You know what they say, when the going gets tough, the tough fuck off to live with a lady of the night. Faced with the many different kinds of carnage involved in The Professionals’ second and last US tour, I did what I always did when a situation had got so bad that the reality of it needed to be faced up to – I bolted.
There wasn’t one specific thing compelling me to stay in America, but there were a fuck of a lot of good reasons for not wanting to go back to England. I didn’t want to go back to the darkness, the junkies, the dealers, the possession charge and the empty flat in Canfield Gardens with no furniture in it cos I’d sold it all to buy dope. Even the Nazi flags had gone; that place just didn’t feel like home without them.
Sometimes there are things that you just can’t do, and the prospect of knocking the band on the head only to get on the plane with the others and fly home with our tails tucked neatly between our legs seemed like such a grim fucking outlook. So I said, ‘Sorry, see you later, guys – I can’t go back to London,’ swanned off with a woman of ill repute, and didn’t go back to England for fourteen years. That part wasn’t premeditated, but the fact that one of my first acts after staying on was to sell my passport for some dough – I can’t remember who to, but I didn’t get much, maybe $80 – shows how ready I was to leave everything behind. I was set in a pattern of scaling back from the dope to the healthy option of heavy drinking and cocaine when I was on tour, then going straight back on heroin the minute the gigs were over. If I’d been organised enough to have any priorities, there’d only really have been one at that point, and it would’ve been ‘Get more drugs’.
When it came to heroin, I’d always thought of myself as a cut above the scratchers you used to see around King’s Cross who were basically zombies with no fucking life. They’d always whine about how they wanted to get clean, but you couldn’t help thinking that wasn’t really true. Even when I compared myself to, say, Johnny Thunders & the Heartbreakers – who would go from city to city and the first thing they’d do when they arrived would be to find out where they could cop – I thought of them as real junkies and me as somehow not a real one. But the clear blue water I thought I saw between us was filling up with old syringes.
Maybe this was just the denial which was part of the addiction, but I still don’t feel like I was a junkie deep down inside, the way I was a thief. It’s the same with alcoholics – there are some who life has pushed to drink too much for one reason or another, and others you feel were born to do it. I definitely fell into the second category as far as booze was concerned, but still think of myself in the first, heroin-wise. To me, dope was more a hole I fell down when I was trying to escape, but how much difference that made, if any, was another matter. The fact was that I was doing more and more of the kind of shit junkies did, and if it waddles like a duck and shoots up like a duck, then it is a fucking duck.
The brass I did a runner with had one quality which qualified her for the job – she knew how to get dope. As solid a foundation as that was for an enduring romance (well, it worked for Sid and Nancy), it didn’t last long. Then I found another bird willing to put up with me who wasn’t a lady of the night but more a social butterfly – hip to all the clubs. We ended up staying together for a while. She was a bit naive as far as drugs went, but after a few months of me staying with her she found a needle in my pocket and realised what was going on. I thought, ‘Oh that’s it, the game’s up now,’ but it turned out she wanted to try it too.
I’ve never seen myself as a role model, and the influence I had on this woman is not something I’m proud of. We carried on that way for maybe six or nine months. She had a decent little loft in New York, sort of East Village/Houston way. It was kind of sleazy, not all cleaned up there like it is now. You didn’t get many tourists and it was dangerous walking around at night, but I was too much of a mess to care.
At first, all the money was coming from her, but I soon worked my way through that reserve, and once she was skint we were back to me going to clubs and nicking handbags or doing whatever other demoralising things I could to keep a habit going. Thievery had become more of an occasional pleasure when the Sex Pistols were happening, if only because there was so much else going on. But they do say it’s good to have a trade to fall back on, and the fact that I never got caught once I hit the Big Apple shows you I hadn’t got too rusty. It was always in a small-time way – I was no Great Train Robber. Mind you, Ronnie Biggs wasn’t exactly a criminal mastermind either.
