Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. (18 page)

Wearing Johnny’s T-shirt (hole sewn up). Bullet necklace. Hair by Keith Levene. 1977

39 HEROIN

1977

Rock and roll is simply an attitude.

You don’t have to play the greatest guitar.

Johnny Thunders

It’s three o’clock in the afternoon. I’ve got to get up, can’t lie here any longer, the room’s too hot. I can smell the baked beans from last night rotting in the sink. I throw off the bed covers – scraps of leopard-print fabric given to me by Mick, which he bought when Biba closed down – and run downstairs to answer the phone.

A thick New York accent drawls down the line. ‘Hey, Viv, what’s happenin’?’

It’s Thunders. He asks me to come and see him at his friend’s flat in Chelsea.

‘OK, I’ll come over for a couple of hours. I’m meeting Sid at six.’

He says, ‘Yeah I know, I saw him last night.’

No time to eat, I’ll buy a packet of crisps on the way. I put on a tight black lace dress Sid got me from a jumble sale. It didn’t quite fit so he slashed a split in the side – which is now held together with safety pins – then he hacked the bottom off whilst I was wearing it, leaving the hem really short and frayed. I pull on holey black tights and Dr Marten boots; I still never wear heels if I’m seeing Sid.

I post a letter to Rory on the way – he’s moved to New York – telling him all about my great band, the Flowers of Romance, and how Sid is a brilliant front man, as good as Johnny Rotten.

As soon as I arrive at his friend’s flat, Thunders grabs my hand and leads me across the living room. He pushes aside a heavy curtain and takes me through the French windows, out onto a tiny wrought-iron balcony where we perch like two scruffy crows, jagged hair and torn black clothes, silhouetted against the backs of the grand white stuccoed houses.

I can’t imagine what Johnny’s going to say or why he’s being so secretive. Maybe he wants drugs? But he wouldn’t come to me for that. Is he going to talk about love? No, that’s impossible, he’s got no room for love, his heart is full of heroin.

I ruffle my hair so it falls over my face and press my back into the railings, trying to get a little distance between us. I bet my skin looks terrible in this bright sunlight. I pray that he has bad eyesight.

Johnny tells me that he saw Sid last night and Sid confided in him that when I meet him at six tonight, he’s going to chuck me out of the Flowers of Romance.

No. It can’t be true.

Not thrown out of the band we formed together. I made my mum cry to be in this band … we’ve been rehearsing all through this unbearable heatwave … and
the Flowers of Romance
is such a great name. If I’m not the guitarist in the Flowers of Romance, I’ve got no identity. Johnny sees my face collapse, I’m too shocked to act like I don’t care.

‘Viv, I
told
Sid he was wrong. I said what the fuck does it matter how well she plays? She’s totally cool and looks great.’

But no one – not even the revered
Johnny Thunders
– has any effect on Sid. I’m out. There’s nothing more to say. We step back into the haze of the living room. Has Johnny told them? No one takes any notice of me, so I flop onto a floor cushion.

Thunders, always the leader, takes command of the room. He announces that it’s ‘Time to shoot up now,’ like a playschool teacher. There’s a ripple of excitement. He looks down at me.

‘Want some, Viv? It’ll make things better.’

I’ve been offered heroin before. I’ve never taken it. I’ve never had any intention of taking it – but today is the perfect day. Today I’m devastated. I want to belong, if not to my band then somewhere else, anywhere, I don’t care, I just need to make the world go away.

So I nod. ‘Yeah.’

Johnny knows I’ve never taken smack before and he becomes reverential. He tells me that I can go first as we’re all going to share the same needle and he wants it to be cleanest and sharpest for me. I understand – this is an honour. He produces a black-and-red bandana from out of nowhere like a magician. I remember seeing him wear it around his head on stage. He ties the bandana round the top of my arm and taps my veins with two fingers to bring them up. I’ve seen this ritual
so many times
. It doesn’t impress me, it doesn’t excite me. I’m numb.

