Flame Music: Rock and Roll is Life: Part II: The True Story of Resurgam Records by One Who Was There

FLAME MUSIC

rock and roll is life part ii

In memory of Cathal Coughlan 1960–2022

By the same author

Fiction

Great Eastern Land

Real Life

English Settlement

After Bathing at Baxter’s: Stories

Trespass

The Comedy Man

Kept: A Victorian Mystery

Ask Alice

At the Chime of a City Clock

Derby Day

Secondhand Daylight

The Windsor Faction

From the Heart (Amazon Kindle Single)

Wrote for Luck: Stories

Rock and Roll is Life

Stewkey Blues: Stories

Non-fiction

A Vain Conceit: British Fiction in the 80s.

Other People: Portraits from the Nineties (with Marcus Berkmann)

After the War: The Novel and England Since 1945

Thackeray

Orwell: The Life

On the Corinthian Spirit: The Decline of Amateurism in Sport

Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation 1918–1940

What You Didn’t Miss: A Book of Literary Parodies

The Prose Factory: Literary Life in England Since 1918

The New Book of Snobs

Lost Girls: Love, War and Literature 1939–1951

On Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Biography

Critic at Large: Essays and Reviews 2010–2022

Orwell: The New Life

CONTENTS

Previously

Who’s Who

Prologue – Go buddy, go!

Part One: Going to California

‘The Flame Throwers’, Metal Chronicles Vol. III

1. Tammy Girl

2. Southwold

3. White Punks on Dope

4. New York Journal, September 1980

Interview with Nick Du Pont, The Flame Throwers: An Oral History (1988)

Part Two: English Music

The Flame Throwers – Breakfast at Ralph’s, New Musical Express, November 1980

5. Day in the Life

‘Keeping Tabs on the Post-punk Revolution’, Sounds, November 1980

6. Hit the North

Some Singles Reviews

7. Waiting for the Love Boat

‘Oscillating Wildly’, New Musical Express, August 1981

8. Arcady

Days in Europa

Systems of Romance – Mesdames et Messieurs, Welcome to the Hyper-Sound, New Musical Express, July 1981

Part Three: Time Out of Mind

9. Little Local Difficulties

10. Honky Chateau

Scuzz TV interview, July 1985

11. Malibu and After

‘Live Aid’, National Probe, July 1985

12. Fugue State

‘Good But Not Great: The Daze of Cris Itol’ – Nick Kent, Q Magazine, October 1988

Part Four: Under the Big Sky

13. Debris

14. Dunwich Bells

15. The Girl Who Played the Tambourine

16. Chicago

17. On the Shore

How to Buy Resurgam Records, Uncut, October 2009

‘London Lives’

Acknowledgments

Afterword

And I’ll start thinking about a late summer sun setting over fifteen hundred identical rooftops and my family and bop glasses and Holly Golightly, about being lonesome out there in America and how that swank music connected up with so many things.

DONALD FAGEN – Eminent Hipsters

Is it better to endure bad art for the spotless ideology it promotes, or to continue to swoon before sublime art made by bad people?

IAN PENMAN – It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track

You know, in the bar Danny and I just bought in New York, there’s some graffiti in the men’s room – three lines written by three different people. ‘Film is king,’ ‘Television is furniture’ and ‘Rock and Roll is Life.’ I think that pretty much sums it up.

JOHN BELUSHI, quoted in Bob Woodward, Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi

You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

BOB DYLAN

Previously

And that was how it ended, there in the hotel foyer, in the sparkling Colorado sun, with the stretcher-bearers hoisting Keith’s outsize and apparently paralysed form up into the ambulance, and June sniffing into a handkerchief, and the bus boys gawping, and Stefano complaining that there was so much fast white powder to hand that he’d ended up sluicing most of it down the sink. There in that hotel foyer, the Helium Kids, they of the five certified Billboard albums, they of the half-dozen No.1 singles and the twenty-seven separate Top of the Pops appearances, those stalwart custodians of the zeitgeist, this raggle-taggle band of rock-and-roll gypsies, reached the end of the road. The party was over: it was time to go home.

Or so we thought.

