Nobody can handle fame. It just ain’t right. You’d actually have to be some kind of a monster, a sociopath, for it not to devastate your personality. So at the first glimpse of celebrity, like anybody in their right mind I was immediately fucked up. Immediately.
The only time I’ve ever been a persistent sex offender was after I’d been on prime-time television. As I’ve said, owing to the perilous post-tubercular state of my physique, promiscuity had never been one of my vices, but after my five minutes on teatime telly, I was suddenly introduced to the life of the libertine and the horrors of the corporeal world.
Where I come from, if you’d been on telly for any reason other than multiple rape or murder you were an instant VIP. I mean, I dined out for fucking months on seeing Nobby Stiles at the Whitsun Walks. I was in town with my dad watching the Italian parades around Ancoats and Stephenson Square. It was a prestige event – you know, life-size Madonnas bedecked with jewellery carried by hefty men, people sticking money on the statuary, a proper Italian Catholic spectacle, on top of which there was Norbert Stiles with his kid. The old man spotted him first, otherwise even he wouldn’t have believed it.
Any time I appeared on TV there was a spike in the number of female sex pests, so as you can imagine, after my appearance on BBC 2’s The Old Grey Whistle Test, I went from being a total Poindexter, a bookish niche act at best, to Casanova already.
After a while it seemed churlish to resist – then I was putty in their hands. Naturally, in no time at all I contracted a gonorrhoeal infection, with all the social leprosy that involves. Not only that, but I passed it on to my girlfriend at the time, who as a ballerina had muscles in her piss. I shouldn’t have wound her up. She pasted the fuck out of me. She was a bit mercurial like that, but you know, venereal disease . . . Nevertheless, we somehow patched things up, but then she got evicted from her flat, and still feeling somewhat on the back foot what with the gonorrhoea unpleasantness, I invited her to move in with me at Steve and Helen’s, temporarily of course. I don’t know what fucking possessed me to do that – it wasn’t my house; I was a fucking lodger. But I had no moral defence: it was my way of making it up to her, I guess.
It was terrible. She moved in with this cat that she was a bit nutty about. Steve fucking hated cats, but at least she only had one. It was me who couldn’t handle it. The thing was walking all over Steve’s artwork for the book and shit; I thought somebody was going to die. Anyway, all the unhappy consequences put the whole promiscuity thing into perspective, and never again did I embrace the life of the voluptuary.
At some point in the midst of this whole sorry episode, I got a call from Elvis Costello, who offered me a guest spot on his forthcoming Armed Forces tour, alongside the excellent Richard Hell and the Voidoids. It was going to be a massive twenty-five-city junket playing large halls, starting in December with seven nights at London’s prestigious Dominion Theatre, and continuing into January ’79, spanning the UK from Bristol to Aberdeen, taking in every major town en route.
I’d just bought Elvis Costello’s, debut album, My Aim is True, and thought it was fabulous – it wasn’t formulaic punk, more a very cerebral sort of high-end pop, plus I was already a big fan of Richard Hell and the Voidoids. Given the strain of the domestic situation in Sedgley Park, I didn’t take much persuading: when I saw that the Glasgow Apollo was on the date sheet, I was in. My Glasgow fiasco with Be-Bop Deluxe was still a source of much mental grief, and getting on board with Elvis Costello plus Richard Hell and the Voidoids was a golden opportunity to get right back in that saddle. I figured that anybody writing it up would give me some credit for having the cheek to come back within a year for the re-match.
Mid-December I was back in London for the first leg of the tour. Richard Hell was housed aboard Jake Riviera’s houseboat in Chelsea Harbour while I’d been accommodated amid the belle époque splendour of the Russell Hotel in Bloomsbury. It would later go down the nick for a bit and lose some of its magic (Evie and I stayed there recently, and the windows were really draughty. We also had issues around the inadequate water management; I mean, if you’re only there for one night you don’t really want to be spending it with the plumber), but back then it was a terrific joint; no two rooms were the same shape. I had all sorts of people coming in and out, delivering narcotics at all hours of the fucking day and night. I think that’s when I first made contact with Jackie Genova in Stoke Newington, who would later become my driver-cum-supplier. Jackie Genova was this Italian Cockney kid; great-looking but tiny, tiny. He looked like a miniature Keith Richards. He had fucking huge Harley-Davidson, so there was tiny Jackie Genova riding around on this massive bike. He had loads of customers and all sorts of rock and roll connections, so I probably got his number via Eddie Chin of The Tourists, the first band to feature Annie Lennox, later of Eurythmics. Jackie Genova had known Eddie for ages.
