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It was July 4 and Britain's number one Asian punk band Sid Hindu and the Paranoid Pakis were playing the Frog and Toad in Stepney. At least that's what the poster outside the boozer said.
But they weren't playing in the pub at that moment. Nor would they be playing there for the rest of the evening, or ever again – not if he had his way, thought Ramjit Tarsane Sag Rama Singh as he leant against the wall outside the pub, taking the air.
Singh sang. He was a singer. That is to say he was the singer with the Paranoid Pakis. He was the almost legendary Sid Hindu. And he didn't like the East End one bit.
In fact anywhere east of Ealing was too oriental for his taste. He may have been born in Bangladesh but he had been brought up in Britain, in Southall, west London's Asian ghetto. He had been to school there, learnt casual sloppy English ways and adopted English music. In his eyes up East was far too halal. For Sid was one of a new generation. He was one of Southall's swinging Singhs.
Not only did he not reckon the East End, he did not reckon the Frog and Toad either. It was a right Black Hole. Though there hadn't been any National Front wallahs picketing the place this time, he had had to take a lot of barracking from yobs in the audience. Those bastards gave him the right Upanishads. He'd have paid anything to give them a punch up the punjab.
Puking up curry on stage was no joy either. It was always so much hotter on the way back up. But that's what the fans expected from a punk Pakistani. Sid breathed deeply, soothing his sore throat. At least the air was cool here outside, he reflected. There had been a touch of the monsoons earlier and the street outside the pub sparkled like the Star of India.
Sid leant back against the wall and tried to relax. He had been getting himself in a bit of a tantra. Going back in to the pub for the second set didn't appeal to him one bit. He was knackered and it was hotter than a Bangalore Pall in there. In his present shagged-out state he didn't fancy facing the racist wideboys in the audience again either. Some of them had already started giving him the rajberry.
But one day he'd show them all. He bit his lip with determination. He was not going to be a fakir all his life. When he was a big star they'd show some respect. They'd not tell him to \"pukka off!\" then. And he was going to make it some day.
He had a vindaloo of a bands together. There was Vish Nu on acoustic sarangi, Steve Charpoy on electric punkah, the legendary John Mahal's younger brother Taj on rhythm tambura and rock veteran Harry Krishna on lead sitar. With a line-up like that how could they go wrong? They'd have the world by the Gurkhas in no time flat. He could see it all in his mind's eye - the rhinestone turbans, the gold lamé dhotis, the brocade Bombay bloomers with six-foot bottoms and no turn-ups. They'd have a backing group, his three sexy siblings the Singh Sisters in short sequined saris. And they'd even have a white elephant on stage. When that started gobbing on the audience, the bully boys would stop their barracking and no mistake: on racial taunt, one ethnic slur and - whambo! - a trunkful of mucus madras full in the face.
For now, though, he was still in the mulligatawny. The first set had gone like a concrete Khyber. The punters at the Frog and Toad didn't go for punked-up versions of classics. “Who's Sari Now?” and “Ain't Nothing But A House Chapati” had died the death. Nor did they like the Johnny Cash-style prison Singh-song song “Singh Sing”. And Sid knew that he'd have to get himself Gange-ed up to go on for the second set.
He took a quick butcher's up and down the Toad to make sure no one was coming, then fiddled in his pocket and pulled out a brown paper bag. In it there was a Bombay duck. He took a long, deep sniff at the small, highly spiced, dried fish and suddenly he was a new man. A few more snorts and he was curried up to the eyeballs.
High as the Himalayas, Sid hoicked himself off the wall and set off unsteadily towards the doorway back into the rub-a-dub-dub. But he had only moved a couple of uncertain steps when a battered blue transit van came screaming round the corner out of control. It slewed off the wet road, bounced up the kerb and skidded to a halt only inches from the wall at the exact spot Sid had been standing only moments before.
Sid leap for the safety of the pub doorway and cowered there thanking his lucky stars. His eyes tight shut, he chanted a great many grateful mantras under his breath to a plethora of pantheist gods.
But when he opened his eyes again he could not believe what he saw. Rama and the boys might have saved his wind and limb, but surely they had let his sanity slip. For in the driver's seat of the transit van, desperately fighting with the gear lever, there was a large, hairy gorilla. And he was armed.

