The Ned Wood Archive

Running Round the Town with the Young Pretender

That last summer, Alex had come round one evening with a couple of amazing albums.  We’d sat in our lounge and he’d played them on our Dad’s stereo.  The Ramones first album.  And Horses.  

The Ramones.  Four brothers who stumbled across a guitar, a bass, and a drum kit and just played the first thing that came into their heads.  Music so pure, so simple, so obvious, so incredibly different that we could do nothing but laugh till tears filled our eyes.  No, I mean it.  I was in tears laughing so much when Alex first played it to me.  Side 1: three slices of amphetamine buzz guitar with lyrics Tarantino would die for, then the charming Hey Little Girl I Wanna be your Boyfriend, so sweet, so cute, so true, then 1,2,3,4 and into three more slices of chain saw guitar.  And so it goes, getting faster and faster each time you hear them, so you know the next time you play it, it’ll all fit on a single.  Great music to lobotomise yourself with.  Great music to cheer yourself up with.

And Horses.  Horses has so much depth to it that I can still listen to it and find something twenty years on.  At first though, I probably only got into Gloria and Land of a Thousand Dances, but something told me it was special.  Mind, who can forget Gloria, with its haunting start.  “Jesus Died for Somebody’s Sins but not Mine”.  The slow measured piano dictating the pace.  The phrase that sticks in your mind and echoes around, welling up when you don’t want it to.  A phrase that takes on its own life, its own meaning so you don’t think about what it means, it’s just there. “Oh, people say beware, but I don’t care.  These are just rules and regulations to me”.  And while you’re listening it, part poem, part song, just savouring the unity, the completeness of it, admiring it as a collection of sounds, strolling around it like you would a vase in the V&A or a flower in a garden, that most glorious riff creeps up and catches you and you’re dragged in, the guitar swaggering on, changing the stroll into a gallop.  Patti Smith camps up the swagger in her accent, dripping raw sex.  And I’m gonna make her mine…

birdland so dreamy, the music following not following the words. creating created by the dream.  i’m not human.  piano so sad, so alone.  like death in venice.  buy a ticket and you know you’ll never win.  the spoken phrase awakening suddenly jumps in.  the possibilities.  so personal.  she’s talking to me.  just me.  when land stops menacing becomes land of 1000 it’s like it’s like it’s like it’s always been this way.  this band is so together.  the possibilities.  half heard half caught phrases you make your own meanings.  don’t try to understand.  the possibilities.

Can you do the Watusi?   Patti Smith was playing in London and I didn’t have any choice but to go.  Some of the gigs I’d been to before I came down were important, like the Feelgoods – you had no choice about the Feelgoods either.  Or the Rods.  But some were just there to pass the time.  I mean I went to see Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, right.  Just cos they did a couple of Springsteen songs.  And I went to see Be Bop Deluxe – OK they weren’t so bad and the support act was fun.  But neither of those gigs are going to be written about in my life story.  No-one is going to care one way or the other.  But Patti Smith was going to be different.

So, it’s Friday, I’ve escaped, and I’m sat on a train going up to London with Jo.  I didn’t know she was going till I met her at the station.  She’s going to see her folks and I’m going to see Patti Smith.  We’re sat opposite each other, and I’m sort of flirting, even though I’m not that interested.  And I think she’s enjoying the attention, but she’s not too bothered either.  We’re just playing at being beautiful people having a laugh.  I hadn’t had a relationship since Clare Welsh the previous April, and to tell the truth I was growing up.  At school, girls were like status symbols – you had one on your arm or you were nobody.  But I’d grown out of that.  I wanted something more.  And there was only one face that came to me when I let my mind wonder – Mary.  That girl Sonia had brought to the coffee bar and whose argument about politics I’d watched.  Mary, whose smile infected me with happiness and whose words awakened me with vigour.  My mind wandered as I tried to recall her face and her voice.  But then Jo would make some weird comment to snap me back to the present and our banter.

So, we took the tube from Waterloo and she stayed on when I changed at Charing Cross.  I was used to being on my own – what with going to football and the like.  I’d been to a couple of gigs in London by myself before too and actually quite enjoyed it.  You get excited as you get nearer the place and even though it was still early, I was getting a buzz.  It must have been about six thirty or so – all the doors to Hammy Odeon were shut, so I just hung around outside.  I do it all the time – get to places early.  You do if you ever have a fear of getting locked out which I do.  Maybe about five other guys hung around too.  I got a bootleg of the Velvets – Foggy Notion and some other stuff – from a shop near the tube.  Then some dude came by the doors of the Odeon selling probably ripped off copies of Horses.  They were cheap so I bought one.  Well, you know I can’t resist buying vinyl.  Even though I’d have to cart the stuff around the gig and back on the train.  Any way years later they let us in – I’m upstairs, so I hang around looking at the posters and T shirts downstairs, but not buying – I don’t know why – I usually bought that crap like mad.  In fact, I’ve got a Be Bop Deluxe T shirt if you want one.  The support act came on.  Now I like to check out support acts, cos sometimes you get a good one.  And this lot were good.  The Stranglers.  Apparently, the story went that they’d supported Patti Smith back in April and were so good they got invited back.  They were a RocknRoll band with a keyboard player.  I’d got into the Doors that summer – well I’d got Riders on the Storm and Light My Fire after I’d heard them on a Juke Box in the Lake District – well in fact almost worn them out on the Juke Box in the Lake District, them and LA Woman which is the B side to Riders on the Storm.  Anyway, the Stranglers sounded a bit like the Doors when the keyboard player went off on a tangent like the guy out of the Doors does on Light My Fire.  Manzarek isn’t it?  I thought they were really good, but at half time I went out to the foyer and there was one of the guys who had been queuing up with me before the show and he said they were awful.  I couldn’t work it out.  I’m used to having disagreements especially with Alex and my brother, but you can explain them – like when they like Deep Purple or Black Sabbath or Led Zeppelin and I like Tamla Motown.  But I would have thought most people would have liked the Stranglers.

