The Wrong People

Doll By Doll had a reliable genius for seriously pissing off all the wrong people. Not any people - the wrong ones, the ones who were of use to us. We could walk into a room containing forty harmless idiots and one person who could change our lives, and within twenty minutes that person would be out in the car park shaking their head in disbelief and disgust while the forty idiots bought us drinks. Not everyone can do this.

We went out with Devo and were thrown off after three days. Devo, a band who dressed as flowerpots and sang about being potatoes, looked at us and decided that we were the odd ones.

Straight from there onto the Hawkwind tour, where they hated us too, possibly for no better reason than that hating people is the only thing their leader Dave Brock has ever been any good at. We got as far as the Hammersmith Odeon before being thrown off that one as well, and the week after, our record company dumped us. i can see a sort of dreadful tidiness in it now.

And then Austria.

We were driving from Vienna to Innsbruck and the woman promoter, a person of real power in that part of the world and therefore exactly the sort of person we specialised in, had decided to travel with us. That morning over breakfast i had done the speech. Now listen, lads. It is really important that we are not rude to this person, or pull any stupid stunts, so that we can play Austria again, or at least before she dies. Do you know what i'm saying? Nobody protested and nobody put on the wounded innocence; they nodded, silently, which should have told me everything.

An hour and a half out of Vienna there was sniggering from the back. i turned round, and so did she, and Nick had got into her overnight bag, taken out her knickers, rolled up a poster, put one end of it in his nose and the other end into the underwear, and was giving a detailed mime of a man taking cocaine from a stranger's laundry.

We never played Austria again.

That night i could not even be bothered to say anything to him, and he came up to me in the corridor with what i still believe was genuine bafflement and said sorry about that, i don't know what came over me, do you think she'll be all right about it. The next day the heating broke in the bus and we drove a thousand miles back to London through a snowstorm with our breath freezing on the inside of the windows, and when we got there we found out the record company had dumped us. Again.

Magnet had us for a while. Lord Levy - he was just Michael Levy then, before the peerage and the fundraising - and in 1982 we delivered two albums' worth of original material, on time, like professionals, and then the money stopped arriving and the tour we had almost entirely sold out was cancelled and the NME ran a small item about traumatic rows. The fifth record, The Last Flick Of The Golden Wrench, has never come out, and i have promised it to people in bars in eleven countries.

Dave Gilmour played on Grand Passion, by the way. i mention it in the same tone in which he presumably mentions me, which is to say not often, and in pubs.

The tours and the money were the least of it. We had built a thing whose whole operating principle was that it could not be helped, and then we needed help. You cannot be an art terrorist and also require a lift home. At some point every one of us worked out privately that the joke had stopped being on them, and nobody said it out loud, because saying it out loud was not available to men of our type in that decade.

We stopped in 1982. Or 1983. i have given both dates, in print, to different people, and i would like to say that this is because the ending was gradual and hard to place, which it was, but it is also because i am genuinely not sure, and a man who cannot tell you the year his band ended has told you something about that year.

Afterwards there were some months during which i was perfectly all right, and people who know how these things go will already be uncomfortable, because that is exactly what it looks like from the outside and exactly what it says on the inside, right up until the afternoon it doesn't.

i had a solo deal. Charisma, Virgin, one of those; Strat still alive and still the only man in that building who listened to a record all the way through. i had songs. i had a voice that could still do the thing it did, up above the note, the thing that made people in the third row put their drinks down. And i had no idea at all about what was coming up the road towards me on a night in north London….