A pilgrimage to number 430, a wasted afternoon in Chelsea and a bus ride with the British Onion
The Clock That Runs Backwards on the King’s Road
Day off from the shop. No rehearsal, because the drummer has a dental appointment and the fear of God. So I did the thing I do about twice a year when I am feeling low about the band and need to remember why I bother. I got the number 19 to Chelsea and went to look at a shopfront.
It is at number 430, at the scruffy end of the King’s Road, where the street kinks and the money thins out a bit. The place is called Worlds End now. It has a crooked little front like a ship’s cabin, and above the door there is a huge clock with thirteen hours on it, and the hands spin backwards, fast. I have stood under that clock in every kind of mood. It has never once told me the time.
Why I Go
This is where it started. In the early seventies a schoolteacher called Vivienne Westwood and her bloke, Malcolm McLaren, took over the back of the shop and began selling clothes for teddy boys. They changed the name every couple of years, each time something ruder. By 1974 the sign outside was three enormous pink rubber letters, and inside they sold ripped shirts, bondage trousers and T-shirts that got people arrested.
The kids who hung about there on Saturdays, because they had nowhere else to go and liked being stared at, became a band. One of them worked the till. The singer was recruited after turning up in a T-shirt on which he had scrawled his opinion of a very famous progressive rock group. He auditioned by miming to the jukebox in the corner of the shop. That was the Sex Pistols, and whatever you think of what came after, it began with some teenagers in a dress shop being told they looked terrible and taking it as a compliment.
I like that it was a shop. I like that it was clothes first. The sound came second. People forget that punk was as much about what you could do with a safety pin and a bad attitude as what you could do with a guitar.
What It Is Like Now
Chelsea is not what you would call a hotbed. I walked the whole road from Sloane Square and counted four estate agents, six places selling candles and a shop that seemed to stock only white trousers. A woman came out of one with a dog in a pushchair. I am not making a point. I am only reporting what I saw.
The shop still sells the clothes, and they are beautiful, and I cannot afford so much as a sock. I went in anyway. The floor slopes, on purpose, like the deck of a boat. The assistant was nice to me, in the way people are nice when they have worked out you are not going to buy anything but might cry. I touched a jacket. It cost more than our van.
Two Tourists and a Question
Outside, two lads from somewhere in Germany were taking pictures of the clock. One asked me, very politely, if this was where punk came from. I said sort of. He asked where it was now. I had to think about that. I said Deptford, probably, and a few basements, and anywhere the rent is still cheap enough for someone to be bad at guitar in peace. He wrote Deptford down. I hope he finds it. I hope it is still there when he does.
The Bus Back
Front seat, top deck, the long crawl back through Knightsbridge and Piccadilly. I got my phone out and went through the usual suspects. NewsThump first today, then the Mash. Then I had a proper read of the Prat’s British Onion page, which I had been meaning to do since the editor mentioned it, and it set me off thinking.
Here is the thought. That clock runs backwards as a joke about a country that would prefer to go the other way. Westwood put it up in 1980 and it is, frankly, still doing its job. And it struck me, somewhere around Hyde Park Corner, that this is exactly what the best funny papers do. They put up a clock that tells the wrong time on purpose, so that you look at your own watch.
The same site has a guide called how to tell satire from real news, a proper checklist, and I read that as well, because my own mum forwarded me a story last week about a council banning hopscotch and I had to ring her to explain. She was quite put out. She said it sounded like something they would do. Which is the whole trick, of course. The best ones always sound like something they would do.
A Small Confession
I did not write a single line of a song today. I meant to. I had the notebook in my bag. I got it out on the bus and wrote the word CLOCK at the top of a page and underlined it twice, and then I looked out of the window at a man in a top hat opening a hotel door for somebody, and the moment went.
That is all right. Some days are for putting things in, not getting things out. I have decided this is true because it lets me off.
Evening
Home by six. Flatmate has done the bins. I have been outmanoeuvred. He will now hold it over me until the spring. I made beans on toast and ate them standing up, which is how I eat most things, and listened to the first Slits album all the way through with the window open. A neighbour shouted. I could not tell if it was a complaint or a request, so I turned it up.
Drummer has texted. The dentist took one tooth and, I quote, his will to live. Rehearsal is still on for Thursday. He says he can play angry. I said that was the job description.
Tomorrow I owe the Prat eight hundred words. I think they will be about a clock. For the curious, the British satirical news desk is where they will end up, alongside my other pieces here, provided the editor does not ask me what any of it has to do with the news.