Punk was taken extremely seriously at the time, and Declan’s lyrics were very arcane and carried certain literary reference points. There was room for reflection in his particular style. Unusually, he dealt with adult themes; he was after all married with a child and a job at Elizabeth Arden in North Acton when he wrote ‘Alison’, an intimate song tinged with a level of regret unavailable to most teenagers. To me, it really stood out because most other punk rockers were eighteen and didn’t know anybody who ‘had a husband now’.
Richard Hell also enjoyed a degree of literary gravitas. Before his recent reinvention and the adoption of his new surname (inspired by Arthur Rimbaud) he had co-founded Television with his pal Tom Miller (now Tom Verlaine). The seventeen-year-old Richard Lester Meyers had dropped out of school in Virginia and moved to New York to realise his literary ambitions. He had co-created and published a literary magazine, set up his own publishing venture, worked as a packer at Strand Books and Cinemabilia, and been published in various magazines from Rolling Stone to the New Directions Annuals – all before he was twenty-one already. He and Tom Verlaine also invented an alter ego, a non-existent poet called Theresa Stern, and published a slim volume of poetry by her under the title Wanna Go Out. They told everyone that the reason Ms Stern never showed up to any public readings was because she kept having abortions. If you want to know more, read Richard’s brilliant autobiography I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp.
Sandwiched between such lyrical giants, I didn’t want to be perceived as some kind of light-relief niche act. Generally, I liked it to be known that humour was a major part of my routine, but this was my one chance to get, well, not serious exactly, but, you know . . .
As the opening act, usually taking the stage at 8.30pm, I had thirty-five minutes, which was a long set on a tour like that – enough time to hit the audience with my best shots. It was a chance to hone and develop my performance, and make it a real act. That’s when I wrote ‘Beasley Street’, ‘Thirty-Six Hours’, and ‘Chickentown’. These were proper punk poems, light on their feet with a sort of social edge, not necessarily funny, and without any specific geographical reference points. The template for ‘Beasley Street’, for example, was Camp Street in Salford, but anyone could identify with the imagery and atmosphere because every town has that sort of area.
Sometimes you get hit with an idea out of left field, and a lot of times I get the last line of a poem first. That’s what happened with ‘Beasley Street’. The inspiration came from the titular song of the 1933 Busby Berkeley musical 42nd Street, starring Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell, which finishes off with the lines:
Naughty, bawdy
Gaudy, sporty
Forty-second Street
Big clunky rhymes building up to the big production finish. So I thought, what’s the reverse of that? How best to convey the opulent squalor of my erstwhile neighbourhood? If I’d called the poem ‘Camp Street’, however, it might have been misinterpreted, so I needed a credible street name. Streets are normally named after illustrious citizens, and that’s where the jockey Scobie Breasley came in. I took his surname, knocked off the ‘R’, the better to obviate any potential litigation, and then, working backwards, the poem seemed to write itself. This is the prosaic machinery that hopefully gives rise to the poetical masterpiece. That’s the plan, anyway. It’s all about getting an angle.
We did seven nights on the trot at the Dominion, including Christmas Eve. I copped three and a half grams of Chinese rocks on Christmas Day, the better to avoid a cold-turkey dinner, and the tour resumed after Boxing Day, with shows in Brighton, Portsmouth, Bath, and Canterbury before the New Year. It was relentless. Jake Riviera worked us hard, and inevitably tempers occasionally got frayed. That said, I always got on great with Declan and his band, the Attractions, namely Bruce Thomas, Steve ‘Nieve’ Nason, and Pete Thomas. Bruce, their terrific bass player, and I got along particularly well, bonding over any mutual obsessions.
