Only I wasn’t. McLaren chose to broadcast the arrival of Sid Vicious into the Sex Pistols by sending a series of telegrams out to the music - and daily - press on which a single curt message was inscribed. Sid was now a Sex Pistol, the missive stated, and the main reason he’d been picked was because ‘he gave Nick Kent just what he deserved at the 100 Club’.
Reading that in the
NME
and everywhere else certainly jolted me out of my junkie stupor for at least five minutes. The thoughts that flooded through my head in that moment of ersatz clarity were distinctly unpleasant ones. I’d been victimised once - by people I’d helped and befriended - and now I was being victimised and slandered again in the public forum - by the same vampiric morally bankrupt preening scumsuckery backstabbers. This was war. But a war I was never going to be able to win. What was I going to do? Buy a gun on the black market and cap the little red-haired prick? He wasn’t worth the angst, the effort or the expense. Nor did I have the time to even plot a feud. The moment-to-moment fabric of my life was tied up in far more pressing issues - like ‘Where will I sleep tonight?’ and ‘How can I stay loaded for the next twenty-four hours?’ Revenge was a luxury I couldn’t afford to cultivate at this stage in my life.
One evening either two or three weeks after McLaren’s poisonous telegram had hit the presses, I made my way up to Dingwalls for some social distraction. I was scarcely through the door when I turned to my right and saw a figure approaching. He had ink-black hair and a big village-idiot grin breaking up his features like
a split coconut. Once again I found myself face to face with Sid Vicious.
My first thought on seeing him advance before me? ‘Oh boy, here we go again. Look out for that bike chain.’ But he just stood there grinning and offered me his hand to shake. ‘Listen, mate,’ he said, ‘I want to say sorry about what happened at the 100 Club. I was out of my head that night. It was nothing personal.’ He then told me that he and Lydon ‘felt bad’ about what McLaren had written about me in his press statement, that it was ‘well out of order’. I just stood there drinking in his words, thankful that my cranium wasn’t again under siege. ‘He doesn’t seem too bright,’ I remember thinking. But he sounded sincere. And borderline contrite too. I accepted his apologies, we shook hands and that was that. He sloped back to the bar presumably to cosh some unlucky music-industry shill whilst I went in the opposite direction in search of anyone who might give me free drugs. It was just a brief encounter of the ‘ships passing in the night’ variety - but it would not be our last.
Meanwhile, it would be fair to say that ‘what happened at the 100 Club’ and McLaren’s later glorification of the incident in the media had a truly calamitous effect on my life. Whenever I attended punk-themed events around London throughout all of 1977 and most of the following year, someone I’d never met before would walk up to me and try to start a fight. It was like suddenly having my very existence turned into the script for a bad Western, the kind where the star-crossed wandering hero has to confront some new trigger-happy inebriated ruckus-raiser in every saloon bar in every town he stumbles through.
Actually I’m overstating the menace a little: I never actually got threatened with a gun. But knives and other sharp wounding
objects were sometimes waved provocatively in my face. My tormentors just wanted to earn a bit of instant punk cred for themselves and maybe even a mention in the music comics. Some misguided person with orange hair tried to stab me in the toilets at the Roxy whilst my back was turned. He failed to pierce my flesh with his blade but cut the jacket I was wearing to ribbons in the ensuing mêlée.
Mostly though it was just verbal violence. I’d be standing there minding my own business and some ferret-eyed mouth almighty flanked by the inevitable pair of gormless-looking sidekicks would sidle up and begin harassing me. ‘You think you’re it’ - that was always the first line out of their lips. ‘You think you’re it. But you’re not. You’re just a piece of shit.’ And so on. Usually I was so stoned that the invective being evoked at my expense splashed over me like water off the proverbial duck’s back. That’s one of the only good things about using narcotics - it can shield you from having your senses too infiltrated by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. But it was still a draining process to have to withstand these assaults on my flesh and general character time after time.
Did I truly merit this sorry, sorry fate? Well, yes and no. Much of my bad fortune - specifically drug addiction and homelessness - I’d brought upon myself. They were nobody’s fault but mine. And I’d done a lot of bad things over the past three years. I’d been too arrogant and too vain, too immature and too judgemental, too wayward and too goddam hot-headed - and that was just the short list. But I never ever let myself become one of those all-the-way bad people who lose all sense of personal humanity and conscience. My heart just wasn’t in it. My inner moral compass was still halfway functioning throughout this whole wretched era.
