the jeunesse dorée.
All of London’s rock aristocracy were in attendance the evening Spanish Tony, nefarious drug dealer to the stars, finally opened his nightclub (which had, actually, only one night). Like all dealers, he didn’t consider himself just a dealer, he wanted to be something else, something a bit more grand, a ma?tre d’ to the hipoisie. Thus, the Vesuvio. It was pretty much of a dive, but the people there were just stupendous: le tout Londres hip. All the Beatles, most of the Stones, a few Whos, spangled guitar slingers, mangled drummers were there – in short, everybody who was anybody, or thought they were. The punch had, of course, been spiked with LSD. And in strolls Paul – very casually, very cool, almost whistling, you know, with one of those little smiles on his lips as if he’s got a really big secret. John was already there and seemed to have had quite a bit of punch by the time we arrived. George, too, of course, and Pattie Boyd, the quintessence of Pop chic. So there’s our Paulie, looking rather pleased with himself. He was in fact very cool, a real man-about-town and interested in different things than George. Curious Paul, fascinated with all sorts of strange things – he really was like that. And what swinging scene would be complete without Robert Fraser, Groovy Bob – the title of Harriet Vyner’s biography, a bricolage portrait of the archetypal boulevardier of swinging London. The Robert Fraser Gallery was the place to be. He showed the classic Pop artists of the sixties – Richard Hamilton, Jim Dine, and Andy Warhol – and made avant-garde art hip to the rock princelings. He was beautiful, took a lot of drugs, and could always be found where the new thing was happening. ‘More than any other figure I can think of, Robert Fraser personifies the Sixties as I remember them,’ so blurbed Lord McCartney on the back of the Vyner bio. Robert even tried to turn Paul on to heroin, but Paul didn’t care for the experience – that was lucky!
So there we were, all having a wonderful time, really high and even a little bit of alcohol, which to us was anathema. It was punch, which is easy to drink and a rather delicious sort of drunk. Little did we know what was in it. Finally we decide to drink, and it was acid! And then in the middle of all this, Paul, sidling about with his hands behind his back.
‘What have you got behind your back, Paul?’ we are crying out.
‘Oh, nothing, really,’ says he. ‘Just something, um, we’ve just done.’ Knowing that everyone would say, ‘Oh! Play it!’
Well, the thing about the Vesuvio that was really great was the speakers. That’s where all of our money had gone, on the very best speakers, huge speakers, the biggest that you could possibly get. Everything else was on the floor, of course; just loads of cushions. Come to think of it, the set-up would never have worked as a club, but Tony wasn’t one to get hung up on the details. For a private party, however, it was perfect. So there was a lot of ‘Oh, go on, Paul, please!’ You know, you always had to do that with him, basically.
‘Oh, yeah, all right, then,’ he says. And then he proceeds to put on ‘Hey, Jude’. It just went – boom! – straight to the chest. It was the first time anyone had ever heard it, and we were all just blown away. And then, of course, we couldn’t stop playing it, we just played away, mixed up with a bit of Little Richard and some blues.
What a night! Right then you just knew how lucky you were to live in these times, with this crowd. That song was so impossible to describe or even take in that I didn’t know what to say to Paul, but of course I did go up to him (we were a polite little lot) and probably burbled, ‘Wow! Far out, man!’ The required string of incoherent sounds, but I felt I had to say something even though, the state I was in, I could hardly speak. Even Mick said it was fantastic, because it was. I guess most people would think the Stones may have had mixed feelings at that moment, and perhaps they did. But (possibly due to the laced punch) the main feeling was one of: aren’t we all the greatest bunch of young geniuses to grace the planet and isn’t this the most amazing time to be alive. It was as if only with this group and at that moment could Paul have done it. We had a sense of everybody being in the right place, at the right time, with the right people. And every time something came out, like ‘I Can See for Miles and Miles’ or ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’, ‘Visions of Johanna’, or the sublime ‘God Only Knows’ from Pet Sounds, or anything at all, it seemed like we had just broken another sound barrier. Blind Faith, the Mothers of Invention … one amazing group after another. Tiny Tim, anything, we were instant fans! And I don’t think it was just the drugs.
It was one of the most incestuous music scenes ever. And how did they all find each other? And how did they all seem to be in the perfect group for them? Most knew that they were, but some, like Eric Clapton, kept jumping about trying to find exactly his right space and never quite finding it. But even that made sense for him. If not for the peregrine wanderings of Eric we would never have had ‘Layla’ and all that. Experimental Eric, mixing it up with different bands: Derek and the Dominos, Greg Allman, Delaney & Bonnie, Blind Faith. He was in so many different bands – a restless troubadour. In the end, though, all this wandering about from group to group made him into a separate entity: Eric Clapton. He’s his own brand.
The Vesuvio may have limped along for another couple of weeks before it closed. Of course, the whole venture was a very dangerous idea; it would have been a place where people went to score. Definitely needed, of course, but somewhat unwise. How tempting it must have been to all – a sort of one-stop shop: you go to the club and you get the drugs right there. It would have made life easier for Spanish Tony because instead of having to drive down to John and Yoko and then to me and then drive to Robert, he could just lie on his cushions and make money. Convenient, yes, but also quite convenient for the local constabulary!
I think Spanish Tony’s fear of immediate arrest may have been unfounded. Probably the first thing that would have happened would have been the local fuzz saying, ‘Okay, how much are you going to pay us?’
In my mind’s eye the last image of that night is this: John and Yoko, both completely legless, deciding to drive themselves in the psychedelic Rolls over to Ringo’s old flat on Montagu Square. They would’ve crashed and killed themselves. Driving wasn’t John’s forte, never mind the acid. I see Spanish Tony, keeping himself cool on coke and smack, rushing out and putting them in a taxi. He hands the driver a twenty-quid note and tells him, ‘Don’t let them out till you get to 38 Montagu Square.’ There’s a picture in my mind’s eye of Mick and Keith in front of the Vesuvio with its painting of Mount Vesuvius behind them. So very camp. Mount Vesuvius was an apropos image for swinging London. We were all living underneath a volcano, getting high, getting dressed, getting together, swanning about in clubs with witty names while forces we hadn’t even guessed existed were about to fall down on us. Scintillating, vibrating creatures in fantastically beautiful clothes from Ossie Clark and the Antique Market, all frolicking beneath a volcano on the verge of erupting.
i guess she kept those vagabond ways
Singing Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht for two years was incredibly good for my writing. The bar shot right up. Not that I can now write like Bertolt Brecht or Kurt Weill, but still the experience of singing their songs on my sabbatical, as I call it, changed my way of thinking about songs – and the point of view of the song’s narrator. A kind of charged ambivalence that inflects all the imagery.
Vagabond Ways is quite a dark record – which is my speciality as I do dark quite well! I had to go into that gothic space and I didn’t have to take heroin to do it. It’s the most unrepentant of my recent albums, but then, I hadn’t done anything so bad recently that I had to repent for except … well, let’s not go into that right now.
By the time I came to record Vagabond Ways in 1999 I had been well marinated in the Brecht/Weill canon. It was like going back to school. You really learn how to use a song to tell a story. The song, ‘Vagabond Ways’, was written with Dave Courts, my dear old friend and hip jeweller – Keith’s skull rings. I came across a little piece in the New York Herald Tribune, where I do get a lot of material. The article talked about how in Sweden they hadn’t