What Declan and I had in common was the presupposition of mass literacy. Generally, people who liked me liked him and vice versa, and we would go on to work a lot with each other. As his lyrics would suggest, he was quite intense, intelligent, and thoughtful, but like so many people of that nature, he also had a great sense of humour and was very easy company; he wasn’t always on. His net has always been wide – you know, eclectic. He and I shared an interest in books, movies, comedians, and, unusually for the time and our punk milieu, the Great American Songbook.
Of course, he had the advantage of his musical background: like Bernard Manning with the Oscar Rabin Band, Declan’s dad Ross MacManus sang with the Joe Loss Orchestra as part of a close-harmony pop vocal trio with Larry Gretton and Rose Brennan. Ross was the balladeer. Declan had grown up in that world, so he had an intrinsic understanding of every corner of American musical history: country, showtunes, the blues, the crooners, soul, and of course, rock and roll. He would sing ‘My Funny Valentine’ at the sound check, and would often throw one of his old favourites into the main act, such as ‘I Stand Accused’, a hit for The Merseybeats in 1965. Plus, let’s not forget that Elvis Costello was the last person to feature Chet Baker on vinyl, playing the trumpet solo on ‘Shipbuilding’. Richard Hell and the Voidoids were the icing on the cake. I was obviously in awe of the whole CBGB axis, and fascinated by that world inhabited by these people who were friends of Patti Smith, The Ramones, and the remnants of the New York Dolls. These people were on actual speaking terms with Lou Reed – the Voidoids’ lead guitarist Bob Quine had even played on one of his records.
Along with Tom Verlaine, Richard was a founder member of Television, the first group on the New York scene to play at CBGB. He had then been employed by Johnny Thunders in an early incarnation of the Heartbreakers. Richard was the guy who created that whole carefully constructed razor blades, ripped-up clothes, and safety pins look with the coupe sauvage hairstyle: apparently Malcolm McLaren copped the entire punk-rock aesthetic from him when he’d been over in New York trying to manage the New York Dolls.
Most of that tour we were all travelling on the same bus. For me, it was the full immersion course: the sexed-up, drugged-up, rockin’ rollin’ roadshow – which wasn’t always as fabulous as I’m making it sound. For a start, when I say drugged up, I mean within reason. Elvis Costello and The Attractions were basically booze hounds: juice heads with a side order of speed and/or cocaine. Richard Hell and I, on the other hand, being bounden slaves in the trammels of opium, had to keep quiet about it. Jake and the Stiff Records people were mainly ex-hippy types, so if there’d been the slightest suggestion of heroin we would have been instantly sacked. Richard had only got the gig after he convinced Jake that he’d cleaned up, so even though we were icky sick with the agonising pangs of frustrated drug hunger, no matter how bad it got we just had to suck it up. As I’ve said, back then you could be banged up for possession of the smallest amount – Hugh Cornwell from The Stranglers went inside for just a ten-quid bag. He was sentenced to eight weeks in Pentonville; they let him out after five, but even so, who needs it?
I didn’t want Jake to know I was using. I figured nobody knew – I was smiling through the tears and doing a very good job of covering it up – but of course they did. Perhaps it was the frequent visits to the chemists to buy up their entire stocks of codeine linctus and Stadol, and glug glug, that gave the game away. Richard and I were permanently full of all sorts of shit we didn’t usually take, which just about kept the edge off. This, coupled with copious amounts of amphetamines, was the only way we could keep well enough to do our thing on a nightly basis.
It wasn’t all horrible, though. In fact, a lot of the time it was pretty funny. It was always a pleasure to watch the Voidoids’ set, for example, because they got a worse time than I did. They were used to it, though, because about fourteen months previously they’d been on tour in the UK with The Clash in their ‘I’m so Bored with the USA’ period. As a New York band, the Voidoids had been hired knowingly, a nuance entirely wasted on the more meathead section of the crowds. They swore they’d never be back, especially after the spitting, so Jake Riviera had done well to persuade them. There was a little bit of residual hostility from some audiences, but if anything, it only spurred them on. They seemed to thrive on animosity, that was one of their great strengths.
The tour bus was state of the art, all mod cons. It even had a video player with a big screen. VHS was very new, and hardly anybody had a player at home, so to have that kind of entertainment system at our fingertips was just wow! We’d sit on the bus and watch old episodes of Kojak, which at the time were not that old, actually.
