Yesterday – a productive afternoon at Tom’s new studio set-up in the countryside outside Hemel Hempstead. Pass his wife Vicky’s beautiful horse in the yard. The horse is having new shoes put on, by a man who I suppose would be called a blacksmith in the past, but is probably described these days as an Equestrian Solutions Manager. He has a white van and does call-outs.
In proper Joe Meek fashion, we record vocals in the bathroom. Rather pleased to finally find a synth sample that actually sounds like a glockenspiel rather than a poor impression of one, so now the album will have lashings of glockenspiel all over it. Suits me.
Evening – a heady night at the Boogaloo. I install myself – Lucifer-like – at the side of Mr MacGowan at the bar. He’s smoking ‘Sweet Afton’ cigarettes, which are named after a Burns poem and feature the poet on the box, but are actually an Irish brand. Burns’s sister Agnes moved to Dundalk, County Louth, and helped to build up a local following for her brother’s poetry. There’s a been a Burns Obelisk in Dundalk since the mid 1800s, near his sister’s grave. Always good to learn new things while getting drunk, I find. In turn, I teach an Australian girl that ‘blond’ is spelt without an ‘e’ when referring to a man. She’s amazed at this information, and thinks I’m making it up.
Babyshambles play a two-set secret gig. I finally meet the famous Mr Doherty, very tall and thin and beautiful. He is Liza Minnelli as a boy. As a band, Babyshambles are impressively tight and un-shambolic, certianly compared to other times I’ve seen them, and put on a rather entertaining double show. I’m not au fait with Mr D’s back catalogue, but I’m pretty sure they play a few Libertines hits: the ones that sound like the Jam. For the second set, Mr D is topless save for his silk scarf. They play a few reggae-ish songs, including a version of ‘A Message To You Rudy’, with a Rastafarian gentlemen called General Santana on vocals. Apparently Mr D met him in Pentonville jail.
Also meet the artist Peter Blake, the Clash & Big Audio Dynamite musician Mr Mick Jones, and Ms Sadie Frost. Who I suppose I should describe as a famous actress, but she seems happy to be better known for just being famous. All these people seem friendly enough to me, particularly Mr Jones. I chat about ‘Performance’ with him, as sampled on that B.A.D. hit. I also insist on discussing Mr Roddy Frame’s Beatles-y haircut in the video for ‘Good Morning Britain’.
A Derry-born chap from the band Vega 4, called Johnny I think, buys me a drink and keeps myself and Mr MacGowan company at the bar. I’d met him the night before, and rather embarrassingly introduce myself to him all over again tonight. He forgives me, but my poor memory for names and faces is getting so bad these days it isn’t true. Or rather, for names and faces that aren’t burned into my cultural consicousness like Ms Moss and Mr Doherty.
But then, celebrity is relative. My father would have recognised Peter Blake more than Mr Doherty, while the reverse is true for a lot of the young people in the room tonight.
The sitting room of the flat above the pub becomes a kind of green room for the gig. Mr MacGowan – who remains at the bar all night except to join Babyshambles in a rendition of ‘Dirty Old Town’ – tells me he’s worried that his rare video copy of Mr Anger’s Scorpio Rising might be snaffled, as he left it in the upstairs sitting room. It’s not the famous ones he doesn’t trust, or the friends of the famous ones. It’s the friends of the friends of the famous ones. The hangers-on of the hangers-on. So I go upstairs to move the tape to a safer location.
I open the sitting-room door to a rather memorable tableau. Ms Moss, dressed in a dinner jacket and black stockings, plus a black wide-brimmed hat (more Judy Garland than Playboy bunny, but with a bigger hat) is tap-dancing in the centre of the room while Mr Jones plays a guitar and sings ‘Should I Stay Or Should I Go’.
Drink too much, say too much, crawl across the road to my bed.
