The Singer (10 page)

The first chiming chords of ’Anarchy in the UK’ roared out from beneath Jones’s fingers. The room moved as one. Like everything had been struck with an electrical
charge and the separate entities that had formerly made up band, audience and bouncers had fused to make one giant Godzilla of a beast, a spiky-haired, pogoing punk-rock machine. A hundred fists punching the air, Johnny leaning into his mic and saying:
‘Riight! Naaaaaaa aaaoooooowwwwwww!’

Stevie and Lynton were near the back of the beast, the wildly vibrating heads and arms in front of them obscuring
their
view. It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter either that hands pressed on their shoulders, that elbows jammed into their sides, that all they got were fleeting glances of Johnny and Steve, of Sid Vicious, the new bassist, looking cool and wasted in his black leather trousers and permanent sneer. It didn’t matter that they had beer splashed all over them and their carefully elevated hair had
wilted in the heat.

What mattered was that they were here, in the eye of the hurricane.

‘Anarchy’ segued into ‘I Wanna Be Me’, segued into ‘Seventeen’. Stevie and Lynton slowly manoeuvered themselves forwards, as exhausted revellers fell away from the front and the rest pushed steadily forwards from behind.

‘New York’ was followed by ‘EMI’, Johnny’s taunt to the company that had just so spectacularly
dropped them. Then Stevie’s new favourite, ‘Holidays in the Sun’. From where he was now he could stare directly at Jones. The guitarist was standing, legs apart, arms windmilling, playing the fattest, juiciest, most searing riff he had ever heard. Stevie felt as if his head might blow clean off his shoulders.

Then somebody broke away from the throng, staggered straight towards him.

Tall and
skinny with luminous white skin.

Leather trousers and a head of thick, shining black hair.

For a second Stevie thought Sid Vicious had jumped off the stage to come and inspect the audience. Then the figure barrelled into him with eyes out on stalks. Stevie instinctively caught hold of his shoulders, pulled him back upright.

‘You all right, mate?’ he asked, staring into bugged-out, redrimmed,
pale blue eyes. He thought maybe the other fella was gonna faint. ‘Have some of this.’

An eager hand grabbed for his pint, necked the dregs of it down in one long gulp. He had a ring on his middle finger, a
big thick silver thing, with a fat blue eyeball set in the middle of it. Stevie watched it in fascination as the stranger knocked back his pint, threw the empty plastic glass to the floor,
and swayed, catching his breath.

‘Ta, mate,’ he eventually drawled, wiping a hand across his mouth. ‘Thought I were a gonner there.’

‘Aye, it’s bastard hot in here.’

‘I’ll get you another’ the stranger’s face suddenly cracked into a smile, as blotches of red colour flushed back into his cheeks. ‘After, like.’ He nodded towards the stage, where the emaciated figure of Rotten now stood up on
the monitors, steadying himself with a hand on the ceiling, ranting:
‘Now I’ve got a reason/Now I’ve got a reason/Now I’ve got a reason/The Berlin Wall...’

And pushed his way back into the bodies. Stevie could see his slick black head making steady progress to the front.

‘Who was that?’ Lynton shouted.

‘Some nutcase,’ Stevie mused.

‘No Feelings’ was next, then ‘Problems’. His eyes fixed on
his alien mentor, Lynton felt that he was having some kind of epiphany, that his life was changing for ever, from being in this room, with these people, right now. He felt like he was growing wings, that any minute they’d burst right out of his back and he’d be up and soaring.

We have to do this band, he realised with fevered intensity. It has to work. It has to get us out of Hull...

As if in
agreement, Jones struck up the first chords of ‘Pretty Vacant’. The room erupted in a second wave of flailing limbs and plastic glasses hurtled towards the ceiling.

Five seconds later, Barry pushed past, propelling the Sid lookalike through the throng on the end of his arm. Blood was running down the kid’s face, but his expression was rapturous.

Stevie’s head swivelled round to follow their
progress. Barry
pushed the kid up against the bar, waved a warning finger in his face. The kid just smiled back at him, slouched against the bar like he owned it, despite the trail of gore sliding down from a cut above his right eyebrow. Barry stomped back past them, heaving his way to the front of the stage.

‘No fun/My friend/No fuuuun,’
Johnny was sneering, while Steve Jones powered the Stooges’
original industrial guitar. Sid with his foot on the monitor, blood running off his chest too.

Steve wondered if the two things were connected.

‘Mate,’ he suddenly heard in his right ear, and a minute later there was someone with his arm around his neck, pushing a pint of lager in his face.

