You look like a star but you're still on the dole...

 

The second chapter of Luke Haines' autobiography Bad Vibes. Another entirely  deserved doff of the cap to the namers of this blog. Brilliant in terms of tone in its sardonic bitchiness. It sums up indie London in the eighties very well. I was at gigs with the Creation entourage and they were as snotty, self-important and comical as Haines paints them. He also describes the London of the time accurately. It really was a shithole!
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Lawrence from Felt, Pete Astor from The Weather Prophets, Bobby Gillespie, Alan McGee, Grant McLennan and Robert Forster from The Go-Betweens. In their own minds these men are rock royalty, (the notion of indie does not yet exist). David Westlake and I sit at the end of the table waiting our turn. Nineteen years old. Winter 1987. Pre-gig pints in the Devonshire Arms, Camden Town. Shane MacGowan's manor. He's in the corner. This is pre-money London Town. When the place was still a shithole. The pubs all close at three in the afternoon for a few hours and there are only four channels on the TV. How did I get here?

 

Straight from school to Art College, where after one year on a foundation course I am thrown out. - asked to leave as I have 'a bad attitude to further education'. Not true. I have a great attitude. I blag a place at the London College of music in Great Marlborough Street - a make-do for those not good enough to get into the Royal College of Music or Guildhall - leave my parents' home in Portsmouth and head for my first rented room, in Stockwell, south London. Just in time for the first weekend of the 1985 Brixton Riots. My housemates Chad and Ange are manic dole fiends. We get drunk on looted lager from the Sunshine Supermarket on Railton Road. Then with a little bit of Dutch we head out and watch the final embers of Brixton burning.

 

 

I have not yet turned eighteen. Music college is everything I hoped it wouldn't be. Like every teenage Velvets nut with a guitar I hold out the hope that I will meet a John Cale to play alongside my Lou Reed, naturally. Time, time. Running and passing. Got to get something together before I turned 19. November 1986. I answer an advert in Melody Maker for the first and only time. 'Servants singer songwriter seeks musicians.' The songwriters name is David Westlake. I obsessively read the music papers) so I have heard of is band The Servants. He has just sacked them. Westlake and I hit it off., and we're into the same stuff: The Modern Lovers, Dragnet and Totale Turns by The Fall. The Only Ones first album. Adventure by Television. Wire and The Go Betweens.By March '87 I am in Greenhouse Studio Islington playing guitar and piano on Westlake's first solo album, destined to be released on the then fashionable Creation label. By the end of the year the album Westlake is out and greeted with a yawn of indifference by a world far more interested in ecstasy and the latest incarnation of the Manchester scene. We, perhaps unwisely revert to the old band name the Servants.

 

 

Lawrence from Felt, Bobby Gillespie, Alan McGee, Grant McLennan, Robert Forster, David Westlake and me. Men convinced of their own genius though at 19 I am not yet a man, and it is strange to keep on meeting people who are at least ten years older. Pete Astor is the lead singer of the Weather Prophets, a Creation band who had their hour in the sun some six months ago. Pete's got the look and the regulation leathers. Ex-music journalist Pete has also got a theory on all rock'n'roll lore. Just as well because the one thing he ain't got is the fucking songs Bobby Gillespie wafts around saying little apart from who looks cool and who doesn't. Strangely people take notice of him. You're just too hip baby.

 

 

Tonight The Servants are supporting Lawrence's band Felt at Dingwalls. It is one of Felt's many farewell gigs to an indifferent nation. It will be a few years until Lawrence gets good and delivers his neo-glam masterpiece Back in Denim . Tonight, in the Devonshire, he is a classic example of  fabulous rock star egotism   in a hideous harlequin-motif jacket. Up his own enigma. Lawrence - a rock star in mind only - travels with a small entourage A lackey is always on hand to light Lawrence's steady flow of cigarettes, as the Felt singer pontificates in a Brummie monotone - to no one in particular - on the possibilities of 'sewing on a fringe'. You see, Lawrence has started to lose his hair and doesn't have the money for an Elton-style transplant. The somewhat unlikely option of sewing on a fringe has become an obsession. In later years he will on occasion, sport a hazardous wig. Photo sessions and video shoots will be at the mercy of the wig and it's inability to cope with inclement weather. On and on he goes. Another cigarette is lit. The lackey's are giving Lawrence's fringe predicament some serious consideration.

