Afterwards
The eighties more or less passed me by like some
big long money train that I’d been pointedly excluded from
boarding. Music became a sorely diminished commodity due to the
advent of mass digitalisation that heralded the emergence of the CD
format. MTV was a further cultural abomination, robbing young minds
of their God-given right to let music run riot with their own
imaginations by force-feeding them with crass video images to
appease their dwindling attention spans instead.
It was also an era that laid down strict
guidelines about separating winners from losers. The winners were
the home-owning human magpies, the yuppie tailgaters, the glib
young professionals in their big-shouldered business suits forever
lurking around wine bars and cappuccino outlets with their chintzy
talk and grasping agendas. The losers were hand-to-mouth drifters
like me - chemically impaired, squat-friendly, short on boundless
ambition, not particularly money-hungry, not good ‘potential
husband’ material, no semblance of Machiavellian cunning, only
concern: ‘living in the moment, man’.
In 1982 the NME sacked me for the second
and final time. For the next two years, I wrote nothing. The new
music I heard during that time left me feeling low and
disenchanted. Then one afternoon in late 1984 a musician
acquaintance played me a copy
of the just-released first Smiths album and something came alive
in me again. The Smiths resonated through me like an answered
prayer. I suddenly felt the overwhelming urge to throw myself back
head first into the old rock-crit scrum if only in order to garland
the Manc quartet with further praise. Most of my old colleagues
thought I was completely mad at first, but me hitching my muddy
wagon to the Smiths’ rising star was the key move that got me onto
the road that led first to career recovery and finally to personal
redemption.
By late 1987 I’d ‘bounced back’ - it was
official. Nick Logan and Paul Rambali of The Face took the
chance to employ me at a time when almost everyone else in
media-land was determined to shun me from their doors of employment
like the proverbial stray three-legged dog. Partly to repay their
act of largesse, I endeavoured long and hard to make the articles I
submitted to them as outstanding as possible. A long Miles Davis
piece from 1986 for example took me almost six months of daily
scribbling and re-editing to complete.
Still, the hard work paid off. Suddenly the
yuppie hordes who’d scorned and spurned me were coming over to pat
me on the back, buy me a drink and call me ‘the great survivor’.
They should have looked more closely. Nothing had really changed
inside my private world. In fact, I was taking more drugs than ever
before. And my current living quarters consisted of a tiny
four-walled hovel in a drastically gone-to-seed block of flats
somewhere in Kentish Town - not so much a room, more a glorified
coal bunker.
That’s where I first contracted a nasty lung
infection due to the asbestos lined into the roofing. My immune
system was on the blink due to all the dope in my system and it
quickly developed into pneumonia. One day I couldn’t get up off my
mattress any
more. Then I started coughing up blood. I’d been giving the Grim
Reaper the old familiar two-fingered salute (or one-fingered salute
if you happen to be American) for fourteen years but now he’d
finally pinned me down. I felt like one of those poor
plague-stricken peasants in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh
Seal lying around on thistle-strewn fields philosophising
whilst waiting for Death to claim them.
Through a supreme effort of will, I somehow
managed to board a train leaving London and voyaging to Swindon,
where my parents now lived. After two weeks of bed rest and
triple-strength antibiotics I was all patched up and ready to
inhale more of the big smoke. I returned at the very outset of 1988
intent on polluting myself anew. But as soon as I was back in my
old haunts, the dreaded symptoms started up again. My body was
telling me in no uncertain terms that it could no longer deal with
all the rigours of my addicted condition and that if I didn’t
change my way of living dramatically I’d be spending my remaining
years in an iron lung or a wheelchair.
Sometimes you need to have things spelt out for
you but I got the message eventually. In mid-January I travelled
back to my parents’ modest retirement flat and moved into the guest
bedroom, having pre-arranged with my London clinic to taper off my
methadone dosage in weekly reductions. For the next three months I
underwent a self-administered withdrawal from all my old bad habits
- methadone, amphetamines, Valium, you name it. The folks at the
clinic told me I was being rash and that I’d be far better off
entering some costly rehab facility for an indefinite period. But
that was out of the question. I’d already spent all my money on
drugs. I didn’t have any more to dispense on trying to be weaned
off them.
