By this point my sole contact at Rabid, really, was Martin Hannett. He was a bit of a flake, and always at loggerheads with the office. Martin and I were confederates, I suppose, but as I’ve said, we weren’t good for each other. We were up and about at all hours in order to keep well. The fact that I was being driven around by a man who was sedated by opiates, and also distracted, didn’t bother me. In fact, the safety aspects of this arrangement never even entered my head. It was a solution rather than a problem.
I consider my hours spent in the passenger seat of an automobile to be golden. That Iggy Pop tune is a page out of my life: the rolling scenery, the controllable heat, the wraparound sound system. Nice. Martin would often be in the throes of production, so he’d always have a stash of cassettes featuring some work in progress. In this way I became familiar with the sublime bass-heavy melancholia of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures, centuries before its eventual release.
Once we drove from London to Edinburgh without a break. Then as now, Scotland was awash with heroin, but not on this occasion. We were going to be working up there for at least a week, and I wasn’t due on stage until the next evening, so I thought, fuck that, went straight over to Waverley Station and caught the sleeper back to King’s Cross and my usual suppliers. I was there and back within fourteen hours. That was nothing; you’d do anything for that shit. If you don’t have it, you can’t take care of anything else.
In April 1978, I played at the Roundhouse in Camden. Top of the bill were the excellent Steel Pulse (the Handsworth Revolutionaries), I was third after Wreckless Eric, and opening the show way down the bill were The Police. Every punk rocker hated The Police and thought they were really corny, which wasn’t surprising, really: they were attractive to women.
The deal with Maurice Oberstein at CBS had gone through, and I was signed up in a five-figure recording contract. Was it a good deal? Was it a bad deal? Then as now, I have no idea, although, in retrospect, even I should have seen that signing over the copyright in my poems to a record company wasn’t the smartest business move anybody ever made on my behalf.
CBS’s UK HQ was in Soho Square, in the same building as the Fender Soundhouse, which stocked all the latest limited-edition custom Fender guitars. CBS gave me a Fender grey sunburst Telecaster custom as a bit of sweetener. It was a top-dollar guitar at the time, with a toggle switch so you could get the thin treble-y delicate Telecaster sound; with the flip of the same switch you could employ this diMarzio pickup and turn it into a Les Paul with that big fat fuzz sound. Two years later I would sell it for a song at Macari’s on Charing Cross Road in order to buy gear; there was no good haggling about the price, I just needed a quick sale, as unfortunately, it was no good trying to offer a guitar to a dealer by way of collateral. I tried it once: he opened a door and there was a whole fucking front room full of big-ticket musical instruments. He didn’t want another fucking electric guitar. Anyway, you’d just about get a quarter of a gram for a Fender, so if you were going to go down that road, it was always better to sell it at a reputable second-hand outlet and buy a decent amount of gear for whatever you got for it. That was what I thought, and I didn’t play it much anyway. I sold it for £150, which bought me an amount of heroin that was completely used up and forgotten about within about a week, and there I was with the same problem all over again. If you want a picture of moral relativism in all of its ugly fucking detail, look no further than the universe of the addict, whose every move, no matter how heinous, is informed by the phrase, ‘Who wouldn’t?’ It’s the death of the soul.
My first album for CBS, Disguise in Love, was once again produced by Martin Hannett, along with a summer single release, ‘Post-War Glamour Girl’, with a live a-capella rendition of ‘Kung Fu International’ on the B-side.
We recorded the album at a studio in Deansgate, with two tracks from a live show at the Ritz Ballroom in Manchester. Martin put together a bespoke backing band called The Invisible Girls with guest musicians like Pete Shelley, Stephen Morris, Karl Burns, Paul Burgess, and my new pal Bill Nelson. The one-note guitar solo on ‘Post-War Glamour Girl’ took eight hours to record!
In advance of my CBS debut, Rabid had crashed out Où est la maison de fromage?, a shamelessly cheap, probably illegal move by a bunch of no-mark chisellers, secretly recorded and marketed without any input or consent from me. Naturally, I only want to present the polished end-product of my labours, therefore its very existence is a continuing thorn in my side. It never stops hurting. If you love me, throw it away.
In the end, Martin Hannett and I were cut adrift by Rabid; everything went wrong. The whole Rabid axis – Tosh Ryan, Laurence Beadle, all of those people – I thought I knew some of them. It turned out I didn’t know any of them at all.
Their offices were on the other side of town, and I didn’t have a car. Actually I did have a car, but I wasn’t allowed to drive it. Whatever, I was always in the dark business-wise. Whatever they proposed, I went along with, within reason, as long as it didn’t directly impinge upon my personal happiness. Whenever I was presented with a bunch of figures looking for an argument, I let it ride. I’m not one for confrontation.
