Then one day my Chelsea Embankment source ran dry for several days and my whole metabolism turned against me. The chills and rapid changes in body temperature weren’t unbearable but the ferocious depression I felt eating away at my very soul for some forty-eight uninterrupted hours wasn’t something I wished to visit upon myself again any time soon. This led to the last jolt of common sense I managed to rouse within myself for the rest of the decade. I decided I needed to distance myself from all the druggy tristesse of the past six months. It would mean abandoning London and all its temptations and relocating to some more exotic climate. But it also had to be a place where I could still find work. There was only one option, really: America, more specifically Los Angeles. I would get myself a golden suntan and prowl Hollywood anew in search of wild tales to tell the folks back home. It seemed like a good idea at the time. But I’d neglected to factor in an important detail: Hollywood in 1975 was fast becoming the West Coast’s very own re-enactment of Sodom and Gomorrah. Finding any kind of personal redemption there was a futile folly.

In the few weeks prior to my February departure, I became deeply embroiled in the music and short life of Nick Drake. Drake had died only a few months earlier - apparently it had been self-administered - but no obituary had appeared in any of the four music weeklies to mourn his loss. I’d been so taken up with my own sack of woe that at the time I doubt his passing even registered with me. But by year’s end I was becoming increasingly aware that his untimely death was something that needed to be addressed just like the three albums of music he made in his lifetime needed to be celebrated - albeit belatedly. I’d always been an admirer of his, ever since I first heard ‘River Man’ waft spine-tinglingly across the airwaves via a John Peel-helmed radio broadcast. In the autumn of ’71, just as I was installing myself into life at London University, I bought a second-hand copy of Bryter Layter and it quickly became the soundtrack for my brief middle-class student-drifter existence. I’d listen to the record and what Drake was singing about - the melancholy feeling of leaving England’s green and pleasant land to chance your arm in London’s gritty, isolating metropolis - spoke penetratingly to my inner condition. His was bedroom-hermit music taken to the level of high art, and the more I’d hear it, the more I became convinced that we had just lost one of the greatest English-born musical talents of the second half of the twentieth century. Ian MacDonald - who’d known Drake briefly when they were both students at Cambridge University - also subscribed to this viewpoint and was therefore enthusiastic when I told him I was planning a lengthy piece on the guy for the NME. It wasn’t an easy assignment. Drake had always been an intensely guarded and private individual. Certainly none of the friends and co-workers of his that I spoke to were able to decipher the inner workings of his mind or explain his enigmatic aloofness. But most of them openly questioned the verdict of suicide that had been handed down after the inquest into his death and I could see their point. Only three tablets of an antidepressant known as Tryptizol were found in his stomach - hardly an amount to guarantee eternal oblivion. I wrote that Drake didn’t wilfully take his own life and I’ve not read, seen or heard anything since to cause me to modify that opinion. The way I see it, both Drake and later Ian Curtis were the hapless victims of incompetent doctors who used them both as unwitting guinea pigs for pharmaceutical companies to test their most controversial new products on. The seventies was the decade of the nefarious pill-form antidepressant. Suddenly NHS quacks were doling them out to their patients like food to the famished. By decade’s end thousands and thousands of middle-aged English housewives had turned into panic-stricken zombies as a result of being force-fed Valium in this insidious fashion. Nick Drake’s tragic end can also be seen as a forewarning of their treacherous fate - the condition known as ‘prescription death’.

My own Drake investigation was completed at January’s end and printed in February. It’s not one of my best efforts but it gave its subject’s musical legacy much-needed acclaim and exposure and helped instigate a mystique around his name that has only grown with the passing of time. My next assignment was a sudden lurch from the sublime to the ridiculous. NME had found a patron to pay for my round-trip airfare to LA and a week’s worth of hotel bills - after which I was to be left to my own devices. There was one snag, however: the patron was Jethro Tull.

In Christopher Headington’s lofty tome A History of Western Music, Claude Debussy is quoted as having once claimed that he favoured featuring the flute in the foreground of many of his compositions because he felt the slender wind instrument possessed the mystical power ‘of a melancholy Puck (the mischievous sprite in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream) questioning the hidden meaning of things’. But Jethro Tull leader Ian Anderson showcased it in his own repertoire for less poetic reasons. He tootled away on it because it added a suitably mellifluous ‘age of Aquarius’ tonality to his group’s otherwise generic late-sixties blues-rock bleatings and because it was also a useful prop for his incessant human-scarecrow posturing whenever he found himself in front of a paying audience.

The Tull had started out as trailblazing ‘crusties’ but soon jettisoned their initial ‘playing the blues for greatcoat-sporting students who rarely wash themselves’ game plan to climb aboard the good ship ‘prog rock’ and seek their fortune through playing electrified madrigals in 7/4 time with lyrics about high-born lusty temptresses beating stable-boys’ naked buttocks with a riding crop. Against all conventional logic, their new direction paid off like a one-armed bandit choking up its entire contents of coinage to some dumb-lucky gambler. By 1975 they were one of the world’s biggest-selling musical attractions. In America they could sell out all the mega-barns any promoter could throw at them. In Los Angeles alone, they’d been booked for four consecutive nights at the prestigious 20,000-seater-capacity Felt Forum. That’s what I’d essentially been flown in to trumpet back to the home front. They seemed to think I’d happily adapt to the role of becoming their token media shill but as usual I had other more personal agendas to pursue.

Their US press officer-a shrill, hyperactive Bobbi Flekman lookalike with a voice like paint-stripper - met me at the airport and then drove me straight to the first of the Felt Forum shows previewed for that evening. I was already in a bad way from the jet lag - as well as probable drug withdrawal - and considered my imminent fate much like a prisoner about to face the gallows. Marshalling a half-hearted stiff upper lip, I staggered into the huge auditorium only to find myself in a scene to rank with Dante’s inferno: 20,000 double-ugly Americans going completely gaga over a musical spectacle so bizarre that it beggared description and which none of them could have even remotely comprehended. If they had, they wouldn’t have been there in the first place. Each song the Tull performed was as long and windy as a discourse on agrarian reform in the nineteenth century, and to top it all they’d incorporate old Monty Python sketches into their routines and pretend to their Yankee rube fan base - who’d yet to see Python on the telly in their country - that they were doing something audaciously original. I couldn’t believe my eyes and ears. Where was the appeal? Why all the bums on seats? I asked Anderson these very questions later and even he was at a loss to explain his group’s popularity. But I already knew - it was bad taste, pure and simple. They say good taste is timeless. But bad taste has been around just as long and is invariably more lucrative.

Anyway, after half an hour of this musical torture, I was starting to sag and wilt like an untended bloom. The press officer - noting my haggard expression - passed me a Quaalude to aid my further discomfort. It was a decent thing to do, all things considered - but also deeply misguided. Five minutes later, I was out cold in my seat. Apparently I had to be carried out of the venue, placed in a car and then driven back to the hotel. I just remember waking up early the next morning fully-dressed in my hotel room with a dust bowl for a mouth and aches in all my joints.

Fortunately Iggy Pop arrived shortly afterwards. He lived virtually next door to my hotel on the Sunset Strip and had come over to renew old acquaintances and possibly scam a free breakfast on my room-service chit. I told him of my current dilemma: jet lag, drug withdrawals and, most of all, the prospect of having to witness yet another Jethro Tull show. ‘Man, I wouldn’t wish that combination on my worst enemy,’ he winced sympathetically before suggesting he contact a friend to help me self-medicate throughout the whole ordeal. An hour and one phone call later, there was a knock at my door. Iggy opened it and in walked a tall, thin, clearly gay young black man dressed like a member of Little Richard’s backing ensemble. His name was Johnny and he dealt heroin when not dipping his toes into other backwaters of small-time LA-based criminality with the aid of his equally overattired black boyfriend, who was known as Levi. He didn’t say much. Just dropped a small packet on the night-stand and then stared at me as if to say ‘So where’s the money, sucker?’ It was then that I had the sudden realisation that I possessed only English traveller’s cheques as a form of viable currency. I showed them to him but to no avail. ‘What the fuck is this shit?’ I recall him saying. ‘It’s just worthless paper to me.’ Fortunately, a compromise was reached. The hotel had a gift shop and Johnny needed a hairdryer so I basically paid for it on room service, as well as for a couple of chintzy items he also took a shine to whilst perusing the merchandise. This meant in effect that the Tull and/or their record company were footing the bills for our drugs. Looking back now, I can’t say I’m proud of the incident. You could dress it up and play it back as an early punk gesture of defiance - me and the Ig literally ripping off the stadium-rock behemoths - but in reality it was just seedy junkie behaviour. Still, it got the job done - so to speak. That night, I sat through two full hours of Jethro Tull in concert and felt no pain.

Once I’d dispensed with all Tull-related duties I began scoping out the Hollywood terrain in search of fun, adventure and good music, only to promptly discover that all three were in woefully limited supply. Ben Edmonds, my old Creem pal, had recently moved there and I remember us going to Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco only to discover the gnome-like Bingenheimer cueing up old glam records on the house turntable to an audience of just three pilled-up punters dreamily occupying the dance floor like extras from Night of the Living Dead. We stuck around for half an hour - just to be polite - and then made our excuses and ran for the exit door. As we were stepping outside, we noticed a disturbance on the pavement before us. Two of the three patrons we’d just been rubbing shoulders with were splayed out on the cold concrete like wounded birds. Just a few feet away, a young long-haired man in an expensive-looking fur anorak was staring at the human wreckage with undisguised glee in his cocaine-rimmed eyes. Ben recognised the guy: it was Glenn Frey from the Eagles.

We both understood the subtext. Two years earlier, glam had been the big noise in town but now it was dead on its legs and the rugged and rigidly heterosexual Eagles had lately risen up victorious as the new messiahs of West Coast rock. It wasn’t hard to fathom out why. Their music was as comfortable and reassuring to mainstream America as slipping on a pair of old slippers. It didn’t challenge its audience on any level or promote alternative lifestyles. It just blended together contemporary hippie mysticism with fanciful cowboy folklore and then served the combo up like a musical box of chocolates wrapped up in a ribbon-bow of mock-prairie harmonising. Their records were like those washed-denim jeans that were so in vogue at the time: bland, inauthentic but impossible to escape. More than any other home-grown act, they had their collective finger on the pulse of what America really wanted to hear in the mid-seventies.