From Rock and Roll is Life: The True Story of the Helium Kids by One Who Was There

DU PONT, NICHOLAS FRANKLIN McARTHUR. b. 1942, in Norwich, Norfolk, UK. o.s. of Maurice (1913–1971) and Jean (1919–1964) Du Pont. Educ. City of Norwich School, Pembroke College, Oxford (Wharton Exhibitioner in English Literature, Goldsmith’s Essay Prize, 1962). Republican Party intern, U.S. Presidential Campaign, 1964. Press Officer, Thames Records, London, 1965–66 (Dwayne Fontane, The Fiery Orbs, Moyra McKechnie etc). Chief Publicist, Shard Enterprises Ltd, 1966–1977, with special responsibility for the Helium Kids. Nova magazine ‘PR to the Stars’ Award, 1968. Publicists’ Circle Award for Low Blows in High Times, 1971, Managing Director, Resurgam Records, 1978 -. ‘Independent Record Label of the Year’,  New Musical Express Readers’ Poll, 1979. M. Rosalind Madeleine Duchesne, d. of Allenby Duchesne of Phoenix, Arizona, 1968 (marriage dissolved, 1972). Recreations: English Literature, hanging out, getting down. Contact: Nick Du Pont, Resurgam Records, 26 Newman Street, London W1

The Rock and Roll Who’s Who, 1980.

Prologue – August 1977

Go buddy, go!

Stefano was good in a crisis. It was one of his skills, his default setting. In his eight tumultuous years on the road with the Helium Kids he had signed bail bonds, forged insurance certificates for non-existent equipment, paid off racketeers and rescued stage-hands from howling mobs. Dealing with a comatose drummer undergoing tests in the toxicology department of the Boulder Memorial Hospital was well inside his range of expertise. And so, within 36 hours of the moment at which Keith’s unresponsive form had been borne away through the foyer of the Century Canyon Hotel to the waiting ambulance he had had every room occupied by members of the band and their entourage cleared of questionable paraphernalia, settled the extensive tab, appeared personally on the local radio station, issued a wholly misleading statement to the Boulder Chronicle and offered Carrie-Ann, his executive assistant, $2,000 plus expenses to stay in Colorado for as long as it took ‘to shovel up the shit.’ The band dispersed, the gear was put in temporary storage in an aircraft hangar out on the flat, the shit was shovelled up, and on the evening of the following day the pair of us sat in the airport lounge, as the planes crisscrossed like slow-moving darts over the Rockies, nervously awaiting the red-eye back to New York.

‘Do you think he’ll be all right?’

‘Who? Keith? How the fuck should I know?’ Somewhere in the innermost recesses of his baggage trunk Stefano had turned up a three-piece charcoal pinstripe suit that, long ago, had been made by a Savile Row tailor. Draped in this sartorial curio, with what looked like an MCC tie dangling from his throat and with the satchel containing $200,000-worth of takings from the tour still wedged under one elbow, he cut an incongruous figure. The departure lounge was full of Eagle Scouts off to summer camp in the Great Lakes. Beyond the orange light of the aerodrome, the long, low ridge of the mountains receded into dusk.

‘Is anyone coming out to be with him?’

‘I phoned that burglar’s dog he went to the NME awards with,’ Stefano said, as if this were the greatest favour anyone had ever done anyone else in the otherwise venal world of popular music. ‘Trixie or Pixie or whatever her fucking name is. She said she’d fly over if I gave her the cost of the air-ticket. Give him a hand-job or something. Cheer the fucker up a bit….Jesus,’ he said, unexpectedly. ‘Have you heard from Don?’

The Eagle Scouts were gangling, crop-haired teenagers from the mid-west with extraordinarily bony knees. Hunched over the maps they carried with them at all times, heads bobbing in unison, they looked like flamingos gathered at the water’s edge.

‘No.’

