Autobiography (6 page)

‘STOP biting your finger-nails,’
Mr Pink shouts at Michael Foley.

‘I can’t. It’s a habit,’
explains Michael.

‘RIGHT!!’
shouts Mr Pink, who then grabs his leather belt and the ritualized violent whacks across Michael’s hands ensue. Again, it is pathetic to witness, and pathetic to endure.

An excitingly arch London magazine called
Film and Filming
has versed me in the Warholian, with all of its guiding principles of self-determination and autonomy. I cried for poetic language and I cried out to find those who were unafraid, those free agents, unbigoted and unshackled. I didn’t want to live unseen, camouflaged within the crowd. I knew then that life could only ever be changed for the better because somebody somewhere had taken a risk – often with their own life. As an educational establishment, St Mary’s contained only the traditional values of negativity, and there would not be a single hour spent within its walls when I could feel either relaxed or untrammeled. It simply wasn’t allowed. In their God-fearing, chanting morality, the teachers of St Mary’s only managed to convey nihilism and limericks. Look for one boy who left the place feeling spiritual and complete. You will never find him. My face had by now taken on the demeanor of continual deep regret, which only music could soothe. The new poets were not by the Lakes, but suspending disbelief in recording studios where words and sound mix the literal with the perceptual and the conceptual. In 1971 I had watched helplessly as Buffy Sainte-Marie made her debut on
Top of the Pops
singing her own composition
Soldier blue
; a mannish white working shirt, and what were surely blue jeans, dogged determination in her brownish face, and the truth of it all in her eyes.

Oh soldier blue, soldier blue,
Can’t you see that there’s another way to love her?

The ‘her’ is the land, and ‘the other way’ is minus bombs and military artillery. Or so I assumed. Serious artists rarely make the stages of
Top of the Pops
because the show is essentially light entertainment, yet this song of great depth has risen to number 7, and, light or not, the BBC are duty-bound as a public service to air any song elected by the public. In the market-driven mush of British pop, there is no continual place for Buffy Sainte-Marie with her carrion calls of loss and injustice. But there she is, and here am I, and the secret of song unravels. I discover
Moratorium
on the flipside of
Soldier blue
, and this song has a fighting vocal over a lengthy stream of words that include the line
‘Fuck the war – bring our brothers home’
, and I weigh my new love against the Willesden weediness of Greyhound, whose singer’s voice is ready to crack and fold at any second. Trojan Records had also presented the Pioneers with
Let your yeah be yeah
, attempting to match the impassable scatology of
Double b
arrel
by Dave and Ansell Collins, or the freeing stringed swoop of
Young, gifted and black
by Bob and Marcia. It seemed to me that it was only within British pop music that almost anything could happen. Every other mode of expression seemed fixed and predictable and slow. Sportsmen used the same seven words in every interview, and were largely incapable of surprise (Cassius Clay and George Best the eternal exceptions). The music of 1971 had given the lost strangeness of
I will return
by Springwater, the eco-protest of
Don’t let i
t die
by Hurricane Smith, and the liberating sadness of General Johnson’s voice on a wild roll of Chairmen of the Board singles. From nowhere comes the California cobra chords of
Run run run
by Jo Jo Gunne and
Heaven must have sent you
by the Elgins – wide variables on an open pitch, all adapting to different listeners – the well and the ill. All of this starts me, and I cannot stop. If I can barely speak (which is true), then I shall surely sing.

‘If you MUST sing every night, would you please sing something that we know?’
says elderly Mr Coleman from next door, which was of course a polite way of telling me to shut up, as each night I sang myself to sleep. T. Rex
had raged into perfection with their trio of
Jeepster
(number 2 for six weeks!),
Telegram Sam
(number 1) and
Metal guru
(number 1),
an extraordinary rush of success magnifying the importance of Marc Bolan as a rattling sea change. Wearing makeup and an extreme mantle of pride, Bolan didn’t seem to have any life other than song. He is struggling to break in America, but it doesn’t work in a country whose fiercely conservative patterns cannot allow a small and effeminate man to attempt to direct and influence their unknotted Ivy League WASPS. Marc Bolan’s lyrics are steeped in the quietly insane world of the gothic English novel, and are too deeply eccentric to survive any explanation. On earlier records, Bolan sounds as if singing in Olde English – incomprehensible to the modern ear. Yes, but the Bible speaks of
‘a whole earth of one language’
,
and this is something that only pop singers can manage. Certainly, politicians cannot.

