His song of sorrow and longing drifted quietly as I hid in the shadow of the doorway and watched, like beholding something divine—the last of a species facing extinction. Tim Hardin, a Vietnam vet who had come home a junkie, wouldn’t be around much longer.
—
A self-proclaimed DJ came into the market one day. Disc jockeys in England weren’t just on the radio; they could play records at parties or events. He was a sixties type—lanky, checked suit, gray teeth, thin colorless hair, vestiges of acne—nothing special but a look I found to my taste. A two-bit hustler, he claimed he could get me a job in a clothing store: “Mates by Irvine Sellar.”
“You need to get onto a good scene,” he kept telling me.
He wasn’t on one himself, as it turned out. He never got me the job, but one afternoon took me by his folks’ council flat. (What we Americans would call “the projects,” except this was where a variety of working-class people lived, not just those on welfare—socialism!) I waited in the living room with his brother, who was watching a horse race on the TV.
“Do you like horses?” I asked, excited to meet a fellow enthusiast.
“Only when they win,” he replied, disdainfully.
Betting on horses was an everyday pursuit for millions of English. Betting shops were on every corner of every high street. Men, old and young alike, spilled out of them and into the nearest pub.
I lost the job selling handbags in the market when I stopped showing up. I didn’t even go to collect my wage. I never sold a bag anyway.
One of my housemates in Englewood Road knew someone in a firm of architects, Martineau Jenkins Associates, and told me that they needed an office-boy type, someone to run errands. It paid £17 a week, which would cover my rent and transport, with enough left for food. Well, I could shoplift the rest.
Everything was in black and white, even television. I was walking past an appliance shop with a guy one day who stopped and pointed to the window, saying, “That’s what I want, one of those.”
I couldn’t work out what he was talking about—I presumed he already had a television—but he was pointing to a color one. Good grief—it was a new thing.
I’d get the Northern line to Charing Cross, the District line to Hammersmith and then the bus to Barnes and walk up Castelnau Road to the architect offices, get my assignment and take the bus and train back into town to pick up photos for the firm. I spent many an hour underground. But I never got over the thrill of not having to wait for someone with a car to pick me up. The first time I rode on a train sitting on a seat facing backwards I couldn’t stand up as I found it so disorientating. But I liked that feeling.
The streets were made for walking, or horse-drawn carriages. That’s what the mews were for, where the horses and grooms used to stay. I wandered for hours, squinting so as not to see the tower blocks and imagining the traps on the streets and the sound of hoofs on cobblestones. I was in England; I’d made it.
I saw St. Paul’s Cathedral as I emerged from a station one afternoon and, although I’d never heard of it and so didn’t know it was famous, when I saw the office buildings slammed up against it, it made me cry. I had fallen in love with London and couldn’t bear to see it fucked with.
I’d wait for someone to enter a “mansion block” (what they called an old apartment building) and dart in behind him before the door closed, take the stairs to the top, find the door to the roof and stand there looking out over the rooftops of London. Beautiful. I was mesmerized by it. If anyone asked what I was doing I’d say, “I’ve lost my cat.”
I heard a sound every morning, eerie, not human. I couldn’t imagine what could cause such an unearthly timbre. Then I saw them: pigeons. A city sound.
I learned not to climb into a car with just anyone. A few times I found myself fighting my way out past some salivating creep. Perverts and sadists were universal. I had to stop thinking I didn’t care what happened to me, because now I was in London and I wanted to live.
John Martineau had a big house on the river. He lived there with his wife, Deirdre, and son Rupert and a cat called Henry. I’d never met people or cats with names like those before. The offices were at the top of the house. Deirdre would make a big spread of “sarnies” (sandwiches) and quiches and fruit crumble, or we’d all go to the pub on the high street in Barnes for lunch.
Every part of town had a High Street, local shops like a mini-downtown in every neighborhood, all of which had their own names and personalities, all different. Kensington High Street, St. John’s Wood High Street (I remembered that name from the Stones song “Play with Fire”), Kilburn High Road, Shoreditch High Street: the list was endless; they were all places in which to hang out and shop and drink and eat and buy flowers.
