Lint

by Steve Aylett

Rensin’s account of ‘Damage Night’ is that when the group was utterly asleep at four A.M., Lint entered in a blast of light, dressed as the Devil and screaming something about blood. ‘He was wearing a really orange fright wig and his eyes were weird, like they’d been peeled. The antlers on him were just massive, scraping across the ceiling.’

  ‘He had some sort of portable klieg light set up behind him I think,’ says Hutton, ‘and a photographer’s lamp in his hand, uplighting his face so the shadows were tearing around all over the joint. And the screaming …’

  Fox recalls: ‘His mouth opened way further than it should, like a black bag, and the screaming of several women came out of it.’16

  Owen disagrees. ‘His mouth was pursed and as small as an eyelid. But his body was rolling like a huge ball, and parts of his arms were far away from his body—like an octopus.’

  ‘He was a cloud of flies with a face in the middle,’ Fox states simply. ‘I can’t explain it, but that’s what entered the room that night.’

  Owen again: ‘There were limbs angle-poised off it like little construction cranes with white gloves on the end, all dripping soup.’

  ‘I saw W.C. Fields come in and say we were all done for,’ says Hutton.

  ‘He never said that thing about “The blood in thee harms the gods”,’ Fox states. ‘He was shouting this “death to empty patience” stuff, and repeated a part that went “Tie a clown to a chair as a tornado approaches. Feel the joy and fear battling within you? That’s what it’s like to create”.’

  ‘He told us there was something wrong with his bones, and that we had to wrap them,’ Rensin recalls.

  ‘I thought he said something about the Confederates,’ says Owen.

  ‘He just wouldn’t stop screaming,’ says Fox.

  Hutton thinks Lint was wearing a magic ‘johnny-hat’.

  Whatever the outrages perpetrated upon the Unofficial Smile Group, it resulted in the ‘sonic failure hurricane’ that was The Energy Draining Church Bazaar. The track list is:

  Side 1

  1. Hydrogen Sheriff

  2. Roses Own That Town

  3. The Pangolin and the Anteater Have a Fight

  4. Pocket Man Schedule

  5. Ignore Tesla

  6. The Varnished Biology of Seafish

  7. Four Hundred Dead in Voting Experiment

  8. You Are Early

  Side 2

  1. DNA Interruption Charm

  2. Mesmerised by Midges

  3. Through the Keyhole I Saw the Funeral of a Duck

  4. Would You Mind Not Doing That?

  5. Roses Own That Town (reprise)

  6. The Number Nineteen is Made of Wax

  7. The Delaware Christ

  8. Dead or Not, He Was Wearing Shades

  The album was recorded under what Fox called ‘trying conditions’, with Lint draping himself over the cymbals to create a more ‘organic’ sound and Hutton weeping into his bass. They are angular, sidelong songs with cascading lyrics and oblique correspondences all over. ‘Pocket Man Schedule’ zigzags like a policy, Rensin a dry voice blowing around and through fossilized instruments. ‘The cello had a joystick,’ says Rensin today. ‘Roses Own That Town’ is a song that swells slowly like a red balloon, slow and gluey bongos loping against a sitar shimmer like gold Argo sails. The song becomes a skittish conjuration. ‘Pressure to conform ejects the soap,’ yelps Rensin. In ‘You Are Early’ several melodies overlap amid out-of-sync screaming about ‘bargains’ from the group as Rensin’s voice distorts into the guitar mix and emerges the other end as, yes, Lint’s voice, dwindling into the fade before we can tell whether the writer can sing.

  In the manner of the day, listeners tried to decode the lyrics—Lint learned that the simple act of sticking his words on an album sleeve would get people to scrutinize them more closely than on the pages of a book. ‘Pocket Man Schedule’ was fairly straightforward:

  Most establishments

  are the false ardently maintained

  stronger than us through scaffolding

  repetition-trained

  But things get more open to florid interpretation with the pleased hyena character in the final track and the sinister egg of ‘The Number Nineteen is Made of Wax’, ‘liquid gears swelling in the embryo’. This latter track halts abruptly as Lint breaks in bellowing ‘In music the interval is not an embellishment god dammit, I told you that didn’t I?’

