Reckless : My Life As a Pretender (9780385540629)

by Hynde, Chrissie

  When punk came along and its followers unconditionally dismissed the bands that had come before, no matter how grand, Lemmy could still hold court and command the admiration of all and sundry. Lemmy was bigger than punk, so if anyone was to be trusted to give sound advice about the construction of a band, he was your man. He might have an idea—he knew all the local bands.

  He had recently got out of Hawkwind and into Motörhead. The whole Ladbroke Grove crowd were a sort of bridge between hippie and punk: Tyrannosaurus Rex when Bolan went glam; Powis Square, the centerpiece of Performance, was just a hop, skip and a jump from Lemmy’s. It was hippies gone into overdrive on class-A drugs all round. Lemmy’s turf, and the Pink Fairies.

  The punks said they hated hippies, but that was all part of the pose. What they hated was complacency, and drugs only make you complacent if you can get them.

  Ladbroke Grove was the domain of antique dealers, drug dealers, hippies, bikers and Rastafarians. When punk arrived, those in mohair jumpers, spiked hair, bondage trousers or rubber gear made a colorful addition to the streets of Portobello and its surrounds. Anyone who called himself a punk listened to reggae, and if you listened to reggae you smoked spliff, without exception. And if you smoked spliff, you went to Ladbroke Grove to score.

  There were no other occupants of Ladbroke Grove, other than the odd aristocrat who had found the only way out of the shackles of the class system in which they—and all the English—had been born. Rich or poor—and many aristos were on their uppers despite the prestige of their titles—the only way to drop out was to become a heroin addict. It was the one thing that would ensure certain expulsion from the club of which one was otherwise a lifelong member.

  No doubt there were a few scruffy writers slumming it there too like Richard Tull, the protagonist in Martin Amis’s The Information. (Amis must have been living there himself at one time, obvious if you read his stories.)

  It was certainly the best place to be in London, as far as I could see. I thought it was the best place I’d ever been. I was in love with London, in love with England, and in love with the thoroughly seedy but titillating streets of Ladbroke Grove, the place where hippie met aristo met Rasta met punk, out of reach of establishment trends like fashion and wise investments. I crashed on many a sofa in Ladbroke Grove.

  So I walked up the cobbled mews to Lemmy’s flat off All Saints Road and knocked on the door.

  Oh, boo hoo, I whimpered, hoping he would feel sorry for me and give me something to cheer me up. But he didn’t. He was annoyed more than anything. “No one said it was going to be easy!” he smiled.

  I was like the student in a Zen fable that the master cracks across the back of the skull with a length of bamboo. Ouch! For once, I had nothing to say. It was true. He was right. Then, to ward off any self-pity sneaking up on me, he put his arm around my shoulder, peered down my shirt and said, “You wanna check this drummer out, calls himself Gas Wild.” He went on to describe a Jeff Beck lookalike who could be found somewhere among the dregs in Ladbroke Grove.

  —

  Ready, steady…

  Chris Brown was a drummer I’d met when I had it in my head that a drummer was the first step in finding my sound—drums being the backbone of the sound and all—as I had some weird time signatures going on and wanted something you could dance to that would still be hard-ass. This is how I got the rehearsal room at Eddie Ryan’s. Brown knew Eddie, who had a setup making drums, Eddie Ryan Custom Drums, and he let us rent a room in his basement to rehearse. In urban environments, a rehearsal room can’t be taken for granted—not like setting up in a basement or garage out in the sticks. Finding a rehearsal place was the number-one stumbling block for most bands.

  Chris and I bashed through a few of my tunes, which sounded pretty good with just the two of us but nothing that was going to set the world on fire. We didn’t last long, but I kept the rehearsal room.

  Sometimes, during a no-fixed-abode period, I would stay the night in Eddie’s basement and sleep on a vinyl car seat, although it was cold and scary as hell in those underground caves, which extended way farther than I cared to explore on my own.

  I had a Gannex raincoat like the one Harold Wilson famously wore—that I’d got at Laurence Corner on Drummond Street, where everybody got all the good military gear, next to a bunch of vegetarian Indian restaurants. I loved that street.

