Bristol Gardens

People say Bristol Gardens as though it were an address, when what they mean is a whole quarter: Bristol Gardens, Formosa Street, Clifton Villas, a run of ochre-coloured crumbling mansions with those moorish arched windows, sliding gently into the canal end of Maida Vale. Taxi drivers used to take the fare with careful hostility. At its height that quarter contained violent Scottish gangs, prostitutes, heroin addicts, daft western Sufis, new age therapists, absconding young aristocrats, confused intellectuals, poets with no poems, and several desperate young rock bands, of whom we were the loudest and by no means the most desperate.

i lived there through the Seventies and into the Eighties, and so did Doll By Doll, and people romanticise squats and squats were mostly cold. It was the best place i have ever lived.

Mrs Bonner kept The George - an elderly Canadian with a voice that had clearly been finished in Brooklyn - and she never once in all those years gave anybody credit, including me, including at Christmas, including the time i stood in front of her and made what i still consider the finest case of my life. She was right, of course. Everyone she gave credit to would have died owing her money. She kept the postcards i sent her from every tour Doll By Doll ever went on, and i only found that out long after it could have been said to her.

Almost every day the police came in. Not for anything. They came in and stood and looked at us the way a farmer looks at a field, and then they went away again.

Up the road at The Shirland, Joe and i would drink five pints of Guinness each at lunchtime and then go and rehearse, and write, all afternoon, and be pleased with ourselves. i have tried to explain this to younger musicians and i can see them doing the arithmetic and not believing me, and the honest answer is that we were twenty-seven and made of gristle, and that the pints were part of the process in a way i am not going to be able to justify to anybody's satisfaction, least of all my own.

My parents came to visit.

i had rehearsed it in my head for a fortnight and had a plan for the conversation and had, God help me, tidied. What happened is that my mother and father took one look at the street and one look at the people and settled in like a pair of old cats on a radiator, because they were proper drinkers, and proper drinkers can find the one thing they have in common with anybody in under four minutes. Within the hour my mother and Mrs Bonner were behaving like women who had been at school together. My father went out for a paper and was seen in conversation with a large neighbour who was at that moment standing outside the café waiting for a man he intended to stab, and afterwards described him as a very civil fella.

When they left, at the corner, my mother looked back up the road and delivered her verdict in that broad Geordie of hers: yer livin' in a street full o buggers.

She was right about that as well. Both of them were always right, and neither of them ever once used it against me, which i did not appreciate until i was sorting out their funerals.

Somewhere in the middle of all that - thirty years ago, i wrote, when i wrote about it, which puts it around 1978 - i was also spending time in the Scottish Borders, in the castle-keep at Fairnington near Kelso, with my second wife Gillian.

Yes. Second wife. i have been married more than once and have gone entire decades of interviews without being asked, because the press decided early which kind of story i was and never troubled the filing. Gillian's father Bill dealt in horses and drove a Range Rover and took me on Saturday mornings to the bar of the big hotel on the Tweed at Kelso, a huntin' fishin' shootin' bar that was not mucking about, and there i sat, a squatter with a punk band and a needle-thin waist, drinking with the Duke's people and getting on with them famously - the very top and the very bottom of the British class system have identical manners and are equally uninterested in your explanation.

Henry Douglas-Home was often in there, brother of the former Prime Minister, a bird man, and he gave me a stone he had painted himself with a woodcock on it. A gift, from an old man, made by hand.

A week later, on a very bad piece of acid, in Newcastle station, i threw it at a football supporter's head.

i have told that story for thirty years as a comedy item and it gets a laugh, and the sober version goes like this: an old gentleman spent an evening painting a bird onto a stone and gave it to a young man who was already gone, and the young man put it into somebody's face. i affected other people's lives a good deal more than that in those years and could not now tell you their names.

The word that gets used about that period is wild, and wild is deer, wild is the tide. What we were was unwell, in a decade that had no vocabulary for it and a great deal of vocabulary for pretending it was style.

And i loved it, which is the part nobody wants in the book. i loved that street and those people and i love them still - Mrs Bonner, Colin, the Sufis, the lot of them - and if you gave me one afternoon back it would be a Tuesday in Bristol Gardens in about 1979, walking up from The Shirland with Joe, slightly drunk, on the way to rehearse, with the whole catastrophe still ahead of us and the light coming down the road the colour of weak tea….