January 30, 1979 and we were back in London for the closing night of the Armed Forces tour at the Hammersmith Odeon. Having been on the road for most of the previous year without a break, Elvis Costello and The Attractions were plum tuckered out. For me, on the other hand, it was an invigorating finale to what had turned out to be an important point in my career – the tour that introduced me to ever greater numbers of the Great British public. As NME reviewer Charles Shaar Murray put it, ‘Showing no strain and feeling no pain, he bounded out on stage in his red tux to motormouth the audience [. . .] and grabbed his moment with the zeal and alacrity of a man at the peak of his powers.’
Later there was the traditional end-of-tour party, a chance to let our hair down and also to say our goodbyes to the American contingent, who would soon be flying back to New York. It would be sad to see them go, but I had other things on my mind.
As the party was just getting started, Richard and I were standing opposite each other, me saying, ‘Well, I’d love to stay, but I’ve got to go.’ Richard likewise seemed to have ants in his pants, ‘No, sorry Johnny, sorry about the abrupt departure but I gotta go too.’ And that was that; we went our separate ways. Forty minutes later, however, when I arrived to cop off at Jackie Genova’s, who should appear from behind a door but Richard. He’d beaten me to it, and we could have shared a cab.
Now that the tour was over, I had no pressing need to get back to Manchester. Or rather, I would have found any excuse not to go back to Manchester, because that would mean a reunion with the ballerina, who by now would have her dancing feet firmly under the Maguire table.
Our relationship had got a bit slack long before I’d left for London, what with the VD unpleasantness, but now there was an added complication: I’d since got involved with a young trainee journalist called Iris (or she got involved with me, as she would probably tell it) whom I’d met when I appeared at the Africa Centre in Covent Garden just before the Dominion shows with Elvis Costello in December, and we were now an item. I was going to have to come clean and break up with my then girlfriend, and I couldn’t face it. Plus there was the fact that the minute we were no longer involved romantically, she would be out of the Maguires’ place on her ear. I just couldn’t go home to that, so I moved into the Russell Hotel with Iris, abandoning the ex and her cat to their fate. I resolved to make everything OK at some indeterminate date in the hopefully not too distant future.
I was exhausted from the rigours of the road and the enforced withdrawals, so when I finally copped a quarter-ounce of Chinese White off Jackie Genova, I didn’t have the energy or the inclination to look for somewhere permanent to live. Iris and I spent my entire wages from the tour shacked up in the Russell Hotel, living like royalty, dining on room service and ordering in the other necessities. Every few nights, when the mood took me, I’d ask reception to move us into another room with another view. I think that’s when I got the bug for staying in posh hotels. I got quite used to the lifestyle – and the staff got used to having me around, and to all these sinister Turks coming in at all hours of the night and leaving envelopes in my pigeon hole. Luxury; pure unashamed luxury.
Reluctantly, I had to leave the hotel every now and again to fulfil my business engagements. After the tour I was in demand; the venues and gigs got bigger, there were more of them, and now I was headlining. I also started to get reviews and press attention outside the UK, and because my Armed Forces appearances had gone so well, Jake Riviera and Elvis Costello invited me along on the Scandinavian leg of their European tour in late summer.
In early February I appeared at the South London Polytechnic with Joy Division as support, and at the end of the month I headlined at the Nottingham Playhouse, again with Joy Division. Unfortunately, however, they were late, so I opened for them. It was a freezing cold night, and by the time they finally arrived, I’d barely managed to warm up the audience. They went straight on and played a short set, including ‘Transmission’, ‘She’s Lost Control’, and ‘New Dawn Fades’. The sound was bad, so nobody listened. Joy Division, all in black and white and totally stationary, remained anonymous for the entire set: no introductions, no chat between numbers. I then came back on and did my main act. We later found out that when I’d introduced the band, it had been generally misheard as ‘Geordie Vision’, thus bringing about the mass indifference one might expect.
The band’s bassist Peter Hook later clarified the reason for their late arrival: Chas Banks, their road guy and Hookie’s cousin, had borrowed a PA from Sad Café only to have it written off in a highway pile-up on the way to collect the guys. Chas had finally arrived covered in cuts and bruises after crawling from the wreckage.
