If they had the breaks, yeah. If some god on high did it all for them and made it all for them, they’d be off to London in a trice, because that, we all knew, was where everything was. That’s where liber-cool parties were a dazed haze of glitter-floating beautiful people with clothes from boutiques so hip even their names were a transgression, where even the lowliest shop-girl was such a counterculture punkette pin-up she got her pic in Sounds, and the streets were paved with cocaine and the gutters ran with Jack in a fumey vapor of sweet decadence; rich boy’s piss, the blood of rock ’n roll. We all knew this to be 110-percent true because what journalist ever wrote paeans to the punk night at Queen’s Hall, Bradford, or eulogies to some darktime niterie in say, oh, Chester? No, it was London; everything, everyone, every luminous, lush, and longed-for treat was stashed in the belly of that old beast. It was a fact. We’d read it in every newspaper, Sunday arts supplement, music journal, and fashionable novel since forever. It was the way it was and we were the huddled peasant masses crouching on our savage hills gazing up in the torch-lit dark at the divine superstar that was London, London, London.
So we sat in the van as it hurtled down the M1, wired out of our skulls with adrenaline and burning with messianic passion, white hot and calamitous. We weren’t kids, oh no; we weren’t teen escapees, you see; we were genuine artists, gone twenty-five and almost possessing a record contract with EMI; cash-poor we might be, but we’d worked like dogs and earned our turn at the table — so no pallid, plump, dumb fuck of a corporate recording executive was going ruin our Big Chance. We would be there in the thick of it, in London, in control. We weren’t going to be throwaway tinsel two-bit popstrels, oh no — we were going to change the face of music, of literature, of art, of life, forever. Those decadent, air-and-arse kissing Londoners would be forced to welcome us with open arms because we were the future, we were the Warriors of the New. Strapped into our armor of hand-stitched leather and raggedy black, we looked in my tattered old tarot cards and saw rapture rising behind us like a prophecy.
It had to be that way. We’d told everyone it would be. We’d been princes and princesses in Wooltown, now we were going to live like kings and queens in the Smoke. We’d chanted the spell, we’d invoked the gods. It was a done deal.
All that winter six of us slept on the spare bedroom floor of our singer’s sister’s shoe-box flat in the Northerner’s ghetto of London, Highbury New Park. Done up like chrysalides in our stinking doss-bags, we waited for spring when we’d be turned into butterflies. At night the floor heaved like a living carpet and the air was sucked clean of oxygen, but it was too cold and grimy to open the window. They’d never said how tumble-down, litter-strewn, and dirty London was in those magazines and on the telly; the muck was terrible. Put on a clean T-shirt and it’d be black-bright in ten minutes of being exposed to the exhaust-fume leaden reek of the monstrous crawling traffic. Blow your nose and the snot was black; clean your makeup off and the grease was shot with gritty gray that wasn’t mascara. The dirt had its own smell too, sour and rank, hanging in the unmoving air like a filthy veil.
Back home, we’d think — each to ourselves and not letting on for fear of being thought soft — the cold, fresh wind off the moor unrolled through the canyons of gothic sandstone buildings, embroidered with the faint scent of heather and the sweet dust of the craglands, scouring the crooked streets and lighting wild roses in your cheeks.
But it was no use thinking like that. We were here to stay, to make our mark. So we’d shake ourselves back to the now and think, hey, who cares about Wuthering Heights when we can go to Heaven, guest-listed on the strength of the last article in the NME about our meteoric rise to cult stardom, or my snarling mask adorning the front-cover of Time Out — Kabuki-style, rebel-girl eyes sparkling incandescent with unreason and fury. Fame, we thought, never having been taught to think otherwise, was better than bread — and infamy was preferable to anonymity. We didn’t have to stand in line with the other runaways outside whatever nightclub was in that week, listening to the chopped vowels and singsong drawl of the North, the West, or all the other great cities that netted the country — what Londoners called “the provinces” in that particular tone of voice that made you want to spit in their eyes.
So we walked past the Liverpool whine or the Brummie choke of the queuing hordes, and strode in a cloud of patchouli, crimper-burnt hair, and Elnett, into the dreamland they could only hope for. A London nightclub; wow. The carpets patinated with muck, spat-out gum, and marinated in beer slops and puke. The glasses plastic and the watered-down drinks a fortune, the toilets a slick tsunami of bog-water and busted, stinking, scrawled-on, paperless cubicles flapping with broken-locked doors. You never really got anything for nothing in London, see; proved how sharp they were, proved no one got anything over on a real Londoner.
Not that we ever met a real Londoner. Not one born and bred, like. Maybe they were out there somewhere, but we never found them. Certainly not one who could truly say he’d entered this vale of tears to the cheery clamor of Bow bells, the coarse comforting din of the old pub pianner belting out “Miybe It’s Becorse I’m a Lunnoner,” and the smiles of pearly royalty handing out platters of jellied eels and cockles. No, folk said they were from London, but there was always somewhere else hidden in the dusty folds of their fast-forgotten past; they’d lived in London, oh, now, you know, God, forever. But they came from Leicester or Bristol or Glasgow or Cyprus or Athens or Berlin or Ankara. They came to be famous, but until that bright day they washed dishes, threw plates of greasy nosh about in caffs, or struggled round the heart-and-soul-breaking savagery of the infamously brutal London dole offices.
Oh, aye, it was a cold coming we, and many like us, had, and no mistake. But what did we care? If we felt heartsick or homesick, we stood ourselves up straight, wiped our eyes if we were girls, unset our rock-hard jaws if we were boys, and commenced afresh our sure-to-be-stellar careers in the world of art. We would show them, we would not be broken and crawl off home like yellow, sag-bellied curs — we had a meeting with EMI tomorrow where we’d tell ’em how it was, and tonight there was a Happening at an old warehouse by the river, promising an installation featuring a naked model-girl embedded in a tank full of jelly created by the latest cutting-edge performance art duo, a clutch of ranting skin-punk poets, and a couple of hot new London bands cobbled together from the tatterdemalion remnants of last year’s hot new London bands.
How many of those Happenings did we go to, expecting the dark whirligig of cruelly brilliant excess and getting instead a half-cocked mock-up in a rickety-rackety drafty squat where some anorexic pilled-up slapper was toted round in a rusty wheelbarrow slopping with lime Chivers by two public schoolboys whose aristo boho dads had been Hampstead artists in the ’60s, and people we recognized from magazines cooed about authenticity and artistic daring as they wiped their coke-snotty noses and patted each other on the back? They always, always all knew each other from school and from their families and they didn’t know us — but suffering Jesus, we knew them, because we knew what real really was and they. Did. Not. Still don’t, as it goes. Anyway, all these evenings ended in fighting, in smack-and-thunder brawls driven by our frustration and our rage at those whited sepulchres and their great stitch-up. How we frightened them, the faux-Londoners, how we shook their skinny trees. Yeah, yeah, yeah — all that talk of voyeuristic ultra-violence and the thrill of the street evaporated like oily vapor off a stagnant pond when they saw the lightning we were. They never knew us, no, they never did. They never saw us weep.