Around the time I came back to Battersea from Banstead Hall, my mum and Ron got themselves a budgie. Maybe they’d missed me more than I thought and needed a replacement, but when I remembered what had probably happened to Brucie, it seemed weird that they’d want to get another pet. That budgie was funny, though. He’d sit in his cage in the living room, and he hadn’t been with us long before he started swearing so much my mum had to put him upstairs when my probation officer came round. There wasn’t a lot of laughter in that flat, but we did have a chuckle about that. And a few years later I’d get to try the budgie’s act out on Bill Grundy …
For the moment, though, music was one of the only things in my life that felt clean. Everything else was pretty much shit. Don’t get me wrong, I was getting more than my share of teenage kicks. There was a pub we used to go to a lot called the Bird’s Nest (appropriately enough, given how many birds we pulled there) down at the west end of King’s Road. A road next to it went to the Albert Bridge, and about fifty yards down that was the Chelsea Drugstore where they had a disco at the weekend. Even though we were going in there from the age of fifteen or sixteen, they were pretty lenient on the door. I don’t ever remember any of us getting asked for a driving licence or anything (good job too). You’d just say you were eighteen and that was it.
I wasn’t looking for a relationship at that time. There was this one girl, when I was maybe fifteen, I got really lovey feelings for, but she wasn’t available because she already had a geezer. Not long after, she broke up with him, but the minute I knew I could have her, all the lust I’d felt instantly disappeared. I’ve always been attracted to birds like that – the ones who aren’t available. That’s the turn-on. With normal birds, the ones who love me, I’m bored shitless straight away. I didn’t understand why at the time, but I realise now it probably all went back to how things were with my mum. She never really seemed available either, and then the situation with my stepdad warped the whole thing even further.
Whatever the reason, going up to Piccadilly for a prostitute was something that was quite normal to me from the age of about fifteen onwards. The sex thing was still new to me, then, and it was totally exciting – looking to see if the red light was on, then walking up the stairs thinking, ‘I’m gonna get laid right now and all I’ve got to do is give her this £10 in my hand, I don’t even have to talk her into it.’ It was scary walking round Soho at night, then, because there were a lot of dodgy characters lurking about and no end of criminal noncey shit was going on. Even if you didn’t know exactly what it was, because those kinds of thing weren’t as exposed then as they are now, you knew you were taking a risk, and that only added to the excitement. I got the clap a few times because I never wore condoms back then. I still don’t now, but that’s another story – it’s enough trouble to get a hard-on at sixty, never mind putting a fucking balloon over it.
Whether or not using brasses from such an early age affected my attitude to women is not for me to say. But by the time I was sixteen or seventeen I was all about a quick shag and see you later. That was my MO. It’s what the whole glam thing was about to us. Me and Cookie would shag a lot of birds together – not at the same time (well, not usually). But we weren’t your stereotypical lads about town either. We were always on the lookout for something a bit different. That was how we ended up knocking about with this pair of drag queens called the Dumb Belles.
This was some time before we met Malcolm McLaren, and I can’t remember how it happened. We might’ve been in a boozer where they were performing and started hanging about with them afterwards. Either way, I know me and Cookie went round their gaff for parties a few times, which was pretty broad-minded for a couple of straight working-class kids. They were fun, though, and I don’t remember anyone trying anything. I think they were just happy to have a couple of young studs around.
Drag acts were very popular in London in the early Seventies – they brought a bit of colour to what was a very fucking grim and Dickensian landscape. It was almost like a family thing that mums and dads would go to together for a laugh, and kids would look through the pub curtains to see what was going on. When I dress up as this very camp character Fabian Fontaine of Earls Court on my Instagram now, it all comes from this time – that’s when that whole way of talking was planted in my head. Obviously it could’ve gone the other way after what had happened to me as a kid, but I never hated gay people; in fact I was very comfortable hanging out with them. They were like the underground crowd, which was always where I felt closest to being at home.
I was in Battersea at the age of about fifteen when they were shooting the last scene of the movie Villain, which Richard Burton played a gay gangster in. That was pretty controversial at the time, and I don’t think it did his career any good in the long run, but I was cool with it. They filmed it down by the railway line, under the arches – near where I’d throw those boulders down off the bridge – and I was there in the background, watching while it was being shot.
