The Ned Wood Archive

A Yardstick for Lunatics

The Strawberry Alarm Clock

Once upon a time there was an alchemist. He’d been trying to turn base metal into gold for years. He’d tried in New York and London. He’d tried to mix outrage and sensationalism and revolution and fashion. He’d dabbled with Good Old Fashioned Rock and Roll, he’d flirted with leather, he’d trifled with rubber, he’d pottered with glam. By 1975 he’d found a tight drummer, an energetic guitarist, and a competent tunesmith and he was looking for a singer. The band would’ve been OK. They might have made it with McLaren’s pushing, Cook’s drumming, Jones’ guitar playing, and Matlock’s tunes. But what made them was the singer. The anger, the passion, the disgust, the hatred that Lydon put into Rotten and that Rotten put into the lyrics lifted the Pistols right up to the top. It made them unforgettable, iconoclastic, revolutionary, disgusting. It echoed the fears and loathings of a generation. It expressed the foul, noxious, nauseous, sickening contempt that ran like a sewer under England’s misguided dreaming.

Once he’d mixed the ingredients, McLaren couldn’t stop the reaction. He’d maybe be able to direct the force of it one way or another, but more often than not, he’d stand back and watch as it went critical. Like at those first gigs in London and the violence that refused to stay beneath the surface. Like the use of any and every shock tactic, the use of any and every insult, the defilement of any and every sacred cow, all of it to push the band’s name. Like the notorious, eloquent, profane appearance on early evening TV with the Grundy. The banning of Anarchy. Anarchy itself. The jumping or getting pushed from one
label to another. Each act of the deranged genie that McLaren had let out of the bottle raised more shrieks that just added to the chorus of hatred from the press.

But in deepest, darkest Hampshire, we could only hear the distant echoes of the battle. Back in April 1977, we only knew a fraction of the story. The tidal wave of change that the volcano of punk had caused was yet to hit our shores. But we knew something. We knew something out there was changing and we wanted to be part of it. And we knew that Anarchy in the UK was a cool single.

So, I was at Bernie’s. I mean, I was at Bernie’s mate’s house. The place Bernie was staying at because we couldn’t stay at the hall. I’d woken up early. I always do. I’m a morning person, you know that. I lay on Bernie’s sofa, I mean Bernie’s mate’s sofa, and let the echoes of the previous night bounce across the inside of my head. Bernie and I had cemented our friendship over a couple of bottles and had filled the house with our off-key, out of tune, impersonations of the mighty John Rotten.

I liked him in spite of all his contradictions. He liked the Ramones and he liked the Pistols and that was enough. We’d played the Ramones album. He’d said, in all seriousness, that you should meditate to side 1. So we tried. We sat down with our legs wrapped painfully around themselves like badly tied bow ties at a wedding. We closed our eyes and tried to find enlightenment. But Bernie kept getting at me cos I was tapping my hands to the beat on the floor. He said I should let go. Let the music pass through my body and it would carry the mind off. Sometimes you can do that. Switch off what you’re listening to. But not when it’s the brothers and you’ve had a couple of beers. And then Bernie couldn’t keep still either, so we’d given up, turned the volume up even more, and played Anarchy in the UK.

He’d thrown himself around like a madman, pogoing to the beat as it spat out of his stereo (I mean, his mate’s stereo) and I’d wondered what he would have done with all of his pent-up pressurised energy if the Pistols hadn’t been invented.

What would any of us have done?

So, even though it was still early that Sunday, and by early I mean sometime before noon, I got up, tiptoed around the room gathering my clothes, and got dressed. There was no hot water, but I had a quick rinse. I made myself some breakfast. Amazingly, there was milk, but no sugar. At least I didn’t find the sugar, so I had sour cornflakes. Never again. I boiled up some water in a saucepan and drank a cup of tea, wondering whether to give Bernie some. I decided to let him sleep.

I started to look around for something quiet to do. Moving around the house, trying not to make a noise, all I could find was Bernie’s battered second hand copy of Moore, Lalicker, & Fischer’s book of Invertebrate Fossils. So I read it for the first time in my life. Did you know that inadunate crinoids were an extinct group from the Palaeozoic? No, me neither. Do you care? No, me neither. I searched through the book looking in vain for something interesting. It was like listening to Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young. Why is it that palaeontology is only taught by recently revived specimens from the Triassic?

I scribbled Bernie a note, telling him I’d be back and then let myself out to have a walk. The whole of Southampton seemed to be still asleep. This is when you feel you’ve stolen a march on the rest of humanity. When it’s bright and early and you’re the only person alive to the world. I drifted down to a park by the river and wasted time just sitting and watching, not knowing what the time was. It’s amazing that I’d never been on this side of the river before. It was like there was a great wall of water dividing the city in half. The east and the west will never meet.

It’s the same in London. Have you ever been south of the Thames? Somehow I didn’t think so. It’s another country. We played football down there once – I didn’t realise they have different rules over there. Like offside is completely different. And the back pass law doesn’t apply if the goalkeeper is wearing blue. And it takes so long to ever get anywhere. Have you noticed that there’s no tube south of the river? Have you ever been to Selhurst Park? Have you ever listened to Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine? It’s all another country. Well, you know what I mean, and Bitterne’s a bit like that.

I was sitting peacefully with this great divide flowing in front of me when I got a sudden flash of enlightenment. Or at least consciousness. I suddenly saw my old dears waiting for me back home, expecting me on the Saturday evening, and no doubt panicking because I hadn’t turned up. I was going to phone the previous evening, but I must have got carried away with the Ramones and the Pistols. So I decided to leg it back home, pronto. Bernie, of course was still asleep when I got back to his place, so I had to wake him up to get him to let me back in so I could pick up me stuff. He insisted on playing
Anarchy one more time before I left, which I couldn’t help laughing at. Even on the train on the way back, I kept smiling, thinking about it.