Frey and the rest of his cocaine cowboy musical fraternity had their own upmarket Hollywood watering hole to frequent when they weren’t cooking up new mellow tunes in the studio for further domination of the airwaves. It was called the Roxy and was situated on the Sunset Strip only a few doors away from the now-ailing Whisky a Go Go. There was a room to drink in, a room to eat in and a room to watch live entertainment in, as well as a dance floor, but most of the human interaction inevitably went on around the bar area. Every second-division rock musician in the region seemed to have a tab there and could be found draped over a bar stool on any given night trying to drown their professional and personal woes with copious shots of tequila. You rarely saw a smile on any of their faces. Hedonism had lately become a singularly joyless pursuit on the West Coast.

Meanwhile, out on the sidewalk the damaged and terminally drug-diminished were only growing in number. Wherever unsuspecting pedestrians went, they’d be approached by some intense young person attempting to indoctrinate them into one dubious cult or another. All these broken spirits had the same basic rap: the end is nigh, the devil has won, give up your ego and all worldly possessions and join us as we sink into blind submission to some crackpot deity.

Hollywood’s moneyed elite - the town’s real movers and shakers - had long since learned to avoid rubbing shoulders with its walking wounded. It was all too elementary. If you didn’t care to be hassled by scary ‘street’ people, then you simply didn’t go out in the streets. Employing this logic to its fullest degree, the area’s superstars tended to lock themselves away at home in Malibu or Bel Air, only venturing out to record or visit their dealers. Every now and then there’d be some ugly public brouhaha: some liquor-looped English drummer and his troglodyte roadies smashing up a local bistro, or Sly Stone and his hoodlum cronies pulling guns on a receptionist at the Record Plant in a seriously misguided attempt to retrieve several master tapes Sly had recorded there without ever paying for the sessions. But most of the real madness of the time was played out behind the locked doors and gated driveways of remotely located luxury mansions once owned by movie stars from the silent-picture age that no one seemed to remember the names of.

Such an arrangement was ideal for at least one foreign body who’d lately beamed himself down into the community. David Bowie had moved to the City of Angels around the same time I had - sometime in February - but was clearly in no mood to celebrate his arrival with the locals. He was conspicuously absent from all the clubs and social functions during that month and the ones that followed. He’d first found fame as a flamboyant ‘look at me’ kind of fellow but now he seemed to be invaded by a Howard Hughes-sized craving for self-seclusion. It made sense. He’d been going through many ch-ch-changes of late and, like a snake, had been shedding a lot of dead skin. Musically speaking, he’d daringly jettisoned glam only to plausibly reinvent himself as a white soul boy fronting an upmarket disco revue. His physical appearance had undergone a startling transformation too. Where once he’d resembled an alien transsexual from the planet Outrageous, he now affected the dress code of an emaciated hop-head straight out of a Damon Runyon novel set in the McCarthyite fifties. Every time Bowie appeared in public that year, he looked like he’d just stepped out of an audition for Guys and Dolls.

Bowie was in LA partly to further distance himself from Tony Defries’s ruinously extravagant New York-based management empire Mainman, which the singer had lately forged a legal separation from. On discovering that their meal ticket had left them in the lurch and flown westward, the fame-seekers who made up the organisation began a frenzied smear campaign of public gossiping that was heard loud and clear throughout the industry. Bowie - his jilted employees maintained - had lately become mentally unhinged, had a raging cocaine problem and needed to be institutionalised before he drove himself terminally crazy or - worse - killed himself. In the weeks and months that followed his exodus to LA, phone lines across America were throbbing with rumours of Bowie cavorting with white witches, pentagrams, exorcisms and Nazi theology. Hearing this stuff, it became obvious why he no longer felt the urge to embrace the madness of the Hollywood streets. From the sound of things, it was already all going on in his overstimulated mind.

Bowie also had a new album set for imminent release, his first full-tilt foray into contemporary soul music, which he’d recorded both in Philadelphia and Manhattan throughout the previous year. He’d briefly toyed with the idea of calling it Shilling the Rubes - Jewish slang for ‘ripping off the peasants’ - but had later relented, titling it instead Young Americans. A song of the same name was the opening track and RCA, Bowie’s record label, had earmarked it as the project’s first single as well. One sultry day in mid-February, I was in a Sunset Strip coffee shop with Iggy Pop when the radio playing over the loudspeaker system suddenly announced they were about to unveil an exclusive preview of David Bowie’s latest musical caper. The song came and went, leaving me underwhelmed. True, Bowie once again had hit upon a brand-new musical hybrid - Johnnie Ray meets gospel - but the blend sounded as forced as a shotgun wedding. Iggy liked it, though. He genuinely admired Bowie’s sense of creative ambition and thought he was a ‘damned fine singer to boot. It’s a good piece of work.’ He kept repeating, ‘He’s still a white-hot talent. ’ Neither of us knew it then but in less than a month Bowie would start focusing that white-hot talent of his on heating up Iggy’s own career. It wouldn’t come a moment too soon.

Bowie and Iggy’s personal circumstances at that point in time couldn’t have been more different. The former had supposedly been stripped of a large chunk of his financial net worth in his recent legal battles with Mainman but was still a wealthy young dude with power, prestige and a doting entourage to cater to his every nutty whim. He could make a bizarre public spectacle of himself - as he did that same month when he’d turned up on US television screens to give Aretha Franklin a special Grammy Award, only to deliver a drug-addled eulogy to Lady Soul sounding like Peter O’Toole on PCP - and no one thought any the worse of him. He might have lately become a raving coke fiend like the gossips were claiming but it hadn’t yet robbed him of his golden touch in the industry, and that was all that really mattered.

Iggy - by contrast - was poverty-stricken and semi-homeless, crashing in the spare room of his former Stooges guitarist James Williamson’s modest Sunset Strip apartment and living an existence that can be best described as ‘hand to mouth’. He was no longer - technically speaking-a drug addict, mainly because he simply didn’t have the financial resources to sustain such a lifestyle. In February you could even see him early in the morning jogging the length and breadth of the Sunset Strip. But he was also bored and deeply gloomy about the state of inactivity his musical career had stalled into during the past twelve months, and these factors often compelled him to still get fucked up. He and Williamson were trying to put something together-a new band - with two local brothers, Hunt and Tony Sales, tentatively pencilled in as the rhythm section and a guy called Scott Thurston - whom Iggy always referred to as ‘Doll-face’ - who’d already worked with the Stooges on keyboards. But there was little local interest and no record-label patronage forthcoming. The Stooges had splintered apart with no record royalties or performance income to tide their members over and only bad memories and bad karma as a continued reminder of their very existence. Iggy was doing the only thing he knew how to do - just soldiering on - but he often felt he was beating his head against a brick wall. Worse still, the rest of Hollywood had seen him in some truly pitiful conditions out in public over the past two years and had reached the conclusion that he was just another lost cause.

In a town where fame and money are worshipped above all things, there is little pity and zero tolerance for those with the potential to achieve both who nonetheless end up broke, unemployable and out on the streets. On at least one occasion when Iggy and I were together in local clubs some ‘industry insider’ would take me aside and lecture me about the supposedly dire consequences of ‘being seen with that loser’. ‘Listen,’ I’d fire back, ‘Iggy Pop is not a loser. He’s already made three records that one sweet day will come to redefine the very sound and vision of rock ’n’ roll. The women are all still in love with him and most men still want to be him. This man you call a loser - really, he’s the king of the world.’

Which was precisely how I saw him back then: bloodied but unbowed, still a worthy target for veneration despite his self-destructive skittishness and catastrophic run of bad luck. Over the next two months I spent a lot of time in his company, buying him meals, following him around from place to place in search of free drugs and generally listening to him philosophise at length about life, art and his tumultuous career to date. The guy presented me with such irresistible subject matter to write about later on. But mainly I was drawn to him like a young disciple seeking out his personal guru.

I didn’t see his poor-boy status as demeaning and contemptible - I even found it oddly inspiring. Iggy - from my perspective - had lately turned floating through life like a cool breeze into a kind of zen art. It helped of course that practically every woman in the region nursed a raging crush on the guy and was only too happy to invite him into their homes, even if it meant only to share their drug stashes. There were a couple of lesbians living in the same apartment building as James and Iggy and even they were aflame with mad love for the man. Everywhere he went, females stalked him like bounty hunters. At first I thought it was just down to his personal charisma. But then late one night in early March we found ourselves both standing outside the Roxy surrounded by a bevy of equally intoxicated revellers. I was staring up at the stars in the sky above when I heard a sound like running water below me. I looked down to my left and saw Iggy holding what at first appeared to be a fire hose from which a flood of liquid was pouring onto the sidewalk. I looked again. It wasn’t a fire hose, it was his penis urinating all over the club’s courtyard. Everyone stopped their idle banter and stared at his wedding tackle in mid-gush. It was uncommonly big. Then he shook the last drops off, stuck it back in his jeans and walked off into the night as if nothing had happened.

Iggy Pop’s penis is actually a bit of a thorny topic with me. I wish he’d keep it under wraps when it comes time to step out in the public arena. Seeing it or hearing him describe it in song is just too much information. David Bowie is apparently of the same opinion. ‘I wish Jim wouldn’t keep exposing himself,’ he informed a French newspaper back in the nineties. Put our reactions down to an Englishman’s natural sense of reserve. Back in the old country people called them ‘private parts’ for a reason.

Maybe he had the same problem when they later shared an apartment in West Berlin that I encountered from time to time in 1975 when I happened to pass out on the sofa at James Williamson’s place and ended up spending the night there. The next morning I’d awaken with a fierce hangover only to see Iggy parading around stark naked before my ill-focused eyes. There was inevitably something slightly intimidating about the ease with which he let himself be witnessed au naturel. And it only got worse when I later joined him for an impromptu swim at a nearby hotel pool. My own more modestly proportioned sexual apparatus was duly stricken by some serious shrinkage just as soon as I’d jumped into the cold water. Iggy, as you might imagine, didn’t seem to suffer from this kind of humiliation. See, that’s the problem whenever you hang out with a fellow who just happens to possess unfeasibly large genitalia. He’s got a huge penis, you don’t, and the contrast inevitably begins eating away at your personal sense of manly self-esteem. But I never let the matter sully our relationship because I was always more interested in what was going on in the man’s soul. And I sense that David Bowie felt the same way.