T. Rex are my first concert and my dad and sister drop me off at daunting Belle Vue on June 16th 1972, watching me waddle away alone in my purple satin jacket – a sight ripe for psychiatric scrutiny. I am now determined, and newly emerged from
Groovin’ with Mr Bloe
by Mr Bloe. England was already set to change trains from Marc Bolan to David Bowie, whose
Starman
single had shaken everyone with its
somewhere-over-the-rainbow
chorus and Blue Mink’s
Melting pot
bridge. Full-page advertising for David Bowie’s new Top Rank tour causes me to laugh excitedly as I see the now famous shot of spike-thin Bowie half-propped on a high stool, wearing tight white satin pants tucked into plastic boxer-boots, one hand on hip, the other hand pointing the way to somewhere, quite fanatically homosexual. The face is damned-soul-as-savior-of-society, preacher and reformer, now free of his own unhappy childhood and willing to help you through yours should Black Sabbath and Deep Purple prove insufficient. I crawl from the cultureless world to Stretford Hardrock in September 1972, where David Bowie is showcasing the venue. At mid-day he emerges from a black Mercedes, every inch the eighth dimension, teetering on high heels, with all the wisdom of our ancestors. Smiling keenly, he accepts the note of a dull schoolboy whose overblown soul is more ablaze than the school blazer he wears, and thus I touch the hand of this inexplicably liberating reformer; he, a Wildean visionary about to re-mold England, and I, a spectacle of suffering in a blue school uniform. Two months later I am at the same venue for Roxy Music, who are still promoting their first LP but who are exhibiting the sleeve of their second LP in the foyer – an advanced flash for those who can’t wait. I creep into the soundcheck (quite easily, since the obscurity of the band does not necessitate any form of security), and I speak to saxophonist Andrew Mackay as he plays a pinball machine in the Hardrock lobby. It is a netherworld encounter for Mackay, but a great joy for the pesky boy. There is new meaning to everything as Roxy Music inexplicably jump to number 4 with their first single,
Virginia plain
, a pursed-mouth whirl of low noise and words used for sound value only. There is no chorus and nothing is repeated. The song is madcap in construction, and singer Bryan Ferry is an honored northern guest – escapist but shy, a slither of glamor rippling like the sea. Roxy Music are resolutely odd, and Agatha Christie queer; the smile of Ferry is Hiroshima mean, as he shuffles crab-style from stage right to stage left
...
like someone who’s had his food dish removed. It’s a voice of cold metal, just barely skin deep. I eagerly catch his first Radio One interview wherein he falls asleep at the drone of his own replies. Eno, on the other hand, uses words that no one else can spell and is wrapped in so much sexual allure that
Top of the Pops
cameras avoid him for fear of frightening the frighteningly drab majority. The technical detachment of Roxy Music is, briefly and possibly accidentally, a radical experience, one that they swiftly dispense with once they establish a large audience. But before they lose their strangeness they are magnificent, and the drabness of true artifice comes alive. Also billed for this night at the Hardrock are the New York Dolls, who have yet to make a record, but about whom the press had already written so much. Bumped up against the front of the stage, I, and others, sigh heavily as it is announced that the New York Dolls will not appear due to the sudden death of their drummer three days earlier in London. In these limping, impeded days of 1972 there is no way that such news could reach our social quarter, since our houses and our lives are shut down from instant communications.

In this year I also see Mott the Hoople and Lou Reed live, and my senses never return. Lou Reed is unimpressed by applause, and lives a life detached from custom. His stare is cold and his romanticism is brutal. His songs are half-sung melodies of menace. He might drop dead any second, and is therefore the real thing. Examined ravenously like a museum exhibit, Lou Reed is evidently spiked to excess, and strangely loveable. This feared raggle-clatter of pop species is changing everything. The womanly David Bowie is attacked by the
Daily Mirror
as being ‘a disgrace’ – although
how
he is a disgrace, or
why
, is not explained. Bowie’s extraordinary effect of menace upon British culture is largely forgotten now, but I watched it break like a thundercloud in 1972, and its presence was as volcanic as that which later would be termed Punk. An even darker force controlled the personalities of the New York Dolls, who are younger than Bowie and who are more-or-less transgender in appearance.
Melody Maker
announces them as ‘the world’s first homosexual rock band’, which, of course, is what they are not. On face value, the Dolls are menacing rent boys who are forcing the world to deal with them. Their arms drape lovingly around one another in photographs at a time when young men are assumed to want to look like Bobby Moore, Jimmy Greaves or Terry Venables.
Disc
magazine gives a warning on its front page:
Lock up your sons, it’s the New York Dolls!
, as singer David Johansen lurches forwards in color. The suggestion that your
sons rather than your daughters
might need to be protected from a male rock band had never previously been considered. The cautionary headline from
Record Mirror
is
ARRIVAL OF THE DOLLY BOYS
, and David Johansen advises the same magazine:
‘We’re not butch’
– an astonishing confession in rock’s macho Zeppelin age.

