Time Flowing Backwards: A Memoir

By Graeme Jefferies

This memoir is the fascinating and revealing story of Graeme Jefferies—one of the most inventive and influential musicians to emerge from New Zealand's vibrant independent music scene in the 1980s. Time Flowing Backwards spans over three decades of Jefferies career spent with bands Nocturnal Projections, This Kind of Punishment, and The Cakekitchen as well as a solo artist. In a candid and in-depth style, Jefferies recounts his recording and songwriting process along with riveting tales from incident-filled tours with the likes of Pavement, Cat Power and the Mountain Goats. This truly original and inimitable inside story highlights intense collaboration and DIY innovation, records made in hallways and houses rather than plush studios and a dedication to produce challenging and remarkable songs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mosaic Press
• Release date: Aug 17, 2018
• ISBN: 9781771612388

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

If I had known in advance about all of the hardship, extreme poverty, close encounters with death and evenings spent nail biting with worry, I think I never would have bought a one-way ticket to London. Instead, I would have just hidden under the bed in fright. Like clever Tony in Evelyn Waugh’s Handful of Dust, I was blissfully unaware of what lay ahead in my life, and just like him I was headed for trouble, destined to find things out the hard way.

Then again, if I hadn’t been brave enough, or stupid enough, to undertake such an adventure, I would have missed out meeting some incredible people and barrels of fun in some faraway places. So maybe I was lucky to have no means of escape from the events I inadvertently set in motion when I purchased that ticket.

****

I had a load of stuff with me for somebody who didn’t really have a forwarding address. Just like Waugh’s Tony again I suppose...except I wasn’t rich and I didn’t have any porters. I wasn’t headed for deep Africa either (like he was), though in some ways I might as well have been.

I’d brought a 1973 Gibson Flying V guitar, a 1970s Guild D-40 acoustic guitar (one for each hand) and a black army surplus trunk with enough clothes stuffed in it to last a year.

Most of my clothes were things I could use to work in the service industry: dickybow ties, dinner jackets, white shirts, singlets and pointy black shoes. They all fought for space inside the trunk and competed with jeans, t-shirts, and as many pairs of black pants as I could muster. It was jam packed. I had crammed as much as my 56 kilo luggage limit would allow. I suppose I thought I was getting my money’s worth but in hindsight it is hard to recall why I really thought I needed all those things.

56 kilos was a hell of a lot of stuff, but that was international air travel back in the ‘90s. It was a different world to travel in those wonderful pre-September 11th days. The trunk was heavy as a small elephant. You needed a baggage trolley to move it through the concrete jungle of the airport.

Being a musician, I’d brought along a bewildering array of master tapes and other geegaws. Analog and DAT production masters (the expensive pre-CDR industry standard of the day). All of the records I’d made up to that point were nestled inside that trunk. I had audio masters for the first two Cakekitchen albums, three This Kind of Punishment albums, the TKP EP, my Messages For the Cakekitchen solo album and all but three of the ten Nocturnal Projections songs recorded at Auckland’s Stebbings Studio in 1982 and ‘83. I also had actual slugaboutable vinyl copies of all of this stuff too, and some uncopied video masters to boot.

I remember I even brought a crescent spanner with me. It was packed into a small black travel case that also contained a quarter inch reel-to-reel tape editing block, splicing tabs, a chinagraph pencil and a pair of flea market surgical scissors that somehow used to belong to the Wellington Public Hospital. Why I thought England didn’t have any spanners I can no longer remember. Perhaps it was because tools (and indeed editing blocks) in the ‘90s were so expensive in New Zealand that I treated them like gold.

****

So there I was at Gatwick Airport on the 4th of August 1990, scissors… spanner… guitars… ready to activate my four year British patriality visa and apply in-person for permission to live and work in England.

