It started in 1981. My previous band, Generation X, had finally disintegrated after the third album. I’d been a musician ever since I left University in 1975 and knew I could never have considered any other career.
Generation X had been my entire focus for as long as I could remember, even if there had been a few changes in the line up since the brilliant guitarist Derwood and Keith Moon style drummer Mark Laff had left the classic original line up in 1979..
There was a time in 1980, when we were recording the Kiss Me Deadly album, when the band had been reduced to just me, Billy and drummer Terry Chimes from The Clash that we had this mad idea - to merge Gen X and the Pistols to form a punk supergroup. We even rehearsed one day that week in Air Studios, with me playing with 2 drummers, Chimes and Paul Cook, Billy and Steve Jones (who had just played rhythm guitar on our new single Dancing with Myself). We played about 10 tracks, a mixture of Generation X and Pistol’s songs. Now that group had a big beat giving me a glimpse of what fun it was to play with two drummers. I guess it was one of those drink-fuelled 'wouldn't it be great if kind of moments'. Imagine the ego nightmare! It was contractually impossible of course, and everyone else involved -- from our record company to their manager Fatchner O’Kelly (who managed Cook and Jones as “The Professionals”, but who was also the former manager of the Boomtown Rats) -- freaked out. But it was a hell of a day.
Sadly Billy and I could not agree on the merits of dangerous drugs as a passport to credibility. I have seen too many times that heroin destroys everything that gets in it’s path, from work to friendships to lives. In this case it left me and Billy on two different planets... and then, almost from one day to the next, it was all over. Billy left the band to write his solo album in New York with the manager who I had brought in during the final year of Gen X to ‘save’ the band. Bill Aucoin, the former manager of Kiss would steer Billy’s solo career on to international success but Billy had left without even taking the time to say goodbye, and I was faced with an emptiness, an awful feeling of loss that I had never known before in my life, like losing a first love and your family all at the same time. The group had been my everything for almost six years, now -- just like that -- it was over and I was completely alone, no manager, no record company and worst of all, no band.