Richard Hell had brought a VHS of T.A.M.I. Show from the States. We knew about it, of course, but I’d never had the chance to watch it in its entirety. It was a 1964 film of a concert held over two days at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium featuring performances by a list of transatlantic rock and roll and R&B greats. As far as pop music on film goes, T.A.M.I. Show has no equal. It’s just so great on so many levels, everybody live on stage at the time they were at their absolutely fabulous best, all in front of a multi-ethnic American teenage audience got up in the Mary Quant look, jiving away with their five-point dos, and featuring go-go dancers in white-leather kinky boots. It just nails the period.
Anybody and everybody you can think of is there: the Byrds, The Beach Boys, Chuck Berry, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Lesley Gore, The Barbarians, Billy J. Kramer and The Dakotas, (Smokey Robinson and) The Miracles, The Supremes, Jan and Dean, The Stones doing ‘Time is on My Side’, and the Ronettes in those gorgeous stylised Mao Tse-Tung pantsuits with mandarin collars and a little kick flare at the hems. Scintillating. Everybody is hitting you with their best shots, and then right at the end of the show, what could possibly top all that? James Brown and the Famous Flames, that’s who. After a line-up like that, there he is: James Brown in his finest hour doing ‘Please, Please, Please’. He’s wearing a black and white houndstooth jacket-and-waistcoat combo, with black slacks and flamenco boots, falling into the splits and immediately springing right back up, snapping his high heels together: death-defying, yet he makes it look like nothing. Then into that ermine-cloak-imperial-crown-elastic-band-encore routine with the cardiac specialist (white coat, stethoscope) begging him to desist for the sake of his health. You know, a man can only give so much before it becomes medically inadvisable.
There were loads of stories on the road, mainly because of Richard Hell. There was a strict ‘No Chicks on the Bus’ rule, which even Declan had to obey. Obviously, if they’d let Mrs MacManus on the bus everybody else would want their wife and/or girlfriend on it too, so it was right across the board. Everyone toed the line, except Richard – though to be fair, it wasn’t his fault. He attracted stowaways; chicks were desperate to get next to the guy. He was the pin-up boy of punk, a professional dreamboat, pussy magnet to the stars, so naturally we were always finding women hiding in the luggage racks. He got the hard word from Jake on account of all this: ‘Oi, Richard, you’ve got to do something about these boilers on the bus. You shouldn’t encourage it.’ That was unjust: on the contrary, Richard had that sexiest of qualities, utter indifference, and as a result there were females up and down the country getting into actual cat fights over the dude.
He had that New Yoick street-punk way of speaking, and would lay on the accent real thick with the ladies. But he actually grew up in Lexington, Kentucky, the ‘Athens of the West’, the ‘horse capital of the world’, and when he wasn’t at work he’d lapse into this bluegrass cowboy drawl that made him even sexier offstage than on. Fucking Hell.
Richard and the other Voidoids – guitarists Robert Quine and Ivan Julian, plus drummer Frank Mauro – were bookish, cerebral, delinquent. They had some sort of Brainiac credibility that the West Coast sun-worshipping drug-downing hippy wasters simply couldn’t compete with.
Richard was a fellow poet, as I’ve said. Ivan Julian had studied music theory and was a fellow Edgar Allan Poe fanatic. At the age of seventeen, he’d toured with The Foundations – you may remember them from such top ten hits as ‘Baby Now That I’ve Found You’ and ‘Build Me Up Buttercup’.
Robert Quine, in particular, was a great source of fascination, above and beyond his undoubted genius as a guitar player. For a start, there was the male-pattern baldness that established the Voidoids’ position as an ongoing adult concern. Bob was a virtuoso musician who later played on a few Lou Reed singles, including ‘I Love You, Suzanne’. He was an intriguing character with an incredibly diverse range of reference. He had earned a law degree from Earlham College ‘out of inertia’ and wrote tax-law textbooks, for example. He had great taste in music, and cited many people as influences; he was very interested in his contemporaries and people who had led him to take up the guitar in the first place. He dropped all the great names: James Burton, Lonnie Mack, Link Wray, Steve Cropper, and, especially, Mickey ‘Guitar’ Baker, the Mickey half of Mickey and Sylvia, responsible for the 1956 classic ‘Love is Strange’.