As Johnny sucks the liquid out of the spoon into the syringe, I feel no sense of occasion – no
Oh my god, this is Johnny Thunders from the Heartbreakers, about to turn me on to heroin for the first time in my life
. And I have no fear. I’m detached, just watching it all happening to me. Johnny compliments me on my lovely virgin veins, then slides the needle into the biggest blue one in the crook of my arm and unleashes the smack.

A rush starts in my toes and surges up through my body. Thousands of tiny bubbles of love and happiness are released into my veins. I feel like a shaken-up bottle of Lucozade. Then I vomit. Right there on the carpet. I know I should be embarrassed but I can’t quite muster up the feeling. I look at Johnny and he smiles. He strokes my hair and tells me everything is OK, this is completely normal, then he crouches down and injects himself.

A door slams. Someone’s shouting. I step off the kerb and fall in slow motion, down into the gutter. Car horns blare. Tyres screech. I’m in the middle of Fulham Road. I think I might die. Black shadows prance on the edge of my vision. Faces loom. A leaf falls. Buildings lean. Everything’s happening at once …

… Cool air blows across my face, I’m in a long dark corridor. Black and white tiles dance away from me, I follow them, they lead me to Sid. He’s leaning against my front door. Long skinny legs, huge cartoon feet in thick rubber-soled brothel creepers, bike chain dangling from his waist, padlock around his neck, black curranty eyes, spiky hair.

He looks at me nervously. ‘Alright?’

What a strange moral code we all have:

Sid, on time for the first time in his life, to chuck me out of the band. Insisting on doing it face to face, because his mum – who’s a junkie – has told him to be nice.

Me, out of my head on smack, risking my life to meet Sid, knowing he’s going to tear my world apart.

And Johnny Thunders, kind and thoughtful enough to warn me of the impending doom and then shooting me up with heroin.

Sid and I go inside. He mumbles something or other about me not being in the band any more: ‘You can’t play well enough.’ I can barely hear him. I’m far away in another world. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t hurt. I don’t give a shit.

Sid’s a bit put out that I already know what he’s going to say and that I’m not in the least bit bothered about it. He can see I’m stoned. He must have seen his mother like this enough times. I get a faint feeling that he disapproves. He asks if I want him to stick around.

‘No no, I’m fine,’ I mumble and wave at him to leave.

He leaves me sitting on the floor of my flat, chin drooping onto my chest, eyes half closed. Out of my head. And out of the band.

40 SHIFT

1977

Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.

George Eliot,
Middlemarch

I hear a phone ringing through the thick fuzzy air. It’s Thunders, asking me to join the Heartbreakers. He says to come over to the rehearsal studios right now. I’m scared, but I go anyway. That should be written on my gravestone.
She was scared. But she went anyway
.

When I arrive he says, ‘OK, let’s figure out some songs you can sing.’ He asks if I know the words to ‘These Boots Are Made for Walking’, by Frank and Nancy Sinatra. I say, ‘Yes, most of them.’ The rest of the Heartbreakers stand around looking polite but not very keen:
Another one of Johnny’s mad ideas
. Johnny plays the intro to the song and the band join in. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I’ve never played in a proper band, I can’t sing, I haven’t used a microphone before. Johnny nods to let me know when to come in. I talk my way through the words in a deadpan voice, my fear slightly cushioned by the heroin that’s still trickling through my veins from earlier. At the end of the song, Johnny says it was great and he loves my delivery. We run through it a couple more times, then they move on to another song and I slump into a chair on the edge of the room, steeped in an idiotic stupor.

Johnny must have missed my vein when he injected me, because my arm turns black from my wrist to my armpit. It stays black for three months. I have to hide it from everyone including my mum, which isn’t easy, as I am evicted from my studio (for not paying rent and complaints from the neighbours about Sid threatening them with broken milk bottles) and have to move back home. I’m so ashamed of myself. I’ve been so weak. I almost owe it to Mum more than myself to have some self-respect. I’ll never take heroin again.

