– William Burroughs
While residing in Leeds 6 Johnny’s haunts include the Royal Park and the ‘Rock “n” Roll’ hotel, the Faversham5 – a place where we share a pint with Joe Strummer after the Clash’s busking appearance on the Leeds University steps (1985). In such joints he expounds his junkie philosophy, professing that he takes smack cuz he likes it, rocking out with or without it and it does not affect his ability to play. Something does though. We follow him for a lost weekend of gigs where he does not touch his guitar once. When we reach the Wakefield Unity Hall the place is buzzing with anticipation (there wasn’t a lot of rock action here pre-Cribs). The Slaves are the support band and I bump into the singer in the toilets, asking him if Johnny is likely to show tonight. Stevie explains that he’s already here but he’s spent some time in the Leeds General Infirmary – he had fallen asleep in a strange position and put his fingers out of action!
Friday night in Leeds General Infirmary casualty department is a madhouse, but Johnny insists he needs his ‘trapped nerve’ seen to and Mick has to take him there. When they arrive it is clear that the battle of the Tetley Ale houses has already taken its toll. People are wheeled in with their eyes hanging out on threads and with various lacerations to their beer-numbed torsos, but Johnny can’t figure why they are receiving preferential treatment. Unfamiliar with the concept of triage, he makes his feelings felt numerous times within the first hour of waiting, but he finally explodes when a bevy of medics hurry by with a guy in a wheelchair who seems to be missing a large part of his scalp. Johnny is so wrapped up in his private world that he cannot see the tragi-comic nature of his cry ‘No, take me first, take me!’
‘Graceful son of Pan! Under your brow your eyes, precious balls, move. Spotted with dark streaks, your cheeks look hollow. Your fangs glisten.’
– Arthur Rimbaud, from ‘Illuminations’
I see Johnny in the Leeds Astoria, hanging out with the Quireboys. His Midnight tan is coming on a treat, skin so pale he looks like Nosferatu, but just before he goes onstage, he decides to apply some make-up – panstick! To misquote the poet laughalot John Cooper Clarke he’s got cold flesh the colour of potatoes and eyes like the tips of cigarettes. Halfway through the set he tilts his mikestand towards my lips. He requires a chorus of ‘Gloria’ and I willingly oblige. Just then he sucks in his bottom lip and his cheeks consecutively, like on the Whistle Test clip, and half pirouettes, half runs across the stage as another murderous chord rings out.
‘Hospitals and jails and whores: these are the universities of life. I’ve got several degrees. Call me Mr.’
– Charles Bukowski, from ‘Confessions of a Man Sane Enough To Live With The Beasts’
We’re in the University Refectory, where the Who recorded ‘Live At Leeds’, coming down from the high of seeing Mr Thunders playing with The Black Kats. Most people are here to see Hanoi Rocks because they are in the charts with Creedence cover ‘Up Around The Bend’, but Ted and I want to shake Johnny’s hand for a job well done. Round the back we catch some of the players, it’s the last time we’ll see Razzle,6 but Andy McCoy will pass our way again, both in the Cherry Bombz and with Iggy. Somebody says we should go to the Phono7 as Johnny’s meeting someone there. The DJ is spinning some Cramps when Andy tells us that Johnny has hightailed it to the Hayfield.8
‘He hit me and I knew he loved me
If he didn’t care for me,
I could never have made him mad
But he hit me and I was glad’
– Carole King and Gerry Goffin from ‘He Hit Me, It Felt Like A Kiss’
Friday night in the Student’s Union, Johnny has barely been on stage for half an hour when he starts to look disgruntled. He stares someone down in the front row, while launching into MIA. Halfway through he breaks off, unstraps his guitar and swings it like a claymore, making contact with … well it’s hard to tell when you are surrounded by six foot hairstyles, goth girls and punk kids, but we think that was skull cracking. Johnny finishes the song and with scant sign of remorse apologizes, explaining that he doesn’t want to hurt anyone but this kid was messing with his stuff. We learn later that the guy was trying to pocket Johnny’s comb as a souvenir.
