The two places I loved going best with Malcolm were the Speakeasy and the Roebuck. The Roebuck was just a regular boozer around the corner from the shop, but you’d get some good faces in there, even the actual Faces. The Markham was more the hippie pub in the area – that was where the longhairs would go – but the Roebuck was where the classic Chelsea characters and the people who owned the shops down the King’s Road tended to hang out. We were in there with John Bindon a few times, the actor/gangster who shagged Princess Margaret. He was famous for his massive knob, which he was always whipping out to impress everyone, and he didn’t disappoint us, though I never saw him do his party trick with the full beer glasses.
The real highlight for me was when Malcolm would sneak me into the Speakeasy. It wasn’t easy to get in there, especially if you were still underage like I was, because that was where the who’s who of everyone who was anyone would go to drink after hours. Not just rock stars – footballers, actors, everyone. That gaff was on a little road parallel to Oxford Street on the north side, and I was always pestering Malcolm to go on a Friday or Saturday. We’d have the odd run-in there once the Pistols were up and running till it all got a bit awkward, but for the moment that was my favoured weekend destination.
What was our conveyance of choice? There was still the odd stolen motor going on. One time I nicked a Jag and took it up the West End. The memory is a bit foggy, but that could’ve been the time the Mandrax really kicked in, this poor fucker pulled out in front of us into the main road and I just fucking sideswiped him – knocked his car right out of the way. We just kept going with everyone thinking it was hilarious. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t hurt but it could’ve been horrendous. Mandrax, booze and stolen cars is just not a good combination, cos everything’s a fucking joke when you’re on that stuff.
For a change I experimented with driving vehicles that were actually mine. I remember buying a car off Wally Nightingale’s dad’s mate for £50, but the cunt completely turned me over. That motor broke down so fast that I was sure they’d done that classic thing of putting sawdust in the petrol tank so the car runs for a few miles and then just dies. That was the first car I’d ever technically owned, but getting ripped off just made me more determined to get something decent, and I had a nice blue Mini Cooper S for a while after that.
I also got hold of a minivan, which was not only very useful for transporting stolen goods, but also gave me an option of somewhere to kip if I was desperate. A fair few lucky young women got the chance to help me test out the mattress I’d put in the back – it was a proper British Leyland love-wagon, like the last scene of a Bond film, but on a toy car budget.
Even owning my own cars wasn’t going to persuade me to try and take an actual driving test. It was just one of those things that seemed like an impossibility, so I never bothered doing it. And I remember Cookie saying it was a nightmare because all the studying was so difficult. It’s a bit of a trigger word for me, ‘studying’ – so I just thought, ‘Fuck me, that’s never gonna happen.’ I didn’t think I had the patience or the intelligence to do anything the right way. The message I’d got from my upbringing and education was that I was a piece of shit who was never going to amount to anything, and that kind of negative view of yourself can very easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I wouldn’t be legal on the roads till more than ten years later, after I’d moved to California. The driving test in America is a piece of cake: you just have to answer a few questions and get round the block without killing anyone. Basically, a chimpanzee could pass it. In fact, I think it was specifically designed by the American automobile industry to ensure that morons would still be able to buy cars.
I don’t remember ever getting done for driving stolen cars or having no licence, road tax or insurance. Again, the early Seventies was a golden age for that kind of low-level car crime, especially with the old Cloak of Invisibility in operation. Nowadays with all the computer-linked CCTV cameras they have in London, I’d be up before the beak before I’d even got into second gear.
The one misdemeanour that the Cloak did not allow me to get away with was fucking my mates’ girlfriends. I kept doing this and I kept getting caught red-handed (and not just handed) as well. Stephen Hayes, Jimmy Macken – even Cookie. No one was safe. It was awful, really. I must’ve known it was wrong, because I didn’t want to own up afterwards, but that never made me pause for a second while I was doing it. I don’t know what was driving me – I never felt like I was being competitive, just that if and when the opportunity arose, I couldn’t help myself.
It was a miracle any of my mates were still talking to me, let alone still letting me kip over at their gaffs. I don’t remember anyone really confronting me about this at the time – I certainly never got the punch in the mouth I probably deserved, though sometimes even now someone (usually Cookie) will mention something that shows me he hasn’t forgotten. And there was one weird time when I was kipping round Stephen Hayes’ mum’s house not long after everyone knew I’d shagged his girlfriend of the time, when a load of his mates came round and started slagging me off.
