Our next musical move after being skinheads was not an obvious one on paper. It normally takes a few steps to get from Ska to Sabbath, but we did it in a single bound. As anyone who listens to my radio show will tell you, I still love to make a leap of faith when it comes to musical genres, and this one felt pretty logical at the time. When Stephen Hayes’ older brother played us Black Sabbath and Led Zep II with ‘Whole Lotta Love’ on it for the first time, we were instantly hooked.
Stephen’s brother’s real name was Tony – although we called him Dick to get on his nerves – and the Hayes family lived on the White City estate. It was a tough place, where most of the cool kids from Christopher Wren tended to live. All the streets seemed to have South African names, which I thought at the time was because of it being White City, but it turns out to be something to do with the exhibitions they used to have on the site before the stadium got built.
I’ve got a very clear memory of sitting on a bed in the Hayeses’ house listening to ‘Dow dow … dow, dow dowwww’. I’m sure you’ve already guessed what song that is – any fool could recognise it’s Black Sabbath’s ‘Sweet Leaf’. I hadn’t picked up a guitar in anger yet, but if any song’s going to make you fancy having a go yourself, it’s that one. The funny thing is, we were very innocent and didn’t know that the lyrics were about weed. Unless of course I’ve got it wrong and ‘Sweet Leaf’ is actually a song about the coming of autumn …
It’s not like drugs were unknown to us at the time. I was only fourteen years old the first time I took a Mandrax. I did it outside a QPR game – it was just a little white tablet that was meant to be a sleeping pill, like an aspirin except maybe a bit fatter – and on top of a couple of pints it had me falling all over the place at around one or two in the afternoon. I remember the older guys all laughing at me and me thinking the tingling feeling the Mandy gave me was the tits. They must’ve been quite easy to get at the time, because I managed to get one and I didn’t know anybody.
I did LSD a couple of times as well, but I fucking hated that. Once was at a friend’s house, which was right on the Westway. Acid is a bit like that road: once you’re on it, you can’t stop, and you’ve not got much control about where you come off. His mum and dad were in one room – with no idea of what we were doing – and the two of us were in another. When I got up to go for a piss at one point I looked in the mirror and all I saw was this black skeleton. Fuck that for a game of soldiers! I don’t think I got a wink of sleep till the sun came up – it felt like the night was never going to end.
I understand that LSD is good for some people’s heads, but it didn’t work for mine. Weed was kind of similar, I’d just get too paranoid and freak out. Some people find it helps them relax but I can’t enjoy it – maybe I’m just too controlling.
One impulse I had no chance of controlling was my addiction to cumming. To that end, my activities as a peeping Tom probably peaked at the ages of fourteen to fifteen. If you ever wondered who it was making little holes in the wall of public toilets in the late 1960s and early 1970s, well, that would have been me. (Not just me, obviously, but if West London had staged a regional championship, I definitely would have been seeded, in more ways than one.)
I used to wait and watch for a bird to go in one and then go in next door and look through the hole. Part of the excitement was knowing how wrong it was – the excitement and shame of sneaking into the lav, just full-blown wanting to nut because I knew that instant gratification was the quickest way to feel good … Normal people aren’t out doing that kind of thing every night, are they? It was like I’d become the local nonce, only in a different form. This was the world I’d been drawn into. That shit was like a virus.
I got nicked when I was out peeping Tom-ing once. I was looking through the window of this block of flats where some toffs lived in Hammersmith and someone must’ve seen me and called the Old Bill. The police caught me and said, ‘What are you doing?’ At first I answered, ‘Nothing,’ but they weren’t having that.
I was too embarrassed by the fact that I was trying to have a pedal to tell them the truth, so I pretended I was planning a break-in. That turned out to be a pretty good move, as since I hadn’t actually got in there, they couldn’t do me for it. But I didn’t get off so lightly the time a couple of bouncers at the Hammersmith Palais caught me up on the roof peeping down into the women’s toilets. They hung me over the edge of the roof by my fucking ankles and threatened to drop me.
