I think I referred to the 1970s as the decade where “ everything went to Hell in a hand basket “ & in many respects this was true but in an abstract sense - politically, socially. Not personally. Not really, agreed some of the ground-work was laid, but beyond that I have to admit to looking at the late-70s ( in particular ) as a golden era. The end of childhood, the music was great and the world looked like the oyster its always claimed to be. Daft image if you ask me, after all a pearl is simply a bit of grit with shell round it right ?
So the Fall came not then ( minor skirmishes not withstanding ) nor even immediately after the loss of my father. In fact, for six long years I held things at bay with a grim determination & not a little success. Trouble is, the more plates you leave spinning at the top of that pole sooner or later your kitchen is going to resemble a Greek Wedding. And with a bang rather than a whimper - maybe crash would be more appropriate, but the simile is hackneyed now.
Also, they say that Pride comes before the Fall don’t they ? [ I’ll have to deal with the “They” at some point but not yet ] And maybe they’re right about that because I did begin to believe my own hype and that’s never a good idea - even as a first-star blagger there are limits & going to bed with your own ego isn’t recommended as a long-term exercise. But don’t take my word for it, suck it & see - the fallout is never pretty.
I’ve dealt in some vague terms about the breaking up of the Scream Scene ( for want of a better sobriquet ) because its difficult to put any kind of timeline on it. Or specific events, really but in general terms long-term haunts began to come to the end of their shelf-life. This was partly due to musical paradigm shift - the so-called Second Summer of Love at the end of the exciting Acid House/Goth crossover years heralded the travelling north to Madchester of the cognescenti - very closely followed by the ‘rock scene’ invasion from Seattle or all-points west.
What happened to the various characters remains largely unknown, and those that are known merely performed a remarkable chameleon-like trick & re-invented themselves to be able to blend unnoticed into whatever a particular ‘night’ required. That is to say those that maintained any sort of social integrity vanished completely, and those of us less abashed by such rapid alteration of personal style made the comparatively short transition into the aforementioned ‘rock scene’. Which had available plenty of appropriate haunts, well-run nights & a certain regard for ‘established’ scenesters - for we were now old hacks. The ‘been there, got the shirt & scars’ type of second-echelon ligger that told a good story, could afford to spread the wealth in beer or whatever & looked good on the arm. Plus, it’s a short cut (haha) from hair extensions to actual long hair & leather duds look pretty much the same everywhere.
Don’t get me wrong, here I’m not putting any of it down. Times were still to be had, but our control had slipped slightly out of focus trading on times past as opposed to stuff we were to do - although we did a bit of that as well. Enough for the kudos, but nothing requiring any actual effort. Decadent sounding, yes ? Well that was the role that those of us who made the change went for & it stuck well. After all, the nights & the sounds may have changed but the door staff remained the same, as did the bar staff etc etc Familiarity makes for a good reference & there were a few of us that had learned well enough to do good.
So, whereas on the back-burner ( somewhere in that highly private and most compartmentalized of places in one’s soul ) there was stuff cooking the open to the world face was shiny with health & wealth & party. Its interesting to note that there was one haunt that made a similar transition from post-punk and Goths to the new status quo of Rock Scene Hangout, and this was Wardour Street’s very own spit and sawdust alt-hangout The Intrepid Fox.
On the kitchen wall in Ibrox Court there still hangs a 7” single called “Upstairs At The Fox” by Max & the Losers, an independent single release made by the pre-rock brotherhood that made it first stop on any given night out way back in the early 80s. Now that the ‘Fox has been uprooted from its spiritual home ( ie just down Wardour from the other uprooted mecca The Marquee Club ), the denizens from Upstairs all had identical Fox-head tattoos to celebrate their time there & these are good examples of the sort of loyalty and reminiscence the place still holds to this day. Refusing to be packaged into a ‘theme’ or anything so trite, even now on any day of the week you can walk into its current location on St Giles Circus ( historically a part of London populated by miscreants and ne’er do wells ) & see faded Punk Rock Stars, up-&-coming Deathrock bands with all and sundry in between. A monument, therefore to what was and what should never have been - to blatantly paraphrase Led Zeppelin.
But it’s the last of its kind. Other late-80s into-the-90s famous hangouts like the Astoria or the Limelight Club & even the W>A>G ( a point for anyone who can tell me what WAG stood for ) have all succumbed to the developer or ( in the case of the Astoria ) the RE-developer. Another set of holes to go with the t-shirts and scars, I suppose and all part of the ever-changing face of life. But it saddens me somewhat. In the sense that nothing is sacred, for want of a better term and that everything tends to entropy in the end. Its depressing, and I wonder whither have all the ghosts of drunken high-jinks and equally drunken lows have dissipated ? To haunt unrecognised & unloved as much as the memories and lives buried even further underneath ? It seems we as a race are all too hurried to turn our pasts into something else, a new totem of a hoped-for and brighter future, our pasts into mere memory and the archaeology thereof. It seems almost desperate, and very neatly encapsulates a society that seems to have lost its core identity, its very soul. But I digress.