  There are theories (see the Smile Group chapter in Kate Senser’s Holy Flame of Surprise) that the entire album is about heroic-level drug ingestion and the resultant neon lethargy. Lint, whose head was a firestormed funfair at the best of times, seems rarely to have indulged. His yage experiment was in the context of shamanic practice, as were the reported occasions of his ‘stepping out of existence’ in the midst of conversation. The charismatic psychopath John Dyche claimed to have heard voices in ‘Would You Mind Not Doing That?’ ordering him to carve a totem pole out of Peter Fonda, a task it is uncertain he achieved.

  Many listeners can’t help feeling a literary bloat after the Draining ordeal. Things weren’t helped at the time by Lint’s gnomic pronouncements to the music press, where his abnormal and creepy suppositions were becoming notorious. He told Melody Maker he was ‘cheese on a cable. I will stay. Or will I?’ Chaim Skipjack of Floozie zine asked for follow-up info on the cable cheese.

  LINT: Necessary for my answer is a perfectly brutal confession, a sort of barrelling at the facts like a snorter.

  SKIPJACK: Well I can’t help you there. What are you going to do now?

  LINT: Sunbathe so long I get a palm tree through my belly.

  In 1970 he told Richard Front of the Los Angeles Free Press: ‘The universe is full of unbelievable bastards. Your name has been mentioned in this connection.’ Front launched himself across the table and strangled Lint, whose pop-eyed and wild-haired visage at that instant was photographed for the issue’s cover.

  The press were divided on the album’s merits, their assessments ranging from ‘a quicksilver transaction of nameless magic’ through ‘it leads us aside and bites us suddenly, bringing the party to a shocked halt’ to ‘you may as well put an omelette on the turntable’. Today Rensin says there were problems connected with ‘the business side of things’ and the fact that this side of things ‘did not exist’. Hutton claims the album was the result of a misunderstanding. The Smile band took a two-year period of recuperation and recovery before their first attempt at commercial stadium rock, Prod Me. After two more bland ‘progressive’ albums as Unsmile (Terra Pocus and Open the Goddamn Door), they split amid an incoherent tangle of grudges.

  Lint, meanwhile, continued to collide, now and again, with the music industry. During his residence in London he encountered the nascent industrial scene and met up with fans Spurtwife, whose track ‘Ossuary TV’ referred to images in the then-obscure Prepare to Learn. U.S. punk band Zombie Supply Teacher and U.K. pub rockers Fucking Bender both wrote songs about Arkwitch, and the ethereal Cocteau Twins-alikes Nectargirl Climbs On produced a ‘soundtrack’ to the Arkwitch trilogy with the album Amateur Saints Blunder Through Visions and Fear of Injury. Lint’s 1991 CD with Stan Esswell (guitarist with Corposant) in which he reads from Easy Prophecy material (The Prophecies) is now a collector’s item, and the movement has continued apace since Lint’s death, with Carlotta Flame and the industrial subsonic outfit Perfect Interruption referencing Clowns and Locusts and The Stupid Conversation.

  Lint equated the freedom of musical experimentation with travel to exotic climes. ‘Explorers are never suspicious, are they?’

  In 1970 an interview with Lint appeared in IT and Lint spoke about the connection that occurs between two disparate objects ‘via the billion billion intervening forms that the two objects are not—the trip between those two objects, even if they’re just a spoon and a salt shaker here on this table, really is a trip.’ The same was true of two ideas—if Lint was presented with a choice between two philosophies, he would see t
he billion billion other philosophies between those two, ‘and then those extended outside that created line, and in all other directions. In other words, there are options.’

  21

  NOSE FURNACE AND OTHER DEATHS

  Suction eel · satan filters · factoids · the Insufferable Banyolar · Arkwitch the Movie · Aquadog · Platypus Payback · where is Durutti? · The Caterer in limbo

  In Lint’s 1958 book Nose Furnace a new devil gives hell a makeover, sweetening the brimstone with marzipan and generally missing the point. The novel is narrated by a sort of suction eel living near a sulfur chimney, making merry in the gas. For some reason this was the first of Lint’s books to be seriously considered for a movie. Lint was fine with it. ‘It’s best that my books were used for these things—if I’d written and developed stuff especially for the screen, the studios would have intercepted my ideas before they got too good.’

