1978 and 1979 were most emphatically ‘changing of the guard’ kind of years in Great Britain. Labour were slain by Margaret Thatcher whilst punk choked on its own vomit and new wave became its less menacing pall-bearer. The spivs had trounced the fops midway through the decade but now the spivs were being sidelined by a new breed - the yuppies. Yuppie rock was what tickled the public’s fancy all of a sudden. It had a little of the primal ‘short sharp shock’ dynamism of early punk but buttered things up with more sophisticated chord progressions, real singing and superior musicianship. The people who played it gave cursory lip-service to the so-called punk aesthetic but were generally more interested in upward mobility rather than dead-end-kid authenticity.

The Police were only one of many bandwagon-jumping outfits to make a big impact during this time frame. The trio was composed of musicians who’d been playing music separately long before 1976. The guitarist had worked with Eric Burdon’s Animals and the Soft Machine in the late sixties, the drummer in a bush-league seventies prog-rock act called Curved Air and the singing bassist in a fusion-jazz combo working out of his native Newcastle. But they’d all managed to stay relatively youthful-looking with the help of a shared bottle of platinum-blond hair dye and were still clued-in enough to comprehend that a big pay day could result from upgrading punk’s root ingredients with steroid-like injections of a higher musical proficiency.

Their lucky break came when the drummer turned the bassist on to reggae. When punk bands tried their hand at aping the rhythms of Jamaica, it was usually a disaster, but the Police brought something new to the white reggae synthesis by making the ‘on’ beats generally more fluid, supple and rock-friendly. And the singer - nicknamed Sting - had it all: Aryan good looks, an instantly recognisable multi-octave-range voice, an eclectic songwriting talent and a limitless sense of personal ambition.

I interviewed him in early ’79 in between a couple of his group’s many arduous club tours of America. The money hadn’t started rolling in yet and he was still making ends meet in a dingy basement flat somewhere in London with his then-wife, the actress Frances Tomelty. Upon arriving at their address, it became apparent that all was not well with their relationship. Tomelty only stayed five minutes but made it abundantly clear in those minutes that she was seriously vexed at her husband, who sat forlornly in the living room like a scolded infant. I believe the couple broke up not long after this.

Sting was at a crossroads in his life anyway. Mega-success was suddenly there within his grasp after years of struggle and dreary straight jobs, and from the way he spoke, I sensed he wasn’t about to miss out on any of its many perks. He reminded me of another Geordie go-getter - Bryan Ferry. There must be something about having once been poor and resident in Tyneside that really stimulates a status-seeking gene in some men. And yet Ferry was an oddity: he craved public adulation whilst feeling noticeably ill at ease whenever bathed in a spotlight. By contrast, Sting was an old-fashioned trouper who took to the spotlight like a swan to a lake. In this sense, he was far more of a Paul McCartney-styled old-school ‘beloved entertainer’ than a thorny new-school ranter like Lydon and Strummer. In fact, you could go so far as to call him the anti-Lydon of the late seventies. One was ugly and - relatively - shiftless, the other was an industrious pretty boy bent on self-improvement and self-empowerment. Charter members of the Bromley contingent all wanted to chop off Sting’s peroxide-soaked head and burn his band-mates like witches but the Police’s singles during this period were still a tonic for the times - infectious and upbeat without being air-headed and crass. They helped fill the post-punk void with a certain panache. But these guys certainly weren’t threatening anyone or anything like the punks had. Rock at decade’s end would become a much tamer place to eke a living from.

All the wind had gone out of the punk movement’s sails in mid-January of 1978, when the Sex Pistols had splintered apart in San Francisco. Lydon had weathered the ensuing media storm by promptly moving into NME’s Manhattan office, which also doubled as the apartment of Joe Stevens, the paper’s photographer and a trusted amigo of the singer. Lydon apparently had no other choice - McLaren had just abandoned him in America with no money for a hotel. The Pistols were dead, punk was dead and Lydon’s career was dead too - at least for the moment.

It would come alive again later in the year once he’d recruited two old mates of his as well as an eager young drummer. The two mates he chose to provide stringed accompaniment raised many eyebrows in the London community. The bassist - Jah Wobble - was known far and wide throughout the region for his sudden outbursts of violence whilst the guitarist Keith Levene was equally notorious for being an unreliable hard-to-work-with junkie. It’s like Lydon went purposefully looking to replace Sid Vicious in his affections by hiring the only two people he knew who were even more potentially disastrous to form a group with. The Lydon-Levene-Wobble axis managed to record two albums and perform a few iffy concerts but never quite managed to summon up the required get-up-and-go to really promote their cause. From what I’ve read, it seems like Lydon was plagued by an undiagnosed case of chronic ennui after the Pistols split that left him gloomy and withdrawn for the rest of the decade. The music he released during that time certainly seems to bear this out.

To his credit, Lydon never tried duplicating the four-to-the-bar hard-rock attack of his previous band. He and his dubious cohorts were looking to invent a new musical hybrid: post-punk art rock, do-it-yourself prog with reggae bass lines and krautrock in place of virtuoso noodling and ever-changing time signatures. This meant that the singer discarded the lyric-writing perspective he’d invented for the Pistols which involved picking a controversial subject and then railing against it with an over-intensity that was as comic as it was scathing. When it came to writing texts and then vocalising them for Public Image, Lydon replaced the comedy and pithy put-downs with obtuse impressionistic blather that he felt compelled to deliver in a strange adenoidal wail that hovered over the backing tracks like a wasp besieging a fat man in a deckchair.

When Lydon found a subject to stir his emotions - as was the case with ‘Death Disco’, a demented re-enactment of his beloved mother’s recent ordeal with terminal cancer - he was still a force to be reckoned with, but the artsy mood pieces his new group were bent on forging mostly forced him into asserting himself in pretentious and overreaching ways, and becoming pretentious was not ultimately a sensible career path for the former Johnny Rotten to wander down. Once he’d figured out which side his bread was buttered on, Lydon stopped trying to impress the chintzy art-rock set and went back to inhabiting the pantomime-horse role that would ultimately net him the most income from reality-show appearances and advertising campaigns.

With Lydon off cavorting with the avant-garde, it was left to the Clash to keep punk’s young dream solvent for the rest of the decade. Whilst the Pistols had been alive, Joe Strummer’s bunch had been very much in their shadow. But being second-best only made them work that much harder to create their own kind of impact. This in turn gave them a much greater shot at career longevity. The Pistols were like some blinding spectacle doomed to short-circuit at the earliest opportunity but the Clash had more staying power. And they also possessed the only other charismatic punk frontman in town: Joe Strummer.

