Who I Am: A Memoir (35 page)

Karen had decided to buy a larger house, still in Twickenham, just down the river, and sold our old house to her brother. I wasn’t sure I wanted to sell it, but as I wasn’t around there wasn’t much I could do to stop it happening. The new house was beautful, and had a pontoon onto the Thames. Karen and the girls moved into it without me in December. I bought them a piano for the house.

As Christmas approached I began freebasing cocaine. On a trip to New York my friend Ike and I spent the entire time cooking up cocaine with Wall Street traders. One morning, as we left the crackhouse with an attractive girl on Ike’s arm, one of the Wall Street guys came over to me.

‘Tell your friend,’ he whispered, ‘that girl he’s with isn’t really a girl.’

I took Ike aside and told him.

Ike looked at me as though I was insane. ‘I don’t bloody well care what sex she is.’

We’d spent twelve hours in a crack den, and cooked up at least half a kilo of pure rock cocaine. I suppose issues like gender really weren’t that important in the greater scheme of things.

By January 1982 I was living entirely alone at The Temple. I drove my Ferrari here and there and met a few new friends, but my heart wasn’t in it. I hadn’t touched alcohol for two months, but I needed help to break my dependence on prescription drugs and heroin. I was doing very little work. I called Meg Patterson in California and asked if she could help me. She set things up for me to go to a rented house on Balboa Island in California, where she would arrange for controlled withdrawal using her NET system.

Meg insisted that Karen be with me during my withdrawal. I said I didn’t expect Karen would do that, but Meg said that if Karen didn’t join me she might not take any responsibility for her part in our troubled marriage. Although Karen had accompanied me when I went to see my hypnotherapist, and she and I were getting on much better these days, the situation was different. Karen was living in the new house – portentously called The Anchorage – and my two daughters were at critical periods of their education. In the end she didn’t come, and I didn’t press.

I spent five days climbing the walls and being preached to by Meg’s charismatic husband George. His visions for the third world were inspiring; his Christian faith was infectious, but I felt Meher Baba (as a mystical force) had never let me down. I just had to find a way home, wherever home was.

On my last day in California my minder Alan Rogan and I drove to Laguna for lunch. It was Valentine’s Day. Afterwards we walked on the beach. My rehab had taken thirty days, and I was clean at last. Suddenly, in the sand, I spotted one of the brown medicine bottles used by cocaine dealers in the States. The first time I’d ever had one of my own had been on Valentine’s Day in 1980, when I’d asked a friend to get me a supply to help me deal with Theresa Russell’s rejection, two years ago to the very day. I picked up the bottle and unscrewed the black cap. I tasted a tiny amount.

Cocaine.

There were about fifteen grams. It must have been thrown into the sea from a boat coming in from Catalina after a booze-cruise. I put the lid back on and tossed it into the waves. Alan looked at me askance.

‘What?’ I thought I’d done a good thing.

‘
You
may have given up cocaine,’ he said, laughing, ‘but some of us …’

In my absence, The Who had started recording at Glyn Johns’s new studio in the country, with Andy Fairweather Low standing in on guitar. I felt pressure to jump off the plane from rehab and join them directly, just as I had after my last Valentine’s Day mess two years before. This time I didn’t, and it wasn’t until 3 March that I drove down to meet everyone.

Much had been said in the press about what I had or hadn’t delivered to The Who as its major songwriter, but I wanted a brief from them, some guidance. My head was empty. John mined his own creative vein in a way that probably wouldn’t change – and would mostly be directed at his solo work. Roger and Kenney spoke about wanting to perform songs reflecting the important issues of the day.

‘They’re more at sea than I am,’ I told my driver Paul as he took me home.

I got together with Louise just once in 1982, my first year of white-knuckle abstinence. We had lunch in order to create a kind of ‘closure’. We laughed and talked easily, and then I went back to my studio and tried to write the song I felt I owed her. I saw Louise once again that year, at a distance, as I was leaving my therapist’s room in Harley Street. She was clearly on a medical mission. I hoped she was pregnant, and that she would have the child I had thought would redeem her.

