The Decadent Handbook

by Rowan Pelling

  Oh, women. They fill the music-maddened mind. Organ music. The Gabler organ in Weingarten Abbey: there behind the vox humana she’s hiding, hot, dusty, whispering, exhausted, but we’ll find her, yes we will. Your man again: Sebastian: his great c minor Passacaglia: we can manage on our own, but to really play it you’d need a woman (naked but for a lynx stole) and syrup of mandragora. But you can’t take it beyond Ligeti’s Volumina: the organ-geek listening to that one (specs, rubber-soled brogues, fish paste sandwiches) is, in the reality of his mind where all reality is constructed, enfolded in the Great Platonic Vulva, soft and civety and warm. The vagina dialogues. If the womb is where we all secretly want to return, music is what sends us there, too, rendering us useless to society, useless to the Department of Homeland Security, useless to the Halifax Bank.

  Sex and violence, and fantasies going so far beyond any thinkable sex or imaginable violence, or any happiness which may exist or grief which may lie in story: music drips its transcendental signifieds upon us and we fall into desuetude, unable even to apprehend our compulsions and desires under its languorous inflaming powers, let alone to name them. Keep your trivia, your cocaine and your wines, your Havanas and furs and sturgeons’ eggs; here is music lies a world of gods and sex and swords, of death and revenge, of amber and diamonds and the icy clarity of mathematics; here the planets whirl and hum and women fall back gratefully among the rocks and velvet and we are heroes and angelic, omnipotent and comforted and the stars proceed, as they must proceed, through the pale frozen canticles of infinite space…

  Oh yes. We are, do you see, utterly out of reach under music’s enchantment, and that’s most decadent of all, that’s when a man is an island: an isle …

  full of noises,

  Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.

  Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

  Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices

  That, if I then had waked after long sleep,

  Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,

  The clouds methought would open, and show riches,

  Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked

  I cried to dream again.

  A man who cries to dream again is no Good Citizen; is fallen into a sort of Decay, born of Fancy: and the subject not of the State but of conjured art and his sensual imaginings. And so both kinds unite, and so I name Music as the queen of decadence.

  Bonnington Square

  John Moore

  I am slightly hazy as to which came first, the drugs or the music. Like many teenagers, I’d ‘experimented’ with the usual array of noxious substances: amphetamine sulphate, diet pills, household products and cannabis – which I certainly hoped would lead to stronger things. I left home at nineteen, armed with a student grant, a ticket to London, and no intention of doing anything but being in a band. Whether I was fortunate or talented is debatable, but I was single-minded and reasonably astute. When the opportunity came I seized it. I joined my favourite band – the Jesus and Mary Chain, and became famous. Although I was more of a hitchhiker and interpreter for incomprehensible (to most of the world) Glaswegians, than a fully paid up member, I had my own little coterie of admirers; and being the only single gentleman on the stage, was often treated as an honourary Scotsman.

  While the Reid brothers moved onto the property ladder, I was domiciled at Bonnington Square in Vauxhall. There is insufficient space here to describe the glories of this place – it deserves its own book, which I might even write at some stage. Suffice to say it was a decrepit Victorian square of four-storey, derelict houses, all squatted, and knocked into whichever shape its occupants desired. Floors were ripped out to make a theatre, lateral conversions knocked through supporting walls. Like the rookeries of Dickensian London, it was possible to avoid police raids, bailiffs and council writs by scrambling through secret passageways and leaving in an orderly fashion several doors away. Occasionally one of the houses would fall down in disgust. It was inhabited by mad old vegans, political activists, and slumming musicians.

  Having hitched a ride to fame with the most notorious pop group of the day, I found myself in the enviable position of being able to indulge in leisure activities almost unimaginable to those less fortunate.