There had already been a fair amount of rigmarole with the whole process just to get me to this point. My grandfather on my mother’s side of the family was English, and according to UK law, I was entitled to live and work in the UK because of this connection. My connection to my father’s Irish mother strangely didn’t apply. You had to be male, and have a male grandparent, to make it work. Imperial ties to the colonies were swiftly eroding. For some reason I never thought about asking my father’s father. He was from the Isle of Man. The Jefferies’ name descended from that tiny rock wedged between Ireland and Wales. Our archetypes all descend from those sturdy and stubborn pilgrims born between a rock and a hard place. Perhaps that’s what always made us such difficult (or at least unforgettable) customers.

I handed over my passport to the unsmiling lady at Gatwick Airport and self-consciously fiddled with my luggage. After what seemed like a lot of mumbling, a bit of throat clucking and a considerable amount of tut-tutting, the matronly English customs officer rubber stamped me with a sigh. Oh Monopoly board victory.

Passport control to Major Tom! Take your stuff with you and wheel your elephant on.

Next please! she said, in a loud authoritative voice.

After a non-stop thirty-six hour flight from Auckland (via Hawaii and Los Angeles) and all the stress of leaving New Zealand, I should have been hopping like a spring rabbit to finally arrive in the UK. Yet the long, claustrophobic and seemingly escapeless corridors of Gatwick squeezed all the victory juice out of the lemon of contention required to engage with British international authority.

I was pretty frazzled and was dying to feel a bit of sun on my face. The flight had been exhausting. Thirty six hours in a tin can, drunk on red wine, legs crushed. A hole burnt in your stomach from the microwaved food you ate too quickly. How could it be otherwise?

Your first international flight from one side of the world to the other is the worst jetlag you will ever experience. For one, there is the instant change of seasons. I had gone from a New Zealand winter to a sweltering English summer. Maybe that’s why airlines get you drunk. When I finally wheeled my burden out into the blistering midday sun, my goose was well and truly cooked.

Although it seems hard to believe now, I had scant idea of what I would really do in London - no plan as to where I would live or how I would survive. The early ‘90s wasn’t the information age we take for granted these days. Ashamed as I am to admit it, I had absolutely no real knowledge of the inner city of London and knew next to nothing of what to expect from life in England. As it turned out, I didn’t even have a single valid contact in the city when I got there. The two addresses I had tucked safely under my belt for security were both hopelessly out-of-date.

When the taxi driver asked me Where to? it took me quite a while to give him a good answer. My initial reply was: Take me into London please.

Yeah, but whereabouts?

I realized that I didn’t really know. I told him that I wanted to stay in the inner city for a few days, or perhaps take the train up to Scotland. We agreed that Victoria Station would be the best place for me to go. Trains and coaches left for lots of different places from there. It was as good a place as any. It was the longest I had ever been in a cab in my life.

I had been told to allow about £50 for a cab fare to the inner city but it came closer to £60 when I was finally dumped outside a B&B near Victoria. It looked like such a flea pit that I tried one around the corner, a little closer to Sloane Square. This one also looked like a flea pit but had at least been freshly painted. By then, it didn’t really matter so much.

In those days, the exchange rate was shocking. It took $3 to buy £1. No matter how much you had squirreled away, you were instantly skinned upon arrival in the UK. A quick calculation led me to the shocking realization that it wouldn’t be long before I was broke. From my £800 life savings stashed in secret compartments, £100 was already out the door just to get into town and find a place to sleep.

I felt totally exhausted, yet totally wired. My God, I had just immigrated! I’d left a country of three and a half million people to a city of over twelve million, and on a one-way ticket to boot.

I was given a room on the second-floor of an old three-storey building. The carpet dust and grime would have made George Orwell suspicious, but I was glad to take it. I showered, locked my stuff inside the dust pit, and went for my first walk in England.

London was in a heat wave. Everything was sticky. I realized later on that English summer only lasted three weeks (and then it rains for the rest of the year) but at that moment, I was beginning to wonder what I had got myself into.

Though I was almost too tired to stay awake, I was too awake to contemplate sleep and dying to have a look at the place. Wasn’t I meant to be off on a big adventure? I must have looked weird walking down the street staring at everything with bug eyes, because I was stopped by two policemen on Buckingham Palace Road less than five minutes after setting forth.

