The overwhelming reality of my life at that time was that I did not want to be in the same house as my stepdad. This probably gave me a head start over other kids my age in terms of how far afield I was willing to go in search of excitement. Effectively I was running away, but once I started getting on buses or tube trains and heading up to the West End, I found it exciting to explore the city on my own.
I was pretty green and given my seemingly irresistible allure as far as the paedophile fraternity was concerned, I was probably lucky I didn’t end up getting chucked in the back of a van and whisked off to Dolphin Square to get rumped and killed by some fucking evil Tory MP. Whether you’re talking about that establishment side of it – and even if the police don’t believe it, some people still reckon kids got killed in that place but it was all covered up after – or Jimmy Savile terrorising the Top of the Pops dressing room, it’s taken years for the truth to come out about how much VIP paedophile shit was going on in London at that time. I still don’t think they’ve done more than scratch the surface.
As it turned out, the worst thing that happened to me on my first few trips up to the West End was getting ripped off by some street conmen playing Three-card Monte (or whatever you call that when it’s dice under cups). You know those geezers with the orange-boxes who are all working together to make you put your money down so they can have it off you, but if you’re really naive like I was you don’t realise? I’ve still got such a clear memory of how certain I was about which cup it was under – I swore blind I was going to win and when these cunts took my money off me the only word to describe how I felt is ‘violated’.
I guess it’s odd that word should spring to mind when I’d been in other situations that seemed to suit it better. But thinking about it, maybe that’s actually not weird at all, because sometimes the only way to deal with those sort of things is to keep them at a safe distance. And I was genuinely fucking devastated about the money. It could have been as much as a tenner – which was a lot then – and the probability that I’d come by it dishonestly did not make me feel any better about losing it.
Would it have occurred to me that this was how all the people I nicked stuff off probably felt? Not for a second. All I cared about was making sure I never fell for such an obvious trick again. I was only a young dude then, still a long way from the hardened criminal of later years, but that was a big learner for me – walking away from the situation, knowing I’d been royally done.
You could tell by the kinds of things I was nicking what a kid I still was. Hornby model railway accessories were one of my first stops on the branch line of larceny. I’d go up to Hamleys, the big toy store on Regent Street, and come back with all this stuff for the amazing train set I’d sometimes be allowed to lay out on the floor of the living room in the upstairs flat at Benbow Road. I was obsessed with the detail of the engines, and the great thing about them was you just opened the packet and there they were. Not like with Airfix kits, where I would’ve loved the finished product of a World War II fighter or a bomber, but because of the attention deficit thing I just didn’t have the patience to make them. Well, I tried a couple of times, but mine came out looking more like train wrecks.
Not being able to read the instructions probably didn’t help, but the main thing was I just did not get the concept of delayed gratification. Why would I want to spend weeks and months painstakingly making one when I could go out and steal something else that would have the same level of detail and all the work already done?
Instant gratification was also the name of the game in my other main criminal speciality, which in the early days of my reign of terror was nicking bikes. There was a proper bike shop on Putney Road, just south of the river – I think it was called Holdsworth’s. I used to walk across Hammersmith Bridge, turn left along the towpath towards Putney, then go right off this one road and come out near the bike shop. I’d stand there waiting till some geezer would get off his amazing Tour de France racer to go in there, then if he didn’t lock his bike up properly I’d be off down the towpath on it before anyone knew it’d gone.
I got some pretty tasty bikes that way. I used to stash them in the coal chute of the Benbow Road basement. And it wasn’t long till I progressed from nicking bikes to nicking mopeds. They were easy to get going – you just had to pedal them and they’d pretty much start. I had some good runs up and down that towpath. I remember getting chased by the Old Bill down there once with someone on the back – I can’t remember who.