‘The drink I owe you. Sorry it’s late.’ The kid’s face was covered in blood but his eyes were bright
and round, the pupils like pissholes in the snow.

‘Er, ta,’ Stevie’s big fingers gripped the plastic pint jug, his newfound friend still hanging round his neck.

‘What you do to your face?’ he couldn’t help but ask.

‘I kissed Sid Vicious’s bass,’ the eyes now rapturous. ‘Trouble was, fucker kissed me back!’

Stevie looked at him, incredulous, then started to laugh and started to pogo, the gig
nearing its end, the crowd moving in one final surge towards the dirty godheads on the tiny stage.

‘No fuuuuunnnnnnn/No fuuuuuunnnnnn…’

Lynton knew it was about to be over, never wanted it to end. His eyes still stared at the spot where Rotten had hunched over his mic even after the band had left the stage, the crowd had finally accepted they’d gone and Terry and Barry tried to push everyone
back out of the doors.

No one had called him a nigger tonight, Lynton realised. He hadn’t even heard ‘nignog’, ‘chocolate drop’, ‘wog’ or ‘Chalkie’. Not a one.

Stevie brought him back to reality. ‘Eh up, Lynt.’ He felt
a tugging on his sleeve. ‘I think duty calls.’ One of the London bouncers was motioning them towards the stage.

‘Tek care of things a minute,’ Stevie urged. ‘I’ve just got to
nip out back a sec. Tell ’em I won’t be long.’

Lynton nodded, moved towards the stage, then looked back to see what Stevie was up to. His friend was headed towards the load-in door. He seemed to have a large, bloody, Sid Vicious lookalike attached to his neck.

‘Get started on that,’ the London roadie ordered Lynton in the direction of the drumkit. It wasn’t long before Stevie was at his side,
unscrewing the kit and stashing it into boxes. Dismantling seemed to take even longer than setting up, and both were tired now the euphoria of seeing the band had diminished into the slog of tidying up after them.

The floor was a carnage of crushed plastic and spilt beer, discarded scarves and pools of vomit by the time they had finished. A pissed-off looking middle-aged woman with a fag clamped
to her bottom lip was out with a mop and bucket.

Don Dawson smiling from the bar, a thick roll of money in his hand. ‘Well done, lads,’ he clapped Stevie across the back as they assembled for their wages. ‘I like to see you young ’uns having fun.’

Barry didn’t look like he echoed his boss’s feelings. ‘Bunch of fuckin’ yobs,’ he muttered, flexing his fist. ‘We had some right bastards in here
tonight.’

‘Bastards they might be, but their money’s still good for me,’ leered Dawson gleefully, licking his fingers and peeling some notes off. ‘Here, lad, tek some extra.’

‘Cheers, Don,’ Barry’s eyebrows raised.

‘And you lads, tek this between you,’ he proffered a fiver at Stevie, nodded towards Lynton. ‘I’d like to know more about this punk-rock lark from you what know it best,’ he told
them. ‘You’ll have to come up and see us some day.’

Stevie and Lynton exchanged glances.

‘Terry tells me you have your own band,’ Dawson furthered. ‘I’d like to know more about it. I’ll let you know when’s convenient.’ The big man stashed his roll back safely in the pockets of his faux Italian suit, nodded to one and all. ‘Right then, lads, we’ll call that a night.’

As they got back into the
van, Stevie whispered a strange thing to Lynton. ‘Sit over here. Don’t go near that.’ Something long and large had been bundled in the back of the mattress and covered over with sheets.

‘Have you nicked something?’ Lynton hissed back in alarm.

Stevie shook his head furiously. ‘Just don’t touch it. I’ll explain it to you later.’

They were halfway back down the A63 when the sheets suddenly shook
into furious life.

‘What the…?’ Lynton began.

A hand emerged, then another, then a shock of black, shiny hair.

‘Where the fuck am I?’ moaned the Sid Vicious lookalike, rubbing his head that was caked with dried blood.

‘What bloody hell is that?’ Barry’s head spun round from the front of the van. ‘Not that bastard!’ He recognised him instantly. ‘What’s he doing in our van?’

‘Calm down,’ Stevie
moved forwards, palms oustretched. ‘That’s just me mate Vince. He said he needed somewhere to stay the night and I said me Ma’d put him up. He’s completely harmless, honest.’

‘No he’s bloody not,’ Barry fumed. ‘He nearly had us eye out earlier.’

Vince started chuckling.

‘Shurrup!’ Stevie warned him.

