‘That year the Beatles got MBEs, the Stones got done for insulting behaviour, and I got my first electric guitar. It was a Hofner, which I teamed with a Supro amp, all second-hand, of course. That beefed things up a bit and I got to spend another summer getting to grips with a guitar.’ Johnny shifted in his seat. ‘I wanted to play slide, like a lot of the musicians I admired, but I didn’t know what to use. I didn’t fancy breaking off bottlenecks and sticking my fingers in them, I was too much of a coward. Then I was at my gran’s house one day helping her to sort some stuff out. She was chucking away a little table with hollow chrome legs. I had a brainwave. I’d heard about people cutting up mic stands to make slides, so I took a junior hacksaw to one of the legs, sanded down the cut edges and made myself one. Christ, I loved it, the sound it made. I felt like a real musician. I was trying different tunings, copying the records I liked, trying to get the same sounds, just learning all the time.
‘We were getting to be pretty good, for a bunch of kids. That Christmas we were booked for the school dance, and in the New Year we started playing in the local club for three quid every other Friday night. Gary’s dad got us the gig. He was the secretary there, and he’d heard us practising in his garage and knew we were good enough.’
Alex was fascinated with all this early stuff. None of this had been unearthed for the unofficial Heartbreaker biographies. She knew their book would have an immediate edge.
‘In those days, we were still learning, even when we played on stage. There were a few bum notes, it could be a bit rough.’ Johnny stopped then laughed. ‘Christ, who am I kidding? It could be a lot rough. Back then we had far more enthusiasm than talent. But we got better. We practised and practised, I got blisters and only stopped when they burst. Our bookings at the club got bumped up to every week and we improved as musicians, got more confidence performing.
‘Tom and I hoped that the band could make a go of it when we finished school, but Gary and Vinnie wanted to go to university. They went off to college and that was that.
‘We left school at sixteen with a handful of ‘O’ levels each, determined to make a living as musicians. Our parents actually had a meeting about it, they were so concerned. They didn’t mind us having music as a hobby, but didn’t think it was responsible for us to go professional. They tried all ways to get us to change our minds. My dad in particular always wanted me to get a proper job. Christ, he still thinks I should get a proper job. He’s never been the slightest bit impressed with either me or my career.
‘All Tom and I could think of was how soon we could get another band together. We needed to make some money; besides, being in a band was a great way to meet girls.’ Johnny grinned. ‘We were teenagers. Girls were nearly as important as music.
‘Our next band was the Rockin’ Robins. We advertised in the local paper for band members and held auditions in the club. We played together regularly and earned a living of sorts for a couple of years playing rock and pop covers.
‘Meanwhile, I had managed to get my driving licence and with what we made from the band and the part-time jobs we used to take to help make ends meet, Tom and I had bought an old van to get around in. Before that, we’d used a milk float.’
Alex burst out laughing. She broke her own golden rule and interjected. ‘Get out of town. You can’t go to gigs on a milk float.’
Johnny laughed, delighted. ‘It wasn’t one of those electric things, it was a flatbed truck. Sometimes still had a few crates of milk on it when we used it. Honestly. Our lead singer worked for the guy who owned it, he let us borrow it so long as we put petrol in to cover what we used. What with that and the passion Tom had for floral shirts back then, I think we were the least stylish band in town.
‘We were starting to argue a lot, though. The other two wanted to stick with popular covers, whereas Tom and I wanted to write and play our own stuff. We were becoming more influenced by people like Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan and Rory Gallagher. We went to stay with my cousin Steve in London and we saw the Yardbirds play Luton College in the summer of 1968. I remember it was a Sunday night, pissing down with rain, but it was worth the soaking. The gig was run of the mill, the band had obviously had it, but we were just blown away by Jimmy Page’s performance; you should have seen him. It’s almost old hat now, but when Jimmy used that violin bow on his guitar … Jesus Christ, you should have been there. They were playing the number that became
Dazed and Confused
, it was brand new. Can you imagine that? That big old sleazy riff creeping round the room like a peeping Tom in a dark alley. Jimmy had a Fender Telecaster and he was sawing and chopping at it with the bow, he got sounds out of it like we’d never heard before. With or without the bow, he could make that thing cry and moan so that the hairs on the back of your neck stood on end. He was awesome, Alex. I can’t tell you. He’s still one of my biggest heroes today.