For about an hour they were standing right in front of the bed I was lying in, telling me what an arsehole I’d been, and I just couldn’t face dealing with it, so I pretended not to have woken up. It was pretty weird and horrible. I was in his brother’s bed making out I was asleep, while Hayesy lay in his bed on the other side of the room not saying anything because he didn’t know how to deal with it either. He didn’t join in even though he’d have been more than entitled to – in a weird way I think he even felt sorry for me. And I think that made his mates even more angry, so they just carried on cunting me off and saying I should own up to what I’d done, while I just lay there squeezing my eyes shut. That was my approach to a lot of my life back then: fucking people over and then pretending to sleep through the consequences.
The exception to this rule – the one infamous act that I was happy to take the rap for in public – was the biggest coup in my whole career of rock ’n’ roll thievery. It took place, fittingly enough, given how large this West London landmark loomed in the blighted landscape of my childhood, in the Hammersmith Odeon. (Everyone who is old enough to remember its glory days still calls it the Odeon.) When I was haunting its rafters like the Phantom of the fucking Opera, it was a beautiful old cinema that was one of London’s premier rock venues.
It held about 3,500 people, and many of them (at least the ones with local knowledge) would’ve sneaked in round the back through the maze of tunnels and fire exits. I suppose the best comparison for American readers would be the Ritz Ballroom in New York. Not so much Mercer Hall, but maybe a little bit.
As I’ve said, the lyrics weren’t usually the first aspect of a song that caught my attention, but there was one line in David Bowie’s ‘Hang Onto Yourself’ on the Ziggy Stardust album that did really stick in my mind. That line was ‘The bitter comes out better on a stolen guitar’, and on the occasion of Bowie’s famous Ziggy Stardust farewell shows at the Hammersmith Odeon (although no one knew that’s what they were gonna be before they happened, as he only announced Ziggy’s retirement at the end of ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide’ on the last night) I decided to put that theory to the test. Well, that’s how I like to look back on it now. At the time it was probably a bit less of a scientific experiment and a bit more ‘That’s a nice amp … I’m having it’.
I was lucky enough to go to both those shows, and there was a fair amount of bullshit talked about them afterwards. They were good and everything, but all the stuff about loads of kids having sex everywhere while the gig was going on was bollocks – that was definitely something I would’ve noticed, but all I saw was a load of obsessed teens looking at Bowie like he was God and then getting very upset (but probably not as upset as Mick Ronson was) when he said he was going to knock things on the head with the Spiders from Mars.
I’m not sure which of the two closing nights I struck on. If it was the first night, that would help explain why D. A. Pennebaker’s film of the event had such famously shit sound and picture quality – because we’d nicked most of their equipment (‘we’ being me and Wally, cos I don’t think Cookie fancied it). It would make sense if it was the first night, because otherwise you’d think they’d have removed all the stuff rather than leaving it onstage for the Phantom of the Odeon to make off with.
Either way, after the gig, I had my minivan outside and I just went in and got as much stuff off the stage as I could fit in the back: Trevor Bolder’s Sun bass amp was one of my best trophies, as well as a few cymbals and this little Electro Voice microphone that still had a smudge of Bowie’s lipstick on it. For some reason I remember Trevor always having big sideburns to match his big thighs.
The security guard was snoring with his mouth open in the fourth or fifth row, catching flies. I bet he wasn’t too happy when he woke up. Well, I know he wasn’t, because I was there. I’d dropped the first vanload off back at Wally’s house and gone back to get all these Neumann radio microphones that were being used for the recording, so I slung my hook sharpish when I saw him start to come to. He didn’t chase me out, but I remember looking down at him from the stage as he shifted in his seat and thinking, ‘It’s definitely time to go.’ I don’t recall feeling any compunction about nicking my idol’s gear – only the full-on excitement, especially when it was on the news on Capital Radio the next day.
I was chuffed when I heard that for sure. It was my first bit of fame and I liked it. That’s why I’ve got some understanding of what’s going on in the minds of these lunatics who go and shoot up a fucking school just to get their fifteen minutes on the news. Or the fucking arsonist arsehole who’s set fire to a house and gets his kicks out of hearing the sound of the sirens. It’s that level of narcissism where you get excited because you’ve made your mark on the world and no one knows it’s you. You’re so alienated from humanity that you don’t care how much damage you have to do to get that feeling.
