My career as a heterosexual started with a bang. When I lost my virginity at the age of thirteen I’d never even jerked off before, so my first ejaculation didn’t come from playing with myself, it was from rumping a bird. Well, sort of rumping her. I had my cock pushed in between her legs, but I’m not sure if there was time to get fully inside her before I fucking shot my load. Still, it definitely counted. Or at least, it did as far as I was concerned.
The setting for this once-in-a-lifetime event was the shed where they stored the Flying Scotsman train for the Battersea funfair’s miniature railway. It had that special streamlined shape at the front, kind of like the Japanese bullet train, and my first non-nonce sexual partner was lying back against the metal curve. In retrospect, the choice of location was quite funny (given my obsession with nicking train sets) and I certainly got to my destination at express pace.
After it happened, I was stunned. My mind was spinning – ‘What the fuck was that?’ I ran home to the Battersea council block we’d recently moved to when my mum’s name finally got to the top of the housing list, bolted upstairs to the bathroom and inspected my cock for signs of damage. I thought it was bleeding or something. For someone who’d already found himself in the situations I had, I was embarrassingly innocent. But after that first nut, I loved the feeling of cumming so much that I just couldn’t stop myself. I was jerking off five times a day – with toilet rolls, vacuum cleaners, all kinds of weird fucking things.
At least, I presumed they were weird, but maybe some of them would count as the usual kinky experiments any regular teenage boy would get up to. Either way, I remember I had this obsession with putting toilet rolls on my cock and jerking off – because it almost felt like it wasn’t me doing it, I think that was the concept. I was so fixated on doing this that sometimes I’d get a fucking rash from the roughness of the cardboard.
I suppose I was still trying to figure shit out, and at least I was actually inside something – even if it was only a toilet roll, so it wasn’t that big a step forward. One result of your sexual life getting off to the kind of fucked-up start mine did is that even though you’re doing something which might be fairly normal, you don’t always know that, so you assume it’s as deviant and wrong as all your other impulses. Of course the other side of that coin is that some very strange shit can all too easily become normal to you. It certainly did to me.
The ejaculation thing happened prior to any significant drinking or drug-taking on my part (gasping on a Players No. 6 excepted), and it was my first major fix. Something that got me out of my head for a while, so I didn’t have to deal with all the shit that was in there. Given half a chance, it still works like that for me today, even now I’ve kicked all my other addictions except sugar … I guess you never forget your first loves.
Chasing that sexual high would take me into pretty dark territory in the years ahead. For the moment, it was a good job I finally had my own room, even if there was no way its concrete walls were going to hold me and my exploding teenage libido. I couldn’t sit still for a fucking minute at that age.
The flat we’d moved to in Battersea was in one of those really long, brutal-looking boxes. It had only just been built, and they’d interspersed three of these new blocks with the older, Peabody-type places that remained. Our block bordered on a big patch of waste ground where I think a gasworks used to be, and there was a shaggers’ alley over the other side that I got quite fixated on. People would pull up in their cars and I’d be over the other side of the wall, having a wank while watching them shag – that was a real turn-on for me.
Peeping Tom-ing became a big part of my life over the next few years. I was ashamed of it, but I suppose that shame was part of what was driving me on. It certainly didn’t stop me. Later on, the whole thing would get even more obsessive. I’d find another shaggers’ alley down near the railway lines in Battersea, and I’d be up on the bridge looking down at people fucking in their cars. I’d be so angry that some other guy was getting pussy and I wasn’t that sometimes I’d find a big fucking rock and slam it down on the bonnet from above. Can you imagine being in that car getting your end away when a fucking boulder crashes down onto you? You’d think it was Judgement Day. Not that I’d hang around to see the chaos my handiwork caused. I wasn’t that stupid. I’d leg it and live to wank another day.
There’s not a shelf in the library high enough for this shit, is there? This is the good stuff you just don’t get from the guy from Nickelback (at least, not so far as I know).
Battersea was a rough place to live in those days, but the flat itself was all right. It was a relief to have my own room for the first time in my life, and I was happy to leave behind Benbow Road and its bad memories. The part of it that was a major nause was having to travel all the way from Battersea to Shepherd’s Bush to go to school.