‘What you playin’ at, Stevie?’ Terry’s eyes in the driver’s mirror were stern.

‘Nowt, honest,’
Stevie started, then relented. ‘I think he had a
bit of concussion like, from Sid’s bass. I thought he needed a lie-down so I just put him in here while we loaded out…and then I kind of forgot. I’m sorry, Terry, But we can’t just chuck ’im out on motorway.’

‘Can’t we?’ Barry was fuming.

Vince had by now struggled upright and was staring in awe at the Elvis pennant that hung between Terry and
Barry’s seats.

‘You’re true believers,’ he said, glassy-eyed, pointing at the object of his awe. ‘True believers in the one King.’

Then he slumped backwards. Seconds later he was snoring.

‘I’ve heard it all now,’ said Terry. ‘Heard it bloody all.’

January 2002

We did the first interview in the first week of the New Year, with Tony Stevens of Exile. His company was still run from an end-of-terrace house on Shepherd’s Bush Green, the place it had all started from in 1978. From Granger’s pad on Elgin it was a short stroll through the languid luxury of Holland Park and then a sharp descent into the badlands of the Bush.

The night before, my all-seeing smudger had given me his personal lowdown on Stevens, along with some freshly reprinted black and whites of the signing itself, which had taken place on the green, with the Exile office in the background.

I stared long and hard at the young faces in the frame. Stevens could have been no more than thirty, but he had that slightly older, Nick Lowe air about him with
the suit and the skinny tie, tousled but not spiky hair, and a strong, determined jaw. He was beaming avuncularly as he shook hands with a clearly delighted Steve Mullin, still wearing his Popeye Doyle hat and a battered leather jacket. Next to him, Lynton Powell stood with his hands in the back pockets of his skinny black jeans, wearing a hipster’s
turtle neck sweater and shades and laughing.
To the other side of Stevens, spiky-topped Kevin Holme wore a Damned T-shirt and looked about fifteen. Next to him and leaning into the camera, Vincent Smith, in a white T-shirt under an unbuttoned black shirt, yawned openly.

We approached the very spot across the litter-strewn green the next day. A couple of skinheads sauntered past us, sucking nonchalantly on bags of glue and reassuring me
that not much had changed in this part of West London. Least of all the Exile building itself, which looked just like an ordinary house and had nothing by way of sign, plaque or awning to tell you what its function actually was. The receptionist, with her ironic eighties wedge cut and black eyeliner only added to the eerie feeling that time was standing still on this corner of W12.

That was,
until Stevens himself appeared from upstairs and it became clear that more than just his tie had filled out in the past twenty-four years. He was a big, robust, Germanic-looking man with a florid complexion and an enviable thatch of thick, unruly blond hair. He still had that firm jaw and eyes that sparkled with pleasure as he recognised Gavin and reached out his hand in greeting. With his camel-hair
coat and hand-tooled shoes, Stevens really was the money.

When he took us round the corner and into the vastly more upmarket Brook Green for lunch in a chic little bistro, the impression cemented in my brain. Stevens had come from money in the first place; he didn’t have that chip on his shoulder that so many self-made men do. As Granger had already told me, he’d made his company’s fortune from
a couple of astute signings in the early eighties that still continued to pack stadiums in America. This had allowed him the money to develop less conventional acts at his leisure, some of them taking nearly ten years to make back their advances before success had finally come. It was like a creative kindergarten and many were the comfortably-off, middle-aged rock stars who claimed they owed it
all to Stevens.

Yet, despite his magnanimous nature – which extended over three hours, four courses and vintage wines to match – I could sense there was something granite at the core of Tony Stevens.

The first time I got a flash of it was when he mentioned Don Dawson. Listening back to the tape, I could hear how his voice hardened, even though he’d kept the smile on his face.

We were still
on the starters, general pleasantries having extended through the bread rolls. I’d asked him about the first time he ever saw Blood Truth, and why it was he wanted to sign them. Stevens was a natural raconteur; he enjoyed looking back on the whole story and bringing it back to life, and he’d leaned over to fill our glasses before settling comfortably into his tale.

A friend of his, Paul King,
who now ran Exile’s publishing arm, Outlaw Songs, had tipped him off. King was working for Chiswick at the time, and Blood Truth had got the support slot on The Damned’s pre-Christmas tour. As soon as he saw them, King knew Stevens would want them, and sure enough he was so blown away by a twenty-minute set they played at the Electric Ballroom that he was backstage wanting to make an offer before
the band had even wiped the sweat off their brows.