No one would’ve really blamed them if they’d done it. As you can imagine, being the kid in that particular picture was not a good feeling. It was a time in my life – and not the last one, either – when listening to music was as close as I could get to making things feel all right. I got myself a decent stereo with the proceeds of my thieving and I used to buy some weird records to play on it. I remember this band The Groundhogs who had a great song called ‘Cherry Red’. I knew nothing about them, I just saw the cover of their album Split in a record shop on the King’s Road and liked the way it looked.
Someone else in that same kind of bluesy area who doesn’t get a lot of love these days is Paul Kossoff, the guitarist out of Free. I loved that flat sound they had. Their songs had a real strut about them, but also an elegance. You could still hear the black influences in there, but they were doing their own thing with them. This was the kind of music I’d be listening to in that Battersea bedroom when I was bunking off school and my mum and stepdad were out at work. I’d sit in there feeling lonely and looking out of the window at the huge expanse of waste ground.
Covent Garden Market has been been moved there now, but in those days it was just a big patch of emptiness with a Securicor depot in the distance. The void where the old gasworks used to be was a place of opportunity, and not just for peeping Toms. There was also a big Carlsberg warehouse over the far side, where I could sneak in, climb up to the top and sit on giant crates of Special Brew getting drunk on my own. Sexual deviants, trainee alcoholics – this place had something for everyone. All it needed was a free outdoor driving school for teenage joyriders …
In the course of long hours spent staring out of my window, I’d started to notice how many large earth-moving vehicles were left lying about on the wasteland – dumper trucks, lorries, bulldozers and so on. The weird thing about them was they didn’t seem to be anyone’s responsibility; no one was looking after them and even in broad daylight I never saw any bods over there. It would be bad manners not to make the most of this kind of opportunity. Apart from my grandad letting me hold the steering wheel of his Austin A40 as a little kid, I’d never come close to driving anything, but now here I was at fourteen, manoeuvring these huge fucking lorries around the dump.
It’s a great way to learn to drive, borrowing a fucking big lorry, and I would recommend it to anyone. They were easy to get into – they were never locked, and you could start them with the handle of a comb. I was quite systematic about teaching myself to drive, learning how to shift the gears and use reverse. It turned out that when there was something I really wanted to learn, I could apply myself after all. It just came naturally to me. No one taught me – I figured it out for myself.
Years later I’d find out that my real dad worked for many years as a lorry driver, so maybe there was a genetic element. In the meantime, it was a good feeling, picking it up so quickly. I must have looked fucking ridiculous – a fourteen-year-old kid at the wheel of a giant earth-mover – but no one ever stopped me. Of course I had my Cloak on, but sometimes a mate called Alex Hall joined me and he didn’t have one, so fuck knows how he got away with it.
I didn’t go crazy at first. I was more interested in figuring the whole thing out. But as time went on, I got more ambitious – progressing from the back-loading lorries that they fill up with dirt, to diggers and bulldozers. And once I’d got the basics of driving, we could start to really enjoy ourselves, knocking down wooden tea huts and generally having a riot. Just the simple action of smashing stuff up made me feel a hell of a lot fucking better. No thought of consequences ever came into the equation – we were too busy having fun.
I was lucky to be young in the golden age of car crime. If I’d come of age in the CCTV era, I’d probably still be stuck in Brixton prison now. As it was, there were no cameras, no alarms, no deadlocks, and you could nick just about anything on wheels. Once I’d sussed out how to drive on the building sites, I could take my joyriding skills out into the wider world. Minis were the easiest to get into because of the two little windows. The swankier motors tended to be harder because they’d have a bit more going on, as far as where the key would go was concerned. We did get a Jag once but not till a bit later on so maybe I’ll save that story.
All the time my early adventures in not-so-grand theft auto were going on, my mates were still at Christopher Wren. Sometimes I’d travel over to meet them outside the school gates after a hard day’s bunking off, and once I went up there in a nicked car and was being a jack-the-lad up and down the road outside to impress everybody when I smashed straight into another car this woman was driving her kid home in. Luckily no one was hurt, but it was right outside the school and pretty much a head-on collision. Everyone saw me. I legged it, thinking, ‘Fucking hell, I’m in trouble now.’ And I should’ve got in trouble, but I didn’t. The knock on my mum’s door never came. I don’t know why – maybe the other car was stolen as well.