  I was determined to enjoy whatever pleasures my status enabled, and my minor fame ensured that most pleasures were usually available in some shape or form. Acquiring ladies for the purpose of sexual congress was by no means impossible, drawn as they were to my column inches in the musical papers, the chance of sharing my future wealth and bearing me an heir, in return for a life of indolence in Surrey and all the cosmetic surgery that gravity would one day require. Some weren’t impressed by my bohemian surroundings, but most were prepared to accept that they must suffer for my art – for a while, at least.

  But as all great rock’n’rollers know: Wimmin is fine, but they sure get in the way of good writing, and they split when the hits stop, baby, usually relieving you of your ill-gotten gains. Best to keep them at arm’s length if you know what’s good for you – and while you’ve got that arm out, why not take the time to roll up a sleeve, and introduce a little something from the medicine cabinet into it? At worst you’ll die on the spot, thus creating a legend or, at the very least, sell fifteen more records than you might have done otherwise. Your mum will be interviewed for documentaries about dead pop stars, and find solace in serving tea to the loners who turn up at the family home hoping to breathe in the essence of your tormented soul. Most likely though, you’ll spend many happy hours unravelling the mysteries of the universe, discovering the lost chord, and marvelling at the indomitable spirit of the moth you have been minutely observing for the past seven hours. It certainly helps to pass the time.

  I was taken under the wing of X, and became a sort of Sorcerer’s apprentice. He lived across the street in a room filled with furniture liberated from a closed down sanatorium. His bed was cast iron with height adjusters and collapsible sides, and on the threadbare rug in the middle of the floor stood a statue of the Virgin Mary taken from the chapel of rest. She’d lost one of her praying hands as he dragged her up the stairs, and she now looked as though she were about to perform a Kung Fu chop.

  X was a violinist of sorts, and played in a ramshackle outfit who were quite popular in certain quarters. Everything about him reeked of decadence. He generally wore ancient Saville row suits with frayed cuffs, doused in sandalwood scent to mask their unlaundered odour, and silk cravats and shirts, which bore tiny traces of blood around the sleeves. His mannered voice ranged from a languid drawl to the clipped hectoring of an SS Commandant, and his hawk-like features and black eyes combined the world-weariness of W H Auden with the cold cruelty of Ian Brady. He had a magnificent gift for unpleasantness, which he revelled in, possessing enough negative energy to suck out all the bonhomie from a room in less than a minute, and replace it with unease and anger. Like most great mischief-makers, he was a complete coward when challenged, but could usually turn the situation to his advantage, even at its critical stages. For some arcane reason – possibly because I’d been on Top of the Pops and could pay for his drugs, he took a shine to me.

  He had been using heroin since the age of fifteen. Now in his mid-thirties, he showed no immediate signs of pegging out, although it was occasionally necessary to hold a mirror to his mouth during our long rests; but he’d spent so long hovering on the verges of life and death that he had become virtually indestructible.

  With the tenderness of a father to a son, he introduced me to the pleasures of heroin, and taught me to respect it – not wanting to deal ‘with your mummy when her boy turns up stiff.’ Our ritual was very precise. Usually he’d let me go first, unless he was gagging for it, in which case the laws of chivalry were suspended and it was safer to stand aside and let him get on with it.

  From a Gladstone bag – heavy with books shoplifted from Foyles –he’d produce the correct instruments and the proceedings would commenc
e. Scalpel, spoon, citric and candle, cigarette filter and syringe. The cooking instructions were extremely simple.

  Mix contents on spoon to desired strength, add a little water, hold above naked flame until sizzling et voilà…the last supper. Draw into syringe, inject into self and hope not to die.

  My early attempts at injecting often resulted in painful near misses, so out of benevolence and economy, the good Doctor deigned to ‘hit me up’ himself. Flicking the barrel with casual expertise, he expelled the air bubbles and tapped the needle into place. The thrill of expectation as it pushed against the skin then overcame its slight resistance to pierce the vein, was akin to that of a child on Christmas morning, approaching the tree with its shiny baubles and twinkling lights: you just knew that many of the wondrous presents beneath its pine scented branches were coming your way.