Although I’m happy – even proud – to admit to the Bowie heist, I would like to take this opportunity to say that I did not nick two guitars including a Gibson Les Paul from Rod Stewart’s house in Windsor. I’ve seen these thefts linked together in some accounts of the Pistols’ early days – which they easily could’ve been, I just didn’t do it. Not out of any special consideration for the feelings of my own Ace Face, but because Windsor was a bit too far out of town for me to be going on a thieving mission. If Rod had lived on the Gloucester Road, he’d have been fair game.
Those Neumann mics were probably worth five hundred quid each, but I didn’t know their value at the time so I got stiffed on the sale. I went up to north Willesden or somewhere to palm them off on some mate of Bernie Rhodes’ and he probably gave me a tenner for them. I liked Bernie – he was a laugh. He was hanging around the shop a fair bit at the time and when we all went out to eat together or met up at gigs I never used to think, ‘Who’s this cunt?’ Obviously he’d end up having a fair bit of influence on some of the exciting musical events that were about to unfold. But fuck me, that man knew the value of a pound.
By this time – late summer and autumn of 1973 – in music it was getting towards what you might call the arse end of glam. Mott the Hoople’s Mott – boot-boy music only with platform boots – and Human Menagerie, the first album by Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel, which was a bit lighter and more melodic with strings on, were big favourites of mine and Cookie’s. I think Harley had a dodgy Scotch egg (i.e. leg) because he’d had polio or something, so he had to wear one of those built-up boots. Wally once mentioned me bringing the first Queen album and the single of Thin Lizzy’s ‘The Rocker’ into rehearsals as well, which I don’t remember but it sounds about right.
We saw Queen supporting Mott the Hoople at a famous gig at the Hammersmith Odeon where there was a riot. Both bands had to play two shows because the gig was over-sold, and for some reason – I think they tried to stop Mott’s encore by bringing down the safety curtain – everyone suddenly started smashing the place up. It was fucking excellent. Queen were good then, too – more a glam hard-rock group than the weird kind of pop thing they’d turn into, but either way the Mercury was definitely still rising at that stage.
As for our band, the prospect of us taking our place at the forefront of rock was still looking distinctly fucking distant. I’d been trying to get Malcolm involved for a while because I thought he might be able to help us, but he didn’t seem too bothered about us at first, and I don’t think our name-change from The Strand to Swankers did anything to convince him we were about to hit the big time. When he did finally pull his finger out and make a contribution, though, it was a big one.
Del Noones wasn’t really cutting it as a bass player – he seemed to miss a lot of rehearsals and he wasn’t learning as quickly as the rest of us. So Malcolm hooked us up with Glen Matlock. I already knew Glen, because he worked in the shop on Saturdays. He might’ve stopped me nicking something once, but I wasn’t holding that against him. And Cookie may have played football against him at school. Anyway, Malcolm brought us together at a Thin Lizzy gig at the Marquee, and a few days later Glen came round to Wally’s to audition. I think he played ‘Miss Julie’s Farm’ and ‘Three Button Hand Me Down’ by the Faces. We had that connection of all having gone to the Roundhouse show, and the big plus was, Matlock didn’t just limp through them – he could really fucking do it.
Now that we had one and a half (if you count Wally) members who could actually play their instruments, we might really start to do something. The only slight drawback with Glen was that he’d gone to Clement Danes, which was the grammar school on the other side of the Westway from Christopher Wren. From our point of view, that lot were the upper crust. They wore green and yellow uniforms for a start (ours were plain black), so they were obviously perfumed ponces.
Glen was all right, and both me and Cookie got on with him, but right from the start he had to carry that stigma of being the (relatively) posh one in the band. He wasn’t exactly Stephen Fry, but he had a steady family background and was the kind of kid who’s allowed to borrow his dad’s car, which was a million miles away from how the rest of us – especially me – were living. He definitely came from the right side of the tracks (or the A40, in our case), which eventually turned out to be the wrong side as far as punk was concerned.
If we’d been starting a band like Yes, obviously Glen would have been an asset – we could’ve made him the leader and he could’ve pointed the stick like Jon Anderson used to. As it was, his art school contacts would later be very useful in getting the Sex Pistols off the ground. So it was no wonder he turned a bit sour for a while when he got pushed out a couple of years in.