Hello, hello, hello, what’s all this then? they said.

Unaware of how out-to-lunch I must surely have appeared, I went straight from the tea pot and into the frying pan. I asked them if they knew where I could find a chemist. This wasn’t a good question to ask a policeman. Soon I was rolling up my sleeves so they could examine my arms for holes. I told them I had just arrived in London that very minute and wanted to purchase some vitamins because I wasn’t feeling 100%. It’s for the jet-lag officer. You know how it is Sir?

What sort of bloody smart arse goody two-shoes have we got here then? they must have thought.

I had no idea that the equivalent of what a Kiwi called a chemist shop was called a pharmacy in England. Lucky for me, I had my passport and visa date stamped for that morning. I suppose the British class system had led them to expect all sorts of unimaginable rubbish from the colonies to materialize asunder every now and then.

Once they had established that I wasn’t trying to take the piss out of them, and was about the biggest greenhorn you could find, they got bored with me and let me go, like one of the manky and unlovable pigeons in Trafalgar Square. Chuntering away to themselves, they went back on their beat. I grumbled to myself about police harassment and civil rights, and made a mental note to watch my step with the boys in blue in my new country of residence.

It took me a long time to adjust to living in a city of that size. Sometimes I wonder if I ever really adjusted. Although our senses are set to detect the world we live in, an equal part of them is concerned with blocking out the magnitude of impulses and enticements that constantly invade our senses from the outside world. A New Zealander in London is like a horse that has had its blinkers suddenly removed. Adjusting to living in the sweaty, gritty and uneasy inner-city lifestyle of London took some getting used to.

I can distinctly remember being totally phased by the absolute topographical difference between London and any New Zealand city. I literally stared manically at street signs, strained my head forward and peered too-closely into shop windows looking for identifiable landmarks that seemed unreachable. On my second day in the city, I went exploring and got lost within three blocks of my B&B. It took me two days to find the bus end of Victoria Station, and another day to find the entrance to the Tube.

New Zealand has no subway. I had seen tube trains on TV, but had never equated them with inner-city life. I will never forget my first journey to a tube station. I stood outside the entrance to Sloane Square, reading the notice boards and advertisements, and asked a passer by What’s in there then? When he explained that it was the Tube, with electric trains that ran underground, I wasn’t sure whether I should believe him or not. I hadn’t considered the prospect of such things existing before. Since New Zealand doesn’t have underground trains why should anywhere else? He might be pulling my leg. He must have thought I was taking the piss.

Much to my surprise, the guy wasn’t lying. I bought a day pass and took the plunge. What strange unexpected glee to find the model railways of colonial childhood realized in life-size. Later on, upon closer inspection, I decided that the train system was pretty horrible and that the mass of never-to-be-untangled wires and filthy tunnels that constitute the British public transport system of Central London was a thing of misery. Initially though, I was all for it.

After a few laps on the Circle Line, I got brave and headed for Oxford Circus. I was curious to find some of the streets I had seen on the Monopoly board growing up. I arrived at Oxford Circus around 1pm. It was rush hour on one of London’s busiest shopping streets.

It was murder. I had never been amongst so many people in my life. My born-under-a-big-sky Kiwi antennas felt extremely aware of the closeness and magnitude of the sheer number of bodies, cars, newspapers, trucks and hubris going on around me. I was on edge, uncomfortable, stuck in the busy two-legged rush hour world of Central London.

I’ve lived in a lot of other foreign cities since my three years in London, but out of any place or country that I have set up camp, I think London was the hardest one of any to live in. I would hate to get old there. I am sometimes surprised that I lasted as long as I did, or that (even worse) it took me so long to escape. I never really felt very comfortable there. I arrived in the city at the end of Thatcherism. Morale, hope and dignity were at an all-time low. But as I said before, if I had known what I was about to get myself into, it might have been better to hide under the bed and count myself lucky.

