‘Children are involved,’ he said, his face going a shiny red. ‘We have had several complaints. The point is this, Mr Neville, are you one of the editors of Schoolkids Oz?’
Yes, that was the point. I hadn’t been there for crucial decisions, but I had set the whole idea in motion.
‘Oz is my magazine. My responsibility.’
‘Do you know a young man named Vivian Berger?’
I had met him that one time, but why was he being singled out? ‘On the advice of my solicitor,’ I said, ‘I refuse to answer that question.’
And so it went. Prosecution seemed inevitable. My main worry was the impact on my mother of yet another obscenity trial.
Boatloads of Australians continued to land in London and gravitate to Oz. Marsha Rowe, our former secretary from Sydney, found herself installed in the offices at Princedale Road. Her predecessor, Bridget, set off on a long-awaited jaunt to Europe. Among the first batch of letters was a query from Jim Haynes about the ‘round-the-world plane thing’, still gathering momentum, despite my diminishing enthusiasm. As usual, Haynes enclosed his ad copy for Suck. ‘Schoolkids Oz is good,’ he wrote, ‘but I suspect the cover will cause you problems.’ Marsha said, ‘It’s like old times’.
Much to everyone’s surprise, Robert Hughes accepted an offer to become the art critic of Time magazine. Had his Harley run out of gas? Bob fled his rented mansion in Hanover Square in the early hours of the morning, inviting everyone to help themselves to whatever he couldn’t fit in his trunks. His Aussie mates turned into looters overnight – marble tiles, a water heater, velvet curtains, architraves, carpets, chandeliers . . . Hoppy, from IT, staggered out with the kitchen stove. I was offered a brass shower head.
As a farewell gesture, the mansion’s walls were daubed with graffiti – RIPPED OFF BY THE PARK ROAD PIG FUCKERS – Bob’s last burst of purple prose before crossing the Atlantic. This sudden departure, though saddening to friends, and to his landlord, put one nagging worry to rest. Time magazine’s new art critic would not be chartering a jumbo to change the world.
Germaine Greer thumped in and out of Palace Gardens Terrace with her copy for Cunt Power Oz. Other contributions took the form of cuddly fashion garments, knitted by her own fair hand. The Greer bikini top, for example, featured bright, erect nipples, meticulously rendered, a motif which could be applied, she wrote, to tired undies, black dresses or bridal gowns, ‘worked with metallic threads and sequins’. The needlework for the briefs was challenging, although Germaine’s advice was unstinted. ‘The basis for the cunt-thatch is worked in a chain stitch to provide a solid ground for crocheted fronds . . .’ The labia minora required a satin stitch, diminishing into the collar of the clitoris, which imposed finicky demands on the liberated seamstress. ‘Once over for the plinth, and once more in a darker colour for the bud.’ At Germaine’s insistence, I adorned myself with her hand-knitted, multi-striped cocksock, plus scrotum pouch, and posed for a flattering photo. ‘This snug corner for a chilly prick,’ Germaine wrote, ‘can be whipped up out of coloured wool . . .’
The cover was one of Oz’s most apt – a pop-art box of soap powder. OZ! DRIVES OUT STAINS with FEMALE ENERGY. By some bizarre logic, Felix and Jim were both convinced that with Oz already busted, this was a time when we could publish with impunity. Cunt Power Oz appeared with some of our most provocative erotica ever. ‘Porn Lite,’ joked Jim. The print run was 50,000.
In ‘The Politics of Sexuality’, Germaine’s lead piece, she argued that one of the chief mechanisms in the suppression of women was the suppression of their sexuality. Women needed to understand their cunt, to love it, to care for it, to wriggle out of the missionary position (‘a bummer’) and to reinstate a general potency in themselves, to avoid falling into the ‘sterile perversion of male sexuality, which is violence’.
Danne Hughes, a participant in consensual violence in the bedroom, explored the subject of masochism in her long, opiated rap with Judith Malina, a co-founder of the (no longer) Living Theatre. Anais Nin was interviewed. Others summarised the latest feminist actions, from the staging of a subversive off-Broadway musical to the ritualised burning of bras and the take-over of underground newspapers. Ozworker Ian Stocks stood full frontal with the caption ‘What a man’s best girl won’t tell him’ – Altamont, the gentle, lightly scented, dry, masculine deodorant spray – a twist on an ad for feminine hygiene. On the back cover was the historic shot of Emmeline Pankhurst’s arrest at Buckingham Palace, suitably psyche-delicised.