T
ACKY, TACKY, TACKY
shouts another Dolls headline, and in 1973 the Dolls’ first 45,
Jet boy
, and their first studio album are very heavily promoted in all of the British music papers. The Dolls meet with all of the obvious condemnations, for this is still an era of darkness and drowned dreams.
The New York Dolls were chaotic because they were themselves; their own creation, and not connected to the glam-rock theatrical puns of Slade’s twinkie-blinks or the Sweet’s
Charley’s Aunt
winks. Malodorously 24-carat, the Dolls are legless realism – wired and rigged honest trash scraped up off New York’s back alleys, banished from the communities of the living. The flesh awakens with
Jet boy
, premiered one lunchtime on the
Johnnie Walker Show
on Radio One. What seems like promotion is actually a Mayday bleep.

The Spanish arm of their record label are so offended by the Dolls’ appearance that they refuse to show any photographs of the band on their debut LP, and instead release it minus any shots of the most visual and striking band of the modern age. With relief, I catch the Dolls on their now-famous
Old Grey Whistle Test
television appearance, and whereas both of my parents watch unimpressed, pride and joy electrify my body as the revenge motif dates every other modern pop artist in an instant. Snarl matches visual art and the Dolls were mine. I heard and saw a high-wire act of tough noise and fantastic pop lyrics, and I heard an invitation to anyone man enough to challenge them. Offhand and uncivil, the Dolls were ready to run the game, featuring in a
Circus
magazine article under the title
New York Dolls and what’s it to ya?
In comparison, everyone else suddenly seemed like a travelling salesman. The Dolls were a social unit, great fun, grave fun, salty and completely off the deep end. The opposite to polite and antiseptic, there wasn’t actually any visible line to avoid stepping over, and
‘We have new drags for England that will blow the mind off the Queen herself
,
’
laughed David Johansen, adding,
‘Oh we love all those queens
...
everybody’s alright by us.’
Fast-forward forty years and such comments might not seem so harum-scarum, but this was 1973 – with the Carpenters on top of the world looking down on creation, and with Donny Osmond hanging on as the pickle puss face of America. How could people like the New York Dolls
even exist?
And as a musical unit! And where exactly did this leave Dr Hook and the Medicine Show? The morning after the
Whistle
Test
, I present 50 pence at Rumbelows in Stretford Precinct and I ask for the New York Dolls single.

‘See,’
said one fat assistant to another,
‘I told you someone would buy it.’