I’d first encountered Strummer when he was still a teenager named John Mellor. In August of 1969 I attended the Plumpton Jazz and Blues Festival and on the Saturday evening had been one of maybe thirty people who’d chosen to leave the main-stage viewing area to step inside a makeshift tent at the side and witness an early performance taking place there by Robert Fripp’s breakthrough prog act King Crimson. A curly-haired youth I’d never seen before stood next to me throughout the set, shouting enthusiastically when not swigging from a bottle of cider which he offered to me at one point. It was a young work-in-progress Joe Strummer, and we would have both been seventeen at the time.

The next time our paths crossed was five years hence. Somehow I got coerced into checking out a new group who’d literally just come into existence. The venue they’d chosen to showcase their set in was actually a Soho record store that had allowed them to set up and play on its premises one Saturday afternoon in late 1974. Maybe the establishment thought the live entertainment would attract more record sales. If they did they were sorely mistaken. The group were beyond shambolic. A bloke with hippie hair and a grimy Afghan coat noodled away on guitar whilst two extremely suspicious-looking types to his immediate left tried unconvincingly to master the art of becoming an interactive rhythm section. Only the singer stood out. He had the voice of a ruptured seal and a surly ‘Bill Sykes’s dog’ type of persona that seemed to be chained to an invisible chip on his shoulder so monumentally large he could have stepped out of a John Osborne play. Unlike his hippie playmates, he wore his hair relatively short in a badly groomed duck-tail and sported a suit that might have once belonged to a hobo during the Great Depression. I asked Ted Carroll - the rotund, jovial capo of Camden Town’s Rock On record store who was one of the only five people there constituting an audience - what the singer’s name was. Carroll - who had the amusing habit of calling anyone he encountered by their Christian name prefixed by the word ‘rockin” - ‘Hi there, rockin’ Dave’ - ‘What’s new, rockin’ Nick?’ etc. - replied, ‘That there is rockin’ Joe - rockin’ Joe Strummer. He’s got a big future ahead of him.’ ‘Yeah, but not with that cowboy group he’s fronting,’ I remember countering.

It must have been one of the 101’ers’ first-ever gigs. I saw them playing pubs and support spots several times over the next twelve months and they never really improved. Everyone who saw them was pretty much of the same opinion: the singer was something special but his supporting players were a bunch of deadbeat buskers. I don’t recall ever conversing with him during his years as the king of squat rock but we certainly scowled at each other frequently enough. He lived in a squat on 101 Walterton Road and I often frequented a heroin connection dealing out of the building next door to his at no. 99. He never acted like he was particularly at ease with this state of affairs: oftentimes he’d be outside his building staring coldly at the junkies entering and leaving his neighbourhood. Mind you, he was always on the piss back then so he wasn’t best placed to be voicing any kind of disdain for other substance-abusers. In fact, I never saw the man sober until the end of 1977.

But something evidently changed within Strummer shortly after the release of the Clash’s debut album because he cut down drastically on his booze intake and became noticeably more health-conscious and career-focused. My guess is that he was shaping up to fully embrace his new destiny as the lightning-rod conscience of punk but it was also probably to do with him having spent the end of ’77 bedridden from hepatitis. Whatever the cause, it was a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Joe Strummer I found facing me in early ’78 when we were brought together for a special televised debate on the merits and shortcomings of the UK music press that took up one episode of a weekly BBC programme devoted to analysing the media in general called Don’t Quote Me.

Nick Logan had been invited to participate on behalf of the NME but asked me to go in his place. It was a bold move on his part - sending his paper’s druggiest entity out into TV-land to represent the troops. I made an effort to be as clear-headed as possible but the actual taping occurred early one morning and I’ve never been what you’d call a morning type of person. As a result, I became uncharacteristically subdued as the three musicians booked to speak their minds on the subject of their treatment in the music comics ran down their list of grievances, expecting me to stand up for all their media persecutors. What a thankless task! Rick Wakeman of Yes was one of the three - Roy Harper the other one - and stared at me throughout our exchanges like he was trying to will me into a pillar of salt.

Only Strummer talked any real sense during the half-hour we all bantered back and forth. He paid homage to the power of the press whilst calling to attention its tricky, duplicitous side. He didn’t have an axe to grind or old scores to settle and was smart enough to view the subject under discussion from an informed perspective unclouded by petty grudge-bearing. Witnessing him redeem this otherwise dreary spectacle made me realise once and for all that he was a force to be reckoned with.

I saw a lot of Strummer after that. Throughout 1979 he was living off Edgware Road near the chemist’s I frequented for my daily medication and we’d often bump into each other at a local greasy spoon where we’d pass the midday hours together eating a belated breakfast and discussing the issues of the day. He had a real missionary zeal about him and took his job as punk’s resident Moses very, very seriously indeed. He wanted to get his demographic politically motivated and more in sync with the questing bohemian youth mindset of the fifties and sixties. He didn’t want what he’d helped instigate to go down in history as some brief fashion-driven season of silliness. He reminded me in many ways of the underground press guys I’d worked and lived alongside back in 1972, with their incessant diatribes against ‘the man’ and their fervent embrace of a multiplicity of fringe causes. But Strummer had far more personal magnetism and restless energy than all the rest of the country’s disaffected post-hippie advocates for social revolution put together and had a far better platform to spread his message with: the Clash.

Much has been written since his untimely death about the fact that Strummer’s upper-middle-class origins were so blatantly at odds with the working-class prole firebrand role he assumed in young adulthood. That may be so but his reinvention was so all-encompassing and his drive to project that reinvented persona out to the world so unrelenting that he literally became what he’d dreamt of becoming since adolescence - Che Guevara with an electric guitar. History may now indicate that he wasn’t a particularly brilliant political theorist or any kind of God-given musical talent but he knew how to blend the two roles into one credible entity. And if rock ’n’ roll immortality was based on physical energy alone, Strummer would be at the very top of the heap. His voice may have been a gnarly abomination, his guitar-playing just a blur of rhythmic chicken-scratching and he wasn’t even particularly good-looking, but no one apart from James Brown and Jackie Wilson ever sweated more on stage in order to incite some form of rapture from their audience.

That was the great thing about the Clash: they knew they weren’t the best but that just made them work harder. I remember seeing them play in some hall in Manchester in the winter of ’78, not long after the release of their second album Give ’Em Enough Rope, and it was like Beatlemania revisited inside the venue - kids screaming and risking personal injury to mount the stage and touch their heroes. Strummer stood aloft before them gleefully stoking the fevered response but also cannily controlling the momentum, never letting the high energy teeter into out-and-out chaos. That was his gift - the capacity to rock the house to the rafters whilst indoctrinating its inhabitants in the same breath with more than just the usual ‘let the good times roll’ platitudes. Thank God he and his band were there to pick up the slack after the Pistols’ premature flame-out. If the Clash hadn’t rolled up their sleeves and committed their efforts to furthering the range and impact of punk rock at the end of the seventies, the form would have fallen under the exclusive control of feckless thug-exhibitionists like Jimmy Pursey and Sham 69.

