BRUCE LOCKHART IS probably my favourite rock musician. It’s not so much that I love every note he makes, like for instance Al Jarreau or Eric Clapton, just that as a person he is so damn fascinating, and along with this goes a musical integrity that is all too rare.
For a start, he’s one of that rare group of artists, which also includes Steve Harley, Ian Dury and Stevie Wonder, who have a major physical disability, which doesn’t seem to interfere at all with creativity. Unlike the others, however, he has never appeared on stage since becoming disabled, which is why his name provokes little more than a brief “who?” when it is mentioned, despite having sung on a chart-topping single which was the sole mass-media “hell no” response to Maggie Thatcher’s vote-catching jingoism at the time of the Falklands.
He lives in one of those steadily declining suburbs on the outskirts of London
Despite this admiration, I’d never written about him since he left that charismatic Sixties jazz-rock outfit, the Naked Lunch – the only rock band ever to appear on the Proms, though they didn’t like people reminding them of it. Like me, he was a bit of an unreconstructed Sixties hippy, though I’d cut my hair and abandoned denims for the contemporary two-tone look, while he still had the straggley locks and beard, the roll-up clutched between nicotined fingers and general laid-back demeanour of those hopeful and betrayed years.
But unlike most of his generation, who had descended into alienation or cynicism as their hopes were betrayed, Bruce’s radicalism had hardened so that he was actually the only musician I knew (outside of a few die-hard jazzers) who was still a card-carrying Communist, however many fashionable radical noises the rest of us might make.
Hell, even I had let my membership lapse, but he had actually joined at a time when most of our faith was fading.
This was what I wanted to talk to him about, and as I rang on his doorbell and listened to the low rumble of his wheelchair approaching the door, I tried to compose myself for the interview situation.
“Hey man,” he said. “Good to see you. Wanna cuppa tea? You look a little rough. Gazed on the vine a bit too fondly last night, didja?”
I grunted a vague affirmative and followed him down past the
“So wha’s ’appening?” he said as I sank the sweet, strong brew, feeling it revitalise me in a way that I hadn’t realised I needed.
“Got a bit of a family problem, you said?”
“Yeah, discovered my son’s been shooting up heroin. I think he’s got a habit.”
“I didn’t know you had any kids. Fact, I didn’t even know you were married.”
“I was. He’s just 16.”
“Shit man, that’s awful. Fucking CIA and their chemical warfare. Fucking Margaret Thatcher and her expenditure cuts and her four million unemployed. Don’t it all hang together, though?”
This was a connection I found hard to follow. Four million unemployed looking for chemical ways out of their depression made sense, but what was this stuff about chemical warfare and the Central Intelligence Agency?
“How do you mean?”
“Listen, Jack, the CIA’s been peddling all kinds of dope all over the world since World War II, surely everyone knows that: LSD, smack, coke, you name it, their dirty little fingers have been in it.”
“Well, I know about
“Damn right, the fucking Flying Tigers transporting so much horse they got nicknamed Air Opium. Bit off more than they could chew there, though, their own fucking troops getting so hopped up they fragged their own fucking officers.
“They got kicked out of ’Nam, so now they got the fucking Afghan rebels growing poppies to pay for their fucking ground-to-air missiles, and it all comes West to destabilise their own fucking allies. Bastards!”
“Run that past me a little slower, Bruce,” I said.
“Counter- revolutionaries peddling opium to pay for their weapons I can accept, they did it with the hill tribes in
“Damn right,” he said again. “I mean, look at LSD, how conveniently it came on to the market, just when we were becoming something of a threat. I mean, look what it did to me!”
Bruce is a paraplegic, who fell out of a window during some kind of a rave-up and smashed his spine. Rumour had it he’d been high on acid at the time, and he seemed to be confirming it.
“But you’ve been much more of a threat to the establishment since your accident than you were in the days of the Lunch.”
“Nice of you to say so. I don’t think they give a fuck what wallies like me sing about, as long as they’ve got the fucking power, but it’s what I do so I do it as well as I can, but I’ve got no illusions about how significant it all is. Mao never said nothing about power coming from the fingerboard of a Fender Stratocaster, you know. He said the barrel of a gun and you better believe it. Not that Mao wasn’t sometimes full of shit, but he said more good stuff than they had room for in that fucking little red book, you know.”
“You’re saying that LSD – “
“Was a fucking chemical weapon, deliberately deployed against its own population by the CIA. Certainly am. Check it out, Jack, you’re the writer.
“You know who bought the first fucking batch of acid from the fucking Eli Lilly company? The fucking CIA, that’s who. And did you know the first acid-head who flew out of a window was crazy with drinking spiked fruit punch slipped to him as part of a CIA experiment? He was one of their own people, some kind of a chemist working on the project, but they socked it to him just the same. His widow sued the Agency, but she never got anywhere. Bastards!”
“How do you know all this?”
“It’s all been published, here and there. You think I’m making it up?”
“No. But why would they try and destabilise their own allies? Thatcher and Reagan are big buddies.”
