by Mick Farren
Contents
Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
Author’s Warning
Prologue
Application to Become an Alien
Chapter One
The House of the Chinese Landlord
The Sphere of Alex Stowell
The Safari Tent, the Rio and Finches
The Artesian Well
I Do Like to be Beside the Seaside
Look at His Legs
Chapter Two
The Mysterious East
Holes in the Albert Hall
The Making of the Man
A Shed in Chalk Farm
Chapter Three
Show Me Your Money
Ticket to the Underground
Down the Up Rabbit Hole
Playing Guitar with His Teeth (I)
The Highest Percentage of Social Deviants
Playing Guitar with His Teeth (II)
Art to the Rescue
Busted
Chapter Four
Technicolor Dreamin’
The Children’s Crusade
Breaking the Butterflies
Saturday Night Fervour
Avoiding the Light
Boo Radley’s Porch
Sacked from the Revolution
Chapter Five
Underground Impresarios
PTOOFF!
Road Warriors
Let’s Loot the Refectory
Kill, Zeppelin, Kill, Kill
Being There at Grosvenor Square
Chapter Six
Disposable
The Doors of Perception
You Pretty Things
212 Shaftesbury Avenue
A Cold Day in Hell
Enter the Canadian
Deviants Three and Me
Concert at Tyburn
Weird Scenes on Chemical Row
Chapter Seven
They Don’t Call Them Decades for Nothing
Easy? You Call This Easy?
Trouble at Mill
Speakeasy, Drink Easy, Pull Easy
Hey, Hey, Hey, Mona
As I Was Lying in My Hospital Bed
Ragged Company
Sweet Gene Vincent
Nevermore
Encounter and Reunion
Phun City, Here We Come
Twilight of the Gods
Chapter Eight
Screwing Causes Clap
Harry Palmer with a Warrant
Mists of Avalon
A Nasty Ball
We Fought the Law and, For Once, We Won
The Great Nitrous Oxide Heist
We’ll Always Have Paris
Chapter Nine
Settle Down and Write a Book
Kill ’Em and Eat ’Em
Aid and Comfort to NME
Rodney Biggenheimer’s English Disco
Carnival
Mo the Roller
Dancehall Style
Chapter Ten
The Titanic Sails at Dawn
The Non-Judicial Use of Handcuffs
Nothing But the Haircuts
Country, Blue Grass & Blues
Vampires Stole My Lunch Money
The Night Elvis Died
Sixteen Coaches Long
Lost in the Supermarket
Redemption? I Don’t Think So
Epilogue
The Piaf Summation
Bibliography and Discography
Index
Copyright
About the Book
Through a long and chequered career, Mick Farren has functioned as a writer, poet, rock star, rabble-rouser, critic and commentator, and even won a protracted obscenity trial at the Old Bailey. He has finally written his own highly personal and insightful account of the British counterculture in the 1960s and ’70s, from the perspective of one who was right there in the thick of it.
With a continuing and unashamed commitment to the tradition of sex, drugs and rock ‘&’ roll, he recounts a rollercoaster odyssey – sometimes violent and often hilarious – from early beatnik adventures in Ladbroke Grove, through the flowering hippies to the snarl of punk. Along the way, while he worked as the man on the door at the UFO club, was the driving spirit at IT and, of course, lead singer with the Social Deviants, he encountered the celebrated and the notorious, from Jimi Hendrix and Germaine Greer to Julie Burchill and Sid Vicious. He gives a firsthand, insider’s account of the chaos, disorder and raging excess of those two highly excessive decades
About the Author
Now in his early fifties, Mick Farren currently lives in Los Angeles. With some twenty books to his credit, plus a number of film and TV scripts and a wealth of journalism, his written output remains prodigious. He also still records and performs, and a recent tour of Japan with his band, the Deviants, culminated in the live CD Barbarian Princes. His most recent novel, Jim Morrison’s Adventures in the Afterlife, was published in the US in 2000.
This book is dedicated to Susan Slater for seeing me
through the more painful exhumations of recall, with affection,
sympathy and Valium.
Give the Anarchist a Cigarette
Mick Farren
‘Give a man a mask and he’ll tell you the truth.’ – Oscar Wilde
‘A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what’s going on.’ – William S. Burroughs
Newspeak (1984) ‘was designed not to extend but to distinguish the range of thought and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words to a minimum . . . the expression of unorthodox opinions, except on a very low level, was well-nigh impossible.’ – George Orwell
Author’s Warning
I freely admit that I have left out many things that I would rather forget. I have also changed the names, or merely used the first names, of some private individuals who have committed no other offence than that they once passed through my perception. Although I have, as far as possible, checked dates and the chronological sequence of events, memory is fallible. It has also been repeatedly proved that, with the best will in the world, no two observers’ impressions of the same events are going to be the same. Thus, while striving for maximum accuracy, the story you are about to hear remains highly subjective, and I suffer from a strong impulse to compact events for dramatic effect. You may also detect certain contradictions in my ideas and attitudes as time passes in this narrative. If that creates a problem, I can only refer you to Ralph Waldo Emerson: ‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.’