Oz carried a warning that the next issue would be late, as the staff were ‘taking a rest to prepare for another venture, Ink, a new weekly newspaper’.
Ink would replace IT, now sinking under its own weight, be ballsier and more committed than Rolling Stone, service the pleasure-seekers better than Time Out, scintillate the armchair yippies with prose sharper than New Society’s, smarter than New Statesman’s . . . yakety, yakety, yak. I became enmeshed in wild schemes to ‘hit the rich for bread’, and succumbed to hallucinations about media empires – ‘We’ll rig up a global telex network of freaks.’ The core of the illusion was a gang of four – Ed Victor, Andrew Fisher, Felix Dennis and me.
Maybe the Ink dream was an unconscious strategy to counteract the vulnerability of Oz, now in the long shadow of the law. A new weekly enlarged the arsenal. What is Ink? asked Oz: ‘Roughly speaking, it will be a militant, muck-raking leper-rapes-CIA-agent tabloid of the Movement; where the News of the World and Rupert Murdoch meet the Underground. In short: Inkredible.’ Yeah, I could always write the copy, even before the product was invented.
Ink’s gestation triggered mood swings. During the highs, I could talk myself into anything, and just about anyone else. Over a lingering Goodge Street lunch with Ed Victor, I raved about the potential of a new paper to service the ever-expanding Underground. The Daily Mirror had just launched a pop weekly, and bombed. ‘Wrong wavelength,’ I assured Ed, who was fired up from working on the galleys of Jerry Rubin’s Do It, ‘there’s a new generation . . .’ As he topped my glass and polished off a large cherry-topped chocolate dessert, I remarked, ‘Ed, you know you’re really just a fat cat. Wallowing in everyone else’s discontent, making a buck. All the buzz without the fuzz . . .’
Ed laughed. It was one of those two-bottle lunches. When I reached the basement, he was on the phone. ‘I’ve decided to resign,’ he said, ‘and work full time on Ink.’
‘Ed, are you sure about this?’
Ed was sure.
It was August. London sweltered. Louise accepted an invitation from her brother to join him on a holiday in Fiji. I found a cheap charter flight and flew home for a fortnight to face the family. At Sydney Airport I was detained by Customs officials. A copy of Playpower was taken away for a private examination, and returned without its Headopoly chart. All my Ozes were confiscated.
Had I really been away four years? The house in Wolseley Road was a dusty museum, frozen in its Fifties décor, silent and stale. The same books on the shelves, the rasping voices of bigotry on the radio, the familiar mice droppings in the griller pan. With Mum permanently holed-up in the mountains, Dad was disinclined to differentiate between a home and a military barracks. He didn’t buy flowers or invite friends over. He toddled home tipsy from his ‘6 o’clock swill’, slamming the table with his token of welcome, a magnum of Worcester sauce. The Astor TV flickered in the living room, still competing with the scarlet wallpaper, Dad on the Night ’n’ Day hunched over a plate of burnt chops watching Brian Henderson read the news, and muttering ironic asides: ‘Hitler was right.’
Most of my friends had moved to London. One exception was Richie Walsh, who, having rid himself of Oz, was making a splash in advertising. At lunch near his office at J. Walter Thompson – where sister Jill had cut her teeth – Richie’s wit was braced with a newfound taste for Campari and soda, but I couldn’t help feeling superior – as though he was tunnelling backwards in time, while I stood poised at the thrusting edge of a new culture, frisbee
in one hand, vibrator in the other, both of them glowing in the dark.
On the weekend, Dad drove me to the Blue Mountains. Near St Leonards Station, I yelled, ‘Stop!’ Gorging myself in the back of the Holden, it was like eating the salty essence of homeland. That fish shop was where, during weekdays in the late Fifties, no longer a boarder, I had stepped off the Lane Cove tram, bound for Knox Grammar. As it was a Presbyterian school, with Scottish traditions, it was compulsory to wear a kilt for cadet training. In flimsy underpants, I would press the Globite bag against my sporran and dart across the rush-hour highway, the winds whistling up the tartan.