And yet to suddenly become an all-purpose whipping boy for the emerging punk hordes - that was unjust and plain wicked. Shit, I’d been running around in the music press like a headless chicken talking up punk rock as the next big thing back when Joe Strummer had still been a folk-singing Woody Guthrie wannabe, Malcolm McLaren a fifties rockabilly haberdasher and John Lydon a bloke with long red hair who sometimes sold LSD at Hawkwind concerts. And then to be victimised by the very thing I’d helped bring into being - that was cold.
But at the same time there was no way out. What could I have done? Retreat to the provinces, get healthy and become a librarian? That wasn’t my idea of a viable lifestyle alternative. I just had to keep brassing it out and stay breathing.
After seeing in the new year at the House of Gangrene, I’d spread my junkie wings and moved on to other druggy crash pads in the immediate vicinity as a source of temporary refuge. One shelter from the storm was a first-floor apartment on All Saints Road just two or three doors along from the notorious Mangrove restaurant, a well-known local hotbed of friction between Jamaican potheads and the local constabulary. A guy called Nigel lived there - white, well-spoken, Oxbridge graduate, held down a straight job on weekdays, took loads of drugs on the weekend. He was one of the few genuinely soulful yuppies I’ve ever crossed paths with. He was also homosexual, as were his two flatmates, one of whom was a journalist for
Gay News
. He’d let me sleep on his floor when I had nowhere else to go. He and his co-inhabitants never tried to foist their sexuality onto me. They were out in the margins of society too - down by law and circumstance - and kind-hearted enough to invite a sad specimen like me in from the cold to share their frugal living space.
One afternoon I wandered in and Nigel was talking to an alarming-looking young American woman with dyed blonde hair and a nerve-jangling voice. The subject of their increasingly heated conversation centred on a recent drug deal gone wrong. Nigel had given this harpy money to secure him some heroin and she’d come back with a tiny packet full of brick-dust. ‘Money for old rope,’ he kept muttering darkly. ‘Fuck you, you simpering faggot, ’ the woman - who’d obviously just robbed him - fired back. She then turned on her heels and exited the building, leaving only a trail of insults in her wake. It was my first encounter with Nancy Spungen.
I’d be at Nigel’s place for two or three days at a time and then - not wishing to outstay my welcome - scoot across the road to a hard-core junkie crash pad on a small street parallel to Portobello Road. This place was the closest I ever came to frequenting one of those Victorian opium dens where the clientele would all be splayed out on the floor in states of shared horizontal stupefaction. It was really a ground-floor flat that had been lately squatted by a guy called Gary, who’d fitted the main space out with some mattresses he found on a nearby skip and then opened up the premises to any junkie who might share his dope with him. He was a pretty typical example of what passed for a heroin addict in the more downtrodden areas of London during the late seventies: a nice guy - too sweet-natured to become fully criminal-minded - who’d stumbled into a deadly lifestyle and who was trying to just keep his head above water. His big problem - apart from the dope - was his girlfriend Amanda. Amanda was as grey as a ghost and she babbled incessantly-a semi-comatose, deeply disturbed human ragbag of rampant neurosis. Nobody could stand her apart from Gary, who was utterly
besotted with the ungrateful woman and who saw himself as her knight-in-shining-armour protector. She didn’t deserve him: the love he felt for her was pearls before swine. Later in 1977 she left him to move in with a psychotic dealer working out of North London and Gary had committed suicide the night he found out.
Another of my junkie ‘homes away from home’ was up in Maida Vale, close to Little Venice, where a Persian youth named Attila (it was his real name) was dealing from a basement squat that due to lack of electricity looked more like a cave than a bedsit. Attila was a rich oil sheikh’s son but daddy had promptly disowned him when he’d discovered his son courting a drug habit and exiled him from the land of his birth. The boy - who looked about seventeen years of age - had landed in London and was now connected with some heavy-duty Persian gangsters who used him to sell their product from his extremely humble outpost. He was not long for this world but at least he had an older companion from his homeland with him to keep an eye on the business.
Engin, his Persian compatriot, was a real box of human fireworks: long, thinning hair, a beard from straight out of the Old Testament days, yellow skin, emaciated, cadaverous features, mad terrorist eyes - he looked like a smack-addled Ivan the Terrible and he talked like the ultimate soothsayer of doom. Even when stoned out of his gourd, he’d be mumbling darkly about the impending apocalypse and the godless nature of mankind. It was just as well he devoted all his energies to using and selling heroin or else he’d have probably been out and about putting bombs in tube stations.