I never knew if my mum or stepdad had any idea of the kind of shit I was up to at that point, or if they’d have had any concern if they had found out. I know I used to get a clump if they got called out by the police; the Cloak of Invisibility was still basically working but the edges were fraying a bit, especially when I’d had a drink. The impression I got was basically that they were waiting for me to fuck off. Even so, when I was still in my Rod Stewart phase in Battersea I do remember thinking, ‘I’m gonna become a rock star and get my mum a good house.’ So there was still a part of me that was what you’d call normal in terms of ambitions.
A lot of people who are alcoholics will tell you they were off and running from the moment they had their first drink. It’s the same only more so with junkies and heroin. But it didn’t work that way with me on either count. When I started going down the King’s Road with the boys – Cookie, Jim, Hayesy and Cecil, the usual gang – we’d drink pints of lager or vodka and lime. But it wasn’t like I was thinking about having a drink from the moment I got up in the morning. Tea-leafing was still definitely my first concern, with cumming a close second.
OK, I’d make the odd trip over to the Carlsberg warehouse, but that was more of an occasional thing. I wasn’t really caning it yet. But I definitely noticed a difference in the way I felt when I put alcohol in my system. It made me feel OK with myself. When I was sober I was pretty shy, but once I had some booze in me I would do anything. Jimmy Macken was the same. He came from a bad background, the same as I did – in his case with a horrible, violent dad who’d beat the shit out of him but then fucked off. I think this made us both more prone to instigating trouble – we simply had less to lose than the others. Always being the one that starts things is sometimes a good way to hide from that.
I know Jimmy had a few issues with Paul, because he thought he played things too safe. Jimmy was basically a good kid who loved the Faces, but he became a heavy drinker quite quickly and he also liked to fight. His whole thing was hitting someone so hard the fight would be over after one punch – he was a real tough nut. I was less into violence but I did have that same impulse to keep drinking till I got plastered and then I would have to do something else to keep the buzz going. For him it might be punching somebody, but for me it would be to maybe take a Mandrax and nick a car.
Obviously combining Mandrax with drink-driving isn’t really a good idea, because it’s a sleeping pill. They give you this amazing tingling feeling, but you’re supposed to take them at night, to help you kip, not when you’re going out partying or driving stolen cars at high speed through the streets of London. But when you’re a kid you’re fearless and you don’t see the fucking consequences of what you’re doing – at least, I didn’t.
I don’t remember smashing into other vehicles deliberately but when I was driving on Mandrax I did sometimes swipe the edge of other parked cars. How I never got stopped is a mystery to me, given that I wasn’t old enough to drive legally and was usually drunk and in a stolen car. The Cloak seemed to work OK when I was driving, too. But there was one time when the police nearly got me. I only remembered it recently because I was talking to the bloke who fixes my motorbikes and he’s got the same kind of old Austin Healey 3000 that I was driving on the occasion of this run-in with the law (the difference being that he actually owns his).
They’re lovely cars, which is the main reason I’d nicked one. I was coming round Shepherd’s Bush Green, where the Empire is, with a friend when the police tried to pull us over. They were in a little Morris Minor – it’s a Noddy car, really – and there I was, probably sixteen years old, driving this beautiful red convertible with the top down. It was fast as fuck, and at first when they chased us down Wood Lane towards the BBC and flashed to pull us over, I was kind of going along with it.
There’s a thing in England with the Old Bill – at least there was, I don’t know if they still do it – where instead of parking behind you when they pull you over, you have to let them overtake you and then stop. Of course, the moment the two coppers got out of their car in front of us – it was right by White City tube station – I fucking freaked out. I put the Austin Healey in gear and I meant to go round them but I was accelerating so fast that I clipped the back of their car before zooming off down the road almost to the White City estates. Then, without really saying anything, we just knew we had more chance of getting away if we split up; the two of us jumped out and went our separate ways.
I ran down and along the railway lines and my unnamed partner in crime, well, I’m not sure where he went because I wasn’t with him, but I know he never got nicked. Putting one over on the Old Bill was the ultimate excitement. If they’d caught us they would have beaten the shit out of us as well – not just for smashing into them, but also for having a better car than they did. Afterwards it seemed unbelievable that we’d both got away. I knew running down the tracks was risky, as a lot of people get killed that way, but those people are morons. The secret is don’t fucking run along the middle of the tracks, and if you hear a train coming, get out of the way. It’s not rocket science.