Mum stood on the Upalong verandah, bright and welcoming, framed by a developer-inspiring view of Megalong Valley. The house was stacked with folksy bric-à-brac – twisted twigs mounted on wood-chunks to look like waltzing lovers, a rug I had posted from Delhi, a shearing shed painted on glass. The timber-panelled walls glistened with snaps of family and friends. Bouquets of bottlebrush thrust from antique vases and a stew simmered on the wood stove. Fuelled by pots of tea, Mum and I talked about every subject under the sun – except Oz and Playpower and our emotional estrangement. She was more than ever enclasped in the bosom of the Church, but kept her trigger-finger handy with a weekly column for Dad’s pastoral newspaper, Country Life, under the nom de plume Lucy Locket.
My sister Josie arrived, with her four children. Michael, her eldest son, used to sleep in a cot at Wolseley Rd while his father extended our house into a duplex. An uncle at twelve, I was the talk of the playground. One night I took a portrait of Michael with a box Brownie, while he slept by candlelight. At other times this cuddly interloper incited spasms of jealousy.
We hired horses and trotted into the mists, splashing through familiar streams, frightening the parrots. At night we sang around the piano with ‘Captain Wombat’ (Uncle Ken) playing ukulele. In the morning I took a solitary stroll to Mount Piddington, checking the graffiti on a sandstone cliff, to see if an adolescent burst of soppiness had survived the swirling wind – Richard loves Louise, encased in a heart. It was still there.
On the eve of my departure, I told Dad of the possibility of an obscenity prosecution. He took it on the chin like the old soldier he was, but I felt lousy. All he ever wanted in a son was a Norman Normal, someone to balance the books and mow the lawns.
At Heathrow, my stay in the UK was restricted to two months, as though I was already persona non grata. On 18 August 1970, a few days after my return, the police served a summons alleging the ‘publishing of an obscene magazine’. The first step was an appearance at Marylebone Magistrates’ Court in October, where a ruling would be made on whether or not there was a case to answer. At least it meant an extension of stay.
In September, as a rehearsal for Ink, and for fun, Oz joined forces with IT and another local paper, Friends (shortly to be radicalised into Frendz), to produce FREEk, a daily news-sheet for the Isle of Wight Music Festival. Set in the rolling fields of East Afton Farm, this event boasted one of the biggest line-ups of global superstars to be seen in Europe.
In an army marquee I settled at the trestle table with the Olivetti, sorting through scribbled dispatches from stoned scribes, including two Oz schoolkids. Marsha Rowe fed the foolscap layouts into a Gestetner and ground out copies in their hundreds, her hands grimy with ink. FREEk kept a running tally of drug busts, and alerted readers with updates of plainclothes fashions: Fuzz Dressed As Freaks.
As arrests soared, Release launched a bail fund. One of the collectors was a pushy young Aussie fresh off the boat, Stan Demidjuk, who smart-talked his way backstage to solicit from the rockstars. Stan was short, but his heels were high and his chestnut hair tumbled down to his thighs. ‘Rip-off merchants,’ he reported, fluttering a solitary ten-pound note. ‘Not one of them coughed up, the bastards, except Jim Morrison.’
Joe, the Black Power bodyguard/cook, set up a field kitchen and spiced up the tent fumes. My reaction to Joe had warmed since I had first seen his shaved head peer round Michael X’s door three years before. Editorial colleagues, early Fuzz as Freak victims, now bailed out, spread their bedding on the floor, along with that of Oz staffers and hangers-on. From mid-morn to midnight, this impromptu ‘collective’ hacked out a stormy newsletter, purporting to gauge the pulse of the people, the quality of the high. Sets from the Doors, Joni Mitchell, Miles Davis, Donovan, Jethro Tull and Tiny Tim syncopated with the clatter of typewriters. In the wee small hours, after wolfing down Joe’s soul rations, we crawled into sleeping bags under the tables and wondered who might crawl in beside us.
This was an attempt at a Grand Festival, a state-of-the-art fling. From the start, the mood of the crowd kept the promoters on the defensive and profits in doubt.
Thousands of youngsters squatted on Desolation Row, the out-of-bounds hillside overlooking the stage, and defied incitements to move. ‘The landowners will take an injunction,’ wailed the promotors on the PA. Attempts to knock up a ‘news tower’ in the VIP enclosure were targeted with such a ferocious hail of Coke cans that the chic inhabitants covered their heads and quaked. The project was abandoned.
Mick Farren, former lead singer of the Social Deviants, now calling himself a White Panther, stormed into the marquee and demanded that all franchise food stocks be distributed to the masses.