It wasn’t just that we’d moved south of the river – it took me four fucking buses to get there. The weird thing was (given how not into school I was) it was my idea to stay at Christopher Wren when I could’ve easily gone somewhere nearer. My mum wasn’t bothered either way, and I doubt the school authorities were exactly overjoyed to keep me – ‘Thank fuck for that, lads, Steve Jones is staying!’ – but I didn’t want to leave my mates behind and have to make new ones.
As it turned out, the fact that I now had to get up at seven in the morning if I wanted to make it to Christopher Wren on time was probably the final nail in the coffin of my school career, but it’s not like I was bound for glory in that direction anyway. What moving to Battersea definitely did do was push me a bit further away from the kind of normal life Cookie would’ve probably been having without my intervention. I’d already got used to heading off into the city on my own in search of any kind of mischief to distract me from having to live with my stepdad. Now I had a whole new territory to explore. This is where the Steve Jones Cloak of Invisibility really started to come into play.
My secret weapon when I went out thieving had always been to convince myself that, wherever I was, I was meant to be there legally. Like in Hamleys, I wouldn’t be nicking train sets off the shop floor. Oh no, that was a mug’s game – I’d sneak into the stockroom. People who actually did work there would see this twelve- or thirteen-year-old skinhead looking furtive among the expensive toys and do … absolutely fuck all about it. It was a bizarre concept, but so long as I’d convinced myself what I was doing was perfectly normal, it seemed that people would accept this by sheer force of my will. I don’t know how it worked, only that it did. It was almost as if I’d made myself invisible. Like a fantasy of having a superpower, except you came out the other end with actual free stuff.
The confidence this gave me would take me anywhere I wanted to go. If there was a door, I’d walk straight through it. No matter where it was – the grandest shops in the West End, or the run-down changing rooms of the St Paul’s School playing fields in Barnes, just the other side of Hammersmith Bridge, by the towpath I used to ride stolen bikes and mopeds down. While the normal people were outside in the fresh air playing football or rugby or cricket, I’d haunt those changing rooms, nicking their wallets. I used to do that a lot. It was a great distraction from all the things I’d otherwise have to be thinking about.
Was I technically a kleptomaniac? Well, there wasn’t a day that went by when I didn’t wake up and think, ‘What am I gonna pilfer today?’ If you substitute drinking or getting high or shagging for the thieving, you’ve got a pretty straightforward picture of what addiction is. The fact that what I was doing made victims of strangers never bothered me, even as I was thinking, ‘Who’s going to be the unlucky soul today?’
I certainly got a sense of satisfaction if I got home with a good haul, but I’d still be back at it again the next day. My thievery wasn’t goal-driven; it wasn’t about getting enough money together to do some particular thing, it was about excitement for its own sake, seeing what I could get away with. Well, that and having something I could focus on that would distract me from myself. Plus, it was something I was good at. I stole for the love of it, I tells ya.
The Cloak of Invisibility wasn’t only useful for nicking stuff – it was a multi-purpose garment. I used to put it on to sneak into Battersea Power Station as well. Pink Floyd hadn’t done Animals yet, but you didn’t need a flying pig to show you how those fucking huge chimneys dominated the landscape around my new home. I had to find a way in, which wasn’t hard, and once I was in there it was easy to find stairwells and other little cubbyholes I could sneak off and hide in if any of the geezers working there got suspicious. Which they never did, obviously, because I had the Cloak on.
That place was massive inside. There was this giant open room with these huge fucking turbines – one for each of the chimneys – which you could see them working on even at night-time. You didn’t have to tiptoe around, really, because it was so loud in there no one could hear themselves think. The heat from the burning coal certainly kept it hot enough, but I soon figured out a way to get up to the top of the building so I could go out on the roof. It was fantastic up there – the views along the river were incredible. Years later when that film Brazil came out, with all the scenes filmed inside power stations, the whole thing felt very familiar to me – I knew I’d been there before.
Once you were out on the roof, the four giant chimneys had little ladders on that you could climb up. I went most of the way up one, but not all the way because I fucking bottled it. I was very agile when I was young – it was one of my many gifts – and I had no fear of heights, but I’m telling you it was scary up there. Someone told me Glen Matlock’s book has a dramatic description in it of me getting chased right up to the top of one of the chimneys by the police, but I don’t remember that actually happening (what was I going to do when they caught me – jump off?) so maybe I embellished the story a little bit. Either that, or Glen’s got my real life mixed up with the ending of a film.
