Still, what attracted me most was the guy’s passion, intelligence and daring. He was always thinking outside of the box. Within the first six months of ’74, he completely transformed his shop, changed the clothes he and Westwood were designing and even changed the name. In January it had still been ‘Let It Rock’, but by early summer it became ‘Seditionaries’ and began selling an exclusive range of leather and rubber fetishist clothing whilst all the other London fashion lairs were still stocking up on tacky satin jackets and bell-bottomed loon pants. He was quick-witted and audacious and - because he never took drugs - he also possessed the mental stamina and focus to will his mad ideas into fruition. Meanwhile, the rest of London was still stuck in the aimless pothead purgatory of the late sixties. You could say I was an early supporter of his work as a fashion designer. In the late spring of ’74 I even interviewed him in the
NME
about his clothes-designing relationship with the New York Dolls and his thoughts on fashion and rock. It was one of his first-ever appearances in the media.
The most significant aspect of our relationship though was the way I took it upon myself to educate him on what had actually been happening in rock music over the past ten years. As soon as
the Beatles arrived in 1963, McLaren had simply turned his back on rock music and buried his head in the ground like an ostrich. He didn’t even know who Jimi Hendrix was until I forced him to attend a late-night screening of Joe Boyd’s film documentary on the guitarist. He sat in that cinema utterly slack-jawed with wonderment. He told me he couldn’t believe what he’d been missing out on.
I got him to watch
Gimme Shelter
too and he was deeply affected by its evocation of contemporary rock as a way to still incite blood-drenched mass pandemonium. He loved what he saw because it registered to him in no uncertain terms that rock’s wild anarchic spirit hadn’t died back when Elvis got co-opted into the army, that it was still obscenely alive and capable of raising a nuclear-sized ruckus in whatever social and cultural context you chose to set it loose in. It was great to be around him in those moments because you could see he was receiving major revelations from the screen. It didn’t always work, though. One time I coerced him into sitting through the great D. A. Pennebaker Dylan doc
Don’t Look Back
and he came out cursing the Bard of Beat with even greater vigour. And the Beatles were always a strictly no-go area. But he loved the Doors and the early Who. In many ways it was just like teaching a bloke who’d been living in a cave for ten years about what had transpired during his absence. But McLaren was a lightning-quick learner. You didn’t have to draw him any maps. He’d just fixate on what became instantly fascinating to him like a magpie and then pilfer it into his own private agenda.
As my relationship with him intensified so my relationship with Chrissie began to unravel. Our first six months together had been heavenly. But the six months after that - from January 1st
1974 to early summer - became increasingly hellish for both of us. All love affairs have their honeymoon period when two hearts beat as one and joy is unconfined. But then reality descends and suddenly the lovers wake up and start having to grimly confront each other’s shortcomings and personal eccentricities. Chrissie woke up first. I could see it in her eyes. You can always tell when a woman’s truly in love simply by looking directly in her eyes. If she is, then there’s an intangibly luminous glow to her gaze. It’s a wondrous thing to behold. But when love starts to die, those same eyes will turn cold on you and you will see only irritation and unhappiness within them. I’ve seen it happen a number of times since but I learned it first from being with Chrissie.
The problem was, whilst she was waking up, I was still blissfully comatose inside love’s young dream. Only a moment ago, we’d been giddily talking about getting married. Now she was suddenly pushing for us to live separately. With the aid of hindsight I can now see the merits of her suggestion: we were so glued together at first it was starting to become suffocating. But at the time I reacted to it as an act of colossal rejection on her part. That’s what I mean about still being sixteen emotionally in the old noggin.
Plus the fact that she was suddenly doing the same job as me didn’t help matters one jot or iota. Though neither of us was aware of it initially, working for the
NME
back then had a compulsory side effect. It put everyone involved in a position where they were automatically in competition with each other. It wasn’t a soothing or nurturing environment to work in. There was an unhealthily divisive undercurrent to the way writers were pitted against each other. My relationship with Charles Shaar Murray had suffered because of this but at least I didn’t have to live with
the guy. When Chrissie started adopting much the same confrontational attitude in our home, however, that’s when major indoor fireworks starting going off. I couldn’t believe it at first. I was still lost in love-land. But I felt the change soon enough. It was like being on a plane when a sudden mid-air explosion occurs. After the initial shock, I started looking around in earnest for some kind of safety parachute to help break the free fall.