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Now you may be wondering, how I know all this. Well I was at that gig too. My named Layla Laycock. I was in my mid-thirties and I was slightly taller than Elton John.
My profession? I suppose I was a journalist of sorts. I wrote little pieces for the music paper - like New Mystical Excess, Malady Faker. You may remember the disco column I used to do for Climb Out, London's weekly entertainments guide for those contemplating suicide. It was bylined \"Dance-a-lot\". That was the nickname I picked up well before I got my foot in the door on Grub Street. Long before I tickled my first typewriter I had been a groupie - that is to say I fucked with stars. I was a starfucker, starfucker, starfucker, starfucker, star. It would be fair to add that I'd had more heavy Hamptons that you've had hot dinners and The NME Book of Rock reads like a book of cock to me.
In polite company I maintained that I earned the nickname by being nifty on my pins and dynamite on the dance floor. But actually the allonym came from my performance in bed. Well, not in bed exactly. A bed barely came into it in those days. If I was lucky I got a knee-trembler in the shelter of the stage doorway, a bunk-up bouncing in the back of the band's bus as it sped between gigs or a cosy coitus over the drum kit. The thing was wherever it was I always came off like I was having an epiletic fit. My orgasms were always real force-niners on the Richter Scale. And among those juvenile jerkers I used to go with, the joke was that I “danced a lot” on the end of their cocks.
The groupie lifestyle was all very well while it lasted. But who wants a fairy when she's forty? More especially who wants a girl that's been gang-banged by every grotty guitarist in Great Britain once she's pushing twenty-five? The toe rags who played the rock-and-roll circuit go in for fresher meat. They want school-girl shrieks and the illusion they are debauching the innocent. White socks and gym slips, navy serge knickers and plates of ham, that's their cuppa. So when I reached by pony I packed my autograph book and my nickname and walked right out of the game.
I set off back to the Smoke and started writing exposés of the rock stars for the Sunday linens to earn my keep. And that's how I came to join the noble profession of journalism, the fourth estate. Though when thing were thin I still pulled the Social.
On the night Sid Hindu came face to face with a gorilla driving a transit van I was doing a piece on the Paranoid Pakis for the American rock magazine Drooling Goon, which I pulled while researching a series on the perennial fad among rock stars - premature death. The high-light of the piece was to be a between-sets interview with Sid Hindu himself. So during the break I left out my usual four rum-and-blacks at the bar and went out to look for him.
I found Sid crouched in the doorway of the boozer practically paralysed, staring down the road like a tit in a trance. He was transfixed by a battered blue transit van that was bouncing down off the pavement outside the pub. He seemed to find something about it inordinately interesting. So I watched it too.
Once the van had got all four wheels back on the road, the driver slammed into second gear and booted it. Up the road, the driver ran the red light, signalled right and slued the van round the corner, getting a nice bit of drift on the back end.
It was then that I realised there was something odd about the transit. A most peculiar sound - a cacophony of squeaks, squeals, clucks and other most unmechanical noises was emanating from the rear.
As it drifted round the corner, the van hit a pot-hole. The whole motor jarred and shuddered. The back door flew open as the driver fought for control. Out of the flapping rear door a great crescendo of squawks erupted - like a boat full of benighted banshees strangling a crowded container of claustrophobic chickens. And with this sound billowed out a great flock of black feathers.
The van narrowly missed a keep-left sign, then recovered. It snuck into the side street and the rear door slammed shut again. And as it sped out of sight Sid Hindu fell sobbing into my arms.