It wasn’t that bad - all things considered.
Valium withdrawal was the worst - twitching for three days and
nights and a couple of full-blown panic attacks. And the methadone
reduction process sometimes made me feel like I was on acid, though
without the hallucinations-a common reaction, I later learned. The
hardest aspect was the lack of sleep - for two whole months I
subsisted on a regime of no more than one hour of shut-eye a night.
It all sounds unrelentingly grim when described in stark prose but
I look back on that time now as oddly exhilarating. During those
two months I actually felt my soul re-entering my body. A corner
was being turned. A new road was opening up for me.
Once I’d gotten over the chills and aching
joints, I set about healing my body in the old-school way: when ill
health looms, simply go outside and walk the ailment off. My folks
lived next to a picturesque park called Coate Water, with a big
pond and miles of open countryside and rolling hills behind its
borders. I’d take tentative rambles through the greenery that grew
more extensive as my stamina returned.
By May I was completely drug-free for probably
the first time ever in my adult life and passing my days strolling
through the forest alone. The activity made me feel like I was a
teenager again, a child of nature. I could feel my old hippie roots
a-stirring. And then one day I walked for miles and miles into
countryside I’d never ventured through before until I came to a
little Finian’s Rainbow kind of village bathed in the
idyllic rays of an early afternoon sun high in a cloudless blue
sky. The place seemed deserted. The only shop there was shut. No
activity on the streets. My gaze fell on the tiny wooden chapel
partly obscured by a tree. I’d not been a churchgoer since before
reaching puberty, but for some reason I felt compelled to enter the
building. No one else
lurked within. It was just me staring up at the stained-glass
windows feeling the coloured light reverberate through the darkness
of this candle-lit space I was now in.
As the light streamed over me, I was seized by
the crazy urge to kneel down and pray at the altar. I asked God to
help keep me away from the low side of the road. Let me begin
again, I pleaded. I can change, I swear. Give me the strength to
redeem myself. I have done many bad things. But I know the
difference between wrong and right. I have this window of
opportunity now to turn my life around. Rid me of this terrible
loneliness. Restore me in the ways of grace. As I concluded my
sinner’s lamentation, the light from the windows engulfed the whole
room in a blazing golden glow. OK, it wasn’t as dramatic as Jesus
Christ turning up in person to Bob Dylan’s hotel room but I knew
there and then that some kind of full-blown spiritual experience
was visiting me. It was ironic - all that time I’d been looking for
God in drugs, and then just as soon as I get them out of my
bloodstream He makes himself known to me.
For quite a while afterwards I found it hard to
reconcile with what had occurred to me in that little church. There
was a scientific reason for the rapture - after fourteen years of
enforced inactivity, the endorphins in my brain were starting to
wake up again. Maybe they’d been responsible for the epiphany. But
in the same breath I knew the incident wasn’t something I could so
easily explain away and then brush aside. Everything was changing
within me. Temptation still reared its ugly head sometimes when I
ventured back to London but otherwise I experienced no deep
yearning for further dope-befuddlement. It wasn’t so bad being
straight for a change.
Then it dawned on me - from now on, I had two
choices.
Either spend your time constructively or it’ll be spent
self-destructively. I didn’t need to go to any Narcotics Anonymous
meeting to learn that. I didn’t have the time to recite my old drug
misadventures to a roomful of recovering addicts. I knew what I’d
done and who I became in the process. Now I needed to just close
the door on that old flaky life and get my eyes back on the
prize.
What happened next is best kept for another
project. In short order, I met the woman who would become my wife
in December of 1988. ‘I’m going to be your drug now,’ she told me
not long after our introduction. How can you not respond to a line
like that? She lived in Paris and invited me to move in with her.
London was bumming me out. Walking its streets stone-cold sober
left me feeling more and more isolated. Once you’ve been homeless
in a city, all its inhospitable qualities tend to overshadow its
positive factors anyway - even if it’s your birthplace. I needed
new horizons to contain me, and Paris aka ‘the city of light’
seemed ideal. I arrived there with less than £200 to my name but I
also had a love to keep me warm, a roof over my head and the innate
feeling that Lady Luck was back in my court. Such was the
case.