‘Neither have I. I mean, not since we put the original call in…Jesus,’ Stefano said again, one red-rimmed eye moving from the thronged hallway of the departure lounge to the shadow-lands beyond. ‘Just look at those fucking mountains. Imagine being up there at this time of night with some fucking timber wolf or whatever after your arse.’ I saw now that, curiously, all the pent-up passion he had carried around with him for the past three weeks had been released. There was no doubt about it. Keith’s putting himself in a coma had done Stefano good. We sat companionably in the big metal chairs for a while, watching the Eagle Scouts and the mysterious old women with nutcracker faces waiting for late-night flights to Oregon and Seattle, as the janitors came round scooping up fallen Coke cans, an irony-primed transistor radio played Fleetwood Mac singing ‘Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow’ and the planes tracked back and forth through the ripening sky.

‘Is Keith, ah, insured for this?’

‘He’s insured for the tour,’ Stefano said, with rather more nonchalance than might ordinarily have been warranted by the situation in which we found ourselves. ‘As for what happens afterwards, do you know, Nick, I really couldn’t say?’

*        *        *

At the office on Tenth there was a drift of unopened mail on the carpet together with a pile of fast-food delivery-firm flyers and half-a-dozen prostitutes’ cards. It was that kind of joint. As I went through the letters, totting up the record of our obligations and outgoings over the past month, Stefano established himself at the big desk overlooking the smeary window with its patina of snuffed-out insect life and sat musing on his opportunities.

‘Christ, the hookers they got in New York these days. Will you listen to this? New girl in town seeks afternoon play-mates. All major credit cards accepted.’ But there was no solace in the prostitutes’ cards. A minute later he said: ‘How much do you reckon we owe?’

‘Ten, eleven thousand dollars maybe. There’s probably some more bills to come in.’

‘The fuck! I mean, Nick, really, what on earth did we spend all that on?’ At times of momentary irritation, Stefano’s upbringing leapt back to the surface of his personality. Just now he sounded like a member of White’s club querying his bar bill.

‘Cab fares. Hospitality. That dinner you gave for the people at Rolling Stone. Those chauffeur-driven limos you sent up to Albany you wouldn’t even tell me about.’

It was a long and incriminating roster. ‘Yeah, well’ Stefano said wearily, when I had reached a point about three-quarters of the way through, ‘you can take it from me, Nick, that tour took some planning. He threw the invitation to afternoon play-mates high in the air, where it danced beneath the winnowing fan. ‘Well, I’m not paying them. You’d better send them to Maddox Street.’

‘Don won’t like that.’

‘Do you know, Nick,’ Stefano said, with the same ineffable nonchalance he had brought to the question of Keith’s insurance plan, ‘I’ve got beyond caring what Don thinks?’

*        *        *

For the best part of a week, as the New York smog hung over the roof-line and the sidewalks stank in the sultry mid-August heat, we kept up the pretence that everything in the admittedly bizarre and chaotic world of the Helium Kids would soon be returning to normal. A carefully-crafted press release was couriered to the offices of the principal entertainment weeklies, downplaying the extent of Keith’s infirmities – the phrase ‘temporary indisposition’ may even have been employed – and a story about the ‘hundreds’ of get-well-soon cards received by the Boulder hospital – in fact, there were precisely three – appeared in the New York Post. Meantime, certain notional attempts were made to procure somebody who could temporarily replace what the press release called ‘this legendary sticks-wielder’ on some even more notionally rescheduled tour-dates. Thus:

‘Some promoter up on Forty-Seventh I spoke to this morning reckons that bloke who used to be in Jethro Tull is free. Think he’d do it?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’ Here in the Tenth Street heat-haze the three-piece suit made Stefano look storm-crossed and unreliable, like a broker in one of those Wall Street soap-operas who, after thirty years of loyal service, is about to go crazy in the dealing room. ‘Don’t tell me there’s previous?’

‘It depends if you count the time Garth head-butted him at the Speakeasy.’

‘Oh that…’ Stefano acknowledged, with the air of a Viking chief whose attention has been drawn to his failure to authorise the sacking of a neighbouring village. ‘I’m surprised anyone’s still worried about that. Look, John Bonham and I go way back. Zep aren’t touring at the moment, are they? Why don’t I see if he’ll fill in for a couple of weeks?’

‘No…Anyway, how is Keith?’