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Needless to say my interview with Sid Hindu was a write-off. He kept babbling about manic monkey murder plots, the difficulties large arboreal anthropoids have with sorting out the cogs in four-speed synchromesh gear boxes and that. From what I could piece together he seemed to believe that the van had been driven by an ape who had deliberately set out to run him down. All I knew was that this giddy gorilla stuff I was getting was not going to go down at all well with Drooling Goon's editors in New York.
On the other hand the whole incident did seem to set Sid up for his second set. When he went back on stage the adrenalin was really pumping. He gave a magic performance of the band's latest surfing-style single, “Karma, Karma, Karma, Karma Sutra With Me”, then bunged us some brilliant tracks off their punk album Sikh On Stage. His yupppie bit with the nail duvet was ace. He took the audience's breath away with his version of the Indian rope trick, performed while the band sang “Looking Through The Eyes of Ali Butto” and he finished them off with a controversial finale where they vasectomised a cow called Sanjay on stage to the strains of “God Siva Indira Gandhi”.
He had played a blinder. But what probably glued this performance into the brain cells of those who saw it more than anything else was Sid's get out. For the second set he wore a torn tartan kaftan held up with safety pins, a spiked-out turban and a pair of day-glo orange PVC sandals which were chained together. And he had red caste marks splattered across his face like technicolor measles.
All of this was very disheartening in one way. I knew that whatever I wrote about Sid Hindu's electric act, some ex-hippie hack in New York would headline it \"Sahid it to me\". After all journalism is the recycling of clichés. That's why I'd learned to love it so.

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The only other thing that sticks in my mind about that evening was that I saw an old face in the ban someone I'd been with in the old days. Normally this would not strike me as surprising. My pussy has seen more punters than Harrods' revolving door at sale time. But here was a face I could not place. And it was a member I should remember.
You see back in my groupie days there weren't many curry merchants in the music scene. The only one I could thing of was Ravi Wankar and, as far as I could remember, he did not even make it on to the groupies' play list. So if I had had this paki in his pre-Paranoid days he should have stood out in my memory like a sore wotchermacallit. Still I could not place him, though somewhere in my heart this bloke did sound a distant dong.
This didn't bother me much at the time though. It was just a fleeting impression. I was not eager for second helpings no matter who this bloke was. After I had dropped out of the groupie scene I had given up men completely. I was totally disillusioned with them. Well, you did see them at their worst backstage. Usually when they were not actually playing, they were pissed out of their heads or strung out on embalming fluid, haemorrhoid salve or patent udder rub and begging you to do obscene tricks with light-ale bottles. A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle and since I had gotten out of the business I lived exclusively, faithfully and monogamously with my darling Jennifer. She was the only one who gave me large portions these days.

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I had met Jennifer when I was on the last knockings of my groupie career. She was just 17. And it was a drummer I got off with that got us together.
This shows you how far I had fallen, straight off. As every good groupie knows, drummers are strictly division two. After them it's roadies and record company executives.
I had pulled this tom tom Tom in a pub. I'd already sussed that he was a skins man but reckoned that this maybe my last chance to work in my chosen profession. And it was back at his place that I met my Jennifer.
She was five foot ten and skinny. Her eyes were blue, her skin fair and her beautiful hair, which hung down to her nipple-line, was a subtle shade of auburn. She had just run away from home and had been living with drummer for about two weeks. Her father was a Beefeater who lived in at the Tower of London. Consequently he locked her in nights. For me, it was love at first sight.
The three of us sat around the drummer's Finchley Road gaff, quaffing Mateus Rose, smoking copious joints and listening to Hendrix. Once we were in a suitably mellow mood Mr Skins plucked up the courage to suggest that we all went to bed together. Jennifer was young and naive, but I was no spring chicken. I looked shocked at first of course - the punters always went for that. Then I allowed myself to be talked round. An hour later, Jen's long paisley dress was lying rumpled on the carpet. My hotpants were hanging from the light fitting. She and I were making wild, passionate love. And the drummer was tending his bruises in the bathroom.