  To watch your blood swirl up into the brownish mixture you are about to be introduce to your body is a glorious negation – Life is not sacred, it is something to be played with, interfered with, by those without medical certificates, altered for amusement and risked for nothing more than selfish pleasure. Days were spent listening to records, thinking about music and how to do it better. Notebooks filled with random thoughts, to be arranged cohesively at a later date.

  I do not regret any of my drug experiences, except perhaps the disastrous attempt at making crack in a conventional oven in the days before microwaves, or snorting ecstasy, which felt like a brain haemorrhage. I would find it exceptionally difficult to turn down the opportunity to take more, should it arise – in fact, I look forward to passing my dotage in a cloud of opium smoke, surrounded by children who say: ‘Look at Grandpa, he’s off in a dream again.’ I would not actively seek them out now, or spend days on a lousy mattress in south London, surviving on Bombay mix, imagining myself to be de Quincey at Limehouse; but if a nice, un-baseball capped, non pit bull owning dealer moved into the village, I’d be very pleased to pay him a call occasionally. I might even get round to organizing those notebooks as well.

  Dead or Alive in Leeds: Johnny Thunders

  Stevie Boyd

  ‘I hear he’s pretty bad,

  Well he’s good bad, but not evil’

  – from ‘Great Big Kiss’ by the Shangrilas

  Throughout the Eighties Johnny Thunders is a Rock ‘n’ Roll gypsy, wherever he lays his fedora is home. He often has a Tonto to his Lone Ranger, usually Jerry Nolan, but sometimes the likes of Tony James in London, or Stevie Vayne in Leeds. A lot of people reckon he is on the run from a New York neighbourhood infested with dealers and hangers on, others point out that Leeds is a good place to connect and London, only two hours away by train, is the home of his good friend the Doctor. Whatever the reason, he spends a lot of his Autumn nights in this Northern city.

  ‘You need an escort to take a piss,

  He holds your hand and he shakes your dick,

  You’re so pretty suburban kiddy.

  You think you’re gonna change, re-arrange this city’

  – Johnny Thunders from ‘London Boys’

  Visits to Leeds are not without incident. The first as part of the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy package is curtailed when councillors catch a whiff of the filth and the fury that surrounds the infamous Bill Grundy TV appearance. The second begins with Johnny’s band being held at gunpoint for five hours in a hotel1 overlooking the City Railway Station. This ordeal necessitates fingerprinting on the first of numerous visits to Millgarth Police Station. These prints are reproduced for the cover of the Heartbreakers’ album LAMF (Like A Mother Fucker).

  Johnny Thunders is standing in a doorway in Harehills, late ’87. He is wearing a full length leather coat that could have been ripped from the corpse of a Gestapo Officer but his teeth are still doing a tango as he shivers and digs his hands deeper into his pockets, ‘It’s colder than a witch’s tit, I think my balls are going to drop off.’ He pulls back the flaps of his coat and gestures to his package, remembering a recent incident … He’s being driven, in a Roller no less, when the cops pull him over to the side of the road. His tight red leather pants make him look as though he’s carrying a pair of overripe mangoes in his jockeys, so the officers and the guitar slinger engage in a fifteen-minute dialogue regarding why this should be. Finally, Johnny tires of this and whips it out -thus ending the conversation and shedding a little light on why he is also known as the Italian Stallion.

  August 1984 and the Heartbreakers meet the Vaynes2 for the first time. Walking into their dressing room at the Leeds Warehouse3 they catch them shooting speed. Wise Uncle Johnny admonishes the boys sternly for their devil-may-care use of narcotics and their casual disregard for their own health, adding, almost as an afterthought, ‘You got any Heroin?’