I knew he was in town when I clocked his sax player Jamie in the Fav’. Johnny’s holding court, a glass of vodka clasped in his rigid digits. He’s looking less Pacino-cool and more Ratso-cold, but he’s still keeping it together as he disses a bunch of people and gives a big up to a host of others. Names such as Dee Dee Ramone and Truman Capote are dropped. No matter how low he gets he keeps it comic – I hear him refer to a mutual acquaintance, in a voice like Joey Pants, as a ‘one-eyed cat’ (as in the Elvis song) and he dedicates a song to another friend’s girl, puncturing any soppiness by concluding with – ‘the one with the big tits’. His arm is fucked and it’s not because of all those needle holes, but tonight at the Duchess9 he has Mick Vayne strumming for him. Mick is great but he takes some verbal and a little physical abuse from the man – ‘Take it down – this ain’t a fuckin’ heavy metal song’. I’m looking at Johnny and thinking of his friend Stiv. The erstwhile leader of the Lords of the New Church had been shot on stage a number of times. More recently Stiv got hit by a car and didn’t realise he was dead – 48 hours later he keeled over. Johnny fell down a few months later.
‘… the shattered bone hath laid him groaning among the happier dead.
It is an easier thing to rejoice in the tents of prosperity:
Thus could I sing and thus rejoice: but it is not so with me’
– William Blake, from ‘The Price Of Experience’
‘The vegetable serenity of junk settled in his tissues. His face went slack and peaceful, and his head fell forward’
– William Burroughs from ‘Junky’s Christmas’
The last time I see Johnny in Leeds, he’s fifteen feet tall on the Hyde Park10 cinema screen. Lech Kowalski is here to present his cinematic biography of Mr T, The Last Outlaw. Watching the celluloid hero shuffle from gig to fix, I’m reminded of what his old mate Tony Parsons said about him choosing drugs over women – with those Latino good looks he shoulda been winning as many hearts as he was breaking. Lech and I had chatted about this project a few years earlier when he was in town for the Leeds Film Festival. The Director started out producing porn, allegedly on the Mafia’s dollar, but he is better known for his brave attempts to document the implosion of Punk (see also D.O.A.). The film will eventually surface as Born To Lose: The Last Rock “N” Roll Movie and while I pick holes and stress over the abundant input from Dee Dee, I have to agree with Filmmaker Magazine, it is ‘… a remarkably powerful human drama and the nightmare flipside to the rockstar dream life and limousines.’ We know, we lived it.
‘There’s something wrong here where the best ones want to go
Parker, Lautreamont, Monroe they held it just to throw
The World away who were its grace before they left
To choose to have a point of view oblivious that leaves the rest of us bereft’
– Richard Hell, from Don’t Die
Notes
1 The hotel in question was the Dragonara, which has been renamed as the Leeds Hilton. Morrissey notes that Thunders had partied here with the Dolls in ’73.
2 The Dead Vaynes formed in Leeds in the early 1980s. Their leader Stevie Vayne set out to create a post punk/counter Goth movement known as ‘Schlock Rock’. Early recruits included ex-members of the Sisters of Mercy and The Abrasive Wheels, who set out to inject some sonic revolution into the sleazy speedfreak scene of Headingley.
3 The Warehouse is one of the best venues in Leeds. The exposed brick interior complete with Public telephone kiosk was the site of triumphant gigs by countless alternative artists including most of the local Goth fraternity, REM, Nico, and the Gun Club. Marc Almond was a former cloakroom attendant.
4 Stevie Vayne describes this famous curry house, now known as the Balti King, as a favourite after hours drinking venue for the Leed
s rock fraternity – ‘Johnny in a curry house was a funny sight and all the rockers in Leeds used to turn up there late on. The look on their faces to see J.T. in Naffees was hysterical and of course Johnny trying to understand the waiters and order food was funny as hell too’.
5 The Faversham is an enormous Victorian pub built in a walled site just off the University campus. Most of Leeds’ budding rockers from the Magnificent Seven to Young Professionals have propped up the bar here. During the Nineties it became one of the biggest draws on the dance scene, but it is now re-established as a live venue and is the local home for Club NME.
6 A month or so after the Leeds gig Hanoi Rocks’ drummer was killed in a car crash. The driver, Motley Crue’s Vince Neil, was found to be under the influence. He received a short custodial sentence.