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The very next week Jennifer and I moved into a council flat in Bermondsey. Our new drum was on the ninth floor of a tower block. Through a crack in the wall you could see clear through to the ground. The lift smelt of piss and the entrance way was splattered with National Front graffiti. Otherwise it was okay. And we lived there dead cosy for over a decade. Blimey, I was so settled I even thought about buying a TV licence. The secret of our happiness, I reckon, was stability. Over those ten years we lived together, Jennifer had not changed one bit. She remained fully rooted in the sixties. She grew dope in a window box and our home life was all tie-dying and hand-thrown pottery. Our flat was decorated with pictures of rock stars and war victims clipped from the colour supplements. The furniture was straight from the Oxfam shop. We had a three-piece suite, a huge oval table for dinner parties and a legless bed. And Jennifer's record collection didn't contain anything pressed later than 1972. She meditated a lot, manoeuvred our diet into whole food and wore long flowing indian dresses. We were Friends of the Earth and Save the Whale. Our ninth-floor nirvana was high-rise back-to-nature.
Against this stable background I found I was free to change as I chose. My new line of work in rock journalism made me lend a lug-hole to the harsh sounds of the seventies and pretty soon the New Wave was crashing over me. I came to hate the indolent, idiotic, idealistic days of the sixties when everyone thought beautiful thoughts but no one did sweet FA.
This perturbed Jennifer no end. She believed in the peace and love thing and wanted it to last forever. But simply to keep food in our mouths I had to go out and listen to the new bands. You can't got on writing about Herman’s Hermits forever.
Still, with the help of my Jennifer, I managed to preserve a nice streak of sixties' hedonism in me. I still sort of believed that music was kinda important and would change things, and that getting out of your head on whatever substances was a good thing per se. I drank wine and jasmin tea at home (Guinness and rum-and-black when I was out). I smoked dope and popped pills wherever. And then there was making love.
I had never had anything like Jennifer before in my life. Her body was beautiful and alluring. She was a flower child in bed, so gentle and considerate. What a change she was from those rock-band animals who liked nothing better than to shove the sharp ends of their Stratocasters up my unprotesting twat.
But soon everything was going to change. I felt it. Recently Jennifer had been going out a lot. She had informed me that she wanted to have a baby. And lately she had been getting into black velvet.

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I took a cab home from the Frog and Toad that night. I was feeling horny. Jennifer would already be in bed and I hated having to wake her up to get my oats.
In the back of the taxi I started writing up my notes. I wanted to outline the Sid Hindu interview while the evening was still fresh. The curry-crazed Sid hadn't given me much to go on to be sure - in fact, there was not one word of his babblings I could use. But, as a journalist, I was not unduly worried by the absence of fact. It wouldn't take me long to dash out Sid Hindu's views on the media, the system, racism, fascism, the revolution, drugs, sex, violence, god and money, whatever they were. I'd make them up as I went along. I'd thrown in a few bits about where his music was taking him, where it was coming from and how he got his act together for good measure. I knew all that stuff by heart now. It was a doddle.
When I had finished the outline the cabby started blagging me. They always gave a tart alone at night a bit of chat and this geezer had more front than Brighton. But I wasn't having any. Fixed in my mind was the vision of Jennifer, her auburn hair splayed out over the pillow, her naked body under the duvet, waiting for me. So I paid the cabbie the exact fare, gave him a right mouthful before he had a chance to start on me and made a dash for the coffins-sized cubicle that would that me up to the heaven called home.
But as the lift door opened on the ninth floor, I was greeted by an enormous barrage of sound. Someone on our landing was having a party, I thought at first, and I wondered whether I could wangle myself an invite. But as I walked down the corridor it gradually dawned on me that the inordinate din was coming from my own flat.
I quickened my pace, puzzled by what was going on. The music throbbing its way through my front door was loud and abrasive. Jennifer, I knew, had nothing like that in her collection. It was a bit far ahead even for me. Had a burglar broken into the flat to just to abuse our stereo? Had some marauding maniac mutilated her mellow and mystic melange? My mind raced.
Outside the flat I fumbled in my handbag for my keys. But as I opened the front door. I was swamped with a wall of watts and shied back behind the jamb. After a couple of minutes my ears became more accustomed to the deafening decibels and I crept forward slowly up the hall steps into the living room. Halfway up, I peeped over the top but there didn't seem to be anyone in the room at all. So it was down to me. I clenched my teeth, made a dash for the stereo and turned the sound down.
Once the walls had stopped shaking, I looked around the room and there, to my horror, was my Jennifer. She was no longer the loose, languorous hippie I once knew. She stood stiff against the far wall of the living room, pogoing aimlessly up and down.
She wore leopard-skin tights, a torn, tartan mini-kilt, fluorescent ballet pumps and a tight, black, cross-zipped leather jacket. Her beautiful hair was gone too. It had been shorn. Her barnet was now cropped short and spiked out from her head. It was no longer that ravishing shade of auburn either. It was crosshatched with patches of orange and pink and green and black.
And she was sniffing glue from a Smiths' Crisps' bag.

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