‘Unsurprisingly, that spelt the end of the Rockin’ Robins and if I’m honest, I was glad. I was sick of playing other people’s music, there was no vibe when we were performing. Sure, there was a spark with Tom, we’d go off on one in the middle of a number occasionally, just let the music go where it wanted to, but we got so much shit from the other two when we did that. Instead of joining in, they’d just mark time. They liked things nice and neat, as rehearsed. I think they wanted us to be a fucking jukebox. It was starting to become a chore. Music just shouldn’t be like that, you know?’
Alex nodded.
‘Since the band was finished, Tom and I took it as a sign that we should chance our arm and move down to London. We didn’t want to leave it a moment longer, so much had already happened. The year before had been the Summer of Love, although not so’s you’d notice in York, and this was the year of political awareness, student protests around the world. Music had gone from
Sergeant Pepper
to
Sympathy for the Devil
and Tom and I were still playing other people’s tunes. We felt things were passing us by. There was a real urgency to our actions. We sold what we could, raided our piggy banks, upped sticks and left.’
‘Weren’t you scared?’
Johnny ran his hands through his hair. ‘Things were different then. It felt like the world was young, an anarchic adolescent. People were pushing out the boundaries with drugs, music, writing, the way they lived their lives. The pill was amazingly liberating; it started a revolution on its own. More folk were rejecting what they saw as a “straight” life and choosing something different. Kids no longer looked like mini-adults, didn’t blindly follow in their parents’ footsteps or obey church, state or law. The world was ours. We didn’t like what earlier generations had done with it and we were determined to change it.
‘When we first got down there, we stayed with my cousin Steve for a few weeks until we got sorted out with somewhere to live and then we set about putting another band together. Tom and I were overwhelmed by the potential. Music was changing and London was the place to be if you wanted to be a part of it. It was exhilarating.
‘Free, the Rolling Stones, John Mayall, Cream, Alexis Korner, you could see them all around London at that time. We’d go to the Nag’s Head in Battersea to see bands, and the Marquee, and other clubs, like Electric Garden and Middle Earth. That one really appealed to Tom because he was right into Lord of the Rings. He was a kind of trippy blues hippy in those days, until he had a bad acid trip. We didn’t know enough about it for me to talk him down and he didn’t dare try it again, not for a long time. So after that we stuck to beer and dope. And speed. We took speed to keep going. It’s nothing short of a miracle that we didn’t kill ourselves that first year or so. We didn’t look after ourselves very well at all. Too much drinking and smoking, crap food, damp bedsits, not enough sleep.
‘Tom and I had girlfriends back in York. We hadn’t either of us been going out with them for long, but we had to leave them and go and start again. It was a wrench. Especially as we didn’t think sophisticated London birds would want anything to do with a couple of yokels like us.
‘When we told our girls we were leaving, Tom’s did a Tarot reading for him.’ He shook his head. ‘Just about every chick you met then was into something weird; fortune-telling, spiritualism, runes, I Ching, tarot, palmistry, astrology. The odd mad one was into necromancy or witchcraft. Then when
The Exorcist
came out, everyone had bits of paper with numbers and letters on them round the edge of the coffee table and their fingers on the glass in the middle, just waiting to commune with the other side. Crazy.
‘Anyway, Tom’s bird said she saw no future for Tom and I with anyone but each other, that we were meant to be together. She said that as long as we were true to one another, we were unbeatable.’
Alex smiled. ‘Well, she wasn’t exactly wrong, was she?’
‘I thought it was really kind of her, letting us go like that. She knew we were nervous. It was the nicest going away present she could have given us.’
‘You and Tom were really close, weren’t you?’
Johnny nodded. ‘Yeah, we grew up together. We shared everything.’ He scratched his head. ‘Those early years at school, then living and playing together for so long … I don’t think I was ever as close to anyone as I was to Tom. All those hours we spent drinking beer, smoking dope and talking crap. If we hadn’t loved each other, we’d have gone crazy.