In a way, anyway because I’m at that point where to put the inevitable crash into some kind of understandable context begins to show the limitations of my grasp. Because there is no single definite point or event to which I can point and say “There, that’s where it started.” I don’t suppose there ever was one, no matter how many of the therapists you go to seeking sufferance or absolution wish there to be. I will, however sift through the evidence.
The most obvious point to start is the day - and to this day, I still cannot bring to mind what logic led me there - the day I went and bought some heroin for the first time in about five years.
On the face of it, nothing was that bad. Stuff in the hurt-locker piling up, I guess. I was single again for the first time in quite a few years & that wasn’t sitting well ( although I’m a dab-hand at it now, have it down to a fine art thank you very much ) but equally I was sick of all the bullshit that being in a relationship entailed. It seemed to me that as soon as some kind of stability was established then the magic, too went winging its way onto the next “ honeymoon-period proto-couple” & an all-too-familiar domesticity of day-to-day ritual took over before the inevitable “ where are we going ?” conversations. We all know only too well where those go. So, finally sick of it all, I had ended the affair and gotten rid of all the superficial hangers-on that I had acquired over the previous two or three years. Selfish free-loaders who lived under my roof free to criticise my lifestyle but not to put their hands into their wallets apparently - & of course this kind of catharsis always has some kind of fallout. I became periodically solitary, something I maintain to this day. Now its for healthier reasons but then I think, disillusionment had set in. I seemed to work all hours God sent for a couple of days/nights to get all dolled-up and worked-up & go … well, nowhere new. Hearing nothing, seeing nothing new. Talking the same-old shite to the self-same idiot you told it to last week. It had become a sorry merry-go-round of ritual, merry-making by rote and doing a poor job of it to boot.
So I had knowledge of gear available in the area ( Colindale/Burnt Oak - hardly a shock ) & after having the idea in my head for a few weeks, eating away at my resolve I suppose I upped and went for it one cold February night in ( I think ) ‘94.
For those of you not aux fait with the protocol of heroin buying I’ll explain. Once you’ve chased the Dragon you are forever marked by the experience & thus recognisable to anyone else who has also done so. Even with years of abstinence behind you, you can pass a stranger in the street and catch their eye to pass an un-spoken bond. You know a ‘user’ when you see one. They also know you for one. This is useful when negotiating your way into a first ‘buy’ after a period of abstinence. It makes the necessary initial-approach far less perilous than it might otherwise be, but not without its pitfalls completely. You have to be pretty resolute, unless you wish to risk a trip to the various ( & notorious ) ‘frontlines’ that pepper the capital. You can end up with a bag of curry powder at best, or skint and badly hurt as easily as score at a ‘frontline’ spot. But people still use them, as I have on many an occasion.
This time, however I had an address at which ( I had been reliably informed ) that gear may be acquired. Foolhardy as it may seem, I went straight to this front door & after a little negotiation ( read- bullshitting ) was invited somewhat (belatedly) furtive within & after only a minor wait ( the wait is another thing, it can last for hours. This tests resolve, & ‘reliability’ ie if I’m not followed in by the Drug Squad five minutes later … etc ) left with a twenty-quid wrap of brown heroin. If this sounds absurdly simple, then you’d be right. When it comes to this area of life I have ridiculously big cojones & can front myself anywhere - its necessary to my continued existence and relative well-being, trust me. Doesn’t mean I didn’t allow myself a huge grin of relief & a few shakes once I’d negotiated the short walk home. It is that simple, though if you are so inclined & on that particular night it seems like I was.
Now this is before the days that I used a needle. Things hadn’t quite got that out of hand but in retrospect this was most certainly the first step along that road. I’m being candid in this way for two reasons ; one, it seems there’s an awful amount of rubbish perpetrated by media & what-have-you about the sordid world of drug use. The so-called rules of having to seek out dodgy middlemen in spit & sawdust pubs, of waiting in alleyways & ‘sampling’ packets of white powder with the tip of a knife are all images from Hollywood or thereabouts. Yes the world is populated by criminals, prostitutes etc etc but at the bottom line there is the supply and the need. And two, I want folk to know that it is that easy should the fancy take & that there really aren’t any hoops to jump through before the dragon jumps up that tube & things will never be the same again. I want you to see how a reasonably intelligent & capable person can push all common-sense aside and do this all too easily. Because the other bottom line is that there is no simple answer, and its not just heroin. Its everything, everywhere. Anything can do the damage, you just need to need enough. After which shame & the need for secrecy begins to do the rest of the damage.
