Adrenalized Read online

  From the opening number, “Highway Star,” I was completely mesmerized. They played everything. “Smoke on the Water,” “Space Truckin’,” and more. It was loud, thunderous, and energizing. Pushed up front against the wooden stage I could see, feel, hear, and practically taste each note as it was played. What I saw Ritchie Blackmore do that night—the range of styles he displayed—was stupefying. He played classical, jazz, blues, rock and roll—he just blew me away. As I reached up toward him, he slapped my hand.

  At the end of the show, as they plowed through the encore, “Lucille,” Blackmore smashed his Fender Strat on the stage. I was euphoric. Actually, sitting here now thinking about that night, words can’t really describe how I felt. I may have left my body. Oh my God, I thought. That’s what I want to do! I want to be that guy up there!

  Many professional musicians will reflect upon a specific time when they saw their future, their destiny, their fate, whatever you want to call it, all converge in one spectacular and explosive moment. This was mine. Ironically, it wasn’t until many years later when Def Leppard played the Brixton Academy that I realized it was the same building as the former Sundown and that the reason I played guitar on that side of the stage was because that was where Blackmore had played. It was actually really freaky looking out on the audience and remembering that this was the first place I had ever been to a show. Then there I was, on the same stage, looking out at the audience. Years after attending my first show, I was looking at Made in Japan—a live Deep Purple album recorded in Japan—and I said to myself, Hey, these fans don’t look Japanese! referring to the audience members. Upon further inspection, to my joy, I saw me!! There I was, front row, propping up the stage at my very first concert.

  The intensity and creativity that Ritchie displayed that night completely convinced me that I had to go home and persuade my mum and dad that they needed to buy me an electric guitar. But guitars were expensive, and it would take two years of pestering.

  So I began my pestering routine for an electric guitar. I didn’t know my parents would go into debt to get me this guitar. Although when I was younger I knew it was a sacrifice, as an adult the gravity of what they did really hit home. While I waited it out, I’d go over to my pal Steve Hewer’s house and play air guitar pretending to be Bowie, Slade, and T. Rex. Steve showed me my first barre chord and taught me how to play songs like Hawkwind’s “Silver Machine” on his guitar.

  I also filled my time seeing more shows: the beauty of living in London was that everybody played there. So I got to witness a plethora of amazing bands, especially—and finally—David Bowie on his Aladdin Sane tour at Earls Court in London on May 12, 1973. I vividly remember my mum and dad dropping off me and Martin Blackman at the venue. The whole night—from how the audience dressed to Bowie and the Spiders onstage—was a spectacle. Even though I think Martin and me were the only two out of 18,000 fans who didn’t dress up in some crazy outfit, it was strange to be part of the alienesque Bowie tribe. His fans were so obsessively dedicated to looking like him, dressing like him, and adopting his persona that it was as if we were within the colorful bowels of some glittery cult. But we loved it. We felt special and anointed. And when he finally hit the stage I almost couldn’t believe it was really him. In the flesh!

  Bowie at this point was at his creative peak. The makeup, the glam, the glitter, the killer songs were dazzling, with Broadway-like precision and energy. But as captivating as Bowie was, it was his guitar player, Mick Ronson, who all but stole the show. It was amazing to me how he could stand out as he did without ever upstaging Bowie. There was this ultimate confidence just oozing off the stage, yet he still remained a team player. He knew how to be seen without being over-the-top. So many musicians fail to master that art.

  I also saw Mott the Hoople at Hammersmith Odeon, along with then up-and-coming supporting band Queen, who blew the lid off the place. Another killer show was Led Zeppelin at Earls Court. From what I remember, when I first went inside, it sounded like some big monster had come roaring into the arena. I couldn’t even tell what they were playing at first, but then it hit me: it was “Rock and Roll,” from their fourth album. Eventually, before its demolition in 2014, Earls Court became a horrible toilet. Its massive sound just bounced off really high ceilings and walls. But back in the day, shows in that place were pure magic.

