I Know This Much: From Soho to Spandau. Gary Kemp

       CHAPTER SEVEN FOLLOWING THE DURM

      ‘We have to go to this, it’s gonna be amazing.’ Dagger was standing under the glittery lights in full Chelsea-mod regalia. He’d just arrived, and his declamatory statement, given while brandishing a black-and-white A4 flyer, had all the pub’s smoky heads turning towards him. He held the page up for us to see. On it was a Xeroxed picture of a short-haired singer and a young, similarly barbered guitarist. Above them, in an aggressive scrawl, was written THE SCREEN ON THE GREEN PRESENTS A MIDNIGHT SPECIAL SUNDAY AUGUST 29TH MIDNIGHT-DAWN. Below that it said SEX PISTOLS. What a name, I thought.

      It was bank holiday weekend and Steve Norman and I were sitting in the Camden Head. Since the Same Band (or whatever we were now going to call ourselves) had started rehearsing upstairs, this cut-glass pub had become our centre of operations. Fundamentally a soul boy, Steve had inspired me with his StevieWonder andMotown records that he played at his home on the Bourne Estate in Islington. His father, Tony, a cabby whose passions were London, the voices of Mel Blanc, and commentating upon the soap opera that was going on inside his tropical-fish tank, had passed his typically North London sense of humour on to his son. But what drew me to Steve was his instinct for music. He had a sharp ear for what was going on in the arrangements of records we’d play, comfortably transcribing them to our guitars, and we soon performed a morning school assembly together, playing ‘Light My Fire’ and ‘A Horse With No Name’, albeit to a hall of half-awake kids, still lost under their bed-hair.