In all the biographies and articles written about Bowie and/or Iggy, it’s claimed that the pair stepped into a studio to write and record together for the first time ever sometime in May 1975. But the session actually occurred some two months earlier, in mid-March by my recollection because Iggy told me about it the day after. Bowie had phoned him up clear out of the blue and invited him to collaborate on some new material he was set to demo in a local Hollywood recording facility. Iggy turned up at the appointed time to find a rail-thin Bowie alone in the studio apart from an engineer and an oval-faced teenager who turned out to be the journalist Cameron Crowe on assignment for both Rolling Stone and Playboy magazines. After snorting cocaine together, Bowie and Iggy set about composing and then recording three impromptu songs - ‘Turn Blue’, ‘Speak to Me’ and ‘Sell Your Love’ - with the latter supplying both lyrics and vocals and the former playing and overdubbing all the instruments himself. There were scattered moments of open conflict. At one point Bowie admonished Iggy for sounding ‘too much like Mick [Jagger]’. ‘I don’t sound like fuckin’ Mick,’ the Mighty Pop snapped back sniffily. But this experiment in creative human bonding turned out to be a successful one for both parties. Iggy was elated to be back in a studio and working with such a quick-thinking and prestigious presence. And the prestigious presence was thrilled too - if Cameron Crowe’s account of the session later printed in Rolling Stone is any indication. ‘Bowie clutches his heart and beams like a proud father watching his kid in the school play . . . “They just don’t appreciate Iggy,” he is saying. “He’s Lenny fucking Bruce and James Dean. When that adlib flow starts, there’s nobody like him. It’s verbal jazz, man!”’

It was Iggy’s talent for ‘verbal jazz’ that ultimately attracted the newly christened Thin White Duke to work with him - rather than a desire for some Velvet Goldmine-like sexual trysting. David Jones had devoured Jack Kerouac’s On the Road as a teenager. Now, in his twenties, he’d found the ultimate wild American friend - his very own Neal Cassady - to share his life with.

History now indicates that Bowie and Iggy did indeed become travelling companions, globetrotting the world - and elsewhere - together. But these journeys only began taking place the following year. After the session, Iggy didn’t hear from him for months. The Thin White Duke had other more pressing matters to regulate. There was a film being shot in Mexico that summer entitled The Man Who Fell to Earth that he’d agreed to play the starring role in. There was a new manager and new business advisers to select and monitor. But, most urgently, he needed to be put in touch with a reputable exorcist. In her autobiography Backstage Passes his then-wife Angie recalls receiving a barely coherent phone call from her husband that must have taken place shortly after the Iggy session: ‘He was in a house somewhere in LA and three people - a Warlock and two witches - were holding him for some terrible Satan-related reason. He wanted to get away . . . but the witches wouldn’t let him leave.’ Flying over from London to help calm her spouse’s paranoid fantasies, she ended up consulting a white witch herself about the best way to exorcise demonic spirits from their temporary LA homestead. The real problem, she strongly implied in her text, was that these spirits were nothing more than hallucinations visited upon Bowie due to his grave overdependence on cocaine and a general lack of food and sleep.

Iggy too had hellhounds dogging his trail. His demons were real though: poverty, public indifference, a stalled career, boredom, frustration and flat-out despair. He still had his patrons. A gay youth named Raymond who’d somehow managed to con his way into receiving ATD - financial aid for the totally disabled - even though he was quite able-bodied would turn up every month to share his drugs and government cheque with his downtrodden hero. A teenaged girl whose father was a rich Mafia lawyer would raid her parents’ jewellery stash, pawn the stolen items and then give the money to Iggy to tide him over financially for a couple of weeks at a time. He’d mastered how to survive in the margins alongside the rest of the dispossessed and how to gainfully court the kindness of strangers. But he was also going stir-crazy because he’d been born with a hyperactive nature and couldn’t stand being made temporarily redundant as a performer and musician. He always needed some work-related pursuit to keep him halfway anchored or else he’d be off somewhere running wild, spinning like a spinning top in a hurricane. Drugs were still a problem for him because he still intuitively believed he needed to be intoxicated in order to summon forth the essential all-defiant Iggyness that lurked within his otherwise somewhat guarded and inward-looking personality. But the drugs weren’t working any more because his nervous system couldn’t take the continued abuse. Back in the not-so-distant past, chemicals had helped ease the pain and beat the odds but now they were only pushing him further and further into the black hole of despair.

Another outstanding LA-based music-maker struggling to hang on to his sanity in the mid-seventies was Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys’ former guiding light. Iggy had encountered him once at a mansion in the Hollywood Hills. Alice Cooper had also been on the premises. Wilson - overweight, sweating profusely and dressed only in pyjamas and a dressing gown - had tried to get the two singers to harmonise on a version of ‘Shortnin’ Bread’ that he’d improvised on a nearby piano. I asked Iggy how Wilson had seemed that night. ‘Like a total, certifiable lunatic,’ came the reply.

Everyone in Hollywood had their own ‘crazy Brian’ anecdote to share. Iggy and James Williamson’s next-door neighbour was a woman who’d recently become the personal astrologer of Wilson’s wife Marilyn and she’d often recount with saucer-eyed incredulity the dysfunctional vibe of her new employer’s Hollywood home. A guy living just down the hall had once stumbled upon Wilson passed out on someone’s lawn. It often made for painful listening: people invariably invoked the term ‘some kind of permanent brain damage’ when attempting to define his mindset.

I was staying in the spare room of Ben Edmonds’s rented house at this point and most mornings I’d awaken to the gentle pitter-patter of early morning rain just as dawn was lighting up the sky. By 7 a.m. the sun would be gleaming and I’d fleetingly feel that healing California glow I’d come in search of. To keep that good feeling flowing, I’d play Beach Boys records throughout the morning way into the afternoon - early stuff like Summer Days (and Summer Nights!!) and the incomparable Today!. I needed to rid myself of all the jadedness I’d lately become engulfed by, and the Beach Boys’ vintage music proved a bracing tonic in that regard. It still thrilled me the way it had when I’d first been exposed to it as a dreamy-headed pre-pubescent sprog. There was hope yet. And the more I listened, the more obsessed I became with trying to fathom out what had really happened to Wilson in his rise and fall from grace. Without at first realising it, I’d found my next project for the NME.

When the penny dropped, I went into full ‘investigative journalist’ mode, tearing around the region in search of clues and Beach Boys acquaintances who could still remember what had transpired in the LA music community over the past fifteen years. His evolving story soon started to feel like a potent metaphor for La-La Land itself. It had once been the closest thing in the Western world to a Garden of Eden. But disruptive forces had taken dominion over the terrain and turned it into a sun-baked snake pit. Many of the carefree golden boys and girls who’d roamed the beaches with surfboards back in the sixties were now crazy-eyed human wreckage. No wonder Brian Wilson had retreated deep inside his bedroom and become scarily obese and creatively inactive. He just wasn’t made for these times.

With the promised land’s native spawn starting to turn distinctly frayed and crispy around the edges, it was down to the bulldog-breed expat rockers who’d lately installed themselves in this balmier clime to bring the requisite star-power and sparkle back to Tinseltown. Like David Bowie, they’d come to luxuriate in the American dream after having spent far too long cocooning in England’s dreary landscape only to find the drinks more toxic, the lines growing fatter and the laughs getting thinner. No fewer than two ex-Beatles, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, were holed up there now, though they generally made a point of never seeking out each other’s company. The still boyish-looking McCartney - in town to mix Wings’ Venus and Mars album - had lately sullied his usual squeaky-clean image by getting busted driving around Santa Monica with reefer in the car. Wife Linda saved him from possible extradition by taking the rap. Starr meanwhile had fallen into the role of Hollywood’s most illustrious town drunk, with local lesser lights like Harry Nilsson and ex-Monkee Micky Dolenz providing a raucous and ever-willing entourage at watering holes dotted throughout the region. But lately he was facing stiff competition: Keith Moon had moved into the area too and was bent on drinking the town dry. Everyone remembers Moon nowadays as this mischievous imp who caused mayhem and merriment wherever he went but the man I saw night after night out in the clubs rarely corresponded to this image. He’d be sitting in a corner with a look of utter misery on his face, pouring booze down his neck to drown his sorrows and still his inner demons. Where had all the good times gone for these guys? Those crazy days and crazy nights, those high-spirited Pied Piper sixties? One minute they and their peers were high and happy and on the brink of some shared state of enlightenment, the next they were nursing dour faces and stiff drinks and practising the dark art of self-obliteration. The spell had been broken - that was it. The good magic just wasn’t happening any more and everyone who’d lived in the cloud-cuckoo-land of Utopia now had to face the painful descent back to planet Earth and the harsh realities of broken marriages and aimless hedonism.

And how was I personally bearing up in this godforsaken sun-blistered environment? As well as could be expected. I’d take half a Quaalude most evenings: it made life more fuzzy and Felliniesque. I even started drinking furtively for the first and only time in my adult life. The Rainbow served this formidable concoction called a Velvet Hammer which contained vodka but tasted exactly like a chocolate milkshake. Just one shot would send me reeling.

Those two months I spent in Hollywood were also the last time I did any serious womanising. The girls there were very pretty and sexually up for anything. But they often weren’t that bright. So I got myself a girlfriend instead. Her name was Sable Shields and she briefly became my very own California sweetheart. I’d actually first met her two years earlier when she was a local legend, trading under the name of Sable Starr, LA’s wildest wild child and most brazen groupie. She was only fourteen years old back then but had packed so much worldly experience into her short life that she scared me at first. Now she was sixteen and - after illstarred romances with both Iggy Pop and Johnny Thunders - was once more living with her parents, attending school and generally trying to keep out of trouble. We ran into each other at the Whisky a Go Go one night and a mutual attraction sparked between us. I started taking her out on dates - to concerts, movies and the like. Considering our lurid pasts, it was a relatively chaste relationship to begin with. But then of course the inevitable occurred: we soon ditched the lovey-dovey stuff and concentrated more on getting high together and making out. It was the seventies we were living in after all - not some dorky episode of Happy Days - and it just made more sense to kick back and go with the carnal and chemical flow. It was fun too - at least up until the night I nearly died of a heroin overdose whilst in her company.