There was a real thrill to the cold night air hitting your face when you climbed out of that giant furnace room and onto the roof. It’s a fucking shame some idiot developers have been allowed to rip the guts out of that place to make a quick buck. Those chimneys are the only thing anyone remembers about that part of London. Well, that and the dogs’ home.
The view from the top of the power station wasn’t the only excitement that Battersea had to offer. As I mentioned at the start of this chapter, wonderful things also happened at the fairground in Battersea Park. I used to love going there, and I had another of those landmark musical moments – epiphanies, I suppose you’d call them – by the waltzer, where the Fairground Ted stands on the back to impress the girls and try and nick money out of people’s pockets. They were playing the hit songs of the day and Otis Redding’s ‘(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay’ came on. It was the same basic MO as with ‘Purple Haze’. Boom! The song doesn’t just stick in your head, it rewires your brain.
I must have stood there for a full two hours, hoping to hear it again, but obviously they weren’t gonna play the same song twice. Eventually it got to about nine o’clock at night, the fair shut down and I went home with ‘Dock of the Bay’ still reverberating round the old noggin. Maybe it’s the whistling. I do a thing now on my radio show, Jonesy’s Jukebox, where I whistle a song over the guitar chords and people have to guess what it is: it drives them nuts when they can’t get it. So I suppose Battersea Funfair could be where that started, but it’s more likely it was just something about the song as a whole that resonated with me as a thirteen-year-old kid.
I don’t know why I was so desperate to hear it again. I suppose you could look at the lyrics and say, ‘Well, it’s someone stuck somewhere near the water who is trying to imagine a better life,’ but as I said before, I’ve never really listened to the words of songs, although maybe I’ve just taken them in without really noticing. I hate admitting that because it makes me sound like a fucking dumbass, but it’s true – the melody and the overall vibe were what mattered to me more than anything else. Thinking about the lyrics would’ve reminded me of school. Of course things can take root in your mind in a way that you don’t understand, but however that song spoke to me, it wasn’t through me thinking about what Otis Redding was singing.
One thing I’ve realised about myself when I was growing up is that I never asked questions the way other kids did. I think I’d have felt like I was bothering someone, so rather than just ask ‘Why?’ if there was something I didn’t understand, I just let it go and glossed it over. It wasn’t that I wasn’t curious or didn’t notice what was going on around me, but if I was confused about something I never expected anyone would want to help me.
When you grow up like I did, with the world and even your own family constantly giving you the message that you’re a piece of shit who is never going to amount to anything, it’s hard not to start believing that yourself. It wasn’t that my mum and stepdad were directly telling me, ‘You’re nothing, you’ll never get anywhere,’ all the time – although once I started to get in trouble with the police I would hear that kind of thing more and more; it was just a general feeling of not being supported.
The sad reality of my Cloak of Invisibility was that it was double-sided. The beginning of it was just being ignored. Then I took that painful reality of not feeling wanted in my own home and flipped it around – ‘Well, if no one’s gonna notice me, maybe that means I can just wander into places and nick stuff. At least that way I’ll get something out of it.’ It was almost as if not feeling I had the right to belong anywhere gave me the impulse to go everywhere. Some of these issues were just too painful to think about, and so long as I was on the move from one crime scene to the next, I knew I could ignore them. The Cloak could protect me.
It didn’t occur to me at the time, but I think there were two sides to how my mates saw me as well. On the one hand, I was the chosen one – Jimmy Macken used to say I ‘could fall down in cow-shit and come up smelling of roses’. On the other, even though this – and especially not the thing with my stepdad – wasn’t something we’d ever have talked about, they must have clocked that things weren’t right at home. It’s not something you really want other people to know, is it? You want everyone to think you come from a normal family so you don’t have to be the odd one out. But why else did I always want to stay over at Cookie’s or Hayesy’s or Jimmy Macken’s?
I was that kid who never stopped wanting to hang around and stay over. I was probably a right pain in the arse, but I think my friends’ parents must’ve felt sorry for me, because I don’t remember any of them ever letting me know that I was surplus to requirements. They could see that I was trouble, but they did their best to look out for me anyway. I guess some people are just warm-hearted like that.