From what I’d observed, most examples of humankind facing imminent heartache tended to pour themselves into a bottle and let the liquor anaesthetise their woes. In fact, poor old John Lennon was busy doing just that over in Hollywood, drinking his way through a lost weekend that lasted through most of 1974 because he couldn’t stand to be separated from Yoko Ono. But immersing oneself in alcohol was never really an option for me. Booze of any grain and potency tended to leave me dizzy and red-faced. I was a died-in-the-wool drug snob anyway.
But which drug could truly comfort me in my time of sorrow? Not cocaine - it just made me crazier and more fever-headed. Pot couldn’t quell the pain, either. Only one pharmaceutical really possessed what I needed - the power to effect a complete shutdown of all emotional feeling within me. It was called heroin and it was becoming steadily more and more available throughout parts of London - particularly in Chelsea, where many bored young things with too much of daddy’s money had fallen victim to its lure.
As I’ve already mentioned, I tried it first in Germany at the end of the previous year. But I don’t think the powder I inhaled that night actually was heroin. The effect was altogether too benign. A month later Chrissie and I were at a photographer friend’s Maida Vale flat. We’d been snorting cocaine all night together and we
were both seriously wired. I asked the photographer if he had a Valium to counteract the tremors and he said no - but that we’d be less agitated if we both snorted a line of heroin. We were so desperate for any kind of calming antidote that we immediately took him up on his offer. This time it really was heroin. I have a dim recollection of us almost literally crawling our way back to Clapham South just as rush hour was commencing. Chrissie didn’t take it after that for a long long time. I wasn’t so cautious.
Actually it was my third encounter with the drug that was to prove the most fatal. I was spending a lot of my down time in Chelsea during ’74. You’d often have found me lurking around McLaren’s headquarters but I was also a regular presence at another World’s End clothing emporium just a few doors down; Granny Takes a Trip had been fêted internationally as London’s hippest and most exclusive haberdashers during London’s psychedelic summer of 1967, the year it first opened. The Beatles, Stones and Syd Barrett had all their most flamboyant outfits made up on the premises that season.
The guy who actually set it all up was an enterprising young Englishman named Nigel Waymouth, but he soon tired of his creation and sold it to a couple of fashion-besotted young New Yorkers named Marty Breslau and Gene Krell at the end of the sixties. I first got to know these two when I began buying clothes from them in late ’72. ‘Granny’s’ was practically the only clothes shop in London at that time that still sold elegantly cut straight-legged trousers unencumbered by a flare and cool-looking boots without clumpy platform heels and soles, and I was always a stickler for both. Flared trousers should be worn only by those unfortunate people with one leg significantly shorter than the other. And only midgets need to even consider sporting platform
heels. Anyone else who adopts their look is committing an abomination against both style and nature.
But I digress. I actually became friends with Gene and Marty during the Stones’ European tour back in autumn. They’d turned up to several shows on the Continent as Keith Richards’s personal guests. I didn’t know it then but Marty was one of Keith’s many heroin suppliers. He and Spanish Tony Sanchez - Richards’s main drug courier and general enforcer who’d later co-write the scurrilous
Up and Down with the Rolling Stones
literary exposé - were thick as thieves. Marty was a handsome fellow - he looked like a stoned Warren Beatty with a girlish shag cut - and he’d evidently led something of a charmed life throughout his teens and twenties. But his luck changed dramatically when he met Keith Richards because he fell head-over-heels in love with the guy and - in order to remain in his presence - ended up destroying his career in the fashion world in order to become his drug dealer. It never got better for Marty after that and he ended up dying of an overdose in the early eighties. He wasn’t what you’d call an especially nice guy - too vain, too tricky, too stupid - but I rather liked him all the same. Ditto Spanish Tony.
