Mojo - The Music Magazine

The real Johnny Thunders, the wonder of Martin Hannett and the wrath of The Who…

What was Johnny Thunders like?
He was probably my best male friend. I used to spend most of my time with females but he was my best male friend at that time. We had a similar taste in music, clothes, all sorts of things really. One thing I regret is that he died [in 1991] before I felt able to play with him properly. He kept coming to me in the ’80s trying to form a band with him and I spent the ’80s telling myself I needed to get off drugs in order to get back into music again properly. It was a constant getting-off, then relapsing, and I even went into hospital in ’85 and stayed off for a month or so.

So I was determined to get off, so I told myself I couldn’t afford to spend a lot of time with Johnny. In the beginning of the ’90s I was clean enough to see him and not be tempted but he died and it was a shame. If anything, I tended to underestimate him because my thing had always been to get musicians that could play and Johnny couldn’t! Now, in hindsight, I can see it didn’t matter. He could play six notes better than anyone, he put so much emotion into those notes and that’s what it was all about.

Another remarkable thing about your early career was that CBS allowed The Only Ones two albums without a producer. How did that come about?
The first album we had near-enough recorded before we signed to CBS. Then when it came to doing the second album they brought in [Blue Öyster Cult producer] Sandy Pearlman to gigs of ours. They were trying to usher us into using him because he had some connections with the high-ups in CBS America. We said we didn’t like him and then they foisted him onto The Clash (laughs).

Finally, we get to hear the Martin Hannett mix of Big Sleep…
Well, eventually CBS started to rethink the self-production thing, because we weren’t getting a hit. So they insisted we record the third record with a producer. One of the two people who were suggested was [Joy Division producer] Martin Hannett, so we went in with him, did The Big Sleep and Oh Lucinda. Now, I got on really well with Martin Hannett, but he spent the whole session just slumped in a chair (nods out) and everyone else thought it was just like having another me in the studio (laughs).

We needed someone who could whip us into shape and smooth out the rough edges. But I think the eventual choice [Magazine, and later, Duran Duran producer Colin Thurston] smoothed everything out too much. The chorus on the guitars had just been invented, and it just makes it sound wishy-washy to me. The Martin Hannett version actually sounds like guitars, the way they should sound. That’s my one regret, that we should have done the third album with Martin. There’s some good songs on the third album but they weren’t done justice.

When you look back at the end of The Only Ones, Act I, are you sorry? Or do you think it was inevitable? Were you lucky to get three albums out of the line-up?
Probably, with the personalities involved, it was inevitable. It’s a shame, as we might have made it pretty big if we’d stayed together. Lots of people who supported us at the time went on to make it pretty big – I mean, U2 went on to become enormous. When we stopped it wasn’t out of any failure; we were playing in front of audiences of three thousand people in England. The third album, if you look it up, it actually did better than the first two albums. So from that point of view we were stupid to break up.

The American tour of 1980 was the final straw?
Yeah – especially for Alan, who didn’t take drugs and just wanted a straight life. He was sharing a hotel room with John and he’d come back and there’d be people lying in the bath with needles stuck out of their arms. He didn’t really need that.

Then we had to cancel the last 30 dates of our tour as I was wanted in California. It all got so chaotic. But it was silly to break up in America. We should have gone back and seen how we felt in a couple of months. But once you announce you’re breaking up, you don’t want to back down. I hate bands who break up all the time to get a bit of publicity, like The Who.

It’s a familiar tale with bands, isn’t it? There’s no careers advice in rock’n’roll…
But that’s what I think we’d have got if we’d signed with Chris Blackwell. He was like a father figure, and if he signed people he stuck with them. I mean, he stuck with John Martyn for decades. In 1977, Chris had said, Whatever CBS offer you I will match. He flew up to gig in Leicester to sign us. He said to me it didn’t matter to him but out of interest, was I a junkie? Because I looked like one! At the time I wasn’t. But he was clearly someone you could talk to about things like that and it would have been great, later on, to have been able to say to him, Look Chris, I need to get well. Blackwell would have been prepared to wait.

You started off that American interlude on the Who tour as their support band, but you were thrown off. Why was that?
For a start, The Who had a bad reputation for the way they treated their support bands – The Pretenders lasted two gigs, y’know? When we were first asked whether we wanted to do it, we um’d and ah’d but the roadies really wanted to do it because to them, in their careers, that was the top of the tree, supporting The Who! So, to keep our roadies and give them a buzz, we said all right then.

Originally, it was down to a shortlist of three: us, Squeeze and Stiff Little Fingers. Apparently we were Pete Townsend’s choice, so obviously they had a lot of disagreements as to who they wanted, otherwise why did it take them until three days before the tour started to decide? There was a lot of friction between all the individuals of The Who, I don’t think they were best friends at all. We started to hear that Roger Daltry wasn’t happy with us, as we weren’t warming up the audience in the right way, apparently. They swapped us for a band that played, like, bar music, a good-time American band.

Click for Part IV, where The Only Ones crumble, Perrett drives a car over someone he doesn’t like and we get a lesson in the ’70s smack trade…