Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography (29 page)

I met Kate at the EMI offices on Manchester Square and, once again, I fancied that there were seductive wheels within wheels spinning away behind the surface level of my questions and her answers. Kate, it turned out, was from my part of the world – well, South-East London anyway – and we both squealed with recognition when we picked out shabby little landmarks we both knew in Lewisham and New Cross. She told me how scary some people at EMI were and how she hated talking about herself. I told her I was the
NME
receptionist and she gasped. We seemed like two giggling conspirators suddenly swept up in a big adult machine. I liked Kate Bush and, as with everyone I came across, really thought she liked me. I can’t lie to you, that’s just the way I am. (Deep breath.)
Anyway
. What happened next was this – and it is something I have felt truly rotten about ever since.

When I came to play the tape of the interview back (this time I’d actually taken a recorder along) I knew I couldn’t be as anodyne as with the Kirsty puff and so found myself very unfairly going for the gags. True, some of Kate’s pronouncements about the world did border on the airy-fairy, but on the tape I could hear myself cooing along with each one like I was getting it straight from the Dalai Lama. I had two choices: write up a fairly straight report of the meeting and risk Phil McNeill washing his hands of this formerly promising street punk, or have fun with the encounter – even if that meant relegating Kate Bush to merely a foil for my whizz-bangs. Had I the slightest clue that she would go on to be
the
Kate Bush, perhaps I would have decided differently but, as it was, I sat down behind the typewriter, cracked my knuckles and cranked out the folderol. Here’s how it began:

EMI: three letters that have come to represent ‘the enemy’ in rock’n’roll’s war games. EMI House rambles like a country home with a thousand warrens of ministry-type boring pools and divisions. The guard on the reception listens to me announce my appointment with Kate Bush with all the emotion of a weighing machine being told a hard luck story. Like everyone else, I get told to take a seat while he talks, unheard, into one of the extension phones. About 10 minutes later I’m led down and through EMI House and up to a corridor down which the
Daily Mirror
’s Pauline McLeod is striding. She’s out – I’m in. Kate Bush is sipping Perrier water from an elegant glass. I tell her she’ll get a rosy old bugle if she carries on guzzling the gin like that, and she laughs naturally. She’s far more attractive than I’d ever thought.

Hey Kate. Do you feel obliged to sing in that style all the time these days?

‘What? You mean . . .’

Y’know, like you could age the nation’s glassblowers.

‘Oh sure, I mean I don’t feel obliged, it just flows that way. As a writer I just try to express an idea. I can’t possibly think differently of songs of mine because they’re past now, and quite honestly I don’t like them anymore.’

Have you still got people around you who’ll tell you something’s rubbish?

‘My brother Jay, who’s been with me since I was writing stuff that really embarrasses me – he’d let me know for sure!’

And so on into an interview where I always seem to entirely have the upper hand, an attitude even. The ‘glassblowers’ gag wasn’t a bad line, of course, but I hadn’t been anything like as chippy as that face to face. I emphasized her hippy phrasing at the expense of what she actually had to say. I ended the article like this:

Kate Bush is a happy, charming woman that can totally win your heart. But afterwards on tape, when she’s not there and you actually listen to all this . . . well golly gosh. Don’t lose sleep, old mates, it’s just pop music folk and the games they spin. But like, you know, Wow.

This was Chicken Licken, Cosmic News, Atlantis, goodnight, man . . .

It was a rotten thing to do. I knew that even as I typed it up and yet I also knew it was exactly the sort of thing people bought the
NME
for – why I had bought it like a ritual all those years. Why? Because it was funny and it took a position against the music industry on behalf of the readers. It would also get some remarks and laughs from the other writers, which was, for me, the most important thing of all. I remember once seeing Chuck Jones, the genius director of countless Warner Brothers cartoons, being asked, probably for the millionth time, who it was his animations were aimed at: children or adults? ‘Neither,’ said Jones with a shrug. ‘We made ’em for ourselves.’ That was also very true of the
New Musical Express
in the 1970s. Writing and reading such stuff was pure exhilarating fun. That Kate Bush’s publicity had to be devoured by our vanity was simply the house style. In time, the whole of mainstream pop culture developed a similar relationship with fame, but I like to think that the
NME
fired its darts with a certain renegade panache and wagonloads of humour. We were making hay while the sun shone too, seeing how today the music industry is protective to the point of paranoia about the hapless hollow product that pop has become. Anyway, I apologize, Kate, even after all these years. At the time, however, I couldn’t have felt too bad about sending her up because about a fortnight later I was doing exactly the same thing to a pious Brian Eno. At last I was drawing encouraging remarks from Nick, Charlie, Tony and Julie. I had fully arrived on the team and I was getting good at it.

