Pop Stars in My Pantry by Paul Simper

Author:Paul Simper [Simper, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783523887
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2017-07-12T04:00:00+00:00

11

SHAKING YOUR EYES

The cab ride from Radio City Music Hall to Sade’s after-party had started off simply enough. With the show over and the venue emptied, I’d nipped backstage with Jon Futrell to get the party’s address and hopefully cadge a lift. That was all fine and dandy, but what I hadn’t expected was the little red capsule that some kind soul popped in my mouth just as we all departed.

You may recall that in my early days in London I’d had no truck with drugs. Like Mrs Slocombe, I had remained unanimous in that until the moment at a Spandau after-party – this one more humbly set above a chip shop called the Midnight Express in Bournemouth – where someone had beckoned me into a cupboard, produced a little twizzled piece of white tissue paper and said: ‘Here, you’ll like this.’

They were not wrong. Within the twinkling of an eye that tatty little upstairs bar had been transformed into the South coast’s very own Studio 54 as I spun around with Beat Route girl Jill Humphry, like Saturday Night Fever’s Tony Manero and Stephanie Mangano, to Chaka Khan, Change and Evelyn ‘Champagne’ King as the effects of what my benefactor would later reveal to be a heady mix of MDA and mescaline kicked in. If this was drugs, absolutely, yes please, I was in.

Being very much a party-don’t-stop kind of person and working with a limited budget my stimulant of choice for the next few years tended to be speed. Speed was not only good for non-stop dancing, but a little dab every now and then could also keep you wide awake through all-night movie binges or indeed army-based US TV sitcoms.

The only cheap alternative of any interest was acid. If a wrap of sulphate set you back twenty quid, a tab of acid was even more of a snip at a fiver or less. For eight or nine hours of variable mind trickery that seemed like the bargain of the century.

Of course, I’d also heard of the perils of LSD. People mistakenly believing they could fly or being marauded by imaginary swarms of bees. No one wants a bad trip. I was exceedingly grateful that nothing had come my way on that Kid Creole jaunt.

Instead, my first acid adventure was kind of down to Mrs Simper.

A lover of antiques, my mother had for a while worked part-time in Charnham House Antiques in Hungerford. Here she would do her best to extract generous sums of money from the many dedicated browsers and occasional famous face like Maggie Smith (no sale), Johnny Morris (no sale but a cracking impression of a parakeet) and Princess Margaret that came her way. But what her customers didn’t know was that concealed in the room above her were the drug squad. This was part of a top priority stake-out called Operation Julie, a two-and-a-half-year investigation involving eleven police forces across the country that ended up seizing a reported 6.5 million tabs of acid. With

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