Show Me the Sky - Nicholas Hogg [16]
‘Fires and Lies’ shot straight to number one. TV, radio, festivals and talk shows shook with the Notorious. Billy K, still shy in interviews hiding behind his sunglasses, left the talking to Ronnie and Tommy.
Dr Jekyll offstage and Mr Hyde performing, Billy K began the life of a rock god tentatively. On stage he transformed before the baying fans, twisting and thrusting, naked from the waist up, each and every muscle taut with the music and the screams. Behind the scenes he was the whirling dervish come to rest, energy drained and vulnerable.
The Notorious, still only two singles and an imminent album old, were originally billed as support for the Saturday night at Reading when the Infantiles self-destructed in a Paris hotel room. Thrust before 100,000 sweltering festivalgoers, Billy K took the stage as though he’d walked into his own living room. He performed such a pitch-perfect set that even if it had rained the crowd could’ve walked on water.
Billy K, the boy who’d played his first concert to an audience of one, who’d been kicked on to the street with just the clothes on his back and his electric guitar, who’d slept between the records of has-beens and dead singers, now found every second of his life, each breath he took and word he uttered, recorded and scrutinised, edited to a sound bite, set between the pages of a magazine above his picture, the curly haired Adonis of youth, adored by the men who wanted to be him, the women who wanted him, the schoolgirls and housewives, beating at the glass of the tour bus and limousine, rushing the stage to offer their bodies, to reach out and touch, transforming a boy with a guitar into a man with a legion of fanatics.
For rock ’n’ roll stars barely in their twenties, young, good-looking, talented and virile, the Notorious were angels with instruments – apart from the occasional spliff and post-gig booze-up, hotel rooms and TV screens remained intact.
But starved paparazzi had column space to fill. Billy K read about his fictional orgies and coke binges, recorded with such detail and clarity that he wondered if they’d somehow occurred without his knowing. His subsequent fall from grace was as though he’d decided he might as well become the rock demon press and public portrayed, that Billy K should jump off the stage into the fiery pit fans and journalists had tended for him.
The louder the gig, the greater the rush of sound and screaming fans, the higher the crowd surfer rose above the stage, the lower the post-gig comedown. To upend his mood, Billy K, like his peers past and present, took drugs, smashed up rooms, had sex, and drank. He became the ultimate enfant terrible.
On return from tour he bought the warehouse home in East London, paying in cash with a carrier bag full of fifty-pound notes. While the Feeney brothers headed north for a break from the scene, Billy K and Ronnie stormed the capital as though each night was the last of their lives.
Gecko lawyers first defended Billy K on charges of public disorder and the breaking of an archaic byelaw: ‘Negligent animal husbandry within a mile of the Houses of Parliament.’ When Billy K and Ronnie released a lorryload of spray-painted sheep into Trafalgar Square, each one sheared and luminous green, bleating down Whitehall with pink earmuffs and an anagram of the Notorious as a mock brand on their rump, lawyers claimed ‘political statement’ rather than a puerile stunt, and Ronnie and Billy K escaped with cautions.
Fines dealt with a soliciting charge in Rome, and arrests for cannabis and cocaine possession resulted in nothing more than a week’s stay at a rehab clinic. These ‘misadventures’ enhanced his reputation as the tortured artist – too talented and sensitive to play by the rules of us lesser mortals – and it was only his fleeting, but intense relationship with 48-year-old Czech born actress, Zdenka Vandova, that gave a brief respite for the Gecko lawyers.
The press needed no Freudian experts to conclude the toy boy calmed in the company of a much needed mother