  I was in awe watching the masters play their electric guitars. I loved the really flashy playing of Ronson and Blackmore, but I never thought I’d be able to play like that. To me they were superhuman. I wouldn’t even know where to start. I would go to this place in the West End of London called the Fender Sound House, and sit and stare at the Fender Stratocasters and Gibson Les Pauls hanging on the walls. I would literally be drooling. Those sparkly blues, reds, and purples. And the sunburst-colored wood grains. They looked delicious to me. In quite a pervy sort of way I would touch the guitars. This was a big deal because 1) I couldn’t play and 2) you weren’t supposed to touch the merchandise, as the militant shopkeepers were always keeping watch. I felt that if I were to pick up one of the guitars I’d be pummeled to the ground by one of the staff. This made the guitars all the more desirable.

  And then came that monumental day: my sixteenth birthday, December 8, 1973. The day I got my first guitar—a red Gibson SG. My life was about to change. This instrument represented what I dreamed would be my future. (Seriously, I would put the guitar against the wall and stare at it until I nodded off to sleep.) But as my parents told me, nobody was going to make that happen but me. True.

  Along with the guitar came another birthday present—an album called The Guitar Album, featuring songs by both current and classic blues guitar players. Jimi Hendrix was on there, as was Duane Allman, but the tune that really jumped out at me was B. B. King’s “Sweet Sixteen.” King’s playing was so sparse and intense and emotional. I felt like I could identify him after only one note, it was just that distinctive. I played his track on the record over and over; plus it was my sixteenth birthday. Ironically, in a very cool twist of fate, exactly forty years to the day, I went to see the late, great B. B. King in concert for my fifty-sixth birthday. I got to meet him. When I told him the story about my sixteenth birthday and the album I received with him singing “Sweet Sixteen,” he remarked, “Then I should sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to you.” And he did. (Almost a year and a half later, in 2015, he would be gone. RIP, B.B.)

  Apparently, when learning how to play guitar, you’re supposed to learn your chords first, which I did. But I was shocked to discover that I could play lead guitar, or solos, almost immediately. And that’s really what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to play “finger-style” or “chordal-style” backing musician. B. B. King never played chords. Like him, I wanted to be a lead guitar player straight off the bat. This was almost like being able to fly. The self-expression that I had in my head I could manifest through my fingers. Pretty fucking cool. My guitar teachers were Jimmy Page, Jimi Hendrix, Mick Ronson, Ritchie Blackmore, and a host of jazz rock pioneers like Al Di Meola and Larry Coryell. Even though he was a bass player, Stanley Clarke was a big influence, too. I obviously couldn’t play all of this shit they were doing, so I would take the odd phrase that really stood out to me and incorporate it into my own style. Before long I would have a collection of my favorite licks that would come to represent me. I didn’t so much sit down and learn songs in their entirety—just the parts that I really loved. I did the same with singing as well. I’d just sing along to the odd line or chorus, and before you knew it, I could actually sing. This was the same thing with guitar playing. What had seemed like unattainable magic was all of a sudden within my grasp.

  I had barely graduated at sixteen, and went straight to work at a burglar alarm factory. It was the first real work I had ever had, but it was the best way for me to pay back my mum for lending me three hundred quid to get my second guitar, which was a wine-red Les Paul custom. There’s a picture of me playing it on the Girl album Sheer Greed. I didn’t really
know what to expect from this job. I just knew that I wasn’t going to be there for long. It was a means to an end for me; otherwise it would have been really depressing. I was convinced I was going to be a rock star.

  My workday started at 8 a.m. I would take a bus each morning (until I got my Honda 250 motorcycle) to the AFA burglar alarm factory, a huge building in Walthamstow. I learned a variety of different things that I never really needed to know again, except for the soldering wires part. I rotated through several departments of an assembly line, the first of which was putting screws into a plastic base. That was fairly mind-numbing. Then I was placed in the paint factory for a while, basically coloring the wires. Next I was moved into the soldering department, which I thought I had down pretty well until a few years ago, when I tried to solder a wire for one of my guitars and found that I had completely lost my soldering mojo. I knew I was color-blind when I failed all those tests in school when you have to guess the number inside the colored dots. But I hadn’t really thought too much about it until some of these burglar alarms would fail the test—that was just me getting the colored wires mixed up, as I’m pretty sure my soldering skills were solid back then. Pretty ironic that a color-blind guy would be putting colored wires into a burglar alarm. I didn’t last in that department for too long. I was with AFA for only a year.

