Lonely Boy

PART I: BEFORE

1. THE ARTFUL DODGER

One of the main things I remember about growing up in West London in the 1960s was the corrugated iron, that and the odd Ford Anglia driving about. There were building sites and debris everywhere – it was like the whole place was falling down around us. And the corrugated iron was a real nause (i.e. a fucking pain in the arse) to climb over. It was eight feet high and sharp enough to cut into your hands as you pulled yourself up to the top. It was almost like those builders didn't want me to get in there and develop my driving skills by hot-wiring bulldozers to smash up their tea huts, the inconsiderate cunts.

You didn't see a lot of film stars on the mean streets of Shepherd's Bush in those days, even though the BBC TV studios were just around the corner. So when Jack Wild – the kid who played the Artful Dodger in Oliver! – walked past the end of my road, one day in the late 1960s, that was always going to be something which caught my eye. I was already a bit of an artful dodger myself by that time – maybe not picking a pocket or two yet, but certainly giving the odd stolen bike or brand-new train set fresh from the Hamleys stockroom a good home. But I wasn't looking at Jack as a criminal role model. All that interested me was the fact that he was famous – if it'd been Elsie Tanner from Coronation Street walking down my road, I'd have been just as excited.

Me and a few other kids cottoned on to who he was and started following him. I suppose this wasn't anything too weird in itself, just the common reaction any thirteen-year-old might have to someone they recognised from a film or off the TV – wanting to be as close to him as possible in the hope that some of the magic might rub off. But I always had to push things one stage further. One by one, all my mates dropped away, but I carried on trailing him, like he was Peter Pan or something. I'm not sure why now. I guess I was just more strongly drawn than they were to that special quality stardom gave to him.

Jack Wild was a couple of years older than me, but he wasn't much bigger than I was. He didn't look nothing special – he wasn't wearing his top hat or anything. It's just that when you're one of those kids who has that sense of yourself as being trapped and maybe a bit lonely, if you see someone who seems like they've got it all sorted, you think if you can just be close to them everything will be all right and all the pain you feel will just go away.

I don't know what he thought about me following him. I guess it freaked him out a bit, especially with all that corrugated iron along the sides of the road that he'd never have been able to escape over. At that time my mates and I were part of the first wave of skinheads; listening to Motown, Ska and Blue Beat, loving the music of people like Prince Buster who we'd picked up on from the West Indian kids who lived around us. So if Jack had turned round to sneak a glance at me – trying to look casual while he did it – he'd have seen me bowling along behind him in my oxblood Dr Marten boots with the space-age soles you could see through. I polished the shit out of my first pair of those. I'd have probably been wearing some nice Sta-Prest or Prince of Wales check trousers as well, and one of the crisp Ben Sherman shirts I'd go all the way to Richmond to nick from a shop called Ivy League.

He probably felt quite relieved when I finally gave up the pursuit about a mile further on. In later years I'd cross a lot of lines to get close to people I thought could fix me, but I hadn't started boozing yet by this time, so I still had a few boundaries left. Jack Wild would be off to Hollywood a short while after, but I don't think his story ended too happily. A lot of those child stars seem to have tragic lives in the end, don't they? Fame fucks them up at an early age, but when you're busy envying someone you never think about the fact that they might have problems of their own.

As a kid I used to have fantasies where I would imagine having different parents. I'd see people in films or on TV shows and think, 'Why can't I be in their family?' Diana Dors, who was kind of the English Marilyn Monroe, she was one of them. I would spend ages thinking about how much better off I'd be if I was her kid: 'Let me be with Diana, instead of these parents I've got.' The funny thing is, I don't even think it was a sexual thing at the time, I just didn't like my shit life and I was looking for anything I could grab onto to get me away from the place I was in.

It's not like I had the worst childhood ever. You hear horrific stories of kids going through way worse abuse than I did, and I'd hate it to look like I'm trying to put myself on that level. What I do know is how much things that happened when I was a kid fucked me up – still now, to this day. Of course the chemistry of everyone's brain is different, so some people might deal with a lot worse and come out fine, and others could have it really easy and still feel very hard done by. All I can tell you about is my own experiences, and given how dodgy my memory is, I can't even be too sure about some of them.

I ain't got a clue what my story is gonna look like once it's all set down on paper. I haven't got any kind of agenda at the outset, beyond a few things I want to set straight, and maybe hoping I'll be able to make a bit more sense of how different stages of my life fit together. One thing I'm pretty sure of is that I'm not going to come out of the whole thing smelling of roses.

You know that bit in A Clockwork Orange, where the main guy has his eyes forced open to make him feel like shit every time he remembers what a rotten cunt he was? That's pretty much how writing this book is going to feel for me. Obviously no one's forcing me to do it, and I've had my share of good times as well, but now I can't be doing with my old shenanigans any more it does sometimes make me feel almost physically sick to think of some of the horrible shit I used to get up to.