So off home I went, attended to the very familiar ritual of rolling a tube and laying the powder on a foil-chute before chasing the bubbling brown liquid up and down with a lighter, judiciously applied underneath. I fell into a reverie, then woke & repeated this process for the best part of the rest of the night. When it was finished I crashed out & got up for work cursing and vomiting a few hours later. And … and nothing. This is probably the scariest bit; the next day, you don’t wake up pale and thin, teeth missing & rattling the bones you can see for a ‘fix’. The next day starts with a hangover, just like a night out on the ale. So its easy to see why, and how so many do the “I can handle it, no bother. Just dabble.”-dance for months on end. No thunder & lightning, no mark of Cain. Simple as … Scary, huh ?
It takes work to pick up a ‘habit’. Which can mean ‘once a month/week ‘etc down to an hour. But when the countdown starts, the only person that knows its started is you. So the clock of the habit just keeps ticking. In which meantime the rest of life rolls on oblivious. In fact, it seems to me now - working from memory, at least - that ‘life’ as far as I knew back then continued to be lived in much the same way. That is, working for five or sometimes six days a week, then the going-out ritual of the weekend days. Nothing on the surface to betray any symptom of the real process at work underneath. Except there are signs, if you know where to look and what to look for. For instance a sudden cessation in drinking. Especially someone who habitually drank quite a lot. That’s a good sign to look for, if you’re of a mind to look. The two don’t really mix, but if the person is still using the usual amount of stimulants - well that’s strike-two. Usually a speed user will drink to first control the buzz and then to avoid the come-down. So put two & two together it gives you enough for a suspicion, no more. And besides, if its only somebody you’d see for an evening or two out of seven then you’re probably not paying such close attention. I mention it only as an interesting point.
I managed to maintain a positive image for a long time after the cracks were showing elsewhere. Naturally my work suffered, particularly as I was taking time out each morning to pick up before going out on my runs but I managed to survive any problems there by making excuses about my health. I was known to be asthmatic, so I used that card whenever something was said. Your finances begin to suffer, too. The first thing to go are the habitual nights-out. Then when the bite to keep mind and body together in enough shape to work every day you need to make a decision. Do you ‘get registered ‘ & take the methadone ?
I’ll have to explain a bit. Getting a ‘script nowadays is a lot easier than it once was. Before the data-protection act there was always the possibility of various interested bodies being able to access your medical records, so being a ‘registered’ user of narcotic substitute Methadone wasn’t something you engaged in lightly. But you did it because you had to. You ouldn’t just google-up your nearest clinic, either. General Practitioners who were ‘known’ to be addict-sympathetic were generally difficult to get registered with for obvious reasons, and because they were few they were often over-prescribed if you’ll pardon the joke. Luckily ( or unluckily depending on your point of view ) there was one-such sympathetic GP very near my home & I successfully registered and started my first regimen of ‘juice’.
Some addicts, & I for one have never really understood this behaviour, would pick up their weekly supply of Juice & promptly go sell it in order to buy heroin with. This is really stupid, & I’ll take a moment to explain the other reason as to why this is daft. The going-rate for methadone linctus/mixture is ten mil/ £10. Now while fifty miligrams of methadone will ‘hold’ an addict from being ill from withdrawal for a good twenty four hours, fifty quid’s worth of street-level smack won’t get you much past ten if you’re lucky. So do the maths. I never did this, preferring to look upon my dose as enough hours to do the graft & get the cash for my gear without complications. But its this kind of thinking that can get you equally into deeper shit. As in, why waste all that money on street crap when there’s pharmaceutical gear out there you can mix judiciously and stay higher for longer, for cheaper ? ! I think you can see where this is going, and you’d be right.
One fateful evening I was out with one of my regular partners ( ‘friend’ just isn’t the right word, it lacks a certain sense of the intimacy of drug-taking as well as implying too much of the other facilities of friendship -loyalty, for instance ) looking for a fix, but of that was there none. Nish, nowt. Nowhere. Now logically we were physically ok, but after a few hours on the ‘look’ one does begin to feel the bite of the need irrespective of whether you’ve had a substitute. So we knew a fella who instead of selling powder sold ‘amps’. These are ampoules of methadone, usually 50mg a pop. It was a scene all on its own - addicts who, eschewing the uncertainty of street drugs went to private doctors and paid for prescriptions ( perfectly legally ) of meth-amps plus valium and dexys ( dexamphetamine sulphate ). So any port in a storm, we paid this man a visit and came away with a goody-bag of exactly as I have just described.
The other thing here, of course is you can’t smoke an ampoule. This was strictly intravenous fare, but that particular rubicon had been passed some months previously with not a blink of thought, or regret. This was to be a red letter day, for me at least. I mixed the three as directed and without qualm shot a pretty good dose, into heaven - or a reasonable facsimile thereof. This was something else entirely. Clean & high & long, I rode that for about forty-eight hours. Thereafter nothing would ever be the same, and the mere thought of going back to the grubby habit of mixing unknown powders into a brown liquid and putting that in my arm was a no-no. I could get to the place I wanted, legally (ish) and without the usual risks of overdose and poison … The top of the horribly precipitous, very slippery slope had been reached.
It was 1995.