“Jack, love, it’s dog eat dog out there. We’re a fucking parliamentary democracy, aren’t we? And there are even some wets in her own party. She might lose the next election, though we should get so lucky, and even though the Labour prime minister’s likely to be a right pillock, he’ll have to make some gestures to placate the rank-and-file, and that won’t please the Agency, not at all. Four million drug addicts will keep us nice and busy, won’t they?”
All this was getting a bit far from the interview I’d planned. Though I’d wanted some political stuff, this was a bit too far-fetched for me, much as I’d like to unload my guilt on to the CIA.
“You don’t think my son’s just an addict because he comes from a broken home?”
“I can’t tell you why your son’s an addict. Hell, I don’t even know the geezer. But if it’s your fault he’s an addict, how come everyone whose parents split up ain’t sticking needles in themselves? But I tell you this, the smack he’s using is grown by those lovely romantic Afghans you see in the TV documentaries, it’s transported by people working for the Agency, and it’s coming into Britain by the planeload because fucking Margaret Thatcher cut the customs service by I don’t know how many hundred staff, conveniently making it easier for them to get it in.
“And she has the brass to talk about waging war on the drug traffickers, when her mate Ronnie Rayguns is the biggest drug trafficker alive. Shooting’s too good for bastards like that.”
I needed to think about what he’d been saying, to see how it rang true, and if true, how it affected me in my individual problem, but I wasn’t ready yet. So I got on with the interview.
“Tell me about your latest album.”
On the way back in the rickety electric train that ran from Bruce’s home suburb into
I told myself I had got my emotions under control, that the hysteria of the morning was the result of a combination of hangover and exhaustion which I could handle, now.
The first thing I had to do was to set things right, to pay for the damage I’d caused, and if possible to get back into communication with Adam.
I knew it wouldn’t be easy, but I knew it had to be tried.
When I got there, the door was locked and barred. There was no knocker or doorbell, so I had to thump on the door panels with my fist.
No one came. So I added the toe of my shoe to the racket, wondering wryly if this crashing and banging was really the right way to return to make things up.
I listened for a moment.
I thought I could hear footsteps coming down the hall, and when the door opened a crack, it was the young woman I’d met in the kitchen that morning, with the baby in her arms, asleep.
She said nothing.
“Hi,” I said, with a rather false brightness. “Remember me? I was here this morning.”
She nodded, dumbly.
“I decided to come back and apologise for kicking up such a stink. And I’d like to pay for the damage. Is anyone – ?”
“No one’s in,” she said. “Just me and baby. They all went out.”
“Could I come in and talk to you?” I asked.
Now I’d got this far, it was important to try and make some kind of contact with them, even through this not very bright young woman.
She didn’t reply, but unhooked the chain from the door and pulled it just wide enough for me to squeeze past her. I could smell that typical baby smell of stale milk on its breath and urine that took me back to Adam’s earliest days. The baby was breathing through its mouth, sterterously.
She shut the door behind me and we stood there for a moment, as if neither of us knew what to do next.
“Would you like a cup of tea?” she said.
Everyone offers me tea, as if it’s the solution to all life’s little problems, but it was at least a gesture of hospitality.
“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks.” And I followed her into the kitchen.
“You’re wrong, you know,” she said eventually.
“Wrong?”
What particular error did she have in mind? I wondered. I seemed to be wrong all down the line. One extra wrongness, either way, didn’t seem that it would make much difference.
“About Jim and Bloggsy. Yeah, Bloggsy’s got a habit, but he don’t get his stuff here. We don’t allow no drugs on the premises, not even pot. We got to be so careful. We get so many hassles as it is, without that.”
So there it was, a dead end. I realised now that though I’d told myself I was coming back to make amends, I’d actually been trying to find out who was Adam’s dealer, with some sort of crazy idea that if I could stop the source of supply, then the problem might become more manageable.
“So he has to go out to get his fix?”
“Yeah, I suppose so. Jim wouldn’t allow him to shoot up here. He’d kick him out. We let him stay because he doesn’t make much trouble, doesn’t nick stuff from us or nothing, though he gets a bit strung out at times, you know, when his man isn’t around.”
“Man?”
“You know, the supplier. Or if he’s out of bread. He’s tried to cold turkey it a couple of times, and he was like very ill, but it’s difficult to do it on your own, you know.”
Remarkable! This girl was – how old, half my age? – and she was explaining things to me that no one had ever told me before, giving the problem a dimension it had lacked before, clearing away the Man With the Golden Arm, Panic in Needle Park hogwash so I could see it in human terms instead of high drama.
“Well as long as he isn’t dealing.”
“You don’t know nothing about it, do you? I mean, how can he avoid dealing? All junkies are pushers too, they got to be. He gets his GIRO, spends twenty quid on a few bags of H, sells three hits for twenty quid, that means he’s got his hit for free. Or a mate’ll bump into him in the street, and he’ll stake him to a score. Next time, the mate’ll do the same thing for him. They help each other out.”
“So how can we stop it?”
“Stop it? The word on the street is the Government encourages it. Keeps them under control. I don’t think you’ll ever stop it.”
“So Adam is doomed?”
