Reading stories of betrayal, despair & friendships going south from “Wally …Did You No Wrong” by Ron Evans:
some of you may -or may not- be familiar with the sad & obscure tale of the lost Sex Pistol, Wally Nightingale, Steve Jones & Paul Cook’s schoolmate who actually put the initial pre-Pistols band together as a trio & provided the classy rehearsal space (“Riverside” studios in Hammersmith, London, where the boys could sneak in since Wally’s dad worked there as an electrician) but got the boot because Malcolm McLaren had decided he didn’t fit the image he had envisioned for the band, being the geeky & uncool kid with the ‘old man’s glasses’. He was completely erased from the Pistols history in a heartbeat, as though he had never existed and the rest is known R’n’R history.
Wally’s story remains a fairytale gone bad, one in which the dishonest get all the glory while the good guy is left with bollocks, and Ron’s book is so rich in first-hand feedback and so well written that sometimes it’s hard not to actually see the narrative played in your head as a scene from a movie that hasn’t been filmed yet. Like the heartbreaking part where Wally’s pals come to his parents’ house, after he was ousted from his own band, to get all the gear that he kept in his bedroom: guitars, acoustics, amps, saxophones, foot controls and harmonicas that had been nicked throughout the band’s lifespan. Wally had been gutted but he managed to keep it all in with dignity (he was such a lovely bloke that he even went for a drink with his ‘former’ bandmates that same night after he got the axe) and when they came with a van to move the gear, he dutifully even helped them to unplug and pack everything up, carefully putting everything in their cases, while his mum and dad silently stood in the hallway, till his mum broke into tears and had to be hurried into the living room while shouting that they owed Wally:
“I could hear her crying as I went back upstairs to say goodbye to Wally. His bedroom door was ajar and I looked through the gap. All I could see was that second-hand Les Pau copy he’d bought in order to start the band sitting on its stand, and Wally sitting on his bed crying”, says his schoolmate Steve Hayes.
Needless to say that the late Wally Nightingale is my all-time favorite R’n’R anti-hero, the most underrated figure in the entire history of punk & the undisputed champion of punk rock underdogs, and Ron Evans, his younger schoolmate/neighbor/friend/bandmate in Key West -the band Wally Nightingale played after the Sex Pistols- has done an excellent job in documenting Wally’s tragic path to self-destruction. You can order the book from his site: https://www.ronevans.rocks/, as well as his cool music, which you can also enjoy on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/1z5w6O0737uoAZutq48mrn