At last I am someone!
The 45 purchased has the middle section of the song cut out and fades quickly, in an arrangement I have never since discovered on any pressing of this record. The confusion with the Dolls is that their scumsucker rough-trade drag contrasted with the truth of their wise-guy personalities. The Dolls were actually the toughest band on earth, and their appearance proved it. Unfolding before us, they raised the game one hundredfold so that even Alice Cooper – supremely devilish on his
Billion D
ollar Babies
coup de maître – was suddenly a broad on Broadway to the Dolls’ own Bellevue Hospital. Pomp-rock had degraded everything and left audiences immobilized and horizontal in trench coats and woolly sweaters. The Dolls were the slum of all failures, had nothing to lose, and could scarcely differentiate between night and day. For the Dolls, it could never be dark enough. Their raw existence vibrated with expectations of disaster, yet their organs are not tormented. Mockery and practical defeat may very well be their reality, and musical success doesn’t even appear to be their aim. On an infinitesimal scale, Dolls songs are about life happening against us – never with or for us – and as agents of their own troubles they relate everything to themselves. Their eyes are indifferent. They have left the order of this world. Jerry Nolan might even kill you. Because they feel excluded they have no reason to account for their own actions.
Trash
scorches the skin. Flayed alive, the Dolls may look beautiful, but they are withering fast, and around them we see Johnny Carson, Paul Newman, Cassius Clay, Robert Redford, David Cassidy,
as males within the paragraphs of law. The Dolls endure the consequences of how they look, afflicted by existence yet not responsible. David Johansen laughs, but is irritated by everything and anything, since life clearly signifies nothing, yet he can always save the day with an eloquent phrase. The detachment of Johnny Thunders and Sylvain Sylvain is open to nothing, and you mustn’t ask more of Arthur Kane than just being alive.
Well.
The Dolls are the last frontier of task and adventure for the discontented mind. The objective is only in being. Their excess of drugs and alcohol increased the fire and sword of their swagger – now is the golden hour, and tomorrow could be too late.
Vietnamese baby
may very well be a song of universal meaninglessness, but the Dolls have no cause to disguise their madness, and isn’t sex the one and only reason why all of us are actually alive? Appearance is a new debate in rock music, and the counter-culture of the New York Dolls is an infinite landscape. But who can cope with such a landscape having been kenneled for so long? The uniform of bad denim still shrouds most of the million-sellers on the US chart, but bassist Arthur Kane, with his hand resting on guitarist Sylvain Sylvain’s knee, ventures further than the universe allowed. This did not happen with the Eagles. Squinting, the Dolls were in endless puberty, deeply close to one another, as thick as t
hieves, a private gang of deep-seated buddies whose companionship and familiarity revealed a mutual affection that rendered them loveable in a way that Wings or the Moody Blues just weren’t. The word ‘doll’ had only ever previously been tagged to a female – of beauty queen or Venus nectar. The New Oxford helps with
‘doll: attractive woman, beautiful woman’
, which is possibly why we have no recollection of James Cagney ever turning to George Raft with ‘
Say, you’re quite a doll’
(not on camera, at any rate). Their chosen name, the New York Dolls, was as provocative and inflamed as being called the New York Fags; and really, this is precisely how the Dolls were initially deciphered, anyway. Knowing what we now know – that the Dolls chased the bearded clam at every opportunity – simply triples their social effect. And this is how history is made.

Jerry Nolan on the front of the Dolls debut album is the first woman I ever fall in love with; the hussy-slut positioning of the legs is playmate call-girl, and the pink drum kit just might be a rock ’n roll first. When had drummers ever looked this way and played so hard? You have witnessed a lunar-landing even
before you start to listen, and within the courtesan cover you discover a fit of throttling lunacy from a band that fear no foe or woe.
The Velvet Underground had been born weary, had found hell within themselves, and they couldn’t care less if they made you suffer, because their message was simple: you will never have anything. The Dolls were laughing all the way to a speedy grave. That they were even alive at all, and had managed to endure on a planet that even I had felt certain was as flat-tire as fuck, was a shock to anyone having been raised, as I was, on smiling nice-boy singers. How had the Dolls found each other? Searches for ‘like-minded musicians’ seemed, to me, to be so unfeasible as to be hardly worth attempting. Pugs who played musical instruments in 1973 were either older than dirt, or moth-eaten techies. In the swell-elegant world of success it was always the case that most bands of dapper style nonetheless also contained members whose natural ugliness let the team down. The New York Dolls were the first band who equaled each other in demeanor and effect; in essence, the most perfect-looking pop group – minus that hesitant component who wasn’t quite sure of his connection to the others.

High-toned, I carry the Dolls LP sleeve into school, where I attempt to reproduce its front cover in blotchy Manchester Education Committee goo-paint as an art presentation. Art teacher Miss Power (for teachers,
Miss
told us that she was not legally bound to a man,
Mrs
told us that she
was
legally bound to a man, whilst
Mr
slyly
protected the secret) was so highly strung that she frequently raced from the classroom in tears of rage at someone not present. On this particular day, spotting the New York Dolls sleeve resting on my desk in that’s-my-boy sniffiness, Miss Power grabbed the LP sleeve and held it aloft for the entire class to examine:

‘LOOK AT THIS!’
she demanded of everyone,
‘LOOK
AT THIS!’
and everyone looked at this.
‘THIS is sickness. These are MEN making themselves sexual for OTHER MEN.’