‘Last I heard he had one tube coming out of his mouth and another one up his backside. Actually, Nick, you’re right about Bonzo.’ Stefano looked crestfallen, all the bounce suddenly gone from his outsize frame. His heart was not in the business and he knew it. Another cluster of mail fell dramatically through the door, as if a pelican had started regurgitating a pile of flatfish. ‘Listen,’ he said, urgently. ‘Fuck all this. Let’s go see an adult movie.’

‘A what?’

There was something mad about Stefano’s eyes. The long years spent permanently detached from reality, out on the fritz with the Helium Kids, had taken their toll.

‘Like I said. An adult movie. Come on, Nick, this is Porn City USA. I mean they’re feeling each other up in the kindergartens over here. Society’s in fucking crisis and Mayor Beame can’t do a thing. Let’s go check it out.’

And so we went to a bedraggled movie theatre round the back of Times Square filled with equally bedraggled movie-goers and watched a film called Swedish Co-Eds Get Mouth Crazy. Next morning the stack of mail realised further invoices to the value of $4,017. These Stefano ceremoniously incinerated with a cigarette lighter. That afternoon a message came from Don’s office in Maddox Street to say that the rest of the tour was cancelled and we should come home forthwith.

*        *        *

Flaring mid-western dawns; boundless Idaho potato fields; Barry Goldwater’s parched white face craning from the elevator door; Ian Hamilton, the Helium Kids’ bass player and his wife June drinking English breakfast tea and eating English breakfast muffins on a hotel terrace in the lee of the Adirondacks; harsh white sunlight spilling through my hands; distant fires smouldering in the mountains; drug-addled Keith on his insufficient stretcher: this was the freight I brought back from six weeks in America. Maddox Street, reached late on the following afternoon, was just as it always had been: the same inertia stealthily undercut with menace; the same blonde-haired sugar-babies cheerfully typing away in their hutches; the same bruisers in box-suits lackadaisically on hand to open doors and torch cigarettes; the same overemphatic portrait of Don’s daughter Belinda, looking as if she was about to burst out of her school uniform mounted on the wall above her father’s big bald head.

‘Now let me arsk you sumfink,’ Don said, tee-shirted and statuesque and doing his usual trick of seeming to pick up a conversation that had begun the previous afternoon rather than two months ago. ‘You heard of a character called McLaren?’

Though shrewd, and on certain occasions far-sighted, Don could not be called au fait with the latest developments in popular music. At this stage in the proceedings, he would probably not have heard of punk rock.

‘Malcolm? I’ve met him once or twice.’

‘Ave you now? Sounded like a ponce to me. Rung up the other day and offered me that band he manages for – what was it? – fifty grand. Naturally, I haddem checked. Turns out there’s a mad kid who sings, couple of geezers off the estate and a bright boy that writes the songs. Only now they’ve gone and fired the bright boy and got another kid who’s even madder than the first one. Sounds like a fucking liability to me, but what do you reckon?’

I had a sudden vision of the Pistols at large in Don’s office: leather jackets amid the box-suits; cheap lager spraying over Belinda’s chintzy smile; the secretaries in tearful retreat.

‘I’d leave well alone if I were you.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ Don said, shifting one fat haunch more comfortably against his chair-back. ‘No harm in taking a second opinion though. Or maybe I’m just getting soft in me old age.’

I thought about Don’s exploits in the world of popular entertainment over the past fifteen years: the music journalist hung by his heels out of an upstairs window; the star of a rock ‘n’ roll revival package – Gene Vincent? Chuck Berry? – hurled bodily on stage after lingering too long in his dressing room; the court case that turned on aerial photos of an outdoor concert in Hertfordshire skilfully doctored to support Shard Enterprises’s claim to a greater share of the take. You didn’t mess with Don in those days, or in any other days that I knew of, and there was no question of his getting soft.

‘Anyway,’ Don said, returning me to the bright, uncertain present. ‘First things first. Where’s that fucker Stefano?’

‘He said he had to get back to Barnes to see Amanda.’

