Mojo - The Music Magazine

Another Girl, Another Planet goes ballistic. Plus, Sid Vicious unplugged!

So the drug business funded the first steps of The Only Ones…?
The money meant we could record whenever we wanted to and work on it until it was right. Zena had carried on doing the business and she invested all of her money in the group. So we recorded Lovers Of Today and sent it to Melody Maker, NME, Sounds and Record Mirror and it was Single Of The Week in all four. I don’t think a new band could do that nowadays.

Weren’t you in a way the British Television?
Yeah, the New York punk bands were more like us than the English ones. Although I’d like to think that we were a bit more exciting live than Television (laughs). They were like statues onstage, whereas we were really emotional.

I was an angry young man because of what had been done to me at boarding school. Just to release a lot of aggression, I’d jump about a lot and smash things up. It’s the opposite of what I can do now. Because I was stupid enough to take drugs for a long time, the legacy is that my lungs are totally fucked. If I want enough breath to sing a whole line I have to stay completely still.

The second single was Another Girl, Another Planet. Can you tell me the circumstances in which you wrote that?
Well, it wasn’t about drugs, but it was using drug imagery: “You get under my skin / I won’t need rehabilitating.” It was about going out with different girls and how you get something different from each of them. It was an attempt to justify my behaviour. With Zena, we’ve been married 39 years now and for the first ten years I was unfaithful every single day. Then I grew up and I’ve been faithful for the last 29. I was lucky; most girls would have left a long time before. Back then, girls were a major preoccupation. Music was number one, girls were second and drugs a much lower third. The worst thing about drugs is that they gradually overtake everything else. It becomes number one and everything else becomes nothing.

So Zena really is the unsung heroine of The Only Ones…
Before we signed to CBS, she had already spent forty thousand on the band, which was a lot of money back then. For her to do that when I had left her and was living with other girls showed a complete dedication to the music. No matter what I did to her she really believed in the music. Now that we haven’t got a Zena and we’re not signed to anybody, we can just about scrape together three hundred pounds for one day in a studio.

How does it feel to have written one of a relatively small handful of genuine rock‘n’roll standards?
It’s amazing and I’m really grateful for it. Years ago I used to resent the fact that my other songs used to be ignored. But after 30 years, you have to be happy you have a song that means so much to so many people. To see kids on the internet playing it is really fun. John put some up on his Myspace, and there was this family of two girls and two boys between the ages of 10 and 14 and they played it really, really well.

Remarkably, given its afterlife, Another Girl, Another Planet only got to #56 in the UK singles chart. Were you ever preoccupied with “making it”, being a conventional success?
I was never preoccupied. I just thought I was a genius and that now that people had recognised I was a genius nothing could stop us! That’s why we didn’t really care who we signed to. We signed to CBS mainly because that was Dylan’s label and Dylan was my all-time hero. They were offering as much as the other two companies – which were Island and Sire. But the person who signed us to CBS, their A&R Dan Loggins, had left after six months and the new people through the door were more concerned about the people they had signed, that’s how they get their kudos. They put a lot more into the Psychedelic Furs than us. We were old hat within a year. In those days you needed a hit single to sell an album, but we never managed to get on the Radio One play list.

In retrospect that’s not hard to understand, is it? Your worldview wasn’t a mainstream one. The second album, Even Serpents Shine, is very brooding, from the apocalyptic sleeve image onwards…
But there was a lot of humour in my songs at that time. I was a very optimistic guy who was having a lot of fun. In my eyes I had the perfect life. Every minute of every day was pure self-gratification. It’s only since then that I have experienced the darker side of life really.

Between the first and second album you played on the Johnny Thunders album, So Alone…
Johnny had broken up The Heartbreakers near the end of ’77 and he asked me if I’d help him form a new band and I thought of the name The Living Dead. Initially it was Johnny, me, Kellie and Alan. Then Alan dropped out and at one gig at the Speakeasy Sid Vicious played bass. That was entertaining. The gig started with Nancy [Spungen] introducing the band topless which Sid was really upset about because he was a little kid and she was his first girlfriend. He was jealous.

Anyway, at the sound check we’d found out that Sid didn’t know any notes at all. All he’d learnt were the 12 Pistols songs and that was it. If you said ‘just pedal an E’ he looked at you blankly, so I tried to get his fingers and put them on the frets. Afterwards Johnny said, Sid’s not playing, and I said that it’d break his heart because Johnny was Sid’s absolute hero. I think that’s why he got into drugs – just to be like Johnny, which is really sad and I think Johnny felt really guilty about it afterwards.

So Johnny let Sid play on the condition he wasn’t plugged in. So Sid’s jumping up and down but his amplifier and speaker are disconnected, and bless his heart it wasn’t till about the fourth number that he realised that there wasn’t any sound coming out (laughs). Then he starts fiddling around with the amplifier and asking the roadie to sort it out. That was when Johnny says, ‘Thank you, Mr Sidney Vicious! thank you very much!’ and sort of ushered him off.

Anyway, after that show, there was enough interest from Real Records to sign Johnny on condition I help keep him together. Which I did in a way, because I wasn’t as un-together as him back then, and my brain was still working fully. So we started recording the album but The Only Ones had to go on tour, our first since signing to CBS. But we had just enough time to do all the original songs, like You Can’t Put Your Arms Around A Memory, which I think is his best ever song. I’m really proud to have played on that.

Click to read Part III, wherein our hero encounters the real Johnny Thunders, pisses off The Who, and we discover an unreleased Only Ones track…