At some point soon thereafter, I went to Ireland on a seven-date tour with Dr Feelgood minus Wilko Johnson. On about the second night, in Cork or somewhere, I was coming off a stage for which a rickety chair stood in for a set of steps. This was pre-health and safety. It was dark. The chair wasn’t secure and I fell, fracturing my wrist. I had to go straight from the venue to the nearest nursing convent, where one of the sisters plastered me up. She asked, ‘What is it you do?’ I said, ‘Well, I’m a poet, sister.’ She replied: ‘Oh, you are. Would you be after reciting some of it?’ ‘You wouldn’t approve of my poetry, sister,’ I told her. ‘It’s very rude, and I wouldn’t want to befoul your ears.’ I think they appreciated my reticence in this regard.
The sister did a perfectly good job, but she was anxious that I get an X-ray, so I told her I would be in Belfast the next day. ‘Oh, you’ll be all right there,’ she said. ‘They’ve the best doctors in the world.’ For obvious reasons. This was at the height of the Troubles. The next day I was in the outpatients’ department in the Royal Victoria Hospital, expecting some guy to come in any minute looking to get his face stitched back on.
We were staying at the Europa Hotel in Belfast city centre, famously the most bombed hotel in Europe at that time. The Feelgood gang were all proper round-the-clock schickers, whereas I was a fucked-up druggy. I was informed one too many times by the late Mr Lee Brilleaux of the hotel’s bomb-scare policy. Apparently, if you had to vacate the building due to one of the all-too frequent terror alerts, it was free champagne all the way.
I’m no detective, well, again, not unless you count that thirty years I spent working for the Scotland Yard Forensic Division, but I could see where this was fucking going. One of these cunts was sure to ring up hotel security with a bogus threat, so I didn’t bother getting into my pyjamas, but just waited for the inevitable alarm to go off. Sure enough, I wasn’t disappointed. Lee Brilleaux, Gypie Mayo, and the Wedding Guests from Hell didn’t seem inordinately upset about this chain of potentially life-threatening events. Put it this way, they hadn’t changed into their pyjamas either. While everybody else at the muster station was inadequately draped in their night attire, shivering their bollocks off in the freezing Belfast drizzle, we were in our Crombies and scarves, impatiently waiting for the all-clear, and the promised tidal wave of shampoo.
The part of CBS I was signed to had now changed their name to Epic, and wanting to cash in on my recently heightened profile, decided to put out a live album in the summer. Having just returned from Ireland, I named it after Charles Haughey’s ‘Walking Back to Happiness’ campaign – a fitness drive initiated by the future prime minister. It had also been the title of a Helen Shapiro hit in the early Sixties.
Walking Back to Happiness was recorded live at the Marquee in Wardour Street, and featured numbers including ‘Gabardine Angus’, ‘Majorca’, and ‘Twat’. A lot of people think the final track is called ‘Gimmix Play Loud’, but actually it’s just ‘Gimmix’. The ‘play loud’ was simply a recommendation added at my insistence – as was often the case with Martin Hannett’s records, I thought it was too quiet, thus the user instructions to crank up the volume. Anyway, whatever my thoughts on the production values, the pre-release of ‘Gimmix’ as an orange, triangular 10-inch single was a UK top forty hit in March.
Delightful as it was to have some chart success, I was more concerned about getting a publishing deal for Ten Years in an Open Necked Shirt. Epic were only interested, like everyone else, in putting a scissors-and-paste job together, and fine, fair enough, anything they said went. In any case, they weren’t interested in books: they were a record company. That’s where the John Cooper Clarke Directory came in: a rough 48pp tongue-in-cheek paperback in the style of a Thomson’s local telephone book, deliberately defaced and featuring a very few of my best-known numbers, including ‘I Married a Monster from Outer Space’, ‘Post War Glamour Girls’, and ‘Psycle Sluts’.
It was a quick exploitation pamphlet really, rather than a full-on poetry collection, but that said, it was a good thing, because it was put together by a terrific graphic artist, the late Barney Bubbles, a fabulous vinyl album cover designer,* and was copiously illustrated in black and white throughout, with photographs by Kevin Cummins, Tom Sheehan, and Paul Slattery.
It was originally released by the CBS/Epic publishing arm Omnibus Press, and then, as a sweetener, it was given away free with every copy of my third album, Snap, Crackle & Bop. Now it’s a rare collectors’ item, and goes for three figures on eBay. If I were you, I’d snap ’em all up. In a thousand years you could be a millionaire.
Good as this post-punk graphic-design marvel was, Directory was not the volume of poetry I wanted to be remembered for, so the pursuit of a publisher was another good reason to stay in London.