  I wasn’t alone—I soon found others who were also obsessed with playing, and before I knew it, we decided to form a band. And you never forget your first band. We couldn’t actually play all that well, but that wasn’t important at the time. I played guitar, Martin Blackman was on bass, Tony Torres did vocals, and Gary Dewing hit this drum kit that we bought for five quid.

  Many houses in Britain’s working-class neighborhoods had a “room for best.” It was for company only, and there’d be plastic over the furniture and a record player and maybe a small bar. My good friend Rudi Riviere lived in a house that was almost identical to mine, plastic covers included, but his family was from the Caribbean, so I don’t know where this craze originated. My first band rehearsed at my mum’s house at 223 Boundary Road in the room for best, which, thankfully, she had no problem with. We managed to get through the Hendrix version of “Wild Thing,” being that it was only three chords. In our heads, we sounded great. We did a world tour of my mum’s front room. We were like a garage band with no garage. Eventually friends would come over and watch us. We also started writing our own songs, so it seemed this was as good a time as any to give ourselves a name. So I did what any naïve musician did—I closed my eyes, opened an atlas, and put my finger on a page. We said wherever the finger landed, that word would be the name of the band. So our name became Moosejaw, after Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Canada. The name was short-lived: we disbanded after a few months over some kind of silly drama, which sort of makes you think, Whoa! If there’s drama now and we can’t even play, what happens later when there is really something at stake? I would one day find out. My first live performance would happen the very next year. I’d be seventeen years old.

  London was always influential, be it in fashion or music, and had been the center of the civilized world. It was always a hang—the Swinging Sixties; Carnaby Street, which was the fashion epicenter; and you had all of these amazing bands like the Stones, the Who, the Small Faces, the Kinks, and later Jimi Hendrix, all calling London their home. The amazing cornucopia of jazz, reggae, soul, rock, and all the cultures that music brings with it made London an encouraging and inspirational scene. The fact that you could have all of this stimuli coexisting was the reason people from all around the world flocked to this amazing city. London wasn’t just the capital of England—it had been the capital of the world. Everyone would want to come there. Even the Beatles, who hailed from Liverpool, set up their own Abbey Road Studios (where Def Leppard were honored to record a live TV show). So London really had a lot going for it. Later I was grateful to have come from such a great city—not just as a reference point, but also for the fact that you do take some of it with you wherever you go. It’s an attitude/confidence thing. Then I was fairly uncultured; but after I’d traveled around the world a few times, when I went back to London I really appreciated the culture, art, architecture, etc.

  But by the mid-seventies, London had gone through a whole new transformation. The seeds had been sown in the late sixties by Iggy Pop and had later taken root in New York City thanks to bands like the New York Dolls and the Ramones, who were responsible for a new, raw, do-it-yourself attitude, which was completely stripped down and about not giving a fuck.

  The punk rock explosion in London, which kinda started in 1975 but didn’t really hit the masses until the Sex Pistols appeared on Bill Grundy’s Today program on December 1, 1976, changed everything. It changed fashion in general, political ideals, social commentary, and even how record companies operated. I don’t think I ever felt as musically energized as the first time I heard the album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. To this day, that album announces itself as something radically different. It seemed pure and raw. Although everyone said these guys couldn’t play, the first Pistols album had something that every rock album that had come before it couldn’t get close to. It was the voice of a generation, but you had to be in England to experience it. In fact, when the Pistols album came out, all the streets were stinking due to the trash collectors going on strike because they were being taken advantage of. Their strike had nothing to do with the album, but it was all in the timing really. Everything was just fucked up. It was a time of economic depression. Unemployment was at its highest since the Second World War. State control through nationalized industries seemed to be well on the way to fulfilling George Orwell’s prophecies so boldly stated in his novel 1984. All this rage manifested itself by kids’ using music as a voice because they were not being heard. With that said, it was the perfect time for a new train of thought. Never Mind the Bollocks was a howling buzz saw of a record that didn’t just throw down the gauntlet—it pissed and puked on it as well.

