7/ All pop careers end in failure [ Back to excerpts ]

We decided to do one last tour of Europe as a three-piece, and one last British tour. I set up a lot of the European gigs myself, spending days on the telephone with promoters in France, Holland, Germany and Scandinavia. Of course these European promoters wanted punk bands now, and it was quite difficult to set up a tour that would pay, but I finally got the dates into some sort of shape. One of the gigs we were most looking forward to was the Kant Kino, a cinema in Berlin that hosted gigs on an irregular basis. We had enjoyed a great deal of success in that city on previous appearances, and they booked us for two show on consecutive nights. We always loved Berlin. It was our sort of city. The wall was still standing and the city was like a depraved outpost of a time gone by. There was an energy and an atmosphere there unlike anywhere else in Germany.

The night before the Berlin shows we played a gig in Hamburg, and set off early the following morning to drive to Berlin. At that time there were only three roads that you could take from the West into Berlin, and one of them connected Hamburg to Berlin. The formalities at the border crossing were tedious and irksome, with endless amounts of form filling, customs clearance and money-changing to be completed before entry into East Germany was granted. By now it was getting dark, and twenty miles into the East the van we were in developed a fault, and seized up in the middle of nowhere. Within minutes an East German police patrol car pulled up and questioned us for half an hour. We explained that we had broken down. They offered little sympathy and no help. They flagged down the first West German vehicle big enough to tow us and ordered them to take us back over the border. Reluctantly the trucker attached a towline to our stricken vehicle and drove at twenty miles an hour back to the crossing point at Lauenburg. Unhitching us as soon as we were back over the border in West Germany, he bade us a none-too-fond farewell. From Lauenburg I phoned the promoter in Berlin and told him our plight, and that we wouldn't be able to get there in time for that evening's show. He was very sympathetic and told me that ticket sales for both shows were good, and that he would reschedule another show to replace that evening's. I promised that we would get the van fixed the following day and get there in good time.

We were a touring party of six: myself, Stoner, Peter, Hobbsy and Joe Stoner, our roadies, and Giovanni Dadomo, who had come along for the ride. We found a garage for the van and checked ourselves in to a tiny Gasthof, a traditional-style German inn, with a few rooms above a bar. We had a few drinks and then had something to eat, and then started to drink in earnest. There was a skittle alley at the back of the bar, and we played endless games of skittles with the locals, who eyed us with suspicion and amusement. Rounds of drinks were exchanged, and the local schnapps, called Alte Korn, became the staple of the evening. It was a powerful, coarse, clear spirit, with a distinct kick. After a few of these the evening really started to go with a swing, and by bedtime we were all totally and hopelessly drunk. Clinging to the handrail for support, we edged our ways to our upstairs room, stumbling into huge potted plants and stuffed hunting trophies on the landings. We came to a door that we thought was one of our rooms, and, on entering, we were confronted with a massive coat rail holding a dozen Nazi uniforms. Naturally for a party of English drunks it was irresistible, and we all shed our own clothes and immediately changed into the military uniforms we had just discovered, giggling hysterically all the while. Once in uniform we strutted around the other rooms and up and down the staircase, like inebriated extras from Colditz. It was unspeakably childish but, fuelled by drink and swept along by a manic hysteria, we were in tears of laughter. Giovanni was goose-stepping along the narrow passage and castigating a stuffed brown bear for trying to escape from 'Ze Kamp!'

Inevitably the raucous commotion we were making woke the owner of the hotel who pursued us upstairs, berating our abuse of his hospitality, as we hid paralysed by laughter behind rubber plants or stuffed animals. He went and got a shotgun from his hunting room and, aiming it at Giovanni's groin, he ordered us to return the uniforms and get to our rooms. We sheepishly obeyed, and slunk off to bed and oblivion. The night was punctuated by the unmistakeable death rattle of men being violently sick emanating from several of our rooms. The following morning, ashen and contrite, we filed into breakfast and apologised for our misdemeanours. Our host was most forgiving, but informed us that, nevertheless, he would be 'Obliged to be imposing a fine, in addition to ze cost of ze rooms.' It seemed eminently reasonable.

