Life at the top....Yeah great fun. As I said previously, I was living  in New York at the renown Iroquois hotel, West 44th between 5th and  6th. It was a regular haunt for touring bands and we had used it  often when touring with Brian Brain. It was never the height of luxury back then but it was cheap and you could get 4 people in a "Suite" for a  reasonable price. So it was the obvious place for me to stay when I  got the PiL gig until something else could be sorted out. The problem  was that the PiL "management" were a bit slow to pay the bills and the hotel were for ever hassling me for money, and I in turn would  hassle PiL for the cash. At one point things got so bad that there  was a $1200 bill to pay and all Keith Levene could say was "We are  all individuals in this band man" and all I had was $20 in my pocket  and two mouths to feed. The stupid thing about it all was that we  were getting 12-15000 dollars a night for playing and should have  been rolling in greenbacks. Most of the money was snorted or disappeared into the slimey back pocket of the manager..what a shit!! 
     All the hassles about paying the hotel bills ended up with me and the  girlfriend having to do a runner from the hotel one night. Over a  period of a few days we had transferred all our stuff to  Keith's apartment. We couldn't both leave the room at the same time  through fear of having our room lock "plugged" with all our stuff  inside. Then we just got up and went. We went to stay at Mr. and Mrs  Levenes apartment on 5th avenue. A swanky but small one bed apartment where we slept on a sofa bed in the lounge. It was cramped, but  during this time I got to talk to Keith a lot about the band and life  in general. Some of the conversations were a bit strange at times but  underneath all the drug fuelled trauma Keith was a nice bloke, he  just confused himself and others with his ramblings. His wife was no  better, she once put forward the argument that John was jealous of  Keith because he was married. John was gay and in love with Keith,  that's why they were always fighting and John couldn't cope with this  jealousy!! Heavy stuff indeed. It was also a time when Keith and I  would talk about the philosophy behind PiL and what it all meant. He  would tell me that I was part of PiL just as he was. I maintained,  and still do, that PiL was a combination of Johns charisma and Keiths  chaotic genius. It was unique, and anyone else was a bit player in  the equation, including me.
     So I slept on the sofa for a while and things sort of got along but as  you can imagine the stresses eventually reflected the cramped living  conditions for four adults and we had to leave. We then went to live  with one of the road crew in a cockroach infested apartment uptown. It  had more room and we had our own bed, but the roaches really got to  me. All of a sudden the thought of a British pint got me  thinking about heading East. The inner wrangling of the band was out of my control, I just wanted  to play, not get involved in the petty immature arguments and politics. A few people needed their heads banging together, but it  wasn't going to be me that did it. I was becoming edgy, worried about what was going to happen next. There was talk of going to Japan and  Europe, Keith didn't know where he wanted to go, there was turmoil,  confusion, not enough gigs, and certainly not enough money. I had  managed to scrape enough together to pay for air tickets back to the U.K. and I made sure that I didn't spend it. I felt sure I would be  needing it soon.
 

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