I was always much happier on Camden Road than I was later, living on the top floor of a townhouse in Holloway, which, looking back, was an exercise in making myself feel edgy. Some nights I even slept in a cage, in the spare room of a prostitute we’d made friends with, a woman we’ll call Natasha. Natasha worked from home, I suppose you could say; she ran it as a sort of brothel and, when she wasn’t working, she hung around Camden a lot, a face at our shows. Someone said she knew one of the guys in Blur, but I don’t know. What I do know was we needed somewhere to sleep, and she had the space, so we took her up on her offer, despite its pitfalls. Natasha looked like a beautiful fourteen-year-old boy: skinny, emaciated and striking, and she was an enigma. She thought it would age her being outside too long, took cabs everywhere, and wouldn’t leave the house without applying sun block – a very paranoid girl, and quite lonely as far as I could tell. The bedroom I was allocated had a big iron cage in it, halfway between an outsize birdcage and a medieval torture device, which I often ended up sleeping in. I think her clients used to spend their hours in there paying to suffer, but it afforded me a degree of security I enjoyed. Natasha was our drummer for a few hours; we liked the notion, but she really couldn’t drum.
When she had a client, Peter and I would sit in the next room holding pellet guns and talk in gruff voices so that, through the wall, one might think that she had muscle to look after her in case a client freaked out. As a thank-you she’d usually take us to the café across the road and feed us, which seemed a fair exchange. Peter and I used to spy on her and her clients, sometimes, crawling quietly around on our knees to peep through the keyhole. I remember seeing her with a Hassidic Jew and, surprisingly, the drummer from a band we knew. Not at the same time, of course. We sat back dumbfounded when we caught sight of him on the other side of the door.
However, the boarding arrangement couldn’t, and didn’t, last. A few months in, Peter found a new girlfriend, which Natasha didn’t like at all. She could be quite possessive and paranoid, and she used to have these fits and attacks that she seemed totally convinced by, but which we never quite fully believed in. We used to take her to hospital and she’d always rally and make a recovery, a little miracle every time. She claimed to be able to see auras around people, and know high-ups in government, clients, she said, who were in positions of terrible power. One night she left a note to say goodbye and perched out on the window ledge feigning a suicide attempt. There was another suicide note pinned on the door one day when we got back from somewhere, and we ran into the kitchen where she had her head in the electric oven. I’m not sure she enjoyed the sound of our laughter, and I don’t think we were laughing because we thought the situation funny. Fundamentally, we were pretty scared of her. In the end I took the coward’s way out and fled to Manchester in the middle of the night. Peter had already gone, and I was getting the fear alone in my cage. Someone told me Natasha has since moved to Ireland, but if ever I’m on the Holloway Road I still tread lightly.
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They were lazy days on the whole, though, and when there was no wind to fill our sails Peter and I would drift in slow circles, becalmed, waiting for the currents to bear us away. After we left Holloway, we moved to Dalston, where Peter had a room and I was sort of squatting. Also there was Don, whose place it was, who was eccentric at best, and another guy, Mad Mick, who lived up to his name and was always hanging around. Nothing much moved on those long hot days, cars hummed in and out of sight, and we lay listlessly in sunlit windows trying to feel the world turn. Downstairs there were a couple of French girls who spent their spare time attempting to make ketamine out of rose-water that they’d bought at the chemist. They’d spend afternoons boiling all sorts of ingredients in rose-water, because one night at a club someone had given them a bum tip that that was how you made the stuff, but they were having about as much luck with that as most alchemists have conjuring up gold. Mad Mick was from Brooklyn, and I liked him. He was quiet and self-contained, but a lunatic with it, and it was as if he lived in the shadows: you’d only see him at very strange times, like six in the morning at Dalston Kingsland train station when he really lived over in Kentish Town. We’d always meet him at the most odd, out-of-the-way places with the oddest people. We’d show up at a random squat party in Deptford and he’d be there. I was in a Jobcentre in Hackney once in an interminable wait to see someone and I suggested we start breakdancing and, without another word, he did. He was a damn good breakdancer, and it made the surly staff feel uncomfortable, which was a bonus.
During those early days we got a gig in a nursing home in East Ham because our drummer at the time knew one of the nurses there and we’d been promised £50 if we did this gig for the old people. So we trooped down and were confronted by a room of very fragile and vulnerable old people, the kind of old people, shockingly old, you don’t see on the street any more because they can’t really get around. I feel quite bad about it now. About the most suitable song in our repertoire was a cover of ‘Anything But Love’, the old jazz standard, and we tried to be quiet, but we weren’t especially good at that, and there were a lot of fingers in ears and a lot of confusion. People kept getting up and walking around, as if they weren’t quite sure what was going on, or where the door was. One of the patients there was called Margie, and she took rather a shine to us; the poor lady had alcoholic dementia and kept asking if we’d brought a pint with us. We persisted, though, and by the end of our set a few people seemed into it. Then a couple of nurses came in and quietly drew a curtain around one of the beds. It transpired that its occupant had died during our performance of ‘Music When The Lights Go Out’. It was a pretty incomprehensible moment for us, but the nurses took it entirely in their stride. It might sound cold, but I suppose that’s just how it is in a hospice. It was terribly tragic, but what a pertinent song to go out on. There are, I imagine, worse ways to go.
To add to the surreal turn that the day had taken, before the gig we’d told Mad Mick that he could be our manager. We didn’t really want him to be, and of course there wasn’t a job because we didn’t really need a manager back then, but it was just a cool thing to tell people none the less. We’d said to Mick that if he ran to the gig from Dalston then the job was his. As we left the hospice after this terrible confusion, just as we were driving off, we saw Mick at the end of the road, huffing and puffing. He had just arrived, had run all the way, but there wasn’t room in the car to give him a lift back so we had to leave him there. I remember looking in the rear-view mirror and there was Mad Mick, confused and red-faced, sweating in his jeans, getting smaller and smaller until he was only a speck.
Gigs like that were clearly not going to pay, so I had a series of other, mostly crap, jobs that I sometimes enjoyed but mostly resented. Waterloo had been my gateway to the world, but the altogether less lovely Hammersmith was my gateway to the world of work. The temp agency there saw something in me that I’m not all too sure I saw in myself, dispatching me across London to push paper around like a clerk in the background in an Ealing comedy. For a while, I was at the BBC, and I looked out over west London from my office at Television Centre, a network of endless corridors and boxy rooms that held about as much charm as pleurisy. I was twenty-one, and an easily distracted employee at best. The wages were criminal and, feeling hard done by, I spent my days roaming the corridors wearing a suit and a trilby, which wasn’t really done back then, and flirting with random BBC employees, ambitious girls who really didn’t care if I lived or died, though the hat piqued their interest. I was a purchase ledger clerk, which mean paying the BBC employees, though I can’t quite remember ever paying anyone or not. At the same time, I was performing in the house band at a place called Jazz After Dark on Greek Street in Soho. The four of us played for four hours a night for the princely sum of £20 (between us, not each) and a bottle of beer apiece. Which, considering that none of us could actually play jazz, was probably fair enough. My undoing was oversleeping one morning after a gig and missing my shift. The BBC drafted in another temp to do my job, a temp who accomplished, I was reliably informed, my whole eight hours’ work in the first five minutes of the day. It was fair to say that they were on to me.