In August, Slobby Rabid Opportunists (their words, not mine) had me headlining at a series of gigs in Manchester and Liverpool to promote their roster. On Friday the 18th, I performed at the Factory at the Russell, supported by Giro, Ed Banger with guest appearances from Prime Time Suckers, and ‘Gordon the Moron’ of ‘Jilted John’ fame. Most of the time the Russell would have bingo and domino nights, or appearances by various reggae artists. From 1978, after the demise of the Electric, it was requisitioned for two nights a week by Alan Erasmus and Tony Wilson as the Factory. Alan Wise (of whom more later) was the promoter, and somehow managed to book some real top-flight acts.
I was still living at Steve’s, and he and I had become a bit of a double act. It was a cross-inspirational thing: his pictures would induce a train of poetic ideas or would call forth a snappy title. For a self-portrait in front of a marine horizon, for example, I suggested ‘Back to the Sea’, a John Masefield reference which I would revisit for the poem ‘I Mustn’t Go Down to the Sea Again’. Steve, likewise, would occasionally illustrate my poems.
He was always mithering me to take my poetry to the publishing world. By this time, I had enough material to make up a collection, so now that I no longer had a job to go to, when I wasn’t out doing gigs he and I did the very unpunk thing of putting together a book with actual artwork. It would be entitled Ten Years in an Open Necked Shirt, the title of one of Steve’s earlier works.
Steve’s illustrations were meticulously gradated pencil drawings with extraordinarily fine cross-hatch detailing, each of which took weeks and weeks to complete to his satisfaction. Pencil is the slowest, dirtiest medium; you just had to breathe on one of the drawings and it was smudged.
None of my management at this time, nor anyone at the new record company – no one – was remotely interested in this joint project. What Steve did was amazing, but it wasn’t punk. ‘Fuck that,’ they all said. ‘Just stick in a bunch of photographs.’ I was in it with Steve for the long haul, though, and adamant that his craftsmanship would turn the book into something special.
It was down to me, therefore, to get a publishing deal on my own. Steve always had more than one painting on the go, which was his legitimate excuse for not getting involved in the business end. So there I was, pounding the unfamiliar pavements of Bloomsbury, knocking on the doors of that indifferent neighbourhood.
I offered our work to small publishers at first. I got a lot of knock-backs, but Jay Landesman was enthusiastic enough to meet me at his recently formed Polytantric Press. He was having success with Heathcote Williams’s Hancock’s Last Half Hour and his reissue of By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart. Jay was a hipster in the original sense of the word, but he wasn’t interested in ‘art’ books.
That was also the message from most of the bigger publishing houses. What seemed to be required was a quick scissors-and-paste exploitation job with the usual punk graphics – sliced-up photographs featuring tower blocks, barbed wire, and flyovers, with the odd mugshot of the author here and about. Although Steve’s illustrations were often admired, the feedback was always the same, ‘Maybe later.’
Disguise in Love came out in the autumn, with sleeve art featuring one of Steve’s existing works,* a bas relief in the manner of René Magritte on a conveniently square piece of chipboard, lending itself perfectly to the album-sleeve format. Paul Morley in the NME gave the album a hefty thumbs up: ‘The problems of how to handle Cooper Clarke on record, away from the advantageous atmosphere of a live recital, have been handled triumphantly. [. . .] The music is cute and all integrity is retained.’
CBS/Epic had a red-hot publicist called Judy Totton who worked with some really big-name acts, including ABBA, the Jacksons, The Vibrators, and The Only Ones, who had signed to CBS the same week as me. They were pals of mine, and I did a hell of a lot of shows with them.
Judy was a real professional, brilliant at her job, a real trouper and sweet with it. Before I had a place in London, she let me stay at her flat in Chepstow Road, just behind what was then the Odeon on Westbourne Grove. At that time, before it had been gentrified by the post-Richard Curtis intake, Ladbroke Grove and Notting Hill were a sort of low-rent hippy ghetto, still populated by people who had been living there since the days of the notorious Peter Rachman, with a new intake of bohemian types, jazz musicians, painters, the crowd that started Oz magazine, and other denizens of alternative culture. All that made it a really easy place to buy drugs, especially marijuana. Judy put up with a lot, especially as I was shooting up shit in her house, and she was from the other side of the world in that regard.
It was a really happening manor. Stiff Records, indeed all the punk-rock business, seemed to be based nearby, so I would run into all sorts of people: Billy Idol, Ian Dury, Declan MacManus aka Elvis Costello, Declan’s manager and Stiff founder Jake Riviera, poet and nominal Stiff publicist Jock Scot, The Clash, even Lemmy of Motörhead fame, on occasion. But my most useful contact at the time, for obvious reasons, was Peter Perrett of The Only Ones.