Even though it's been half my life since I first stopped drinking and taking drugs, I still wake up in a cold sweat sometimes, thinking about all the things I've done that I'm not proud of. But if I made a big song and dance about holding myself accountable for every new crime against humanity as I commit it, this book would get very boring very quickly. So I'm going to have to ask you to take it on trust from the kick-off that I'm trying to be a less despicable person these days, and then anyone who wants to judge me can do so at the full-time whistle.

One thing I can promise you is that I won't be pontificating about how everyone else needs to get sober. I don't give a fuck if other people wanna get high. I've had my go and now it's your turn – knock yourself out if that's what you wanna do. Of course if someone else can relate to my experiences and by some miracle that helps them to be less of an arsehole than I was, then that's all well and good. But I don't want to be that cunt where it's like, 'Oh, he was a rock and roller, but now he's telling everyone else how to live.' Fuck that preachy guy. He's the last person I want to be. Just because I eventually ended up following Jack Wild to Hollywood, that doesn't mean I bought a one-way ticket to La-La Land as well.

It'd be a few more years after bumping into the Artful Dodger till I met my own Fagin, aka Malcolm McLaren (who loved all that Dickensian shit). Once that happened, it was like ol' Jack had passed on the baton, and it wasn't long before our merry band of musical outlaws started picking record companies' pockets like there was no tomorrow. But by the time we'd realised that our light-fingered Svengali had spent all the loot on The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle – a film explaining how the whole punk thing was his idea and we were just a bunch of suckers who couldn't play – it turned out the joke was on us.

And as for the annoying little brat with the great bone structure who's always asking for more … well, let's leave Johnny Rotten out of this for a while, shall we? He's had his say a few times. Maybe enough times. It's my turn now. Because much as the Sex Pistols couldn't have existed without John – or Malcolm, or Cookie, or Glen, or even Sid – it was my shit upbringing that got the ball rolling. That's not me showing off, it's just a fact.

2. MY NICOTINE RAG

I was born in 1955 – around the same time as rock 'n' roll. I got my sense of rhythm from my mum, Mary Jones, who was a Teddy girl, so I was in her fucking womb when she was jiving down the Hammersmith Palais.

Teddy girls – and Teddy boys, which is what my dad was – were the first in the long line of British youth cults which would brighten up the post-war years. Their name was shortened from the Edwardian style of clothes they favoured (like drainpipe trousers and long, drape jackets) and they were the ones who started rioting to 'Rock Around the Clock' when the film Blackboard Jungle came out. It's no wonder I've got such a strong connection to all those old rockers from the early days – Eddie Cochran for sure, but not just him.

Up until the age of about six years old, my childhood was going pretty smoothly. OK, so my dad had fucked off without hanging around long enough to say hello to me, and at that time it was a bit of a no-no to be what was still technically known as 'a bastard'. But you couldn't really blame him, as I don't think he and my mum had been together that long when she got pregnant. And the household I lived in felt like quite a normal – even loving – home. You might say, 'How does a kid know what normal is, when they've got nothing else to compare it to?' But I think they just know. I certainly did.

My mum and I lived with my nan Edith and grandad Fred in a third-floor flat in Riverside Gardens, Hammersmith. It's that big brick Peabody buildings estate, near the bridge. If you were heading out of London towards Heathrow airport, you'd see the Hammersmith Odeon – or Apollo, as it is now – on your left as you drove west over the flyover, then our flats would be on the right as you come down off the flyover and the main road levels out. I say that as if it's changed, but they were still there last time I looked (although admittedly that was in 2008).

It wasn't just the four of us. My gran and grandad's three other children lived there too. I slept in a cot at the bottom of the bed my mum shared with her sister Frances. My gran and grandad had their own room, and my uncles, Barry and Martin, shared the last bedroom. The flat ran between two corners of the block, so one main window looked out over the flyover towards the Odeon (the scene of a few memorable adventures later on in my life) and the other faced the opposite way. There were no lifts, so you had to walk up the stairs to get there, but this was nobody's shithole. It was a proper Victorian housing estate – decent accommodation for decent working-class people who were getting by OK.

I'm not sure how the Joneses were keeping up with everyone else, though, because my grandad was a lazy cunt. The story was he'd avoided having to fight in World War II by putting his foot under a tram to mangle his leg. I don't know if that was true, but he certainly never worked the whole time I was there, maybe because of the same injury that kept him out of the army.