Pursey was a big noise in 1978 - a big, hectoring, double-ugly noise that drew punk’s dimmest adherents to him like flies to excrement. Sham 69’s audience was a sight to curdle the soul - skinhead behemoths with prison tattoos and someone else’s blood on their Doc Martens - and Pursey had them spellbound like T. S. Eliot’s ape-necked Sweeney reinvented as a punk Mussolini. Throughout ’78 and ’79 he made it his business to invade the NME offices on virtually a weekly basis and lecture us all on ‘what the kids are really thinking’. You’d be trying to do your work and this malodorous brute would suddenly materialise out of nowhere and start rabbiting on about his and our responsibilities to ‘the kids’. If there’d been a gun in the place, I’d have gladly shot the man. He represented everything I despised most in the late seventies: rank, vainglorious, talent-free opportunism masquerading as ‘the voice of the oppressed’. Elvis Costello once remarked that the worst aspect of Thatcher’s gruesome regime was the fact that she ‘let all the dogs out of their cages’, that she in effect empowered the greedy and heartlessly vindictive to run amok over the country’s social policies and cultural landscape; punk’s immediate legacy was much the same, with smarmy brutes like Pursey and his ilk suddenly choking up the spotlight and drowning everyone else out with their barking and braying.

It says a lot about the ongoing deterioration of the NME that such an obnoxious pest should be not only tolerated in the paper’s office space but actively welcomed into its very midst. It wouldn’t have happened if Nick Logan had still been the editor but in May ’78 he stepped down and left the paper to be guided by other hands. IPC duly interviewed a number of possible successors and picked a candidate they felt worthy to assume the responsibilities. But then, just two weeks before he was due to take control, this ‘candidate’ received a visit from the drug squad, who came armed with a search warrant and uncovered enough cocaine in his home to duly charge him with dealing the drug. This charge also effectively put the kibosh on his chances of becoming NME’s next kingpin, which meant that IPC suddenly had to resort to solutions closer to the immediate home front.

With time running out, they had no other option but to offer the post to the fellow who’d been Logan’s assistant editor since the departures of Ian MacDonald and Tony Tyler. This was one Neil Spencer, a former schoolteacher who’d first appeared in the paper in the mid-seventies as a kind of self-appointed reggae specialist. Spencer took his reggae so seriously he felt compelled to talk at all times in a fake Jamaican rude-boy accent even though he was English and whiter than a loaf of Mother’s Pride sliced bread. Somehow he’d managed to get involved in the day-to-day running of the paper - editing copy, taking the train to the printers each Tuesday morning and overseeing the weekly print run - until he’d become the de facto head man during ’77, when Nick Logan had often been absent.

To his credit, Spencer worked hard to keep the paper afloat in extremely trying and uncertain circumstances, and when he was formally anointed NME’s editorial top dog - it was made official in the May 23rd issue - it was generally assumed that he’d at least have the moxie to keep the winning team of writers at the paper’s disposal in gainful employment. This turned out not to be the case, however. Spencer wasted little time in consigning the paper’s more ‘difficult’ elements - i.e. argumentative, independent-minded writers like myself, Lester Bangs and Ian MacDonald, as well as opportunistic fire-starters like Parsons and Burchill - onto the back burner of the paper’s creative oven.

In our place, he brought in a sorry selection of music-industry functionaries and groupies. One was a woman who’d been both Bob Marley’s press officer and a ‘close personal friend’ of John Lydon’s. Another had done time as the press agent for both Jimmy Pursey and Siouxsie Banshee. Joining them in the front lines were the young editor of a Clash fanzine and a bloke who happened to be sharing a flat with the singer from the Gang of Four. With these kind of industry ‘insiders’ on his team, Spencer felt confident he could get the paper closer to the very heartbeat of the end-of-the-seventies pop-culture Zeitgeist. What he achieved instead was to set in motion an ongoing haemorrhaging of the papers weekly sales figures.

The only one of this ‘clued-in new breed’ that I found in any way sympathetic was a gaunt Mancunian lad named Paul Morley who’d been a local ‘stringer’ for the NME prior to Spencer’s coup d’état and who’d lately been drawn to try his luck as a struggling young writer in London. He was being groomed to take over the role I’d been sidewinded into assuming back in the early seventies - that of NME’s resident word-wielding ‘gunslinger’. Spencer and the other editors were always whispering in his ear trying to mould him into their idea of the new office saviour, but I could tell Morley was growing increasingly ill at ease with their interference.

One time we were alone in the reviews room-a dimly lit space with a desk, hi-fi and a chair that was ideal for drug consumption - and I told him to ignore all the ‘editorial advice’, that the people now running the paper were all talentless jobsworths anyway and that he’d be far better off simply following his own instincts and writing about things that genuinely moved him. From what I’ve seen of his work since, he evidently took those words to heart, though not in a way I could readily relate to. At first I felt slightly protective of the fellow - he always looked like he was in the grip of some secret sorrow and soon started cultivating a scary predilection for pouring hard liquor down his throat as a way to deal with all that deadline stress. But then he decided to reinvent himself as Britain’s most pretentious man-a role he’s apparently proud to sustain to this very day - and I promptly lost all interest in him and his general well-being.

Morley’s media ascension corresponded neatly with the way his old stamping ground Manchester had lately started to become a hotbed of home-grown music-making talent. Back in the sixties, the Northern metropolis had been something of a bad joke amongst the beat-boom cognoscenti. Liverpool had the Beatles, London had the Who and the Stones, Birmingham had the Move and half of Led Zeppelin, and all the Mancs could muster up was a bunch of mickey mousers like Herman’s Hermits.

In point of fact, the city had little to boast about - popwise - until the advent of punk in 1976, when the Buzzcocks took it upon themselves to single-handedly raise local standards of group-forming and electrified music-making. As soon as the Pete Shelley-led combo burst nervously upon the national scene, the floodgates were flung open throughout the region as a tidal wave of young Mancunian dreamers determined to chance their arms on a stage or in a demo studio poured out into the public spectrum. This was UK punk’s most far-reaching gift to popular culture - the long-overdue de-Americanisation of rock as a medium of expression, thus making it a vehicle for all comers. Suddenly it was cool to be English. John Lydon and Ian Dury weren’t the first blokes to sneerfully sing in unadorned English prole tonalities - both Syd Barrett and David Bowie had been doing it ten years earlier - but they were easily the most influential, setting off a national wake-up call throughout the British Isles. Literally overnight, any UK group still singing in dodgy mid-Atlantic accents about rocking down the highway all the way to Memphis was rendered obsolete. Suddenly it was the ‘in’ thing to create lyrical scenarios set strictly in one’s own neck of the woods and to be voiced in similarly Anglocentric tones, and no area benefited more from this state of affairs than Manchester. London’s youth have always been by nature somewhat narcissistic and straitjacketed into a suffocating sense of their own perceived cool, but the lads and lasses up North were a lot less self-conscious and unafraid to go out on a limb even if it meant making complete fools of themselves in the process. They generally made a refreshing change from the po-faced Southern art-school wannabes who were busy scurrying aboard the new-wave bandwagon like rats off a sinking ship.