‘Christ! Is he still with her? I mean, she wasn’t exactly love’s young dream when she used to lick the floors at the Scotch. And that was ten years ago.’ The memory of Amanda in her previous calling as cloakroom attendant at the Scotch of St James hung between us for a moment like some blithe and tatterdemalion faery. ‘Now, about the tour. Actually, fuck the tour. Between you and me, Nick, I’ve had it with the Kids. Actually, everyone’s had it with the Kids. EMI have passed on the renewal option on account of there’s 85,000 copies of the last one still sitting in some fucking warehouse in Staines. I rang Jerry D’Artagnon at East Coast Central Entertainment the other day, Jerry D’Artagnon, who’d still be shooting craps out in Hackensack if I hadn’t…if he hadn’t…to see about rescheduling the dates and he just…he just laughed. So that’s it. Finito. Kaboom. There was some geezer in here from one of the indies the other day offering me [sniff] ten grand or something to take them off my hands, and I said, ‘Nigel [sniff], you don’t want the fucking bother, son.’ That Garth, thinking he’s [sniff] Abbadon out of the black pit or something…Not to mention the fucking disrespect.’

The sunlight streaming through the single plate-glass window was full of dust-motes. The muscles on Don’s thick white forearms quivered like live things that might soon take on an existence of their own and go scurrying up the wall.

‘His Majesty’ – he meant Garth – ‘finks he’s going to get a solo deal for a hundred and fifty grand or something,’ Don droned on. ‘Between you and me e can go on thinking that. I’m not having anything to do with it. Thing is: what am I going to do about you?’

It was a good question. While I was pondering it, Don played another of his tricks, which was to veer off on one of his free-associative tangents. His biceps had calmed down a bit now.

‘What do you think of this reggae nonsense?’

‘Not much.’

‘Uh huh.’ The collective spectre of Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Haile Selassie hung between us for a moment and then faded gently away. ‘Velvet Goldmine have got an album in October. Can work on that if you like.’ Velvet Goldmine were one of Don’s terrible glam bands, whose moment had passed about three years before. ‘Or you can cut loose on your own. I shan’t mind,’ he went on, giving the impression that when one or two other people had cut loose from Shard Enterprises he had minded a great deal.

‘Actually, I was thinking of starting a label.’

Don made a vague undulating motion with his badly-shaven chin. Over the years dozens of people had sat in his office and told him things like this: that they intended to found twelve-piece jazz bands; that they wanted a month-long engagement at the London Palladium; that they had too much money; that they had too little money; that they were mad, suicidal or psychologically conflicted. Some of them he had jovially sworn at. Others he had had thrown out into the street. A very few he had actively collaborated with.

‘Was you now?’

A fortnight later Don would send me a cheque for £20,000 and a letter requesting – no, demanding – 10 per cent of any subsequent share issue. Now, he simply waved me silently on my way. Outside in Maddox Street everything seemed suddenly more exaggerated than it had done fifteen minutes before. More molten sunshine cascaded over the flagstones. A file of Asian tourists went past exclaiming over the antique house-fronts. Outside the property next door, where builders were at work, on a radio balanced on a plank between two paint-flecked trestles, the Stranglers were playing ‘Go Buddy Go’ – brutal music, designed to get under your fingernails and ramp up your disquiet. And so, in just the same way as had happened a decade and a half before, when the street-lamps of down-town Phoenix burned through the dusk and Lucille Duchesne, drunk, disorderly and infinitely dangerous, sat waiting in the car beneath my apartment, and with the same faint inkling of all the unshiftable debris, seen and unseen, that lay across my path, I moved hesitantly off from one world into the next.

*        *        *

In those days I lived in a mansion flat down by the river in Fulham, which overlooked a strip of municipal tennis-courts. All that long autumn, as the tennis players came and went and mist drifted in from across the park and each afternoon the arc-lights went on a little earlier, I sat in the big, airy front room and planned the rise of Resurgam Records. Resurgam in honour of the school Latin master. A record company because I had spent a dozen years as a high-class gopher and wanted to see what I could do myself, secure in the knowledge that there would never be a better time. For this was 1977, the era of buzz-saw guitars and leather jackets, bin-liner tee shirts and punk rock, which might not have sold many records but had left the music business in no end of a tizz. There were bands to be signed, I told myself, late at night as the owls swooped low over the wound-down tennis nets, and money to be made.