Early on in my thieving career I had a decent track record of not getting caught. One time when I was still no more than twelve, I was shoplifting in Selfridges department store – one of my other favourite West End haunts – when this geezer goes, ‘Oi!’ I thought he’d collared me, but gradually I realised he just wanted a sweet, excited kid to demonstrate a toy for a story in the paper. It was called a Johnny Astro and was essentially a balloon you had to land on the surface of the moon using the air from a fan. You can see the suspicious look on my face in the photo they took, cos I still can’t quite believe I’m not nicked. The fact that this photo appeared in the Sun was just the icing on the cake. This was my first appearance in the tabloid press, but it wouldn’t be my last.
The guy who took the picture had no idea what a little crook he was dealing with. I guess people who aren’t hardened thieves can be a bit naive when it comes to realising kids are up to no good. I can tell when someone’s at it in two seconds – there really are few truer sayings than ‘it takes one to know one’. And that doesn’t just apply to thieves: the same goes for junkies. If you’re high on dope, I can smell it on you, because I was that guy. It’s actually a pain in the arse, because even though I’m not doing those things any more, my head’s still full of them. You can’t relax because you’ve constantly got the antennae on – like I would never leave anything lying around backstage at a gig, in case there’s a Steve Jones around. I suppose there’s a kind of justice to that in a way.
The first thing my friend Paul Cook – Cookie for the rest of this book, no point standing on ceremony after all these years – says he remembers noticing about me once we became friends was that I was always ‘doing furtive things with bikes in the basement’. Our paths had crossed a few times before that when we were a bit younger, walking to our different primary schools. I think our mums vaguely knew each other for some reason I never quite understood, because they used to wave at each other across the road. It never went much further than a quick hello, though.
It took us a little while to get to know each other once we’d both started at secondary school because we were in different classes. I was in the one with all the thick cunts and he was in the top stream. It was both being skinheads that brought us together.
A few people over the years have said that our personalities complement each other, and I guess that’s so. He’s a Cancer and I’m a Virgo, for a start. Not that we’d have given a shit about that bollocks when we were at school, but it basically means he’s quite secure and laid-back whereas I’m more of a loon. When it came to getting in trouble I was always the instigator and he was the one who came along for the ride. He wasn’t a criminal like I was. He didn’t always need to be thieving like I did – he didn’t have that drive – but he liked a laugh enough to tag along and see what would happen.
Some parents would’ve seen their kid becoming friendly with a troublemaker like me and tried to put a lid on it, but Paul’s mum and dad weren’t like that. I never got that from them. They took me into their house and showed me what a normal home life could be. The Cooks were a loving family – his dad, his mum, his sister, they were all good people who enjoyed each other’s company. They even had friends who would come over to their house to watch TV sometimes: that’s how sociable they were.
Apart from Cookie’s house, another place where I found a bit of sanctuary was going to see Queens Park Rangers play football on a Saturday afternoon. It took me five minutes to walk up to their ground at Loftus Road. A load of other kids from Christopher Wren went and I just followed suit. If there was an away game I’d sometimes go to Fulham or Chelsea – and they’re my team now. I guess that’s a King’s Road thing.
There was a phase when I was really young when I would watch the game, but once the skinhead thing took over, it was all about going to the ground for a bit of a rampage afterwards. I remember a few times when we all went into a shop on Shepherd’s Bush Market and nicked Ben Sherman shirts. I was proud of the number of those I’d managed to get my hands on by fair means or foul over the years. I think I topped out at thirteen, which was a lot for a kid of my age – certainly more than any of my friends had.
The buzz of it was all about feeling part of something. I liked the camaraderie of being with a bunch of blokes, even blokes you didn’t know but only saw at the game. I was so used to being on my own that it was a relief to be part of a group. I’d go with mates from school, too. Cookie, Stephen Hayes, Jimmy Macken and Alex Hall – that was our little crew. The violence side of it wasn’t for me, though. I might’ve bullshitted myself that it was for five minutes, but that’s not really my nature. There was plenty of shit going on at the time but when you’re only twelve you’re not in the front rank and no one’s really expecting you to be – it’s more about being one of the kids at the back going, ‘Come on, let’s ’ave ’em!’