A couple of weeks later I go to the Music Machine (a club in Kentish Town, now Koko), and bump into Ben Barson (the guy from Woodcraft Folk I was going to marry). Now I’m his equal, I’ve caught up. Don’t you love it when that happens? You meet someone who wasn’t interested in you, then a couple of years later you meet again and you’ve reinvented yourself. Ben fancies me now, dressed in my pink and black fetish gear, Dr Martens and feisty attitude. As we talk, he slides his arm around me, like we’re teenagers, but I’m meeting some people backstage so I have to go.

Backstage I’m chatting to Johnny Thunders. He asks me what I’m doing later, do I want to hang out? I glance over at Mick, he glares back at me, furious. Johnny sees Mick’s expression, laughs and sings, ‘
Who’s it gonna be? Him or me?
’

Something snaps in me.
What are you doing, Viv? Stop messing around. What do you want out of life?
I realise I don’t want to be with either of them, so I walk out, hail a cab and go home. It’s time to show people, and myself, what I’m made of. Time to try, and maybe to fail again, but better that than never try at all.

41 SIDNEY’S DREAM

1977

Me and Sid are still mates, I’m not going to be petty about him dropping me from the band. We still hang out together all the time, endlessly listening to the
Ramones
album, it encapsulates what we’re trying to do, pushing everything to extremes. Sid takes some speed and says he’s going to stay up all night listening to the record. I go to bed. When I get up in the morning he’s still in Alan’s room, but now he’s playing Paul’s bass along with the record. He can play every bass line of every song. He’s never played bass before but he’s worked it all out by ear and made his fingers do it. Those bass lines are really fast and he can play every one perfectly. I’m in awe of him, he’s done that in one night, turned himself into a bass player.

Because of what he did that night, Sid’s ready when John asks him to replace Glen Matlock as bass player in the Sex Pistols. Talk about a dream come true. We were standing at the back of the Screen on the Green watching the Pistols only last week, saying, ‘What’s the point of being in a band? If you can’t be better than the Pistols then don’t bother.’ Unbelievably, Sid actually thinks twice about joining them, even though to him they’re the best band in the world. He asks me what I think he should do, should he join them or create his own thing? He’s not sure about being part of something he hasn’t formed. This dilemma only lasts about five seconds; he says yes, of course.

42 THE COLISEUM

1977

The Clash, Buzzcocks and Subway Sect are playing at the Coliseum tonight but I haven’t come to see them, I see them all the time. I’m here to see the Slits.

The Slits asked me to join them a couple of months ago, I can’t remember how they contacted me, probably through Nora, the young singer’s mother, who I hang out with quite a lot. Nora is German, tall, athletic, blonde, sophisticated. She wears vintage suits and heels, she’s very feminine compared to the rest of us. I respect her for sticking to her own style. The Slits were looking for a bass player back then. I play guitar, I don’t want to play bass, I don’t feel bass. Your instrument is not interchangeable. I’m a guitarist: even though I haven’t been playing long, I know I’m a guitarist. And anyway, I don’t want to be in an all-girl band.

I talked to Chrissie Hynde about it. (I got to know Chrissie when I met Mick at art school. He was trying to get a band together with her, she’s still not in a band but she really wants to be in one.) I said, ‘It’s gimmicky and tokenistic being in an all-girl band, isn’t it?’ She told me to shut up and get on with it. I read a lot about feminism and I’m a feminist, apply it to everything I think and do, but I don’t want to be labelled in any way.

I’m interested in what Palmolive’s up to now she’s not in the Flowers of Romance any more. I’m not expecting much, I’ve seen the Slits around town with paint daubed on their faces, wearing black bin liners, and Ari, Nora’s fourteen-year-old daughter, is usually charging up and down the room screaming.