With some of the £20,000 I took a two-year lease on a reconditioned maisonette in Shepherd’s Bush, with an option to renew for a further year. Hermione, the lieutenant-colonel’s daughter, came from the Belgravia Bureau at £100 a week (‘Always get some posh bird on reception,’ Stefano had counselled. ‘Gives the place a bit of tone, and you won’t get any trouble. No one ever kicks off with a posh bird on the desk.’) It was to Stefano, additionally, that I applied for advice on staff appointments. ‘No point in wasting money,’ advised the man who had once spent $800 on bottled water during a two-week Helium Kids tour of Scandinavia. ‘At this stage you’re just feeling your way. I should go down the Speak and hire the first couple of herberts you come across with any kind of a track record.’ With this in mind I went to the Speakeasy and engaged the services of a man who had once done the lighting for Pink Floyd and Barclay James Harvest’s former tour manager. With these intrepid companions, I established myself in the office at Shepherd’s Bush and, not yet oppressed by the reek of the kebab shop next door, sat down to plan the first Resurgam release.

This was less easy than it sounded. The initial idea had been that we should start with one-off singles – you could cut an acetate in a basement for £200 in those days – and use the cash-flow to finance albums by people we thought had some kind of staying power. When this failed, nobody being impressed by the tiny advances on offer, Damian, the man who had worked as Barclay James Harvest’s tour manager, said, somewhat shyly, as if he feared giving offence, ‘We could always get Wally Bav.’ ‘Christ! Is he still alive?’ ‘Saw him at the Music Machine just the other week,’ Damian volunteered. ‘His new demo’s rather good.’ ‘Jesus, Dame’, said Bruno, the man who had done the lighting for Pink Floyd, ‘you’re just wasting Nick’s fucking time here.’ ‘No, no,’ I said pacifically, ‘let’s hear it.’ Unexpectedly, the tape turned out to have merit. If it was not a bona fide New Wave classic, it had a decent guitar sound that almost, but not quite, cancelled out the embarrassment of its being titled ‘Street Corner Lady’. The problem lay not in the music but in its creator, Walter ‘Wally’ Baverstock. It was not that he was in his late thirties and several stone overweight, but that so many iterations of him lay strewn over the popular music of the past fifteen years. Back in the Beat Boom, as a nervous twenty year-old with a Tony Curtis hair-cut, he had masqueraded as ‘Wally and the Wal-tones’. I myself could remember him supporting the Helium Kids at the Fairfield Halls, Croydon, as the lead singer of a psychedelic commune called Custer’s Last Stand. There had been other outings: the album he had cut with a heavy metal band named Demons and Wizards had turned up in an Oxford Street remainder bin only the other day.

The Wally Baverstock argument lasted a week, during which time we signed a pressing and distribution deal with Virgin. After it was over, Wally and two middle-aged sidekicks were despatched to a basement studio in Harlesden where, in three hours and at a cost of £150 they produced an acetate of ‘Street Corner Lady’ and a weird rockabilly cover of Chuck Berry’s ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’ that would do as the B-side. On the afternoon it came back from the pressing plant I sat down with Damian – now promoted to Acting Head of A&R – to plot the extensive personal makeover that would be required of Wally before he was let out into public view. It was all rather like the meeting a dozen years before when, with the Managing Director of Thames Records, I had planned the costume in which Moyra McKechnie, the Dundee Dynamo, would sing for the Queen Mother at the Royal Variety Performance. ‘We’ve got three weeks,’ I instructed Damian. ‘Put him on a crash diet – he could lose a stone in that time – and tell Desmond that if he fucks up we’ll halve the royalty rate. It’s not going out under his own name. We’ll call them the Pimps, and, I don’t know’ – I was clutching at straws here – ‘say they’ve all just come out of Wandsworth or something. As for the get-up, you’d better put them in leathers, but for God’s sake don’t let him stand sideways-on to the camera.’ I wrote the press release myself. It went: The Pimps are three ex-cons playing the kind of noise you won’t have heard before. This is end-of-the-tether, down in the drain-pipe, mad-as-hell street music from a band who’ve spent time on the wild side of life. Your mother definitely wouldn’t like it, but, hey, what do they care? There were quarter-page ads in the New Musical Express, Melody Maker and Sounds.