  It wasn’t just the Pistols’ message, but the guitar was how I imagined rhythm guitar should be played in my head. The drums were how I wanted to hear them. All of this with a rather upset Johnny Rotten screaming over the top of it. Brilliant.

  I could still really dig a Genesis album as well as a Pistols album. It all just broadened my horizon.

  By late 1976, London was awash with music pouring out of club after club. In addition to the Pistols, the Clash, and the Damned, dozens of other musical upstarts were rebelling against the perceived pomp of bands like the Stones, Zeppelin, Floyd, and the horrendous pop that was being regurgitated on the radio. This was also the era of disco, which had, like any other genre, pure genius and real shite, but was the opposite of punk. Like the mods, rockers, and any counterculture groups within the same culture, it allowed kids to choose their sides.

  The first live gig I ever played was with my next band, Lucy. We played for a nurses’ party on Mile End Road in East London—an all-female audience. I was the youngest one onstage. I was seventeen and had moved on from burglar alarms to being a motorcycle dispatch rider for Profile Typesetting. All the other guys in the band were like twenty-three and upward. We were kinda punk without the attitude. I was scared shitless and didn’t look up from my fret board all night. Even though I was petrified, once it was all over, I had that first gig under my belt. I wasn’t a stage virgin anymore. We played mainly original songs, and I don’t remember how long the set was, but I’m sure it was the longest thirty-five minutes or so of my life. At least we didn’t get booed offstage. That would come later. Lucy released an EP called You Really Got Me Going . . . I think. After that we recorded a bunch of demos, but the real highlight for me was performing as an opening band at the Marquee Club on Wardour Street in London. The Marquee had played host to some of the most famous bands in the world. At its original location on Oxford Street, the Rolling Stones played their very first official gig in 1962. But in 1964 the club moved over to Wardour Street,
where it played host to the Stones once again, the Who, Jimi Hendrix, Deep Purple, Stevie Wonder, Pink Floyd, and many others. The Stones even came back to the famous club in 1971 to film a television special, and Bowie filmed The 1980 Floor Show there, where he famously sang the duet “I Got You, Babe” with Marianne Faithfull dressed as a nun.

  In addition to playing the Marquee, something else happened in my life at this time. My parents got divorced. I was kind of bummed that they hadn’t said anything to me prior to that and that they would do this ultra-British thing and not communicate with each other. So they drifted apart until it was unbearable for both of them. They kept it from me for the sake of not wanting to upset me. When we eventually spoke about it I remember saying that I would have been cool if they had just mentioned it to me. I’d have said, “Don’t stay together for my sake.” What ended up happening was that my dad, being on the road so much as a lorry driver, was always gone for weeks on end, driving to Scotland, Liverpool, and all over the place. So he simply grew apart from my mum, and she from him, given all the free time she had. There was no malice or any real arguments that I remember, just a gentle and obvious growing apart that resulted in both of them deciding that that was the way to go.

  Divorce was still a fairly taboo subject in the mid-1970s, and I didn’t know a lot of other kids who came from what we call broken homes. But my home never really felt broken. I had a great life as a kid, and it remained great even in the midst of my parents’ divorce, and they continued to be friends. Besides, I was eighteen at the time and cool with their decision. I certainly didn’t love one parent more than the other, nor did I harbor any resentment toward either of them. I wish they had actually done it sooner.

  My dad moved out soon afterward and eventually hooked up with a woman named Doris, who was really cool. She brought my dad out of his shell and even got him to dance (which he loved doing) and to give up smoking. My mum, my nan, and me carried on at home. I think it was a pleasant divorce. My dad got to dance and my mum kept her little boy.