‘Does he have a girfriend?’
‘Several, I think. You can choose.’
Chortling, Alex thanked me and departed.
Even without having to disclose their imprint, the printers often went to jelly at the sight of our camera-ready pages. At such times, we would fan out across the country, searching for another willing weboffset. On the train to Reading one morning, as I sat thirsty and sleepy in the dining car, Germaine Greer strode down the aisle. With Hendrixed hair and a see-through blouse, my old friend was on her way to shoot some segments for Nice Time, her quirky alternative comedy show on Granada TV.
‘You’ve always had an instinct for the great pop conspiracy,’ she said, sitting down, signalling the waiter for tea, ‘but I’ve just cracked it.’
‘Oh? I thought you were strictly Bach and Verdi?’
‘Monteverdi, the great madman. I was. I am. But something else just happened. In, of all places, a TV studio.’ She rubbed her palms and grinned. ‘The place was full of smoothies and groovers being cool, and this sweaty rocker with his underpants showing just blasted off . . .’
Disregarding my attempts to catch his attention, the waiter placed a teapot and cup in front of Germaine.
‘His wailings blew out the crap – all the BBC gumshoes and bullshit – and I knew I was on his side.’ In Wardrobe, dressing for a sketch, Germaine had looked up and seen the group eyeballing her bare breasts, ‘with a kind of hot innocence and I suddenly realised – yes – groupiedom is possible.’
It was in the air. It was on the cover of Rolling Stone. Two young ladies from Chicago, the Plaster-Casters, had achieved recognition for their cast-from-life replicas of pop stars’ erections. One of them, Miss Cynthia, advised, ‘Every girl should try it at least once. Groupies will be a significant element in the revolution.’ Frank Zappa concurred, ‘Sociologically it’s really heavy.’ It put Jenny Kee in the front row. Since arriving in London her pop conquests continued. But Germaine? ‘I thought you spent all your spare time in libraries.’
‘No, no, I’ve been rushing off to rock concerts.’ At times, she was disappointed. ‘The Doors were a terrible bring down. Jim Morrison’s sex kitten act didn’t cut it. The guy’s vibes were off.’
Yes, Martin Sharp had thought them pathetic, Morrison too fat for his leathers.
God, I needed my tea. Where the hell was that waiter? Outside, the urban sprawl was giving way to flashes of green. ‘Maybe the Doors are a victim of overhype?’
‘That oughta be irrelevant. You and I both write stuff to earn a bottle of wine. But when it’s all hype, all crap . . . when the Doors reduce love and revolution to nothing but commodities, then I believe assassination is called for . . .’
Yeah, that’s what I felt about the waiter. I grabbed his sleeve. ‘Tea . . . please!’
‘No. No.’ He stormed off. Germaine didn’t register. Moving on to the joys of star-fucking, she finished her cup, poured herself another.
‘You know, I even find Engelbert Humperdinck horny-making. Those high-fronted shiny mohair trousers . . . ohhh . . . with a length of rubber hose. Evil. No wonder those lonely housewives cream their jeans . . .’
I screamed at the waiter, ‘Why not?’
‘Your long hair. It pisses me off.’
Germaine gave her nose a reflective pinch and sailed off into a monologue on the niceties of balling an entire group. It wasn’t easy. So much jealousy. Even Jefferson Airplane, who were said to ‘dig each other’, were still ‘uptight about sharing birds’.
MC5 was the nearest, as she had seen first hand in their hotel suite, with the adjoining doors ajar. ‘I find I really like being able to hear people balling close to me . . . while I am.’ She shuddered with pleasure, as the Reading outskirts rattled by. ‘You see, Richard . . . the group fuck is the highest ritual expression of our faith – but it must happen as a sort of special grace.’
Yeah, sigh.
A pink-faced gent in a stockbroker suit at the adjacent table was listening with keen interest.
‘The group fuck can’t be contrived,’ Germaine boomed. ‘It would be terrible. Like a dirty weekend with the Monkees.’
Giggling, I kissed her cheek and headed for the door. She would write a wonderful piece, I knew. When it came to ‘letting it all hang out’, no one could match Germaine. The gent touched my elbow. ‘I heard the whole thing,’ he said.
‘Oh.’ I was suddenly embarrassed.
He handed me his card. ‘A British Rail caterer has no right to refuse service on the basis of hairstyle.’ He suggested I seek legal redress and offered to appear as a witness.