 

 

Unfortunately any suggestions provoke petulant fits from the eccentric genius. I don't want to be complicit in high-maintenance Lawrence mania., so I move over to Grant's table. Grant McLennan of the Go Betweens has become a mentor to David and me, pushing 30 and proud of his elder statesmanship to the assembled Creation mob. Alan McGee loves the Go Betweens; he even names his forgettable mini-Malcolm McClaren scam girl band, Baby Amphetamine, after an Only Ones fanzine that Robert Forster and Grant put together back in their native Brisbane. Thankfully McGee's respect is not reciprocated. Tonight Grant is on form and drinking like giddy up. The Go Betweens fly back to Australia for good the next morning, after a few tough years in unyielding, unforgiving 80s London. Tonight is partly a farewell drink for them. 'It's great to be here tonight with all my favourite English bands who all wanna sound like the Byrds and the Velvet Underground.,' muses Grant. 'Y'know Creation is my third favourite record label,' he adds with heavy sarcasm rubbing McGee's face in it.

 

 

Alan McGee, anointer of genius and self-styled record mogul. I first met McGee back in the spring of '87 in fury Murrays, a hellhole of a club behind Glasgow Central station. I am sound-checking my brand new Fender Telecaster. A Fender Telecaster I have scrimped and saved for in saved dole money and starvation. Hard won. If anyone so much as looks at this guitar in the wrong way they will unleash the winds of psychic war, Westlake and I are on the Scottish leg of a tour supporting the Weather Prophets.. McGee sidles up to the front of the stage and points at me. 'You. You're Tom Verlaine.' He is of course referring to the buzz-saw blitzkrieg maverick lead guitarist of seminal symbolist New York City art rockers Television. Maybe some people would be happy with this introduction. Not I. I am a stickler for manners and would have preferred a 'How do you do?' or even a simple 'Hello'. The eighties were plagued by these small time indie Svengalis, wannabe Brian Epsteins or mini Malcolms. Forever proclaiming some poor bugger to be a genius. Of course hype is fundamental to pop music. But it often says more about the hyper than the hyped. The start of the cursed holy bestowals.

 

'You. You're Tom Verlaine,' it says , utterly unbecoming. I fix the fool with a dead-eyed stare. Say nothing, say nothing. You, Alan McGee will pay for this transgression. You will pay.

 

Back in the Devonshire Arms Grant McLennan turns to me and whispers loud enough for anyone to hear, 'That Alan McGee, not much going on up top.'

 

  

Westlake, McLennan and I stagger up the road the 200 yards or so to the venue. The old long bar of Dingwalls. Robert Forster is in the shadows. Thirty years old and a lean six foot four. Always conspicuous. Forster has just come out of his Prince phase. His new look is somewhere between Raw Power period Iggy and Sherlock Holmes. With his long hair dyed silver grey - a homage to Dynasty's Blake Carrington no less - round wire-frame glasses and tweed cape. This is a bold, potentially tragic look, but Forster carries it off. David Westlake and I are in awe of the man. Everyone loves Robert Forster and no one can quite work out why he is not a huge star. He has hit a creative peak, having just written some of the best songs of his career - 'The Clarke Sisters', 'When People Are Dead', 'The House That Jack Kerouac Built'. A few hours earlier back in the Devonshire, Pete Astor developed a lecture on why all Robert's songs are merely 'filler material'. Yeah, yeah Pete. Whatever you say.

 

 

 

We do the gig. Too drunk to play well, we still - in the rock'n'roll vernacular - blow Felt off the stage. Everyone talks loudly through Felt's set. Lawrence is playing his latest epic, 'Primitive Painters'. On and on it goes. Somewhere, fresh paint dries upon a wall. Sadly, I am not there to watch it.

 

More drinks at the bar with Robert, Grant and Lindy Morrison, the Go Betweens terrifyingly blunt drummer. 'If you're gonna play Dingwall's you gotta fucken rock. Lemme hangs out here with fucken Johnny Thunders. You can't play like a bunch of fucken pussies. You've gotta fucken rock.' She has a point.

 

Lawrence. Pete Astor. Bobby McGee.. Alan McGee. Grant McLennan. Robert Forster. David Westlake. Me. All of these men convinced of their own genius. One of these men now sadly dead.'

 

* On Saturday 6th May 2006 Grant McLennan died in his sleep at his Brisbane home. He is sorely missed.

 

© Luke Haines 2009