I Know This Much: From Soho to Spandau

With Steve Norman I’d started visiting a folk club at the Florence pub near Upper Street, a real finger-in-the-ear, knit-your-own-beer sort of place. The English folk scene was going strong, and although it was a home for nervous, intellectual introverts, I had a deep feeling for the music, even getting up one night to sing my ‘Highwayman’. The early seventies folk revival seemed to come from a general desire to return to the loyalties of a simple past, a reaction to the sixties op-art future and Wilson’s ‘white heat’ utopia that never came. And by early 1975 it definitely hadn’t arrived in our street.

The Kemps were still in their rooms in Rotherfield, with no bathroom and one outside loo shared between three families. My parents, far from interested in middle-class folk nostalgia, were desperate to get the luxury that their friends in high-rise places had, and they quite rightly craved an avocado bathroom suite, a warm, dry loo seat, and maybe even a small area outside for greenfly to gather. When my memory is lit by the candlelight of Ted Heath’s Three-Day Week, the place takes on a certain Dickensian nostalgia, but in reality the enforced Victorian living conditions only added to the coldness and grimness of our situation. In any case, my brother and I were getting a little too old to share a bedroom, and had to satisfy our daily desire for teenage privacy in the damp shed of that smelly yard toilet.

The opposing walls above our beds reflected our separate interests in a kind of face-off of passion.While mine was hung with a growing collection of stringed instruments, Martin’s was a riposte of kung fu posters. Martin, who played football for Islington and had had a trial for Arsenal, was much sportier than I was, and he invariably beat me in our occasional fisticuffs. And so his burgeoning showmanship found its stage on the football pitch, with his deft attacking touches enhanced by a customised pair of football boots that he’d painted sky blue and lined with fake fur from Mum’s sewing bag. He balanced this with some wonderfully intelligent acting—being given the chance to co-star in Glittering Prizes, a drama for television starring Tom Conti—and being offered a place at the other Islington grammar school, Central Foundation.

Although 138 Rotherfield Street meant a sparse and cramped existence, it was a rock of love for my brother and me to venture from and return to, a place of safety where we found confidence and therefore a growing success in our lives. My parents, on the other hand, deserved better.

My acting career with Anna had fallen away, owing mostly to my growing lack of attendance because of my obsession with the band and music, although I did keep my thespian leanings going at school. A teacher called Roger Digby, a large bearded bear of a man who played a squeezebox and Morris-danced in his spare time, had the inclination to pull together some ambitious school productions. The first was The Boy Friend, where I charlestoned as Bobby Van Husen, and the second was an even camper musical, Salad Days, in which I was given the lead.

Things weren’t going so well with the Same Band, though. Flicking through the music papers one day, we saw a gig listed for none other than the Same Band. But it wasn’t us. A trip to meet them was made. The confrontation went something like this:

‘How long have you been the Same Band?’

‘We’ve been the same band since school.’

‘No, how long have you been the Same Band?

‘I’m sorry, but we’ve been the Same Band longer than you have. I’ve never heard of the other Same Band.’

‘But we are the Same Band. We’ve done lots of gigs. You can’t have the same name as us—people will think we’re the same band!’

‘What?’

‘We can’t have the same name. One of us has to be another band.’

‘Another Band? That sounds awful.’

Pause.

‘Oh, whatever…Shall we toss a coin for it?’

We lost.

In 1975 Islington Council were in the process of renovating the houses in our area, and with great excitement we were suddenly relocated two blocks east to Elmore Street and a ‘modernised’ Victorian terrace with our own front door and all the amenities we’d craved. My room was small, but at least after a hot bath I had my privacy. Mum got her avocado suite, and Dad finally had a garden to play in. To us, it was a mansion. In the summer evenings I would sit alone with my guitar on the little six-by-six square of grass, and watch the sun dancing upon our washing line. But my meditative little tuffet was about to crash against an accelerating new wave.

CHAPTER SEVEN FOLLOWING THE DURM (#ulink_1ecc428a-d80f-54bb-a1c7-96f5b5295ee5)

‘We have to go to this, it’s gonna be amazing.’ Dagger was standing under the glittery lights in full Chelsea-mod regalia. He’d just arrived, and his declamatory statement, given while brandishing a black-and-white A4 flyer, had all the pub’s smoky heads turning towards him. He held the page up for us to see. On it was a Xeroxed picture of a short-haired singer and a young, similarly barbered guitarist. Above them, in an aggressive scrawl, was written THE SCREEN ON THE GREEN PRESENTS A MIDNIGHT SPECIAL SUNDAY AUGUST 29TH MIDNIGHT-DAWN. Below that it said SEX PISTOLS. What a name, I thought.

It was bank holiday weekend and Steve Norman and I were sitting in the Camden Head. Since the Same Band (or whatever we were now going to call ourselves) had started rehearsing upstairs, this cut-glass pub had become our centre of operations. Fundamentally a soul boy, Steve had inspired me with his StevieWonder andMotown records that he played at his home on the Bourne Estate in Islington. His father, Tony, a cabby whose passions were London, the voices of Mel Blanc, and commentating upon the soap opera that was going on inside his tropical-fish tank, had passed his typically North London sense of humour on to his son. But what drew me to Steve was his instinct for music. He had a sharp ear for what was going on in the arrangements of records we’d play, comfortably transcribing them to our guitars, and we soon performed a morning school assembly together, playing ‘Light My Fire’ and ‘A Horse With No Name’, albeit to a hall of half-awake kids, still lost under their bed-hair.