When I saw the destination Muswell Hill on a bus I jumped on and rode to the end of the line, where I wandered around knowing that Ray and Dave Davies must have walked there too. London—I was a kid in a toy store.
I found every aspect of the city totally fascinating. I woke up every morning, a girl in love—at that stage of love where the object of desire has no faults.
The architects took time out one day to watch Princess Anne get married on television. We could see the pomp and ceremony and the horses all dolled up. I didn’t really know who the Royal Family were, but it was easy to see they had the best horses. Princess Anne wore a dress like something Nita would have designed, scooped sleeves trimmed with pearls. Someone said she was a good rider, a show jumper.
There was a picture of Brigitte Bardot on the cover of a men’s magazine and posters of her outside every newsagent in town. She was turning forty, so it was an opportunity for the press to celebrate her. In the picture she wore hot pants and tall stonewashed-denim platform boots. Was there a girl alive who didn’t want to look like Brigitte Bardot?
I went to Kensington Market and found some cheap-ass knee-high platform boots, cut off a pair of jeans and pranced about like a little sexpot without worrying about being turned over by a fleet of psychos on Harleys.
Kensington Market was, like Point, a bunch of indoor stalls, but much cooler. It was on multiple floors, and the people in there were more rock and roll than the Oxford Street bunch. It turned out that there were rock fans after all, and I was finding them at last.
I had a bootleg reel-to-reel tape-recording of a Velvet Underground performance I’d been guarding since my arrival. (Oh, yeah, that was the other thing I brought with me from Akron.) I got a guy in a shop to make a copy and for his trouble told him he could keep the tape. I also got him to print up an enlargement of a photo I had in my wallet: a picture of Bowie and Lou and Iggy with their arms around each other, Iggy being held up by the other two, a pack of Luckys in his teeth. Now I could listen to “Foggy Notion” on cassette while looking at the picture of my guys up on my wall.
Next door to Kensington Market was a huge emporium, a clothes store called Biba. It was the best place I’d ever seen. You could get blue lipstick and purple nail polish and all sorts of metallic clothes. It was the place that Alex from A Clockwork Orange would have hung out, and, for me, something of a concession for missing out on the sixties London that I mourned.
Life was almost perfect and I knew it.
18
THE NME
After a couple blissful months in London, a few home truths were starting to sink in: the radio wasn’t as good as in Ohio, and nobody was obsessed with Iggy Pop like I was.
I’d been misled by the backdated NME I got at Gray Drug at the Summit Mall. It was a live review and, judging by the enthusiasm of the writer, I’d assumed England was swarming with Iggy Pop fans. I’d stuck the picture of him in his silver hip-huggers humping a mic stand up on my wall, a big inspiration for me leaving Akron.
I was beginning to get inklings that my old, useless, familiar and constantly suppressed depression was creeping back. I nicked a bottle of wine from an off-license (what the English called a liquor store), and got the Tube to Acton in search of an address som
eone had given me for a party.
I walked in, knowing nobody. It looked like it was a student party in someone’s parents’ house. Never mind, I didn’t plan on staying long. Someone gave me the old “Cheer up—it might never happen” line. I hated it when people said that.
I mumbled, “Yeah, well, it did happen. Someone stole my three prized possessions—White Light/White Heat, Raw Power and Fun House,” and made my way to the drinks table. Then came a voice from the back of the room: “I know Iggy.”
I spent the next hour talking to the first person I’d met who was as much a fan of the Ig as me. He was an emaciated oddball in leather jeans, sporting a tooth earring, Keith Richards style. As I was getting up to leave he asked if I knew of a place where he could crash for the night, so I took him back to Clapham and showed him to an empty room. But first he had a good look at the pictures I had stuck up on the wall of my room: Iggy, Lou, Keith, Dylan.