He just used to sit there in his chair all day smoking roll-ups while my nan went out to work cleaning other people's houses. He'd still managed to buy himself some wheels, though – an Austin A40 which started with a crank. Having a car parked in the square down below the flats was quite a status symbol at that time, even if it did always break down when he tried to drive us down to Brighton in it. Come to think of it, his leg couldn't have been that bad if he could still drive. I remember him sitting me in his lap sometimes and letting me steer when he'd take the car for a turn around the square – my first underage driving experience; maybe that's where I got the bug from.

Most of my memories of those times are happy ones. Like my nan giving me a bath in the sink, or making those amazing old-fashioned steamed suet puddings where she'd stretch a cloth over the top of the bowl and tie it with a piece of string. She'd fill the bowl with raisins and then cover the whole thing in treacle from a green and gold Tate & Lyle tin. There's some things which happened last week that I don't remember too well, but fifty-five years on I can feel how good that pudding tasted on my tongue as if I'm eating it right now.

My nan wasn't spoiling me, she was just doing what any normal grandparent (or parent, come to that) would've done – nurturing, I suppose, is what you'd call it. I don't remember my mum so much at this time, even though she was there. The flat was pretty crowded, so it was easy to lose track of people, but it's my nan I remember doing all the cleaning up and making the dinners and checking everyone was all right. She was great.

I got the feeling that my nan had always preferred boys to girls, and as a result her sons had probably got the lion's share of her attention. Maybe that was part of what my mum didn't like about my nan being so warm and loving towards me when I was little. It made her quite cold towards me when I was growing up.

All I knew about my dad (apart from the fact that he was a Teddy boy, which was how he and my mum had met) was that his name was Don Jarvis and he was an amateur boxer from Fulham. That was the only information my mum gave me then. I think I'd picked up that it wasn't a subject she was too keen to talk about, though I do remember going down to some kind of court at a very early age where my mum was hoping to get money off him. I don't think she had any luck, because they'd never been married and she was definitely having a good old moan outside the court after.

My family did like to complain, but there was a lot of laughter, too. My grandad was a grumpy old sod, but he was funny with it. He would sit me on his lap – there was no weird shit there, nothing noncey – and he had this rag that he used to blow cigarette smoke into and then hold it over my face. I fucking loved the smell of those cigarettes. Breathing in the smoke from that rag was one of the best and most comforting feelings I've ever known. When it got put back in the drawer I'd be shouting, 'Where's me rag? Where's me rag?' It wasn't just for special occasions, it was for all occasions.

I can see now that this was probably the start of my first addiction. I don't think it was just the nicotine I loved, it was the fact that my grandad cared enough to blow smoke into the rag just because he knew I wanted him to. Either way, I really craved that rag when I didn't have it, and it certainly didn't take me long to progress to a pack of Players No. 6 as soon as I was old enough to buy my own fags (although I did get into Gauloises for ten minutes at one point because I heard Ronnie Wood smoked them; they were a good strong smoke). A few years later, when I was on heroin, I'd be on five packs a day. You smoke a lot more once you're on dope. As if it's not fucking unhealthy enough already.

Obviously you don't see the nicotine pacifier recommended by too many parenting manuals these days, but to me it was part and parcel of what I look back on as really good times. Even though she wasn't exactly the maternal type, I think my mum and I got on OK at that stage. Once she got me a brand-new pair of Tesco bombers – just shit jeans – and plimsolls that were like Converse but weren't Converse. I used to love it if ever I got new clothes: I'd be on top of the world the minute I had a bit of fresh clobber on, and I felt like I could walk tall through the squares that linked up the different Peabody buildings.

There was a real sense of community on that estate. There was a boozer on the corner with an off-licence next to it, and when we'd take back the R. White's lemonade bottles to get the deposits, I'd sit outside the pub listening to the guy who played the piano. That's one of my first conscious musical memories, although there'd be plenty more to come (and a few unconscious ones to go with them).

I also loved going to the matinees at the ABC cinema, just round the corner on King Street, to see Commando Cody and all those shit Saturday serials. I preferred sitting in the back row, because I didn't want to be close to all the other kids, and for some reason I loved it when the geezer would come out between the films and go, 'Hey, kids, what do you think?' Then everyone would go home and you'd have to come back next week to see the spaceship with a little bit of string holding it up.

Looking back on them, these were some of the happiest days of my life. I'd made a few friends on the estate and started primary school at Flora Gardens in Ravenscourt Park down the road. My grandparents loved me. It was all good.

I think I'd still have ended up being an alcoholic even if I'd had more of a charmed upbringing and stayed with my nan and her steak and kidney pies till I was old enough to leave home. There were quite a few big drinkers among the men in my family, and I just had that obsessive–compulsive alcoholic gene from day one. That's nothing to do with scenarios that have unfolded in my life, it's just who I am, or that's what I believe, anyway. But I don't think the Sex Pistols would've ever existed – at least, not with me in them – if it wasn't for what happened to me next. Apart from anything else, the urge to look for a better life wouldn't have been there, because I'd already have had one.

