by Billy Idol
By the summer of ’70, we had tried hash, which I found very strong at first. It made me feel a bit super-aware and self-conscious, even paranoid at times, but I persevered, of course. Hadn’t the Beatles smoked it all the way through the making of Rubber Soul? So, I hung in with it and gradually overcame that initial trepidation to discover a world of calm and bliss.
That summer, I also took my first acid trip, the first of many. I suppose, thinking back, I did have a few nerves about taking LSD, as there had been some strange stories about people having bum trips, going psychotic, and hurling themselves from windows of very high buildings in a crazed state. But that wasn’t the impression one got from listening to the tales of musicians who had taken it, as they talked about acid giving them a whole new perspective about the world and their music. These lessons from my musical gods overrode any minor qualms or fears I had. The drug came on quite slowly at first, kicking in after about forty minutes, as I experienced a mild feeling of calm and a sensation of the world slowing down a touch. This gave me time to begin noticing details in objects or my features, which became tantalizing as I stared longer at the vista, which pulsated slightly to a hidden rhythm. As the effects grew stronger and the pulsing, multicolored, distorted vision took hold, I could begin to understand what some of the Romantic poets had described. I didn’t see “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” images, but a more visceral, gossamer landscape that was still very real, not a fantasy at all. In fact, that was what could easily overcome you: the feeling of the corporeal world pulsing, breathing in and out at one with you. It was a strange, disconcerting sensation, one that could be either good or bad, as I would discover firsthand over the course of time. That first time, the trees all looked like their branches were covered in snow, giving the impression it was Christmas, though it was midsummer. At one point later, lying in bed alone, I heard my heart slow down as if coming to a gradual halt. I thought it had stopped for a moment as a thick bead of sweat fell with a dull echo from my forehead; but as I listened, it slowly whirred back into action. One doesn’t think logically. My first tab was called Yellow Sunshine, like Hendrix got Purple Haze from the name of another breed of acid.
I was getting to love this new world now opening up to me. Come along, William, this life beckoned, as the wilderness had once called out to Daniel Boone. But one morning my dad lowered the boom, and my little universe was shaken to its core. My father had lost his job when an American firm took over and sacked everyone, replacing them with their people. It meant another move was on for us, with Dad starting his own business, which meant leaving Worthing for Kent, near London.
He had decided to form a small power-tool hire/buy concern, U-Hire, which would service large and small construction companies. He would live in a small room above the office his business occupied in Charlton, South East London. His plan was for us to join him once things got up and running.
Bollocks, I thought, just when I’m starting to hang around with some great mates! But there was nothing I could do about it. He was firm about his plans; we needed to go where the money was. The only consolation was that I would be living a lot closer to the beating heart of southern England, swinging London.
Nevertheless, it was difficult saying goodbye to Lol and my other mates, though Bromley was only sixty miles away. I knew from my other moves just what the stark reality would hold for me in the forthcoming months: a new school, and new classmates. I would have to adjust, again. I’d just started finding my niche in Worthing High School, and now I would have no close friends nearby, and who knew if I would meet the same sort of pals as I’d just left? These thoughts were paramount in my mind. I’ve always had difficulty facing the unknown—who doesn’t?—but the unknown was there to be faced. Once again, it was time to find a new path.
CHAPTER FOUR
SUCKING IN THE ’70S
Bromley, South East London
BROMLEY WAS A SMALL TOWN on the outskirts of SE London, on the edge of the urban sprawl area, where it reaches into the Kent countryside to the south. It is a twenty-minute train ride from the main central London station, from where you can get to anywhere in England, and the world.
The old country lanes became modern roads that twist and turn illogically, lined by leafy oaks whose branches form a natural arch. We lived on top of a rise on Shawfield Park, which, from my mum and dad’s bedroom, offered a twelve-mile view into the green countryside to the southeast and beyond. My walk to school took me down Tylney Road to my new school, Ravensbourne School for Boys. Although still a grammar school, it was slowly converting to the new comprehensive school system that would divide students by streams, not separate them into two distinct groups at age eleven.
I slowly began to realize that most of the teachers were allied with the old system; they seemed to have lost interest, and were just marking time until retirement. Right from the start, I knew something was wrong, as I was put in the highest level for math, where I’m hopeless, and the remedial class for history, when that was my best fucking subject. Some of the kids in my history class didn’t even know how to read. Fuck it. The one subject I’m really good at and love and they put me in with the slow learners. This made me begin to hate school. Thank God I didn’t have to take biology, as I hate to cut things up, but took an alternative choice, Religious Knowledge, which entailed “a look into the historical background to the events of the New Testament,” which meant I was seriously studying the history of the Holy Land at the time of Jesus along with the sociopolitical implications of his actions. Most people in the class were just malingering, but I, naturally, found it fascinating and still do.