My favourite late-seventies Manc creative upstart was a pencil-thin poet named John Cooper Clarke. He was more of a beat poet than a punk per se, being older even than me, but the movement had emboldened him to stand onstage in various local pubs without the aid of musical accompaniment and fire up the punters’ imaginations with his often hilarious scattershot stanzas of self-penned verse. Seeing him in action was always a sight to behold. He looked like a cross between Blonde on Blonde-era Bob Dylan and a willow tree in a windstorm. His skinny legs shook so much when he performed you could practically hear his knees knocking together in time with his own spoken-word routines.

In October of 1978 the NME sent me up to Manchester to generally sound him out. I liked him immediately - it was almost impossible to do otherwise. The guy was one of the funniest raconteurs and natural storytellers to stumble out of late-twentieth-century Britain. His life up to that date had been one long calamity stream and his recollections were all tragicomical, with the emphasis always on the uproariously comedic. For example, he had a seemingly limitless supply of woebegotten tales involving him trying to score reefer from the Jamaican community in Prestwich and being generally short-changed that - when woven together - made for an absolutely brilliant oral novel. Thirty years later, I’m still waiting for his autobiography to be published. When it finally arrives, I know it’ll be a masterpiece.

I saw a lot of Johnny Clarke in 1979 because he’d often be in London and we’d stayed in touch. On a couple of occasions, I spent the evening with him and the guy who was producing his records at the time, the now-legendary Martin Hannett. I’ve since seen Hannett portrayed in films as an out-of-control nutcase but he always seemed pretty rational to me - passionate about music, liked to smoke pot, but no signs of inner turbulence to indicate that I was in the presence of the future ‘mad, bad, dangerous to know’ Phil Spector of the North. I think when he started reaping success with his production work he just opted to assume a scary image in order to mask his insecurities, and that image ended up overpowering and ultimately consuming him. The drugs obviously played their part as well. He and Clarke were still really just diehard reefer heads when I was rubbing shadows with them. But they were both ripe for further chemical experimentation - like two blokes who’d grown up listening spellbound to their Velvet Underground records and who now had the chance to live out what those songs had been talking about.

I’m trying to ransack my memory to come up with some salient scrap of detail Hannett might have told me about his working relationship with Joy Division-a relationship that would have begun not long before we met - but nothing is forthcoming. He must have at least mentioned the group to me, but nothing really registered. In retrospect it’s good that Morley was on board the NME because he recognised something special in Ian Curtis’s fledgling quartet, something that none of the older scribes was able to decipher.

I’ll readily admit it-I was much too jaded to see any value in what Joy Division had to offer the end-of-the-decade pop/rock landscape. I’d been lucky enough to see both the Doors and the Stooges live in their prime and had little interest in watching a former young civil servant and his three mates trying valiantly to channel a similar sense of all-encompassing musical dread. It was only with the release of ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ that I started taking them seriously. Then I saw some TV footage of the group in concert and it all clicked. Curtis had absolutely none of the wayward sexual magnetism of an Iggy or Jim Morrison but more than made up for its absence by exuding a singular charisma born of suffocating discomfort and the looming threat of imminent epileptic collapse. I can see now that the guy was a significant talent, but by the same token whenever I’m confronted by his image I automatically think of that line Jack Nicholson delivered in Prizzi’s Honor - ‘If this guy was so fucking great, then how come he’s so fucking dead?’

When it comes to Manc indie icons, I’ve always preferred Mark E. Smith of the Fall anyway. Not so much for his group’s early musical output - which in 1979 was practically corrosive to the human ear - but because of his take-no-prisoners mega-truculent personality. I’ve never, ever written about the Fall but I got to know Smith quite well in the mid-eighties because we happened to frequent the same London-based speed dealer’s ramshackle apartment down around King’s Cross. He was just a skinny Northern lad back then who looked like his mother still dressed him but he had such a forceful personality you’d have thought he was Giant Haystacks the professional wrestler. He really is the closest thing England has ever spat out to compare with American hard-boiled rock ’n’ roll cranks like Jerry Lee Lewis, and I’ve spent quality time with both men.

In 1994 the Rolling Stones invited Lewis to a recording session and the old bastard apparently never stopped criticising them to their faces, calling them amateurs and all-purpose soft lads until steam was coming out of Keith Richards’s ears. In 1987 I once found myself in a room with the Fall leader as well as Nick Cave and Shane MacGowan and witnessed Smith do much the same thing to his two peers, mercilessly nit-picking at their music and respective images and even making untoward remarks about their countries of origin. They just sat there and took it, much like the Stones had done with the Killer.

He was generally quite civil to me though, maybe because I was well known as one of Iggy Pop’s early champions and Mancs generally look up to Iggy like born-again Christians tend to revere Jesus Christ. The only points of conflict we ran into revolved around my unstinting admiration of the Smiths. Let’s just say that Mark Smith wasn’t a big fan of the group’s lead singer and never let an opportunity pass to verbalise his contempt. The last time I saw him was in a pub practically adjacent to King’s Cross station at the close of 1987. He’d just finished touring America with the Fall and had talked witheringly about the new ‘health consciousness’ craze supposedly sweeping the country. ‘Fat blokes in sweatbands jogging down highways, women with huge biceps and skin like old leather handbags.’ He then paused and looked around at the pallid forms and grey faces collected together in the main bar with real joy in his eyes. ‘I can’t tell you how good it feels to be standing next to really unhealthy-looking people again.’ He was another one who followed Lester Bangs’s dictum - the more you slowly poison yourself the more illuminated your creative output becomes. ‘I read the other day that your pal Morrissey has started working out at a gymnasium each day before he goes in the studio to record,’ he remarked to me at one point with a suitably sardonic grin on his face. ‘Aye - all creative inspiration sweated out of the man before he can even get close to a microphone.’

Looking back at the end of the seventies, there’s surprisingly little that’s managed to last the test of time for me. For every Fall and Joy Division, there were a thousand careerist drones like Simple Minds and the Boomtown Rats infiltrating Top of the Pops and generally hogging the spotlight. Dire Straits - pub rock for the rising young homeowner demographic - were suddenly hugely popular on both sides of the Atlantic. The two least impressive acts to have come out of the mid-seventies Manhattan proto-punk clubland explosion - Blondie and Talking Heads - both managed to build lucrative, chart-busting, internationally successful careers for themselves during this period whilst the trailblazing likes of Television, Patti Smith and Richard Hell all fell by the wayside. And then came the rise of synth pop: blokes with dodgy haircuts hunched over keyboard-operated machines stuffed with wires and do-it-yourself tone oscillators making sounds like a brood of geese passing gas in a wind tunnel. Whoopee! This was the way the seventies ended: not with a blood-curdling bang but with a cheap, synthesised, emasculated whimper.