Lennon Speaks

T
he first big trip
NME
sent me on was to interview Village People in New York. It wasn’t my first trip to the city. About a year previously I had been lounging over a lunchtime drink in the Albion pub, Rotherhithe. Chum Sebast was tugging on his ever-present roll-up and reading an article in the
Evening Standard
about the sensational new Sky Train service entrepreneur Freddie Laker had introduced, which offered a revolutionary low-cost airfare to the USA of only £59. Resting the paper on his knees, he took a sip of beer and said, ‘We should have some of that.’ I had little in the diary, so my reply was, ‘When?’ ‘I dunno – Friday?’ he said. This was on a Wednesday and we were both technically unemployed at the time.

As it turned out, we didn’t get to New York till the following Monday, having sold everything we possessed – in my case the rump of the record collection – and securing visas after queuing all day at the American Embassy. We stayed for two nights in John Gillespie’s apartment near Columbus Circle, too terrified by tales of the lunatic Big Apple to go outside much, before embarking on a wild-goose chase to visit the only other connection we had in the States: my sister’s husband’s aunt, Marie Spoon, who had married a GI in the 1950s and now ran a motor-boat firm in land-locked Burlington, North Carolina. Any Kerouac-style romantic notions we had about taking a Greyhound bus such a distance was shattered within twenty minutes of leaving the Port Authority Terminal at 42nd Street. The bus smelled of urine, sick and carbolic, was full of twenty-stone wild-eyed maniacs who seemed to carry their whole lives with them, and made more stops than a London Routemaster. After about five hundred or so of these chaotic, noisy pick-ups, we found ourselves in Richmond, Virginia at four in the morning, both absolutely shattered and with no idea what to do with ourselves until the connecting bus – to Raleigh, North Carolina – arrived in an hour’s time.

Having decanted into the grim empty terminus we found, to our great joy, the only other visitors were a group of about nine wild-looking youths, all drinking from bottles of booze hidden in paper bags and cursing loudly. Within minutes of the bus pulling away, they shouted some indistinct things at us before walking over, noisily kicking their empties out of their path as they approached. Oh, this was great. As they bore down on us I pondered the long odds that they might be fans of Kevin Rowland. Sebast muttered a low ‘Oh fuck’, as they gathered round.

‘Way you fraaarrrm?’ said a pug-faced skinhead, clearly pissed out of his mind.

Before I could answer, another of them spat, ‘Why you wearing nigra shoes? They’s shoes nigras wear.’ To clarify the observation, another one told us that ‘faggots’ too favoured my footwear.

I should explain that I, in some ludicrous gesture of individuality, had decided to travel into these most conservative of states wearing bright-red, crepe-soled, Teddy boy, brothel creepers. I snapped into action. I had developed a remarkably successful system for defusing atmospheres that are threatening to turn rancid – learned mainly when playing provincial towns with punk rock bands. What I do is begin talking to the most belligerent member of the lynch mob as though they were a long lost, great mate of mine. Looking down at the offending creepers, I launched into it.

‘These?’ I said, with so much perkiness it threatened to bring the sun up. ‘These? See, we’re from London, England and
everybody
has these there. You know, I’ve noticed in America you don’t have them, do you? Tell you what – you’ve got the right idea. They weigh a ton! I can’t wait to get them off – feel a right fuckin’ idiot in them, man. Where do you guys get shoes, because I need a pair!’

They couldn’t make head or tail of it of course.

‘Where you from?’ they came again.