I found out much later that the Beatles’ producer, George Martin, had once been a student at Ravensbourne, but I had no idea back then. It was populated by what we called “suedeheads,” onetime skinheads who’d grown out their hair but still followed the skins’ creed. I had long hair and was into rock ’n’ roll. There were only two or three other boys like me, which was the direct opposite of Worthing High. We really were the odd ones out, but fuck it. Feeling disenchanted, I started cutting school to play music with one of the two blokes I got to know well, my friend Bill Jenkins, in his basement, strumming a twelve-bar backup while he picked out blues leads.
Bill had long, dark hair with a tight wave toward his ears that just reached his shoulders and he always walked with his back up and his hands in pocket, leaning forward. My eyesight is so bad, I always remember people by how they walk, recognizing their gait before their features. Bill was shorter than me, a really good bloke, as we would say in England, and he loved music.
We didn’t start hanging out at first, but over the course of a few weeks, I realized he played the guitar and was quite serious about it. He was into jazz and blues as well as rock, and we began to play together. The guitars were amplified by attaching a microphone to a reel-to-reel tape recorder stuck onto the voice box of the acoustic guitar with tape and then sticking a piece of cardboard in just the right spot so the mic would become live, putting the amplified sound out into the air instead of just recording it. We used a laughably few watts of power, but it gave our cheap acoustic guitars a semblance of an electric, though very crude, sound.
I would play rhythm as he played blues solos and wailed on a harmonica he had taped to a coat hanger that, when bent into shape, did the job of giving a solid platform for him to play both guitar and harp at the same time. Bill had a basement in the bottom of his house on Widmore Road, and we would take off from school in the early afternoon to go play music there. The first time I ever heard Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat was in that basement. We listened to everything. We eventually found a bloke who played drums, and he set his kit up in Bill’s basement, which gave us a place to hang out that most kids have would have killed for. Most houses in England didn’t have basements, unlike those in America. I don’t remember his parents bothering us much. They were out when we skived off school.
One day, we took acid and were still trip
ping at school the next day; amusing, but not the best way of coming down off that stuff. We shared plenty of shit together. One afternoon while jamming, we discovered that if we slid the tape recorder microphone up and down a female mannequin leg Bill had, the recording would take on a crude form of phasing.
I had first started to teach myself to play drums when I was seven, but as soon as I realized the drummer was always at the back and usually didn’t write the songs, I graduated from my makeshift drum kit to a five-quid guitar I bought for myself with my caddie funds, as my parents refused to buy me musical instruments I actually wanted to play, rather than the violin they tried to force me to learn. Because of my long hair and bad attitude in school, my dad didn’t talk to me for two years, from the time I was fourteen until I was sixteen. It was rough, his not speaking to me, but I knew he couldn’t understand how I was so different from him, in terms of my learning abilities. He was a mathematician, and I was hopeless. He thought I just wasn’t trying, that I lacked willpower, but today I’m sure I would’ve been diagnosed with ADD/ADHD. We waged a silent war—he hated my long hair hanging in my breakfast each morning.
I had picked up Bert Weedon’s beginning guitar book from the music shop back in Worthing, and then other items I needed from the music shop in Bromley. I taught myself some chords—E, then A, and D, as you could play a song with those; then B, as E, A, and B are blues chords; and then D. Next I learned G, C, F, and so on, over the years eventually progressing to bar chords. It was all so I could accompany myself singing or to try to write a song one day. I bought myself a pitch pipe to help me tune an instrument. It was like a six-note harmonica, giving the basic tuning of E-A-D-G-B-E. I struggled through the fingerings on my own in my room, but in England in those days, there wasn’t much to do, so you didn’t mind sitting there for hours on end buggering around, coming to grips with trying to be a musician of some sort. I’m a shitty guitar player, but I had at an early age realized that I was learning to play the instrument for a purpose—not to be the lead guitar player, but so I could write, sing, and play in a rock band. Not that I was such a great singer, really, but I began making some vocal noise, singing along to songs one step down, which is lazy, but it gave me part of the sound people recognize today. It was a start, a hobby, really, a fascination, and something I truly cared about, and I was doing it for myself, not because anybody told me to.
While in Bromley, at sixteen, I saved up my morning double paper round money and bought an Epiphone Riviera electric guitar some bloke was selling. That guitar would be with me for many years to come (you can hear it on the Generation X version of Lennon’s “Gimme Some Truth,” and see it in the “White Wedding” video). I owned a rudimentary amp for a while, but at eighteen, I bought myself an HH solid-state amp.
The do-it-yourself approach leads you down a path that says, This is about you, no need to compromise. All those people—parents, authority, friends—probably won’t ever understand completely what you’re trying to do or why, but communication is a beginning, and by just doing what I was doing, my actions spoke volumes.
I occasionally played with some mates other than Bill Jenkins, as I never passed up an opportunity to practice and improve. Another lad I got to know from school in Ravensbourne was Andy Steer, who had the dubious distinction of being the tallest teenager in England. Andy would suffer pain from his heart as he was growing so fast. He used to throw up at the sound of the Lee Dorsey song “Working in the Coal Mine,” so his brother bought the record just to annoy him and make him vomit. Andy was a great visual artist who hoped to be an animator for Disney one day. After finishing at Ravensbourne at sixteen, I didn’t have enough qualifications to go to university, so I attended Orpington College of Further Education for two years to redo my A levels and try to raise my grades.