Not even the old sixties guard could forestall the sharp dip in musical standards that prevailed at decade’s end. With Mick Jagger once more at the helm, the Rolling Stones managed to record and release their last real album of consequence - Some Girls - in 1978 but the record’s subsequent success only set into motion yet another long creative slump. By 1979 Jagger and Richards had fallen into open conflict over key issues regarding the group’s general direction, and Ronnie Wood was busy introducing himself to a new and extremely costly form of drug dependency then emerging from the West Coast of America: freebase cocaine. Keith Moon’s death in September ’78 robbed the Who of their unpredictable engine. The other three continued for a while with a new drummer but all the zany energy and sense of spontaneous combustion that had typified the group in live performance suddenly vanished from their repertoire.

Led Zeppelin eventually regrouped after the death of Robert Plant’s son but Plant was increasingly disturbed to find two members of his old quartet and their manager still addicted to hard drugs. A final album was laid down mostly in Abba’s Stockholm studio at the end of ’78, but the singer and the bass player liked to work mostly during daylight hours whilst the guitarist and drummer tended to only come alive after dark. This conflict in personal schedules ended up destabilising the group’s precious human chemistry. The resulting album In Through the Out Door lacked the authority, drive and inner cohesion that Jimmy Page had brought to previous sessions as player, co-composer and producer.

Led Zeppelin then performed two colossal shows at Knebworth in August ’79 - their last hurrah on British shores - followed by a short European tour in the summer of the following year. An American tour - their first since the Oakland debacle - had been negotiated to commence during October of 1980 but then on September 24th John Bonham - apparently ill at ease about his upcoming duties in a country that always seemed to bring the worst out in him - calmed his nerves during a group rehearsal at Jimmy Page’s house by downing some forty measures of vodka mixed together with a ‘mood-altering’ medication he’d been prescribed known as Motival and then falling asleep. He somehow choked to death in his slumber and never woke up again.

The repercussions were enormous. The biggest band of the seventies had lost an irreplaceable component and suddenly had no other option but to splinter apart. Another major creative player over the past ten years, Neil Young, was also stricken by grievous tidings during this period: he and second wife Pegi gave birth to a son named Ben on November 28th 1978 who was duly diagnosed as suffering from acute cerebral palsy. Young committed most of his energies in the following years to tending to the welfare of his immediate family and guarding them from any kind of public scrutiny. In the process, he closed himself down emotionally to the point where ‘I was making it, doing great with surviving - but my soul was completely encased. I didn’t even consider that I would need a soul to play my music, that when I shut the door on pain, I shut the door on my music.’

And then there was the matter of Bob Dylan’s sudden religious conversion. 1978 was the year the Bard of Beat chose to release Renaldo and Clara, the cinematic disaster zone he’d filmed on the fly and then painstakingly pieced together over the previous three years. It lasted more than four hours and generally left viewers with the sensation that they’d been watching paint dry. Everyone was hoping the most mysterious presence in popular music would finally strip aside his many masks as the camera rolled but all he ended up revealing was a taste for plot-free, scattershot surrealism and auteurish self-indulgence that had mercifully fallen out of vogue in the film world by the end of the sixties.

‘Dylan’s folly’ as it quickly came to be known was hauled over the critical coals hither and yon upon its release and the catcalls kept coming throughout the rest of ’78, mainly in America. Dylan released a new album that year - Street-Legal - and embarked on a lengthy world tour, his first since 1966. The Japanese and European dates were well-received but the 110 US dates that followed were often savaged by the nation’s media pundits. Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young had lately been ordained rock’s new reigning messiahs and all of a sudden the taste-makers were openly insinuating that the man who’d first inspired Springsteen and Young to actually write songs was no longer worthy of being talked about in their lofty pantheon.

Dylan has always nursed a fairly jaundiced view of the media in general and probably took these latest harsh words in his usual stride. But a far darker cloud hanging over him during this period was all the emotional and spiritual fallout from a painful recent divorce. In 1977 the singer/songwriter had even been accused of spousal abuse in the nation’s tabloids. Now he no longer had a family to anchor himself to, and with only a gruelling tour schedule to focus on, he fell into a deep depression. One of his backing singers, Helena Springs, suggested he try prayer as an antidote to his inner suffering. Another musician friend, T-Bone Burnett-a recent convert to Christianity - read Bible passages to Dylan late one night out on the road at the latter’s request. When Burnett came to the line about those who place their faith in astrologers and other spokespersons of ‘the dark arts’ being automatically doomed to lose their families, Dylan reacted as if a lightning bolt had just struck him. And then on December 17th 1978, after a show in Tucson, Arizona, he experienced a full-blown spiritual ‘awakening’ whilst alone in his hotel suite. ‘There was a presence in the room that couldn’t have been anybody but Jesus,’ he later recalled. ‘Jesus put his hand on me. It was a physical thing. The Glory of the Lord knocked me down and picked me up. It’s like waking one day and being reborn. Can you imagine turning into another person? It’s pretty scary if you think about it.’

Dylan’s conversion was so dramatic that in 1979 he put all his back catalogue in the closet and set out on another long US tour, this time determined to perform only brand-new self-composed material, with all the lyrics exclusively slanted on his sudden embrace of Jesus Christ as the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. An album of such songs named Slow Train Coming was recorded and made available before decade’s end to a generally perplexed world reaction. His vocal cords may have been gainfully loosened up by the son of God’s impromptu visit but godly surrender hadn’t brought his singular gift for songcraft any blessings. In point of fact, it robbed him outright of his wicked sense of humour and - worse yet - made him small-minded and a bit of a bigot. ‘You’ve either got faith or you’ve got disbelief. And there ain’t no neutral ground,’ he railed out on one track. It was just too weird for most of Dylan’s core following to readily accept.

At least his European fan base was spared the jarring spectacle of him addressing audiences between songs like some curly-haired Elmer Gantry preaching hellfire and brimstone to the disbelievers as he did during his US shows throughout the year. Several of these rants were tape-recorded and then transcribed to print by audience members. ‘I told you “the times they are a-changin’” and they did,’ Dylan informed one crowd. ‘I said the answer was “blowin’ in the wind” and it was. I’m telling you now that Jesus is coming back and He is! And there is no other way of salvation.

‘You know we’re living in the end times. The scriptures say in the last days, perilous times shall be at hand. Men shall become lovers of their own selves. Blasphemous, heavy and high-minded. ’

The ‘Jesus saves’ banter may have come off as cranky and depressingly out of character but Dylan’s quasi-apocalyptic depiction of the seventies as vanity-driven, drug-sodden ‘perilous times’ was pretty spot on in retrospect. The sixties had been so tumultuous for him that he’d spent the last third of that decade in a state of reclusive semi-retirement. But surviving the seventies had finally sapped his will and brought him so low that he could only react by subjugating his very spirit to some supposed higher power. Ultimately it would get marked down as just another of Dylan’s bewildering ‘phases’, but at the time it left many deeply estranged and unable to reconcile themselves with the man.

