Fantastic! Paris had become the centre of the universe. Sick of history being stuffed down its throats, my generation was making its own. When the tape ended, the bandaged messenger revealed that Lebel had been arrested the next day. ‘He’s still in jail.’ We redoubled our efforts to raise funds and the wild talk waxed into the witching hours. Next day, Louise reported new graffiti on the wall of the Gaumont Cinema: ‘All You Need is Dynamite.’
Ed Victor was already pounding the phone about The Book.
‘Man, I’ve got Cape excited on this one. When can I show them a few chapters?’ I had a provisional title – Something’s Happening and You Don’t Know What It Is, Do You, Mr Jones? but that was about it. Mr Jones’s head was spinning, trying to keep up with the daily news. On 6 June 1968, Robert Kennedy was shot in the head at close range, and three days later, the man charged with murdering Martin Luther King was arrested in London.
When I wasn’t fielding Ed, editing Oz copy or dealing with traffic in and out of the basement, I stole off to the dank back room and slogged away at The Book’s first draft. Each sentence was a headache. I strove to replicate the tone of a groovy academic. In person, I could be accused of being a motormouth, but at the Olivetti the motor was stalled. How I envied Sharp’s fluency of vision and his ability to compose in a salon, attended by sylphs, the latest LPs blasting till daybreak. He didn’t need to lock himself away and wrestle with the causes of a cultural revolution. Sharp was one of its gifted symptoms.
Patches of mould disfigured the improvised wallpaper, end-to-end Legalise Pot rally posters, which peeled off and fell to the floor. Hunched at my typewriter, I felt summer slipping away. My sister lent me a sun lamp and I sweated over isometrics with a Bullworker. Sharp flew off to a Mediterranean island, where he sought to rekindle his relationship with Anou, his long-lamented love from Australia. Where was I up to? Oh yes, Das Kapital, Chapter 3. Louise dealt deftly with the data flow by clipping pieces from newspapers and pasting them into scrapbooks, each labelled like a chapter heading: Students, Blacks, The Future, Rock, Sex, The Left . . . generally getting the research properly organised.
To deal with the demands of Customs and Excise, Oz held an all-night fund-raising benefit at Middle Earth, a cavernous club in Covent Garden. Pink Floyd headed the line-up, which included Soft Machine and the Pretty Things. Andrew Fisher organised a series of ‘happenings’, drawing on his student days as a fan of the Theatre of the Absurd. Andrew felt left out by the drug culture, about which he was even more cautious than me, and planned a happening of his very own to ‘freak out all the acid trippers’.
One of our many resources, granting Oz an edge over rivals, was the extensive network of transient Australians; a contingent I took for granted, rarely acknowledged, often unpaid. In times of crisis they rallied round. On benefit night, Mike Newman, a former editor of Honi Soit, sat in a tent under the sign ‘The World’s Longest Joke’ and pulled in the punters at a pound a head. A friend from the upstairs flat, Sebastian Jorgensen, proclaimed himself The Most Boring Man in the World and for a fee took on all who could stand to listen to him. He emerged at dawn, his ears numbed, shaken by the continuous stream of talkers more entitled to the title than he. In an adjoining room, Bruce Beresford, the future Hollywood auteur, screened a number of Underground classics. As first light came, a volley of blank shots heralded the start of Andrew’s ‘happening’.
Uniformed men waving weapons charged into the stoned throng. Freaks screamed and fled. The ‘soldiers’ circled their unfortunate quarry and dragged him off, a role played by a volunteer, whose struggles were most convincing. It was Felix Dennis, the Oz enthusiast, our star street-seller. Shrieks and tears from the onlookers, as the ‘mercenaries’ stripped Felix and strung him, head hanging, to a cross. A sign was raised – FREEDOM OF SPEECH IS AGAINST THE LAW. It was brutal. I ran to the mike and soothed the trippers, offering it as an ‘absurdist’ comment on rebellions in Africa . . . On with the next item – female mud-wrestling.
One night I drove home Caroline Coon, the warrior queen of Release, the drug-bust organisation. We kissed on her doorstep and she invited me in. Beside her studio was a womb-like room painted red, with a wall-to-wall bed. Release had been conceived on the night of the demos against the Rolling Stones jailings. Caroline had hurled herself at a News of the World despatch van. She had witnessed the oppression of the UK drug laws first hand, after a Jamaican lover had been imprisoned for four years for possessing a joint (he got only six months for possessing a gun). At night, the Release emergency line was switched to the phone by the bed.
