene, and I quickly fell in with the crowd of ‘cool’ people. That was kind of the beginning of the great times for me in LA over the next two years. The bands that I knew weren’t at the level of Guns N’ Roses, of course, who were top of the tree by then, but my friends were all having a go at breaking their bands, working in the day at telemarketing companies or in retail stores, then gigging at night, playing the Sunset Strip. I’m not trying to make out I was some kind of big name in these clubs; I was sort of low level. I wasn’t in the VIP room with Axl Rose; I’m more milling around on the dance floor, watching the bands. One of the bands that I became friendly with was called the Zeros; they were kind of a New York Dolls type of band, with a Hanoi Rocks vibe. They were hard-working guys, gigging all the time and on the verge of getting a record deal, but unfortunately they never quite made it really big. So I’d hand out flyers for those guys, help roadie for them occasionally, too, just setting the gear up. I got to know a lot of bartenders and they kinda liked the English vibe, so I wasn’t buying many drinks or paying to get into clubs or gigs. I was getting really immersed in that whole scene, going to clubs such as Scream, Power Tools, Cat House, hanging out with people like Johnny and of course Taime (whom I’d sold the PVC pants to the year before; by now his band Faster Pussycat had become relatively big news). They were great days.
During the daytime, these guys were either working or if they were not on a shift we would hang out around Hollywood. I was doing odd jobs maybe one or two days a week, decorating, that sort of shit, getting fifty bucks a day, so I was living meagrely, essentially hand to mouth, but that was okay, I was only twenty, I could handle it. I actually really enjoyed it for a while.
I would get up around eleven, go down Melrose, walk the street, go to the stores, hang out, shoot the shit, ‘What’s going on tonight? Where are you guys going?’ Probably wait for whoever I’m staying with to come home at five to let me in. Hang out with them, maybe go eat, you know something cheap and cheery at a hot dog stand or El Coyote where you could eat for like two or three bucks, then probably head to a club. The goal was always to get there early, because then you get in free or, failing that, be on someone’s guest list. Then hang out at the clubs till two in the morning. Each night there was always a lottery of how you could find a way to crash with someone. Aside from when I was living with Johnny, I didn’t always have a place to sleep, so sometimes it’d be, ‘Where you going later, Magnus?’, ‘Well, I’ve actually got nowhere to stay, can I sleep on your couch?’ So there was a little bit of that for two or three nights here, three or four nights there. I never actually roughed it on the street, but there was a long period where I wasn’t sure which sofa I would be sleeping on each night. Someone said to me that essentially that qualified me as homeless, and to a degree that’s true. I guess I could have always gone back home, although for much of that period I simply didn’t have the money to buy a plane ticket.
Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t sitting there feeling sorry for myself. It was a pretty wild and carefree time. Yes, it was hedonistic in a way; this period is what I would call my sex and rock ’n’ roll time. That wasn’t necessarily the big motivation, though; that was just a part of it. There was a lot of drinking. There were drugs on the scene, too, of course. Myself? I never did drugs, but people around me were doing blow and heroin and stuff like that. I spent a lot of my days just bumming around on Hollywood Boulevard trying to kill time, trying to stretch the day out, living on fifty-cent frozen burritos. Cash did go a certain way but it didn’t go that far. I do remember stealing people’s quarters out of a change jar and a few scrapes like that. I also remember occasionally asking for pocket change because everyone seemed to be doing that on Hollywood Boulevard. At times, it was literally hand to mouth … but I was loving life. You have to make the best of what is given to you, simple as that. It’s all about survival tactics. Besides, I loved the people I was meeting. Happy times.
There was no goal there, no grand masterplan. It was just a case of, This is great. I’m getting by, the sun is shining, people are super-friendly, I’m getting into gigs and clubs and partying, hanging out with cool people who are into the same music as me. I’m having a great time. It was still an era when being English in America was a little bit of a novelty in a sense, so people were super-nice to me. I was only twenty, I looked cool and I was just having a good time. I was with a bunch of rebellious teenager vagabonds that were one step away from being runaways, and we had all come to LA from somewhere else … to find something else.