The Clash were all proper West London types, QPR supporters. Mick Jones lived just round the corner in a flat in Chepstow Place, and later moved to the slightly plummier Pembridge Villas just off Portobello Road, with Tony James of Generation X. We started to see each other quite a lot. It must be around this time that I first met my gentleman driver and dear friend, Johnny Green, who in those days was the road manager for The Clash. Johnny was originally from Gillingham in Kent, but he always lived around Notting Hill and Camden, where he had a cold-water apartment at the Rehearsal Rehearsals studios just inside the gates of a former British Rail goods yard on Chalk Farm Road. It was within walking distance of Dingwalls and the Roundhouse, so I’d be running into him all the time, and not just in London, but when I was on tour at the same time as the band.
When Disguise in Love was released, we needed to whip up some interest in the capital, so Judy organised a publicity stunt at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park on October 22nd.
At Speakers’ Corner you can say anything you like as long as it isn’t amplified. With that in mind, Judy got hold of a bullhorn in the full knowledge that its use was illegal and that the fuzz would step in, providing the perfect paparazzi shots of me and the law in an adversarial position.
The whole thing worked like a charm – Elvis Costello even turned up under heavy disguise along with Bebe Buell, his extra-marital inamorata of the time, which caused a bit of a showbiz frisson. But what was more, later that night the Evening Standard carried the money shot – me, head to head with John Law, like some kind of victimised ‘public enemy number one’ type. The accompanying caption went so far as to suggest that I had narrowly missed a sleepover in the Scrubs.
Judy was really good at this kind of scam, or possibly scamola. She would also plant stories and rumours in the press that I would be called upon to vehemently deny. E.g. I didn’t have my sunglasses glued to my temples. You read it here first. It never happened.
At some point later that year, I fell into a brief liaison with Bebe. She had a colourful romantic history; for several years she’d been in a relationship with the hotshot LA singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer Todd Rundgren. She made a particular point of dating rock stars, and had been linked variously with David Johansen of the New York Dolls, Mick Jagger, Rod Stewart, Jimmy Page, and Steve Tyler. At the time, though, I didn’t know much about her backstory, just that she was in London, on the rebound from Elvis Costello and at a loose end, so I did the gentlemanly thing and ushered her out a few times. It was her idea; I was always prey to vampish women. Bebe was in charge all the way – she could organise your entire life.
Bebe was the original rock-chick babe: everybody knew who she was. She wasn’t just some anonymous groupie or something. She was one of the beautiful people, a real IT girl. I wasn’t deluded: I knew I wasn’t going to make it in the world of hunks and Hollywood buff tings, but I figured with my kind of looks, I could cut it in the punk world. There were uglier and more drug-dependent people than me at CBGB after all, and they seemed to be doing all right. I wanted my slice of that slutty, messed-up glamorous pie. As for Bebe, she put it best herself: ‘I was a young girl and had brilliant suitors. I sort of had that fantasy of being one of the muses of Paris and hanging out with Toulouse Lautrec and Picasso. I just followed my heart, you know? I was a free agent. And I was a very independent, successful girl. I did my own thing, I made my own money, I bought my own airline tickets. I’m also one of those people that even when I have a backstage pass, I like being in the pit.’
The publicity Judy generated to promote Disguise in Love was phenomenal. At the end of October I recorded a session for John Peel featuring tracks from the album, and into November did various shows with Joy Division, The Fall, the Drones, and the Buzzcocks. I seemed to be appearing at Eric’s in Liverpool on a weekly basis. Roger Eagle who was a long-time friend of both Tosh Ryan and Alan Wise had long since vacated the Magic Village and was now running this place. I also appeared on The Old Grey Whistle Test presented by Annie Nightingale performing ‘Readers’ Wives’ and ‘Kung Fu International’ with The Invisible Girls. The shows were filmed at Radio Manchester Studios on Oxford Road, and were recorded live: you only got one chance to get it right. At the time the broadcasting industry was highly unionised, and you weren’t even allowed to turn your own amplifier up. If you wanted to pull one plug out and plug another one in, you had to get a technician to do it for you. The anxiety was palpable.
I got a lot of gigs on the strength of Disguise in Love. This created difficulties at first, because now I was now known through the medium of the album, on which I’d been accompanied by all these top of the range session guys from the Dougie James Soul Train plus various celebrity cameos. I was perceived to be the front man of this ‘supergroup’, and my appearance on The Old Grey Whistle Test only confirmed that belief.
I wasn’t very happy with this turn of events. I had long ago been convinced by my erstwhile teachers that I had no team spirit, and every school report confirmed it. I like pottering around in a car. Just me and the driver, not a fucking Wallace Arnold coach party.
For almost a year after the album came out, I was really swimming against the tide in that respect. I’d turn up at the venue without a band, and as you can imagine they’d be both puzzled and annoyed, especially abroad. Every time I’d have to reveal that there was no band, there never was a band, I couldn’t afford a band, I didn’t need a band, and anyway, The Invisible Girls were purely a studio phenomenon. What I do is poetry. Just me, the PA, and the public.