Out on a boat navigating the Bahamas in the autumn of ’79, John Lennon, Dylan’s old creative sparring partner back in the mid-sixties, heard the song ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’ on the radio and suddenly felt the urge to pen a song of his own on the subject of spiritual servitude. A cassette recording he made of the impromptu composition is now available for all to hear on a posthumous box set. It’s called ‘Serve Yourself’ and it’s more of a rant than a song per se, a sustained howl of derision at his greatest rival’s desperate clutching at the most inflexible straws of orthodox religious dogma.

Lennon had never been visited by Jesus Christ personally but in the LSD delirium of the late sixties had briefly toyed with the idea that he might indeed be the living reincarnation of God’s only son. He apparently even tried to summon up a press conference in May ’68 in order to inform the world of his Christ-like status until wiser heads prevailed and dissuaded him from this course of action. Yet he still managed to factor his Jesus complex into the lyrics to ‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’ the following year, addressing the Messiah as though he were Lennon’s own personal Siamese twin. At the end of the day, though, a ferocious intellect like Lennon’s was never going to be cowed by fairy stories involving a humble carpenter from Nazareth changing water into wine. Lennon had his own living, breathing higher power to prostrate himself before: her name was Yoko Ono.

In 1975 they’d reconciled and conceived a child, Sean, an event that prompted Lennon to stop making music and concentrate on a new vocation instead, that of house-husbandry. Apart from the creation in 1970 of his last real musical masterpiece - the primal-scream-driven Plastic Ono Band - the first half of the decade had been one long bad dream for Lennon in the shape of drug problems, FBI wire-taps and one highly publicised Hollywood meltdown. He’d had to do battle in court with money-hungry bloodsuckers like Allen Klein, work alongside egomaniacal nut-cases like Phil Spector and live with the scary sensation of being constantly spied on by US government agents in the pay of Richard Nixon. Facing off adversaries like these would have been enough to take the fight out of any man.

How comforting it must have been then to hear the love of his life soothingly inform him that he didn’t need to record another record or have any further contact with the music industry and the outside world in general. With her career in the avant-garde at something of a temporary impasse, Yoko Ono had become intrigued by the idea of launching herself as a businesswoman. She calmly informed Lennon that from now on she would be the family breadwinner and that he would simply concentrate on rearing their infant son.

It was evidently a sweet deal to his way of thinking because he fell into the new routine like a newborn babe into slumber. His fan base felt slighted and blamed Ono for brainwashing him into creative inactivity, but Lennon’s escape from the vanity factory of seventies pop was still probably the coolest move he made in that whole ten-year stretch. Suddenly he was no longer just a valuable commodity, he was a free man. But as we all know, freedom is a very relative concept and this was as true for John Lennon as for any other human being.

When Lennon saw how his wife deftly managed to quadruple his finances by decade’s end with a series of canny investment strategies, her word became law to him and he deferred to her judgement on all aspects of his life. That’s why he was sailing around the Bahamas in ’79 when he first tuned in to Bob Dylan crooning to his saviour: Yoko Ono - under the direction of several astrologers - had sent him out there without further explanation and he’d bowed to her wishes without question.

Listening to the radio on the vessel each day he felt suddenly compelled to start writing songs again for the first time in almost five years. At first he didn’t know what to do with these new compositions until one night he heard over the airwaves a record by a new group from Athens, Georgia, known as the B-52’s. The quintet had a distinctive danceable sound that was both artsy and garage-rock-friendly but what really piqued Lennon’s interest were the weird Yma Sumac-like female voices shrieking out through the mix. They instantly reminded him of a sound he’d once been all too familiar with - the wife at full vocal pelt. Maybe - he thought to himself - the world is finally ready to embrace Yoko Ono’s singular take on music-making with open arms. From that moment forward, his return to an active musical career became a done deal. But not as a solo entity. Lennon really wanted Ono to get the praise and attention this time around. He genuinely saw her as his superior and had even taken to referring to her as ‘mother’ at all times.

We all know what happened next. Lennon and Ono recorded their Double Fantasy album and Geffen Records released it on November 15th 1980 to generally lukewarm fanfare. Then on December 8th Lennon was returning home after having mixed a new track his wife had just concocted entitled ‘Walking on Thin Ice’ at a local studio when a deranged fan shot him to death in front of his family’s apartment building.

It’s quite tempting to play up his murder as a kind of definitive ‘death of the seventies’ moment but on closer inspection it doesn’t really hold up. Lennon was a spent force throughout much of the seventies anyway and had little direct influence on its ebbs and flows. No, his slaying felt far more like the death of the sixties instead, or at least the final nail in the coffin of the spirit of that now long-gone era of marmalade skies and endless possibilities.

I remember hearing the news whilst floating through central London. A radio announcement kept leaking out of all the shops along the way, followed by the eerie sound of Lennon’s own voice recorded in an interview just prior to his passing. Everyone around me in the busy streets had the same stricken ‘this can’t be happening’ look etched across their faces. Involuntarily my memory returned to the days of my youth when the Christmas season had always been soundtracked by the hotly anticipated release of a new Beatles album. When December rolled around, the shops would all be playing the record seemingly in rotation and the communal joy this music conjured up everywhere was both palpable and deeply infectious. But that was then-agentler, more enchanted time - and this was now, the era when ‘greed is good’ was about to become the mantra of the masses.

In due course, I arrived at the NME’s Carnaby Street offices, only to walk into a scene of utter desolation. The old-timers there were all teary-eyed and barely able to speak. One was so distraught he kept having to go to the toilet to throw up. Even the younger scribes were all choked up as though it wasn’t John Lennon but their beloved John Lydon who’d bitten the bullet in his place. But then how else were we all expected to react? It was a heartbreaker whichever way you looked at it: a gifted family man still nimble-witted and rife with rude health slain at the hand of some insane narcissist, a wife widowed, a young son left fatherless and a world robbed of the victim’s physical presence and future artistic contributions. It was such a senseless scenario that almost thirty years later we’re still trying to make sense of it.

But then again, maybe Lennon had received a momentary mental flash of what fate ultimately had in store for him back in 1970 when he wrote the song that became his second post-Beatles single release - ‘Instant Karma!’. ‘Instant karma’s gonna get you,’ he sang almost maliciously on the finished record. ‘Gonna knock you out of your head / Better get yourself together, darlin’ / Sooner or later you’re gonna be dead.’ People at the time thought these sentiments were directed squarely at Paul McCartney but Lennon could just as easily have been addressing himself. John Lennon knew a thing or two about karma after all. He saw it as the central guiding spiritual force in the universe.