  If I wanted to keep the two-bar heater on, I had to put up with the fluorescent overhead strip light, as they were both on the same plug, so I kept the coat over my head as a black-out blind. I was way too scared to turn the light off anyway. There was a supernatural aura down there that kept me awake.

  Covent Garden was largely empty: the markets had closed down, the huge glass atrium stood empty and the place was like a ghost town, apart from the opera house and some council dwellings. I was petrified in the caverns underground there on my own, Phantom of the Opera and all that.

  One night, I got that supernatural frozen-in-terror thing, so I threw off the Gannex coat and bolted. I ran up Long Acre to Leicester Square and got the night bus to Ladbroke Grove. Vivien Goldman lived above the Coral bookmakers next to the bridge.

  Viv was a writer I knew from Sounds when I was at the NME. She was an actual journalist, though, not a phony posing at it like I’d been. I stepped off the bus to find scaffolding all up the front of her building so, as her flat had no bell, I hoisted myself up to the second floor and banged on the window. She flung back the curtains, stark naked, her Page Three breasts pressed up against the window—an eyeful of a Robert Crumb moment for the two officers down below who were stepping out of their squad car. They watched in silence as I went in through the window. She didn’t even wake up.

  For the next few weeks Viv let me crash at the bottom of her bed. My party trick was washing windows. I was something of an expert with a bucket of water, washing-up liquid and stack of newspapers, which ensured I was a welcomed houseguest.

  It was a Saturday—the day Portobello Road came to life with all the antique stalls and hippies and punks and Rastas swanning around for the afternoon like extras in a Robert Altman film. I was polishing Viv’s windows, when…bingo! I spied Gas Wild on the Street, just like Lemmy had described him.

  I struggled with the sash window and forced it up. “Are you Gas?” I shouted over the din of the street.

  A skinny rocker in tight jeans, studded belt, biker jacket and white scarf spun around, turning his hollow cheeks up in my direction and yelled, “Yeah!”

  “Wanna get in a band?”

  “Yeah, but I haven’t got a drum kit.”

  “I’ll get you one.”

  I threw a set of keys down and he let himself in. And that, essentially, was the beginning of the Pretenders.

  27

  CLOSING IN ON DESTINY

  I took Gas Wild to Dave Hill’s office on Wardour Street. Dave looked taken aback to see me with a Jeff Beck lookalike who was all affectation and swagger and peppered his conversation with the word “baby.”

  He was a very straight guy, Dave, not like other managers who would stay up till five in the morning in hotel rooms gossiping and getting loaded with other managers. He kept to himself. I never once saw him at the bar having a pint, even. But I suppose after being in Johnny Thunders’ world, Wild’s slurring and stumbling must have seemed like child’s play.

  Gas was from Hereford, a town in the West Country near the border of Wales and home of the famous SAS—the Special Air Service, part of the British Army and internationally recognized as the number-one badasses without rival. Hereford is also famous for the magnificent Hereford bull, one of which makes a cameo appearance in my cowboy film of preference, Appaloosa.

  Gas told me he knew a bass player from home who had just got back from Australia, where he’d been touring with an Aussie band called the Bushwackers. Enter Pete Farndon.

  Farndon came along to a rehearsal, if you could call it that with just a drummer and my primitive skills. I won him over with
a funky but punky version of “Groove Me,” the King Floyd song built around a tasty bass line which he had to pull up to work it out. He was visibly impressed with the crazy time signatures of my originals.

  My time signatures, I was to discover, would be considered “clever,” although the reason they were unusual—not 4/4, 7/8 or 3/4—was because I couldn’t count anything. I was used to guys trying to work them out and saying, “But that’s wrong,” or, “How do you count that?” to which I would answer: “Just memorize it.”

  Farndon was a fan of the current punk scene, but he didn’t look it. He had a classic quiff and wore a biker jacket. Gas Wild also was right out of step with punk, looking like he did, a throwback to the Keith Richards school of rock, admittedly never completely out of fashion. So the three of us looked convincingly like the motorcycle club with guitars, not bikes that I had long-envisioned—and three makes a band, even if we were a band short of a guitar hero.

