Boy About Town by Tony Fletcher

Author:Tony Fletcher [Tony Fletcher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2013-07-04T04:00:00+00:00

Number 23: STRANGE TOWN

MARK WAS STILL a teenager when he answered my latest Melody Maker ad for a fourth member. (Jeff and Chris had finally accepted that we were going nowhere without one.) But he may as well have hailed from another planet. Nineteen years old, he listened to dub, funk, avant-garde, electronic music and everything else experimental, lived with his girlfriend in a squat on the other side of London, had been in bands since he was fifteen and, to cap it all, had written for an original punk fanzine, Skum – for which, in December 1976, he had interviewed Sid Vicious.

Back then, Sid had been in the Flowers of Romance, alongside Viv Albertine, Palmolive and Keith Levine. The first two had gone on to form punk’s first original all-girl group, the Slits, and at the point that Mark joined our band, Palmolive had just left the Slits for a band called the Raincoats, while Keith Levine was suddenly famous as the guitarist in Johnny Rotten’s new band, Public Image Ltd. As for Sid, he was dead, having overdosed on heroin in New York City, the day after he was released from Rikers Island on bail. (He was not in jail for allegedly murdering his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, the previous October, as most people thought. He was in jail for beating up Patti Smith’s brother with a broken bottle while on bail for killing Nancy.) The February morning that Sid’s death hit the British tabloids, Jeff Carrigan wore a black armband to school. Our form teacher promptly made him remove it. We all laughed at his subservience to authority. Jeff vowed vengeance on Judgement Day.

Within a week of Sid’s death, Virgin Records released a new Sex Pistols single: Sid Vicious singing Eddie Cochran’s ‘C’mon Everybody’. This was the same Virgin Records that had just had a Top Ten hit with the single ‘Public Image’, on which Johnny Rotten – preferring now to go by his birth name John Lydon – screamed at full tilt about his hatred and mistrust of the music industry. You could hardly blame him.

Then again, I had gone to see Public Image Ltd perform their second-ever show, at the Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park on Boxing Day (their first-ever show was on Christmas Day itself) and came away feeling cheated. I’d been excited about attending the Rainbow; it had a better reputation than the Hammersmith Odeon – even more so when the seats were taken out. But I wasn’t one for dancing, and neither, that night, after opening sets by future reggae band the Basement 5, political reggae poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, and dub reggae DJ Don Letts (our own old Tenisonian), was anyone else. Public Image were aloof, distant, cold. Jah Wobble’s thunderously deep bass lines and Keith Levine’s blunt guitar riffs bounced off the vast walls and reverberated around the hall like they were ghosts, and Lydon whined about a God who spelled backwards was dog (like we couldn’t figure that one out

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