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with drugs, music, writing, the way they lived their lives. The pill was amazingly liberating; it started a revolution on its own. More folk were rejecting what they saw as a “straight” life and choosing something different. Kids no longer looked like mini-adults, didn’t blindly follow in their parents’ footsteps or obey church, state or law. The world was ours. We didn’t like what earlier generations had done with it and we were determined to change it.
    ‘When we first got down there, we stayed with my cousin Steve for a few weeks until we got sorted out with somewhere to live and then we set about putting another band together. Tom and I were overwhelmed by the potential. Music was changing and London was the place to be if you wanted to be a part of it. It was exhilarating.
    ‘Free, the Rolling Stones, John Mayall, Cream, Alexis Korner, you could see them all around London at that time. We’d go to the Nag’s Head in Battersea to see bands, and the Marquee, and other clubs, like Electric Garden and Middle Earth. That one really appealed to Tom because he was right into Lord of the Rings. He was a kind of trippy blues hippy in those days, until he had a bad acid trip. We didn’t know enough about it for me to talk him down and he didn’t dare try it again, not for a long time. So after that we stuck to beer and dope. And speed. We took speed to keep going. It’s nothing short of a miracle that we didn’t kill ourselves that first year or so. We didn’t look after ourselves very well at all. Too much drinking and smoking, crap food, damp bedsits, not enough sleep.
    ‘Tom and I had girlfriends back in York. We hadn’t either of us been going out with them for long, but we had to leave them and go and start again. It was a wrench. Especially as we didn’t think sophisticated London birds would want anything to do with a couple of yokels like us.
    ‘When we told our girls we were leaving, Tom’s did a Tarot reading for him.’ He shook his head. ‘Just about every chick you met then was into something weird; fortune-telling, spiritualism, runes, I Ching, tarot, palmistry, astrology. The odd mad one was into necromancy or witchcraft. Then when The Exorcist came out, everyone had bits of paper with numbers and letters on them round the edge of the coffee table and their fingers on the glass in the middle, just waiting to commune with the other side. Crazy.
    ‘Anyway, Tom’s bird said she saw no future for Tom and I with anyone but each other, that we were meant to be together. She said that as long as we were true to one another, we were unbeatable.’
    Alex smiled. ‘Well, she wasn’t exactly wrong, was she?’
    ‘I thought it was really kind of her, letting us go like that. She knew we were nervous. It was the nicest going away present she could have given us.’
    ‘You and Tom were really close, weren’t you?’
    Johnny nodded. ‘Yeah, we grew up together. We shared everything.’ He scratched his head. ‘Those early years at school, then living and playing together for so long … I don’t think I was ever as close to anyone as I was to Tom. All those hours we spent drinking beer, smoking dope and talking crap. If we hadn’t loved each other, we’d have gone crazy.
    ‘Some of the places we lived in you just wouldn’t have believed. Flea pits and doss-houses. I remember our first bedsit with particular affection. “Cockroach Central”, we called it. These fucking huge black beetles would crawl out from under the cooker, day and night they’d be scuttling around the place.’ He shuddered. ‘Jesus.’
     
     
     

Chapter 9
    London, 1968
    A wintry Thursday night, typical of many, found Tom and Johnny lounging in a grubby little bedsit in North London. The boys were oblivious to the squalor: with a roof over their heads, a place to crash and a new band to play in, they had everything they either wanted or needed. As a bonus, the guy upstairs sold dope, there was an off-licence on the