London street-smarts were very different to the New York variety back then. I’d see all the other junkies shuffling around with their eyes glued to the sidewalk without realising that they were probably doing it for a reason. Striding round Alphabet City (which was where I used to go to cop dope) like it was Canfield Gardens may not have been the smartest move at the time. It’s yuppie central now, but back then it was the opposite: a run-down bunch of blocks controlled by Puerto Rican gangs, where I must have stood out like a sore thumb. It was a scary urban jungle vibe – completely different to what I was used to. And not only was I very much out of my element, but most of the time I was out of my head as well, so I was lucky not to get mugged.
I came close a couple of times. Fuck knows what would have happened to me if I’d woken up in a hospital with concussion. I didn’t have a passport, I didn’t technically have anywhere to live – I was ahead of my time as far as being off the grid was concerned. As shit as all this sounds, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit there was an element of excitement to it, too. Alphabet City was definitely a whole different ballgame to sitting in some gringe’s front room while he made me listen to Tales From Topographic fucking Oceans.
There were times when walking down there to cop was the last thing I wanted to do. But when you’re sick for the dope, you’ve got no choice. It was scary, but I knew I had to do it. The thought of getting high was all that was keeping me going. There was no joy coming from anywhere, but at least I knew what the point of me was. This is going to sound pretty fucking weird, but being a junkie felt like a necessity after the Pistols ended. It would be crazy to say it saved my life, but that kind of is how I feel about it. It’s never the down-and-outs that kill themselves, it’s always the ones who’ve had something and lost it. I’m lucky that I’ve never had coherent suicidal feelings in my life, and you can’t imagine what that feels like if you’ve never been to that place, but the hole inside me was yawning so wide that fuck knows what else I’d have filled it with if I hadn’t had heroin.
It wasn’t that I liked being a junkie. I never wanted to make being a mess a part of my schtick like Sid did. I knew how pathetic I looked. Standards were slipping in fashion terms with my baggy trousers and big hairy sweaters; the peacock of my Sex Pistols days had slowly lost its feathers and became a fucking pigeon. Filthy fucking vermin I was, and some of the shit I’d do to get a few bucks was so petty it was embarrassing. Nicking birds’ handbags at clubs was bad enough, but the girlfriend I’d corrupted had lived with a rock photographer before we got together, and I think the low point of my New York junkie phase was when we nicked loads of 8×10 photos of bands he’d taken pictures of – nothing fancy, just standard press shots – and tried to sell them to passers-by on the street.
You know what a joke you’ve become when your chances of survival depend on flogging someone a stolen 8×10 press shot of the band Heart. I just used to grit my teeth and hope no one recognised me.
The funny thing was that even though I was not in a good place in personal terms, I was still happy to be in America rather than London. I’d felt used up and unwanted there, and at least New York was exciting. Big streets, places that were open 24 hours … it wasn’t like that in England. There were still only three channels on TV and the grim London vibe hadn’t woken up and smelt the Eighties yet. Now everything’s more or less the same all over the world, people might not remember how different America was then.
Obviously New York was edgier than the rest of the country, and I know this might seem a weird thing for someone who was a junkie at the time to say, but I loved the fact that Americans still prided themselves on service. When you’d go into a restaurant – even if it was just a cheap cafe – people would bend over backwards to make you happy. Ask for a sandwich in England at that time and the geezer’s crying because he can’t get the piece of ham small enough.
After I’d been in America a year or so, another band came about. It was me, Tony Sales from Iggy Pop’s band, Michael Des Barres, who’d been the lead singer of Silverhead in the early Seventies – they were kind of in Led Zeppelin’s shadow but with a glammy edge to them, and I’d liked their second album, 16 and Savaged – and Nigel Harrison and Clem Burke from Blondie. This was in the days when the music industry had a bit of money to spend, and people would give you a big wad of cash just to do a show. Obviously mine went straight in my arm, but we did the gig, which was at the Peppermint Lounge, and the whole thing came together pretty well.