7 For a quarter century Le Phonographique was the place for the alternate rocker to be seen in Leeds. The small basement room in a 1960s shopping centre reverberated to the sounds of Punk/ Goth/ Industrial music as the young, not always so beautiful, admired themselves in its mirrored walls.
8 The Hayfield pub was a notorious den of iniquity in the heart of Leeds red light district. It was Chapletown’s main drug dive, and features in numerous murder crime files, including those on the Yorkshire Ripper. Alternate sources suggest that Johnny may have ended up in Foxe’s on the night in question. The latter was a suburban nightclub in the infinitely classier Chapel Allerton. Here Bowie and Roxy clones rubbed shoulders, and other body parts, with soul boys, especially in the unisex toilets.
9 The Duchess was an inauspicious little venue on one of Leeds main shopping thoroughfares. Promoter extraordinaire John Keenan turned it into the happening live scene of the era. Thunders played there at least three times.
10 The Hyde Park Cinema is one of the oldest cinemas in Britain. In Edwardian times it housed the Brudenell Road Social Club, but since before World War 1 it has operated as a film theatre. It remains a beautiful feature of Leeds Student land; an art house showing some of the most interesting films the World has to offer.
The Decadent Set-list
Dickon Edwards
Decadent disco is curated (as opposed to DJ’d) and patrons are encouraged to dress up in their own take on period glamour. Cigarillos, braces, tweeds, beads, silk, scarves, unforgiving teddy bears. Drink, dance, and ponder the nights’ tenderness to an eclectic but discerning mix of Sinatra (Frank & Nancy), Strauss waltzes, soundtracks, musicals, El records, Gilbert & Sullivan, Ella Fitzgerald, Dory Previn, Doris Day, Bugsy Malone, Cabaret, Chicago, deviant disco, shadowy soul, parvenu pop and insouciant indie.
Bernice Bobs Her Hair – Divine Comedy
Get Happy – Judy Garland
You’ve Either Got Or You Haven’t Got Style – Frank Sinatra
Nice On The Ice – Vic Godard
Initials BB – Serge Gainsbourg
I Wanna Be Loved By You – Helen Kane (1920s recording)
I Feel The Earth Move – Carole King
Casino Royale – Bacharach (theme from the movie)
Dream A Little Dream Of Me – Mama Cass
Anything Goes – Harpers Bizarre (theme from The Boys In The Band)
The Lady Is A Tramp – The Supremes
I’ll Keep It With Mine – Nico
How Does That Grab You Darlin’? – Nancy Sinatra
Move Over Darling – Doris Day
The Number One Song In Heaven – Sparks
Mrs Robinson – James Taylor Quartet
Yada Yada La Scala – Dory Previn (this works fantastically well)
Elizabeth Taylor In London: with John Barry CD, (on El Records, naturally) is arguably the most stylish album ever made. Against a stirring, swooping orchestration by Mr Barry, Ms Taylor recites various texts related to the capital: Wordsworth’s ‘Westminster Bridge’, Queen Victoria’s diary entry following her husband’s death, Queen Elizabeth’s Tilbury speech (‘I may have the body of weak and feeble woman …’) and Churchill’s post-Blitz statement comparing the city to a defiant rhinoceros.
Decadent Travel
The Decadent Traveller
Medlar Lucan & Durian Gray
I was at A***n*n in the south of France, and went up with my luggage to the station which was being rebuilt. A branch line had been opened the day before, and all was a chaos of brick, mortar and scaffolding. The water closets were temporarily run up in wood, in a very rough manner. A train had just brought in many passengers. I was taken with violent bellyache, and ran to the closets. They were full. Fearful of shitting myself I rushed to the women’s which were adjoining the men’s. ‘Non, non, Monsieur,’ screamed out the woman in charge, ‘c’est pour les dames.’ I would have gone in spite of her, but they were also full. Foul myself I must. ‘Oh, woman, I am so ill, – here is a franc, show me somewhere for God’s sake.’ ‘Come here,’ said she, and going round to the back of the wooden structure, she opened the door of a shed. On the door was written ‘Control, private, you don’t enter here.’ In I went rapidly. ‘Shut the door quite close,’ said she, ‘when you come out.’ It had been locked. I saw a half-cupboard, and just in time to save my trousers made myself easy on a seat with a hole in it.
