Burnt Kiddies

By then i was squatting the basement of a house in Formosa Street, London W9, taking a quantity of acid that i would now describe as structural, and i had painted the whole flat black and red and silver, so that it looked like the set of a Hammer film in which the vampire has gone into interior design. Doll By Doll got put together in that basement, the way you put a thing together in a shed, out of what is lying about.

We meant to be an art terrorist rock band. i know how that sounds now, in an age when the most subversive thing available to a musician is a functioning pension, but we meant it, and we were good at it.

The first proper campaign was the calendar. We assembled a hideous calendar, twelve months of it, properly printed, full of images depicting poverty and war and cruelty, and had it hand-delivered to the fifty most important people in the London music business by our road manager Colin, who was the most frightening man any of us had ever met and who did not knock. He went into the reception areas and threw them. Then we printed disturbing postcards to follow up - a Japanese girl being hit by a car, a fox in a trap, a gypsy tinsmith coming at the camera with a hammer - and on the back, in nice type, DOLL BY DOLL REQUEST. DOLL BY DOLL REGRET. DOLL BY DOLL HAVE MOVED.

You will want to know what we thought we were doing, and the honest answer is that we were refusing to be lovable, which works in the way that jumping off a roof works.

Kris Needs came to see us at the Acne Club in Aylesbury in front of about fifty people and wrote in ZigZag that we were a nature ramble through Hell, which has been read back to me at parties for thirty years. He also wondered in print why a band living in a London squat gave all its gig money away. We did, and it was a moral position, and it was also completely mad, and both of those things can be true of the same twenty pounds.

Then Reading.

We took acid before we went on - not a bit, the amount you take when you have decided that the performance is the least important thing about the afternoon. It was one of those cold grey August festival days where the audience sits in bin bags, and John Peel, who hated our music with a purity i still find moving, stood at the side of the stage next to Lemmy, and the two of them watched us with what i can only call transcendental disapproval. And as we went on, the sun came out. Paul Du Noyer wrote it up in the NME: perversely, he said, when Doll By Doll took the stage the sun decided to shine. That sentence has been worth more to me over the years than several of my albums.

The first record was going to be called Burnt Kiddies. i still think it is a great title. The record company - and here you must imagine a man in a good jacket doing the face - explained that it was not a great title, and it came out as Remember instead. Shame.

At the ZigZag tenth birthday do at the Venue, which our own lot had helped organise, Jo Shaw came to the end of his patience with something i have never been able to reconstruct and demolished five hundred pounds' worth of rare and trusty guitar in front of everybody. Five hundred pounds, in 1979, for a guitar he was fond of.

None of it was a strategy to get attention. We had attention. Melody Maker would have run us on the cover if we had let them. What we were doing, and nobody in the band could have told you this at the time, was arranging for the attention to hurt us in a manner we controlled, which is a thing damaged people do, and which is why bands like ours get described afterwards as ahead of their time, when we were exactly on time and facing the wrong way.

And the music, which i have hardly mentioned. There were nights in halls and universities and one ballroom in Scotland where the promoter wept, when the four of us got up to something i have not heard from anybody since, and i include in that every record i have subsequently made. Jo Shaw played guitar like a man arguing with God and winning on points. Dave McIntosh hit things as though they had said something about his mother. And in the middle of it there was a thin Fifer in a state of permanent chemical astonishment, singing in a voice he still had then, a voice that went up into the roof, and who assumed at twenty-eight that the voice was simply a thing he owned.

Joe named a chord sequence once - E A B E A B - and called it Summer's End. We used it. i have used it every year since in one shape or another, and mentioned every year that he named it, and one of these days somebody is going to work out that i have been writing the same song since 1979 and that the subject of it is four young men in a room in Maida Vale being briefly, unbearably good….