Given the extent of my criminal activities at the time, it was inevitable I’d wear a hole in my Cloak of Invisibility, but I never expected that what I’d ultimately get nicked for would be nicking a Lambretta. I’d had it for so long that I felt like it was mine, and I’d taken the side panels and the front off it to turn it into a ‘skeleton’ – essentially just two wheels and an engine – which is what all the fashion-conscious scooter thieves were doing in West London in the early Seventies. I was riding it round Battersea Park when the police stopped me, and I ended up getting sent to an ‘approved school’ called Banstead Hall.
If I was doing a public information film for teenage criminals, like the old Alvin Stardust one for the Green Cross Code, my advice would be: ‘So, all you young kids, don’t turn your stolen scooters into skeletons because you will get nicked.’ But getting sent to Banstead Hall didn’t work out too badly for me. It was a beautiful old Victorian building down in Surrey – right out in the country – and I actually liked it much better than being at home.
Approved schools were one step short of borstals. They were places where they sent kids they still thought had some chance of turning a corner, and Banstead Hall was run in a pretty decent way. There weren’t a lot of us there – probably twenty kids at the most – and you slept in big rooms that had four beds in each. The staff were all right. They knew we were wayward boys, but it felt more like they were giving us another chance. It wasn’t like a proper nick where they’d just treat you like shit.
This was the first time I’d been in the countryside for longer than a day trip, and it took me a while to adjust to not living in a big block of flats with all sorts of other bullshit going on the whole time. Once I got used to it, though, I started to really enjoy myself. It wasn’t quite the Famous Five, maybe more like when kids from London got evacuated in the war. After you’d been there a while they’d put you out to work in the gardens. That was a beautiful experience to have as a kid – being out in the fresh air, surrounded by nature. It definitely planted a seed – and that’s why these days I’m always banging on about wanting to move out of LA and up to northern California.
I liked being at Banstead Hall so much that when it got to the point where they’d let us go home at weekends, I didn’t always want to. Nearly all the others would be off except me and maybe a couple more kids with fucked-up home lives. We decided we’d rather stay where we were. Being in the countryside gave us a kind of comfort; the only drawback was, there was nothing to nick.
Of course I had no interest in giving up thievery – and that was where the whole rehabilitation process broke down. In fact, one of the funny things about being there was that the times I did go home to London for the weekend, I’d often end up nicking a motor to drive back to Surrey on a Sunday night. This was prior to computerised licensing and everyone knowing what was nicked and what wasn’t, so it never felt like anything I was going to get done for.
You’d think someone might have clocked all the stolen cars parked in the field out the back after a while, but they never did. And I can’t take the piss out of them too much for being unobservant, since I’d somehow managed not to notice that the whole point of me being at Banstead Hall was to stop me thieving. I just didn’t connect those dots at all. The way I lived my life back then – and for a good few years afterwards – was that I was just in a place, and whatever happened was just another experience. That attitude would become a big part of what punk was (or at least was meant to be) but it got me in a hell of a lot of trouble.
One of the best things about life at Banstead Hall was being able to watch Top of the Pops on a Thursday night. I was sitting in front of that approved school TV when two of the biggest events in my musical education took place. The first, in June 1972 (that’s definitely right, cos I looked it up on YouTube), was Hawkwind’s ‘Silver Machine’. Obviously I didn’t know then that I’d end up buying speed off Lemmy in Notting Hill a few years after, or that we’d be friends for years in LA later on. What I did know was that I fucking loved that song. If there was a soundtrack for my car and bulldozer and moped stealing exploits, ‘Silver Machine’ was it.
Two months later (thanks, YouTube), an even bigger musical bomb went off in my brain: Roxy Music’s ‘Virginia Plain’. It was the way they looked combined with the sound that really did the damage with this one. Of course you only saw it once, cos there were no video recorders with pause and rewind buttons yet, but that just made the memory of it even more special. Brian Eno looked like he came from outer space with his green feathers, and Bryan Ferry was so dandified he’d become a bit of a fantasy figure for me in the years to come.
He was kind of like James Brown and Prince Charles rolled into one, and I used to imagine him living in a penthouse in Knightsbridge and think about how much I wanted that kind of glamorous existence. My mum had a part-time job washing people’s hair in Knightsbridge around this time, and that seemed about as close as I was gonna get to the international jet set.