  Contained too long, a coiled spring may lose its stored potential. Lint had got to know the publishing industry the way people ease into winter, but for a writer the movie system was a world of barred studios and gratitude only confessed in deepest nightshade. So he never took it too seriously. Lint had become quite a raconteur, but purely on his terms, as at a gathering for Tony Curtis’s birthday at which he stood and described a process of cutting slivers of devil to place over a camera lens—these ‘satan filters’ were impossible to market, he claimed, because they disclosed the evil of whoever was being filmed as a scrambling acidic corrosion. He knew, because he had tested it on Benny Hill. This rambling diatribe, nested as it was among the other guests’ tributes to Curtis, got him thrown out and he rolled down a verge into Mulholland Drive. ‘Even their cruelty was half-baked and anemic,’ wrote Lint. ‘They didn’t seem capable of organising anything.’

  Lint deplored the impersonal sterility of the 1980s. ‘Everyone moves so fast. Stop to say something and you lose your friends.’ He was finishing the last Arkwitch book and planning several other works including the Easy Prophecy series. ‘At that time,’ Lint later recalled, ‘my thoughts fell on me like bits of ceiling. And all the books were longterm.’

  The media adaptations and apparent lack of new raw product led Gore Vidal to say of Lint ‘He was once a genius—he’s now a born-again mediocrity.’ Lint fans have asserted that he would never have conceded to such projects as Into the Nose Furnace, but he was a pragmatic fellow and did a fair bit of hack work at times of low funds (‘Money disappears like ice,’ he wrote, ‘even when it’s freezing.’) These jobs tended to bear the ‘mark of Lint’, however. The Caterer comic, after all, was a work for hire—so was his rejected Star Trek episode. For a few months in the early 80s he wrote jokes and ‘factoids’ for candy wrappers, his offerings including ‘The stinkbug is a force for good’, ‘Yuri Gagarin screamed upon re-entry’, and ‘I’m not scared of you.’ He also accepted a commission to produce a subway poem that, he was directed, had to be about ‘The Giraffe’. The poem rushed beneath New York giving everyone the heeby-jeebies:

  I am not the giraffe you think I am

  I do not run as if in slow motion

  I scream like an anvil-eared skull

  And blast at your window like lightning

  This was after all the man who said ‘When the abyss gazes into you, bill it.’

  With his interest in magic Lint followed the activities of the Insufferable Banyolar, an audience-resenting stage illusionist who saw fit to hide his disgusted sneer in a lion’s mouth. The inevitable accident that ended his earthly career inspired Lint to propose an appalling kids’ toy based on the incident. Lint was so persistent that one company paid him a ‘kill fee’ to bugger off.17

  At another time Lint got the idea for a food product consisting of shaped pieces of ‘boneless and chinless’ fish, which Lint wanted to market as ‘Chicken of Heaven’. He told Alan Rouch that he thought it might be possible to sell the idea to a food company and then ‘disappear’ as if he had never existed. Rouch suggested that the product could be marketed with the tagline ‘A test of faith.’

  Another supposed cash cow was ‘Spatial Awareness Snot’, a magnetized resin that was supposed to give the user a birdlike perception of direction and geophysical positioning. In fact it was just some sandwich jelly and any additional instincts it bestowed upon insertion into the human nose was purely the result of resentment and cheated rage.

  Lint also pitched an alternate-universe Spiderman strand to Marvel: ‘What if Spiderman Knew he was a Waste of Space?’

  But many fans have never believed that Lint allowed the frozen decade to waste his time, and this more than anything has led to rumours of undiscovered masterpieces. It is known that he trained a hundred octopi to flash particular messages along their flanks and then released them back into the wild, hoping that they might combine and re-combine to create different stories. He was also said to have used a seahorse as a party noisemaker.

  By the time the movie of Nose Furnace fell through, it had attracted the attention of Wallent Comics, who set upon a disastrous adaptation of their own. Their take on the story was that Santa Claus is put in charge of Hades, in response to which Lucifer sends a bounty hunter to kill him. Bloated and bland, the Nose Furnace graphic novel is a product to rival Disney and its heart-smart dollars.