****

A renewed calculation of my quickly diminishing cash flow revealed my prospects were even worse than I first though. I had to do something pretty quickly or I was in trouble. If I didn’t make a concentrated Hurry up Harry effort on the job front my £20 a day B&B would eventually lead me to be a hungry and homeless. I had so much stuff with me too. I needed some sort of solution to a B&B or I would end up out on the street and probably lose the lot.

I had done a training course as a barman in New Zealand before coming to England, so with a shirt and tie on (in the middle of a heat wave) I wandered from pub to pub asking for a job. After a few days, and close to 50 rejections, I got lucky. I scored a job behind the bar in one of the endless watering holes in the West End. But this still wasn’t really a solution. It wasn’t full-time, and I wanted to work in a bar I could also live in so I could have a place for me and all my junk.

A week later, I found a live-in job at another pub and moved in. It was a £2.60 an hour, six days a week job on the edge of Piccadilly Circus. It was there that the long hand of fate dealt me an unexpected bit of luck, and where I made a connection that set an unexpected chain of events, and a whole way of life, into motion.

On my way to the post office outside of Tower Records on a lunch break, I bumped into former Chills bassist Martin Kean by absolute chance.

I had only met him once before, at a party in Auckland where Caroline Stone introduced us, but there he was, plain as day, outside Tower Records in amongst the crowds of mad dogs and Englishmen fighting it out in the midday sun. We exchanged details and met up again a few days later at my pub. He brought along some of the resident Kiwi mafia of squatters and newly branded colonial rubbish including my former recording studio boss Victor Grbic and eventual Cakekitchen bass player Keith McLean.

I had never heard of squatting before and found it hard to believe that you could simply scout out a place, break into it, change the locks and live rent free. It seemed too good to be true. You only had to pay a minimal amount for power and (at the risk of possible conviction, if you accidentally opened the door to the gasman) nothing at all for heating if you were brave enough to reboot the gas yourself.

It occurred to me that maybe somebody might be pulling my leg once more but since the Tube had worked out, and the pharmacy had indeed been a chemist shop, I was more willing to believe the squatting story after these other recent discoveries.

Martin and Keith were living in a squat in Brixton at the end of the Victoria Line. Strangely enough, it was only an eighty minute walk from the West End, as the crow flies. You just had to think like a crow, and poverty quickly forced me to learn that approach.

When I first visited the squat though, on my next day off, I took the Tube. When I first hit the streets of Brixton I was shocked at the unrelenting squalor, but the squat itself was homely enough once you got inside the boarded up windows and fire damaged exterior.

A lot of people were living there. The place had been going for over a year, and had a long history. A sausage-like procession of Kiwis, fresh off the plane, called it home.

English poll tax laws at the time were atrocious. They charged people who lived in the ghetto over £500 in annual resident tax, while people up the road in the more stately Wandsworth paid a mere £2.60 a year for the same thing. This meant Brixton courts were always blocked by cases of poll tax evasion, and as such, meant good luck for all those who chanced their arm by squatting there. It could take up to two years or more to be evicted legally from a squat in Brixton. Once you had changed the lock it was difficult for them to legally get rid of you. The courts had to get round to posting the five necessary legal eviction notices before you could be officially removed. They were more concerned with trying to prosecute those still thought to be living in the area that hadn’t paid their poll tax bill. So you were safe for a while because of the legal bumblings of the local council.

You just had to be careful who you opened the door to once you were inside. The squat doors had little fisheye peepholes in them, so people inside could see outside without being detected. If the persons standing outside looked dodgy, you didn’t let them in.

This connection to the world of free rent really saved my bacon, as I soon got fired from my pub job and had nowhere to go. The kindness of the Kiwi squatter mafia was all that saved my arse from hitting the ground in the initial stages of settling in London. It all went pretty pear shaped after my beginner’s luck.

The bar manager at the pub I worked at was South African, from Johannesburg, and we quickly clashed over his views about life back in his home country.