Well it wasn’t a sell out and a couple of songs into Patti Smith’s set, I went back down and walked into the downstairs.  I didn’t go too near the front because of the vinyl I was holding, but I watched and listened.  She played Pale Blue Eyes from the Velvets third album and said it was written by a friend of hers about another friend of hers.  You can tell people by what they cover.  If I was doing a gig I’d do some stuff from Roxy’s first album or maybe the Yardbirds You’re a Better Man than I, and I’d throw in an old Shadows number like Foot Tapper, just to prove how much hipper I am than them, because the Shadows first three or four albums are a good test.  It catches most folk out, cos if you don’t dig the Shadows, you’re a good twenty credibility points down.  No really.  Because I say so, that’s why.  Anyhow covering the Velvets was a mighty cool move in those days, although I would have done All Tomorrow’s Parties myself.

I don’t know which I enjoyed the most, the Stranglers or Patti Smith.  Watching Patti Smith was like walking through an art gallery.  I’ve said that before, but it’s true.  Your brain is being assaulted on multiple levels, only some of them leading to the heart or the foot.  Watching the Stranglers was more hectic, more RocknRoll.  Patti Smith is an acquired taste.  The Stranglers were fun.  And afterwards I had to come down and take the long numbing train ride back.  You’re knackered because your adrenalin has been running and you’ve been determined to enjoy yourself.  And finishing with stuff like My Generation and Gloria knackered me.  And yet you have to rush back to Waterloo to get one of the faster trains back, because if you get the mail train you’re sunk because it stops all the time in places like Woking and the like.  So, you rush to the tube after the last encore.  You know, you have to catch the encore otherwise you haven’t seen the whole gig.  Like part-timers who leave a game five minutes before the final whistle.  So as soon as you know that you’ve seen the last encore you rush to the tube.  And you rush to make the connection at Charing Cross. And you rush up the escalators at Waterloo and scan the giant timetable like mad to work out which platform the next train is leaving from.  And then when you’ve got the right platform you can crawl onto the train and settle down to try and get some sleep.  And everything echoes around your head because it’s midnight and there are fewer noises so each one has more work to do.  The footsteps and the guard’s whistles and the trains pulling out and the drunkards’ shouts stay with you for longer.  Well you know what it is like to stay up all night.  Your brain takes on a life of its own about two foot outside your head.  Everything is so hollow in there.  It’s like when you’re watching some game live from Eastern Europe and there’s nobody watching it in the stadium, and they have some sort of filter on the boom mike so the limited crowd noises echo around before they bounce up to the satellite and down.  And you can hear all the players shouting to each other – but the wonderful fact is that only the English players are shouting.  Being on a train at Woking at one in the morning is that surreal.

Now I was on a minimum grant and saving all my pennies for albums and gigs, so I was playing the cheapskate.  And that means ripping off British Rail to subsidise trips to London.  What you do is buy a return which is valid for three months.  You don’t get it punched on the late trains, so if you can keep it when you get off in Southampton, you can use it again.  That means the next time you go to London, all you need is a single to get you through the checks at Southampton and Waterloo.  The drawback is when you come back, you have to get off in Swaythling or St Denys or even worse, Eastleigh.  If you go into Southampton, you get caught by the guards and have to hand over your ticket.  So depending which train you get, you might have to get out at Eastleigh, which must be a good three miles from Chamberlain, and walk the rest.  Saves you a pound each trip.

I get dreams about that walk from Eastleigh.  It’s the road Munch used for that painting of his.  The guy standing near the railway bridge screaming.  I never met the guy, but I know that’s where he hangs out.  The road runs along by the side of the track, so when you are walking back you have a single row of houses at least a mile long on just one side of the road.  And they’re all the same, this long terrace, all facing the road and the railway.  And even when you reach the end of them you aren’t even halfway back.  And the wind gets at you.  All you can hear are your footsteps hammering the wet pavement echoing in that part of your brain which is still awake.  You tell yourself it’s not worth the quid you’ve saved, but you wouldn’t spend the money on a taxi even if one did drive up and anyway you still get out at Eastleigh next time round.  It isn’t raining too bad, just enough to annoy you.  Are you halfway along the row of houses yet?  It must be about two in the morning, which means that your brain isn’t all there so you don’t experience the full tedium of the walk, but still your mind screams at you.  A hollow bored scream that bounces back between your head and your brain, still a couple of feet away.  Your footsteps are getting louder, like a metronome they build up as you concentrate on them, so you try to distract yourself by remembering the gig rather than worry about your bed, still two miles away.  Jesus Died for somebody’s Sins.  But not mine.