I enjoyed Orpington College a lot more than Ravensbourne, as we were allowed to wear our own clothes and the teachers spoke to us like adults and were genuinely interested in teaching. These were more like college courses, and I responded by trying harder, as I had no idea what I would do for a living, but I knew it was death to get a job you didn’t really like. I took English language, literature, and British Constitution, which was interesting because a teacher who was a Trotskyite taught it. Thanks to his efforts, I learned that there is always more to take into consideration than the face value of society.
Still, I missed my pals from Worthing, but Lol Satchel would come up to visit and I would go down there. But Bromley became my everyday reality. With Andy up in the clouds, Bill J.’s shoulders up to his ears, and me channeling John Lennon—long hair, round glasses, and all—we must have made an amusing sight standing out amongst a bunch of suedeheads.
I soon began to find more friends who shared my passion for rock ’n’ roll. From hanging around the Bromley South train station after school, I met up with some like-minded blokes who were attending the more enlightened Bromley Technical High School. Among them was Steve Bailey, later to metamorphose into Steve Severin, the bass guitarist with Siouxsie and the Banshees; and Simon “Boy” Barker, who became a noted photographer going by the name “Six.” I identified with these new friends, as they shared my passion for rock music, especially David Bowie, whom we all admired a great deal. We were always looking out for the new and interesting in art, music, and life, recognizing in one another, by the way we dressed and what we liked, kindred, outcast spirits. Steve had long, light brown hair down to his waist and a caustic wit. He lived in Bromley, just a short walk from my house on Shawfield Park. Simon Barker had long, dark hair and an acid sense of humor. Even though we attended different schools, we became close friends and began going to concerts together.
One of the shows we saw was Captain Beefheart at the Finsbury Park Astoria, now the Rainbow Theatre. It was one of my all-time favorite shows, the Captain an outrageous character who defied all bounds of middle-class taste with his Delta-blues growl and made-up language. We also attended a double bill of Hawkwind and Frank Zappa at the Oval Cricket Ground. We had tickets for the second night of a Zappa gig up in London the year before, but a bloke, jealous because his girlfriend had just confessed to being infatuated with Frank, pulled him from the stage and broke his leg, and the next evening’s gig was canceled. We also went regularly to the Croydon Greyhound to see bands like Stray, a London-based melodic hard-rock band, and Osibisa, whose music was a fusion of Afro-Caribbean rock-jazz and R&B.
We were all real big fans of the savagely satirical, hybrid jazz/doo-wop/blues-rock played by Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, the German electronic band Can’s albums Monster Movie and Tago Mago, and John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra record The Inner Mounting Flame. The more out there, the better we liked it. It was only later that we began to appreciate the simpler, song-oriented new glam sound of David Bowie, Roxy Music, and the New York Dolls.
Around this time, I met a girl named Rebecca, whose brother was into groups like the Velvet Underground and Iggy Pop. I couldn’t believe how outrageous songs like “Heroin” and the entire White Light/White Heat album were. I became obsessed with this new music, and rode my bike ten miles to a secondhand record store in Penge, where I found the Stooges’ self-titled first album. I told Steve about this music from New York and Detroit, and we both started to believe it was the wave of the future. We read that David Bowie was hanging out with these bands in New York, chumming with Lou Reed and Iggy at Max’s Kansas City. We gravitated toward these personalities who seemed far from the mainstream, with their own unique views on poetry and musicianship, evincing a do-it-yourself attitude opposed to the glut of “muso” bands dominating the rock landscape.
When we could afford to, we smoked hash and downed acid, Tuinals, Seconals, and Mandrax. Sometimes we took speed. One friend who had a particular fondness for speed began losing his back teeth from overuse. Steve, Simon, and I lived drugs and music, dreaming of one day having our own group, which became our daily focus, even though I was the only one who actually owned a guitar an
d could play it.
We started to take acid bought from a bloke who sold it near a pub on Chislehurst Green. After partying, I would hitchhike home, fucked up on Mandrax. Sometimes I was so tired, on the verge of falling asleep when I got home, I didn’t realize I had left a trail of Ritz crackers and cheese on my way up the stairs to my bedroom. Mum confronted me one night and I told her I was drunk, but I had no smell of booze on my breath, so she became exceedingly suspicious. Another time, the acid I took on a Saturday afternoon didn’t start kicking in until I sat at home with my parents that evening. The carpet looked like it was rippling from a snake underneath, and when Mum put her head around the door to ask me a question, she and Dad looked like they were wearing Indian war paint. I excused myself as being tired, went up to my room, and hallucinated in bed for hours. My glow-in-the-dark crucifix was moving, and it looked like Jesus was dribbling a soccer ball at his feet. I remember listening to King Crimson’s The Court of the Crimson King, having to lie back on the floor while an electric feeling coursed through my body. If I closed my eyes, it felt as if I were rushing backwards, and the picture in my mind was of me surrounded by a blue/white light. I stayed in bed until the trip gradually came to an end the next morning.