In the morning he asked if he could leave some things at my place for a few days as he was in the middle of moving house. I said I didn’t mind. Two days later, a U-Haul van pulled up, dumping a few hundred coverless records—sticky with yogurt and fingerprints—in the middle of my room; the guy moved in on me!
It was some weeks later that I realized this was the same guy who’d written the article accompanying the photo that had given me the final impetus to go to England. Coincidence? Obviously. Divine intervention or messengers from above couldn’t be that twisted. Enter, as they say, Nick Kent.
In a way, you could say I was slowly zeroing in on him—Iggy, I mean, not Kent—but the real question was what was Nick Kent doing at a student party? Dark stuff indeed.
How can we prove that anything is arbitrary? Even what at first sight might appear the most arbitrary encounter can have lasting repercussions, like a car accident. Everything in nature lives according to some order so it seems unlikely that humans live outside this system, even if they try to resist their instincts. That’s how we can be sure we’re not animals, this refusal to abide by what we know is good for us. If an animal’s instinct tells him to avoid something, he has no trouble keeping a wide berth. We, on the other hand, run in the direction of danger if it offers a thrill or satisfies a curiosity.
As far as my meeting Nick Kent goes, in fiction you probably wouldn’t include too many coincidences like that because it would seem phony, too unlikely. In real life it happens all the time.
He wore pink nail varnish and black eyeliner to highlight his haunted, staring blue eyes. He smoked St. Moritz menthol cigarettes and subsisted on a mixture of tinned mandarin orange segments and Heinz custard, also tinned (or “canned,” as the Americans would say). He often wore a dog collar studded with rhinestones, and a cheap belt with fake doubloons on it, probably from a stall in Kensington Market. He played guitar, not much better than me, and was madly devoted to rock bands; he looked up to Bob Dylan, Keith Richards, Lou Reed, Sid Barrett and Iggy. I suspect Mick Jagger was his guilty pleasure.
Mainly, he was fascinated by anyone in music if they were damaged and weird, or deranged and destructive or addicted. He was happy to meet someone as devoted to the above as himself who he could take along to gigs with his access pass as an NME journalist. I was only too happy to tag along. I’d been getting worried that I might not have found the rock mecca I’d been dreaming of after all.
The first show we saw was a band called Kilburn and the High-Roads at the 100 Club on Oxford Street. I thought the singer looked like what Lou Reed should have looked like then. (Lou had gained a few pounds—a no-no for rock stars.) This Kilburn guy was scrawny and, like Reed, a college-professor type, although crippled by childhood polio. It was Ian Dury: a good first gig to get under my belt.
Kent and I spent hours reading back issues of Creem magazine (of which he had an Asperger’s-worthy collection, Lester Bangs being a big hero of his), while listening to the Flamin’ Groovies, Goats Head Soup, the New York Dolls—and the Temptations; I would often find him enraptured listening to “Just My Imagination.” We all have our soft spots.
One night in a pub I went off on one about some band or other in front of a long-haired intellectual type across the table, a friend of Nick’s. The guy leaned forward and said, “You should write for us.” Nick introduced me to him, Ian MacDonald, his assistant editor.
The idea of me writing anything at all was ludicrous. My head was disorganized, a tangle of crossed lines. I couldn’t conclude a thought on a postcard.
Hi!
It’s good here.
Cool stuff.
Saw a band.
Well, it’s raining.
Okay, that’s all.
Bye.
I wasn’t a poet. I wasn’t a writer. To begin a paragraph and find my way to a conclusion—Gretel tracking a breadcrumb trail would fare better. I had no understanding of music theory. My only qualification, had I required one, was that I was as frustrated as the rest of them—a frustrated musician (the cliché of music journalism), opinionated, hungover, illegal in the workplace, devoid of ambition and, if I couldn’t find a word in my dumb guy vocabulary, I would make one up.
MacDonald, observing this over half a pint said, “Yeah, you should write for us.”