Despite the most appalling hangovers which the Alte Korn had left us with, we got the van fixed by a mechanic first thing that morning, (if ever you need to know, 'Lichtmaschine' is the German for dynamo, and 'Kaput' is the German for totally fucked) and got to Berlin in good time. Most of the journey was undertaken in a vacant glassy-eyed, throbbing-headed, dry-mouthed silence, broken only by fits of giggling as we remembered the previous night's bacchanal. The shows in Berlin, with both nights totally sold out to a crazy audience, were apocalyptic, and so was the entertainment afterwards.

Travelling home I told Giovanni that I thought we would fold up the band before the end of the year and he thought it was the best thing to do. 'YouÕve got such a talent,' he told me, 'youÕre bound make it when you find the right vehicle.'

I think it was while playing at a rainy outdoor festival with Eddie and The Hot Rods in Chelmsford that I finally decided it was over. Not just for us, but for punk too. It was a dismal day, brightened only by a backstage visit from Rob Tyner, leader of the MC5, one of my great hero bands of late sixties. He was wildly enthusiastic about the set that we had just played, and wondered if we could do some work together at some stage. My head was elsewhere, and I never even took his number.

The Doctors of Madness played their final show at the Music Machine, in Camden Town, on the twenty-sixth of October 1978, three and a half years after we had signed with Bryan Morrison and Justin de Villeneuve. Cabaret Voltaire supported. We intended to play a very long set, taking in most of our favourite songs from the three albums plus a few others besides. It was as much for old times' sake and a sense of putting those songs to rest. We opened up with a ten minute-long new song called Trouble, which I had written some time back, but never done with the Doctors. It kicked the set off with a howling agonised maelstrom of feedback, the rhythm slowly insinuating itself, and then asserting itself until it was an insistent lobotomised jackhammer. For a three-piece we made a most terrifying racket that night. The song ends with one of my more modest observations, 'If genius was murder I'd end up in the chair/ I've got a mind like Bertrand Russell and I dance like Fred Astaire.' TV Smith joined us onstage for two songs that he and I had co-written, Making Machines and The Last Human Being in the World, plus a song called Who cries for me? which I had recently finished. I remember we also did a killer version of Lou ReedÕs Velvet Underground classic What Goes On? which we had first tried out in Berlin. But there was no real fun in the gig for any of us. We were so strung out on speed and booze, and it felt like the people in the cavernous jejune arena had just come to pay their respects to a corpse.Many of the critics reviewing that show took the opportunity to give the corpse a good kicking just to make sure it was dead. The music journalists Paul Morley and Jon Savage were two of the most vicious cadaver abusers.

The three and a half years since the Cabbage Patch had been a bumpy ride, full of excitements and disappointments and unfulfilled dreams. We had got tantalisingly close, we had been to the top of the candy mountain and seen the land of milk and honey, but we had been denied entry. We had somehow gone from being 'ahead of our time' to being passŽ, without ever spending a single night between the crisp, clean white linen sheets of being Now. From dynamos to dinosaurs. All pop careers, like all political careers, end in failure. Or death. Or, worse still, a reunion. Since there is no blueprint, no-one knows what 50-year old rock stars are supposed to do. One thing is certain, though. They should not get up onstage, fat, flabby and flatulent, and try to convince themselves and us that they are still 22. No-one in their right mind would ever say the records the Stones have made since the mid-seventies have been a patch on their earlier work. No-one who saw The Sex Pistols reunion tour, or The Velvet Underground reunion tour, would seriously suggest they served any useful function, except to provide an old-age pension for the participants. Would you swap your copy of Revolver for Let it Be? Or The Clash for Sandinista? Or Ziggy Stardust for Tin Machine? Snake-hipped Elvis's Hound Dog for bloated Presley's My Way? No, nor me. See what I mean? All pop careers end in failure.

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