We spent the next nine months scouring the streets of London for a singer, just like in those pop movies. We continued to hang out in coffee bars, in hairdressers, in local clothes markets in Soho, Kensington, Chelsea and even all the way out at Richmond where the Stones started, hoping a star might walk by. It was hoping for magic... looking anywhere where creativity might just be propagating. Small ads were hopeless for the star singer I dreamed of, I knew he didn’t exist in the conventional sense of singers. Neal and I became a familiar sight in coffee bars all those months. We started to know the street and know the people working there. Somehow we were connecting with a London scene.
There's a tape of me working with Annie Lennox who lived just down the road from us in Maida Vale. Mick Jones had suggested her and we jammed about one afternoon. She had a brilliant voice but I was locked into my vision and I didn't want a girl singer....Yeah right Tony and what was that you were saying about having good perception? One of the songs we jammed together that day as she free formed singing, surfaced years later as a huge hit for the Eurythmics, “There must be an angel playing with my heart....”
It seemed hopeless some times but above all we kept the faith. Remember, I didn’t know who I was looking for, or what the group would look like yet, but I knew I was looking for the extraordinary. That red notebook did not contain a master plan just needing four puppets to play the parts and sing the songs I’d written, what it did contain was page after page of ideas, concepts and visions of the imaginary group that I wanted to be a part of.
Then, by chance, Magenta and I were out shopping in Kensington Market one day when there - dancing to Cochran and Suicide in his shop YAYA - was Degville.
This freak weirdo, with hair made of coloured feathers. We'd seen no one like him, ever, but he was for real and that’s what so many people forget. The way he looked, this was his whole life and he lived it every day. I had the vision, but I still had to find the reality. Degville was wearing 6" stilettos and the clothes he had made himself. He was a vision of the future. Remember, X and I looked very sub Dolls or Cramps at that time, Degville was the missing link. Eventually he would create the pink pineapple hair for me which completed the transformation of me into this new thing, a world away from my punk background.
His shop YAYA was to become our base, just like SEX was to the Pistols. We spent our lives in that shop, hanging out, playing music and generally collecting a scene. I’d moved on from the coffee shop but this was just as good, in fact it was everything, the centre of the Sputnik universe. They were the start of great times.
So now we were three...
