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