Even though I’d still not picked up a guitar and had no technical knowledge of music at all, I already had a very clear sense of what was good and what was shit. It was the same as with clothes, knowing the difference between Levi’s and Brutus. For example, even though Sweet and Gary Glitter and all that were put under the same ‘glam rock’ umbrella as Roxy Music, I knew theirs was shit music designed for teenagers who didn’t have a brain, whereas Roxy Music had an intellect and depth to them and were just generally more stylish.
Well, Ferry and Andy Mackay and Brian Eno were. Phil Manzanera was a good guitar player but he didn’t go the whole hog with the image, that’s for sure. He seemed more like an old prog guy who was trying to go along for the ride – he still had a beard and all that shit. OK, he made an effort to fit in with something a bit more avant-garde, but you could tell he didn’t really want to.
I loved those first two Roxy Music albums so much when they came out – the self-titled one and For Your Pleasure. I still love them now. The third and fourth albums are great too, but it was the first two that changed everything for me. I’ve got the intro of ‘Beauty Queen’ as my mobile ringtone even now.
I don’t know why – maybe because he seemed the most approachable of the three, and he was also really odd and out there doing his own little fucking thing – but Andy Mackay was the one I’d end up latching onto. A few months later (and it was only nine months between the first and second albums coming out – fuck me, they didn’t hang around in those days, did they? That Chris Thomas must’ve been a real slave-driver), l got myself a pair of those brothel creepers with glitter all over them you can see him wearing with a boiler suit in the gatefold sleeve of For Your Pleasure.
Andy Mackay even inspired a bit of a hair experiment when I dyed the front of my hair with household bleach in his honour. Unfortunately, I have that fucking thick hair which won’t conform to whatever you want to do with it. This untrainable barnet would cause me a lot of problems over the next few years. It’s probably the thing about myself I’ve been most consistently disappointed by.
The unsuccessful attempt to bleach the front of my hair to look like Andy Mackay’s was not the only daring glam experiment of my Banstead Hall era. One time when me and this other kid were getting the train back to London at the weekend, I got him to suck me off in one of the closed-off railway compartments that all manner of shit used to go on in, and then gave him 50p for his trouble. I know what you’re thinking – ‘the last of the big spenders’ – but 50p was a lot of money back then. You could buy a single with that.
Given the men-only nature of my sexual initiations, it was weird that as a kid I’d never worried that I might be gay, but from an early age I was always very confident about my sexuality. I knew I loved birds and, as a general rule, didn’t want nothing to do with geezers. I’m not saying this through embarrassment. If I’d been into geezers that would’ve been another thing. But my Banstead blowjob was the first of a handful – if that is the right word, and sometimes it would be – of exceptions that proved this rule over the years to come.
At the root of all my shit over the years has been the same thing: loneliness and a desire to feel OK in my body, which at that age I never seemed to be able to manage unless I was acting out in some way. In that context, it doesn’t feel like the fact that in the absence of female company I was occasionally willing to broaden my catchment area a bit was actually that big a deal. I can’t know how the child abuse affected me. I’ve no fucking idea if these things would have happened without it, but at the end of the day, does it really fucking matter?
Obviously not everyone feels the same, and in some ways it would have been easier for me to keep schtum about the tiny portion of my bulging back catalogue of sexual experience that was what is technically known as ‘geezer-on-geezer’. The reason I thought it was important to ‘go there’ in this book was that a lot of guys – and probably girls – have the occasional queer moment and end up beating themselves up about it for years.
Some people will take their feelings of guilt and anxiety to their grave, and the other thing is that when you see a gay guy getting beaten up in a film, you can be 90 per cent sure that the guy who’s doing it will be either gay themselves, or at the very least unsure of their sexuality. People often attack others for something they’re worried about in themselves. I never went that way, because it’s never been a big deal to me. I’m not saying me telling all is going to change anybody’s life – ‘Oh, Steve admitted it and now I feel OK about what I did.’ I don’t really care what anyone else does, but I do think the world would probably be a better place if people were less embarrassed about this stuff.