A young Baxter Dury meets Joe Strummer, in this extract from his memoir

The Gallagher family lived on Irvine Road, Shepherd’s Bush, in a large squat close to Hammersmith. Micky played the keyboards in Dad’s band, the Blockheads, and his two sons Luke and Ben were the only kids I knew my age in London when I arrived. Whereas only one of my parents smoked pot and was unlikely to get out of bed before midday, they had two.

The house was divided between the adults and children, and the basement was dedicated to expressiveness and was full of instruments and games. Both Luke and Ben as a result were exceptionally good at everything creative.

We had a shared interest in hip hop, breakdancing and, mostly, graffiti as it was slowly filtering through from America in the early eighties. Luke was brilliant at it, which I exploited. I would pass his art off as mine at my school. This seemed to soften some of the aggression I was experiencing at the time. Luke must have understood that this was what I was doing but decided not to say anything.

As a teenager Micky had considered joining the clergy, as was the expectation of his religious family. But a few years later, in 1965, at only twenty years old he replaced Alan Price on the keyboards in the Animals. They were at the height of their fame with ‘The House of the Rising Sun’ being a hit across the world. He subsequently left his home town of Newcastle and toured across America and never looked back.

He had a strong sense of his Catholic roots but with a new open-minded outlook that the sixties and being in a rock ’n’ roll band inspired.

The Gallagher house was free of normal rules and had a spontaneous energy to it. When Luke, Ben and I decided that we should try and spray our ideas on a public wall it was Aileen, their mother, that encouraged it. She woke us up at 3 a.m., made us some toast and gave us calming drops from her cabinet of potions.

The designated wall was on the side of the Hammersmith & West London College that had relative cover away from the main road. Luke’s steely nerve kept him focused and he and Ben managed to complete most of the design. I panicked and ran back and forth from one end of the street to the other, convinced of our imminent capture. Luke and I were only thirteen and Ben just eleven.

Soon after, Ben and I smoked our first joint together after stealing hash from his parents. We broke into a disused railway building to the side of Olympia station, placed the whole lump into a Rizla and sprinkled it with a tiny bit of tobacco. We waited for any great revelation as to why most adults we knew smoked hash but nothing very special happened. From that point on we persevered, easily taking it from either parent’s stash box until they realised and we had to start looking elsewhere.

At the time, the All Saints Road in Ladbroke Grove was west London’s drug-dealing frontline, mostly run by Jamaicans. Different types of hash could be purchased in a variety of sizes, the smallest being a £5 draw. This could be a stick of Red Leb, a lump of Moroccan rocky or more commonly a bit of plastic dustbin lid.

Ben and I would nominate one of us to brave the scary line of dealers to find someone willing to sell to us. As soon as we scored we would run as fast as we could as we were trespassing into an unfriendly grown-up world. Sometimes the area could feel dangerous as there was so much tension between the police and the local community.

Once, in the middle of the Notting Hill Carnival, Ladbroke Grove seemed more volatile than usual so Ben and I took cover at Joe Strummer’s house off the All Saints on Lancaster Road. His house was several floors of sprawling chaos full of every weirdo to be found locally. Micky had worked for the Clash over the years and was a regular member of the touring band so Ben had close ties to Joe’s family.

We scurried through a mesh of drunk adults towards the roof where Ben knew of a secret place where we could smoke our hash undisturbed. We climbed a precarious ladder from the attic and sat with our legs dangling over Joe’s roof and rolled our joint. Surveying the festivities, we could see across the whole of west London.

We drank a beer and flicked tiny bits of slate at the revellers many storeys below. Then we both decided we needed to piss but were too stoned to make the arduous journey back down. We stood up on the precarious ledge and urinated off the side in unison.

We then began the slow descent down the many flights of stairs where we were confronted by Joe and Micky. They were drenched in what I could only assume was piss and looked very angry. They asked us where we’d been and we answered simultaneously, denying we’d been near the roof, and without hesitating ran past them and out of the front door. This was the only occasion I ever met Joe.

Extract from Chaise Longue by Baxter Dury (Corsair). Buy a copy here.

Baxter Dury is a special guest on A Drink with the Idler on Thursday 9 December. Register here – it’s free for members.

Subscribe to the Idler here and get 26% off the cover price plus a free copy of An Idler’s Manual.

Buy single issues here.