I was born in 1955 – around the same time as rock ’n’ roll. I got my sense of rhythm from my mum, Mary Jones, who was a Teddy girl, so I was in her fucking womb when she was jiving down the Hammersmith Palais.
Teddy girls – and Teddy boys, which is what my dad was – were the first in the long line of British youth cults which would brighten up the post-war years. Their name was shortened from the Edwardian style of clothes they favoured (like drainpipe trousers and long, drape jackets) and they were the ones who started rioting to ‘Rock Around the Clock’ when the film Blackboard Jungle came out. It’s no wonder I’ve got such a strong connection to all those old rockers from the early days – Eddie Cochran for sure, but not just him.
Up until the age of about six years old, my childhood was going pretty smoothly. OK, so my dad had fucked off without hanging around long enough to say hello to me, and at that time it was a bit of a no-no to be what was still technically known as ‘a bastard’. But you couldn’t really blame him, as I don’t think he and my mum had been together that long when she got pregnant. And the household I lived in felt like quite a normal – even loving – home. You might say, ‘How does a kid know what normal is, when they’ve got nothing else to compare it to?’ But I think they just know. I certainly did.
My mum and I lived with my nan Edith and grandad Fred in a third-floor flat in Riverside Gardens, Hammersmith. It’s that big brick Peabody buildings estate, near the bridge. If you were heading out of London towards Heathrow airport, you’d see the Hammersmith Odeon – or Apollo, as it is now – on your left as you drove west over the flyover, then our flats would be on the right as you come down off the flyover and the main road levels out. I say that as if it’s changed, but they were still there last time I looked (although admittedly that was in 2008).
It wasn’t just the four of us. My gran and grandad’s three other children lived there too. I slept in a cot at the bottom of the bed my mum shared with her sister Frances. My gran and grandad had their own room, and my uncles, Barry and Martin, shared the last bedroom. The flat ran between two corners of the block, so one main window looked out over the flyover towards the Odeon (the scene of a few memorable adventures later on in my life) and the other faced the opposite way. There were no lifts, so you had to walk up the stairs to get there, but this was nobody’s shithole. It was a proper Victorian housing estate – decent accommodation for decent working-class people who were getting by OK.
I’m not sure how the Joneses were keeping up with everyone else, though, because my grandad was a lazy cunt. The story was he’d avoided having to fight in World War II by putting his foot under a tram to mangle his leg. I don’t know if that was true, but he certainly never worked the whole time I was there, maybe because of the same injury that kept him out of the army.
He just used to sit there in his chair all day smoking roll-ups while my nan went out to work cleaning other people’s houses. He’d still managed to buy himself some wheels, though – an Austin A40 which started with a crank. Having a car parked in the square down below the flats was quite a status symbol at that time, even if it did always break down when he tried to drive us down to Brighton in it. Come to think of it, his leg couldn’t have been that bad if he could still drive. I remember him sitting me in his lap sometimes and letting me steer when he’d take the car for a turn around the square – my first underage driving experience; maybe that’s where I got the bug from.
Most of my memories of those times are happy ones. Like my nan giving me a bath in the sink, or making those amazing old-fashioned steamed suet puddings where she’d stretch a cloth over the top of the bowl and tie it with a piece of string. She’d fill the bowl with raisins and then cover the whole thing in treacle from a green and gold Tate & Lyle tin. There’s some things which happened last week that I don’t remember too well, but fifty-five years on I can feel how good that pudding tasted on my tongue as if I’m eating it right now.
My nan wasn’t spoiling me, she was just doing what any normal grandparent (or parent, come to that) would’ve done – nurturing, I suppose, is what you’d call it. I don’t remember my mum so much at this time, even though she was there. The flat was pretty crowded, so it was easy to lose track of people, but it’s my nan I remember doing all the cleaning up and making the dinners and checking everyone was all right. She was great.
I got the feeling that my nan had always preferred boys to girls, and as a result her sons had probably got the lion’s share of her attention. Maybe that was part of what my mum didn’t like about my nan being so warm and loving towards me when I was little. It made her quite cold towards me when I was growing up.
All I knew about my dad (apart from the fact that he was a Teddy boy, which was how he and my mum had met) was that his name was Don Jarvis and he was an amateur boxer from Fulham. That was the only information my mum gave me then. I think I’d picked up that it wasn’t a subject she was too keen to talk about, though I do remember going down to some kind of court at a very early age where my mum was hoping to get money off him. I don’t think she had any luck, because they’d never been married and she was definitely having a good old moan outside the court after.
My family did like to complain, but there was a lot of laughter, too. My grandad was a grumpy old sod, but he was funny with it. He would sit me on his lap – there was no weird shit there, nothing noncey – and he had this rag that he used to blow cigarette smoke into and then hold it over my face. I fucking loved the smell of those cigarettes. Breathing in the smoke from that rag was one of the best and most comforting feelings I’ve ever known. When it got put back in the drawer I’d be shouting, ‘Where’s me rag? Where’s me rag?’ It wasn’t just for special occasions, it was for all occasions.
I can see now that this was probably the start of my first addiction. I don’t think it was just the nicotine I loved, it was the fact that my grandad cared enough to blow smoke into the rag just because he knew I wanted him to. Either way, I really craved that rag when I didn’t have it, and it certainly didn’t take me long to progress to a pack of Players No. 6 as soon as I was old enough to buy my own fags (although I did get into Gauloises for ten minutes at one point because I heard Ronnie Wood smoked them; they were a good strong smoke). A few years later, when I was on heroin, I’d be on five packs a day. You smoke a lot more once you’re on dope. As if it’s not fucking unhealthy enough already.
Obviously you don’t see the nicotine pacifier recommended by too many parenting manuals these days, but to me it was part and parcel of what I look back on as really good times. Even though she wasn’t exactly the maternal type, I think my mum and I got on OK at that stage. Once she got me a brand-new pair of Tesco bombers – just shit jeans – and plimsolls that were like Converse but weren’t Converse. I used to love it if ever I got new clothes: I’d be on top of the world the minute I had a bit of fresh clobber on, and I felt like I could walk tall through the squares that linked up the different Peabody buildings.
There was a real sense of community on that estate. There was a boozer on the corner with an off-licence next to it, and when we’d take back the R. White’s lemonade bottles to get the deposits, I’d sit outside the pub listening to the guy who played the piano. That’s one of my first conscious musical memories, although there’d be plenty more to come (and a few unconscious ones to go with them).
I also loved going to the matinees at the ABC cinema, just round the corner on King Street, to see Commando Cody and all those shit Saturday serials. I preferred sitting in the back row, because I didn’t want to be close to all the other kids, and for some reason I loved it when the geezer would come out between the films and go, ‘Hey, kids, what do you think?’ Then everyone would go home and you’d have to come back next week to see the spaceship with a little bit of string holding it up.
Looking back on them, these were some of the happiest days of my life. I’d made a few friends on the estate and started primary school at Flora Gardens in Ravenscourt Park down the road. My grandparents loved me. It was all good.
I think I’d still have ended up being an alcoholic even if I’d had more of a charmed upbringing and stayed with my nan and her steak and kidney pies till I was old enough to leave home. There were quite a few big drinkers among the men in my family, and I just had that obsessive–compulsive alcoholic gene from day one. That’s nothing to do with scenarios that have unfolded in my life, it’s just who I am, or that’s what I believe, anyway. But I don’t think the Sex Pistols would’ve ever existed – at least, not with me in them – if it wasn’t for what happened to me next. Apart from anything else, the urge to look for a better life wouldn’t have been there, because I’d already have had one.