A month after my relocation, I sat down in my new
accommodations to put pen to paper. I’d just interviewed Jerry Lee
Lewis for the first and only time and had a suitably hellacious
encounter to transcribe. Over the past fourteen years, writing had
become a truly wretched endeavour for me to undertake. I was always
staring at a blank page, grasping in vain for deep thoughts and
wise words to fill it with. Inspiration was always tantalisingly
out of reach. The wheels in my brain just weren’t turning fast
enough. But that day my old gift returned, the one I’d briefly
possessed back in the early seventies before it got squandered.
The words just came to me. I wrote them down as if in a trance.
Several hours later, I’d finished a 6,000-word profile. I read it
back and my eyes misted over: I had the power again. It had been
restored to me. From that point on, I never looked back. Life just
kept getting better and better.
It’s been twenty years now since I’ve been living
in Paris and my family is still together, we all remain in good
health, la vie est encore belle. My son James’s birth in
January 1993 was the cherry on the cake for me. I even followed
John Lennon’s example and became a house-husband, changing diapers
and taking him to parks daily. Forget anything I’ve described in
this book - being around my infant boy is what I’ll be flashing
back to in the final seconds before life gets sucked out of
me.
Jim is sixteen now - with hair growing more than
halfway down his back and a room full of computers and guitars.
Every morning before setting off to school he psychs himself by
playing music - death metal they call it - that sounds like the
Lord of Misrule and his minions building shelves in an adjacent
building. He has no respect for the old groups I used to knock
around with. The seventies have little to tempt him with, or so he
claims, and I can’t say that I blame him.
I still regularly dig out records from that era
and play them for pleasure but they’re more likely to be something
by Steely Dan or Joni Mitchell than anything punk- or
new-wave-related. I can’t help resenting the way ‘postmodernists’
have ceaselessly endeavoured to rewrite history by claiming that
the early seventies were empty, worthless times and that the decade
only began to flourish with the arrival of Johnny Rotten and his
barbarian hordes. That’s just a wilful misrepresentation of the
facts. But then again,
I may well have happier memories of the first five years simply
because they were the ones that neatly corresponded with my rise in
personal circumstances whilst the five that followed now represent
more of a full-on fall from grace.
All I know is - if a time-travel machine was ever
invented and made easily available to the hoi polloi, the seventies
would be the last time zone in history I’d want to return to. I
harbour no nostalgic yearnings whatsoever for the days of my
wayward youth and have been more inclined over the past twenty
years to simply distance myself from the feelings and past
frequentations of that era. As a result, I remain in contact with
only a precious few of the figures that have populated this
book.
Apart from Pennie Smith and Nick Logan, I haven’t
seen or spoken to any of the original NME gang in aeons.
Some kind of impromptu reunion would probably have occurred had I
attended Ian MacDonald’s funeral in 2003 but no one invited me or
even thought to tell me about it.
As for the Sex Pistols, I’ve stayed on good terms
with Glen Matlock and enjoy the occasional impromptu phone call
from Steve Jones but wouldn’t be caught dead at one of their
reunion shows.
Iggy Pop and I stayed friends throughout the
nineties; we shared much in common after all. We’d once been
prodigal sons but now we were both clear-headed and work-driven
individuals still trying to make full sense of our past
shortcomings. But when the noughties struck, we just drifted apart.
It happens. Maybe we’ve just used each other enough for one
lifetime.
In 2003 I re-established contact with Jimmy Page.
It was great to see him clean and sober and fully focused once
more. I’m interested to hear what he’ll do next musically. He,
Plant and
Jones should definitely try to get the Zep aloft one more time in
the studio. There’s still unfinished business to be completed
there.
Talking of unfinished business, Chrissie Hynde
also re-entered my life in ’03. She’d turned fifty and had just
split from her second husband, and I guess she maybe just wanted to
reconnect with some old faces again. At first I was hesitant but
then thought better of it and invited her over for a meal. She was
still the same impetuous Chrissie but age had now provided her with
wisdom and self-awareness too. I really enjoyed being in her
company and we became friends again, even exchanging the odd letter
and telephone call. Mind you, whether our friendship will still be
standing after she reads this book remains a matter for
conjecture.