After a couple of blissful months in the Russell Hotel, however, my money eventually ran out and I went back to couch-surfing, at Bernie Davis’s in Streatham or, more often than not, chez Judy Totton near Westbourne Grove. Judy had left CBS to form her own PR company, taking The Only Ones and me with her, and very quickly attracting high-earning clients like Status Quo, Toyah Wilcox, and, for a while, The Clash. Later on, she was hired by some of the big rock acts including Kiss, INXS, The Kinks, and Rory Gallagher. I was fortunate to be with her, because she had great contacts and we were all in it together; Judy could use her big-name clients as leverage, but more importantly she was a class act and a real mensch to put up with me as a semi-permanent house guest.
The Only Ones were and are one of my favourite English beat combos. We did quite a few shows together. I spent a lot of time at the Perretts’ place in Forest Hill: not only did we have a publicity agent in common, we also had a mutual interest in pooling our resources in order to procure increasing amounts of dope for smaller amounts of money. I had my own connections, of course. I had contacts all over town, in Kent even: distance no object.
So now I’m eating out all the time and going to all sorts of shows with Judy, but after a while, I figured that I couldn’t impose on her indefinitely; we got on great, I was doing my bit, and she never made me feel unwelcome, but having me staying at her house must have been like taking her work home. Iris was living with her dad’s ex-wife in a house in Pimlico, which had a basement apartment with a nice skylight onto the street. She suggested I move in. I agreed.
In June, I went on a mini-tour to coincide with the release of Walking Back to Happiness along with two support bands, Fashion and Joy Division. We played gigs at Eric’s, Liverpool, the Royalty Theatre in London, and the Nuffield Theatre at the University of Lancaster, ending up at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester.
As a trainee journalist assigned to the Westminster Press, Iris was obliged to work for whichever of their roster of regional newspapers she was assigned to. One of their regions was Bermuda. It was either the Bermuda Star or the Stevenage Gazette. At first I was, ‘Bermuda Star! Bermuda Star!’ There was, however, the matter of the non-existent dope connection, so Stevenage it had to be. That’s when I finally got a glimpse of the Shredded Wheat factory with its profusion of windows maximising the solar illumination of the workplace, and the grain silos.
We lived in Stevenage for a couple of years. It was leafy, close to London, and quite revolutionary in that it didn’t have any traffic lights, just loads of roundabouts, underpasses, and flyovers. I immediately recognised the centre of the New Town as the setting for Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, the charming Swinging Sixties comedy starring Barry Evans, Judy Geeson, and Adrienne Posta.
Soon after we got there, one of Iris’s early assignments was covering the Knebworth Festival for the Gazette. Knebworth was a big deal, at least as big as Reading is now, and only about ten minutes from our house in a taxi. The main attraction that year was Led Zeppelin, but I was more interested in the New Barbarians featuring Keith Richards and his mate, the pre-Stones Ronnie Wood. This guaranteed the attendance of Nick Kent, so I thought we might be able to cop without having to go all the way into Central London for once.
Nick was a mad Stones fan. Pre-punk, the NME had paid for him to go on the road with them. He had a major man-crush on Keith, who once threw up over Nick’s leather jacket, and he’d never washed it since. To this day, his leathers carry the micro-remnants of Keith’s second-hand shepherd’s pie.
Anyway, we went to Knebworth and it was great, for one reason and one reason only: yes, Nick Kent was there, and yes we scored, but the thing that really blew me away was Chas and Dave. It was the first time I’d seen them live. I thought, ‘Fucking hell. I pity the fools who have to follow this!’ It was ‘see you later’ as I left Iris and Nick to deal with the New Barbarians: I had the dope, so I bought a bag of doughnuts and went home.
Mid-August, I was off on a whistle-stop tour of Holland, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, opening for Elvis Costello and The Attractions. It was my first visit to Scandinavia, and my abiding memory of this excursion was that after a short walk through the freezing Nordic streets, a man gets kind of hungry. I was informed by the promoters that a great feast had been prepared in honour of our arrival, and sure enough there was a table about a mile long, groaning with comestibles. I walked the length of that table, looking for something hot, sustaining, and preferably delicious, but on that whole mile-long table not only was there nothing hot, everything on offer was actively cold: platters of raw fish on a bed of ice. What the fuck? Imagine coming home from a hard day at the fjords only to be offered raw fish, pickled this, frozen that, marinated the other, nothing cooked. Not even a potato. It was unbelievable. Plus, the only liquid refreshment was a choice of iced water or bottles of chilled Jolly Cola.