  We started going down to Eddie Ryan’s and it was beginning to feel like something might happen. Pete and I spent a couple days in Eddie’s basement attempting to soundproof it. Apparently if you stuck egg cartons all up the walls and ceiling they acted as insulation.

  I’d been having serious doubts that this band idea was ever going to happen, but now I had a rhythm section, a rehearsal room, a manager and some songs. (And I wasn’t wearing a polyester dress and hairnet and asking some trucker if he’d like sour cream or butter on his baked potato.) My expenses were negligible as I was still crashing where I could and didn’t have to come up with rent. I was a low-maintenance number.

  Typically, just as we started we began to fall apart. Gas was getting too fucked up. We all were, of course, but when the drummer falls off his drum stool mid-song, it’s red-card time. And then we were two.

  —

  I was still hanging out in Ladbroke Grove, and now crashing at Mick Farren’s ex Joy’s place. Mick was a writer for various leftist publications I’d met at the NME. He was white but had a big afro, which I once trimmed like a bush into more of a Gene Vincent, which he was quite pleased with. He had an album out called Vampires Stole My Lunch Money, which I think I sang on. Joy’s place on Ledbury Road was just around the corner from the squalid digs of Philthy Animal Taylor, Motörhead’s drummer. I wanted Taylor for myself, but that was something I would never have said out loud. Taylor was of the Keith Moon school—a wild man and a showman—but he was the property of Lemmy.

  I would never dream of poaching anyone from another band even if I could, but word on the street was that the Heartbreakers had their sights on Taylor. There were always rumors that Motörhead might be splitting up.

  If the Heartbreakers had designs on Taylor, well, I couldn’t let that happen. (I don’t remember what was happening with Jerry Nolan, the Heartbreakers’ superb drummer at the time—I just remember the rumor.) I had to think of a way to let Philthy hear what Farndon and I were doing, then in the event of a Motörhead fracture he would at least have had a taste of what we sounded like before the Heartbreakers pounced.

  I came up with a plan. We’d tell Phil we needed a drummer in order to hold auditions for guitar players. That way he would only be stepping in to help out, and inadvertently getting a lug-hole of our repertoire. It was a good plan. You have to go by the book once in a while. Now all we needed to do was find some guitar players to act out the charade.

  Pete said he knew a guy in Hereford, a local guitar-hero type, who would probably be up for the crack. I asked for a full description and it turned out that the guy was married and had a kid. My face screwed up when he told me that part. Then he added that there was another guy—the little brother of a girl he’d gone out with briefly. He could find out from her if the little bro was around still.

  He was dialing the local guitar hero when I reached over and put the receiver back in the cradle. I figured that if we were going to bother with the audition, even if it was just a setup with ulterior motives, then why use a guy who’s married with kids when there’s one who’s unattached? We could kill two birds with one stone.

  Enter James Honeyman-Scott.

  Jimmy Scott was lanky, pasty, blotchy and blond. He worked in a music store in Hereford. His mother was Welsh, his father Scottish. He had a girlfriend. He liked the Beach Boys, ABBA, Neil Young, Dave Edmunds, Nick Lowe and John Lennon. He particularly disliked punk music, which he didn’t find in the slightest bit interesting as it was devoid of musicality and melody. He didn’t give a toss about attitude.

  I had forgotten about any melody I might have had within; Jimmy Scott was about to reawaken it.

  We didn’t particularly like each other at first. He probably thought I was just some loudmouth, and I thought he was too smooth a player and was slightly offended by his total dismissal of punk. But making music together would change all that. Jimmy would transform my songs in a way I could only have hoped for in my wildest imaginings, and my songs gave him a platform to be the guitar hero God intended. Still, at this juncture I didn’t recognize any of that.

  We didn’t go through with the deception to poach Philthy as it turned out that Motörhead was definitely not splitting. Jimmy Scott went back to Hereford, without me realizing who he was.

  Dave reckoned we’d need some demos so he’d be able to play something to record companies, and we asked Jimmy back for a day to record some of my songs with us. We found a good enough drummer, an Irish guy, Gerry McIlduff, who we’d had down to Eddie’s basement once or twice. Dave booked us into Regent Sounds Studio.

