On the road, we tended to enjoy each other’s company. They were still snooty and arrogant, but by this time I’d become pretty snooty and arrogant myself, so we were a good fit in that respect. Roxy was still a group at this point but, unbeknownst to the rest of us, Bryan Ferry was getting ready to assert his dominion on the project. That summer he gave Brian Eno his marching orders against the wishes of other group members and installed a young prog-rock-schooled multi-instrumentalist named Eddie Jobson to take his place. It was a potentially suicidal decision on Ferry’s part - Eno, in spite of his instrumental shortcomings, had always been a major asset to the group’s image and personality - but he could no longer bear sharing the acclaim and spotlight with someone as wilfully ambitious as he.
It’s funny for me to think back on it now but Brian Eno and I actually got quite close during that specific period. We’d hang out together a lot in London, visit cinemas and nightclubs and generally swan around, trying to impress the girls with our hermaphroditic allures and fledgling pop-star creds. He was good company then: extremely witty, extremely bright but not pretentious and full of himself like he later became. Still, our budding friendship was doomed to be short-lived as we differed so fundamentally as people. Brian didn’t take drugs and was generally scornful of those who did. As you’ve already probably ascertained, this was not a view I happened to share.
But I had a much bigger problem relating to his concept of ‘what art really is’. To me, art was a deep expression of the human soul, something you needed to struggle with in order to get fully expressed. To Eno, though, the creative process was simply about
throwing different things at the wall and whatever ends up actually sticking to the wall - hey, that’s art. I saw this approach executed at close quarters later that year when he recorded his first solo album
Here Come the Warm Jets
in a tiny recording studio situated somewhere in Clapham. Hawkwind’s drummer and I contributed the anarchic piano part to one of its tracks, a number called ‘Blank Frank’, earning us the credit ‘Nick Kool and the Kool-Aids’ on the vinyl album sleeves as a consequence. But I didn’t really like his music and possibly told him so or wrote something in the
NME
to that effect-I don’t exactly remember - but from a certain point on we rarely socialised. Understandable, really. We were both on diametrically opposed career and lifestyle paths.
One evening in early summer he and I attended a Gary Glitter concert at the Finsbury Park Rainbow. Two girls approached us in the foyer as we were leaving and invited us to a party they were throwing a few days later. I thought nothing more of the invitation until one of them later phoned me at the
NME
office to repeat the offer. Having nothing better to do that evening, I went along.
The address was somewhere deep in the bowels of North London: a big house, as I recall. But nothing was really going on to constitute a genuine party atmosphere. The girls were glib and full of small talk and there were no drugs to be had anywhere on the premises. I was getting ready to make my excuses and leave when a tall skinny girl suddenly entered the living room, where everyone was awkwardly mingling. She was dressed from head to foot in blue denim and looked strangely agitated as she paced around. Then she opened her mouth, addressing no one in particular. Her accent was instantly recognisable to me: it sprang
from the American Midwest. But it also had something of an unsettlingly whiney edge to it. ‘Oh man,’ she began, ‘my life is just so shitty at the moment.’ And then she proceeded to itemise all her recent personal setbacks in excruciating detail. At first I sat there watching her in a state of quiet alarm. I thought to myself, ‘Who is this badly dressed harridan and why should I be even remotely interested in listening to her sorry lamentation?’
But then all of a sudden she terminated her list of woe by moaning, ‘And the worst thing is, man - someone stole my Stooges albums. Now I’ve really got nothing to live for.’ In that very instant, an invisible bond was forged between us. Stooges fans were so few and far between back then that whenever I met another like-minded apostle, I instantly made a point of getting better acquainted. I told her I actually knew Iggy, and that got her attention. ‘So should I know who you are?’ she asked. ‘Not necessarily, ’ I replied. ‘Well, I’m Chris,’ she continued. ‘Chris Hynde from Akron, Ohio.’