I wasn’t quite as good at avoiding accidents in the workplace. My few abortive attempts at legitimate employment usually ended in a smash-up of some kind. There was a brief flirtation with helping out a milkman where I smashed a fucking cart up at the depot. I don’t know why I was even driving it; they should never have let me behind the wheel that early in the morning. Maybe the guy just asked me to bring it over to him but, either way, he should’ve known better. I was too fast to live, too young to die in those days, even at the wheel of a milk float.
Give me a stolen bulldozer and I was fine, but anything vaguely legitimate and I went to pieces. I just had no attention span for any kind of normal, responsible job. There was a cab company too, down near Shepherd’s Bush, where I briefly used to wash the cars, but I think something that happened there maybe ended with a taxi getting smashed up. When you put all these incidents together a pattern does begin to emerge. I don’t think I fucked up deliberately, but it might have been my subconscious mind’s way of telling me (and the world) that this kind of mundane menial work was not for me, and I certainly wasn’t qualified for anything more executive. Except being a rock star, of course.
I’ve seen interviews I did when the Sex Pistols were happening where I said I’d been a window cleaner before, but I think I was talking out of my arse. The bullshit I was spouting about all my sexual adventures sounded more like the storyline of Confessions of a Window Cleaner than anything that would actually happen, anyway. I may have carried some geezer’s bucket a few times, but as far as getting round to cleaning a fucking window was concerned, forget about it.
The closest I came to an actual job was another spell as a plumber’s mate – this time for a heating and ventilation company called Benham’s. I’d got the job through an employment agency called Manpower. Maybe the name was a clue to the fact that one of the plumbers would try and get hold of me inside a giant fucking industrial boiler. He was another one that wanted to wank me off – he wasn’t trying to fuck me – and the way my memory goes blank when I try and recall exactly what happened suggests I might’ve let him give me a pedal. It certainly wouldn’t have been out of the question.
Some people give off this fucking energy. Maybe once you’ve been down the road of doing things that aren’t normal, others who are on that road themselves can almost smell it on you. It’s not just about being fucked with and then people spotting you as a target. Some people are just born more sexual than others, and I was definitely at the front of the queue when that shit was being handed out. I did have one happier memory of that job, which will show you what I mean even more clearly. I think it was at lunch break when the guy I was working with went off to get something to eat and I stayed behind and tried out this big industrial vacuum cleaner on my cock. It actually worked pretty well as far as I remember; at least, there was no need for a trip to casualty to get it removed.
When I wasn’t conducting deviant sexual experiments with high-powered vacuum cleaners, the work with Benham’s usually involved servicing boiler rooms up in the West End. But the one job which stood out from the others involved heading north into the wilds of Willesden. There was a Wall’s sausage factory up there, and I remember having to see them slaughtering the fucking pigs. These weird dudes with aprons covered in claret were doing the deed. The strange faces these guys had – they looked like lunatics. But wouldn’t you, if all you had to do all day was kill frightened animals?
I don’t know what we were supposed to be doing, or what the geezer I was meant to be helping was up to, but he left me alone long enough for me to wander off and watch the whole grim process. The pigs came in off a lorry and got shuffled into these little pens, then the geezer would put the big electric prong on them. Before there was time to see if they were dead or not, they’d get hooked up by their hooves and sent whizzing up this fucking conveyor belt with their back feet at the top and their heads hanging down.
First they went through this furnace which would burn all the skin off, then they’d be washed clean with jets of water. The poor cunts didn’t stop on the conveyor belt till they were in a packet. I remember watching up to the point where the geezer with his big knife slit open the stomach and all the fucking claret came out the middle of it – then I had to look away. That place was just a fucking hellhole and I’d never seen anything like it. Not even when Chelsea played Leeds. As far as me and work were concerned, that was pretty much the final nail in the coffin. It certainly was for the pigs.
The worst part of it was that you could see some of the pigs were really smart and didn’t want to get off the truck. The geezer with the prong just got on there and pronged them off and they’d make that horrible squeaky squealing noise that tells you how scared they are. Anyone who tells you that farm animals don’t fucking suffer has never been inside one of those places, I’m telling you. Did it stop me eating sausages? Did it fuck. But it did teach me one thing.
I was never going to be one of those people who just go along with what everyone else thinks you should do, cos that’s how you end up getting your guts ripped out and your arse wrapped in plastic. I’d done a normal job for ten minutes: that was more than enough. If this was someone else’s book, they might try and blag you into thinking that what went on in that factory was some kind of prophecy of what was going to happen to them when they got sucked into the machinery of the music industry. But things would not work out that way for me. If anything, I was the guy with the prong.