My father passed away in February 2007 at the age
of eighty-six. I’d seen him for the last time three months earlier.
He told me then that he was in such near-constant physical
discomfort he would have preferred to have died three years
earlier. He said this without a hint of melodrama, almost
matter-of-factly. I looked into his eyes, saw all the pain barely
contained behind them and told him I understood. So it wasn’t a big
shock to my system when the news came through. That word Americans
love to throw around - closure - we’d achieved it in the nineteen
years prior to his death. Everything we’d needed to say to each
other had been said. I knew he’d always loved me and he knew I
would always love him back. There were no regrets unaired or thorny
issues still unresolved between us. I kept this foremost in my mind
during the weeks leading up to and then following his funeral. I
only cried once and didn’t suffer any semblance of a
grief-triggered meltdown. I needed to stay strong and support my
mother in her time of sorrow.
In March she and I were driven by a friend to a
specific stretch of countryside outside Swindon where the shape of
a gigantic white horse that had somehow been etched into a hillside
back in ancient times was still plainly visible. My father had
often indicated that he wanted his ashes scattered on this spot of
land. The sun was high in the sky but there was also a fierce wind
bustling up the trees and hedgerows and it sent the contents of the
urn I was carrying flying all around me as I emptied his remains
out. I stood there and breathed him in one last time. He was inside
me now and as time marched on I came to learn a simple truth: the
best way to mourn the death of a beloved parent is to endeavour to
actively adopt the finest aspects of their personality and then let
them live on through you as you struggle to follow their
example.
In my case, it’ll always be easier said than
done. My old man was a paragon of steadfastness, moral rectitude
and self-discipline and, as you already gathered, I’ve been
notoriously deficient in all three virtues. And I’ll never have his
unassailable faith in the existence of God and the kingdom of
heaven. But even in my darkest hours I couldn’t quite shake off the
inner voice of his influence and value system. Sooner or later we
all turn into our parents anyway. It’s best just to go with the
flow of human nature.
I’ve yet to re-establish any real face-to-face
contact with the Rolling Stones. But our destinies still seem to be
strangely intertwined. Whilst writing this book, I was contacted by
James Fox, who’s actually writing Keith Richards’s forthcoming
autobiography, and sat down with him one afternoon to share my
memories of the great man during his vampire years. Apparently
Keith has only the dimmest recollection of what transpired in the
seventies. It figures.
I don’t have that problem though. I may have left
the seventies but the seventies never totally left me. Not in my
waking hours so much. But when I sleep, they still reappear to
torment me anew.
At least once a week, I have the same dream. It’s
the late seventies again and I am a passenger on a train pulling
into King’s Cross station. People are laughing at me in the streets
outside. They can see I’m strung out and vulnerable. I need to
escape. Suddenly I’m backstage at a Rolling Stones concert. It’s
the usual scene; the superstars and the slaves. Sometimes I get to
have a short conversation with the group’s two principals, other
times I get blanked.
Sudden change of scene. I’m in a small club
somewhere watching Iggy Pop misbehave. It’s another loveless night
with another loveless crowd. One of my NME co-workers
saunters over and plies me with his sugary condescension. An
aggrieved ex-girlfriend is lurking somewhere behind her cold-eyed
stare. But I can’t stay. I’ve got to find a place to crash for the
night. I go from door to door but no one answers. Finally I open
one and walk into a confined space of impenetrable darkness. It
feels like being inside a coffin. I start to panic. Then I wake
up.
It takes all of ten minutes to reacclimatise
myself to ongoing reality. I’ve developed a mantra to pave the way.
‘I’ve got a beautiful son. I’ve got a beautiful wife. I’ve got a
beautiful life.’ It seems to help.
By the time I’m out of the bed I know who I am
again. Once upon a time I was just another dead fop walking. But I
changed ranks along the way and now I am a soldier of love.