Karen and I decided to spend some time together alone, so we went to Venice and stayed at the Cipriani. When we got home we attempted to spend a weekend at Cleeve as a family. It was extremely tense and hard for Karen, and I was full of mixed emotions, as usual.

My first public performance in 1982 was for the inaugural Prince’s Trust Concert on 21 July. I had helped organise it, and had asked David Bowie to appear with me. He agreed, it was announced, but then the dates seemed to change under me, or I’d got them wrong, and it turned out he couldn’t do it. He was filming
The Hunger
in London, and his work schedule couldn’t be rejigged to cover my error. He and I stayed friends, but his manager was vituperative towards me ever after.

This was the last time I saw Ike, my friend-cum-drug-connection. ‘So,’ he said when we met backstage, ‘you went to the police.’ This was an expression used at the time for addicts who had gone into rehab, leaving their old using buddies behind. I made no excuses.

Ike died of a suspected overdose a few months later. When I attended his funeral and met his family I learned that his father had been British Consul to the UK for many years, and had disowned Ike at some point. I felt his family believed I could have saved his life – a couple of his friends had said as much. He had been my closest friend for many months in 1981. I was extremely fond of him, but there was no way I could have saved him; I wasn’t even sure I could save myself.

The next Who album,
It’s Hard
, came out on 4 September 1982. It nearly wasn’t released at all. When Roger heard the final mixes he wanted to hold it back, because to his ear it didn’t really feel finished. But with the tour closing in on us we were running out of time, and I persuaded him to let it stand.

There were two extraordinary moments from Roger on this album. The first was on ‘One Life’s Enough’, a slow ballad about acceptance, and the simple pleasure of making love. I thought this would be a song I would sing, as filler really, something to create some relief. Roger sang it himself, beautifully and tenderly. It’s one of my favourite vocal performances from him, equal to his discovery of that falsetto voice he had first used so brilliantly on
Tommy
.

The second was ‘Cry If You Want’. Again I thought I might have to sing this one, or at least share it with him. I’d tried to sing it a few times for the
Chinese Eyes
solo album and never pulled it off. Roger had learned the torrential stream of words by heart before he did the vocal, and he nailed it, almost fainting for lack of breath, the words come so thick and fast.

Glyn Johns wanted me to sing ‘Eminence Front’, probably the most radio-friendly track on the album. He insisted on using the first take, and I always felt I could have sung it better. The album was recorded very quickly indeed, in less than a month. In hindsight it is actually a very good album, but the slightly provisional mood it conveyed was belied by the truth: there would not be another Who studio record for a very long time.

The first Who shows of the tour were in Birmingham for two nights, then we headed for the US. At Shea Stadium we had two performances lined up, and I was interviewed for a TV show in a limo on the way to the gig. I didn’t usually ride in ghastly American stretch limos, and accommodating a TV crew while pretending it wasn’t there felt terribly contrived. The Who played pretty well on this tour, but it was being billed as our ‘Farewell Tour’, and I wasn’t about to argue.

The tour was highly lucrative, achieving one of the highest grosses of our career. Long before it was over, everyone in our circle knew that I would announce that I was leaving the band. It also became clear that a peculiar crime had been perpetrated. The Who had gone down, but not in flames. There had been no glorious on-stage heart attack, no grandly tragic hotel-room overdose, no suicide; nothing. Nothing I had done on stage had incited Roger to bash my head in; he had never felt the desire to walk off, or to complain to the press about my overly long solos, or any other self-indulgences.

I played according to the rules, and there were no diversions. I wasn’t guilty of anything that might have prompted the inevitable end, but neither did I attempt to send us out in a blaze of glory. That could have caused me terrible problems in the
future
– an Elysian place in which I hoped I’d never have to work with The Who ever again.

I had been a bore. At least, that had been my plan, and for quite some time it worked pretty well.

In New York, on 11 October 1982, I was contacted by Henry Mount-Charles, who worked at the prestigious British publishing house Faber & Faber and wanted to offer me his job there as he was moving back to Ireland. I was flattered and intrigued, and arranged to meet Henry’s boss Matthew Evans when I got back to London in the short November break. I became friends with Matthew very quickly.