3. THAT PLACE STANK OF RUBBER

So there I was, having a great old time in the shadow of the Hammersmith flyover, when all of a sudden this guy comes along and my life takes a turn to the dark side. Ron Dambagella his name was, and I think my mum met him at work. She'd had a few part-time jobs. I remember one as a 'telephone girl' – that meant cleaning other people's spit off the telephones in offices, which can't have been a barrel of laughs. But then she got something a bit more permanent at this factory making rubber components, I'm not sure if they were for shoes, or cookers, maybe both.

Anyway, after a while she got moved to a smaller workshop under the arches, right next to Flora Gardens, my first school. I think he was in charge of that place, and I always remember the two of them working there alone, because once they'd got together she used to tell me proudly, 'Ron's the boss,' and I used to think, 'You're the only ones there!' But when I asked my auntie Frances about this, which I had to do, because my mum and I haven't spoken for a few years and I wanted to make sure I've got everything as accurate as possible, she told me there were other employees as well. Apparently old Ron (and he was old – a good ten years older than my mum, anyway) had a reputation of being 'very flirtatious' with the female workers.

I'll have to go into a lot of detail about things that happened over the next few years, some of which will probably be quite difficult for anyone who was involved to read. But I want to say from the outset that I'm not doing this to make my mum look bad. I've absolutely no interest in coating her off (though my stepfather is a different matter). I understand that her life wasn't easy. She had me too young – when she was about twenty – my dad had left her, and she maybe didn't feel like she had too many options, so I can see why she might have lowered her standards a bit. She probably thought, 'Well, I've got this kid, which is baggage to a lot of men, and I ain't gonna get anyone better.' My mum was not a square, in fact she was kind of hip – she bleach-blonded her hair and had massive knockers – so I bet Ron couldn't believe his luck.

The first time I sensed something was going on was when my mum was walking me along King Street to school – she'd drop me off there on the way to work – and we stopped at a crossing. I can't be sure if this actually happened or if I've elaborated on my mental picture over time, but I do have a memory of the wind catching my mum's coat and blowing it open, and me thinking she didn't have anything on underneath – well, maybe stockings, but not a skirt. That momentary flash kind of spun me a bit, and when I was older I'd wonder if they were maybe up to some kinky shit at work. For the moment, though, I was only six years old, and my whole world was about to go down the toilet.

The next thing I know, this Dambagalla guy's in the picture. He never came up to visit at my nan's, but I guess part of the deal for my mum in getting a new geezer in tow was so she could get her own place. So we waved goodbye to happy times with my nice, nurturing nan and grandad, and began our shit new life in a one-bedroom basement flat at 15 Benbow Road, Shepherd's Bush. It wasn't much more than a mile away from where we'd lived before – I even stayed at the same school – but it might as well have been on the other side of the world.

Fuck, that place was grim. It was dark and damp and horrible and I was sleeping on a fucking camp bed at the bottom of what was now my mum and Ron's bed. The khazi was outside, and when the tin bath came out in the front room, I'd be the last one into the dirty water after he'd gone first and then my mum had followed.

When I've talked to Americans over the years about what being poor meant in Britain at that time, they've never quite seemed to get it. I don't remember having a fridge or a TV, no one ever had showers, and for hot water there was the sink with the Ascot heater above it. You'd put money in the meter to get the radiator on and most people would knock the lock off and keep putting the same 10p in. I remember when I first went to America in the late Seventies, even poor people who were near the bottom of the ladder seemed to take things for granted that I'd always seen as luxuries.

Where I grew up, it was fairly normal to turn a blind eye to the odd bit of opportunist thievery. If people were struggling to get by and could get away with nicking something every now and again to make ends meet, that was maybe frowned on a little bit but no one was really going to hold it against them. We were all living at subsistence level – in short, none of us had a pot to piss in – so I can understand now why when families went to the Tesco supermarket on King Street together I'd sometimes see them putting stuff under their overcoats. Maybe there was nothing left in the house for dinner and it was their only way to put food on the table. At the time, though, I didn't really get it. Maybe because it wasn't really talked about afterwards, I'd be thinking, 'What's going on here?'

Another time they had some kind of competition in Tesco's where they would read out a number over the PA and if it was your number you could win a prize. I don't know how it happened, but my mum or Ron must have known someone on the inside, because their number came up and they won something, but for some reason it was obvious that the whole thing wasn't legit and they got rumbled. It was all a bit of a farce and quite humiliating, but again because nothing was ever really explained to me, I found it all very confusing.