‘The people are angry and hungry,’ Mick warned, pacing our muddy tent-floor in metal-studded, thigh-high, platform-heeled boots. ‘Those shits on stage are only there because of the proletariat, but they project their act towards a tiny élite at the front – basically a bunch of rich honkies.’ He demanded that Pepsi and Birds Eye donate their entire on-site warehouse to the crowds, in return for a favourable mention in his next speech. He scrawled out an Emergency Statement ‘from the White Panthers’, calling for insurrection, after which I directed him to Civil Aid, which was running a soup kitchen.
A message arrived from Desolation Row. For three days we have listened to free music. To show our appreciation, we offer to clean up the litter. PS Some of us even had tickets, but preferred the hill vibes. At midnight, all groups claiming to represent the masses held a strategy meeting. It included the Hell’s Angels, the White Panthers and the Young Liberals – true. As a ‘symbolic act of protest against élitism’, the alliance agreed to carry out a joint assault on the main fence. From the stage, meanwhile, Jeff Dexter, the harried MC, kept preaching peace and love and the spirit of Woodstock; as though Altamont had never happened and history had halted with the spring buds of Flower Power ’67.
The insurrection erupted at 10 a.m., led by two French anarchists with a battering ram. ‘Zeeze kids are being toe-tally controlled by zooperpigs,’ one of them yelled, thumping at the sheets of iron. The voice was familiar. I had first heard it on a cassette recorded at the Paris barricades and played to a fund-raising meeting in the basement. ‘Ex-source-sted, wretchyard, sleeping in zee pissoirs . . .’, thump, crash, ram. It was Jean-Jacques Lebel, famous for storming the Paris Odéon in ’68, his chubby face flaming with aggro. ‘Zeeeze kids are worse than zeee Jews,’ he screamed, ‘at least zeee fuck’n Jews didn’t pay to go to Auschwitz . . .’ Crash! The corrugated iron caved in. Two Angels, a Panther and a Young Liberal squeezed into the arena, where, to their astonishment, the oppressed masses joined the security guys and their Alsatians in chucking them out and repairing the breach.
‘It’s the corruption of money,’ lamented Mick Farren, limping back to Desolation Row, ‘and I suppose it’s only logical that the kids will protect what they paid for.’ Later, he issued a bulletin. ‘The constant references to “making this a beautiful scene” only serve to make the hungry freak realise that rock is becoming an opiate designed to turn him into a docile consumer. For once, as it turned out, Mick wasn’t just Right On, he was right.
Inside the FREEk tent, it was a festival of fucking, perhaps due to the chilly temperatures and scarcity of sleeping bags. For several days we lived the sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll dream to the hilt.
So
ul chef Joe flung off his bulky woollen beanie and let his dreadlocks tumble down his bare back. On his chest were tribal scars. Tiny Tim’s Rule Britannia, Britannia rule the waves . . . falsettoed over the loudspeakers. Joan Baez sent us a message denying she had demanded a yacht, as reported in FREEk. I had urged Danne Hughes to climb from her communal sleeping bag and clarify the rumours. Since Bob’s departure for Time, Danne had flung herself into the affairs of the Underground press, as well as affairs with its writers.
As the eighth issue of FREEk spun through the Gestetner, I thought it time to vacate the marquee and soak up some of the ambience.
And she feeds you tea and oranges, that come all the way from China, Leonard Cohen was singing as I wandered over to where Caroline Coon stood at a large metal cash box, counting money. ‘They’re still busting people,’ she said, ‘and we need the bread to carry on.’ I kissed her. She was amazing. To fund Release, Caroline spent half her time begging people for cash. She scooped handfuls of silver and pound-notes into a canvas bank-bag, all donated by festival goers, a kind of Underground community levy. In an antique velvet dress with a plunging bodice, attended by a sea of wispy bearded youths in tattered clothes, she looked like Maid Marion at a Sherwood Forest hide-out. Caroline took me to visit the Release trip tent.
Along the muddy track behind the Wimpy stand we came to a hessian-screened compound.
And he wants to trade the game he plays for shelter . . .
The trip-tent was white, fluttering with bunting, tinkling with chimes and glinting with stained-glass mandalas, Arabian Nights meets Haight Ashbury. I followed Caroline through the flap. The floor was covered with mattresses and freaks in foetal positions. Trippers in need of a hand-hold played agitatedly with their beads. Volunteers did the rounds; nodding, playing the sage, exchanging hugs. The air reeked of incense. Soothing strings from a cassette overrode the festival’s PA. A woman sponged the brow of a supine Hells’ Angel.
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