Engin dealt from a tip of a squat he shared with a rail-thin,
comatose Irish hippie girl called Siobhan down on Castellain Road, only two minutes’ walk from Attila’s abode. One late afternoon I had cause to visit the place and found myself ambling towards the building in question when something else caught my eye. A youth was lying horizontally, half of him on the pavement, half of him on the road directly in front of Engin’s. He looked to be in a lot of pain. My first instinct was ‘Oh shit - maybe he’s been shot. Maybe Engin’s just been robbed by some heavy-duty villains and there’s been some kind of massacre.’
But then - as I approached the prone form-I recognised who it was: Sid Vicious - again. Moreover, a Sid Vicious undergoing extremely nasty physical contortions. ‘What the fuck are you doing laid out like that?’ I asked him. He was crying and moaning - literally - babbling on about how he had to get some smack because the Pistols had a show that night and he was too sick to make the date. He’d heard that someone was dealing on this street and so had gone from door to door, getting them slammed in his face at every turn. He’d gotten so frustrated - he said - that he’d taken out his knife and started cutting up his chest. He then showed me the wounds. I’d never seen the results of self-mutilation before. It was an alarming sight. Anyway, I helped him up off the ground and guided him to Engin’s door. Sid after all was breaking the number-one commandment in the drug addict’s Bible - never needlessly draw attention to yourself in public - and had to be removed from the sidewalk before the police were called in.
When he opened the door, I could see Engin was not elated by the thought of seeing Sid about to cross his threshold. Apart from being a full-time harbinger of gloom, he also fancied himself as a prog-rock drummer. His drum kit took up most of the
living room where he and his true love spent all their time. You’d be nodding out on a sofa and suddenly be rudely awakened by him bashing away on the thing as he tried in vain to keep time to a Mahavishnu Orchestra record blasting from the stereo. Engin had heard about punk and reckoned it was the music of the Antichrist. Now the Antichrist was about to step into his home and hearth. Suffice to say, it took all my powers of persuasion to get him inside. Once in, I asked Engin to help Sid out, and after some grumbling he supplied him with a five-quid bag of heroin. Sid dug a syringe out of one of his pockets, cooked the stuff up, drew the residue up into the syringe’s barrel and then - without tying off to find a vein - just drove the needle into his arm, sending blood spurting onto the floor before him. Thirty seconds later, his eyes were as tiny as pinwheels and he was weaving uncertainly about the room with a beatific grin on his face. He couldn’t stop thanking me and Engin for our generosity, and with good reason. Nothing bonds junkies closer than when one helps another in time of sickness.
Four days later I returned to Engin’s Castellain Road sink-hole only to find him sharing the space with two new tenants. Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen had taken up squatter’s rights there too - just strong-armed their way into his living room with all their worldly possessions contained inside three or four plastic shopping bags. This was a truly mind-boggling living arrangement: Engin and his whispering girlfriend were dyed-in-the-wool hippie relics whilst Sid and Nancy were foul-mouthed barbarians who would have gladly spat on their hosts and then left them both bleeding in an alley in normal circumstances. But heroin has a curious way of bridging all social and cultural divides once one has succumbed to it. At first Engin had bristled at the idea of
these two moving into his domain but Sid had pulled out a bunch of cash he wished to exchange for dope, and from that moment on he and his horrifying girlfriend had been allowed to become fixtures on the premises. They occupied a ratty old couch which they lay on in a semi-conscious stupor.
When I arrived, a black-and-white telly was already relaying the sounds and images of a live Eric Clapton concert especially filmed and recorded for the BBC. On the flickery screen, Clapton-a former heroin addict himself - stared out at us from behind a gold prospector’s beard. He looked seriously liquored up and sang in a voice frayed with exhaustion and too much inhaled nicotine. There was nothing remotely dynamic about the music he and his group were making - no energy or daring. It sounded like everything that punk had lately been invented to give the bum’s rush to and Spungen kept up a running commentary as she stared witheringly at the spectacle, employing language that even a sailor might have paused before using. One of Clapton’s backing singers was a black woman and Spungen kept running her down, calling her ‘that dumb fuckin’ nigger’ over and over again. I looked at Sid to see whether he shared his love interest’s racist outlook but he was comatose, eyes shut tight, mouth slightly ajar. How this scabby pair ended up becoming the token Romeo and Juliet of the late seventies is something I-and pretty much anyone else who knew them - still find bafflingly hard to take into full account. Theirs wasn’t even what you would call ‘love’ per se - more an intense mutual neediness.