“I met her in a club down in old Soho/Where you drink champagne and it tastes just like cherry cola...”
Chelsea three. Scotland Yard nil
by Max Décharné
King’s Road
Chelsea, July 1977.
They found him in the pedestrian underpass beneath the northern end of the Albert Bridge, a short walk down Oakley Street from the King’s Road. He’d obviously been given a thorough kicking, and there was an orange shoved in his mouth, completely blocking the passage of air. Tied up like something in a butcher-shop window.
Didn’t look like he was bothered, though. He’d been dead for a good few hours already.
There wasn’t much about it in the local papers, but you could tell the police thought they were onto something. They’d been seen nosing around at Seditionaries the following afternoon, flicking through the racks, checking out the Cambridge Rapist T-shirts, clutching copies of the NME as if they were going to stumble over a clue in among the usual snarky jokes and record reviews. Who knows, maybe they thought they had, because there they were again later that day, looking very out of place at the rear of the spiky-haired crowd in the Man in the Moon watching Adam and the Ants.
Nosed around. Asked a few questions. Lowered the tone of the place. Something about bondage. Yeah, well, officer, what can I tell you? There’s a lot of it about...
Didn’t look like the gig was their kind of scene. They left halfway through the headliner, X-Ray Spex.
The following Saturday it was hot as hell. Usual collection of punky scufflers hanging around outside Town Records. Watching the passersby. Opening cans. Wandering off to check out the stalls at Beaufort Street Market. Keeping an eye out for the Teds or the Stamford Bridge boys. Regular King’s Road scene that summer, ever since the Jubilee violence had flared up — Punk Rock Rotten Razored, all the tabloid column inches stoking the flames. “Pretty Vacant” was heading up the charts while “God Save the Queen” was just on its way down, but Boney M and ELP were both in the top ten, and the papers were saying that Warner Brothers had just issued a single featuring a group made up of the Sun’s page three girls. Finger on the pulse, as always...
Davis got out of the tube at Sloane Square, picked up a copy of the Standard at the stall outside, and headed up past Smiths in the direction of the Chelsea Potter for a lunchtime pint. No word on that stiff they’d found the other week at the Albert Bridge, but now some posh woman had been discovered smothered to death in her bed in Cheyne Walk, just a few hundred feet away from the site of the last killing. Done in with a pillow. Police are refusing to comment on possible lines of enquiry. Yeah, sure. Unconfirmed reports of a message of some kind pinned to the body.
Davis looked out from his window seat and watched the nervous out-of-town kids heading for Boy a few doors away, heads down, expecting trouble.
Two killings in as many weeks. Not unusual for the Lower East Side, but this was Chelsea.
He rolled up the Standard and put it in his pocket, digging out the tatty copy of the NME he’d been dragging around for the past couple of days. Front page headline all about violence in the punk scene: This Definitely Ain’t the Summer of Love. Turned to page forty-six and scanned the gig guide, looking for likely shows. Nothing much doing tonight. Pub-rock no-hopers in most of the clubs. Monday looked better — Banshees/Slits/Ants at the Vortex, or Poly Styrene’s lot on Tuesday at the Railway in Putney. All good research material. Getting an article together on the upcoming rash of punk films currently in the planning stages. Russ Meyer farting about in Scotland with the Pistols, trying to get Who Killed Bambi off the ground. Derek Jarman rounding up his mates for something called Jubilee. Then there was the bloke who’d put some money into the last Python film and was now backing a disaster-in-the-making called Punk Rock Rules OK.
“Get out there and see what’s happening,” said his editor. Five thousand words on the punk film scene. Throw in a sidebar about Don Letts’s 8mm footage they’ll be showing at the ICA. Have a look round the clubs. Keep your eyes open. Nice little feature with a few shots of some of these punkettes in fishnet stockings and ripped T-shirts. Play up the punch-ups with the Teddy Boys as well. Sex and violence. Must we fling this filth at our kids? Blah, blah, blah... Get a quote from that GLC nutter, Brooke-Partridge, the one who reckons most punk rockers would be improved by sudden death. Is this the future of the British film industry? The usual bollocks, you know the form...
So there he was, knocking back a few pints in the Chelsea Potter, waiting to interview some idiot who claimed to be getting a script together about punk, but whom none of the bands or the managers on the scene that he’d spoke to had ever heard of. Probably a wasted afternoon, but what the hell. Even if the guy turned out to be a complete dingbat, he might provide some comic relief. A few stupid quotes. Ten years of interviewing some of the “giants” of European cinema for the magazine and listening to all their pompous arty bullshit had taken its toll. Egomaniacs, the fucking lot of them. Fellini’s 8, Fellini’s Roma, Fellini’s talking out of his arse... Give him an out-and-out chancer or a total loser any day of the week. At least they might be funny.
In any event, the guy was a no-show. Two hours late and nothing doing, he was three pints down and had read both papers cover to cover, winding up back at that murder report in the Standard. Smothered to death sometime yesterday? Let’s check out the scene. Mildly pissed but coherent, he pushed through the door and headed west along the King’s Road. Turned left at Oakley Street, down past Scott’s old house, with someone playing Unicorn by Tyrannosaurus Rex out of an upstairs window nearby, then round the corner to where Rossetti had kept wombats and peacocks in his Cheyne Walk back garden a decade before they even built the Albert Bridge.
Bored-looking copper on guard outside, bolting the door after half of Aintree had scarpered. Davis dug through his wallet and pulled out the press card he hardly ever used, knowing full well that it meant damn-all to most people. Still, you never knew.
“Afternoon, officer... Nothing much left to see, eh?” Offered the copper a fag but he turned it down. “Heard there was a note pinned to the body...”
“That’s right. Not that it helps much.”
“Guess he’s hardly likely to have left his home phone number...”
“Sounded like a quote from a book or something.”
“Oh yes?”
“They’ll be putting out a statement this afternoon, so there’s no harm in saying...”
“Saw it, did you?”
“Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard...”
July 21. Hadn’t been a bad week. He’d seen the Only Ones at the Speakeasy on the Saturday. The Adverts and 999 at the Nashville on Monday, then that new bunch of Australians, the Saints, down in Twickenham at the Winning Post. Talked to a lot of people — punters, groups, managers. Bernie Rhodes refusing to let him talk to the Clash. Miles Copeland trying to convince him that some desperate bunch of ageing hippies calling themselves the Police were actually a punk band. Same old story. He’d also gone back to Chelsea again, to the Royal Court this time. Alberto y Los Trios Paranoias and their punk rock musical Sleak! with the annoying bloody exclamation mark on the end. The coppers were still sniffing around the scene, chasing some supposed connection with the two murders. As if killers are so eager to be caught they go around leaving clues, just like in the films.