When I was young I sometimes felt that if I wanted something badly enough, I could get it through sheer force of will. I can’t do it any more. Maybe the drive to make stuff happen was a reaction to how little control I had over other areas of my life. Cookie remembers sending me letters for a while when I was stuck in a place called Earlsfield House in Wandsworth that I have absolutely no memory of whatsoever. He says it was during the glam times and I was really pissed off to be missing out on all the weekend action at the Chelsea Drugstore – which sounds like me – plus he had a clear picture of writing the address on the envelope. I hope he didn’t spend too long on the contents cos I wouldn’t have been able to read ’em anyway. But as for what I was doing in there, that is a complete fucking mystery.
If it was a prison, I could’ve understood it. The old Cloak had taken a bit of punishment by this time and some of the things I was getting nicked for were just downright stupid. One time on King Street when I was drunk I put a brick through the music shop window thinking I was gonna have a load of guitars away, but there was a shutter inside the glass. So I’m standing there trying to work out what to do next – paralytic, on my own – when the Old Bill pull up and ask me what I’m doing. The best response I can come up with is something totally lame like: ‘Oh, here you are! … I don’t know.’ It’s not exactly the Pink fucking Panther, is it?
I think I might have got let off with a warning for that one – like they thought the embarrassment was punishment enough. And when I looked that Earlsfield House place up online, it seemed it used to be a Victorian workhouse. By the time I was meant to have been in there it had turned into something called a ‘Receiving School’, which sounds like a kind of halfway house between a borstal and being in care. There’s black-and-white photos of lines of beds and nothing’s ringing any kind of bell at all. Googling shit for your own peace of mind never really works, does it? But if I wasn’t in there for being a bad boy, presumably it was just because my mum and Ron didn’t want to deal with me.
Maybe I just checked out mentally because I found it all so painful, and that’s why I don’t remember it. It’s the best explanation I can come up with, anyway. All this does is verify again that I did have quite a shitty upbringing – my credentials are solid in that area. Sometimes in the back of your mind you tell yourself, ‘Oh, it wasn’t that bad – maybe you’re just making a fuss,’ but then something will come up which puts you in some gaff in Wandsworth you can’t even remember and then you think, ‘No, I was right: it was fucking shit.’
Even though it took us a while to get the whole thing going, the idea of having a band at least gave me something to hold on to. There was this kid we’d known from school called Warwick Nightingale – ‘Wally’, we called him, because he was one – but he could actually play the guitar a bit. He had an amp and a Gibson Les Paul copy, and given that the first line-up of the band never really made it as far as a proper rehearsal because Macken and Hayesy weren’t really that bothered, it seemed like Wally might be ready to take the whole thing more seriously. He used to tell us, ‘You’ve nicked all the equipment, you might as well do something with it,’ and he was right.
We weren’t doing things on a schoolboy whim any more, and there was no point in fucking about. We could have managed without Wally’s miserable boat-race, but our natural good looks were enough to carry him – or so we thought, at first. Wally’s mum and dad had a little house with a garden on Hemlock Road in East Acton and they didn’t mind us hanging out there, so that kind of became our first base. There’s a picture of us in Kew Gardens with these weird outfits on. It’s the original line-up, which is me, Cookie, Wally, Jimmy Macken and Stephen Hayes.
We got our original name – The Strand – from ‘Do the Strand’, the first track on the second Roxy Music album. In the lyrics Bryan Ferry was telling people to ‘Do the Strandski’ – the idea being that this was the dance that all the cool kids would want to do, so that worked OK. And going up to the Rainbow in Finsbury Park to see Roxy Music on the For Your Pleasure tour in the spring of 1973 was a really big deal for me and Cookie.
Another big gig for us around that time – well, a couple of months later – was on our old Christopher Wren turf at the White City stadium. That place was usually a greyhound-racing track, which had no appeal to me whatsoever (although, thinking back, I suppose there would’ve been some fat wallets there), but every now and then they’d put a big gig on. I remember this one as being headlined by Humble Pie, but Cookie assures me it was The Kinks. Apparently Ray Davies’ wife had left him and he had a bit of a tantrum onstage and retired from music at the end.
It bothers me a bit that I have no fucking recollection of this whatsoever – or of Sly and the Family Stone, who were on the same bill. Maybe I was pissed. Blackouts seem to have been a feature for me at those White City stadium shows, as Cookie also insists we were there for David Cassidy the next year, when a little girl got crushed to death at the front. What the fuck we’d have been doing at a David Cassidy show I have no idea, so maybe he could be taking the piss with that one. But maybe when there was a local event we felt duty-bound to sneak in for nothing.
Either way, the one bit of that big Kinks gig which did stick in my mind was when the guitarist Rick Derringer came out with the Edgar Winter Group and played the solo in that song, ‘Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo’. It was so fucking slick it completely blew my mind. I wasn’t even thinking of myself as a guitarist at that time, but I guess looking back the writing was already on the wall for poor old Wally.