These English weren’t the same as the wasters I’d been used to. They used words like “quintessential” and the occasional phrase in French. I wasn’t sure how I fit into the alien strata, but I wanted to. It hadn’t taken me long to sniff out British versions of artistic types, the con artists I gravitated towards who were still too young and fresh-faced to be unmasked as con artists. Only time could reveal that.
I started writing for the NME.
The “flourish” came off Hynde (a thinly veiled ruse on my part to throw the Home Office). Nick Kent kept introducing me to people as Chrissie, either because Chris was a guy’s name in Limeytown or because he preferred Chrissie, I never asked. Thus I became Chrissie Hynd of the NME and no one called me Chris ever again.
My theory, that to make it in this life you didn’t need qualifications, was how I’d justified my steady slide as I watched the hard-earned savings my parents had put towards my education disappear down the crapper, so I wasn’t going to change my mind all of a sudden and embark on a career. I never called myself a journalist or a writer because I wasn’t a journalist or a writer. But, more important, now I wasn’t a waitress either.
Ian MacDonald, one of the stars of the NME, which at the time was the leader, the most intelligently observed and humorous of the music papers, was a true visionary and humanitarian. But he was wrong this time: I really couldn’t write.
He didn’t care. He wasn’t looking for quality. They were looking for sex. They wanted sex. They wanted a pimple-faced loudmouth to push the male staff around and make them crawl on all fours. Besides, I was fresh from getting the sack from Martineau Jenkins Associates, and this would save me having to find a job. Martineau had offered to train me up as an architect, but I preferred to sit around drawing pictures of the staff and drinking tea. They used my portraits on the end-of-year calendar and then gave me the elbow.
Come to think of it, nobody seemed to care about qualifications at all in England. Me, an architect? I thought you needed an eight-year slog through a university course and stacks of degrees. Nope. Hairdressers too seemed to be set up and raking in the cash sans certificate. What a great country it was!
I looked around my room in Clapham, rubbing my hands together as if I’d won the pools. I wouldn’t even have to leave the house. I got thirty quid for my first article and figured I could coast on that until I found another job, having not a shred of doubt that I’d be banned from the NME offices after the hate mail my first review received.
Pissed-off Neil Diamond fans wanted me dead. The cross-eyed divorcées at Stouffer’s who’d laughed at my Bowie scrapbook were Diamond fans and I had an ax to grind. There, that’ll teach ’em. It might have been juvenile of me, but this getting your own back was rather good. And it was the English way.<
br />
Where American journalists thoughtfully reported the humaninterest aspect of a story, the English went straight for the underbelly. Everything was a “riddle,” never a straightforward murder but always tinged with sadism. Right up my street.
The more dismissive and poorly written my reviews, the more the NME applauded me. They wanted the bad publicity. Hate mail now spilled out of the post room and they liked it. They liked it bad and that was good.
I went with Nick Kent to Ladbroke Grove to meet Brian Eno. I remember the day distinctly because the mild-mannered, feathered bald one invited me to make a pot of tea, and I experienced what was to become an all-too-familiar feeling of cultural humiliation.
I’d never made a pot of tea before, and I had no idea how many loose leaves from the caddy to put in the pot. Twenty? A fistful? I’d tried all the herbal varieties back in Akron, popular around the same time as incense and pot: Constant Comment was a good one, black tea infused with orange rind and spice; burdock root, another I could get in the one health-food store in Akron, Alexander’s on North Main Street. Mu was my favorite, ginseng and an aromatic blend of oriental spices. I thought I was pretty sophisticated in my knowledge of tea, until I got to England.
Faced with a kettle and teapot I felt like a total ignoramus. In fact, the English drank ordinary Tetley tea, but there was a whole method to it, which was kept secret from Americans. The water had to be boiling first, tea bag in before pouring, two schools of thought on whether or not milk went in first or after—but it was never hot. Sounds simple until you get to a hotel in the States and you’re jonesing for a cup of English tea. The English had never heard of iced tea, the very notion of which was met with unanimous disapproval.
Reckless : My Life As a Pretender (9780385540629) Page 13