That unfortunate incident still looms large in my memory, as do the events throughout the week leading up to it. Rod Stewart and the Faces had arrived in town to play a series of sold-out shows at a nearby enormodome and the stars came out in force to welcome them. Backstage on the first night I was standing around jawing with Stewart when a deeply tanned, well-heeled middle-aged couple stepped in to greet the singer. It was the actress Joan Collins, accompanied by her obscenely wealthy husband of the hour. Rod was his usual charming self and Collins wasted no time in then introducing him to a friend of hers whom she’d also brought to the concert. The face, form and flowing blonde hair looked distinctly familiar. ‘’Ere Nick - say hello to Britt Ekland,’ he shouted at me. ‘Rod ’n’ Britt’ soon went on to get designated as the ersatz Burton and Taylor celebrity couple of the rocktastic seventies but this was the moment they first actually met. I don’t recall the Rodster being much impressed by Miss Ekland’s charms at first glance. ‘She’s all right,’ he told me after she and Collins had exited the dressing room. ‘But I’m really waiting for Wednesday. Julie Christie’s supposed to be coming down to the show that night.’

After the first-night performance, Cher threw an impromptu party for the group at her well-appointed Hollywood eyrie. It was meant to be a celebrities-only bash but Ronnie Wood very kindly invited me along to mingle in the glamour, and it was just too good an opportunity to refuse. Fortunately no one bothered to inform the hostess of my profession or else I’d have probably been turfed out without further ado. The sultry songstress was getting a rough old time from the international press at this precise juncture because of her peculiar love life. On the one hand, she was bona fide well-respected Hollywood royalty with a hit TV show still high in the ratings. But ever since she’d broken up with husband/Svengali Sonny Bono, she’d been making distinctly catastrophic choices when it came to finding new suitors and the tabloids were hauling her over the coals for her oddball trysting. She’d recently been linked romantically with feared entertainment-industry power broker David Geffen. Unfortunately he turned out to be gay. Now she’d turned her amorous gaze on Gregg Allman. Allman was the vocalist and gaunt blond-haired figurehead of the Allman Brothers Band, arguably the most popular and successful home-grown US rock act of the early seventies. The Southern rockers were loved nationwide for their often turgid blues-rock improvisations but they were feared too, particularly by industry insiders who’d already seen their barbaric side at close quarters. Their roadies were supposed to have been homicidal thugs. One of them had even done jail time for stabbing a Mafia-affiliated promoter to death in his own club. But the definitive legend surrounding the group involved their guitarist, one Dickey Betts. Apparently he’d been out riding his Harley one day when he became peckish. Seeing a bull grazing in a field, he’d stopped his bike, ambled over to the animal, beat it to death with his bare hands and then cooked it and ate it before casually returning to his vehicle and speeding off again. Clearly, these were fellows it didn’t pay to trifle with.

It was providential indeed then that Gregg Allman was the only ‘bro.’ present at Cher’s little soirée and that he was so utterly cabbaged that night he’d have been hard-pressed to punch his way through a sheet of Kleenex. They say that love is blindness and in Cher’s case this was all too evidently true. It had taken her ages to divine the homoerotic sexual leanings of her previous boyfriend and now she - an ardent anti-druggie - had somehow managed to become smitten with the most notorious celebrity junkie in mid-seventies America. At one point, Allman staggered over to a white piano and attempted to perform a slow blues for his girlfriend’s guests. Whatever drugs he was embalming himself in, they certainly weren’t doing his musical chops any favours. Only Ronnie Wood was impressed by the impromptu recital. Seated next to me, he looked awestruck and mumbled words to the effect that we were both privileged to be in the presence of such a gifted entity. That’s when I came to the realisation that Ronnie Wood wasn’t exactly the brightest light bulb in the great fuse box of life.

But then again, no one ever required the cerebral acumen of a rocket scientist in order to become a successful rock guitarist. He might not have made an ideal contestant for Bamber Gascoigne to browbeat on University Challenge but the happy-go-lucky fellow with the jackdaw face and pineapple hair was still nimble-fingered and personable enough to be sought after by the musical crème de la crème du jour. On the second night of the Faces’ LA festivities, Mick Jagger turned up backstage seemingly out of the blue. There was a tense moment early on when he found himself face to face with the actor Ryan O’Neal, who’d recently been accused in the tabloids of having had a fling with his wife Bianca; Jagger came perilously close to bitch-slapping the grovelling thesp. But his mood lifted once he found the tune-up room, where Wood was strumming away surrounded by several cocaine dealers who were all offering up their merchandise for free.

After the show, we all returned to Wood’s hotel suite. Jagger started talking about a one-day festival show he wanted to set up somewhere in the States that would involve a bill featuring just three acts - the Faces, Led Zeppelin and the Stones. ‘Who’d be the headliner though?’ asked Wood. ‘We can work that out later,’ sniffed Jagger. ‘The thing is - I’m still not sure where we could actually stage it.’ ‘How about Death Valley?’ I offered. No one thought that was very funny. Jagger stayed glued to Wood that night. Back in England Keith Richards had been jamming with an American guitarist called Wayne Perkins and was grooming him as Mick Taylor’s replacement in the Stones. But Jagger was unconvinced and still hankered for ‘Woody’ to fill the role. That’s what this visitation was all about for him, a way to fathom out how the land actually lay for the Faces and whether their guitarist could be easily uprooted from it. In fact, I’ll wager that it was on this very night that Ron Wood first tentatively committed to life as a Rolling Stone. Mick Jagger just wouldn’t let him off the hook.

An even more momentous rock icon left his lush Malibu hidey-hole just to mingle with Woody and his scampish band-mates on their last night in the city of fallen angels: Bob Dylan. The wiry little troubadour with the sagebrush facial hair and the deeply sardonic eyes was still in his Garboesque reclusive phase despite being the comeback king of the season with Blood on the Tracks nestling at the top of the US album charts, but to everyone else’s astonishment made a point of coming out to party down with the Faces. I later wrote in the NME that I’d actually gotten to shake his hand that night but I don’t think I was telling the truth. I hope so anyway because I was ‘in a very bad place’ that evening. Just prior to attending the event, I’d driven over to Danny Sugerman’s house with Iggy and Sable. Johnny the black gay dude I’ve already introduced you to was there with some Mexican heroin he wanted to offload. Mexican heroin was very different from the Chinese rocks I was accustomed to back in London. The latter was ideal for crushing down and snorting but this Mexican stuff was like black chocolate, practically impossible to reduce to powder form. Injecting it directly into a vein was the only way to feel its power. So I persuaded someone present to do just that - to shoot me up for the first time. Oh boy! I just remember the needle piercing my arm, the tiny spool of blood it left when it was removed and then-a rushing sound in my head like migrating birds furiously flying out of my skull. After that - nothing. The next image I recall was Iggy standing over me, shouting and slapping my face. Danny Sugerman was behind him, screaming obscenities and demanding that the singer remove my prone cadaver from his bathroom floor, get the fuck out and never darken his towels again. So Iggy and Sable propped me on their shoulders and dragged me out into the driveway. I couldn’t understand what the fuss was all about: I wanted to fall back into the coma I’d just been rescued from. But Iggy kept getting in my face, shaking me and making sure I was still semi-conscious. We drove around for what felt like hours with the windows down and the breeze from the highway rushing into my face. At one point on this journey I started to fade out again and Iggy stopped the car and dragged me out onto a deserted Hollywood hilltop. It was a beautiful night. LA was stretched out before us in a swampy haze of glowing neon and the sky above us was ablaze with real stars. The only sound to be heard was Iggy’s voice. ‘Just don’t die on me, OK,’ it kept repeating. Thank God he was there to play the good Samaritan. Virtually anyone else in that environment and under those circumstances would have left me to float off into the ether. Hey, it was the seventies, baby. Kindness and basic human decency were mighty thin on the ground.

We finally arrived at the party around midnight. When Rod Stewart saw me weaving uncertainly through the door, he immediately dragged me into the toilet and started throwing tap-water from one of the sinks over my face to help further revive me. It was a gallant gesture but I think now in retrospect he did it more to impress Britt Ekland, who was there by his side. The only other memory I have of that night is this: I was leaning against a toilet-cubicle door with Iggy to my immediate left and a human behemoth hovering over both of us. ‘Old Kenty and Iggy fucking Pop - as I live and breathe,’ the latter exclaimed in an inebriated East London cackle. ‘Look at the state of you two cunts.’ Iggy - who didn’t recognise the guy - was looking at him with a truly disdainful expression and I knew he was about to say something deeply inappropriate like ‘Who is this fat prick anyway?’ So summoning what presence of mind I could muster, I reached out, placed my hand firmly over his mouth before he could utter a single syllable and said loudly and very firmly, ‘It’s Peter Grant, Jim.’ (I called him Jim because he tended to behave more reasonably when addressed by his given name. If you called him ‘Iggy’, he’d inevitably behave like Iggy, and that could prove problematic.) His face completely changed when he heard those words. Iggy knew all about Peter Grant - how feared and all-powerful he was throughout the music industry. He also knew Grant could break him like a twiglet if he felt the urge. All the contempt drained from his eyes in a split second, to be replaced by a look somewhere between stark terror and awe. ‘Hey, Peter, man - great to see ya,’ he spluttered enthusiastically. Grant just stood there grinning madly - he was seriously drunk - and laughing at the state we were both in. It was like two callow young punks suddenly coming face to face with Tony Soprano on a bender in a public rest room. Or two minnows confronting a whale. I told Iggy afterwards - ‘Hey, listen, you saved my life tonight but I may well have saved yours too. If you had said what it looked like you were about to say to Peter Grant before I butted in, he would have crushed you like he did when he recently sat on Elvis Presley’s dad.’

It was one of the juiciest pieces of gossip to have come out of the scandal-mongering seventies: Led Zeppelin get invited to a personal post-gig powwow with Elvis Presley in Las Vegas in early ’75 and their manager only makes the mistake of placing his enormous girth on a chair that - he fails to notice - already contains a frail, sleeping Vernon Presley. In Chris Welch’s posthumous biography of the man, Grant actually verified this improbable tale and even added embellishments. However, my wife recently interviewed one of Elvis’s boys who was present when his boss met the Zeppelin entourage on the night in question - one Jerry Schilling - and he swore that the incident never occurred. Logic indicates that Schilling’s version is the easier to believe; after all, Grant could have broken every bone in the poor man’s body if he’d descended on him from behind. But that doesn’t stop me from wanting it to be true.