The interview with the printer was a waste of time. While it was agreed that Oz was within the law, the location of the press was awkward – ‘a bit too close to Windsor Castle’. For Oz 19, Germaine wrote a homage to groupiedom, ‘The Universal Tonguebath’, in which she interviewed herself. For the photo session with Viv Stanshall, the bespectacled leader of the cult group The Bonzo Dog Doodah Band (the warm-up for Tiny Tim), she bared her breasts and knelt mockingly at his feet. On the cover, we used the one of her unzipping his fly.
Alex Mitchell came to have another chat about The Body. With him was Tony Garnett, producer of Ken Loach’s gut-wrenchers Cathy Come Home and Kes. Felix Dennis had almost fitted the bill, they said, and was more than willing to fuck on camera – but with whom? No steady partner. ‘All chicks are the same to him,’ sighed Alex, with a trace of envy. ‘You two are the perfect couple.’
Louise laughed. ‘You said you wanted a working-class Marxist . . .’
‘Ideally, but you do lean to the left . . .’
‘Give me a break. I’m a middle-class Catholic.’
‘The main thing is you’re committed,’ Garnett put in, ‘you’re in the firing line of social change.’ He looked appraisingly at Louise. ‘Your presence will help to, er, balance the cast.’ This included a dwarf, the tallest man in the world, a blind teenager . . .
‘What is this,’ I asked, ‘a remake of Freaks?’
‘This world is being rapidly polluted by man,’ said Tony, ‘DDT in the seagulls, oil slicks on the beach – every day it gets worse. About the only thing we have left is our body, and we don’t have a clue how it works.’
‘It’s an educational film. For our couple we need two people who do truly love each other,’ said Mitchell.
Louise enthused about Cathy Come Home, which had caused an outpouring of compassion for the homeless after being screened on the BBC. ‘If it’s half as good as that . . .’
‘This has the potential to be even more powerful,’ Tony insisted. ‘It’s global.’
Time was precious, but the fee was tempting. Alex pleaded, ‘We need you.’
Angelo Quattrocchi and Jill popped over from Paris and I took them to dinner at a restaurant down the street, The Ark. My sister had finished writing a novel based on the May Events. The ecstasy of revolution had not only added to the frequency of intercourse, Jill discovered, but to the incidence of venereal disease – hence her title, The Love Germ.
In London, it didn’t require a student revolution to unleash a bout of VD. The Pill was prevalent, condoms were out of fashion, and all of us, from time to time, found ourselves sitting in the waiting room of James Pringle House, a state-of-the-art VD clinic. A quick jab, a course of antibiotics, a spell of abstinence and then . . . back to the fray.
Angelo was full of plans for Oz, suggesting a supplement on the Situationists, a mysterious radical cell whose ideas had infused the May Events. The Society of the Spectacle was a provocative Situationist pamphlet. Sometimes incomprehensible, it derided the conventions of bourgeois rebellion and sparkled with insights, often akin to the Yippies in full flight. ‘The world is upside down,’ maintained the Situationists, ‘the true is the moment of false.’ It was reminiscent of Abbie Hoffman’s words, after a mass march in 1967 to levitate the Pentagon, ‘The peace movement has gone crazy and about time.’ I wanted my book to transcend these twin impulses of oceans
-apart anarchy, to forge a new doctrine of bloodless revolution, which I would enunciate with mind-blowing simplicity. If only . . .
‘The idea is to the mind,’ Angelo scribbled on a napkin, ‘what the gentle clitoris is to the woman.’ He wanted five pages to elaborate. Sure, Angelo, as many as you need. His passionate raves flew in the face of the stodgy British left.
After a second bottle of wine, Jill began venting her fury at the direction Oz was taking. She had loved the romanticism of ‘Plant a Flower Child Today’ and even presented a copy to her startled concierge. But she recoiled from the new rawness, regarding it as a throwback to adolescence; vulgar and obscene, ruined by the inclusion of American Underground comics. Robert Crumb, in particular, was ‘foul and unfunny’. And if she was shocked – Jill wagged a finger – the Brits would be outraged. ‘Remember what they did to Oscar Wilde.’
Jill sensed an incipient conformity about Oz and its milieu, which was likely to clothe us in fashionable opinions and lessen our ability to talk out of turn and think outside the mould.