Like every self-deprecating Englishman, I had always thought that the food of foreign lands was infinitely more flavoursome than our own. This may be true of the Mediterranean, and the far reaches of the crumbling empire, but the food of Northern Europe, with its Calvinist aversion to flavour, made even British institutional cuisine seem positively sumptuous. Holland: cheese for breakfast? Now that ain’t right. Germany: the invention of vegetarianism and the outdoor life. No thanks. Then there’s Sweden. My one visit to Ikea left only the olfactory memory of the meatballs. It’s school dinners, really; they’re not even particularly spicy. Meanwhile in Denmark, Plumrose chopped ham with pork. Norway, sild. Almost, but not quite, sardines. You see where I’m going with this?
Dope wasn’t going to be a problem, however. Just before I left England, I had got hold of a load of DF118s from a dentist. (DF118s, aka dihydrocodeine – opioid painkillers available only on prescription.) I’d got them on account of a tooth abscess, along with a medical cover-note saying I was entitled to have them in my possession. I had enough to exceed the stated dose – one always overstated the case, and thus got more than one needed. I probably also told the doctor I was going to be in Scandinavia for seven months or something. So as long as I didn’t operate any machinery, everything would be fine.
I was sorted, but the rest of the guys couldn’t even get a drink. I don’t know what it’s like now, but back then Scandinavia seemed to have stringent measures in place which obviated any chance of casual drunkenness. A family wedding would involve an application three months in advance to a government official, in triplicate, just to get a single case of champagne. Other than that, forget about it. Off-licences didn’t seem to exist.
Maybe it was their enforced sobriety, but the others in our party were beginning to lose their temper. The only booze available in Copenhagen was at the pre-show dinner in the hotel restaurant. It was like a baronial castle with flag floors, vaulted ceilings, chandeliers, a walk-in fireplace, and extensive wine cellars. We dined in the library. We had a whole pigeon each, and for the first time, for me anyway, a bottle of wine that cost three figures.
Jake Riviera was quite the oenophile, a gentleman connoisseur with a flourishing cellar of his own. Scandinavia is not known as a centre of viniculture, but Jake was in possession of a case of green wine that he’d got from somewhere or other. He obviously foresaw some desperate measures from the forcibly ensobered band members, so the safekeeping of the wine became my responsibility – as a drug addict, I was considered a safe pair of hands in that regard. As he hid the booze under my bed, I was sworn to secrecy and told that it wouldn’t be ready to drink for another five years – not only would it not taste very nice, but its ingestion could have violent gastro-intestinal consequences. If I knew anything about addiction, though, if those guys couldn’t get a drink after the show, they’d be necking the Aqua Velva aftershave or whatever the fuck. Sure enough, Bruce and Pete Thomas came a-knocking around 3am. ‘Where is it?’ they demanded. I denied all knowledge. They bribed me with cocaine, but that not being particularly my drug of choice, I stood firm. They nevertheless went about searching the room for somewhere to chop out some lines. Every surface in this castle was rough-hewn, hammered, pitted, textured, or covered in elk fur, even in the bathrooms. In desperation, they must have looked under my bed, where of course they unearthed Jake’s precious vino stash, some of which they instantly absorbed. Thus emboldened, the subject of the nose powder re-presented itself.
To that end, I removed a massive glass-covered painting from the wall above my bed. Ever the hygiene freak, I insisted that the glass be washed clean and rendered germ-free before any lines were hacked out. Barely had we started the sterilisation process, however, than there was a great big crack and the glass shattered. We managed to get a couple of lines chopped out on a flat, undamaged area, and then looked upon the inadvertently vandalised artwork. Concerned about the welfare of the cleaning staff, we decided to deglaze the picture before putting it back on the wall. It had to be rendered safe: after all, I had to sleep underneath it.
There were splinters. Blood was shed. Then there was the matter of what to do with the bits and pieces. Finally, we agreed to wrap them all up in two bath robes and a bed sheet and put them out on the balcony, to the point where only an idiot could injure themselves. Even so, we thought we’d better put a warning notice on it. After much deliberation on the appropriate wording, I wrote on the sheet in felt tip: ‘Beware: Shards.’
Next morning at breakfast, the physical condition of Bruce and Pete told Jake all there was to know. He wasn’t happy. ‘I don’t mind a laugh,’ he kept telling me, ‘and it isn’t just the money. But the thing is, it wasn’t ready for drinking. Now they’re going to get sick, and it’s all your fault.’