I know a thing or two about how gossip is formed and then spread about. I’ve dished it out in my time and felt its boomerang effect as a victim of scurrilous and unfounded rumours myself. It’s usually 30 per cent truth mixed in with 70 per cent wilful misinformation. Most of the time, it’s mean-spirited and unreliable. But in this case, it’s so ludicrously funny it deserves to be written into the history books. Elvis would have killed your ass if you’d have stepped on his blue suede shoes but he didn’t seem to mind when Peter Grant sat on his dad. Maybe he was just too stoned to notice. (Strange rumours were starting to circulate about Presley all around LA. They were saying that the King was a hopeless pillhead junkie. At first it seemed absurd, too implausible to even contemplate. Elvis on drugs? No one could believe it.)

Or maybe the King felt chastened and genuinely taken aback by the sheer power Led Zeppelin wielded throughout the country of his birth at the time of their meeting. By the mid-seventies America had become their own personal fiefdom. No other act was remotely as popular. And in LA particularly the mania surrounding them was so vast and volatile it seemed capable of setting off earthquake-like tremors throughout the community whenever they played there. Zeppelin and their music had a strange, unearthly effect on the region that had to be felt and seen to be believed. The natives went stark staring mad just knowing they were in the vicinity.

Zeppelin and their touring retinue arrived in Hollywood - just as the Faces were finishing up there - in order to play a series of concerts booked all over the West Coast that March. They even had their own private aeroplane waiting at the local airport to wing them to the venues. In the past, the town had played host to the group’s highest times whilst out on the road. But the high spirits of yore were much harder to locate this time around. Cocaine was largely responsible for this hardening of Led Zeppelin’s spiritual arteries. There was far too much of it freely available: dealers would literally line up to share their wares and curry favour with the group’s principals. And the groupie situation surrounding the band had lately gone into a state of red alert. Valley girls were prepared to tear each other limb from limb in order to beat the competition and bed a Zep member. Jimmy Page told me about an incident where one deranged female had placed razor blades in a hamburger bun one of her rivals was about to eat as a way of eliminating her from the competition. The story had helped inspire the lyrics to one of their most recent songs - soon to be available on Physical Graffiti - ‘Sick Again’, Robert Plant’s disapproving ode to these self-styled she-creatures of the Hollywood Hills.

In fact, both Plant and Jones made a point in ’75 of steering well clear of all the groupie hysteria by renting accommodation in quiet mansions near the beach, far away from the Sunset Strip. The rest of the touring party though were happy to install themselves in Hollywood’s Continental Hyatt House hotel in the Strip’s centre, an establishment renowned for turning a blind eye to any outbursts of rock ’n’ roll excess.

Yet even Jimmy Page had grown tired of being fought over by scantily attired LA jailbait. In ’75 he initiated a new sexual pursuit: celebrity wife-swapping. He’d lately been seen enjoying the company of Bebe Buell, Todd Rundgren’s leggy consort, but had chosen Chrissie Wood as his ‘special friend’ throughout this West Coast stopover, a situation that didn’t best please her husband, Ronnie. Page spent practically all his down time sequestered in his suite on the hotel’s top floor. I visited him on several occasions there and found him holding court with a number of other acquaintances, all of us seriously wired on the voluminous quantities of cocaine that were readily available. Heroin was just starting to creep into the picture too. One night, he treated us all to an impromptu screening of Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising, the film he intended to create a soundtrack for later in the year. It lasted for about half an hour and consisted of amateurish home-movie footage shot by Anger of an extremely stoned Marianne Faithfull in black robes silently stumbling down a staircase embedded in the mountains of Egypt, holding a lighted candle.

Page may have been ever-increasingly drawn towards the dark side of life but he didn’t let these preoccupations interfere unduly with his professional responsibilities. He could still detach himself from the madness when he chose to. John Bonham, however, wasn’t so lucky in this respect. Los Angeles brought out all his most disturbing character traits and magnified them to a degree that made him a very frightening individual to be in close physical proximity to. He drank all the time partly as a way to counterbalance all the cocaine he was inhaling continuously. He’d even taken to placing an ounce bag of the stuff between his legs during their live shows and could sometimes be seen placing his hands inside the bag and throwing handfuls of the drug into his nostrils whilst still behind the drum kit. Mick Hinton, his personal roadie, told me once that the entire road crew would very carefully dismantle the kit after each concert’s conclusion and then tip his drum mat over a large sack in order to capture and share the large deposits of cocaine the drummer had spilled onto it during each show.

However, his escalating excesses were turning him into an increasingly tortured figure. One night that week, he ended up spending an evening in the company of Bryan Ferry, the suave Geordie crooner whose Roxy Music were also touring the LA area at that point in time. Ferry later recalled Bonham repeatedly bursting into tears and pleading to return to the relative calm of his home and family back in the Midlands, so terrified was the drummer becoming of his own insatiable appetites whilst on the road.

I made my own escape from LA in early April, just in the nick of time. I returned to London with an unsightly sunburnt face - I’d fallen asleep at an outdoors Beach Boys concert I’d attended two days prior to taking the plane homeward - and no appreciable healthy glow to my features. I’d made few friends during the two months I’d been resident there and was now pretty much persona non grata in the region. Someone had even alerted the local police to have me placed under arrest if I ever returned there (it must have been rescinded; I flew back five years later without incident). The folks over there just didn’t understand kamikaze journalism. The place gave me the fucking willies anyway and I’d rubbed up against enough of its weird scenes and fame-worshipping grotesqueries to last me a lifetime. The way I saw it, California was doing me a favour banning me from its borders. I’d almost died out there but had still managed to tunnel my way out. Plus I had a couple of hot stories to peddle to the NME and its readers. All was not lost - at least not yet.

London hadn’t changed in the time I’d been away from it - it was just as grey and glum-spirited as ever. Glam rock had brought some fleeting colour to its streets and music venues two or three years earlier but now that trend had petered out, all the blokes at gigs and in clubs had gone back to dressing like roadies and the women didn’t look much better. I was still flouncing around in my Beau Brummell phase and was generally mortified by the lack of sartorial flair being exhibited by my pop-picking compatriots that year. But then 1975 was another watershed year in rock and youth culture, and watersheds are generally gloomy places to be stuck in.

It was the last year that old-school rock ’n’ roll values still held the reins over young music-lovers around the world. Throughout the sixties the music itself had grown in structure and complexity in a genuinely forward-thinking fashion, but by the mid-seventies it had become stagnant and far too besotted with its own perceived past. A case in point? John Lennon’s musical output over the two decades. Simply play ‘I Am the Walrus’ from 1967 and then follow it up with ‘Whatever Gets You Thru the Night’ (a US no. 1 hit for him in ’75). The first track is a glorious, mind-boggling sonic lurch into the unknown whilst the second is an unimaginative regurgitation of late-fifties Brill Building popcraft complete with a double-corny sub-King Curtis sax solo. Rock was still hopelessly Yank-fixated, which meant that the vast majority of English acts were still singing with pronounced American accents and name-checking American towns and cities in their songs instead of being true to their real roots and writing about their own experiences and regions. Punk would change that, of course. But punk as we now know it was still a full year away from unleashing its fury.

In its absence, UK-based rock was being hijacked once more by the testosterone brigade - lusty-voiced blues-cliché-spewing lead singers in gonad-constricting loon pants who were always using the medium of music to bray on about their two-fisted manliness and rambunctious hard-loving ways. Ex-Free singer Paul Rodgers - lately a rising star again with Bad Company - was the kingpin of this hirsute studly mob. Legend had it that Rodgers was so manly he could start a show clean-shaven and by the end of the set he’d have grown a full beard before the audience’s very eyes. But a capacity for sudden facial-hair growth is ultimately scant compensation for the lack of musical adventurousness he and his ilk instilled in the mid-seventies rock landscape. I could see it in the rapture-free stares of their London audiences. Everyone looked just as jaded as I still felt. A lot of good music had come out of the early seventies and I’d been there to hear it all. But by mid-decade, inspiration was scarce on the ground. A few gifted mavericks like David Bowie, Steely Dan, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young still released new music of real consequence and artistry but the rest had mostly gotten bogged down in aimlessly parroting whatever they wrong-headedly perceived to be ‘the new contemporary trend’. This was when the musical abomination known as ‘white reggae’ started to materialise. And if rock bands weren’t making complete fools of themselves trying to appropriate rhythms best left to the likes of Toots and the Maytals, they’d be loitering in studios under the influence of too much cocaine attempting to play funk with equally desultory results. What a sorry state contemporary music was in. Two years earlier, I’d returned from the States with my suitcase laden with new records I’d heard whilst there and fallen in love with. When I’d flown back this second time, I hadn’t bothered to take any vinyl whatsoever from my LA sojourn with me. The only piece of music in my luggage had been a master tape James Williamson had made for me of a Stooges gig in Michigan just prior to their final break-up. On it you could hear Iggy being heckled and then physically attacked by a biker gang in the audience. I told James and Iggy I could sell it for them and get them some (much-needed) advance cash in the process, and they’d happily complied. I then flew to Paris and gave it to my pal Marc Zermati, who was the only punk-related person to have his own independent record label - Skydog - at that time. Marc paid them and then received another live Stooges tape by mail from Williamson. The two low-fidelity tapes were sequenced together and released the following year under the title of Metallic KO. The record went on to sell surprisingly well and became a seminal soundtrack for UK punks, who gleefully aped the unruly aggression of the audience response captured within.

Stepping back into NME’s Long Acre office that spring felt strange. Business was booming - the paper was selling more than ever - but morale was low within its ranks. It felt like most of the staff and contributors had suddenly grown detached and cynical about what we were supposed to be doing. Few of us now felt the continued urge to push the envelope and take rock journalism into ever more provocative areas. I was unhappy about this state of affairs and duly vented my spleen on the subject to the guilty parties. And then - just three weeks after waving my unfond farewell to California-I got the sack.

In strict point of fact, I was fired for someone else’s fuck-up. My bosom buddy Pete Erskine was supposed to deliver a cover story one week but missed the deadline because he chose to down a full bottle of cough medicine instead of applying himself to the task at hand. He was so comatose he also neglected to hand in a singles review I’d completed and was counting on him to deliver to one of the editors due down at the printers. This review’s non-appearance was the reason for my sacking. Erskine got off with just a few stern words.