And on she went, terribly upset. She appealed to the class for support, but none came, and although I expected a fierce larruping for abstaining from dullness, none came, and Miss Power had merely outed me as a prostitute; a midnight cowboy in flannel-grey. I felt quite pleased that something might disconnect me from the vacant clambrains seated around me, but it wasn’t Miss Power’s fault that she did not know that the Dolls’ appearance had girls – not boys – flocking to mingle with them, and that the Dolls gratefully obliged in a modern world uncharted by Miss Power, who was nonetheless certain that her own life had a moral superiority that the New York Dolls ought to be wise enough to follow. But the world within (and without) St Mary’s was not yet ready, and even when the Dolls’
Frankenstein
was bravely spun on the school’s
nearer-my-God-to-thee-am-I
record player by Miss Judge for an English language dissection (for I was not the type to give up until blood spurted out – my own, if necessary), none of the listening lads of 1973 had anything to say by way of autopsy until Andrew Lempiki spoke up quite brilliantly with:

‘I thought they were birds.’

Unfathomably, I had several cupcake grapples in this year of 1973, with no experience worth repeating, yet somehow having dropped myself further into each bungee jump than I thought allowable. Plunge or no plunge, girls remained mysteriously attracted to me, and I had no idea why, since although each fumbling foray hit the target, nothing electrifying took place, and I turned a thousand corners without caring. Plainly I was not interested, being chosen but not chooser. In King’s Lane a sporty Welsh girl lands me such a powerful clenched-fist blow that I fall to the ground deafened.

‘What was THAT for?’
I said, sightless with soreness.
‘Because I like you and you won’t look at me,’
she said – as if what she had done might improve the situation. It didn’t.
Far more exciting were the array of stylish racing bikes that my father would bring home (from the Stylish Racing Bike Sanctuary, no doubt; we were wise
not
to ask). The bikes were often too large for me, but all the better to risk the sharp corners and mud-splattered daredevil routes of Turn Moss. Something within me loved the manic race through the darkened warrens of Longford Park, battered by rain, drenched but alive, taking iceberg corners too quickly, rising aloft from the seat down wing-and-prayer slopes. Night after night like an unowned dog I would tear through the park, a creature in human form, all perilous bolt inviting danger, the bike dancing controlled flips as I gulped jets of rain – more danger, more fun. In comparison, what had girls to offer? Nothing but a mangled jungle of tangled hair presented as the jackpot payoff. Honeypots sprawled like open graves, their owners doing nothing at all other than
letting you.
The call of duty is all yours – to turn on and get off; to hit the spot and know the ropes; to please and be pleased; as the owners of such Bermuda Triangles do
...
nothing.

The lonely season was best, and I much preferred time wasted with my closest friend Edward Messenger in these childish days that lacked any profound distinction between the sexes. But I am already a popular menace, and Edward’s older brother Leslie wants something that I’ve got, and shortly thereafter a famous bout took place in the Messengers’ garden on King’s Lane,
wherein I emerged victorious (but un-gloating) from my first punch-up with Leslie, and it all becomes too muddled, and life’s divides take hold. Prior to this, King’s Lane had been a second home for me – one less complicated than my own. Edward’s mother Jean loved Steve McQueen and was a strong woman of northern bluntness, yet untroubled by my constant presence. The house is northern cheerfulness and cooking smells and Sandy the dog being lovingly bullish. Leslie calls his younger brother ‘Ebward’ for reasons ungraspable, and somewhere in the middle their sister Annette is a smiling face beneath limp brown hair, just waiting to be old enough to
do something
. It’s a good home to go to, and Edward and I unleash make-believe as our teeming imaginations race over and through each King’s Lane garden like gundogs; a disorderly chase through stinging nettles with horrified protests from elderly dwellers who have tended and tended all of their lives. Maddening church bells stop play each Sunday as I, but not Edward, am called to attend church. Mothers who never let go
of their sons, and sons at pains to grow, are all I
see in the crammed churches, and I ache to return to King’s Lane horseplay – which had always moved on by the time I was finally unshackled from God. I slept at the Messenger’s house many times – at the opposite end of Edward’s bed. In the fashion of the day, nothing encourages openness, and we instinctively never widen our understanding of anything, and the fetish of secrecy begins, for isn’t it touch alone that changes you? Ten years later we pass one another in the street, and we nod as we pass, because that’s what northern males do, and can only do.