She was also the one who copped it from Mum, whose former sympathy for Oz had turned to rage. Long, bitter missives from Mount Victoria lamented the decline and fall of her only son. As an adenoidal boy, I was prone to sleep with my mouth open. On medical advice, to prevent a slack-jawed posture, my parents sealed my lips with Sellotape at bedtime. Was Oz an unconscious revenge for this nocturnal gagging?
For Jill, the shots in Oz of Germaine entwined with a rock star were the last straw. She threw the magazine across the restaurant, where it landed adroitly in a champagne bucket. Without missing a beat, an elderly gentleman in a polka-dot cravat extracted the Oz, nodded his thanks and absorbed himself in its pages.
Elegant in antique fabrics at her Chelsea Antique Markets stall, Jenny Kee spoke scathingly of Germaine’s discovery of groupiedom. ‘It’s tragic, Rick. The MC5? It’s like going to bed with a zoo.’
‘Yeah, Jen. But not everyone can claim the scalp of a Beatle.’
‘And the Stones, and Eric Clapton, and Roger Daltrey, and . . .’
‘Don’t forget Martin Sharp,’ I said.
She laughed.
‘I bet there’s one you let get away.’
‘Oh, yeah – who?’
‘Tiny Tim!’
Just then, believe it or not, a customer friend, Ace, was dragged into the stall by the leash of his new pet – a lion.
For April Oz, Andrew Fisher delved into the London chapter of the Hell’s Angels. Hollywood movies, Movement rhetoric and a book by Hunter S. Thompson had elevated the bikers to the level of radical chic. For our photographer, the Angels subjected their girlfriends to some unspeakable simulations. Try as he might, however, Andrew was unable to glamorise the gang, depicting them as a bunch of losers with broken bikes, few brains and no future.
‘Is that Andrew Fisher?’ asked a female voice on his home phone, soon after the issue appeared.
‘Who is this?’
‘A friend. They’re going to kill you.’
It was Chrissie, one of the women in the photographs.
‘They’re on their way now.’
Andrew ducked off to Wales. Later, creeping back, he found it wasn’t only the Hell’s Angels trying to track him down, but the Vice Squad as well. Chrissie, shown squirming photogenically with an Angel in Oz, had turned out to be under sixteen. To calm Andrew down Louise handed him a joint. It was his first time. After one puff, he became paranoid, unable to move from the armchair. ‘Fate. It’s caught up with me.’ An understandable sentiment, considering, but then Andrew became obsessed with his watch. He looked at it every half minute and said, ‘Time! It’s passing. Oh, God. Time!’ Variations on this mantra continued for some hours, until he started to snore. Andrew never smoked pot again.
On May Day 1969 we assembled in the Strand for a march against the Vietnam War. Everyone was edgy because the previous anti-war demo had ended in a hail of truncheons. Baffled by the proliferation of New Left splinter groups, Louise and I joined the ranks of Aussie expats, distinguishable by a high-held national flag. Some marchers were friends, other faces were familiar enough. The two stocky men marching beside us in wraparound sunglasses, shiny blue suits and well-polished black shoes seemed out of place. As the streets resounded to the chant of Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, one of the marshals, an erstwhile Oz contributor, squeezed behind the suspicious couple and held a placard above their heads: WE ARE POLICE SPIES. At first there was laughter, then jeers. The two suits slunk from the scene. It was a small victory, but ominous, and contributed to the theatrics that followed.
The demo came to an unexplained halt, with our mob stalled outside Australia House. The anger of our chants intensified. (At a recent demonstration in Sydney, when his official car had been blocked by protesters, the State Premier had urged his chauffeur to ‘run over the bastards.’) Placards and pamphlets piled up in the gutter, as if by pre-arrangement. A match was lit. Shouts, screams, a tussle with the Australian flag. Larger than life, Germaine thrust herself to the fore and hurled the flag into the flames, shouting, ‘We are all Vietcong, we are all Vietcong.’ Cheers, boos – and from me, a shocked silence.
However much I shared and identified with her rage, an ingrained respect for my dinkum Aussie Dad and his beliefs prevented me from endorsing what she did to the Southern Cross.
Why did Louise and I agree to be the bodies in The Body? The track record of the producers? The imprecations of Alex Mitchell, the hard-nosed journo with a penchant for ‘righting wrongs’? The ready cash? All of the above. I realised too that it would be good publicity for The Book.
