CHAPTER 1. The False Start...
It started in 1981... Generation X had
disintegrated after the 3rd Album...
Now I must admit, Billy had discovered the band Suicide before me and
they were to become a big influence on Sputnik.. I remember him coming round to
the apartment wearing rubber stockings and playing Frankie teardrop
continually... but sadly we couldn't agree on the merits of dangerous drugs as a
passport to credibility... Something that damages so much from work to your
friendship.. it just left the 2 of us on different planets, and suddenly it was
all over... Billy Idol left the band to write his solo album in New
York.... so I was faced with the emptiness, this awful feeling of loss, like
loosing some one so dear to you... the group had been my whole life for nearly 4
years and just like that it, was over and I was completely alone, no manager or
record company...
Gen X had been the only group I'd ever been in... there was a time in 1987, when
we were recording the Kiss Me Deadly Album, when the band had been
reduced to just me, Billy and drummer Terry Chimes that we had this mad
idea - to merge Gen X and the Pistols.. we even rehearsed one day
that week in Air studios.. 2 drummers, Chimes and Cook, me, Billy and Steve
Jones... we played about 10 tracks, a mixture of Gen X and Pistols songs...now
that had a big beat.. I guess it was one of those drink fuelled 'wouldn't it be
great if kinda moments'....imagine the Ego nightmare!... it was contractually
impossible too and everyone else involved from our record company to their
manager freaked out, but it was a hell of a day..
Billy moved to New York and I didn't see him for more than a year till
out of the blue he called me up and came round!... he brought with him a white
label 12" of a new track he'd just finished called "White
Wedding" which was so great I was completely thrown...
The Story of Sputnik started slowly as I knew I had to come up with something
spectacular to compete with Billy!... I was living with Magenta Devine in
those days ,who was then working as a publicist with Tony Brainsby.. she
later went on to present the BBC2 TV travel series "Rough Guides"..
she was to become my partner in crime and muse... the nights we lay awake in bed
agonizing over who was right and what we should do... where was the essence of
rock and roll... how to pull it off again.. When I look back now I realise how
important Magenta was to the birth of sputnik.. she somehow embodied the spirit
of rock and roll and style and we discussed everything... in fact it all only went
wrong years later when magenta left to follow her own career... most people form
spin off bands from their original group but how many people who had started in
punk were able to start a whole new scene??.. a scary thought... especially as
the bedroom we were laying in was exactly the same as it was when the former
tenant left it, completely black all over, floor carpet, walls and ceiling, wow Sid
Vicious had taste..... I was reading lots of Colin Wilson at the time
and believed we could influence our future if we cared enough..
There were several false starts as I was tempted by various friends to take the
easy route.. there was a 3 month stint working with Stiv Bators with the
formation of Lords of the New Church.. I actually wrote their best song I
think called Russian Roulette, check out the song credit on the label..
its credited to James / Chimes although I wrote it all (I do get the royalties
of course..)..most people assumed that it was Brian James!... In fact
Stiv and I got on really well and wrote several tracks together...I still can't
believe he's dead, killed in a car accident in Paris.... such a waste....
There were the sessions when I produced the
group Sex Gang Children.. I loved the name (I found out later it was Malcolm
Mclarens idea... damn him, he was always to haunt me).. we recorded their
first album in a studio in the country and I indulged in my "great producer
" fantasies making them record to candle light, attacking the mics with
power drills, spray canning huge murals on the walls to create atmosphere, it
was the Guy Stevens school of producing - Ian Hunter had told me
years earlier that when Guy had produced Mott the Hoople in the 70s that
one evening in Wessex studios they were doing a take and looked in the control
room to see Guy smashing chairs up and even trying to smash the control room
glass - it was to create that magic, to create atmosphere, that somehow goes
into the music that touches the listener - true rock and roll.... aaah the
fantasy... Andreas the singer and I still speak a lot.. but really I never liked
being a producer of other bands.. I wanted my own band, my own fantasy, my own
movie where I could write the script, and like Tarantino, I could be in
my own movie too!
3 Pindock Mews in London, the Mews house that Magenta owned, became the center
of madness for 7 years!.. Steve Jones stayed there for a while and we did
some recording together but Steve was too scary for me in those days... and then
I became friends with an old hero, Johnny Thunders formerly of the New
York Dolls and Heartbreakers.. Thunders just turned up at our door
one day with Jerry Nolan and asked if I wanted to play with them that
night.. U bet!!.. it was a dream come true.. I get to play Personality crisis
legitimately!. We learnt 30 songs that afternoon sitting around in Magenta's
front room and later that day I turned up at the gig in Victoria, the Venue,
and waited.. and waited... when 2 hours later 3 friends carried Thunders in
unconscious and laid him out on the dressing room floor I realised a real life
rock n roll nightmare was to begin....
I got to somehow 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 once and did a great photo session with us
too.. We toured in France by train, we were canned off in Sweden, we sat around
in Paris trying to record... and I felt totally out of control. Back in London
Thunders started to haunt me... I used to dread that 3 am knock on the door as
he would arrive, completely out of it, to party with us...
I helped Thunders remix LAMF for jungle records... actually a really
pointless exercise when I look back at it.. that would be like remixing Raw
Power to give it a modern sound, it sooo looses the moment, the essence of
what makes great Rock and Roll.
One nite Thunders sat up with me and watched Snooker while I tried to explain
the game to this out of it American... it was the classic semi final match where
Alex Higgins (who I only ever met once, one night at the Hippodrome and
the only thing he said to me was "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... But usually it was awful... the times Magenta and I
walked him round the apartment praying he wouldn't OD on us.. watched this
tragically addicted junkie shooting up anything..... But somehow he was really
great, such a genius guitarist....I cried when he died years later, his talent
never fully realised... Nolan died too, another casualty... but no, this wasn't
what I was looking for...
Billy Idol and Tony James in 1975..with Billy in his pre spike hair days, Tj still looking to Bob Dylan....rehearsing in Portobello road
Tj and Idol, Air studios in 1979... it seemed like a lifetime later and the 2
song writing partners were on different planets...
Tony James and Magenta
photographed at 3 Pindock mews during the GEN X "Kiss me Deadly "days...
Tony James outside Pindock mews photographed by Magenta.
Tony James and Thunders on the uncomfortable sofa ... Tony explains Snooker to the Mummy...
Jerry Nolan, Thunders, Tony James and Steve New in an early photo in 82, Tj the only one NOT taking Heroin! Sadly Nolan and Thunders are both dead
now...