Uneasy about my two-timing with Caroline, I lectured Louise on the sexual revolution. Monogamy and marriage were bywords for ‘bourgeois’. I said it would be fine if she had a bit on the side, forebearing to mention that my bit on the side was already had.
A letter arrived from Sharp, shacked up with Anou in the Balearic Isles where, according to legend, lived the siren who had lured Ulysses. Mart was following the footsteps of his Cream lyrics: And the colours of the sea/blind your eyes with trembling mermaids/and you touch the distant beaches/with Tales of Brave Ulysses . . .
‘Come to Spain!’ he wrote. Why not? A chance to relieve my keyboard constipation. No phone calls from Ed. It was Martin’s PS that decided me. ‘Whole fields of flower children to gaze upon.’
It was thirty-one pounds for a return ticket to Formentera. This small island was reached by ferry from Ibiza, which in those days was considered remote and lost in time. Sharp’s postal address was ‘La Mola’, on Formentera’s furthest tip. When I emerged from the sole taxi, a wartime Fiat, I stood alone in an unpaved square, in the shadow of a huge, defunct windmill. A pudgy pubescent took an order for coffee, and I sat on my bags, pondering how to locate my friend. La Mola was the name of the town, not his rented house. At sunset, a Vespa screamed up, Sharp wobbling at the controls, a familiar face on the back. Her hair flying, Anou looked fabulous.
For a week or so, we played at living like peasants in a crumbling finca, without kitchen, lighting or electricity. A track at the back led to an isolated beach, where a naked and mute woman lived in a cave, recuperating from too much LSD. Long-hairs of various nationalities floated about, writing books, chewing the fat, watched by sullen old widows in black. Refugees from the Paris riots, crushed by de Gaulle, were lying low in the portside bars. For me, without phones and publishing hassles, the days drifted by in a dream. Dutifully I ploughed through a Pelican paperback by C. Wright Mills, The Marxists.
Not all was well in Formentera. For Martin, Anou’s arrival had been a let-down. ‘I’ve grown out of her,’ he whispered. My role was to ease the tension between them, assuage his guilt, extend his freedom. Most mornings he screeched off to unnamed errands in the main town, leaving the two of us alone.
One afternoon Anou and I strolled back to the farmhouse from the beach. I stroked her hair. We began to reminisce about our times in the back stalls at the Savoy.
‘Do you think I stayed in Sydney too long?’ she asked.
At the house, we stretched ourselves on the mattress and uncorked the wine. ‘Let’s not get carried away. Mart would hate me forever,’ I said.
‘He cared for me back then,’ she said. ‘Now he can’t get rid of me quick enough.’
I saw what had happened. Compared to the starlets of Chelsea, Anou seemed an embarrassing throwback. She might have inspired ‘Tales Of Brave Ulysses’, but now it was the island’s other attractions which beckoned Ulysses to explore alone on his Vespa. How his naked ears were tortured by the sirens sweetly singing . . . Sharp was due back with our dinner supplies, but we could never be sure. He was just as likely to party till dawn in the port.
‘I can’t, Anou,’ I said, as the vino took its toll, ‘I’m still in his moral debt.’
‘No, you’re not. He’s already taken his revenge.’
What? Anou disclosed that Sharp and Louise had indulged in a fleeting liaison in London while I was still climbing that mountain in Nepa
l. Oh, shit. She refilled the glasses. There was nothing now to stop us, I guess . . . except the screech of the Vespa nearing the house. Anou and I rushed to the door. Sharp’s scooter bumped over the dirt, driven by a stranger in mirror shades, wearing absurdly embroidered flares. He wasn’t stopping. I stepped into its path, waved my arms. Swerve, crash. ‘Merde, fuckvous!’
‘That bike isn’t yours,’ I shouted.
With a look of unspeakable haughtiness, the youth brushed the dust from his flares, flicked a red scarf over his shoulder and headed up the track for the Fat Boys café, crushing me with a parting quote from Peter Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist: ‘Shit, man . . . all property is theft.’
