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I
live opposite Rat Scabies. He’s the former drummer of The Damned,
one of the ‘big three’ British punk rock bands, the other
two being the Sex Pistols and The Clash. The Damned were the first of
the punk group to put out a single, a typically speedy ditty called New
Rose. That was 1976. They were also the first to release an album and
the first to perform in America, but their greatest success came a decade
or so later with a song called Eloise, an uber-goth anthem that got to
Number Three in the UK charts. The Damned are still doing the do today
– trotting off on the odd tour, recording the odd album –
although Rat Scabies quit the band in the mid-1990s. Around about the
time I moved in across the street from him, as it goes.
A
friend of mine who drank in a pub round the corner had told me that Scabies
lived somewhere in Brentford, but I was surprised to discover the man
who sits up there with Johnny Rotten and the ghost of Sid Vicious in the
very highest of the high chairs of punk rock infamy was, quite literally,
on my doorstep. I must admit that I was delighted, too, because The Damned
had been big heroes of mine as a teenager. When I was 15, a classmate
at school had lent me a copy of New Rose for the night and, within three
seconds of dropping the needle on the record, three seconds that consists
of nothing but Scabies’ demented drumming, I was hooked. I wore
a little round Damned badge, stark white letters on a plain black background,
for three years solid after that. Punk rock – the sound of London,
100 miles yet a zillion lifestyle years away from the small town in deepest,
dustiest Norfolk where I grew up – had hit me like a lump-hammer.
I don’t believe I’ve ever properly recovered.
The
first time I spoke to Rat Scabies, he was clambering out of a battered
old Ford he’d manoeuvred to a juddering halt outside his house.
He was wearing swimming goggles and had a leather flying helmet jammed
on his head. I smiled and said hello. He smiled and said hello back. So
far so good. I saw him again a few days later, when I was struggling to
trim my high and unruly hedge with a pair of rusty shears I’d found
in the garden shed. I suddenly had the feeling that someone was watching
me and, spinning round, there he was, arms folded, back pressed against
his gatepost.
‘Give
it a mohican,’ he shouted across the street. ‘That’ll
teach the bastard.’
The
next time I met him, he came hurtling out of his house as I trundled home
from the supermarket. ‘Just the bloke I’ve been looking for,’
he said, waving a freshly bandaged hand in my face.
‘What
have you been up to?’ I asked, nodding at his injury.
‘Sliced
through me hand in a whittling accident,’ he replied. ‘Cut
through the tendons in me thumb. I may never play the drums again.’
My
brow furrowed in genuine concern for the future career of a man often
described as one of the best rock drummers in the world. ‘Let’s
not worry ourselves about that just now, though,’ he added, with
a half-snarl, half-grin. ‘My immediate problem is that the missus
has taken the kids up to Scotland for a few days and this’ –
shoving his hand under my nose again – ‘means I can’t
roll spliffs. You any cop at rolling? Yeah? Good. You can come in and
flick a couple up for me, then.’
I
flicked up more than a couple for him over the course of the next week
or so. One morning, when I opened my bedroom curtains, he was standing
in the middle of the road, grinning at me with his bandaged hand aloft.
He paid me for my trouble in cups of tea and tales of rock ‘n’
roll excess, which seemed to be more than a fair enough deal to me. ‘Earl
Grey or normal?’ he’d begin. I felt 15 years old again, although
I was disappointed that he had no memory of when The Damned had played
Peterborough in 1978. It was one of the first live gigs I’d ever
been to.
‘You
set your drums on fire and most of the stage went up with them,’
I told him. ‘The rest of the group buggered off, but you were still
playing when the fire brigade turned up. They flooded the venue and sparked
a riot. Every window in the place got smashed. People were fighting in
the car park for hours afterwards. You must be able to remember that!'
He
took a glug of his black, honey-sweetened Earl Grey and shook his head.
‘Sorry mate, you’re gonna have to give me something more.
There were loads of gigs like that.’
Having
spent a lot of years working as a music journalist, I’d got plenty
of music biz anecdotes of my own to share – and Scabies and I soon
discovered we had several mutual acquaintances in the industry. Gabbing
about music while drinking tea in Scabies’ kitchen (during the winter
months) or on Scabies’ back porch (in the summer) has become a major
part of my life in the years since then. Not that I’ve always had
a whole lot of choice in the matter. A phone call that usually begins
‘Fancy a cuppa?’ and sometimes continues with ‘Hi Ratty,
erm, I’m actually kinda busy at the moment’, invariably ends
with ‘I’ll see you in a minute, then’. Click. Brrrrrrr.
Scabies
is a persuasive man, that’s for sure. Which, as I have to explain
to all first-time visitors to my home, is why I have a bass drum for a
coffee table and a head-high Marshall stack standing in the corner of
my living room. ‘Just for a couple of weeks,’ he’d promised
me. ‘Just ‘til I sort out some space in the attic,’
he’d said. That was about five years ago. I’ve stopped mentioning
it now. I got tired of him coming back at me with, ‘Yeah, but the
Marshall looks great with plants on it. It really works. It makes the
place and it’s a piece of rock ‘n’ roll history. It’s
a unique artefact. I reckon you ought to give me money for it. A hundred
quid, whaddya say?’
I
soon learnt to say nothing. I’ve learnt to say nothing on many such
occasions. Instead, I usually respond with a sigh and a dog-chewing-a-wasp
look – eyebrows knitted, mouth twisting left and right and left
again. I’ve got it down to perfection, but then I’ve had countless
opportunities to practice. Like the time Scabies tried to sell me the
porch built onto the back of his house. He negotiated with me for the
better part an hour before announcing that the porch, a wooden structure
that looks like the sort of thing you’d find at the front of a Wild
West store, complete with a hitching rail and a creaky old rocking chair,
wouldn’t actually be moving.
‘You’ll
be able to use it whenever you like,’ he declared, tipping backwards
and forwards in his rocking chair. ‘Although there is the small
matter of access. Don’t look at me like that, I’m trying to
do you a good turn here.’
In all fairness, though, he has done me lots of good turns over the last
few years. He’s supplied me with sugar, milk, tea, coffee, bread,
jam, butter, baked beans, booze, fags, matches, headache pills, cough
remedies, light bulbs, fuses, shoe laces and cat food, often at a ridiculous
hour of the night. Above and beyond the call of neighbourly duty, he once
gave me a dozen sticks of celery and a tin of peaches at two in the morning.
I didn’t actually want them, but that’s not the point. He’s
given me computer games, dodgy videos, racing tips and business advice
(the latter consisting of a mere three words – ‘follow the
money’). He’s introduced me to some fascinating people (including
several other punk heroes of my youth) and taken me to some amazing parties.
Going anywhere with Scabies is always a bit of an adventure, not least
because he’s forever initiating conversations with complete strangers.
On one occasion, he tried to persuade a South African woman we met on
a 15-minute tube journey to smuggle diamonds for him.
In
short, he’s become a very good friend. He even taught me how to
do the Michael Jackson moonwalk. He was in his slippers at the time, which
was quite disconcerting.
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