“Doomed? You mean, is it going to kill him? It might in the end, but I know plenty of junkies who seem to be able to handle it. Some even got jobs. Yeah, they look terrible and they never have no money. But as long as he’s careful, you know, about dirty needles and that, he’ll be OK. We look after him when he’s strung out. He’s got plenty of friends.”
“But junk is a killer.”
It was a statement, not a question.
“You wouldn’t get me doing it, not in a million years. I got enough problems. And I got baby to look after. A mum with a habit has really got problems, and she may pass it on to her kid. No, not me. But you know mister, your Adam’s OK, really he is. He’s with people who care for him, he’s got somewhere to sleep, he gets his GIRO regular, and one day he might find out how to kick it before things get too bad for him. Of course, the DHSS hassles him, like it hassles all of us, but that’s nothing special, though it gets worse all the time. If you could do something about them, you might be helping him more than worrying about his habit, coming round here, breaking up people’s furniture.”
“Yes, well I wanted to do something about that, apologise or something.”
“Well I can tell Jim and him that you called round and what you said.”
“And I’d like to pay for the damage.”
“I think you’d better see Jim about that, it’s his room.”
“See Jim about what?” It was Adam’s voice behind me, and he didn’t sound too pleased to see me.
“Your dad came back to set things straight,” she said.
“Oh,” he said, “and how were you going to do that?”
“Well, you know: apologise, pay for the damage, thought we ought to see more of each other, maybe have a meal, something like that,” I explained, rather lamely.
“Look,” he said, in the tones of someone reasoning with a difficult and not very bright child, “I don’t care if I never see you again. Get it? With or without your fucking money.”
And he walked away.
“Hey listen, Adam.”
“And don’t call me Adam! I hate that bloody name. What did you think you were doing with me, repopulating
“Look.”
“No, you look. Things are difficult enough here without you coming and giving us a hard time, getting us involved with the law.”
“So why stay here?”
“Because I like it. Where else could I stay?”
“You could kip down with me.”
“Oh yeah, in between the floozies?”
“No, I mean it. You want to get off the smack, you’ll always be welcome, no bother.”
“I knew there’d be a catch. And what if I don’t want to come off?”
“Well, I dunno, we could work something out.”
“Look, dad, you seem to think I’m some kind of a junkie, just because I do a bit of smack now and then. Really, I’m all right, or I was before you came barging in.”
As we stood there in the gloom of that filthy corridor I found myself overwhelmed with a wave of love for him. I could hardly see him in the murk. He overtopped me about a head, young as he was, and he was skinny, gaunt even. I couldn’t see his dark brown eyes that I used to love so much, opening to me every morning when he was a baby in his cot, but suddenly somehow we seemed to be communicating again, if only for a minute.
“Listen, I said I was sorry about that. Your mum came round and told me and I kind of blew my top. I was out of order, I realise that. But we don’t like to see you killing yourself. So if you want to come round and stay, then OK. Let’s see if we can get you clean.”
“Oh dad, I am clean. I don’t want to come round on conditions. I’ll come round, but only if I can come there stoned, straight, drunk, sober, happy, sad, whatever.”
I took a decision.
“OK, son. No conditions. Any time. Have you got my number?”
“No.”
I dug out my business card.
“Oh, very posh. Is this to impress people?”
“Yes, well, sort of. Give me a ring any time you need help. I’ll always be there.”
“Yeah, I know, like you always were,” he said, almost gaily.
And he vanished up the creaking stairs.
I was about to leave when I felt the young woman’s hand on my arm. I’d forgotten about her.
“Don’t let what he says get to you,” she said. “He’s still upset about this morning. But I’m glad you got talking to each other. He needs someone like you around, I think.”
Like a hole in the head, I could hear him jeering, but I didn’t object. A man in my position needs a few fans.
“You know I said he didn’t get his supply here,” she said, after a moment’s hesitation. I nodded. “Well, I think I know where he gets it. I went with him once to a house in
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Well, like you say, it’s a killer and those people are really evil, giving smack to a kid like him. You ought to do something about it.”
“But you said - “
“I know what I said. I thought you were another wally, but it was really nice, the way you said Bloggsy – your son – could stay with you, no conditions. I wouldn’t go there, if I was you, but you have a right to know. Oh, I don’t know, go if you want. It’s none of my business. It’s a building on its own, opposite the dental hospital. I think they live in the basement. You can’t miss it. Don’t tell ’em I told you, ’cause they’re really evil. A bloke got killed.”
“Killed? How, when?”
“Some kind of a war between dealers or something. People say they blew him away with a sawn-off shotgun. They’ve all got shooters.”
“Do the law know about this?”
“Dunno. For Christ’s sake, don’t bring the law into this, or we’re all buggered. I probably shouldn’t have told you but, you know, you’re really nice, you know that?”
Just call me Rudolph. Valentino, that is, not the red-nosed reindeer. I make conquests like this all the time.
There was a note from moptop when I got home.
“Sorry for the mess,”it said. The place looked like a white whirlwind had hit it, like the old detergent ad, though clean rather than tidy. “I had an evening meeting, so I couldn’t stay. I found out there’s an FA meeting in the Crypt tonight. Starts at 8. Good luck.
“J.”
And three kisses, like a daughter sends her dad on his birthday card.
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