10
The ICE CAPS are MELTING,
HARRODS is LOOTED
In August 1968, when the Chicago police charged an assembly of ‘peaceniks’ in a park opposite the Hilton Hotel, the game between generations turned bloody. Truncheons and tear gas flew in the night. On the TV news it looked as if the yippie Festival of Life had become, for many, a near death experience. ‘Police smashed their clubs into the human mass, aiming between their legs, at their heads, shoulders – anything,’ wrote Max Hastings in the London Evening Standard. ‘They used chemical spray to disable them and were still hitting them as they lay on the floor . . .’
The heroes of the fray were Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, whose wit, high spirits and media savvy turned the police riot into a propaganda triumph. ‘After the events of the last few hours,’ continued Hastings, ‘it will never again be possible to think of either the city or Mayor Daley without feeling slightly sick.’ The yippie nomination of Pigasus the Pig for President, on the other hand, was ‘splendid satire, pushed through with remarkable style’.
While the yippies got the laughs, Mayor Daley got the National Guard. Some supporters of law and order began to doubt their own side. The Times reported a ‘new horror’, vehicles strung with spikes. ‘The tactic was to drive the jeeps into the crowd. Those who could not get away would be lacerated by the barbed wire.’ The land of the free? Perhaps the National Guard was taking the anti-war chant too literally: WE ARE ALL VIETCONG. Hey, let’s give it to the gooks.
It was a generation being punished for its exuberance and originality, for its hair and its music, for its ideals and its hopes. ‘In Paris, in Berlin, in Hong Kong, even in London, there is now a recognised reflex action against beads and beards and the contemporary juvenile thing,’ wrote British commentator James Cameron. ‘I would say I have never seen it so coldly and cruelly systematised as here in Chicago.’ But that didn’t stop the yippies. An ‘anti-birthday party’ was held for President Lyndon Johnson, sixty. ‘Beware of all leaders,’ shouted one of them from a Chicago stage. ‘If the revolution is to succeed, it must happen in your own minds.’ The cheering was loud and prolonged.
Inside the Convention Hall, Democrats shunned their young Turks and embraced certain defeat: the weary conservative Hubert Humphrey won the nomination over Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern, the advocates of peace. Dissent was denied a legitimate outlet. ‘You nominate a President and he eats the people,’ noted a Pigasus supporter. ‘We nominate a President and we eat him.’ While Mayor Daley’s tactics won as many cheers as sneers in his home town, for the youth of the West, Chicago ’68 was a turning point – the dawn of a new age of contempt for ‘the system’.
When I returned to the London basement from Spain, brown and lean, Louise was nowhere to be found. I took a cab to the Oz layout studio, and saw her walking along Gloucester Avenue with Keith Morris, our leather-clad bikie-but-soulful photographer. I’d asked Keith to ‘make sure Louise isn’t lonely’; and he had. Neither had I been lonely. So how come I was shattered to see her with another man, looking so relaxed, as though she had flowered in my absence? Jealousy and possessiveness were vestiges of an outmoded mind-set, weren’t they? Such inner turmoil didn’t gel with my own need to screw around, nor with the kind of ‘open marriage’ that I envisaged as the way of the future. I stopped the cab and called to Louise.
We chugged back to Palace Gardens Terrace. Louise said that Keith had been a kind and attentive companion, but she loved only me. I wanted to hurt her, so I dredged up Anou’s revelation. ‘So that’s what you and Sharp were doing while I was in Kathmandu!’
‘Darling . . .’
‘You could have mentioned it before.’
‘You know very well it meant nothing.’
‘Nothing?’
‘We were a bit bored, a bit lonely . . . and missing you. In a kind of way, he was doing it for you.’
‘Yeah. Who was Keith doing it for? Oz?’
She laughed. We held each other.
One morning, Louise left early to meet her mother at the airport and take her to a hotel. At some stage, it would be necessary for me to visit Louise’s mum ‘to pay my respects’. We had once met briefly in Sydney, when I had come to collect Louise for a date. She hadn’t been friendly. ‘Nothing personal,’ Louise assured me, ‘that’s the way she is.’ Apart from the Catholic priesthood, Mrs Ferrier seemed to hold the whole world in low regard, especially the boyfriends of her daughter.
The basement was a mess. I collected the papers and fried up some eggs and bacon.