We started chatting away about how
Fun House
and
Raw Power
were the two greatest rock albums ever made, but then a drunk bloke - who I later discovered was the manager of a Scottish band called Nazareth - began sexually propositioning her in an extremely blunt fashion. She told the guy to go fuck himself and then invited me to share the fare of a taxi back to her one-room accommodation in Clapham South. I didn’t find her that physically alluring but I could already tell she was intelligent and wanted to continue our conversation, so I tagged along.
When we got to her lodgings, the first thing that struck me was that one of the four walls was covered with photos cut from newspapers of Keith Richards and Iggy Pop. Right away, I could tell the woman was blessed with exquisite taste. Apart from that,
the room was pretty bare: no record player, no portable telly, one chair and one single bed and not much else. So we sat down and talked late into the night, and it became quickly evident to both of us that we had much in common. We’d both been to university, she at Kent State, where four protesting students had been shot to death by riot police just three years earlier, an incident that Neil Young immortalised in his song ‘Ohio’. We’d both lost our virginity at age nineteen and then followed it up with extended periods of sexual promiscuity. We both loved great rock music with an all-consuming passion. She’d been turned on to it at the same time I had - just when the Beatles were coming into vogue. She told me that when she first heard their records, it was so overwhelming she literally got down on her knees, placed her hands together and prayed to the radio whence they came.
It was a different story though when she talked about her current situation. She’d arrived in London three months ago and nothing had really worked out for her since. She’d briefly sung with a bar band back in Cleveland and wanted to pursue some kind of musical career here but had yet to find any kindred Limey spirits to share her dream with. In the meantime she’d gotten stuck in a nine-to-five job, making coffee and answering the phones in some architect’s office; her life had lately become somewhat aimless - she readily admitted - and she was starting to feel so depressed she was seriously considering returning to Cleveland.
Then she said something that truly floored me: she said one of the key deciding factors in her coming to London was an article she’d read some months ago in a British music paper about her beloved Iggy Pop. I asked her to describe it further and realised
the article in question was one of mine - my first-ever
NME
feature in point of fact.
A deep connection was starting to form between us but the hour was already late - 3 a.m.-ish - and it was time for counting sheep. She showed me to an adjacent room full of large sculpted gargoyles - the guy whose room it was created these hideous things to act as special effects in horror films - and I promptly fell asleep on the bed propped against one wall. Three hours later, I was rudely awoken. Light was pouring through a tear in the curtain and ‘Chris’ was standing before me in a blouse and knickers. For a split second, I thought that this was some kind of sexual come-on - but it most certainly wasn’t. She was crying - tears running all down her face - and in obvious physical discomfort. She knelt down holding her stomach and started writhing on the bed next to me from the pain she was experiencing. I just lay there holding her and making soothing sounds telling her that it was going to be all right. What else could I do? I offered to take her to a hospital but she didn’t want to go.
After more than an hour, the stabbing pain in her lower abdomen abated enough for her to return to her room. It was almost 8 a.m. and I had work to do, so I bade farewell to ‘Chris’ and strode to Clapham South tube station. I was due to interview Slade at Wembley Stadium in two hours and then had to write the encounter up in just twenty-four hours to make the Monday
NME
deadline. In other words, I had to focus on matters at hand and think of penetrating questions to ask Noddy Holder and his wacky brood of Black Country fashion victims.
Still, it was difficult to push the girl I’d just met to the back of my mind. I’d never met a young woman before who’d been so cranky and yet so intelligent, so tough-talking and yet so terribly
vulnerable. It would be a further two weeks before I’d actually return to her Clapham bedsit and re-establish contact, but our first meeting certainly preyed on my thoughts throughout those fourteen days.
This is my version of how I met Chrissie Hynde. Chrissie’s is different. She claims that after she invited me to her room, I returned the following day with all my worldly possessions in a removal van and simply moved into her room without even asking her in the first place. Her retrospective mind must be playing tricks on her. Her version is untrue and also manages to misrepresent the tenor of our early relationship. From the start, I felt protective towards her and treated her with nothing but tenderness and empathy. I wasn’t trying to use her or exploit her in any way. It was the exact opposite, in fact: I wanted to help her find her place in London, to make her feel cared for and included. In strict point of fact, I didn’t even move in with her until we’d known each other for at least two months and only after she’d openly invited me to do so.