  Towards the end of the decade, Johnny decides to return to Leeds under his own steam. Tiny, a snake-hipped kid who resides in my loft is turning tricks in Leeds City Station when he spots a strange little guy bedecked in soft silks and scarves. The guy is looking lost in the station’s shopping square and Tiny is thinking of approaching him when he suddenly breaks into a chant, ‘Mick, Mick, Mick!’. Johnny, for it is he, has British Railed into town solo. His only prior request was a welcoming party, but no one has arrived. Leeds ain’t that big, maybe if he shouts loud enough his road manager will emerge from the shadows by Menzies. Office workers and travellers shoot the little dandy quizzical glances as he continues his call. These are the days before the mobile phone and Johnny’s mantra does not trail off until two leather clad figures come through the sliding doors. Mick Webster drives his charge back to Stevie’s.

  ‘John Willmot penned his poetry

  riddled with the pox

  Nabakov wrote on index cards

  At a lectern in his socks

  St John of the Cross did his best stuff

  Imprisoned in a box

  And Johnny Thunders was half alive

  when he wrote Chinese Rocks’

  – Nick Cave, from ‘There She Goes, My Beautiful World’

  The days and nights in Stevie’s Hyde Park flat are permanent twilight zones, torn curtains closed, screening the parade of local rockers from the outside world. The only light comes from the flicker of a small black and white TV screen. The scene is more than a little surreal as the fashion conscious New Yorker surveys Yorkshire’s own Richard Whiteley on Countdown (if the two had ever actually met the combination of stripes and polka dots would have been too much for anyone’s vertical hold). Stooges’ posters peel from the walls and roach ends smoulder on formica table tops as Johnny indulges in some of his favourite pursuits. This being one of his fallow periods, the proceeds of his last record company advance long gone, he goes into semi-hibernation. When he is having a lucid day he taunts his house buddy, making out that Stevie’s dog loves Johnny more than him. These guys need to get out more – they need to perform.

  Johnny occasionally sees the light of day as he stumbles to the newsagents. Passing the International Stores the man Nick Kent christened ‘Prince of the Streets’ nods to sari-clad maidens who try to figure out the origins of this stranger. His thick black mane peeps from beneath a cap that could have been liberated from a Greek fisherman, and that tartan piping must surely indicate the old Sicilian clan Genzale. He requires something to alleviate the boredom. It might be that he has watched Scarface one too many times, or perhaps he has decided that he has more in common with Bo Diddley than the two chord trick of ‘Pills’, but whatever the reason, Johnny Thunders is a gunslinger. He begs Mick to take him to the Shooting Range. Mick and Stevie, fearing a ketchup splattered scene of carnage like the one on the cover of Live At Mothers, come up with a scheme. They will drive him to the range but only when it is safely closed for business.

  I’m lying in bed with some friends (you need to do something to keep warm in Manor Drive) when ‘Subway Train’ comes on the radio:

  ‘I can’t ever understand

  why my life’s been cursed, poisoned, condemned

  When I’
ve been trying every night to hold you near me,

  But I’m telling you it ain’t easy’

  John Peel explains that even though the tuning on Thunders’ guitar is wrong it is clearly so right for his oeuvre. Dave and his girlfriend have decided to ‘Doll me up’ so Kelly, her knees either side of my chest, applies warpaint from the box resting on my pillow. This is the last time I see Dave as some months later he takes a dive from a moving train while being pursued by the cops. Ted wanders into my room and despite the fact that I am wearing more make-up than his Mother and the Pete Murphy wannabe upstairs combined, ignores my painted visage while describing an encounter earlier in the night. Turns out that after his shift pulling pints at the Royal he headed to Nafees4 and found himself seated at a table next to the Doll’s guitarist himself. We reminisce about meals we have shared in this place. Once we sent back a Madras containing metal shards only to have the waiter explain that this often happened as tacks from a board holding the various bills fell into the food. Many jokes about staple diets later we were plied with complimentary drinks and piled into a free taxi home.

  ‘Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage’