Sunday April 14, 2013

RICHARD TREVASKIS MEETS MALCOLM MCLAREN

By John Stapleton

For me London of the 1980s was always bound up with a band of Australians I had known for years.

Richard Trevaskis, who had starred in a play I wrote back in the 1970s called The Police Commissioner’s Grandmother, was one of the leading lights.

The play had garnered good reviews and I experienced for the first and last time the pleasure of sitting in a theatre listening to an audience laugh at my sense of humour.

A subsequent play The Oblivion Seekers, a multi-layered science fiction epic big on collapsing reality systems, was never performed. It found its’ first and only outing at a playwright’s forum in Canberra and was hated by the judges; ending that particular avenue of creativity.

We were all a little in love with Richard. He kept insisting on going out with girls while kissing us affectionately each time we saw him.

London, although we hadn’t realized it at the time, turned out to be Richard’s high water mark.

He was the barman par excellent; looked smashing in black and white. Trevaskis had a knack of getting gigs in some of London’s trendiest nightclubs, including that massive cathedral of hedonism known as Heaven. Richard was always a loyal friend. He showed particular skill at spotting our little gang and swishing us drinks from behind the bar across the six deep queues of customers clamoring for his attention. All with the greatest of panache. There were always privileges to knowing him. Until there weren’t.

Richard died of a drug overdose, retreating from London to Sydney and finally to Adelaide, along the way helping to organize some of Sydney and Adelaide’s wildest mega-parties before becoming an incoherent shell in his mother’s giant house. It was the most pointless of deaths.

Even in his final days Richard would have been interested in the news that Malcolm McLaren was dead.

The mother of my children relayed the news in the muggy heat of a Phnom Penh backyard in 2010, but it immediately took me back some 30 years to that day when, as per arrangement, Richard and I went to

interview Malcolm McLaren, often enough described as a Svengali like figure.

Richard Trevaskis acted as the photographer. He hoped it would be the beginning of a great career.

We were the boys from Australia, bumfuck nowhere as far as most Londoners were concerned.

Having more or less invented punk rock and the Sex Pistols, Malcolm had recently discovered opera.

His record, which I later played till no one could bear to hear it anymore, combining rock with Madam Butterfly, was just about to come out.

Everything seemed to be soaring then; the music, our lives, our loves; the endless adventures of London nights.

I would come home to my partner of the time sooner or later; but nothing much stopped some of us going out all night most every night.

Who was to know that this would be our last hurrah?

That Richard’s dreams of being a photographer or even a film maker would never amount to a pile of dust.

That these days, this interview, wasn't a precursor to an ever more fabulous life and successful career, but that this was it. There would be no rehearsal. We were already on the stage.

Richard didn’t finish work until late; and often drank heavily through until dawn. For a long time he got away with it. Women adored him. Men swooned. The lethal speed he kept scoring up Chelsea Road kept us running at a million miles an hour. Late at night the holy rituals led us to states of euphoria no human should endure.

Richard was always up at three or four in the morning, perfectly happy see a visitor. That was the sort of friend I liked.

For years aeer he died I kept expecKng Richard to show up in the early hours of the morning with a bojle under his arm; a sunny smile plastered across his ever appealing face, giving me a big hug and talking about everything and everybody just for the fun of it.

When, a few years later the whole of Sydney turned clean and sober overnight as self-help programs and personal recovery became the trendiest thing on God’s planet, I took Richard to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in the hope he might join the throng of the recovered.

Instead of spending his nights in that Elizabeth Bay apartment with the harbor lapping on the sandstone walls outside; working his way through bottle after bottle of vodka and wondering why nobody visited him much anymore.

Richard, a walking encyclopedia on cocktails and every form of fancy alcohol known to man, couldn't think of anything worse than a sober life.

So I took him to a meeting when the slide had already begun, when the good times were in the past and the mega-parties of the era, which took months of planning and were remembered and discussed for months afterwards, were just objects in the litter of the city’s social history.

When the crates of fine beer and the bottles of high class booze began to clutter Richard’s apartment in an embarrassing way and he became pathetically glad to see any of the old gang.

Some of Sydney’s meetings were just ridiculous, full of people who didn’t have a problem except that they could never fit in anywhere and lacked ambition, motivation or talent. Instead they made up stories of their own dereliction and despair as incest survivors, describing their own supposedly terrible rock bottoms by piecing together bits and pieces of other people’s narratives.

At least they now felt they belonged somewhere, with a crew as equally dysfunctional and unaccomplished as themselves.

It was a terrible meeting. Even I, filled at the time with the fervour of recovery and the substantiality of a mainstream job, had to admit that.

It was an inner-city meeting I thought Richard might relate to; but far from being inspirational it was just chaotic. An old junky, obviously stoned, droned on for 30, 40, 50 minutes, and nothing Richard heard gave even so much as a glimmer of alternate fate lines.

After the meeting Richard couldn't wait to get down to the nearby pub the Lord Roberts, just couldn't wait. As I watched, he drank furiously, anything to wipe that dreadful meeting out of his mind.

Richard drank that night and every other night; and was determined not to stop; and that dismal meeting, that one attempt at rehabilitation in the soggy streets of Darlinghurst, became just one little point on the highway to no return.

Grow old? Forget it.

Richard retreated to his old bedroom in his mother's giant house in North Adelaide 1400 kilometers away. For the last year of his life I heard stories; and wanted to go and visit. We occasionally spoke on the phone. And then Richard was dead at barely 30 and there wouldn't be any visit south anyway.

But way back then, in London, Richard had been an aspiring young photographer and the idea of photographing Malcolm McLaren had excited him greatly.

We had shown up at McLaren's offices in Soho and while I did the interview Richard fussed around with all his gear, trying to pretend this was just another routine assignment. In fact it was the first time he had ever photographed a celebrity.

McLaren was an interview I had already sold to a magazine called Stiletto back in Australia.

After keeping us waiting for almost an hour McLaren couldn't have been more charming. It was that rarest of interviews. While not normally a fan of the interview format, I typed up the transcript, changed the order of the first and last sentences and sent the piece off. It read perfectly.

During the interview Malcolm disappeared several times into his offices and then re-emerged sniffing slightly, even more articulate than he had been minutes before, expansive on the future of fashion, music, cultural. Perhaps the high quality of the cocaine available in London at the time had as much to do with the quality of the interview as the subject’s natural gifts.

Richard fussed as McLaren expanded on his many themes. I was glad to see his earnest face there because I hated doing these jobs on my own.

What was the point of meeting famous people if you couldn't share the experience with someone afterwards?

Richard took photograph after photograph. And in later years would talk about the day he met Malcolm McLaren. And now McLaren is dead and Richard is dead; and everyone in those little rooms and past adventures has passed away; that precocious smile and fine body nothing but a skeleton in a remote grave yard.

“Malcolm McLaren is dead,” the mother of my children said as we lounged by a Phnom Penh pool behind 20 foot walls; the chaos of potholes and beggars that characterized the nearby streets lost on her. “Can you believe that? I loved Buffalo Gals. I loved the Sex Pistols.”

I just nodded. With her, saying nothing, silence, was the safest place to be.