You see, since returning from the States in April, I’d been essentially homeless. I had no bolt-hole in London to call my own and tended to float around, crashing on friends’ sofas when not successfully importuning kind-hearted women for temporary accommodation. Then in either June or July I’d bumped into my pal Lemmy from Hawkwind at the Speakeasy Club. He and I shared much in common, specifically the same birthday and a committed taste for the wild things in life, and so when he mentioned that he’d just moved into a house somewhere between Gloucester Road and Earls Court and that there were other vacant rooms to rent there, I promptly decided to become a tenant too.
He then produced a spare front-door key from one of his many pockets and handed it to me. I thanked him and left him at the bar in order to inspect my new premises. Once I’d located the address and let myself in, it didn’t take me long to work out that the place was in fact a squat. A worryingly thin young woman - the only person present in the house - took me upstairs right to the top floor and showed me the room I’d be inhabiting: it consisted of four walls, a small window and a mattress on the floor with a sheet spread over it. It was late so I disrobed and went to sleep on the mattress, using the sheet as covering. The next morning I awoke with a familiar feeling of deep irritation all around my scrotum. The crabs I’d recently left in Hollywood had come back to play havoc with my genitalia once more and this time I hadn’t even had sex. They’d been lurking in the mattress. What was this godforsaken place that I had lately come to dwell in?
I got my answer as soon as I went downstairs. Lemmy was there with his eyes on fire surrounded by five or six German people who looked like they hadn’t washed themselves since 1965. They were all hard-core speed freaks and they’d just scored some pure amphetamine sulphate powder, which they were furiously chopping into long lines and snorting, letting out wild whooping screams whenever the drug burned into their nasal membranes. Lemmy offered me a taste and I inhaled one tiny line. I didn’t sleep after that for four whole days and nights. Fortunately, I didn’t spend that time awake in Lemmy’s house, otherwise I would probably have been netted in some police bust. I just left and never went back again.
It was after that experience - and a speedy visit to the chemists to once again eliminate body lice - that I mentioned my ongoing home-hunting dilemmas to Chrissie and she gamely suggested I
move in with her for the time being. So I did. My worldly possessions at the time amounted to about eighty vinyl albums, a cardboard box filled with well-leafed paperbacks, a record player, an acoustic guitar and two large paper bags containing my flashy clothes. They made the room less empty-looking and generally more homely.
The first night I moved in, she reached out for my guitar and attempted to perform one of her self-penned songs for me. Her voice was strong and her phrasing as clear as a bell but her rendition kept breaking down because it took her a good half-minute to regroup her fingers on the fretboard each time she had to change chords. I could see she still had a lot of work ahead of her if she wanted to become the confident professional musician she dreamed of presenting herself as. But that was OK: she was a human work in progress and so was I. More than that, I saw us as kindred spirits whose fates were mystically intertwined. I was starting to fall in love with the woman.
It was a somewhat gradual process, though, because - to be frank - she wasn’t the easiest person to show emotional warmth to. There was an authentically wild and abrasive side to her personality - a trash-talking biker-girl mindset that she’d suddenly assume whenever the mood would take her - that was often hard to coexist with. She even boasted of having been initiated into the local Cleveland chapter of the Hells Angels just prior to moving to London. She had a name for this loud shameless alter ego of hers too - Bernice - which she had sown onto the back of her regulation denim jacket.
She rarely drank liquor but on the odd occasions that she did, ‘Bernice’ would materialise and cause an almighty ruckus anywhere she happened to find herself. Sometimes I’d look at her
mouthing off and trying to start fights and ask myself, ‘What in God’s name are you doing chaperoning this shrill, charmless creature around? Can’t you see she’s a lost cause?’ But then she’d lose the fake bravado and revert back to the more approachable personality that I’d first fallen in love with and that invisible bond we shared would once more reassert itself. I’d never experienced anything like this before in a relationship, but then again I’d never really been in love before - at least not in the adult sense of the word. I was about to find out, though. And so was she.