During this time I also had dinner with Sir Freddy Ashton, who wanted to talk about his godson Kit Lambert. I told him how much I missed Kit. ‘I need to write about him,’ I said, ‘not just talk about him and tell funny stories.’

‘Then write about him,’ said Sir Freddy.

‘A love poem?’ I was being a little facetious, but Sir Freddy leaned forward and put the ball back in my court.

‘If love is the issue, a sonnet would be in order.’

So I wrote this sonnet for Kit:

My love stands in the archways of my night,

Come out into the alley of my day.

Your ghost is mine, in life you stood away,

Come near let me embrace you near the light,

To touch your face so healthy, once so white,

And hold you in my arms is all I pray;

For long I’ve plumbed the sadness you display,

To hear you laugh was always my delight.

We loved, but never lovers were to be,

Yet in the darkened city we might meet

To talk again in sweet complicity;

Svengali fashioned neophyte Trilby.

But music, once of heart, is now of street;

And genius, once of you, is now of me.

With The Who finally laid to rest as far as I was concerned, I was starting the second year of deep psychotherapy, and there were many amends and apologies to be made: many old friends to be taken to lunch, many businesses to unwind, including Eel Pie Books. I was living at The Anchorage now, with Karen, and I converted the basement bedroom into an artist’s studio, with a small recording studio in an adjacent room. The emphasis was as much on the visual and graphic arts as composing. Oceanic was being revitalised or reoriented, with a plan to convert the place into a multimedia video lab. I decided to buy a motor-yacht large enough to undertake long passages, so we could have some adventures as a family.

I wanted to build a new creative vision for myself and facilitate it with physical resources: studios, materials, finance and time. At the end of February 1983 I wrote a very simple treatment for my next solo album. I wanted to provide all the necessary artwork myself, so I began painting again in earnest.

On holiday in Cornwall the previous year I had composed a basic musical theme I called ‘Siege’. It was fairly simple, but it lent itself particularly well to variations. I had been inspired by the idea of a soul besieged in a magnificent castle, surrounded by the litter of the ages, the detritus of faded wealth. There was no clear plot, but none was necessary for what I had in mind. I was producing music, stories and lyrics, and even took a few photographs again after a long break from doing so, to create a kind of ‘mood-board’ for the project. With the help of producer Helen ‘Spike’ Wilkins, I started gathering together my demos of various released and unreleased Who songs, as well as demos of entirely new material, which I would release in a collection called
Scoop
.

I was still writing short stories, or coming up with ideas for them. One from February 1982 is:
Man who makes love to a girl who disguises her orgasm by singing scales
. I don’t know whether I was hoping to emulate Jorge Luis Borges or Monty Python, but the images I produced began to get more light-hearted. I painted several pictures of Pete Wylie of
Wah!
to accompany my lyric for ‘Brilliant Blues’. I combined the faces of my wife and her sister Virginia, and surrounded the image with angels. I painted a good portrait of Mr Freedom in the style of Peter Blake. I also took Polaroids from the television screen, and made one good collage called
I Didn’t Hear You
, about domestic violence.

I had dropped the Goldhawk Club manifesto, the idea that grew from ‘I Can’t Explain’ and that demanded my work be an empty vessel in which the audience could find itself. Instead, I needed to find
myself
. Painting and drawing had become a cathartic new outlet, but I was still making music in the old manner. I would noodle around on a guitar or piano, then put down a simple cassette demo. At The Anchorage I used my basic four-track cassette Portastudio rig for demos. I still had a professional studio in Soho, the high-end SSL suite at Oceanic and a good studio workroom with a concert grand piano at Cleeve. My work in my new home at The Anchorage was developmental and private, and coming along very well.

Minta, about to turn twelve in April 1983, was always curious when I worked behind closed doors. Sometimes she would creep down when I was out and look through my artwork and stories, perhaps indicating that she was still worried for me. Emma, a couple of years older, was already running a musical band, The Launderettes, made up of friends from St Paul’s School for Girls. When I made some recordings with them it was clear that Emma was immensely talented. She was also starting to look very beautiful. The smile at the edge of her eyes had returned. I felt that I was falling in line, and getting things right.