‘I know, I know – London, England! Like ten thousand miles away! What are we doing in Virginia, eh? Well, I’ve got to visit my fuckin’ relatives – you know what
that’s
like, right? Jesus, fellas – we’ve been on that fuckin’ bus for days, weeks! I thought America was the same size as England – this is a HUGE country, dudes. So how’s the action around here – we seen nothing but fuckin’ COWS for days, man! At last, this city looks like it might have somethin’ going on!’

There was a minor stand-off at this point, until someone at the back said, ‘Richmond sucks.’ And then the one who appeared to be their leader declared to his crew, ‘They ain’t nothin’,’ and they all strolled away. Sebast, who I think had stopped breathing ages ago, congratulated me on the performance.

The rest of our trip played out uneventfully, as probably any trip to Burlington, NC usually does. Four days later we were back in the Albion pub having not really exploded our lives as fully as we had planned (there originally having been some talk of never coming home at all). But at least we had done it, recklessly and pointlessly, and soon America would start to pack me to the hat brim with countless Technicolor adventures – starting with the proposed Village People trip.

In fact, it’s strange that I still label my first assignment abroad with the name of this much-derided group, given that I actually filed two interviews during that fortnight away. Yes, I dutifully got a good cover story from the revealing and rather sad talks with the Indian, the Construction Worker, the Cop, et al.; perhaps the most telling moment being when the Leather Man, Glenn Hughes, said that the whole wild-and-crazy package was a façade and how he and the others were tied to brutal contracts that barely covered their weekly rent. ‘We are under no illusions,’ said the erstwhile actor who at that time was heading toward global stardom, ‘that anybody gives a fuck about us. Nobody pays to see Glenn Hughes or David Hodo or Randy Jones. They pay for a leather clone, a hard-hat, a dancing cowboy. We know that if we don’t like the money – pffft – they can re-cast this band like that.’

However it was a chance meeting I had the day before my rendezvous with the downbeat disco sensations that rather upstaged the Village People and filled column inches far beyond the pages of the
NME
.

As usual, I hadn’t travelled alone; the minute my friends heard that I had a pre-paid hotel room available in New York they rolled up to book their own seats on the Sky Train. Indeed, I think I enthusiastically encouraged them in this lark. This was going to be the Kent Coast chalet scam all over again, with six of us piggybacking into a one-room berth and with Phonogram Records picking up the eventual bill. Our home-from-home though, as it turned out, was one of the most disgraceful and revolting fleapits in the entire Western world. Called the Hotel Dixie, it sat on 43rd Street and has since been voted the Dirtiest Hotel in America’s History by the Trip Advisor website, with tales of crack dens in every other billet and an actual dead body stuffed under one of the beds that was discovered by a couple visiting from Indiana. Strangely, we never really noticed this at the time. On that first trip though we simply slung down our bags in my grimy, bug-infested ‘junior suite’ and headed out into the Big Apple, fearless. We were, after all, half a dozen wired-up Millwall supporters and this time there was to be no question of finding New York City too intimidating to explore.

We had been in town only four hours when, shortly after exiting a terrific bar on Amsterdam Avenue, I was suddenly snapped out of our rapid-fire Budweiser-fuelled badinage by the sight of the couple coming towards us.

It was John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

Well, full of cold draught beer and jet-lag as I was, I knew a hot rock’n’roll scoop when I saw one. This was in the period when Lennon had totally withdrawn from the world and hadn’t made a record or given an interview for almost five years. Well, John, I thought, you’re giving one now. I think it would have gone better had not my mates all crowded around saying, ‘Didn’t you used to be John Lennon?’ and singing ‘She Loves You’ at him. As it was, John manfully continued to stride along the sidewalk and answer my fuzzy improvised questions with clipped but friendly monosyllables. Yoko seemed quite amused by it; possibly she was used to him being fawned over by eager to please males. The interview went something like this:

Me: John!

JL: Yeah, hi. Great.

Me: How’s it going?

JL: Yeah great.

Me: We’re from London!

JL: OK. Great.

Me: Any message for the world?

JL: Rock on. Be good.

Me: I work for the
NME!

JL: Oh right. Is Alley Cat still going?

[This was a reference to a long-running gossip feature in the sixties.]