As a young man he’d often behaved viciously and done his share of nasty, despicable things. But then LSD consumption had caused him to detach himself from his naturally violent temperament and become more peaceable and inward-looking. As his personality evolved so did his music and his quest for personal redemption from past transgressions. This he found with the arrival of Yoko Ono. But in strict karmic law the dark doings of the past have a way of impacting on the individual even after he or she has arrived at a state of some personal grace. And Lennon always had a scary knack for overstimulating the mad outer fringes of society, mainly because he was such an incorrigible weirdo himself.

Some years back, I was browsing through Mark Lewisohn’s Beatles: Recording Sessions doorstopper, which chronicles each and every Abbey Road session Lennon’s old group ever attended in impressively exhaustive detail, when a stunning hitherto unknown fact jumped out of the text to grab my attention. When John Lennon had recorded his vocal for ‘Come Together’ in 1969, the master tape revealed he’d prefaced the verses by repeating the words ‘Shoot me!’ again and again over the introductory riff. (George Martin had later wisely edited the phrase down to a spooky-sounding ‘Shoo’ that’s still clearly audible on the finished track.) What can you say about such a brazenly insane act except to duly note that eleven years later, someone actually took him at his word?

But enough fanciful conjecture about the karmic destinies of rock’s pioneer stock. Let’s turn to the fate of lesser folk instead. What was happening to poor, poor pitiful me during these two dreary endgame years?

Things could have been worse. I always had a roof over my head as well as one square meal a day in my intestinal tract. I was way more productive than I’d been in the two preceding years. I was writing songs now and even had two of them recorded one night at Island’s Basing Street studio, the place where I’d almost gotten into a fist fight with Bob Marley and the Wailers five years earlier. A friend of mine, Peter Perrett, played on the session and brought along two of his co-workers in the Only Ones - guitarist John Perry and drummer Mike Kellie - to further augment the line-up. Tony James from Generation X provided the bass parts. The finished tracks, ‘Chinese Shadow’ and ‘Switch-Hitter’, were never released - although someone told me they later briefly surfaced on a new-wave compilation released only in Japan sometime in the nineties - but I remember playing them to Iggy Pop shortly after their completion and him telling me they were good works and encouraging me to continue.

By the end of ’79 I’d started rehearsing in earnest with a drummer named Chris Musto and an excellent young bass player known as James Ellar. Paying for the rehearsal space required me to keep contributing to the NME, though I was finding it increasingly hard to be in their general vicinity. Leafing through back issues from this era recently in order to further jog my memory, I was surprised to rediscover just how prolific I’d been in their pages during this stretch of time. The subjects I tackled ran the gamut from young hopefuls like a trio of teenagers from Crawley who called themselves the Cure to cantankerous old-timers like Al Green, Wilson Pickett and James Brown. But something was still evidently amiss with regard to the actual choice of words I strung together into article form to commemorate these encounters. True wit and illumination were still awfully difficult to detect within the sentences I was scribbling down. That’s why I was moving over more and more towards a career as a professional musician. I’d lost the talent to do my other vocation any kind of justice.

The other good thing about writing songs and making music - I quickly decided - was that my continued drug-taking didn’t impede the process in the way that it did whenever I tried to write journalistic copy. Methadone is generally viewed by the medical establishment as a chemical halfway house between heroin addiction and sobriety, but that’s only true when the substance is administered in steadily decreasing quantities over a period of no longer than six months. That wasn’t the case for me. The powers-that-be at my clinic provided me with strong daily dosages for an indefinite period of time which eventually stretched on to slightly over ten years.

It was decent of them, all things considered, because if they’d forcibly weaned me off the drug before I was ready to do so myself, I’d have tumbled back into full-blown smack insanity like a dead crow falling from a tree. But methadone is a funny drug. It curtailed my craving for junk and gave me a nice soothing buzz for a few months but then it began to rub up against my central nervous system with all the delicacy of a Brillo pad, making me generally down at the mouth and subject to grumpy moods. A drug buddy recommended Valium as an antidote to my suffering and I started mixing the little yellow or blue pills in with my methadone supply as a way to calm my nerves. The combination worked only too well. In fact, I became so calm it was almost impossible for me to get out of bed. So I started taking uppers in earnest - cocaine when I could afford it, speed when I couldn’t - as a way to stimulate my depleted reserves of stamina. Factor in also that I’d started smoking reefer as compulsively as Willie Nelson and you’ll understand that I was now addicted not just to one vampire drug but to four separate extremely potent rogue chemicals.

A typical day? Wake up around midday. Glug back my methadone. Take a piss. Put on a record. Snort a line of speed in order to fully wake up. Take a 5 mg Valium to counteract the fierce amphetamine rush. Smoke the remnants of a joint. Wait for the various substances in my system to form their synergy of mood enhancement. Once this occurred - it usually took about two hours - step out into the London streets to pick up the next day’s methadone supply from the chemist’s in Edgware Road. Spend the late afternoon hours in some tentative form of work-related activity. Skulk furtively around the metropolis as dusk is setting in. Make an impromptu call at places where drugs can be bought or scammed. Walk home after midnight. Play guitar alone in my room whilst smoking copious amounts of dope. Drop another Valium in the wee small hours before passing out fully clothed on an unmade bed. Wake up the next day and repeat process.

Looking back today from the perspective of a responsible middle-aged homeowner, taxpayer and parent, these days of advanced chemical refreshment and carefree floating feel like an odd form of freedom, but of course they weren’t. I was a lone wolf now - out on the prowl for anything that could make me forget who and what I’d really become - and my world was getting smaller and smaller by the minute. Hermine my guardian angel had lately bid a none-too-fond farewell to my toxic hide. It had been coming for ages - she just couldn’t stand seeing me fall further and further into the pit. She tried for a long time to wake me from my slumbers but I was beyond rehabilitation. Finally she snapped. It was either her or the drugs - the old ‘tough love’ ultimatum. I stayed with the drugs and she stayed with her husband. Without all the chemical interference we might have made it work, but I’d just become too pitiful for her to waste any further time on and by decade’s end our love affair was just another painful memory. I reacted as I’d always done - by getting so loaded that I could feel nothing beyond woozy numbness. ‘Drugs can break your spirit but they can’t break your heart’ should have been tattooed onto one of my scrawny biceps back then.

I was better off alone anyway - without emotional ties, drifting rudderless through the murk of old London town. I was well into my ‘prince of darkness’ shtick by this stage of the game. I loved strolling around the city at dead of night dressed in a black fedora hat, a black Edwardian coat worn over the shoulders like a cloak, black leather jacket and strides and dagger-pointed Cuban-heeled boots. In my drug delirium I probably thought I resembled Count Dracula’s Limey stepchild. But the common man was generally less easily taken in by my dark cavorting. ‘Fuck me, it’s that cunt from the Sandeman’s Port advert,’ a drunk in a Maida Vale pub shouted at me as I stepped in to buy some cigarettes.