In show business, male-pattern baldness has always been an unmitigated tragedy, something to ‘come to terms with’, or ‘dealt with’ by way of prosthetics, weaves, toupees, beanie hats, and finally, the barcode comb over. Given the care and loving attention I squander on my own thatch, what with the unguents and pomades, I suppose this affliction has always held some terror for me, thus anyone who manages to pull off the naked skull with some degree of elan can only be admired. That said, there has never been a better time for a guy to go bald than now, thanks largely to the social heavy-lifting undertaken by the late Robert Quine and other notable slaphead heroes like Yul Brynner, Telly ‘Star of TV’s Kojak’ Savalas, and Cyril Jordan from the Flamin’ Groovies. Oh, and don’t forget Mark Strong, Stanley Tucci, Billy Zane, and Michael Stipe. Thanks to these people, baldness today is a legitimate lifestyle option.
Bob Quine used to kvetch about the Voidoids and how they banned the preppy clothes he loved to wear; his Brooks Brothers button-down Oxfords and the Florsheim loafers ran counter to the Voidoid position as feral undernourished urban saboteurs. They were always trying to get him into a leather jacket, but be reasonable. They finally agreed on a clingy black turtleneck, black tapered trousers, and a blazer made out of black alpaca. Exquisite, but it made Bob look kind of beat, with or without his Ray-Ban Wayfarers. Still, you wouldn’t really have called him a punk because he was a little bit too old. Nevertheless, now all in black, with his baldness and general air of jittery urban paranoia, he added a welcome sinister edge to the proceedings.
Nobody took liberties with Robert Quine. He had an unabashed misanthropic aura that I found enviable; if approached by a mendicant, you could see him looking for somewhere to run. I’m from the inner city myself, and I’ve never seen this antisocial quality worn with such easy grace.
It was when we got to Edinburgh, however, that we found out who he really was. Up until that point, he’d been Mr Sanguine. The minute he got across Waverley Bridge, he turned into the archetypal American tourist abroad. He put on his beloved powder-blue Brooks Brothers Oxford button-down shirt and suede sport coat, a pair of stout walking brogues, and his Burberry mackintosh, and went striding up the Royal Mile, a state-of-the-art camera draped about his neck, looking for his family tartan, giving it the full haggis supper: ‘Say, I’m a quarter Scottish myself!’
I went with him. He signed us up for the full guided tour of the Castle, and he fucking loved it. I don’t normally go for that sort of thing; I’ve seen The Black Shield of Falworth starring Tony Curtis and that’ll do me, but it was good to see him genuinely charged with enthusiasm for once. He’d got some energy from somewhere, and was darting around taking photographs of Lochaber axes, Highland broadswords and Mons Meg. You know what Americans can be like about that sort of shit: ‘Hey, Johnny, would you look at that suit of armour!’
Meanwhile, Richard had his own agenda. He’d come out to eat with us and so on, but he’d often go off on his own to an art gallery or something. Or as it was Edinburgh, maybe he was hoping for some kind of dope connection, as was I.
Before I knew it, it was the Glasgow Apollo and the return of the comeback kid. Emboldened by a fast connection in nearby Cardonald, I wasn’t taking ‘Fuck off!’ for an answer, and my diffident charm paid off good style. It could have been like Groundhog déjà vu all over again, you know, a bit samey, but thank God, thank God, thank God Almighty, crikey, I slew those motherfuckers to death.
I was so glad I was able to return to Glasgow so quickly and nail the Apollo, rather than having it hanging over my head as the playhouse of the damned. That’s a real big place to go under, so the redemption of that night was priceless. Ever since then, my Glasgow audiences have been some of the wildest in the world. It’s a wonderful city full of beautiful people.
Looking back on it now, I can see that although I like to think I’ve led a charmed life, I never took the safe route. I always thought, it might not be good right now, but it’s going to pay off later; this gets me that. And every time, I’ve been proven right in the fullness of time.