Mojo - The Music Magazine

On drug busts, the joy of oxygen, and the truth about Pete Doherty...

After The Only Ones split, what were your musical distractions?
I literally did not play the guitar throughout the ’80s. When I started playing the guitar again, it was like learning again. I did get really fit, though, in a sustained period of giving up drugs. I even gave up smoking cigarettes and took up drinking decaffeinated coffee, got really stupid about it. People go that way sometimes, go from one extreme to the other. You don’t appreciate oxygen, you take it for granted! Oxygen is brilliant stuff. If I could breathe properly and walk to the corner and not feel dizzy, hot and sweaty, I’d love it.

Would Another Girl, Another Planet coming out on a compilation keep you going financially?
Not financially. The only thing financially that has kept me going is the Vodafone advert [2006]; that was like forty grand and I noticed that. We were well off throughout the ’80s, we did what we wanted and had what we wanted. I actually went back to dealing and it was very profitable, if you dealt with importers and did it wholesale you could make a lot of money. Even on one deal, you would make anything from five to ten grand or something.

Wasn’t that a very dangerous way to make a living?
Oh yeah! On two or three occasions we had the police living opposite us, for a period of months. I mean, they spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on operations to bust us, and they got close on a couple of occasions. Luckily, we lived in a fortress, it was impossible to get in. We’d watch them try and break the door down but the door was at the very top of a steep flight of stairs. So, they would have to try and run up the stairs, and they could never get full contact on the door with their battering ram – it just used to slide off (laughs).

We use to watch them on the CCTV. We had cameras everywhere, and as soon as they stepped onto the property, the alarms would go off. Once they found a load of money, but never found any drugs. They used to follow us, with like twenty different vehicles, loads of cars, motorbikes, to the point where they’d been following us for a couple months and they’d seen enough.

We met our Iranian friend in Shepherd’s Bush and Zena just used to get into his car and then back into mine. We used to drive around in circles while that was happening, but then I noticed these vehicles and that they weren’t logical, so I flashed my friend and Zena got back into my car. He drove off 90mph one-way; I drove off 90mph the other. Sometimes people think it’s paranoia through too much coke, but this was definitely happening. We went to a friends’ and told them that they were likely to get a visit soon, and I said to Zena, just throw it, it was only worth five or six grand. But Zena was very money-conscious, she hadn’t seen the people, and didn’t know whether it was just me being paranoid. So, she managed to put it inside her.

So we get back to Forest Hill where we were living and all off a sudden people jump out of every car and dive on us. They searched everything and kept us for a couple of days. They were really pissed off. After about two days, they eventually found about twelve grand in fifties. That made them even more pissed off because this was the culmination of all the time that they had been living in the offices opposite us: twelve grand!

It was quite funny but it was quite scary at times, having to keep one step ahead of them. It’s not a pleasant way of living, always being paranoid. I only did one day on remand and that was in Wandsworth Prison in ’76, when The Only Ones just got together. It was the first time we played with Alan, August 13th; I remember telling him we had to do some recording sharpish, because I had a court case in October and I might go down for a few years. But what I got was one night in prison and a five grand fine. I only actually got done for possession of hash, although it was, like, three kilos of hash!

And if that seems lucky, get this… The day before the bust, we’d been sitting on 20 kilos. But that night Zena had a dream – she has dreams of the future sometimes – and she said she felt that we were going to get busted. So Zena took it out and left it on a bombsite in a suitcase.

The reason the police found out was because Zena’s little sisters were taking bits of it to school, and so they thought we were selling drugs to school kids! So, it was the SPG who came around, really heavy.

But our partners in those days were pretty heavy too. There were the Italians, and this Australian who was like the guy in the film Chopper – he’d walk around the streets with a hand grenade in each pocket. Heavy people. If you wanted someone to disappear, they would order them in from Canada; these guys would stay a week, the person would ‘disappear’, and then they’d leave the country. So you did have to protect yourself, and we were one of the few dealers that had guns around. But there was only the one time we had trouble with heavies… Have you heard of John Bindon?

Yes. He was connected with Peter Grant and Led Zeppelin…
His lot thought of themselves as a little gang and they tried to come around and rip us off. That same night, we went round with guns to their parents’ house and their parents went crazy at them. They didn’t realise there would be any comeback, not knowing who our partners were. We led quite entertaining lives really. When people ask if you miss the money from the music world, you’ve got to laugh really; compared to the money I made in the drug world, I never made any money in music.

For a while around 2004, you had Pete Doherty staying with you…
That’s because my kids were playing with Babyshambles – they’ve got a band called Strangefruit now, really good band. I thought I was friends with him, until I found out what he was like. He just uses people, totally. He’s only interested in becoming famous, more interested in how many tabloid stories he could get than what his record sounded like. He’s a product of modern society, like Big Brother. People don’t care how they make it, as long as they do. It’s just incidental that he’s become famous as a musician; he would have been happy in whatever way he became famous. He’s just addicted to fame and headlines, much more than drugs.

Click for Part VI, the Final Chapter?