Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. (12 page)

Mick still believes in love and romance whereas I’m questioning all my old beliefs and habits. He wants emotional stability. He was brought up by his grandmother, Stella, in a council flat in Royal Oak. I think he’s done well. I know lots of people who had a much more auspicious start in life who aren’t half the person Mick Jones is.

Every night of the week that it’s open, I go to the Roxy club. I’ve never got any money so I jump the turnstiles at Shepherd’s Bush tube station and jump them again at Covent Garden when I get off, then I blag my way into the club for free – the owners, Andrew Czezowski and Susan Carrington, are very sweet about us all doing this night after night – and we don’t buy any drinks either. I come here a lot because it’s the only place to go but sometimes it gets boring, talking to the same people all the time, just wasting a few hours then trying to get home again.

I hang around downstairs mostly, where Don Letts DJs. I first met Don when he worked at the clothes shop Acme Attractions on the King’s Road. He used to buy me a sandwich or give me my bus fare because I never had any money. My flatmate Alan and our friend Keith Levene (Keith lived across the road from Alan in Southgate. I’ve known Keith since he was fourteen) disappear into the bogs a lot to take drugs. Don plays reggae, lovers’ rock and dub. I stand by the DJ booth and try to dance. I feel self-conscious because I don’t know how to move. I haven’t seen many people dance to reggae, there’s no one to copy. It’s not the same as skinheads dancing to ska. Don’s friend Leo (later the bass player in Dreadzone) tells me to listen to the bass. Before he said that I was trying to dance to the rhythm of the guitar, which is double-time and off-beat. If Wobble’s here (when he became a bass player he added ‘Jah’), I watch him dance. I don’t know how he knows what to do but he’s very elegant and light on his feet and has a good sense of rhythm.

With Don Letts and my Hagstrom guitar

By the time the Roxy closes for the night, the tubes have stopped running and I’m stranded. I haven’t got any money for a cab and there’s no way I can go on a night bus dressed in black rubber stockings, a string vest and a leather jacket. Night buses are dangerous: full of skinheads and drunks, no girls travel on them alone. Also, it’s a long walk from the bus stop at the other end to my squat. I know this’ll be a problem every time I leave the house but it never stops me going out, I just hope things’ll work out. And there’s always Mick. He’s never sure if I’m going to go home with him or not but he waits until the end of the night when everyone else has faded away, then offers me a lift in a taxi back to his grandmother’s flat. He’s always looking out for me.

28 MICK AND VIV

1976

We’re taking a short cut through the car park behind the Hammersmith Odeon. It’s dark. Slinking out from between the cars come the skinheads. They surround us.

Skinheads don’t like ‘punks’ but they don’t hate us as much as teds do.

Coming across me and Mick tottering through the car park on high heels, dressed in pink and black leather with our blonde and black spiky hair, is good luck for them and bad luck for us. We must look like two exotic insects wafted into their territory on a rogue breeze. I think,
Oh no, Mick’s going to be absolutely useless, why did I pick such a weedy bloke to go out with?

One of the skinheads swears at us, the rest gather behind him, a sea of bobbing baldies. Mick stays calm. He’s used to this kind of thing. The swearer gets more aggressive, taking the piss out of Mick’s clothes. Then he turns to me and hisses, ‘Next time I see you, I’m gonna
fuck
you.’ Without any communication between us, Mick and I take this as an invitation to leave. We walk away together. My back is burning. I tell my legs to stop shaking and my feet to hit the ground steadily.
Walk with confidence, Viv
. I pray they won’t come after us. As we get further and further away and there’s no thundering of Dr Martens on gravel, I dare to believe they’ve let us go. Every day something like this happens, or is likely to happen. We’re always on edge, always on our guard. It’s exhausting.

Danger comes in all sorts of guises and I’m often in trouble because of my own stupidity. On Friday nights we all go to the dances at the Royal College of Art. Tonight, Steve Jones, the Sex Pistols’ guitarist, is flirting with me, even though he knows I’m with Mick. I’m fascinated by Steve, not just because he’s attractive in his own way, but because he’s so different, a ‘bit of rough’. Callous and very sexual but with a vulnerability underneath the bravado. John Rotten calls him the Coalman, because he looks like a labourer. Steve and I wander outside together, and he says, ‘Come down here.’ He leads me down some stone steps into the basement of a big white Kensington house. I don’t know why I go with him, I know it’s wrong. Then he says, ‘Go down on me.’ No nice flirty chat. I shake my head. He keeps on at me to go down on him, I keep saying no. He tries another tack. ‘I’ll go down on you then.’
God no. What was I thinking coming down into this dark hole with him?
I suppose I thought we might kiss, but Steve is the most sexual person in our group, he’s always shagging, of course he’s not going to want to kiss. I’m getting scared, I’m out of my depth and can’t see a way out of this. I’ve got a feeling that if I run off it might get worse, might excite him.

‘Viviane!’