‘The papers’ didn’t just mean The Times. Thanks to the Underground Press Syndicate, more and more of the fringe and alternative tabloids were sliding relentlessly under my door. They were flowering in the most unlikely places – from Antwerp to Argentina, from Melbourne to Missouri. And they were filled with a righteous anger. The Chicago riots had galvanised rhetoric against ‘the system’. Police were now ‘pigs’. It was a new wave of pamphleteering, and an obvious chapter for The Book. I decided to send a questionnaire to each of the editors, fishing for anecdotes.
I munched at a piece of bacon, flipping the newsprint. In the Dallas Notes I read that the ‘Vice Squad of the Pig Department raided our office last Wednesday, carting off two tons of alleged pornography – all our back issues and other underground papers . . .’
There was a knock. Grabbing a sarong, I headed for the door, presuming it was a fan in pursuit of a back issue. Mrs Ferrier burst into the basement.
‘Where’s my daughter?’ she demanded. ‘Why are you naked?’
‘Hi. Welcome.’ Her daughter was waiting at Heathrow, I said, as the cabbie stacked her bags in the kitchen and I scratched around for some cash.
Mrs Ferrier seemed at a loss. ‘Louise lives here?’
I sat her down in a tattered armchair, scooped underwear off the floor, jammed the box of Pellens Personal Products under the bed. ‘Tea?’
‘This is worse than I feared.’ The rumpled bed was strewn with papers; and I was afraid she might ask to use the bathroom.
‘Tea?’ I repeated.
‘Would you mind putting on a pair of trousers?’
She examined a hookah, picked up in Calcutta, which looked like bagpipes set in a pewter vase. Mrs Ferrier was upset at her daughter for failing to meet the flight.
‘Lazy . . . lazy . . . lazy . . .’ When I produced the tea, she asked, ‘How long did you boil the water?’
The door opened and Louise appeared, tears welling in her eyes. ‘Oh Mum, here you are. I’ve been waiting . . .’
‘You can never be counted on . . .’
‘But, Mum, I’ve been at Heathrow since . . .’
‘You’re starved, I can tell.’
She fluttered her lashes defensively.
‘It’s still not too late to start a new life.’
‘Mum!’
‘You look dreadful. This dungeon will be the death of you. It’s damp. I suppose your asthma’s worse . . .’
I headed for the shower.
Another Oxbridge Tony from the BBC, Tony Palmer, recruited me for a new pop commentary show, How It Is. Despite the monolithic sobriety of the BBC, its corridors seemed riddled with talented malcontents. How It Is aimed to be boppier than The Eleventh Hour, with live rock, jazz, interviews, slick reportage an
d a pair of ‘hip’ commentators sitting on a stool sneering at the passing parade. My co-presenter, a Liverpudlian mystic DJ, John Peel, had been promoted from a pirate station to BBC’s Radio One. Peel published a meaning-of-life column in IT, ‘The Perfumed Garden’, which read like Christopher Robin in a sari, wooing Pooh Bear.
On How It Is, our subjects ranged from ‘conflicts of interest’ within the corporation’s department of Light Entertainment, to the Pope’s recent visit to Colombia.
Peel: The Pope said living conditions should be improved.
Neville: Few would disagree – especially those families whose ceilings fell in when his helicopter flew overhead.
After the show, as I descended the steps to the basement, I saw through the window that Louise was being questioned by a gentleman in a dark suit, his hair parted in the middle. Drugs Squad, I thought, but it was Dad. Here on a brief business trip, it was his first time abroad since the war. ‘Don’t let anyone tell you,’ he said, having just viewed How It Is, ‘that you shouldn’t be on television.’ A compliment? He must be mellowing.
Dad filled me in on the State of the Family. How Mum was fully immersed in the affairs of the Church. How every Friday afternoon he still drove the seventy miles to visit her at Upalong. My parents had acquired a duplex in Mount Victoria as an ‘investment’ and Dad expressed the hope I would soon make my way home to help collect the rent. My sister Josie was still battling to raise four kids in the suburbs, chastened by Mum’s wrath after she was caught in a sizzling affair with a dashing Dutch neighbour. It was not Dad’s finest hour. The Colonel had threatened to report the Dutchman to the immigration police. The more he talked about life in Australia, the more relieved I was to be in Notting Hill.
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