The revisionist version of punk has been over-politicised, in my view. The sanctification of victimhood and the celebration of all that was negative were simply generally regarded as quite stylish.
By the time punk rock impinged on the provinces, though, it was generally perceived as an ugly, brutish new teen movement more invidious than any that had come before – worse than Teddy Boys, Greasers, Mods and Rockers, worse even than skinheads.
Since my initial appearance at the Embassy Club, I had tried to make the incongruity of the venue work in my favour. Poetry is usually seen as a silent, contemplative, even pastoral interest: punk rock and Bernard Manning helped me disabuse the public of that notion. I was either dismissed as a foul-mouthed malcontent with big ideas, or largely ignored. My outsider status was all very topical; as I’ve said, my aspirations had to do with sick American comics like Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce, whose verbal routines could wind people up enough for them to be banned from an entire country – that was the kind of cachet I was after. My man Baudelaire was, after all, a poet who had been prosecuted on a morality rap.
At twenty-seven, I was too old to be a punk, really. As it turns out, I was one of the few who didn’t lie about my age. You find out how old people actually are when they die. What a chump I was: if only I’d lied like everybody else, I might still be alive today.
Independent record labels had started sprouting up in the provinces, especially in Manchester, but I had London in mind. I was old-school enough to be desirous of a metropolitan profile in common with every previous pop star, and I included The Beatles. In the words of Frank Sinatra, ‘If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere . . .’ The alternative was to be written off as a local eccentric. How ghastly would that be?
Performing alongside punk acts, I realised, was my ticket to the capital and beyond. Hitching my steed to the punk-rock bandwagon, however, was a calculated gamble. Punk wasn’t the mass sensation that people now make it out to be; there were only ever about seventy people really involved in it, although the amount of publicity it attracted was disproportionate. Most cities were openly hostile to it, and in those where it did thrive it was borderline niche. At first most of the punk venues I worked in, therefore, were shitty little underground clubs, and grotty discos like Nikkers in Keighley.
Soon after they formed, I did a lot of shows with The Fall. These took place largely in municipal-facility-type venues in places like Kirby, Skelmersdale, and St Helens – yeah, yeah, overspill estates.
Their singer, Mark E. Smith, was about eight years my junior, so I first knew him as a schoolboy. His mother worked at the post office in Sedgley Park where all my artist mates cashed their giros. As was often the case in those days, the post office doubled as a newsagents and stationers, so I used to drop in at least once a week to look through the music papers in case I’d been mentioned in dispatches. For a liberty taker on a budget, Mrs Smith’s post office quickly morphed into my own personal reading room; all the music press, of course, but also Yacht Monthly, World of Golf, Practical Zombie, the Jewish Chronicle, and the entire Mills and Boon back catalogue. It’s amazing how much you don’t know you’re interested in. Every so often Smithy would make an appearance in his school gaberdine, hitting his mum up for chip money, etc.
Before long, I would spot him and his mates in the George during my compulsory visits with Steve. The George was frequented by cadets from the police training centre up the road and a lot of trainee teachers from the College of the Faithful Companions of Jesus, a pedagogical order of nuns. We knew Marky and his pals weren’t yet of legal drinking age, and remember, the place was teaming with embryonic fuzz, so this turned me into some kind of unofficial uncle to him, you know, the type of uncle who doesn’t give a fuck what you get up to. Maybe that’s why I was never subjected to any of his famous explosions.
One afternoon as I was speed-reading Automart in the post office, Mrs Smith volunteered the following information, ‘Our Mark’s in one of those punk-rock groups.’ What the . . .? Huh? In my eyes, Mark was just a kid, so I thought, ‘What, him? This I’ve gotta see.’
Of course he was sensational, transformative, right from the start. Smithy reinvented himself on stage, and that’s what rock and roll is there for. He achieved this without actually doing very much. He had a kind of glamour that was invisible in everyday life, but take him out of the crowd and stick him in front of a microphone and hey presto – Captain Charisma.
I’ve worked with the best of them, but The Fall I would watch night in, night out; each performance seemed unique. Like many young bands, they did a lot of covers; the usual punk choices of The Standells, The Stooges, The Seeds etc., but also ‘Race with the Devil’ by Gene Vincent, ‘I Can Hear the Grass Grow’ by The Move, ‘White Lightning’ by George Jones, ‘There’s a Ghost in My House’ by R. Dean Taylor, ‘Victoria’ by The Kinks, and ‘Mr Pharmacist’ by the Other Half. There were others; it’s an intriguing catalogue in itself.