This not unnaturally threw our friendship into a state of some turmoil. I loved Pete dearly - he was my closest friend at the time - but lately he’d become something of a liability. Ever since heroin had come into the picture our relationship had tended to mirror the one later shared by the two protagonists in the film Withnail and I. Pete had left his wife and child and moved into my squalor-ridden Archway retreat (he’d lived there whilst I was off on the West Coast). Suddenly he had no family to keep him in check and got swept up in hard drug use instead. It scared me to see how quickly and how intensely he fell under the lure of heroin. It was like standing next to someone you care about whilst that person is being sucked into quicksand. It hadn’t escaped my attention that I was a bad influence on him: our relationship just ended up bringing out the worst in each other. At first I felt responsible for his worsening state. But then he started screwing up in the workplace and I found myself having to cover for his mistakes. Now I’d been given the boot from the NME over something that was essentially his fault. That’s when I stopped feeling responsible for Pete.

The sacking not only seriously compromised one friendship but also annihilated whatever feelings of camaraderie still lingered within me vis-à-vis the rest of the NME staff. That cherished sense of a shared goal - that ‘all for one and one for all’ high-spiritedness - had left the building back in 1973 or early 1974 at the latest. In its place a mood of divisive complacency had taken over the premises; it increasingly felt like I was one of the only writers who’d stayed committed to upping its level of impact, subject range and journalistic standards. To that end, I was still prepared to risk death, ridicule, deportation and even the wrath of the entire music industry. My colleagues weren’t nearly as gung-ho though. They generally preferred the age-old ‘anything for an easy life’ approach, clocking on and off between 9 and 5 and then stealing away to the comfort zone of their private leisure-worlds outside of pop culture.

Tony Tyler, the paper’s features editor, had basically given up on popular music the day the Beatles broke up and had come to loathe the seventies and its rock musicians with a fierce passion (in the eighties he actually gave vent to this hatred in a slim tome entitled I Hate Rock & Roll). After making it his personal crusade to belittle Bryan Ferry whenever possible in print, he’d turned his disapproving gaze on me. He then persuaded Ian MacDonald that I needed to be put in my place and that the best way to achieve this was to kick me out of the NME. These two then went to Nick Logan and told him I’d become too arrogant and loose-cannon-like and needed to be given my marching orders. This he did - in a short letter he handed me one day in the office. I read it before exiting the premises in high dudgeon.

The weeks that followed are grim ones to recall. They took my name off the NME masthead and acted as though I’d just vanished into thin air. Rumours started circulating throughout London that I was unemployable. Back in the seventies rock journalism wasn’t something the daily papers wished to incorporate into their pages, so career alternatives for me meant signing up with one of the lesser music weeklies - something I wasn’t prepared to do. So I did the only thing I knew how to do when placed in extreme, emotionally depleting circumstances. I went back on the smack.

A month passed before I was struck by a rare moment of lucidity. One night I managed to compose a heartfelt letter to Nick Logan protesting my innocence and generally giving my side of the story. Once he’d read it, he got in touch and asked me out to lunch. During the meal he invited me back into the NME fold under somewhat reduced conditions, and I agreed to return. But things were never the same again for me and that paper. Before I’d viewed the NME as ‘us’; now I saw it as strictly ‘them and me’. Any illusions that we were basically all on the same page and fighting the good fight together went straight out of the window.

I had one ace left up my scribbling sleeve - the Brian Wilson story I’d been researching over the past months. I had enough material for a book but decided instead to have the 40,000-word text I was working on serialised over three separate NME issues. More people would read it that way and I’d be able to show the world, his wife and my in-house persecutors who the real ‘man with the plan’ was when it came to extending the paper’s cutting edge. I went to work like a soul possessed, which was handy as I only had a month to turn it around. The first 20,000 words were a dream: I’d sit there and the prose just flowed out onto the page. I could stay focused and scribbling for up to twenty hours at a stretch. But then - halfway through - something snapped inside my mind and I started losing momentum after that. I’d sit for hours struggling over a single sentence. By the end I felt utterly drained. Nowadays I’m inclined to think that this was because of all the heroin running around my brain and bloodstream but at the time I saw it as something more supernaturally catastrophic, a potentially terminal condition.

Real inspiration - particularly in so-called pop culture - almost always comes in notoriously short spurts. Even Bob Dylan enjoyed only three years as a bona fide creative ground-breaker (’63 to ’66). I’d enjoyed three uplifting years too. From ’72 to mid-’75 my writing talent had been on the rise. It reached its peak with the Wilson investigation. After that it went into free fall. I still contributed to the paper but I don’t think anything they printed with my byline attached during the rest of the decade was up to snuff. Partly it was the drugs, partly it was simple burn-out, but a lot of it was because I’d grown to actively despise the way the NME chewed up and then spat out virtually anyone of substance that came into its orbit - contributors and musicians alike. I no longer trusted anyone who worked there and felt little affinity with their tastes and editorial policies.

As soon as my writing talent began to go on the blink, I realised I needed to start investigating new avenues of gainful creative endeavour, if only to help pay for the drugs I was now addicted to. I tried being a DJ for one night at a Camden Town club called Dingwalls but the bloke running the place told me I wasn’t up to the task because I hadn’t played enough disco. There was only one other halfway viable option open from that point on. I needed to get a group of my own together and make my living as a professional musician.

I’d harboured this particular fantasy from even before reaching puberty. As a child, I’d been forced to study classical piano and had actually learned how to sight-read music in the process. Then I’d fumbled through my teens groping to master simple barre-chord shapes and finger-picking techniques on a crappy acoustic guitar with strings like curtain rails I’d somehow inherited. By the time I’d reached nineteen, I could play both instruments - after a fashion. But I didn’t really know how to play what then constituted rock ’n’ roll in any way, shape or form.

Amazingly, this didn’t prevent me from recklessly offering my guitar-playing services to Iggy Pop the first time I met him back in 1972. That was my dream gig back then - to actually play in the Stooges. Thankfully he rejected my offer pretty much on the spot. I say ‘thankfully’ because had he arranged an audition for me in a rehearsal studio I’d have come out looking like a prize oaf: I’d never actually played an electric guitar up to that point in time. Later that same year the Flamin’ Groovies invited me to be their keyboard player even though I don’t recall us ever playing a note of music together. I was tempted but turned them down mainly because I didn’t want to relocate to San Francisco.

The following year I finally got my first electric guitar. Michael Karoli out of Can sold it to me-a flashy-looking Plexiglas affair that he’d picked up over in Japan and soon tired of. I strummed away on that until-a further twelve months later-I acquired the stolen Fender from Steve Jones. By mid-’75 my living quarters had become overtaken by the six-stringed buggers. You couldn’t move without bumping into a fretboard and knocking the thing to the uncarpeted floor. But my attempts to make music specifically for the public arena up until then had been tentative at best. There were a couple of sessions at Brian Eno’s home studio at Maida Vale. I’d also tried to work with a guy called Magic Michael - an acid head with his own unique personal magnetism who sang like Frank Sinatra and often performed in drag or stark naked. You can catch a glimpse of Michael in full deranged performance flow - replete with shrunken genitalia - in Julian Temple’s Glastonbury film. As you can probably imagine, we went nowhere fast. Michael went on to work as Can’s singer for a couple of months and even moved to Cologne for a while, before resurfacing in London and becoming one of the first signings to Stiff Records. He could have been a massive star but just didn’t have the focus and ambition to make the journey.

At one point, the NME started to take an interest in my musical dabblings. In early ’74 Nick Logan offered to set me up with some esteemed Tin Pan Alley Svengali who’d then be employed to groom me as a performer and recording artiste. His one proviso was that I write about the whole experience and then continue turning out copy for the paper even if my pop-star career were to actually take off. It sounded like a sad old caper to me. Pop stardom really wasn’t something I’d ever craved. And when he went on to suggest that my Svengali could well be Jonathan King, I nipped that idea smartly in the bud without further forethought. The idea of being moulded and talked down to by some self-styled pop pimp was not one that I cared to entertain. So what did I go and do in the summer of ’75? Only link up career-wise with another glib-tongued shyster who dreamed of exploiting and then discarding impressionable young boys with stars in the eyes.

It had been eighteen months since I’d first encountered Malcolm McLaren in Paris and in that time I’d come to view him both as a cultural ally and caring friend. In my darkest hours following the Chrissie Hynde bust-up I’d poured my heart out to him and he’d always listened sympathetically and offered sound advice. But we’d spent most of our times together verbally plotting out the revolution we both recognised that rock music needed to undergo in order to be truly relevant again. Looking around sleepy London town in 1974 though we’d quickly concluded there were no authentically wild young stars-in-waiting to heed sedition’s call. So we turned our attentions to America and its two struggling punk-rock forefathers. I’d recently tried - and failed - to persuade the Stooges to regroup. During the same time line McLaren had moved to Manhattan in order to attempt to reverse the down-bound fortunes of his beloved New York Dolls. During the first six months of 1975 he took on the self-appointed role of being their personal style and image consultant. He dressed them in red vinyl costumes designed by him and then sewn up by Vivienne Westwood and also managed to coerce the group’s principals into writing a batch of new songs. But then he took up with the wrong-headed notion of persuading them to embrace Marxism and quote passages from Mao Tse-tung’s little red book during their live sets. Americans throughout the ages have always taken a distinctly dim view of Communist propagandists and certainly weren’t about to tolerate it coming from a down-at-heel group of three-chord-playing cross-dressing drug addicts. Sensing their jig was well and truly up, the quintet splintered apart in the middle of a US club tour, leaving McLaren to pack up his tent and scurry back to London.

The day after his return - it would have been sometime in early June - he and Westwood came to visit me in my soon-to-be-vacated Archway lair (the landlord - distressed at my lack of domestic skills - had found a loophole in our leasing agreement and was booting me off the premises). For several hours he ranted at the expense of the lately departed Dolls. They’d vomited over the clothes he’d had made for them. They’d sniggered at the Marxist manifestos he’d tried to impress upon them. The singer was a social gadfly, the bassist a raging alcoholic and the lead guitarist and drummer were so junked up they were perpetually half-asleep. He’d started out with high hopes but the group had let him down at every turn. They’d run out of ambition and moxie and their individual shortcomings had turned them into failures who deserved to fail. He was well rid of them - or so he kept saying.