We’d been practising together for a while by then. Our first rehearsal space was in the basement of a shop called the Furniture Cave, down the bottom end of the King’s Road – about a mile west of World’s End, on the way to Parsons Green. A load of furniture shops were gathered there round a little hump-backed bridge. We’d set up our stuff in this dingy room with the amps facing outwards to make it feel like a proper gig. Me and Cookie were on a bit of a mod trip at that time – taking lots of speed and trying to re-enact what it was like to be in the Small Faces or The Who.
Obviously some of that stuff would carry on to the Pistols when we’d do ‘Substitute’ and ‘What’cha Gonna Do About It?’ but it would have to go through more of a filter before it actually worked. The fact that John didn’t like that kind of music as much as we did probably helped give the vocals an extra kick. Me trying to sing like Rod Stewart wasn’t going to start a musical revolution any time soon, and we were probably too straight and sincere in the way we approached things at that time. Basically we were the mod revival six years too early.
Of course I wasn’t as reverent towards other bands’ equipment as I was towards our own musical source material. I did nick the odd guitar from that place when other bands were in. I went down there on my own one day to have a wander round – as was my habit – and found all the lights on with a load of gear set up. It was like the band had just finished a song and then all gone outside to have a fag. Even someone with the capacity to resist temptation might’ve struggled to do the right thing in this situation, but for me it was a no-brainer, and I took the opportunity to make off with a really nice Sunbird Special.
I feel a bit bad about this one because I’ve not had the chance to make amends to the guy who owned it yet, and he was in one of my favourite bands. He wasn’t rehearsing with them at that time, but had his own group going. It’s silly giving clues without saying his name, though, isn’t it? No point being coy about my victims at this late stage in the game. Come on down, Ariel Bender from Mott the Hoople – I owe you a fucking guitar. Ariel’s real name was Luther Grosvenor. But apparently, at least according to Ian Hunter in the Mott documentary, Lynsey de Paul came up with his memorable stage-name after seeing the band’s lead guitarist, Mick Ralphs, walk down a German street bending all the car aerials to express how pissed off he was. I think we’ve all bent a few aerials in our time – I know I have.
Not long after this – I don’t think we were copping any heat for my light fingers, it was just a better deal – we moved round the corner to a place called Sumer in Lots Road. I think the guy there was trying to build a studio he couldn’t really afford and if I helped him out a bit we’d be allowed to used the place for next to nothing. Chris Spedding’s band the Sharks, who supported Roxy Music a few times, were rehearsing there too. I don’t think I nicked anything from him then, although our paths would cross again in the very near future.
By this time Hayesy and Jimmy Macken had kind of fallen away, and we’d got Cookie’s brother-in-law Del Noones in to play bass and slimmed down to a four-piece. Del was another White City boy who used to go to Christopher Wren. He was two or three years older than us, but I’d known him from a very young age because we’d been skinheads together, and I saw him a lot when I stayed over at Cookie’s house and he was going out with Paul’s sister. The only problem with Del was, he couldn’t really play.
Of course this was at a point when none of us, with the partial exception of Wally, knew what we were doing. I wasn’t playing the guitar then, just singing, but both Paul and I knew we had tons to learn and were happy to put the work in. Cookie was getting better on the drums but Wally used to say I was better at playing them than him and to be honest – although I doubt Paul would agree with me – I think I still am. We’re very different people and he plays more with his head – not literally, I mean in his mind – whereas with me it’s more of a feel thing. I suppose he’d be the Charlie Watts type whereas to me the ultimate drummer of all time is John Bonham, with Keith Moon a few steps behind.
I met Moonie once at Malcolm and Vivienne’s shop, very early on when it was still called Let It Rock. He came out of there dressed as a country squire and said ‘Good evening, gentlemen’ in that exaggerated posh voice he used to hide behind for comic effect. It was an exciting moment, because he was a real icon to me. The way he used to do drum fills over the vocal parts was all over the shop (not Malcolm’s shop, the shop in general) but somehow it always sounded fantastic. Moon’s nickname was on the money – he was a total loon. They don’t make them like him and Bonzo any more, that’s for sure.
Although I’ve never actually got to do it on an album, I find it very satisfying playing the drums even now, and I’ve often fancied making a whole record myself the way Prince did – starting with the drums and then seeing what happens. It wouldn’t be an egotistical thing (well, not entirely), but when you’ve spent a lot of your life explaining what you want to drummers and it never sounding quite the same as it did in your head, it would be exciting to see if I could actually deliver the beat exactly the way I want it. I’m not having a go at Paul here, because what he did totally worked on Never Mind the Bollocks … and someone drumming the way I would’ve might have ruined it.
The differences between me and Cookie could have easily taken our lives in opposite directions at this time. There’d always been a contrast where he’d be busy doing something normal like playing football after school while I’d be off peeping Tom-ing or nicking from the Harrods warehouse down near St Paul’s School playing fields, on the same towpath of opportunity that used to take me to the bike shop in Putney – I murdered that gaff! Once we got to that time after leaving school when respectable kids are trying to get jobs, Paul picked up an apprenticeship as an electrician at Watney’s brewery. But it didn’t matter how hard he worked, I always seemed to have a bit more money than him from the proceeds of my nefarious doings – nice one!