It was a long compartment of the wooden shed and running at the back of several privies. No light was provided, excepting by a few round holes pierced here and there in the sides; but light came also at places through joints of the woodwork roughly and temporarily put together. There were chests, furniture, forms, cabinets, lamps, and shelves and odds and ends of all sorts in the shed, seemingly placed there till the new station was finished. The privy seat at which I sat was one end. The privy enclosure had no door, and looking about when my belly-ache had subsided, and I could think of something else, I heard on my right, rustlings, and footsteps, as of females moving, and a female voice say, ‘Make haste.’ Then doors banged and opened, and just beyond my knee I saw a round hole in the woodwork through which a strong light came into my dark shed. Off I got in a trice and kneeling down looked. It was a hole through which I could have put my middle finger, a knot in the wood had fallen or been forced out, in the boarding which formed the back of one of the women’s closets, and just above the privy seat. What a sight met my eyes when I looked through it!
A large brown turd descending and as it dropped disclosing a thickly haired cunt stretched out wide between a fat pair of thighs and great round buttocks, of which I could see the whole. A fart followed, and a stream of piddle as thick as my finger splashed down the privy-hole. It was a woman with her feet on the seat after the French fashion, and squatting down over the hole. Her anus opened and contracted two or three times, another fart came, her petticoats dropped a little down in front, she pulled them up, then up she got, and I saw from her heels to above her knees as she stood on the privy-seat, one foot on each side of the hole. Off the seat then she got, pulling her petticoats tightly around her, and holding them so. Then she put one leg onto the seat, and wiped her bum with two or three pieces of paper which she held in one hand, taking them one by one from it with the other, wiping from the anus towards her cunt, and throwing each piece down the hole as she had done with it. Then looking at her petticoats to see if she had smirched them, she let them fall, gave them a shake, and departed.
She was a fine, dark woman of about thirty, well dressed, with clean linen, and everything nice, though not looking like a lady. The closets it must be added, had sky-lights and large openings just above the doors for ventilation, so they were perfectly light. The sun was shining, and I saw plainly her cunt from back to front, her sphincter muscle tightening and opening, just as if she had arranged herself for me to see it. I recollect comparing it in my mind to those of horses, as I have seen many a time, and every other person must have seen, tightening just after the animals have evacuated.
The sight of the cunt, her fine limbs, and plump buttocks made my cock stiff, but my bowels worked again. I resumed my seat, and had no sooner done so than I heard a door bang. Down on my knees I went,
with eye to peep-hole. Another woman was fastening the closet door. It was a long compartment. When near the door, I could see the women from head nearly to their ankles; when quite near the seat I could not see their heads, nor their knees which were hidden by the line of the seat; but I saw all between those parts.
It was a peasant-girl seemingly about twenty years old, tall, strong and dark like the other. She took some paper out of her pocket, then pulling her petticoats well up, I saw the front of her thighs and had a momentary glimpse of the motte. She turned round, mounted the seat, and squatted. She then drew up her petticoats behind tighter, and I saw buttocks, turds and piddle. She did not lift up her petticoats quite so much in front, yet so light was it that the gaping cunt and the stream were quite visible. She wiped her bum as she sat, then off she went, leaving me delighted with her cunt, and annoyed at seeing what was behind it.
Then I found from looking around and listening, that there were several women’s closets at the back of all of which the shed ran. It was a long building with one roof, and the closets were taken out of it. Through the chinks of the boards of one closet I could see the women enter, and leave, could hear them piss, and what they said in all of them; but in the one only could I see all their operations. I kept moving from one to the other as I heard their movements, their grunts, and their talk, but always to the peep-hole when there was anything to see, – and there was plenty.
I had now missed my train, the two women I expect must have gone off by it, and for quite an hour the closets were all empty. I began to think there was no chance of seeing more unless I stayed longer than an hour when I knew an express train arrived. I resolved to wait for that, wondering if any one would come into my shed for any purpose, but no one came in. I had eased myself, and covered up the seat; but a strong stink pervaded the place, which I bore resolutely, hoping to see more female nakedness.
The Decadent Handbook Page 16