Meanwhile, there were other things to worry about. From her armchair in Bishop’s Mansions, spreadsheets smoothed out across her lap, Holly watched these preparations with tolerant scepticism. She was an accountant at EMI: all this was merely a parody of the seemly usages of her own 9 to 5. ‘Nobody’s going to buy anything by Wally Baverstock,’ she said. ‘I saw that picture of him in the silver jacket and he looks like a turkey done up in Bacofoil.’ But there was more to it than this, more than shambling Wally Baverstock with his teddy-boy quiff and his hopeful expression. In starting Resurgam I could see that I had lost status in her eyes. She took to staying at work late and making sure that the records she played around the flat were by sun-tanned American five-pieces with £100,000 advances.

‘Street Corner Lady’ (Baverstock/Kopechnie) by the Pimps [Resurgam 001] – ‘more than your average chug-a-lug’ – NME; ‘I wouldn’t let these gentlemen babysit my children but they could certainly play at my wedding anniversary’ – Melody Maker – was released in the spring of 1978. It sold 53 copies in its first week, 17 via the mail-order department now operating from the Shepherd’s Bush basement, and 32 in the second. Halfway through the third week I invited the Resurgam plugger, a game twenty-five year-old named Biff Tregunter, into the office and demanded to know why in the eighteen days since release no Radio One disc-jockey had so much as placed it on a turntable. ‘The thing is,’ Biff explained – he was good at his job, and both of us knew it – ‘the thing is, Nick, there’s a problem with old Wally.’ ‘There is? What’s he done now?’ ‘Too much history,’ Biff said, as if history ranked alongside murder and grand larceny on the federal statute book. ‘Annie Nightingale won’t have it on account of he once threw a gin-and-tonic over her at a T. Rex afterparty. I can’t even tell you about the beef Kid Jenson has with him. I took one in to Tommy Vance – you never know, might have gone down well with the metal crowd – and he had security called right there on the spot…’ There was quite a lot more of this. ‘Why won’t John Peel play it?’ ‘It’s the fucking producer isn’t it?’ Biff offered, lighting a cigarette off the one he had in his mouth. ‘Won’t have him on the show. Simple as that. And as for the daytime playlist, you could dress Wally up as Santa Claus, have him sing ‘Mary’s Boy Child’ accompanied by the London Symphony Orchestra and a choir of disabled kids and say the money was going to charity, and the fuckers still wouldn’t put him on it.’ ‘Can’t we invite some of them to one of his gigs?’ Here on a bright spring day the reek from the kebab shop was worse than ever. ‘Slipped a disc two nights ago bending over a snooker table’ Biff explained. ‘He’s not going to be playing live again any time soon. Now, what about that other lot Dame said you were signing? The girls that got expelled from the boarding school in High Wycombe?’

‘The Glimmer Chicks? No, we’re passing on them.’ I was still thinking of John Peel, whose show, tastes and routines I knew well. ‘What happened to those skinheads we had in here the other week?’ ‘The Bash Street Kids?’ Biff looked doubtful. The industry grapevine had spread disquieting rumours about the Bash Street Kids all over Soho. ‘You don’t want to have nothing to do with them, Nick. They had an audition at Chiswick the other day and one of them hit the studio engineer over the head with a pool cue.’ ‘Never mind that,’ I told him. In the room below I could hear the series of ricocheting thuds which meant that Damian was throwing rejected demo-tapes into one of the metal waste-paper baskets. ‘You call their manager and tell him to meet us outside All Souls Langham Place at 8.15 tomorrow evening.’ ‘Don’t think they’ve got a manager.’ ‘Well take a cab down to Bermondsey or wherever they come from’ – I was getting tired of Biff’s stonewalling – ‘and walk round the streets yelling their names until you find one of them.’ Biff nodded and disappeared, his place behind the desk instantly filled by a man who had once played bass for Uriah Heep and lived in hope of a solo deal. That was the sort of aspirant we got at Resurgam in the early days.