A lot of kids like me who leave school without qualifications take that attitude out into the world with them. When it feels like the whole economic and educational structure is designed to keep you at the bottom, it’s only natural to try and find a way to turn the whole thing upside down, and the obvious way to do that is either by direct thieving or finding some other way to scam the system. I think there’s probably more of that shit going on in England now than ever, because the system has got even more entrenched, so a lot of the little highways and byways there used to be for people to improve their situations by legal means have been closed down. Now the odds are even more stacked in favour of tax-dodging businessmen with a public school education, and against people working hard to try and do things the right way. I can say this without being accused of political bias, because I was never part of either group.
One subsection of the community I did sadly get to belong to was people who have got nicked because their partner in crime gave his sister a stolen Afghan coat. We were quite the aristocracy of one, I can tell you.
There was a place on King’s Road called Antiquarius which was one of those mini-arcades that have lots of different shops. As well as a load of antiques stalls, there was a clothes shop called the Great Gear Trading Company that I had my eye on. I figured out a way of getting in there when it was closed on a Sunday afternoon and went back three times to empty the gaff out. I never got caught in the act, but where it went wrong was that one of the guys I knew from Battersea came with me and afterwards we gave some of the stuff to his younger sister. Unfortunately, she stood out from the crowd so much in her smart new Afghan coat that she got stopped by the Old Bill.
This shows you how poor it was round there, then. Never mind Cathy Come Home, it would’ve been Cathy Fucked Off & Never Came Back, if Cathy had any sense. They pulled this kid and asked, ‘Where did you get that?’ She said, ‘Oh, off him,’ and grassed her brother up – she wasn’t old enough to know any better. He then did the same to me, even though he didn’t have that excuse, and it ended up being one of the more serious of the thirteen times I got nicked. (I know exactly how many there were because the number of my criminal convictions would nearly stop the Pistols going to America a few years later when we were trying to get visas.)
Luckily for me, I still wasn’t quite eighteen, so instead of going to adult prison I got put in the juvenile remand home at Stamford Brook, just off Goldhawk Road. Me and Cookie go back there to talk about that in the special features of our 2008 reunion tour DVD. Because it was near where he lived, he used to come round and shout up to say hello and I’d wave at him out of the window. The only other thing I remember about that place is that one night I was a-kip when some horrible cunt came and pissed on me for no reason.
I woke up feeling something wet all over my skin and then saw him running off. It was this big black dude. I don’t know what his problem was with me cos we hadn’t had any run-ins. I suppose he was just being a dick for the sake of it, but it was quite weird because I wasn’t generally one of the guys who got picked on. I wasn’t one of the bullies, but I wouldn’t usually get bullied either. I don’t remember going to fight him afterwards or anything, like my mate Ray Winstone’s character did in Scum. I just thought, ‘Fuck it, let’s not get involved.’ If life’s pissing on you anyway, there’s no point hitting it with your umbrella.
Scum didn’t come out till a few years later, but one film I’ve already mentioned which did have a big influence on me at this time was A Clockwork Orange. It was just a brilliant movie for teenagers. I think I saw it with Cookie in Shepherd’s Bush when it first came out. It was withdrawn not long afterwards after a lot of copy-cat violence – they thought it was going to inspire youngsters, and it certainly inspired me. Not so much to commit acts of inhuman cruelty as in terms of my taste in home decor. It wasn’t just the outside of my block in Battersea that looked a bit like the place in the film where they’re walking by the water; the inside of my bedroom looked like somewhere Alex DeLarge would feel at home.
First off, I had a really good stereo (though I wasn’t listening to much classical music on it). There was also a leopardskin rug that still had the head on it. Everything in there was top of the fucking range, whereas everything else in the flat was pretty much tuppence. Given that my mum and stepdad (who as far as I knew were doing their best to be law-abiding citizens by that stage) didn’t really have two baked beans to rub together, I can see in retrospect why me living it up on the proceeds of a life of crime would’ve pissed them off.
I certainly used to get a clump off Ron when they’d have to come and pick me from the cop-shop. He definitely had a resentment about the fact that they’d be out working hard all day when all I was doing was nicking stuff and then either getting caught or not.
The whole thing came to a head one night when I got home late and they’d locked me out so I woke them up. Ron didn’t like that, but I was getting too grown up to be pushed around by him any more so we had one of those kind of bullshit fights like Phil Daniels’ dad has with him in Quadrophenia. (I found out recently that Lydon was up for the part Daniels played – thank fuck he didn’t get it as the film would’ve been ruined.) Ron told me to get a job and I said, ‘I don’t want some shit job like you’ve got,’ then a few punches may have been thrown, but no one got fully done over.
I don’t like confrontation, so it felt like my best option was just to fuck off and never go back, which is pretty much what I ended up doing. The fact that I didn’t have anywhere else lined up to live didn’t really bother me.