‘Some of the places we lived in you just wouldn’t have believed. Flea pits and doss-houses. I remember our first bedsit with particular affection. “Cockroach Central”, we called it. These fucking huge black beetles would crawl out from under the cooker, day and night they’d be scuttling around the place.’ He shuddered. ‘Jesus.’
Chapter 9
London, 1968
A wintry Thursday night, typical of many, found Tom and Johnny lounging in a grubby little bedsit in North London. The boys were oblivious to the squalor: with a roof over their heads, a place to crash and a new band to play in, they had everything they either wanted or needed. As a bonus, the guy upstairs sold dope, there was an off-licence on the corner, and a twenty-four hour garage ten minutes’ walk away.
Johnny giggled helplessly as he watched Tom try to roll a joint. He’d already had one disaster, the result of mutant Rizla origami, and now had his tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth to help him concentrate. Eventually he grinned triumphantly and held up a ragged effort that Johnny took and lit. It held together and they smoked it in companionable silence, so far as conversation was concerned, anyway.
Beggars Banquet
was cranked up so loud on their little record player there was no chance they could have heard each other speak. They liked the way the sound reverberated through the carpet, sending crumbs, fluff and dirt dancing over the occasional clean patch, only to become mired when they encountered the stickiness that was the norm.
As side one finished, Johnny emerged from the bedspread he was wrapped up in and turned the record over. The couple living below them took the opportunity to bang on the ceiling and shout and bawl about the racket. Johnny took the hint and turned the volume down a fraction, then got himself cocooned again. It was bitterly cold and still only the middle of December. He hoped he and Tom would survive until the spring, envisioned them being discovered by intrepid explorers, frozen solid, each clutching a can of cheap beer and sucking on a three-skin joint, and got the giggles again.
Later, he and Tom were working their way through a clutch of Curly Wurlys, purchased from the all-night petrol station when an attack of the munchies had driven them out briefly into the cold night air.
‘What’ll you do,’ Tom asked Johnny, ‘if the band makes it big? I mean really big. Like Cream, or the Yardbirds, or the Rolling fucking Stones.’
Johnny shrugged. ‘Dunno.’ Then he grinned. ‘I know; I’ll hire Marianne Faithfull to roll joints for me.’
They both found that hilarious, giggled like schoolgirls. Tom managed to hold his thought, though, and he went back to it. ‘Me, I want to take it as far as it can go, musically, you know, and then right at the top, right when it can’t get any better, I want to stop.’
‘Why?’ Johnny wriggled into a sitting position, a pink candlewick caterpillar on a grubby, sticky leaf.
‘Well, it’s one thing being cheered on while you climb the mountain, but I wouldn’t want the world to watch while I stumbled down the other side if it all went sour. Better to go out in a blaze of glory at the perfect moment.’
‘Go out where?’
Tom waved his hands. ‘Heaven. Hell. Wherever. I want to die a beautiful death. Better that than become a parody of yourself.’
‘Fuck you learn a word like that?’
‘You know what I mean. Don’t you want to do that? To go when it’s perfect?’
‘Hell, no. I want to live forever, me.’ Johnny sucked on his Curly Wurly, pushed his hair out of his eyes. ‘How would you do it?’ he asked.
Tom chewed thoughtfully for a while. ‘Heights,’ he said decisively. ‘I’d jump off something high.’
Johnny shuddered. ‘Not me.’ He thought for a minute. ‘Drowning. I’ll bet that’s a better way to go. Jumping off something … that’s gonna hurt, mate. When you land.’
Tom shook his head. ‘No, man. I read that you die of fright on the way down. No pain. Just like dying in your sleep, really.’
‘Except you’re awake.’
‘Exactly.’ Tom found that hysterical, rolled helplessly on the floor. Johnny had no idea what was so funny but joined in anyway, laughed even harder when the folks downstairs banged on the ceiling again.
‘It’s half past bloody three, you bloody layabouts. Shut up and go to sleep.’
***
Johnny smiled at Alex. ‘We had good times, though, despite all that. In fact, it was only ever in retrospect, when we got somewhere a bit better, that we realised how bad the last place had been. While we were there, we just got on with it.