Back when the world was young
Drunk on cheap well whisky
And confused on mescaline
Walking rattlesnake curves
On sidewalks that refused to lay down
Resisting
Resisting
Resisting all the importunate invasions of reality
Back when the world was young
Searching for the gateway
To the secret garden
The maps to the labyrinth
And the silver key
With a woman in red shoes
Whose name was maybe Dolores
Dolores?
Or perhaps her name was . . . Laverne?
Back when the world was young
And fear was so perfectly academic
And the scales were so perfectly poised
That I could still pace the razor’s edge
Without cutting my feet or losing any further toes
And I believed
And I believed
And I believed in every fucking drop of rain that fell
Back wh
en the world was young
And you had but to softly ask
The crushed whisper of velvet
The sheer innocence of pure desire
And the requested favour was granted and gratified
So will somebody give?
So will somebody give?
So will somebody please
Give the anarchist a cigarette?
1996, recorded to music by Jack Lancaster and Wayne Kramer
Prologue
Application to Become an Alien
‘LIST ALL THE organisations you have ever joined or of which you have ever been a member. List all publications to which you have ever contributed as a writer . . .’
He looked, I swear to God, like John Dean of Watergate fame, the boyish attorney to Richard Nixon. He was probably younger than I was and I was thirty-five. His grey suit was immaculate, his fingernails were manicured and he was shaved so closely that his cheeks were close to a baby pink. He smelled of aftershave and breath mints. By the standards of 1979, his hair was unusually short, a colourless near-blond and neatly parted. In maybe five years he would be bald. He was some kind of Under Assistant Attaché with Responsibility for Immigration, and his eyes were cold. He clearly felt part of that responsibility was to keep individuals like me from becoming Resident Aliens in the United States. On the wall was a photograph of Jimmy Carter in a light wood frame. In a year or so, it would be replaced by one of Ronald Reagan, although neither of us knew it at the time. That election had yet to come, although Britain had already made its turn to the right. Margaret Thatcher had replaced Jim Callaghan, and I was getting out of town. Unless the John Dean across the desk with the small American flag attached to the pen and pencil set found a way to stop me, I was going to live in New York City, where I would find bars with Hank Williams and Louis Jordan on the jukebox, multiple TV channels that ran all night, and a man could lawfully drink until four o’clock in the morning.
I looked at the questionnaire John Dean had pushed across the desk at me. Long and hugely detailed, it indicated I was in trouble. Most applicants for Resident Alien status and issue of the notorious Green Card do not find themselves subjected to such intense scrutiny. I was marrying a US citizen, and it should have been only marginally harder than obtaining a visa.
‘Drugs?’
‘No.’
‘Communist?’
‘No.’
‘Anarchist?’
‘No.’
‘Syphilis?’
‘No.’
‘TB? Congenital insanity? Criminal record? Burden on society?’
‘No, no, no and no.’
The questions asked by US immigration exactly reflect American paranoias regarding foreigners from the Ellis Island days of the 1890s to the present. The problem is that none of the US immigration restrictions are ever dumped. The old ones remain while others are simply layered on top, producing a weird bureaucratic archaeology. Once one has ploughed through this catalogue of a nation’s irrational fears, the papers are sent away and are run through the big CIA fruit machine in Frankfurt, and, for the majority of applicants, that’s all she wrote. Unfortunately, in my case, the big CIA fruit machine took one look and came up three lemons, and I was asked to report to John Dean. The interview took place at the embassy in Grosvenor Square, in a room very like the one in which John Vernon threatens Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry, and I realised I was in trouble.
To be denied resident status at this point would be somewhere between an embarrassment and a disaster. I had just got married. My good friend Felix Dennis, then into making his first handful of millions, had thrown a lavish wedding reception, complete with inexhaustible champagne and a white Rolls-Royce. My drunken mates were all present, plus a goodly selection of what was laughingly called ‘the underground’, and figures from the stoned fringe of my immediate rock & roll past. Felix had rented a mansion on Embassy Row, at the western end of Kensington Gardens, for the bash. Next door was the Russian Embassy and, at the bottom of the heavily guarded, maximum-security street, stood Kensington Palace, future home of Charles and Di. At one point in the proceedings a helicopter landed in the grounds of the palace, possibly bringing Charles home for his tea. After an affair like that – not only a wedding, but a tacit farewell party – how was I going to turn round and tell Felix, ‘Sorry, but I’m not going after all’? I had said my goodbyes, disposed of my stuff, given up the flat and burned my metaphorical bridges. Now this large boulder had appeared in the final stretch of the road and I had cause for cold sweat.
‘All the publications to which . . .’
‘. . . you have ever contributed as a writer.’