  I still didn’t see it. It was clear that Jimmy could play, but I was too blinded by punk to remember how great a great guitar player was. I had temporarily forgotten the magic of Jim McCarty, Buzzy Feiten, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page—the transcendental feeling when seeing Mick Ronson blow the roof off the Music Hall that night with Bowie in Cleveland.

  We spent a day recording six songs, including a spoof country song I’d written about the drive out to Tucson with Annie called “Tequila and Precious,” my ode to Cleveland, a sweet little Kinks cover, “Stop your Sobbing,” a revamped, punky version of the Troggs’ “I Can’t Control Myself,” and another one I’d written, inspired by Pete hanging around in pinball arcades, called “The Wait.”

  I casually waved goodbye as Jimmy got on the train back to Hereford, without thinking about when or even whether we’d meet up again. Then I sat down to listen to the demos. I was stunned. I listened again; the songs had taken on another life. These weren’t my songs anymore—they were ours. James Honeyman-Scott was the one I’d been searching for. It was him.

  28

  IT’S ALWAYS SOMETHING

  Now I was faced with my next dilemma: how could I convince Jimmy to leave his home, his job and his girlfriend? Think, think, think…

  Nick Lowe was everything that punk was not. Jimmy didn’t acknowledge punk and neither did Nick, who had no time for “angry.” Jimmy adored Nick’s music and all the bands that he’d produced, especially Rockpile, Jimmy’s favorite group. And Nick was a friend of mine!

  All I had to do now was convince him to produce our first single and Jimmy would be incapable of resisting. It was obvious that Jimmy was one of those guitar players who put the music above everything. I wanted him badly.

  I hadn’t been long enough out of the birthing pool to think logistics yet, but, yes, Nick was perfect for us. I’d been on hold for so long that I was slow off the mark, but this plan was as watertight as a duck’s ass and I knew it.

  Pete and I took a cassette of the demos over to Nick’s, pushed it through the letterbox, gave him just enough time to listen to it and then called him from a payphone in Oxford Street Station.

  “Oh, hi! [Nick’s “endearment.”] I just finished listening to your tape and I definitely want to get in on this Sandie Shaw song,” he said.

  Glory on High! He obviously meant our version of “Stop Your Sobbing.” Good Lord, I thought, he’s going to do it.

  “Stop Your Sobbing” was on the first
Kinks album, and I’d pulled it out of the air when we were in rehearsals at Eddie’s, surprised that no one had heard it before. Never mind that it was the one song I hadn’t written—of course Ray Davies was a million times better songwriter than me—Nick was in, which meant we’d get Jimmy.

  I tried to contain my excitement as I dialed the Hereford exchange. Jimmy answered but didn’t give me a chance to speak: “Before you say anything, I’ve been listening to the demos and I want to be in your band.”

  —

  The next week, we went into Nick’s studio, Eden in Chiswick, and recorded “Stop Your Sobbing” backed with “The Wait.” Under pressure from Pete, I gave half the songwriting credit of the latter to him, even though he’d had no part in the writing—he’d just suggested a key change during the solo. Jimmy took me aside and said, “Don’t ever give your songs away!” He was pissed off about it and thought Pete was bullying me, using the fact that we’d slipped into a romantic liaison to get around me.

  It seems like a trivial thing to mention at this stage, but songwriting credits are the number-one reason bands break up. Well, that and girlfriends.

  Our first single, A- and B-side, was recorded in a day, but we forgot to add the backing vocals, which Jimmy had sung on the demo, as we were in such a hurry. Nick sang them himself after we’d gone—what an excellent touch, having the man himself on our record! Elvis Costello, who Nick was also producing at the time, was hanging about with Nick after we left and suggested repeating the “Stop it” on the chorus.

  Jimmy’s virtuosity and range was becoming increasingly apparent. He claimed not to be a fan of solos but, if egged on, could knock one out of rare magnitude. He used a chorus pedal and was the master of rhythmic arpeggios—nobody else had a sound like his. Even his humor came through in his playing. That was the other thing about Jimmy—I was getting to understand that he was the funniest man I’d ever met. He could have me crying by just pulling a face and popping his false tooth out.