I also became friends with an old hero, Johnny Thunders formerly of the New York Dolls and the Heartbreakers.
Thunders just turned up at our door one day with Jerry Nolan and asked if I wanted to play with them that night. You bet I did!! It was a dream come true for me, I get to play “Personality Crisis” legitimately with the person who wrote it. We learnt 30 songs that afternoon in Magenta's sitting room... Later that evening I turned up at the gig in Victoria, the Venue, and waited....and waited.... and waited. When, some two hours later, three friends carried Thunders in unconscious and laid him out on the dressing room floor, it struck me that a real life Rock n Roll nightmare was happening before my very eyes.
I somehow got to join the Thunders band. There was me Johnny, Jerry Nolan (also from the Dolls - wow!) who was such a brilliant drummer and various rhythm guitarists who came and went. Steve New who had played with the Rich Kids, and who played the lead guitar part on the Gen X track "Dancing with Myself" played with us one night and did a great photo session with us too. (actually now I come to think of it I can’t begin to imagine what a heroin nightmare the recording sessions for “Dancing with Myself “ must have been for the producer Keith Forsey who had turned up that day in brand new shiny punk gear, all leather trousers and Anarchy T- shirt, only to find Idol, New and Jones all with their bottles of methadone strategically placed on the control room windowsill, no wonder he’d looked slightly thrown...)
Now I was in a band with Johnny Thunders and what a ride it was. We toured in France by train, we were canned off in Sweden, we sat around in Paris trying to record and I was learning that this thing moved at it’s own pace. Back in London, things ramped up to a whole new level as Thunders started to take over my whole life.
I loved the man but used to dread that 3 am knock on the door as he would arrive, completely out of it, to “party” with us at the Mews. Things got even worse when at one stage he ended up living there too, which was a bit like having a slowly disintegrating E.T staying at your house.
I helped Thunders remix LAMF for Jungle Records. Actually, this was a really pointless exercise when I look back at it. Like remixing Raw Power to give it a modern sound, it SO loses the moment, and the moment is the essence of what makes great Rock and Roll.
One night Thunders sat up with me and watched Snooker, while I tried to explain the game to this nodding out-of-it New York American. It was the classic semi final match where Alex Higgins (a sporting hero of mine who I only ever met once, one night at the Hippodrome when he leaned over and whispered "Have you got any Charlie?") came back to beat Jimmy White 13-12 to go on to win the World Championship. Even Johnny got excited - well as excited as you can be when you are periodically nodding out....
