You can get what you want…

Can you wish for what you want?  Does it sometimes come true if you wish hard enough?

Way back in 1975 I’d just left Brunel University with a first class degree in maths and computers….. and also just met Mj …I already knew that normal world was not for me – I had a bass guitar. To make matters much worse and to the extreme disappointment of my parents who were still hoping I would become head of IBM, I decided to further a career in coolness by following certain rules laid down in Jack Kerouac’s book ‘On the road’ by trying to pursue a temporary lifestyle in his ‘Sal Paradise’ character vein. Flatbed railroad truck riding was out in 70s London but a cool car parking job was a definite possibility, so following my first summer off spent laying around playing guitar, I got a job delivering, collecting and parking cars at a local auction house.  I adopted the requisite outfit of leather jacket, jeans and shades, one arm nonchalantly placed on a wound down window. I travelled all over London delivering.

There was one particular place I had to deliver cars to nearly every week- it was to a tiny garage business in a busy little street called ‘Pindock Mews’. It was in an area of London called “Little Venice” because of the canals that passed through it.  (If you’ve ever seen the 50s film ‘the Blue Lamp’ or the 70s film ‘The Omen’ – that’s Little Venice around the canal).

I had always read about these romantic corners of London – Mews’s were the small cobbled streets behind London’s grand mansions where they used to stable horses and carriages. They were all pretty much alike with a big area on the ground floor for the horses and a open plan living space above. They had all been converted now, with the horses and straw long gone, to become big 6 car garages with cute living accommodation above. People seemed to care about living in these places –  there were trees and flowers in pots outside, the old openings on the first floor where the hay would be delivered still opened, it was like being in old London in the heart of the modern city – to me they seemed like fairytale places to live

Mews houses were also very cool. Mrs Peel in the cult TV series the Avengers lived in one. Christeen Keeler in the Profumo scandal lived in a Mews house, in fact many, many cool literary and TV show characters lived in London Mews houses. And I wanted desperately to live in a Mews house. Perfect for rock stars. (…..well future rock stars).

Week after week I delivered cars to Pindock mews, parking them in the garage below, being cool. A man called George owned the garage. Every time I would fantasize about living there, gazing up at the flat above, wishing, imagining…. wanting it to be me. I became to know George quite well – I’d like to live here I told him.

Roll forward to 1980,a lot of car deliveries and a lot of bass guitar practice later, the Sal Paradise fantasy has been replaced by ‘bass player in a band’ reality. I was in Generation X making the ‘Kiss me Deadly’ album, our third. I had also started going out with an amazing girl called “Magenta DeVine” who was 6 feet tall, beautiful, with a sculpted ivory face, huge red lips (think Hilary Swank) and bobbed black hair.  Also she wore dark glasses all the time when no one else was doing that.  She was extraordinary looking and incredibly cool and she also had one of those perfect plummy English pony club girls from the shires type accents (think Four Weddings and a Funeral).  Magenta was the type of girl that boys born in Shepherds Bush fantasize about. She was a music publicist working for a famous agency called Tony Brainsby publicity (and later became presenter of the BBC2/PBS TV travel show  “Rough Guides”). She was to become a very important part of my life, much more than I realized during in those early days of our relationship.

In all my early days of being in bands, I had always shared a place with Mj, from the first days of London SS when we had lived at his Gran’s house on the 22nd floor of the famous tower block (see: Clash  mythology – overlooking the Westway) to sharing a flat in Westbourne Grove (Now that’s another tale – living the dream!).  Anyway things had progressed through different girlfriends till finally in classic rock guitarist fashion…. I moved in with my girlfriend – Magenta.

Well Magenta, some years before I met her, had bought the lease for a place, (incredible when I think back now) from a manager called Malcolm McLaren, who had installed it’s former tenant Sid Vicious there, bass player extraordinaire of the Sex Pistols.  Sid with customary flair and imagination for colour had painted all the walls a lovely Black… some of those classic Sid and Nancy photos were taken there. This was a house that already had rock and roll history.

And so I embarked on the next era of my life, the living with Magenta years.  And what extraordinary years they were too – Johnny Thunders stayed there, Jerry Nolan stayed there, Steve Jones stayed there, Stiv Bators stayed there and many many others as the next chapters of my life unfolded – all of them staying in the little second bedroom.

The soundtrack album to Taxi Driver seemed to play on rotation those early days as I gazed out of the front window in the sunshine, looking up and down the little street where I now lived, loving being there.

Magenta and I spent the next 7 years together in her wonderful Mews house.

And do you know what.  It was that very same house in Pindock Mews, Little Venice, London…. where I used to park all the cars and wish so hard that I lived there.  And George still rented the garage space below, he didn’t even seem surprised when I moved in.  And me?  Well I had found the first home I had ever wished for.  So yeah,  life has taught me again and again that you should put your wishes out there, think them through and speak them out – I’m constantly amazed at how often I’ve been given what I asked for – good and bad…..

There are a hundred more stories to come from Pindock Mews too – it’s only now I realize what punk history was to be lived in those four walls…