You just don’t understand what it’s like, he would say.

This wasn’t the only thing we didn’t see eye to eye on. He took great delight in firing me, and there was no love lost between us, but if I hadn’t met Martin Kean my whole story would probably have turned out differently. It’s funny how I always seemed to get saved by my connection to the music business, and in unexpected ways too.

****

Before my arrival in the UK, I had spent three months in Dunedin after I abandoned my inner-city flat in Auckland. While there, I stayed with Nigel and Erin Taylor and completed some recordings I had started back in Auckland with Stephen Kilroy at his Fish Street Studios.

Stephen owned a one-inch Philips eight-track. I had bought a TEAC reel-to-reel four track in November 1985 (which I had been more or less constantly writing songs on) and had sound engineer Craig Mason record rhythm tracks for the entire live set of the original three-piece line up of my band The Cakekitchen onto four-track. We had laid down the songs in a downtown Auckland bar using the PA there that wasn’t being used. Craig put the drums in stereo with the reverbs printed onto two tracks of the four-track, the bass on one and my guitar on the other.

The Cakekitchen had existed for a couple of years at that point, rehearsing two or three times a week, and had a wealth of material that I couldn’t afford to record any other way. Earlier, we had released a four song EP on Flying Nun Records. It was recorded on a two- inch Ampex B77 sixteen-track with the help of a $5000 grant from the Just Juice Corporation. We didn’t have the resources to finance any more sixteen-track recordings ourselves and neither did Flying Nun.

Cakekitchen’s drummer Robert Key and bassist Rachael King had become lovers during the early days of the group and were now in the process of breaking up, so our days were numbered. I very much wanted to capture the essence of what we had while we still had it. Roberts’ drumming in particular would have been really hard to replicate. His parts on those early songs were really important to the overall texture and feel of the material. I rate his contribution to the early Cakekitchen stuff really highly.

We laid down every song that we did well at the time and I transferred the best of these rhythm tracks onto Stephen’s eight-track in Dunedin, where I added all the vocals, extra rhythm guitars and other guitar overdubs. The idea was to come up with a couple of albums of material that included layered (but still basically live) arrangements of all the songs we played as a band, along with useable recordings of all the songs I had written independently that I thought would be good to release. I liked the idea of making up an album that had a varied array of instrumentation from track-to-track and didn’t use the same instruments on every song.

It was great fun recording with Stephen. Nothing was too much trouble for him to consider. He even understood my reasoning for recording the vocals for Walking on Glass inside of the studio cupboard to get that claustrophobic feeling you get reading about people lost inside castle walls like in the Iain Banks book of the same name. Stephen was even generous enough to let me leave town with the tapes without first actually paying the studio bill.

We agreed that I would pay him when I had found a license for the material. Much to my disgrace, it took me way longer to pay him back than I would have ever thought probable at the time. Being the good sport that he was, he never once moaned to me about it, though I’m sure he can’t have been pleased in how long it took me to pay him. I am forever grateful to him for having enough interest and faith in what I did to afford me the opportunity to complete the recordings on time.

As fate would have it, it all got a bit curried up at the end. We ended up having just one night for the final mix down of all the material we had been pushing to complete for three months. On top of that, we couldn’t start until about 9pm because the studio was being used for rehearsals before then. So it really was a bit of a mad rush to finish it all in time, but somehow we managed to get it done. In three months we had layered and completed seven songs on Stephen’s eight-track and I had finished nine songs on the four-track. Some of the four track recordings were completed at Alastair Galbraith’s place off George street in downtown Dunedin.

Considering it was all done in one night it is a wonder the mixes turned out as well as they did. I remember I had to quickly sing middle eight backing vocals before the last chorus on Dogs and Cats prior to mixing the song down. I discovered to my horror that they had been left off the four-track recording. Out of the first 20 Cakekitchen songs to be released by the New York label Homestead Records, 16 of them were all mixed in that one evening. I didn’t sleep at all that night, and once we had completed the mixes I started to edit the analogue masters together with a cutting block and razor blade so that they could be transferred to DAT to make digital masters of the recordings before leaving the city.