Shortly after that, a complete stranger collared me during some dismal music-industry function and told me I was the Thomas de Quincey of the late twentieth century. I didn’t argue with him - he was a big lad after all and flushed with booze. But many years later I read a biography on De Quincey entitled The Opium Eater and learned that - though separated by a full century and a half - we still had plenty in common.

De Quincey had fallen into active acquaintanceship with the two men he most admired - the poets Wordsworth and Coleridge - at the same age I’d been when I started consorting with the likes of Keith Richards and Iggy Pop. Like me too, he’d been drawn to seek solace through the consumption of hard drugs in his early twenties. I was slightly dismayed to discover that he’d been a good foot shorter than me and also that for most of his published writing career he’d been something of a shameless hack. But when I got to the parts documenting De Quincey’s unwavering struggles with creditors and chronic constipation, I immediately felt a strong mystical bond being forged between myself and the man.

In the autumn of 1821 De Quincey wrote a two-part essay, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, based on his own life and drug history for the London Magazine, a literary monthly. The pieces were so widely read and commented upon that they were combined together in book form shortly afterwards and duly went on to become the author’s only timeless contribution to the written word. Over in France Baudelaire set about translating the text, whilst across the Atlantic a young Edgar Allan Poe fell under its wayward influence.

Hunter S. Thompson many decades later would declare that the real secret to capturing drug-inspired reveries in prose form resides in the writer’s own capacity for recalling all the salient details of his or her hallucinations whilst in an altered state, and De Quincey certainly remembered enough of his own ‘spectral visions’ to fill Confessions with credible accounts of his opiated voyages. His addiction to opium would ultimately cost him his physical health and seriously distort his powers of concentration but the drug still managed to fleetingly provide him with a genuine creative gift in the form of fiery visions that merged with his own natural dream-state to conjure forth the ‘confessions’ that would see him remembered - albeit notoriously - down through the ages.

I envied the man because heroin and methadone never bestowed any creative gifts on me whatsoever. I took them instead to erect an invisible shield around myself and to put me in a place where I could feel as little as possible. Coincidentally Pink Floyd released a song in 1979 entitled ‘Comfortably Numb’. It was supposed to be about Syd Barrett’s final days with the group in the late sixties but its dreamy languor spoke just as penetratingly to and about me and all the other ‘strung-out ones and worse’ littering England a decade later.

It’s about time to call last orders on the seventies. My tale is coming to an end and I’m not sorry to see it reach its termination stage. I still get chills down my back when I remember too much from these final years. One thing I’ve learned from writing this book is that self-congratulation, self-justification, self-pity and plain old bitterness don’t really make it as motors for good autobiographical prose. You’re always better off playing up the comedic aspects of your past, blending the light in with the dark and turning grief into laughter. That’s something Hermine first indicated to me around the time she left me. ‘You think your life is such a tragedy but it’s more of a comedy. You’re a comedian.’ At the time I was mortally wounded but now I see she was right on the money.

One last parting shot then of life moments before the eighties ate us up. The scene: another London music-industry reception, this time in a club somewhere close to Curzon Street. It could have been for Ian Hunter or for Pete Townshend - both were present and taking ample advantage of the free-drinks policy at the bar. The rest of the big room was littered with fledgling new-wave luminaries, grumpy old punks and the usual gaggle of record company and media human flotsam and jetsam. Everyone was split up in tight little groups partly obscured by copious clouds of cigarette smoke, all of us engaged in poring over the usual Tin Pan Alley tittle-tattle of the hour.

I’d been a spectator at these kinds of functions for practically all my adult life and had discovered early on that they tend to lose their charm unless you happen to be a trainee alcoholic. So why I was actually there in the first place is something of a mystery to me now. Maybe the venue just provided temporary shelter from the winter cold and a crowd of familiar faces to melt into. Whatever the reason, it turned out to be the wrong one. Before I knew it, I was book-ended by two surly youths looking for a fight. They just started in on me from both sides, drilling me with their double act of vindictiveness. ‘You’re a parasite,’ one would begin, and his mate would echo the words. ‘You’re a cunt.’ ‘You’re scum.’ ‘You’re a worthless piece of shit.’

I’d been attacked countless times over the previous three years but this was the only time it really cut into me in a deeply wounding way. The Sid incident at the 100 Club had at least been relatively brief, as had the stabbing in King’s Cross. But this - devoid though it was of physical violence - seemed to go on forever and it was also a highly public spectacle. Everyone in the place saw me getting ripped apart, which only accentuated the humiliation. Finally Cosmo Vinyl, the Clash’s Robert De Niroobsessed spokesman, came over and drew my assailants away from their prey.

After that I just remember weaving around the room like a punch-drunk boxer. There may well have been tears in my eyes. Everyone else was looking at me with pity in theirs. And then - out of nowhere-I felt someone grab me and sweep me off into a less populated corner of the place. It was Chrissie Hynde. She held me in her arms whilst I wept like a baby.

I can recall staring directly into her eyes and seeing a glimmer of the love and tenderness she’d once felt for me before things had gone so terribly wrong for us. I’d waited five years for that moment and that glimpse because though I was no longer technically in love with the woman, I’d never fully recovered from the way we’d ended up hurting each other the way we did and yearned for some sense of emotional closure to prevail between us. There in her embrace I felt safe for a second, as though the past six years of chicken-scratching my way through a world of hurt had been a bad dream that I’d suddenly woken up from.

But reality always has a way of butting in and pinpricking the air out of our pipe-dream thought balloons. After consoling me sweetly, Chrissie took her leave and moved over to the celebrity side of the room. Both Pete Townshend and Ian Hunter wanted to have photographs taken with her, and the pop paparazzi present were all anxious to oblige. ‘I’m public property now,’ she’d remarked ominously just as we were parting company. I watched her glide over to be engulfed in rock-star bonhomie and flashing light bulbs. It was a humbling spectacle to behold.

When the auld lang synes had all been sung and 1980 freshly minted into existence, Chrissie and her group the Pretenders would be sitting pretty right at the very summit of the UK charts with their third single ‘Brass in Pocket’. The chart fireworks would repeat themselves over in America shortly after that. From that point on, she became a global superstar. There was a new decade dawning and Chrissie - with her fierce attitude, wellcrafted, commercially viable songs and keen young supporting players - was destined to become one of its most successful artistes.

My musical career meanwhile was fated to quickly go the way of all flesh. In 1981 my group the Subterraneans would record an album’s worth of original material and a single was picked for release. Actually ‘released’ is the wrong word: ‘escaped’ was more like it. Without radio play it sank like a stone. No manager would work with us because of my ongoing reputation as an unrepentant druggie. And I’d made far too many enemies in high places during my high-profile NME years to ever think I was going to get a fair break as a jobbing muso from the London-based music industry. It was all going to hell in a hand-bucket in other words - and it would stay that way for a further eight long will-sapping years.

And the worst of it was-I mostly had only myself to blame. Do you want to know what the essential problem with the seventies really was? Too many flaky people. I should know. I ended up being one of them.