I had no ambitions to be the leader of any hooligan firm, but I always wanted to dress like the top dog. This was why I was happy to go miles out of town to that Ivy League place in Richmond. Even as a twelve-year-old, I’d travel to the ends of the earth (that’s officially where Richmond is, right?) to get the best clobber. I’d still do that now, almost fifty years later. As its name suggests, Ivy League was an American shop selling what I suppose you’d call preppie stuff – clothes like the Beach Boys would wear, nice short-sleeved checked shirts with Levi’s Sta-Prest and the proper fucking brogues. Even if the only shoe sizes they had were too big for me, I’d rather put up with the blisters on my feet than not look the part.
I had all the good shit. A lot of skinheads didn’t have a fucking clue; they’d wear some horrible old tat. I was a snob when it came to clothes. If you didn’t have the right stuff, I didn’t want nothing to do with you – if you wore a Brutus shirt, or jeans that weren’t Levi’s, or had sideburns (though that last one may’ve been because I was too young and couldn’t grow ’em yet), then forget about it. By the same token, if you saw another guy with the right gear you’d kind of bond with them straight away, just because you knew they had that little something special about them.
Of course not everyone’s like that. In fact, the vast majority of people don’t really give a shit about these things, and the longer any kind of youth movement goes on, the more the kids who don’t really care tend to get involved. That certainly happened with the skinheads, and it went the same way with the punk thing later on. At the start it was all about making an effort to look distinctive and stand out, but then it became just the uniform of leather jacket and jeans, with no thought or care going into it any more.
That was especially true when the Americans got involved. I think there’s something specifically English about caring so much about these kinds of fashion details. I’ve never been able to quite put my finger on what, but I think it started with the Teddy boys and then got even stricter with the mods and the skinheads. And it carried on into the Eighties with the casuals – the football hooligans who dressed really smart when Margaret Thatcher was on her throne. There’s almost a queer element to the whole peacocking side of it – the idea of ‘who’s the face?’ where you have to dress and do your hair a certain really detailed way and you’re a cunt if you don’t look as good. But in the end I think this mentality is more of a class thing than a sex thing.
The way people were brought up in the British class system must have had something to do with it. If you were working class you were raised with the feeling that you had to know your place, and one way of escaping that was to subscribe to a different set of values which allowed you to become part of your own fashion aristocracy. That’s why Americans never tended to quite get it when they tried to transfer our subcultures over there, because they didn’t have that conditioning to push back against.
For me, having the proper sheepskin coat or the genuine cashmere Crombie was a way to feel good about myself. It was your own little thing that marked out a space you could be successful in. The two-tone suits were the perfect example of that. Not many of us were heading for the kind of jobs where you’d need a whistle (and flute), but we could go down to a place called Stewart’s on Uxbridge Road – he was this little Jewish tailor who saw an opportunity – and get him to make us one for £10. Every kid that was a skinhead from my area had to go through that rite of passage. You’d go down there to get measured up and he’d go, ‘Come in, my boy …’ I bet he couldn’t believe his luck.
In later times, skinheads would come to be seen as very narrow-minded and racist, but it wasn’t like that for us. After all, what brought us together was that we all loved Jamaican and black American music. Even in the 1960s, Shepherd’s Bush and White City were very mixed areas – a lot of Irish people lived there, but also a few Asians and increasing numbers of black kids. And in the early days there was none of that Nazi shit going on. Being a skinhead had nothing to do with racism as far as we were concerned. There was a black kid from school called Cecil who was one of our mates and he was a skinhead without anyone saying anything about it.
As time went on, ‘Paki-bashing’ and ‘queer-bashing’ did become more and more part of skinhead culture. I don’t know how that happened; I think maybe the National Front involved themselves and managed to twist it all in more of a fascist direction. And that side of things got really warped and full-on anti-Semitic once it went over to America. By the time I crossed the Atlantic for the first time in the late Seventies, the Nazi element had really crept in, until no one was really thinking about dancing to Tighten Up compilations any more. Maybe Americans just took the whole thing out of context, the same way they did with punk.