For some reason an uninvited Brian Spittle came knocking on the studio door in the early hours of the morning and proceeded to make the task of editing more difficult by talking at the top of his voice to Stephen about a whole pile of unrelated (but difficult to ignore topics) while I tried to delicately find the right silences under the headphones, then chalk mark and splice the tapes, to assemble the two-track masters for the World of Sand album and the six non-Flying Nun EP songs that made up the rest of the Time Flowing Backwards.

We had to get the two-track back by midday. I didn’t have the heart to chuck Brian Spittle out, but really I should have. There were a couple of hairy moments that resulted from the lack of silence. I actually sliced off the first note of File Under Filed by mistake. Strangely enough, it worked just as well not starting on the tonic note but it wasn’t intentional. The missing tonic note was somewhere on the studio floor. It would have taken too long to find it. Quarter-inch analogue production masters were recorded at a tape speed of 15" per second, so it didn’t take long for a big pile of tape to appear on the floor.

I had a rather vague plan of trying to get a record deal for the two albums of material when I arrived in London. When I got my job at the pub, I set the wheels in motion by purchasing a cassette duplicator for £85 to make copies of the material. It took almost all of my remaining money to buy that duplicator, but since I was working and had a place to live at the time, it didn’t seem so risky.

I hadn’t planned on being fired, and was pretty mortified when I was told that I wasn’t being kept on at the pub. The only other thing that I had done as preparation for my life on the other side of the world was learn a few well known chestnuts I could use for busking if I got short of money. This turned out to be more of a life saver than I would have ever imagined.

****

I started to busk around London almost immediately after losing my job. My version of Paul Simon’s The Boxer was pretty much all that saved the day on many occasions. Time and time again that Li-La-Li chorus filled the case of the Guild D-40 with spare change. Of all the songs that I played during the very long last year I lived in London, (when I more or less existed solely off busking) The Boxer did more to save the day than any other. If ever I should be so lucky to be sitting next to Paul Simon in a bar I would gratefully buy him a drink and tell him my story about his song. I imagine he also played down in the tunnels during his years on the folk circuit in England. I think he would be pleased that his tale of big city loneliness had offered a real life solution for a little bit of food and a little bit of comfort.

I had to quickly pick up the busking code of ethics in the London Underground when I started. On any given day, there was an endless supply of people either playing or begging in corridors of the Tube. You had to get to know everyone because you were competing for the same cash. There were beggars, drunkards, junkies, women with children, buskers and people singing without an instrument at all, everyone was on the make for a little bit of money. In the best spots, you could get £20 in half an hour but since the best places were so desirable, you had to be fairly organized to get them.

The busker’s code of London worked as follows. If you got to say, the tunnel that joins the Piccadilly and Victoria Lines in Green Park at nine in the morning, there would already be a person playing and a list of names and times written on the nearest poster with the playing order for the day’s entertainment. It would usually be booked until at least mid-afternoon by 9am.

However, this list would be null and void if a policeman appeared or the place was vacant. You had to continually check the best spots. The turnaround of people, and the lists of available times, changed at the drop of a hat. The code of honour said you could only play for an hour before surrendering your patch to the next person who wanted it.

The maximum fine for playing in the Tube was £400, but you just had to risk it if you didn’t have other options. Sometimes I even stood directly in front of the No Busking sign so nobody would see it. I learned soon though, that the police didn’t really feel the need to enforce the law if you gave them a chance to avoid it. They let you be if you simply stopped playing and left as soon as you saw them coming. If you kept playing in front of their noses however, they were obliged to do something about it. The police were easy enough to spot in advance anyway, with their big blue egg- shaped hats. You could also be prosecuted by the transport police, and they were harder to spot in their little flat hats. They were also more likely to take you in. They weren’t bobbies on the beat.