I remember going on a mini-tour with them, and most nights it was punch-up city. Smithy was no help in that regard – if anything he fucking encouraged it, even though he never came off best. He’d mouth off, get involved, hitting people with chairs and throwing things around, and then, inevitably, he’d get pasted. He was irritable.
In my medical opinion, he was hopped up on goofballs.
I was working my ass off, doing as many club nights as I could, but actually getting any money out of people was a big problem. I didn’t have any kind of management: I was a one-man band and had to deal with all that unpleasantness myself. I was always trying to get paid on arrival, before I did my set. I’d read about how Chuck Berry wouldn’t put a foot on stage until there was a bag of sand* in his back pocket; any encores were a hundred bucks per number.
I was barely earning three figures for these gigs, but all the awful dives were run by gangsters, and as I was a nine-stone weakling, my Chuck Berry-style negotiations got me nowhere. I’d always find myself in a back room at the end of the night, haggling with some hard-nut surrounded by gorillas. In Birmingham there were Don, Chris, and Eddie Fewtrell, who ran several venues, including the Cedars Ballroom and Barbarella’s. To me, the Fewtrell Brothers were like the Kray Twins of Birmingham, so I’d be shitting it by the time it came to collect my wages. Their schtick was to withhold payments with menaces. Threats were muttered within earshot and questions raised regarding the money, e.g. ‘Ah, yes. The money. My brothers have been most vocal upon the subject of the money. “Who wants this money? Why should he get the money? How much money?”’ And so on. Never once did my fee go uncontested. When I eventually got my money, I always had the impression that it could be snatched back at any moment, so I’d effect a rapid exit before I got coshed.
I’d schlepp to some gigs in towns where nobody was interested in The Sex Pistols or punk rock. Their posturing ineptitude cut no ice in the industrial towns of the north. In places like Barrow-in-Furness, for instance, a blue-collar town where the shipyards were still in full swing, audiences wanted value for money, for the very good reason that their money was hard-won. Many of them were fans of heavy metal, where musical proficiency was respected. Bands who had learned to play, paid their dues, done their apprenticeship. A welder in the shipyards could relate to the idea that hard work, dedication, and craftsmanship will get you rewards. They thought punk rockers were taking the piss.
Even in Birmingham, the second largest city in the country, none of the punk clubs had more than a two-hundred capacity, and even then they weren’t always full. Birmingham had to wait for the New Romantics and Duran Duran to make an impact at the Rum Runner, run by the Berrow family, another Birmingham clubland dynasty.
At Mr Smiths I had only twenty minutes to get the audience on my side, so I went straight in for the laughs with my area-specific poems and gags. I couldn’t take that routine south of Macclesfield, however, so I raided my notebooks for old Chaperones lyrics that could be tarted up and punkified.
Down in Plymouth in the early Seventies, I had bought the contemporary myth that there was no place for rhyme in modern poetry, and like everybody else I was writing blank verse, for example ‘Eat Lead Clown’, ‘Psycle Sluts Part One’, and ‘The Marginal Pre-Dawn Schedules Present . . .’ Fortuitously, this ‘Plymouth period’ stuff tapped into the punk ethos: snapshot lyrics, cheapo graphics, sick humour, schlock TV and shock-horror movies, commercials, cartoons, comic books, and Kojak reruns: all the messed-up glamour of a previous age.
Poems about passing fads and flash-in-the-pan gimmicks also proved popular. I was the first cab off the rank when it came to the Kung Fu craze. I had written ‘Kung Fu International’, having been an avid fan of the TV series also known as Kung Fu, starring David Carradine as Kwai Chang Caine. All the punk ingredients of the day were eloquently conveyed therein: gratuitous violence, filth, bad language, alienation. The title I swiped from a Roy Alton song featured on the album Twenty Reggae Disco Hits.
Any swearing always went down well; ‘Twat’ in particular, which I performed at maximum speed, thus perfecting the ‘machine-gun’ delivery for which I am justifiably famous. I’d always been fast, but thanks to the high-energy ethics of punk, it was now cranked up to the max.