It was a perfectly civilised transaction. Adam and I sat on the floor with Domini and Taggs Island Molly. We didn’t know anyone at the party in Onslow Square, so I’m not sure how or why we were there. Such things were relatively common in those days.
(In fact, a year before, the boot had been on the other foot. I’d arrived at Taggs Island Molly’s birthday party to find her half naked on her bed and almost comatose on heroin. I spent two hours walking her around Barnes Common while she sobered up. When we arrived back at the flat, the gatecrashers had been and gone, but in between they’d wrecked the place. Some idiot suggested we call the police. It would have been like trying to mend a gas leak by candlelight).
Back at Onslow Square, we smoked a couple of joints and chatted and came to the conclusion that each preferred the other’s partner to their own. So we agreed to swap – not just for the evening, but for good.
Adam left for Taggs Island with Molly. I didn’t envy him. She lived on the island in a caravan with her infant son. To reach it, you had to cross a crumbling wooden bridge from Hampton Court. I drove a lumbering old Daimler and every time I crossed the bridge I could hear broken slats and spars dropping into the Thames below.
I’d gone out with Molly on and off for years, in a desultory sort of way. We met when I worked for Music Star magazine and she was Alvin Stardust’s press officer. She took me out for lunch. She had a lazy Northern drawl and lazy, mocking blue eyes.
Our business lunch involved a decidedly unbusinesslike quantity of wine. I dropped her back to her office, she shook my hand, I kissed her mouth, she cried and hold me how her boyfriend had knocked her downstairs.
That evening, I went to her flat and under the hostile stare of her boyfriend, a rock musician, I removed her and her belongings to the tiny room I occupied in Wandsworth.
I never had the urge to knock Molly downstairs but in this it appeared that I was entirely alone.
She’d been engaged to the keyboards player of a rock supergroup. They’d lived together in some style while the band’s albumbounded up every chart on the planet.
They moved to rambling great house near Weybridge and enthusiastically adopted the locals’ champagne and cocaine diet.
Soon, Molly discovered she was pregnant and broke the news to the fiancée. I don’t know what reaction she expected, but I’m sure it wasn’t a kitchen knife in the belly. She lost the baby and very nearly her life.
Nevertheless, she declined to press charges and having received not so much as a word from her lover, discharged herself from hospital and went home.
He offered her champagne and calmly told her that he was going out for a while and that if she was still there when he returned, he’d finish the job.
A friend found her wandering witless in the garden and she spent the next six months in a private clinic in Scotland while they tried to put her mind back together.
It was shortly after her return to London that we met. In the meantime she’d already identified another psychotic musician and shacked up with him. With hindsight, I’d say there was a pattern developing.
We broke up for the first time when I decided to go back to Shirani Maria Assunta Perera, my beautiful if entirely unsuitable Sri Lankan obsession.
But not before Molly had towed me around Europe on an Alvin Stardust tour.
It all seemed pretty plastic to me, having experienced something approaching the real thing with Spreadeagle. The average age of the punters was 12 and the atmosphere at the gigs was more panto than rock concert.
Alvin strutted and minced about the stage with his black leather gloves writhing hypnotically like cobras over his huge black hair.
As a portrayal of evil, it was so safe and anodyne that it couldn’t possibly scare or offend anybody. Until we got to Hamburg.
In Hamburg, they got it seriously wrong. They thought he meant it.
He was met at the airport by the local chapter of the Hell’s Angels, who then rode shotgun as he was driven into the city in a sinister black convertible. He was already feeling uneasy before he reached the reception. But when he walked into the club to meet the press, his legs almost folded beneath him.
The place was lit only by green, chemical cocktail sticks that illuminated the drinkers’ faces from below. On every table was an ornament consisting of a crucifix stuck through a hole in a human skull. On a raised dias, a figure in black leather and chains was slumped in an attitude of despair. At his feet was curled a stuffed dog.
Poor Alvin. He was out of there before you could say, ‘Heil Hitler!’