In a way, buskers were an undercover deterrent for planting bombs in the underground’s highly populated areas, and I think the police were aware of this. Strangely enough, when a station was evacuated because of a bomb scare, the only people that didn’t want to leave were buskers who had a patch booked that in theory was about to be blown asunder. You would sometimes see a line of people with instrument cases walking against the tidal wave of people hurrying to evacuate the presumably doomed tube station.

I also learned fairly early on that the code of honour was not always adhered to. Sometimes the list of names was obviously written by one person trying to book the place for three or four hours at a time. So you knew that Harry’s booking at 10 would probably not be happening. If mysteriously no new person arrived at the patch at 10am, it was usually possible to strike up a deal with the person you had caught out. It was important to be aware of this little scheme because there were some really lucrative places to play and this sort of thing happened all the time. On any given day during peak hours, there were more than a couple of hundred people wandering around the subway looking for a good opportunity to finance their lunch by playing as loudly as possible.

Timing and luck played a big part in being a busker, but volume was also very important. The louder you played, the longer people had to hear you, decide they liked it and fish into their pockets for some spare change. I swear that after a while I could hear the difference between the sound of a pound coin landing in the case from that of a 50 pence piece. I was sometimes astounded to see elderly ladies covering their ears in shock as they walked past. I wasn’t using any form of amplification, but the tunnels themselves provided a wonderful cavernous reverb that made getting a good amount of volume easy enough to achieve. Especially, if you were really hungry.

In a way, busking was all that stopped me from really going under. I had over fourteen different jobs in the three years I lived in London and found the English to be the most difficult and cantankerous employers I ever encountered. Sometimes I quit, but mainly I was fired.

Most of my barman jobs ended in violence. I gave up looking for them in the end. On more than one occasion I had to leave work by the back door, with less than my wages, to avoid the risk of wrecking the place. The broken glass was a bit of a worry. It wasn’t too difficult to have your face permanently rearranged if you weren’t careful. I couldn’t believe how rude the English drinking crowd could be. I was fresh off the boat and inadvertently easy prey: someone for the locals to have fun with by taking the piss out of on a boring afternoon. I was head-butted in the face in Battersea and bashed and battered in Vauxhall.

The guy who head-butted me gave me a scar on the left side of my face (under my nose) when his front teeth bit into my upper lip as he gave me an unexpected Newcastle kiss. He was angry because I refused to serve him after we had closed.

Yeah, busking really was all that saved me in the end. When I was fired, the money dried up pretty quickly and back down into the tunnels I went. Sometimes I used to feel sorry for my guitar. People who were quite mad would come up and say in a loud psychotic voice, Give me some money or I will break your guitar, and I would have to try and work out what to do.

Sometimes I could just shoo them away. Other times I would just close the case, give them a couple of quid and head in the opposite direction. I got to know the tunnels really well after a while. I also got to know an incredible amount of people who had fallen through the cracks on a first name basis. They were all surviving in one way or another by extracting money from patrons of the Tube.

Sometimes things would be going really well and then suddenly you wouldn’t get a penny for 20 minutes. More often than not, if you went and had a look around the corner, there would be a woman and child sitting on the steps, begging for coins with a styrofoam McDonald’s coffee cup. I never begrudged them for their money. They surely needed it twice as badly as I did.

Winter in London was very hard. I was surprised and really disappointed to find that the money from busking diminished by about two thirds after the summer tourists had gone. Less money for food and less money for power, just when you needed it most. Luckily the gas was usually always pumping. We only got caught once when Martin Kean accidentally opened the door of the squat to the gas man by mistake.

Because I could play, I luckily never had to beg. That was the only thing that stopped me, but it was also never a very reliable way to earn money or get things done. It always seemed that if I calculated wanting a little extra for some unnecessary luxury, like an album or a gig ticket, I hardly ever got it. But when I was totally desperate and had absolutely no food and no power, I somehow managed to earn enough money to survive. I think I more or less pushed my lucky star to its extreme outer limit living as a busker in London. I don’t think I could live like that again.