The plot was hatched in a burger bar around the corner from Broadcasting House, between Biff, myself and the three members of the Bash Street Kids who bothered to show. ‘Easiest thing in the world,’ I explained. ‘Peel turns up at reception at about 8.45. When he arrives I want you lads to rush him and pin him up against the wall.’ The skinheads listened intently, their pale, bony faces alive with anticipation. They had been promised £20 apiece and the chance to record a demo-tape. ‘What do you want done to him?’ Toddy, the ringleader, enquired. ‘Give him a tap or two?’ ‘Nothing like that. Just keep him there until the cavalry comes.’ Outside, the darkness was stealing over Portland Place: there was no one much about. Peel, walking up from Oxford Circus, cut a lonely and unsuspecting figure. The boys jumped him as he came level with All Souls and bore him off into the shadows. Biff and I, arriving at the scene a few seconds later, made a great show of dispersing them. ‘Good job we was here John,’ Biff remarked. Peel stood quivering in the twilight, clutching the lapels of his black donkey-jacket, sweat glistening on his balding head. It was clear that in a decade-and-a-half on the pop scene he had endured far worse than this. To judge from the receding football chants, the Bash Street Kids were half-way along Regent Street. As we bade each other farewell, I pressed a copy of ‘Street Corner Lady’ into his hand. He played it later that evening and the one following. With this favourable wind behind them, the Pimps sold 2,000 copies, covered their costs and left us with £500 to sign a band called Paper Plane, of whose yet unrecorded single I had high hopes.

After that things happened fast, so fast that it seemed as if they would never slow down again. But I remember the day three months later when Holly and I drove down to Tenterden to Sammy Antrobus’s summer party, with Paper Plane’s first single booming from the stereo and the flyers for a band called The Unclean all over the back seat. Like Don and Stefano and three-quarters of the people I knew in those days, Sammy was a relic of the 1960s, and his parties were intended to commemorate their Dionysiac spirit. Girls in bikinis, or sometimes without them, floated languorously in the pool, Sammy’s flock of turtledoves – all dyed in pastel shades – stalked across the lawn and people who got bored amused themselves by setting light to the punch. Holly sat in a deckchair at the end of the garden going through the contents of a box-file. A fortnight later I would come back to the flat at Bishop’s Mansions and find her gone. But all this lay ahead, far off in the summer glare. The sun burned on and the music juddered from Sammy’s state-of-the-art stereo system. It was the party at which, as I stood a yard from the surface of the pool – oily now and full of cigarette ends and particles of grit – somebody said there was a man called Rory Bayliss-Callingham who wanted to meet me. But I was too far gone for this. The bright, mysterious future had me by the hand. I know where I am in the world, I thought. And so, fully clad, I jumped head-first into the water, came up like a cork, righted myself and then lay paddling on my back, until the weight of my clothes started to drag me down, and Sammy’s mermaids swam delightedly around me, and Holly, frowning slightly, put down her box-file and came scampering over the grass to see what mischief I had done.

Part One

Going to California

‘I could lose my way on the shortest of journeys…’

THE FLAME THROWERS

Cris Itol vocals Joey Valparaiso gtr/vocals, Steven DaVinci bs, Art Smothers drms

Blink twice and you could miss the very considerable contribution that this assortment of junkies, desperadoes, one-time juvenile delinquents and all-round irregular guys – which is putting it charitably – made to the Los Angeles scene, and indeed to rock music generally, in the tumult of the early ‘80s. Sure, their status as a viable musical entity lasted until the decade’s end, but even by the time Breakfast at Ralph’s hit the racks in the fall of 1980 they were shaping up to implode, and practically everything they recorded has an oddly provisional quality, as if singer and sidemen loathed each other so profoundly that another fluffed drum break would see Cris or Stevie – the principal trouble-fomenters – slamming the studio door behind them for the very last time. Which, most eye-witness accounts concur, was pretty much what a Flame Throwers session looked like in their coruscating hey-day. Producers (Bob Ezrin, Jimmy Miller, Steve Lilywhite) came and went; tours concluded – or failed disastrously to conclude – in screaming mayhem; managers crawled off to commit suicide or file for bankruptcy; but somehow the band held it together during Reagan’s first term. In that brief time they recorded at least one album that would remain a college radio staple for the next twenty years, played half-a-dozen live shows whose scuffed-up video representation is adjudged to give Hendrix, Zeppelin and the