LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER SEVEN FOLLOWING THE DURM

      ‘We have to go to this, it’s gonna be amazing.’ Dagger was standing under the glittery lights in full Chelsea-mod regalia. He’d just arrived, and his declamatory statement, given while brandishing a black-and-white A4 flyer, had all the pub’s smoky heads turning towards him. He held the page up for us to see. On it was a Xeroxed picture of a short-haired singer and a young, similarly barbered guitarist. Above them, in an aggressive scrawl, was written THE SCREEN ON THE GREEN PRESENTS A MIDNIGHT SPECIAL SUNDAY AUGUST 29TH MIDNIGHT-DAWN. Below that it said SEX PISTOLS. What a name, I thought.

      It was bank holiday weekend and Steve Norman and I were sitting in the Camden Head. Since the Same Band (or whatever we were now going to call ourselves) had started rehearsing upstairs, this cut-glass pub had become our centre of operations. Fundamentally a soul boy, Steve had inspired me with his StevieWonder andMotown records that he played at his home on the Bourne Estate in Islington. His father, Tony, a cabby whose passions were London, the voices of Mel Blanc, and commentating upon the soap opera that was going on inside his tropical-fish tank, had passed his typically North London sense of humour on to his son. But what drew me to Steve was his instinct for music. He had a sharp ear for what was going on in the arrangements of records we’d play, comfortably transcribing them to our guitars, and we soon performed a morning school assembly together, playing ‘Light My Fire’ and ‘A Horse With No Name’, albeit to a hall of half-awake kids, still lost under their bed-hair.