  Though his devotees perpetuated the myth that he was the result of an ovum fertilized by a comma, Lint kept up regular contact with his mother, who was now living in Florida. She was never one to slow down—indeed she seems to have gained a new lease on life since the death of her own parents. In recent years her health had not been good, however, and when Lint went to see her in 1981 she was clearly ailing. Liver cancer had been diagnosed. A few months later she suffered her second stroke in two years. Pulmonary complications meant that she had to slow down. It was a surprise to everyone when, at a stunt bike performance by Jetkid Eezie at Seaworld, she volunteered to ride pillion behind the daredevil during a jump over a pool of angry tiger sharks. A misaligned springboard caused the jetbike to hit the wall of the fire tunnel and rebound into the shark tank—the sharks were mechanical but the bike’s jet ignited their gas feeds, causing an explosion. Carol Lint and Jetkid Eezie were killed.

  At the funeral Lint spoke of how Carol was constantly dodging death, such as the time she went to get in her car and heard the hissing of the tire going down, then called a mechanic only to have him point out that the source of the hissing was an eleven-foot alligator waiting under the vehicle. ‘Oblivion doesn’t always wait till after dinner,’ Lint concluded. ‘If the period of trial is subtracted from our eternal reward, mother did well to die at such velocity.’ The priest waited until the other mourners had dispersed before kicking him in the stomach.

  ‘Perhaps putting a byline to truth is as pointless as painting a torpedo,’ Lint wrote in his journal, feeling futile.

  The one project that raised its head with regularity in Hollywood was the possibility of a movie based around Felix Arkwitch, star of The Stupid Conversation, Fanatique and later The Phosphorus Tarot of Matchbooks (the last outlined in manuscript at this time). The supposed bidding war between Mickey Rourke and a young Tom Cruise to play The Caterer’s Jack Marsden caused Lint’s stock to rise in Hollywood and Warner Bros. optioned the Arkwitch series, setting a committee to work on a script that would roll the books into one. While Lint said that The Stupid Conversation was ‘a surrender to the bathysphere part of the human mind’, the movie version seems to have been written with the part of the mind that controls the knee. ‘I wouldn’t dream of interfering with Greg Churilov’s screenplay,’ wrote Lint in a message to Warners. ‘After all, it is shit.’

  In the proposed movie Stargun Warrior, Arkwitch was re-cast as a freewheeling astronaut who lives in a space station outfitted with a whirlpool bath. But Earth is threatened when a group of people from its own nuclear-blasted future travel back in time to invade and forcibly colonise the present. A clock in the lower left corner of their eyesight tells them their remainin
g lifespan. Any Lint-written scenario would have the invaders discover what a boring wasteland eighties Earth is and returning to their deadly future, but in the movie the appalling cold of things is utterly ignored. Arkwitch18 merely destroys the invaders with some sort of makeshift rocket. It was a crappy rewrite to rival Schwarzenegger’s ‘The human should win against the vampires’ demand re I Am Legend.

  The studio decided to add Aquadog, a bouncy purple bastard that audiences are supposed to find lovable as it knocks important stuff off the shelves. The other characters are always having to go back to rescue it from villainous aliens, and Lint sent a memo to the studio that included these remarks:

  ‘Regarding Aquadog, I think it would be more realistic and less irritating for the crew to leave him behind on the Death Planet, or hunt him down and kill him aboardship before they arrive there. Those laser crossbows are perfect for it and the onscreen time could be filled with close-ups of Cindy Morgan’s ass.’

  Warners accepted no more messages or calls from Lint and he was cut off from the project. The Arkwitch movie, in fact, was never made and the never-released Aquadog merchandise fetches large sums on eBay today. The figures are designed to jitter and jump hyperactively while spouting catchphrases like ‘Porthole? I thought it was a spin-dryer’ and ‘Well, it got a reaction!’ Many collectors buy the toys purely to set them alight and watch them twitch for the last time.

  Once again at Alan Rouch’s urging, Lint proposed a pilot for a TV show: Platypus Payback. In the show three members of the public must go to dinner with an animatronic platypus that bellows arcane obscenities in the voice of a sheep while shooting flames from its eyes and spewing blue slime over everyone. It’s not surprising the show wasn’t picked up, this being almost two decades before the heyday of reality TV.

  As for the Rourke/Cruise project, the execs invited Lint to the studio so that they could ignore him in person, but he showed up wearing some sort of styrofoam bathysphere held up by braces. When they became annoyed at having to acknowledge this faux pas, he started kicking them with the end of his legs. ‘Muted by attention,’ he claimed later, referring perhaps to the entire Hollywood experience, ‘I couldn’t think.’