****

I wasn’t always poor though. It just seemed like the up and down life of living in London created a situation of continual bipolar poverty. When I first started squatting in Brixton, I was actually quite rich for a brief while. At one point, I earned really good money working as a night doorman at an exclusive gentleman’s club in Mayfair. I got the job because I was fresh off the boat and didn’t recognize any of the MPs or lords of the manor that frequented the joint.

The club was run by a Frenchman and an Italian. They catered to the comforts of the very rich, and unofficially the place was a hostess bar for the elite. You needed to spend £500 an evening to really sample the sweet delights it offered. They hired a stripper every night just to remind you how naughty you could be. Champagne was £100 a bottle. The ladies base fee for spending the evening just talking to you and letting you buy the drinks was £50. Unbeknownst to customers, the girls got a cut in the champagne sales, so they insisted on a least two bottles per evening. You could see them pouring it into the drunken pot plants while the gentlemen were in the gents.

My job was to stop any riff raff from getting into the place, park the cars of people so rich that they didn’t care who parked their car and to hail taxis for any liaisons (that was where the rest of the punter’s £500 disappeared).

The club employed a dazzling array of British and continental beauties to tempt the wallets of the rich. It was all very discreet. The ladies had no respect for their clients. They delighted in such power plays, as demanding a customer to give me £20 for getting a taxi. The gentleman knew that if they didn’t cough up, the exotic delights promised in the club might not burn his feathers quite so wildly. So they usually obliged without protest.

The girls were great and as a job it was a real eye opener to a bizarre, previously undisclosed, way of life. They would tell you such personal details like Lord Jim always had big skid marks in his underpants because he was so up himself that he was afraid to touch his own bumhole.

One time a high court judge was so plastered he couldn’t leave the club or navigate the mirrored exit. I had to more or less lead him blindly from the club to his taxi. He was so drunk and fat though that he couldn’t fit into the back of the cab. In the end, I had to leave a size ten shoe print on the back of his trousers to force him in.

I almost felt ashamed of being part of this menagerie. Then again, I was making fantastic money and I had no respect for the toffs either. So what did it matter? For a while it was fascinating, in a trainspotting sort of way.

After about four months, I quit. The weather was getting as beastly as the clients and that year London had its worst snowfall in eight years.

Also, it was almost impossible not to become emotionally involved working in a place like that after a while because you came to understand a lot of the circumstances of the women working there. They were either unmarried mothers bringing up children, illegal aliens with no work permits, elegantly dressed and immaculately made up heroin addicts or strong willed adventurers with hard hearts who were out to earn big money and retire early with a freehold house. I started to view the money I was getting as somehow dirty. I hated the way the rich gentlemen spoke to me. The English class system and public school mentality seemed to view all people from the antipodes as sheep fuckers.

But you’re from the colonies old boy, was their stock answer to everything.

I wrote Greater Windmill Street Blues while working there. It uses the phrase Case job leaving in the early hours. A case job is London cabby slang, an easy money earner. It’s where the taxi stays parked outside the house of the rendezvous while the governor samples the forbidden fruit of his lust. The cabbies were always seeking this type of job because it was a gas saver and a good chance to read the paper.

I think if I had stayed working at the club much longer I would have gotten into trouble. There was one woman there that I really liked and got on with extremely well but I couldn’t entertain anything substantial from the friendship because of the way she earned her living. It would have only lead to heartbreak and tears.

I was too much of a puritan anyway and far too green and way too jealous and possessive in matters of the heart to have not been destroyed by my feelings for her in the long run. I made the right decision by quitting. She was really gorgeous though. Greater Windmill Street Blues is about her, and her situation.

Greater Windmill Street Blues

Across the river one more winter.

Safe, inside an air-raid shelter.

Penny says "Please cross the border,

Bring your clothes and taste the water"

Admiral’s city for a handmaid’s shower,

Wastes more money but he didn’t melt her.

No he didn’t melt her. Oh no.

Buys her presence, eats her flower.