Lost

This week a lot of pieces of the forgotten jigsaw puzzle of my career in Rock and Roll got remembered.

Firstly I spent five hours in the Groucho club on wednesday with Steve Andrews, someone who was the A and R man for Generation X way back in 1978 who spent a lot of time hanging out with me and Billy. They were actually people who loved and believed in music in those days. Anyway we spent all afternoon saying do you remember when….. and it was like watching a TV reruns of my early punk days that my memory had long since erased… memories that I had stored on the hard drive of the Tj mind and forgotten where I filed them… I must get these stories down in the blog I thought and I realised I have not written anything for ages…

You know sometimes you blame writing muse for not being there …..but in reality I have only me to blame because I didn’t turn up either…. and I should have been the first in the room.

So here we are…with a story…

We’ve been watching the TV series “Lost” this week from episode one. Its a strange series for me – like watching a grown up made for TV computer game. But I really like the philosophical arguments and moral parables …I never got into it when it was weekly – I like it on “On demand TV” where you can watch episode after episode..watched all 7 seasons of the West Wing like that and loved it. No cliff hanger gonna hang me tonight!… anyway, taking a break after a 5 episode session Penelope went to bed early leaving me sitting here……. and something made me look up the phrase “do you believe in Magic..” on Google. Just came into my head. probably got infected with the Lost vibe…

Then it came up on Youtube as a Lovin’ Spoonful track… and then I remembered something else lost on the Tj mind hard drive….. I’d written a song of the same title years ago.. way back in the early eighties. Maybe its something about that show that makes you come over all surreal like…prompts forgoten memories. And then I did remember.

Lets go back in time.

It was after Gen X broke up (Thats a Loong story tooo, painful one with a few demons to lay to rest there too… Billy and I still have to talk about that time and I’m sure we will… but another time….). It was a strange period, as if a bomb goes off in your life followed by a time of an eerie silence.. you’re kinda stunned and it does not seem real… see – a bit like watching Lost.

Luckily the energy and enthusiasm of youth gives you the strength to dust off and just start again… and while I looked for the magic one..the band where you know its right, I hung out and played with a few friends.

Well I’d become friends with an american musician called “Stiv Bators” from the USA punk band The Dead Boys. Stiv got out of it and took a lot of drugs.. and I didn’t.. we lived totally different lifestyles… yet we had a connection which neither of us understood and though we didn’t party together we knew we would do something musical.

Stiv was putting together a new band with Brian James, formally of the Damned and of course part of my past… the dreaded London SS where Brian was our guitarist way back in 1975… We had a rehearsal together in a warehouse off Ladbroke Grove in a tall dark building and did some jamming – played some of their songs and a couple of mine too that day. I made a tape on a little cassette recorder.. (actually probably the same one I used to record the SS 5 years earlier….).

In Generation X no one really knew that in fact I wrote all the lyrics and Billy generally wrote the tunes – a strange turnaround as its usually the other way around. Well that band has turned up in my life a lot this week. I was even looking in HMV records store yesterday and was amazed to see good old “Dancing with Myself” on The TV series “Glee” soundtrack (you can see the clip on Youtube of course..). Anyway after Gen X I used to sit at home in Pindock Mews (you’ve heard that name before in earlier bogs) playing bass and I had started to write songs all on my own having found myself suddenly with no partner. I wrote them on a bass guitar as I had no acoustic or regular guitar yet.

And that day with Stiv and Brian we learnt one of those new tracks I had written inspired by watching the movie “The Deer Hunter” – it was called “Russian Roulette”. Stiv loved the track. Somehow I left him the lyrics and left that day and decided it was not for me – I guess it was a format that I had already done – I loved Stiv but something in my heart said no because I was looking for something else. “You can do anything” says John Locke in Lost and I believed that back then too.

Stiv and I still saw each other from time to time but I didn’t know they had adopted that song.. and It was a long while later that Stiv came around to give me a 7” vinyl single.. They had called the band “The Lords of the new Church” and that single was Russian Roulette. But because Brians second name was James too everyone assumed he’d written it because the songwriting credit just said “James” so no one ever knew I had played a part in that story…..

Years passed and later I wrote another song especially for Stiv. It was called “Do you believe in Magic” and we recorded the demo in my front room and this time while I played all the guitars and programmed the drums, Stiv provided the perfect vocal for the song. It WAS him and I’d written it about him. He promised to record it properly one day.

Then we lost contact. I went on to create Sputnik and years passed in a blur… and Stiv moved to Paris. Just after Sputnik broke up Stiv was finally recording a studio version of the song Magic (he called it Magyk) but sadly I couldn’t be there. But before they’d finished recording the record one night he went out….. and got hit by a car. He went home shaken and went to bed. He never woke up.

What made me think of him tonight….?

What made me look that song up tonight only to find Russian Roulette on Youtube? A song about testing luck to kill you…. The video has over seventy thousand hits. And I watched Stiv singing those words and I hope he’s still singing them.

And I promised to enjoy every minute of every day because life is good.

Miss you Stiv.

Lost.

Tony James
Feburary 19 2010