We started out doing covers – I think ‘Vacation’ by the Go-Go’s was the song we began our first set with, so that gives you some idea of the kind of sound we were aiming at. It was just a rock ’n’ roll band with a bit of punk underneath, but I didn’t have any better options at the time, so when someone said, ‘This is pretty good – we should do more,’ I wasn’t going to disagree.
The name of the band – Chequered Past – turned out to be appropriate, given that the album we made a couple of years later is probably not the one I’ll be most remembered for. But to be honest I didn’t really give a shit about the music then – being in a band with Sid Vicious had beaten that out of me. All I wanted to do was get high, and this was a way to do it. But I certainly didn’t feel I was betraying the spirit of punk by making a more traditional-sounding rock album. Even when I was in the Pistols I used to go back to the flat and play Boston and Journey. There’s a certain clean-cut, very crisp, clear, melodic rock sound that I’ve always been really into, and when I hear a good song, I can’t help liking it: whether the singer has a mohawk or is a man wearing a dress doesn’t matter to me.
Of course Malcolm wouldn’t have been happy if I’d gone around admitting how much I liked ‘More Than a Feeling’ in interviews in 1976. That would’ve been a no-no for a band who were meant to be the start of something new. But it wasn’t us who came up with the stance that the Sex Pistols were against all old music, for the simple reason that we weren’t against all old music. I agreed with drawing a line under bands like Emerson Lake and Palmer – cunts you could never get close to who had disappeared up their own arses with their grandiose wealth. I got that – I never liked them, even in my progressive phase. But by the time Chequered Past formed in 1982, the rituals of punk had become as set in stone as prog rock ever was.
I’m not bothered about all those Exploited types. I could never give a shit about them, or GBH, or any of the bands with big mohicans. They all looked like scratchers to me, and even if they weren’t, they’d completely lost the plot of what punk was all about. The early stages was the cream. Everyone was dressing differently – it wasn’t all about how high the spikes in your hair were and having a studded leather jacket. That’s when it all became two-bob to me, when it changed from the excitement of what you could become to hanging on to a uniform, frozen in time. Once you’re saying, ‘Let’s stay like this for ever,’ you’re not bringing anything new to it or responding to life as it’s happening. At that point, you might as well be a Teddy boy.
Now I was definitely in need of a new beginning, so when the Chequered Past people said, ‘Let’s start a band, but we’ve got to be based in LA,’ because that was where most of the guys lived, it took me about three seconds to say ‘yes’. I’d first met Michael Des Barres at Dingwalls in Camden when the Sex Pistols were happening and we kind of hit it off. He was one of those people who actually came to our last gig in San Francisco rather than just saying he was there when he wasn’t, like so many others. Cunts still do that to me now – say they were at our shows when they weren’t. Why do they do it when they’re only going to get caught out and look like a dick? I’ll do that to them, too.
‘Hey, I love your album …’
‘Oh, do you? What’s track three on the first side of Never Mind the Bollocks, then?’
I don’t know why things like that bother me. I suppose I just don’t like bullshit, which makes it funny that I should’ve moved to LA, pretty much the bullshit capital of the world. But when I first got to California, even the clichéd ‘have a nice day’ American attitude to life didn’t bug me. In fact, I found how positive everyone was quite refreshing after the darkness of New York. I also liked being free of that narky fucking English vibe where everyone was niggling away trying to stab you in the back the whole time.
A lot of British people who move to LA talk about it being disorientating when you first arrive, but I found the place quite easy to get the hang of. It’s all very open and spread out so you can usually see where you’re going – one way’s the beach, one way’s the hills, one way’s back to the airport and the other way’s downtown. Downtown is more like the old garment district; that’s where all the tramps congregate. Either there or Santa Monica, which makes sense for the old paraffin lamps when you think about it. If you’ve got to be homeless, do it somewhere the rents are high, so long as the police don’t hassle you too much. Downtown LA is pretty much out of control these days – there’s just tents, tents, tents everywhere and a lot of the people in them are crackheads, so it’s a very weird scene, which I was lucky enough never to have to be a part of, although I came close once or twice.