I look up from the basement and see Mick’s head poking over the top of the black wrought-iron railings. He must have followed us out, he’s always watching me. I know I’m in trouble, but I don’t care, I’m so relieved and happy to see him. I race up the stairs. When I get to the top, Mick looks at me and says, ‘It’s over.’ And stalks off.

As I watch Mick walk away from me across Exhibition Road, I realise I don’t want to lose him. I’m worried that if I let him out of my sight, I’ll never get him back. I run after him and try to explain that I wasn’t going to do anything. I beg and plead for his forgiveness, but nothing I say moves him. He hails a cab and I scramble in after him before he has time to slam the door. He doesn’t speak to me or look at me all night but I follow him everywhere like a devoted puppy. I jump out of the cab and chase him into the lift of his grandmother’s block of flats, stick close to him at the front door so he can’t shut me out and sit on the floor of his bedroom amongst the piles of records whilst he gets ready for bed. I lie, fully clothed, next to him on the bed as he pretends to sleep. About ten in the morning, Mick forgives me. He says I’ve shown how sorry I am and how much I care for him. I think he’s surprised how much I want him. What an idiot I am. Nearly lost the guy I love.

After ‘The Steve Jones Incident’, I accept that Mick and I are serious boyfriend and girlfriend. Our relationship is very volatile, we have huge rows, but we love each other and it’s a relief that he doesn’t mind my fiery temper. Most guys can’t stand it. It’s the reason I get chucked usually. But Mick sees it for what it is, a quick flare-up. I can be myself with him and am loved for it, not in spite of it.

With Gibson Les Paul Junior, now sprayed metallic black (sacrilege)

29 SOMETHING IN THE AIR

1976

Lock up the streets and houses
Because there’s something in the air.

Thunderclap Newman

There’s music and band-forming in the air, and I know I’ve got to learn how to play my Gibson or I’ll just be a ‘poseur’ – the worst insult any of us can call each other (apart from ‘careerist’) – just a fake pretending to be something I’m not. Keith Levene was a bit too young to hang out with us a couple of years ago but he’s very intelligent and plays guitar brilliantly, so he’s caught up and comes over to Davis Road a lot to help me with my guitar playing. I don’t find it intimidating to play in front of Keith because I’ve known him so long. We meet a couple of times a week in my bedroom, which is the large double room at the front of the house, and Keith says, ‘We’re not going to bother with chords and scales and all that shit, Viv. I’m going to teach you how
not
to play guitar.’ But I want to learn chords! How am I going to be able to write a song if I don’t know any chords? Keith only has three rules: always start with the guitar in tune (he has to tune it for me), always have clean hands, and never go more than three days without playing. When I’m alone with the guitar, I experiment and try to recreate the sounds of animals and other noises. This is how I build my guitar style from scratch, from a starting point of no chords, no twelve-bar blues chord progressions, and no scales.

I have a Marshall stack in my bedroom, a white amp and huge speaker, big enough for a concert hall (I bought them from Steve Jones – god knows who he nicked them from). I twang away every day, trying to find my way around the guitar, to understand what pick-ups do, what settings to put my amp on, trying desperately to
hear
. I want to develop a distinct personality with both my guitar playing and my guitar sound. I need to be sure that I am conveying the right message with my instrument. I decide I want a thin buzzsaw-ish/mosquito type of sound. That’s what I’m aiming for. ‘Why?’ says Keith. ‘I like that it sounds annoying and dangerous and it’s industrial,’ I reply. I keep twiddling the knobs on the amp and my guitar to try and find the right combination that will lead me to THE SOUND. It’s hard to get it right. Sometimes it’s too extreme, too much treble and you can’t hear any notes, sometimes it’s like a boring old distorted rock guitar. I don’t understand why it sounds different when I’m sure I used exactly the same settings yesterday. Every day the task seems hopeless and I feel like giving up. I lie on my bed a lot, just holding the guitar, feeling like a fraud.

There’s a lot of tension between Mick Jones and Keith Levene because of how friendly Keith and I are. (
I was chatting to Keith recently and said to him, ‘Remember that time back in the seventies when we were lying on my bed and you stroked my back for hours?’ He laughed and said, ‘It wasn’t your back, Viv, it was your front!’
) Joe Strummer shows me how to tap my foot and play along at the same time. He says it’s crucial I do this or I’ll go out of time and have no rhythm. I find it really difficult to do those two things at once and I think it’s unfeminine to stomp your foot so I’m a bit resistant to it. Joe keeps pestering me to go to bed with him, I say no. I can’t believe he would do that to Mick.

My neighbour, Sue, comes round. She very politely begs me to stop playing. She says she’s been sent by the rest of her flatmates to tell me that I can’t play guitar, it’s been months now and it’s obviously not happening, I have no talent for it. ‘Please, for your own sake, Viv, as well as everyone else’s, stop it and find something that you
can
do. I’m sure there are lots of things you’re good at.’ She’s absolutely right and I know it. I’m not progressing, I have no natural musical talent, I’m making a terrible noise. But I’m not going to stop. I don’t know why. Maybe because there’s nothing else in the world I want to do.