The cold eyes looked at me as though I were some kind of specimen. They reminded me of the young Roy Cohn, in old black-and-white clips of the McCarthy hearings, lurking and sinister, behind the raving senator from Wisconsin. In the Eighties I would see a lot more of them. That detached shark-gaze would be common in Manhattan, among the yuppies of Wall Street, the ones determined to be multi-millionaires by thirty. I guess my John Dean was the Washington, State Department version, but I had no time to wonder what he ultimately wanted. I was racking my brains as to what incident, action, prank or polemic the CIA, or whomever, had fixed on as a possible reason to deem me too dangerously subversive to set up housekeeping in New York City. God only knew there were enough from which to choose. In the almost sixteen years since my first night in the House of the Chinese Landlord, I had lent momentum to a good deal of mayhem.
On the possible list was disruption of a national TV talk show. I’d taken a lot of the blame, a little unreasonably I thought, for the trashing of one of the world’s most ambitious rock festivals. I had also organised a very bizarre rock festival of my own. I had edited the country’s largest-circulation underground newspaper for a number of years. I had been dragged into the Old Bailey to defend against major obscenity charges a comic book I’d published. But that couldn’t count, could it? Hadn’t I been acquitted without a stain on my character? I had founded the British White Panther Party, for reasons greatly different from those most of my critics believed. Earlier, I had been the leader of a notoriously unpleasant rock ’n’ roll band, and made a number of albums. I had attended more marches, demonstrations, riots, sit-ins, pranks and pieces of street theatre than I cared to recall, and had associated with dozens of clearly undesirable – and possibly criminal – characters.
As if all that wasn’t enough for them to nail me, I had also committed my ideas and dissatisfaction with authoritarian consumer capitalism to print in hundreds of thousands of words that included rants, essays, monographs and, at that point, five novels and one work of non-fiction, all dedicated to the overthrow of Western civilisation. I realised John Dean might have enough to keep me out of the USA for the rest of my days, if he so desired. As the interview continued, I found myself recounting a version of the previous sixteen years of my life and times, in a censored and highly abridged version that was nothing like the book you are about to read.
Chapter One
The House of the Chinese Landlord
EACH LEG OF the iron bedstead stood in a small pan containing about quarter of an inch of liquid paraffin. The pans were about three inches across, perhaps the lids of Cadbury’s cocoa tins. In the late winter of 1964 I had only a limited experience of West London flophouses, but I was certain these things were related to a major insect infestation. By the age of twenty I wasn’t totally unaware of the lower orders of life. As a student, I’d had my share of hard-time wretchedness, particularly each term, when a government grant that was intended to last for three months was spent in three weeks on beer and Beatle boots. I’d seen cultures of alien bacteria growing in sinks of unwashed dishes that would have been the envy of germ-warfare scientists, and dirty laundry ignored so long that it threatened to glow in the dark, but that was student sleaze and came with the underlying reassurance that one day we would come to man’s estate, and give up the pose of the unwashed. Except tha
t here I was, walking into a rented room in the House of the Chinaman, not only still unwashed, but apparently hitting bottom. I was no longer a student, and this might be as close to man’s estate as I was going to get. This was not a drill, but the real thing. I was unemployed and maybe unemployable. The bed in my new home seemingly had to be protected from marauding bugs, and the only reason I was able to rent even this place, low as it was on the food chain of accommodation, was that I had made a relatively modest amount of money selling clockwork jumping dogs on Oxford Street and Regent Street in the weeks prior to Christmas. Now that Christmas had jingled its bells and gone, Oxford and Regent Streets were a hard place to sell anything. Perhaps even your body.
Aside from the smell of paraffin, a presence existed in the room. Not quite a stench, more of an emanation, old and malevolent, deep-seated and ingrained in the very walls. Had it been more aggressive, H.P. Lovecraft might have given it an unpronounceable name, but this entity was content merely to hang in its own unventilated air, because it knew it already had me low-down and terrified. Individually, no one of its parts was all that threatening. Jeyes Fluid, cooked cabbage and elderly grease, ten-year-old Woodbines, rising damp, mildew and bug powder were all fairly innocuous when taken singly. This cocktail of misery was, however, rendered more daunting when coupled with the legend of the Chinese landlord, who lived in hermit-like isolation in the ground-floor front, sharing his room, in an almost Norman Bates intimacy, with the body of his dead father, while he sought to raise the money to ship it back to China and some ancestral place of burial. It was more than enough to convince me that I had finally sunk to my true level in the world, a bottom feeder returning to the primal slime.
In retrospect, I seriously doubt there was a word of truth in the story about the landlord and his late lamented father. That dreary twilight house of strange smells and forty-watt lightbulbs had lots of rooms and every one of them was occupied. The landlord must have been raking in the cash, and how much could it cost to ship the body of a wizened and possibly mummified old man, even all the way to China? I now suspect the tall tale had its roots in both innate racism and the need of the building’s other denizens for some threadbare romance. A year or so earlier Bob Dylan had played a bit-part in a BBC TV play, Madhouse on Castle Street, about a house not altogether dissimilar to the one I was in. The video version, however, had been chock-full of quirky, eccentric characters, and Bob himself sat on the stairs singing and strumming his guitar. No such frolics in the House of the Chinaman. Even if the father’s body was a figment, the place still had the atmosphere of a mausoleum.