Anyway, one night in early spring I was over at their Chelsea Embankment luxury basement flat. Chrissie and I had just had a major spat back in Clapham South and I was seeking temporary refuge elsewhere. Marty and Tony laid out three lines of heroin and offered me one. And that’s when it truly hit me - the drug, I mean. Suddenly I felt all my burdens melting from my shoulders, all that bad static in my brain - banished. And in their place - plugged into every atom of my being - utter serenity. Total palpable bliss.
Charlie Parker called it ‘the cool world’. Once you’ve been
there it’s hard to rid it from your thoughts. It’s like discovering an enchanted island you can suddenly escape to where everything is safe and serene, where no pain can find you. Your conscious mind keeps telling you that you’re stepping over a dangerous line here and messing with the forbidden but your subconscious keeps replaying the ecstasy of that moment when heroin first revealed its full power within you. You can already tell what was about to happen, can’t you, dear reader? All the ingredients for impending disaster were stacking up around me.
And yet 1974 still managed to bring the best out of me to date as a writer. In March of that year I set out on a personal crusade I’d wanted to instigate since my mid-teens: to research and then write an article that would finally explain to the world what had actually happened to Syd Barrett. The Madcap now has apparently more than 30,000 fan websites devoted to his memory but back in ’74 interest in the man was scant at best. Several
NME
ites were openly dismissive of the project at the outset. ‘Barrett is a has-been and has-beens have no place in the pages of the
NME
’ was one rationale I recall being confronted with. But I knew better. His old group had just had a worldwide no. 1 album,
The Dark Side of the Moon
, that was partly a concept album about madness. And Syd - from everything I’d been informed - had gone completely mad himself. It was high time his tale be fully told.
Here at last was a subject I could totally sink my teeth into. In 1967, the impish-eyed Barrett had been the world’s most beautiful man - the golden boy of psychedelia. By 1974 he’d become a scary-eyed balding recluse whom former acquaintances couldn’t even recognise any more. He lived alone in a flat in Chelsea Cloisters where he spent all his time watching a large colour television and eating meat he kept in a giant freezer in the kitchen. I
thought about approaching him directly-I had the address - but was told he probably wouldn’t answer the door. I spoke to at least two people who’d recently crossed paths with him and they claimed it was now impossible to have a coherent conversation with him. He rarely went out, never searched out old acquaintances and hadn’t made music in two years. Everything was closing in around him and so it seemed more humane to just leave him alone and let others document what happened to him. In the end his absence worked to the piece’s advantage because it further enhanced his mystique, made him even more distantly compelling as subject matter.
Almost everyone I interrogated about Syd openly bore the psychic scars of having witnessed his unforgettable deterioration. Several came close to tears as they recalled the way his wreckless use of LSD had fractured first his potential and then his every mental process. Others expressed the view that - as gifted as he was - he was too young and undisciplined, too over-indulged and too good-looking, and simply lacked the mental focus and spartan nervous system required to successfully sustain a career for himself as a rock star.
The Pink Floyd somehow got wind of what I was preparing and Dave Gilmour - whom I’d never met before - phoned me up out of the blue at home in Clapham South. He offered to do an interview on the subject of Syd because he wanted to put the record straight about his friend and hopefully counterbalance any misinformation I might have picked up along the way. I was scheduled to deliver the finished text - which eventually ran to over 6,000 words - to the
NME
on the Friday morning of the first week in April. But I couldn’t start writing it until I’d finished my chinwag with Gilmour, which ended up taking place in a Long
Acre pub on Thursday evening. It was worth the added deadline stress because Gilmour gave me by far the most revealing account of Syd’s rise and fall, and I’m eternally grateful that he saw fit to entrust me with his often intimate recollections. To him, his friend’s breakdown wasn’t simply triggered by drug abuse; the roots of it stretched back to Barrett’s pampered childhood and his doting mother. His testimony proved to be the last crucial piece of the puzzle I had to conjure up in prose.