Trying to change the subject I asked McLaren if he had any projects or plans now he was back in London. That’s when he told me he’d decided to commit his future energies to shaping and guiding the group that our teenaged reprobate colleagues Steve Jones and Paul Cook - as well as his old shop assistant Glen Matlock - had been struggling to launch. They were young and malleable - unlike the Dolls - and could be counted upon to kick up enough of a storm to rudely awaken the sleeping metropolis from its post-hippie coma. I’d yet to hear them play and so was initially sceptical. But he was already grandly scheming out their fate. He’d even come up with a name for his new wards whilst out in the States. He was going to call them ‘QT Jones and the Sex Pistols’.

A few weeks later, he returned to ferry me over to witness a group rehearsal. We drove to a huge building somewhere in White City that had - until recently - been a functioning BBC studio. But the TV company had moved its staff, cameras and audio equipment to another location, leaving the old premises empty and guarded over by one none-too-vigilant caretaker. This caretaker had a son called Warwick Nightingale, who happened to be one of Steve Jones’s little gang and who’d been assigned the lead-guitar duties in his group. Warwick - better known as ‘Wally’ - had either persuaded his dad to let them turn one of the rooms into their very own rehearsal space or else he’d simply stolen the keys to the building and opened it up to his colleagues.

The four of them were lurking at the entrance as McLaren and I drove up. Then we entered the premises, walking through one spacious stripped-down room after another until we reached one that possessed a makeshift wooden stage on which several amplifiers were placed. I complimented them on their choice of equipment - it was all very state-of-the-art - and they told me it had all been stolen, every last stick of it. The microphones - they then revealed gleefully - had been heisted from David Bowie’s 1973 farewell to Ziggy Stardust concert. Jones and Cook had hidden under the chairs after the audience had left the London venue and stayed there for several hours. During that time, the onstage equipment had not been dismantled. Instead a roadie had been elected to keep an eye on it but he’d fallen asleep on a chair next to the drum riser. Jones and Cook eventually tiptoed around the slumbering roadie onto the stage itself and stole the microphones by clipping them from their leads with a pair of garden pliers.

In due course they plugged their guitars in, Cook sat down behind the drum kit and the four of them performed their entire repertoire to McLaren and me. It mostly consisted of songs first recorded in the mid-to-late sixties by hit-making London-based pop groups of that era, like the Small Faces’ 1965 debut single ‘Whatcha Gonna Do About It’ and a lesser-known album track called ‘Understanding’, followed by the Who’s ‘Call Me Lightning’ and ‘Substitute’. After that their song choices became distinctly ill-advised. They struggled through a wooden rendition of ‘Everlasting Love’, the old Robert Knight soul classic that had also been covered back in 1968 by a UK act called the Love Affair, before segueing unconvincingly into the Foundations’ cheesy pop classic ‘Build Me Up Buttercup’. Contrary to later legend, they could play quite well. Matlock and Cook had already bonded into a tighter and more energetic rhythm section than the New York Dolls had ever boasted in their ranks whilst Jones’s singing style was a straight - but not unimpressive - copy of Steve Marriott’s classic larynx-strafing hollerings. But there was nothing remotely radical about them. They were marooned in a musical past they’d barely known.

But then - after some coaxing - they decided to unveil the only two songs they’d managed to write amongst themselves. One was called ‘Scarface’ and the other ‘Did You No Wrong’, and they were exactly the same piece of music with different words. ‘Scarface’ was about a gangster and boasted a lyric written by Jones’s profligate stepdad, a retired boxer. Steve pulled out a piece of paper at one point and showed me the verses written in their author’s own halting scribble. Almost every word had been grievously misspelt. Still, I wasn’t looking to these lads for tips on good grammar. At this point I just wanted to hear them play something that sounded reasonably contemporary and ‘Did You No Wrong’ finally managed to fit the bill. It’s the only self-penned song from their early repertoire that they later went on to record for posterity and that later studio version - still available for all to hear - isn’t so different from what I heard that day. Sure, John Lydon’s recorded vocal is more sneerfully adenoidal than Steve Jones’s gruff, hectoring original delivery but the lyrics - written prior to Lydon’s arrival but still credited to him - are pretty much identical. Ditto the riff, chords, groove and sense of lurching unbridled menace. All I knew hearing it for the first time was that - in a year filled with cocaine muzak and pretentious sonic blather and smoke - it was like suddenly breathing fresh air after being trapped down a mine shaft. I hadn’t heard straight rock ’n’ roll sound this spry and impactful since the Stooges were still firing on all cylinders back in 1972. At the end, McLaren and I exchanged meaningful glances. The little red-headed bastard might actually be on to something here, I remember thinking.

In due course, the group downed tools and looked to us for some kind of verdict on what they’d just been playing. I told them I was enthusiastic about their self-penned stuff but warned them to banish ‘Everlasting Love’ and ‘Build Me Up Buttercup’ from the repertoire, ditch the underwhelming mid-sixties déjà vu vibe and start listening and learning from the more current US-BASED punk-rocker elite. McLaren then took over the discussion in heated tones. He immediately turned on poor Wally Nightingale, telling him he didn’t belong in the group, couldn’t play well enough and that he should just take his guitar and vanish: he was fired. This was a bold move on McLaren’s part. Wally held the keys to the rehearsal space after all and was also probably the most proficient player of the lot of them. But McLaren couldn’t abide the fact that he wore glasses and was the most overtly sweet-natured of the bunch. He was already thinking in terms of image at the expense of musical prowess. I’d rarely seen anyone behave in such an overtly ruthless and tactless way towards another human being. Nightingale’s eyes were moist with tears as he exited the building: with no forewarning he’d just been viciously exiled from the gang he’d mucked around with since childhood. Not that his old cronies appeared to give a damn. A minute after he’d gone, both Cook and Jones started running him down, calling him a ‘cunt’ and ridiculing his teary-eyed departure. That’s when I got my first serious insight into what a bunch of flint-hearted little back-stabbers they really were.

But the surprises weren’t over yet. Nightingale’s sudden sacking meant there was now a big hole in the group’s sound. Steve Jones had worn a guitar around his neck when they’d played but - as he’d only started actually learning how to play the thing three months earlier - he’d employed it as a convenient stage prop rather than a musical instrument. ‘Who’s going to play guitar then?’ Glen Matlock asked McLaren. McLaren turned in my direction: ‘Nick plays guitar. He can be your new member.’ He didn’t ask me if I was interested in taking on the role - we’d had no prior words on the matter whatsoever. It was just presented as a fait accompli. Suddenly I was a Sex Pistol.

‘Well, why not?’ was my first and foremost reaction. At that exact moment in history, I wasn’t doing much with my time apart from hunting down heroin. At least it would make a change from lying horizontally on a broken-springed mattress and staring dreamily at the ceiling. But there was a lot of work to be done. And they were still kids. There was only a four-year age difference between us but when you’re a worldly twenty-two-year-old and you’re suddenly thrown into the company of eighteen-year-old artful dodgers, relationships are never going to be balanced. It was a challenge - but a worthwhile challenge to take up, whatever the outcome. I’d never been in a group before and a part of me relished the experience of now being part of a music-making gang. Plus I sensed that - with or without me - they would become a successful act because they were still so young and so cocksure. At the very least, it would be something to tell the grandkids in years to come.

My Sex Pistols sojourn lasted roughly two months, possibly throughout July and August ’75. I can’t say for sure because time lines tend to become unreliably elastic when you’re as stoned as I was throughout that period. But that’s how it feels to me now, looking back from the vantage point of relative sobriety. We didn’t rehearse every day - more like once a week. We still used the old BBC building for these sessions. God knows how they’d squared this with spurned Wally and his caretaking dad but they managed to hold on to the space until autumn, when McLaren found them a basement in Denmark Street to work in. At first I busied myself working out the guitar parts of their existing repertoire. I made sure both ‘Everlasting Love’ and ‘Build Me Up Buttercup’ were given the heave-ho. McLaren then coerced us into covering two singles that were part of the oldies collection on his shop’s jukebox. Both songs were B-sides. One - ‘Don’t Give Me No Lip, Child’ - had first been recorded in the mid-sixties by an English singer called Dave Berry. The other - ‘Do You Really Love Me Too? (Fool’s Errand)’ - was a pop song performed by McLaren’s personal fetish object Billy Fury. Neither number did the band’s evolving set list any great favours - to me they were just more wrong-headed retro tomfoolery - but at least learning and then struggling to rearrange them was more gratifying than just aimlessly jamming.

The most productive moments between us happened when Jones and Matlock came round to my place separately and I’d play them records and tapes in an attempt to locate new material and a new direction. Matlock wasn’t like the other two, which is to say he wasn’t particularly tricky or light-fingered. He was more middle-class - about to enrol in art college - and he’d actually read a few books. Jones, on the other hand, had been a borstal boy and was completely illiterate - unable to decipher a single printed word or even write his own name. That didn’t make him a fool in my book. What he lacked in basic schooling he’d more than made up for in accumulating street-survival savvy throughout his teens. But he was at a crossroads in his young life with only two career options open to his lack of qualifications. He could either follow the path he was already on and become a serious hard-core criminal robbing banks and the like. Or he could chance his arm and try and make it as a rock star. For the time being, the two roads were intertwined: he’d already stolen all the group’s equipment and continued to filch and then sell guitars - and other musical equipment - from various central London instrument stores. In fact, no one in Britain at that time had a greater talent for hiding guitars inside a large coat and then vanishing from the scene of the crime than Steve Jones. Now it was time to find out if that talent extended to actually playing them as well.

