To Hell and Back: My Life in Johnny Thunders' Heartbreakers

"I’m a big fan of this one. Walter was one of Johnny Thunders’ Heartbreakers. Do you know anything about that band? They emerged from the ashes of the legendary New York Dolls. For a brief period, Malcolm McLaren was the Dolls’ manager. It was the first band he’d ever managed, so he was very much learning on the job and, naturally enough, made some terrible mistakes. Anyway, the Dolls had a troubled history, during their first UK tour in 1972, their 21-year-old drummer, Billy Murcia, died at a party in Hammersmith. He is ‘Billy Dolls’ in Bowie’s song ‘Time’ by the way. Billy was replaced by Jerry Nolan, and it was Jerry that introduced the band to Heroin. Nolan and the band’s guitarist Johnny Thunders became inseparable friends and when the Dolls imploded in 1975, Nolan and Thunders teamed up with Richard Hell from the band Television, and our hero Walter to form an underground supergroup: The Heartbreakers. By the way, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers has nothing to do with this Heartbreakers. “If you want to know what being on tour is like, go and sit in an airport for three hours every day for three months” Walter played the guitar and sang. In the autumn of 1976, The Heartbreakers came over to the UK to take part in the infamous Anarchy tour—together with the Sex Pistols, The Damned, and The Clash. In the book, Walter gives us a great account of arriving at Heathrow and being met by a desperate Malcolm McLaren a matter of hours after the Bill Grundy Today show, the notorious television interview with The Sex Pistols. Precisely so. Grundy was an old-school broadcaster, and he really didn’t want this bunch of urchins on his show. The truth of it is that it really wasn’t the right show for the band to be on from any perspective. Getting the band on the show shouldn’t have worked at all…it was an example of McLaren’s naive cluelessness. Anyway, Grundy seemed to be very drunk and continually goaded the band. At one point, and very much under his breath, John Lydon (AKA Johnny Rotten) said in response to a question: ‘That’s their tough shit’. This would have gone completely unnoticed had not Grundy drawn attention to it—remember, this was live television— Looking at Rotten, Grundy asked “What did you say?” Rotten was clearly embarrassed and said ‘Nothing, a rude word.’ and tried to move on, but Grundy was having none of it and said: “What was the rude word?” to which Johnny, looking like a naughty schoolboy, was forced to say ‘shit’ directly into camera. Then Siouxsie Sioux started to flirt with Grundy, who flirted back. Now, the impossible to intimidate Steve Jones looked at Grundy and said “You dirty fucker.” All this made the headlines, not just the next day but for about two weeks. Overnight the Sex Pistols were transformed from an up and coming underground band into the most famous band in the country. Now, here’s where Walter Lure’s account is interesting. Malcolm McLaren, who we’re going to get onto later, always made out that he’d set the whole thing up; that it had all gone to plan; the brilliant work of a great PR mastermind, i.e. him. As we shall see. Walter tells us that when the Heartbreakers arrived at Heathrow, McLaren was a babbling wreck. He kept saying, ‘They’ve ruined everything, they’ve ruined their chances.’ It was only some time during the following day that Malcolm saw the negative publicity as an opportunity. What he was in fact was a great post-rationaliser! Returning to the Heartbreakers, Johnny Thunders is worth knowing about. In the Punk pantheon, Thunders has a Lennon-like stature. He was the star of the scene. He must have had an incredible personal magnetism, but I don’t think that really comes across on film. People used to say he was a great guitar player… he really wasn’t, not by any stretch of the imagination. The Heartbreaker’s music was pretty shambolic and their one and only studio album, L.A.M.F. was poorly recorded but very influential nevertheless. By the way, a couple of years later, the chaos which always surrounded Thunders turned the sessions for his solo album, So Alone , into such a drug-fuelled mess that Peter Perrett, at the time a man famously deep in the throes of heroin addiction, was considered to be the most together person present. However, on that album is a classic track, ‘You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory.’ That’s an amazing song. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Walter and The Heartbreakers stayed in the UK for about two years. They kind of got stuck here. Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan both had terrible, long-standing smack habits. Shockingly, when Walter first joined the band his induction ritual was to be shot up by Jerry. He’d never taken heroin before, but now, he too became a junkie and the band moved into a squalid basement flat in Pimlico getting off their faces all day and playing gigs at night. They were in the position of being extraordinarily famous in the underground but making very little money. For most of the band, the endgame was always inevitable: Johnny Thunders limped on through a heroin haze until April 1991, when he died in slightly mysterious circumstances in New Orleans. A few months later, Jerry too was dead. Walter, on the other hand, managed to get off the smack. So it’s a redemption story, the complete opposite of Nico. What happened next is quite extraordinary: Walter got a job on Wall Street and ended up running a corporate brokerage. A very articulate guy, very self-effacing. Unfortunately, he died last year. I never met Walter, I wish I had. This book is really something because of that redemption story. It’s fantastic. It’s very well written and the way he managed to turn his life around makes it very uplifting. No. Heroin is a dangerous thing to touch. Sid Vicious was 21 when he died. Nancy was only 20. I think people forget they were just kids. I think that’s probably true, but we’ll never know."