The Light just faded out... Sputnik meets the black hole

CHAPTER 2. The Lost Years

There was never a day when me and Martin and Neal sat down and said "ok that is it"... the light just faded.. Yeah we had said stupid things, become arrogant... in the madness that is success you loose control...  our naivete...  there was no manager to protect us...  tell us when we were loosing it...  there was just us and we were about to pay for our arrogance.....  I'd even lost Magenta who had found a new career in television.....

I look back even now and wonder if it was me... did I become too cynical?... I know Martin looks back at the person he became and cringes... never again he tells me!... but maybe it was all that "fleece the world stuff"... it was just a play on words, just a cute idea for a slogan and a T-shirt, pointing out how so many groups had propelled their careers forward on the charity ticket..... funny I thought, but people read me wrong, they believed I was some super smart scheming businessman bent on swindling every penny out of all those unsuspecting souls who had supported us...  I was round at Glen Matlocks house last week saying how I hated the business side of things and he was amazed... he thought I must be just like Malcolm McLaren! (Glen has really helped us this time around and I owe him for that... not many people ever wanted us to succeed again and yet he has been so generous with his time and contacts...)... 

Or maybe I pushed too far...  maybe the life I led with Janet Street-Porter was an influence on me...  Now I've never talked about her, and she is an extraordinary woman.. a woman in a mans world, pushing against all odds to get to the top, acting just like a pushy man would...  but of course the world forgives pushy men, that is OK , but a pushy woman is seen as a bitch...  so maybe its that Armour she puts around her self that makes her seem cynical and horrible, when behind it all she is as insecure as all of us...  maybe our time together made us both like that...  I sometimes wonder..... 

Janet and I split up soon after...

Martin set to work on a solo album with a friend of mine from Slaughter and the Dogs, Mick Rossi... Neal X and I started playing again together in the Sputnik studio, playing all Led Zeppelin cover versions but not really knowing what to do.....  maybe we could make a more rock Sputnik...  these times test your confidence... instead we sat upstairs watching violent movies most of the time, really loud, imagining we were enjoying ourselves but all the while knowing our baby was dying...it was hell..... 

But worse, this business doesn't like you to get another go - it's like if they decide you're over, then you have to be over, regardless of what the fans want.......  it was as if all the great ideas had been forgotten...  all the innovation, the videos, the vision, all those great stories that make the special groups have a place in history... it was as if I had somehow conned everybody...  tricked them into liking Sputnik, tricked them into putting us on 70 front covers... tricked everybody into buying 800,000 albums...

Then I got a phone call from Andrew Eldritch of the Sisters of Mercy...