That’s why I was seeing so much of him chez moi. We’d sit around and work on our hopefully intertwining guitar parts. McLaren had decided that the group needed a new singer and that Jones should just play guitar in the line-up from now on. As I just mentioned he’d only started three months earlier. But he was an incredibly quick learner. What had taken me literally years to put into practice on a fretboard he managed to master in a matter of weeks. Actually, that was the most exciting aspect of being in the Sex Pistols musical boot camp - watching Steve Jones find his own voice as a guitar player. Once his fingers could form a few rudimentary chord shapes he was off and running because those chords finally offered him a language to express himself in that had nothing to do with his nemesis, the written word. I tried to show him some minor chords but he wasn’t interested in them: they sounded too pretty and soft-laddish to his ears. He preferred just the big brash major barre chords. They better conveyed his inner spirit, I soon realised. Steve after all wasn’t given to introspection, musical or otherwise. He wasn’t the sort of bloke you’d try and introduce to the music of Nick Drake. I bombarded him with Stooges thug rock instead. ‘Forget the Small Faces - listen to Iggy and his boys. Adopt what the Stooges are doing on their records and make it the integral part of your sound’ became my mantra to the group. (I even phoned James Williamson’s LA phone number to tell Iggy about the Sex Pistols and attempt to persuade him to fly over and be their frontman. That was when I learned the news that he had in fact just been incarcerated in an LA mental hospital.) I also force-fed him and Matlock a cassette tape John Cale had given me of some studio recordings he’d produced for a Boston band called the Modern Lovers. Matlock became greatly enamoured of two tracks on that tape - ‘Pablo Picasso’ and ‘Roadrunner’ - and started pushing to feature the latter in the Pistols’ repertoire. I in turn became increasingly insistent about covering ‘No Fun’ from the Stooges’ first album. That was my contribution to their musical development really: stripping away all the retro silliness and pointing them squarely towards the future.

McLaren meanwhile was focused on finding that elusive new singer. For reasons only he can tell you, he refused to go down the conventional route and place an advert in the ‘musicians wanted’ back pages of the weekly music comics. Instead he chose a more unorthodox approach: he’d hear about a group of teenagers who were performing at a minor social event being held around the outskirts of London and then drive to the event - with the rest of us in tow - to see if they had a singer worth poaching. I’ll never forget him guiding us to what turned out to be a bar mitzvah celebration out in Hemel Hempstead in order to check out the musical entertainment, which consisted of five spotty youths sleepwalking their way through the Bay City Rollers’ recent hits. After they’d finished playing, McLaren strode up to their singer - who looked and sang like a junior bank clerk - and went into his pre-rehearsed pitch. ‘I’m the manager of the Sex Pistols, the most exciting group to ever come out of London, the greatest city in the world. We’re the Rolling Stones to the Bay City Rollers’ Beatles and we’re looking for a singer. Do you fancy coming down to our rehearsal place and giving it a shot?’ The kid looked at him and the rest of us with a kind of clueless scepticism. ‘No thanks, mate’ was all he muttered before sidling off to a table on which several unopened beer cans were still loitering.

Undeterred, McLaren abandoned the bar mitzvah circuit and chose to continue his quest by frequenting the various gay London nightclubs that had sprung up over the past five years. One afternoon he turned up to the rehearsal room accompanied by an extremely timid young man who stuttered whenever he spoke. McLaren immediately demanded that we audition him, insisting that this nerve-wracked youth might well be the answer to our prayers. Like good foot soldiers we did as we were told but I could tell that none of the group were happy about this latest turn of events. Malcolm then gave the lad an earnest pep-talk and told him to stand in front of the microphone stand and sing some notes. He got him positioned between Jones and me and we all started playing. But the youth just stood there silently trembling. This was someone who would have had difficulty saying boo to a goose, never mind fronting the Sex Pistols. McLaren started going ballistic. ‘Try putting a guitar round his neck,’ he suddenly demanded. ‘He can’t play anything but it might help put him in the mood to sing.’ So we hung a guitar around his neck - but it only made him look more awkward and ill at ease. Malcolm meanwhile was berating the guy for being so timid and Jones and I were looking at both of them with angry eyes. We tried one more run-through but it was evidently too much for our callow vocalist. He remained mute, staring into space with a stricken look in his eyes whilst a puddle of urine began to appear from out of his left trouser leg. If Jones hadn’t moved the mike stand, the poor chap would have probably been electrocuted for losing control of his own bladder. McLaren gave the weeping youth with the damp trousers cab fare home and we never mentioned the incident again. But it indicated to me at least that he didn’t have a clue about how to gainfully extend this outfit’s career trajectory.

Steve Jones nursed similar doubts. It was his band, after all - his gang, his equipment. But McLaren had suddenly elected himself as the boss-man and had told Jones he was no longer the singer. This would have been more acceptable if McLaren actually had a red-hot vocalist waiting in the wings, but he didn’t and his attempts to drag any juvenile Tom, Dick or Harry into the role were becoming more and more excruciating to observe. Jones and I would discuss McLaren’s increasingly wacky approach to group management when he’d come round to visit. I’d know he’d arrived when I heard the window to my first-storey garret creak open and saw him climb through. Being an inveterate cat burglar, Steve rarely entered any building through the front door - it was against his religion. Anyway, one evening a guy called Alan Callan who lived one street away and who worked for Led Zeppelin’s Swan Song record label called up and invited us to record something at his home studio. Jones and I wrote a song on the spot-I played guitar and he sang. It was a slow number called ‘Ease Your Mind’. I haven’t heard it since the night we recorded it so I can’t give you an objective take on its merits. Ultimately it was just a fun way of passing the evening and nothing more. But when McLaren heard about it, he saw the session as me trying to undermine his control over the project. He banded the other three together and told them I was a disruptive influence that needed to be exiled forthwith. He then sent Glen Matlock round to give me my marching orders.

In all honesty, I wasn’t that surprised or upset. It had always been something of an uphill struggle trying to find common ground with those guys, musically and socially speaking. It wasn’t just the age discrepancy: I was a middle-class druggie fop and they were working-class spivs who’d steal the gold out of their mothers’ teeth. The fops had owned the first half of the seventies but the spivs would take it over in 1976 lock, stock and barrel. In other words, for the Sex Pistols to be accepted as an authentic working-class rebel youth phenomenon they needed to rid people like me from their ranks. But I already knew that virtually from the moment I stepped into their web. What we had was never going to be a long-term relationship. I didn’t want it to be. I knew from the outset that these were the kind of people that you couldn’t trust on any level whatsoever.

But the scales fell from my eyes with regard to McLaren. For eighteen months I’d viewed him as a trusted friend. I’d been wrong. The guy was just another control-seeking snake in the grass. I’d underestimated the ego that lurked within his Machiavellian mindset. For a couple of months following my firing it was amusing to hear the stories about how the group’s career was developing. Malcolm found them a singer: himself. A little-known event in the early Sex Pistols career, it was also extremely short-lived and ended abruptly after he imprudently suggested they cover a Syd Barrett song from the early Pink Floyd repertoire.

It must have been sometime in October when I found myself walking down Charing Cross Road and suddenly turned to see him sidling up alongside me. There was a spring in his step and gleam in his eyes. He excitedly began telling me that the Pistols were now rehearsing in Denmark Street and had just achieved the seemingly impossible: they’d found the singer who was destined to make them all immortal. ‘He’s this really weird kid . . . looks a bit like a spastic . . . and he’s on acid all the time. But he’s the best thing in the group. He came in the other day with the lyrics to a song he’d just written. The title’s “You’re Only Twenty-Nine - You’ve Got a Lot to Learn”. Absolutely bloody brilliant.’ And we both laughed out loud because indeed it did sound brilliant. The ‘really weird kid’ of course turned out to be John Lydon and it’s fair to say that the Sex Pistols didn’t really become the Sex Pistols until he came into the frame. I’d been involved in a work in progress in other words-a project yet to reach full fruition. I can’t help thinking now of that line uttered near the end of Roddy Doyle’s book The Commitments when the old-timer trumpet player says words to the effect that being in a group is mostly about dull routine but the early days are the ones to cherish - the ones filled with poetry. Well, there wasn’t much poetry in the Sex Pistols’ early days as far as I was aware. A lot of ducking and diving, bad manners and brute force, certainly - but no grace-filled epiphanies or magic moments to wax nostalgic over. It’s funny looking back: none of us knew just what we were unleashing on the world. The rest is history of course - or ‘my story’ as both McLaren and John Lydon egocentrically like to view the 1976 punk-rock explosion throughout Great Britain. I’m just glad I got out when I did. I don’t think my nervous system could have withstood being a Sex Pistol right to the end of the line.

So poor old Wally Nightingale became their very own Pete Best and I became their Stuart Sutcliffe. That’s one way of looking at it anyway. Of course, Stuart Sutcliffe died shortly after leaving the Beatles. I managed to keep breathing, though with some difficulty. Since the summer I’d become a twenty-four-hours-a-day full-bore junkie. That’s probably another reason why the Sex Pistols no longer wanted me around. When I’d started tentatively using a year earlier, it had transpired in relatively luxurious surroundings - cosy, well-heated, sultrily lit Chelsea apartments, big colour TVs with the volume dimmed, cool sounds wafting from the stereo. Not any more. Now it was a case of taking your life in your hands and stepping into squalor-ridden squats with rats scurrying across the floorboards and an equally scary clump of human debris starting to experience the first pin-pricks of drug withdrawal standing around waiting for the dealer to return with the stuff. I was in the deep end now - sucked out into a sea of screaming bloody madness. I’d tried to stop again and again but each time grew more horrendous until my spirit had been broken. Now I simply couldn’t stop. I’d exhausted the willpower to fight the addiction. It’s a scary sensation to realise your life is going down the toilet and you can’t do a thing about it except to hang on, try to remain breathing and keep feeding that habit.

The winter of ’75 was a particularly cruel season - bitingly cold and bleak, bleak, bleak. I was holed up in an otherwise empty house awaiting demolition somewhere in Islington that Hermine had found for me, God bless her. And there was a heroin famine in the city: I had to spend practically all my waking hours walking around the metropolis in search of a ready source. But the worst of it was the music I’d always be hearing wherever I went. One song reigned supreme over Britain’s airwaves at year’s end: Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. Every home in the British Isles seemed to own a copy. Walk down any street and you could hear it wafting out onto the sidewalk like the smell of bad drains. Pub jukeboxes played nothing else. If anyone dared pick another selection, they’d have probably been ejected. The omnipotence of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ made it official: prog rock was still the opium of the masses. Hearing it echo around me on my daily travels, I felt utterly defeated. Queen’s record shamelessly paraded everything I’d fought against as a rock commentator: it was theatrical, pretentious and meaningless, faux classical music for high-brow poseurs with low-brow attention spans, kitsch masquerading as art. I couldn’t see a way out of it. I was doomed and so was rock ’n’ roll. Heroin was killing me and Freddie Mercury and his fruity chums had just seen off the latter. It was one of those ‘darkest hour before the dawn’ extended moments. I couldn’t conceive then that my recent dancing partners the Sex Pistols would actually ride in like the cavalry and save the day for rock just a few months hence. And I couldn’t - in my wildest imaginings - foresee them stabbing me in the back the way they were about to.