On the first day of our transfer from Book to Body, we were asked, like the rest of the cast on the set, to don brown terry-towelling dressing gowns. ‘To blend.’ It was the first intimation that The Body might be a corpse. The cast was likeable. The Welsh miner held up his hands to camera and discussed in detail the source of his scars, tracing the rivulets of sweated agony, a real hero of the real underground. A blind girl stroked my face with her fingers and described what she saw – thick lips, a bent nose. There was a dwarf who never stopped talking; a student from Hornsey Art College who had led the recent sit-ins; and Chris, the tallest man in the world. One morning a white Mercedes glided on to the set, rising about three feet when the passenger alighted. This was Arthur, thirty-nine stone, the fattest man in the world.
Arthur told me he had never been to a doctor in his life – ‘I’ve never felt sick’ – though he couldn’t stand up unaided for more than five minutes. Amiable, dripping with sweat, not smelling the best, I found him rather sad. Arthur couldn’t fit through turnstiles, ascend the stairs to cinemas or ride in a car that was unreinforced. ‘When you’re this fat,’ he told me, ‘you always have to put on a jolly face.’
Technology played its part in The Body. One night Louise and I bedded down on the set, so the succession of our sleeping postures could be captured by time-lapse. We were taken to a military air base and told to embrace in a wind tunnel, so that spy cameras could record our body heat. Finally . . . the bedroom scene. Security guards surrounded the set. Whispered allusions to a ‘skeleton crew’ were reassuring. Alex Mitchell slipped me a bag of grass, courtesy of ‘props’. A wine bucket stood near the Habitat bed. The ceiling was draped with black cloth, with a slit for the lenses to protrude. Louise and I took up compromising positions on the mattress.
Try as I might, the old boy was camera-shy. What to do? How many takes would it take? Such flaccidity had to be in breach of contract. Louise and I blew another joint, and things started to warm up. Someone fell off a ladder. Who cared? We were off and running.
Next morning, none of the crew could look me in the eye.
‘Shocked,’ Alex confided.
‘I was that good?’
He hissed, ‘Only the bloody Frogs do that!’
Champagne, farewells, fingers crossed. It was a wrap. Well, not quite, as it turned out.
The unfazable Alex made another approach. A
delicate matter. A post-production glitch. The sound from the sex scene was ruined – the set had squeaked, incessantly.
‘They expected the Earth to move,’ I muttered to Alex, ‘but not the bed.’ Maybe the Poms lay perfectly still.
One night, a pair of embarrassed technicians miked the basement bed and spooled the wires into the adjoining room, where they crouched in their headphones over a Nagra. This time we could turn off the lights. The opportunity was too tempting. Reaching back to ancestral vaudeville, I tried to mimic a gang-banging pack of hippos. Louise couldn’t stop giggling. Later, white-faced, the men beat a hasty retreat, cables trailing the floor.
‘They’ll have to use the Ride of the Valkyries,’ said Louise.
Scotland Yard launched a summer offensive on the Underground press. Armed with a warrant under the Obscene Publications Act, police raided the offices of IT and confiscated 2,000 copies of the last six issues. The thrust of the bust was the personal ads, considered shocking at the time, and all the replies were confiscated. ‘We run these ads to bring people together,’ explained the editor, ‘and we check first to see if they’re real.’ Even those sympathetic to the beleaguered press, like Phillip Oakes in the Sunday Times, were dismissive: ‘Small ads cater for sexual misfits,’ he wrote, ‘including homosexuals and tranvestites sadly seeking partners.’ The ads provided an excuse for the police, but not the real motivation.
The offices of the solemn and terminally Marxist Black Dwarf were visited three times and its editors threatened with criminal libel. Police swooped on Sharman’s printers in Peterborough, whose clients included IT, Oz and Rolling Stone. No warrant was produced. The May Oz had started its print run, but officers combed through the pages and deemed one ad offensive. The terrified printer put 6,000 copies to the torch. Before the run was resumed, £2,000 was demanded up front, as a bond to cover any legal action. Police also checked the galleys of Rolling Stone, which was left to proceed unscathed. A relieved Jane Nicholson, the London editor, proclaimed, ‘Rolling Stone is not, and I repeat, not an underground paper.’ Her current cover depicted an armed cop kneeling beside a half dead, black and bleeding demonstrator, captioned ‘American Revolution, 1969’.
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