Give the Anarchist a Cigarette

by Mick Farren

  Although I personally rather liked the unfortunate Nigel, I had many misgivings about what his money and intervention would do to IT. Even a radical medium, if it’s operating within a capitalist system, has to be sensitive to market pressures. It may deal in subversion, agitprop and be part of a dissenters’ network, but it also has to move copies off the newsstand. With Nigel underwriting the costs, and maintaining Bill Levy and his editorial staff in splendid isolation, a potentially fatal buffer was being created between editors and readers. The editorial staff also seemed to have a marked prejudice against hippies. Dave Robins again: ‘We never saw a hippie, Bill was no hippie, I wasn’t a hippie.’ Maybe so, but, like it or not, the hippies were everywhere and, as far as I was concerned, formed the paper’s major constituency. If nothing else, it was an attitude that cut off this new crew from vital consumer feedback.

  At approximately the same time another potentially damaging situation that had nothing to do with either Levy or Samuel got under way, which would make it possible for the same kind of editorial isolation to continue, even after Nigel was out of the picture. The lonely hearts classified ads began to grow by quantum leaps after IT decided to accept gay personal ads and, for a while, the paper would command a huge readership of gay men, maybe as many as 30,000, who bought it for the classified section. Ultimately it would result in the paper’s second bust, which would, this time, go all the way to trial and conviction. At first, however, it wasn’t the potential legal problems that bothered me. It was an odd economic subtlety that dogs any paper when it becomes too comfortable with one highly specific advertising section. Today, in the USA, much of the so-called alternative press is able to maintain its drearily impersonal and politically correct editorial content only because it’s subsidised by ads for phone sex and prostitution.

  The inclusion of gay-sex ads was laudable, innovative and courageous, but also a Faustian bargain. Any alternative publication that is financially dependent on sex ads creates for itself a readership that may have absolutely no interest in the general content of the magazine or newspaper. It may be an economic solution, but it distorts the relationship between sales and content. The publication might have an editorial policy that is in fact losing its real and intended readership, but this is disguised by the purely service buyers who pick up copies for the advertising. It’s something an editor has very carefully to factor-in to all policy decisions, and Bill Levy and his successors simply weren’t doing this.

  All my instincts told me that IT was on its way to being managed into toothless irrelevance, but after my tête-à-tête with Nigel in the oyster bar it wasn’t my problem any more, and I could now go to hell in my own disorganised basket – except that Nigel Samuel had yet to finish with me.

  Chapter Five

  Underground Impresarios

  WE HAD A whole factory going on the ground floor of the new IT building on Betterton Street in Covent Garden. It was March 1968. A dozen freaks were pulling freshly pressed records, in their white inner sleeves, out of the boxes in which they’d been delivered, slipping them into the printed covers and then repacking them. A couple more were rolling joints or making themselves available to go out for beer and sandwiches when needed. The Deviants had made an album, but it had been done in a way that few other bands had even considered at the time. With the exception of actually supplying the finance, we had pulled off the whole thing ourselves, all the way from conception to manufacturing and distribution. We had gone in knowing almost nothing and come out at the end of the process, maybe not experts in the ways of the record industry, but at least with our own finished product. The truly amazing part was that, just three months earlier, I had been on the verge of collapse, all enterprises appeared to be failing and the summer of flower power was collapsing into a winter of discontent worse than my direst paranoid predictions.

  The hammer blows had come like a prizefighter’s triple combination – one, two and then one more – that should have put me, if not on the canvas, at least sprawling on the ropes. I had been fired from IT, and just before that UFO had collapsed. Then the Deviants had all but broken up after a disastrous trip to a highly unlikely rock festival in Utrecht, called (with a tenuous grasp of both English and practical reality) Flight to Lowlands Paradise.

  For the London hippie community, the disappearance of UFO was probably the most telling blow, since it had tended to substantiate that the underground, far from being able to mount a cultural revolution, couldn’t even maintain a successful nightclub. After the cops shut us down by putting pressure on Mr Gannon at the Blarney Club, Joe Boyd had tried to save the day by moving the entire enterprise to the Roundhouse, but, although the Roundhouse could hold perhaps three times the audience, it generated ten times the grief.

  The problem was essentially one of size. The club was now so big that the skinheads knew exactly where to find us, and we were also coming to the notice of the hoods who ran the protection rackets in Camden and Kentish Town. Where the mods and skins had come to the Blarney Club in their twos and threes, they began showing up at the Roundhouse mob-handed, far beyond anything that Norman, the Firm and I had the capacity to handle. Additional help was recruited from some very odd sources that included an East London karate club and a squad of Michael X’s black militants. Although we managed to keep the worst of the aggro away from the perception of the audience, the door began to take on aspects of a rough day at Khe San. Since the IT party, Centre 42 had made a few structural improvements, including a more functional set of wide concrete stairs and an open foyer where potential troublemakers could be contained, but both the karate shoguns in their white kimonos and the X-men in Black Panther-style berets, turtle-necks and black leather tended to intimidate, and many of the hippies found this less than groovy.

  The compensation was that, at its peak, the Roundhouse was a pretty damned spectacular psychedelic environment, with a full 360-degree lightshow projected on huge white plastic sheets hung from the circular gallery. For the lightshow to create its full impact, however, the place had to remain almost as dark as a cinema, which made it even more crucial that the bovver boys be turned back at the door. Once they were inside the auditorium, they were hard to see, let alone deal with, and when trouble did spill into the crowd, the crowd itself could be more of a hindrance than a help. On one memorable occasion I was forced to confront a team of seething young proles who bluffed their way past the door and then started harassing hippies. I figured I could get them out with a quartet of militants behind me. The secret is to be determined to avoid violence at all costs, but never to let your adversary know that. It’s a kind of a Gandhian confidence trick and, after eight months at UFO, I had my confidence well together.

  We were starting to back the bad guys out of the room, without any punches being thrown, when a troupe of hippie maidens decided to imitate Suzy Creamcheese and smother the confrontation with peace and love. One of them embraced me, pinning my arms so that the leading boot-droog was able to smack me on the side of the head a number of times before my back-up hustled him out. Creamcheese had a certain deranged magic that enabled her to pull off those kinds of tactics, but God preserve me from those who didn’t and couldn’t, but still made the attempt.

  We might have been managing to handle the skinheads, but other far more sinister forces began to close in. Things turned unpleasantly grim when Miles was robbed while depositing the UFO takings in a nightsafe. Although unhurt, he was understandably shaken, and the first thoughts of throwing in the towel were voiced. After the mugging incident, rumours flew that word had indirectly come down that similar nastiness would go on happening until an arrangement was made to pay for protection. At this point Joe Boyd declared enough was enough. With that kind of pressure, I couldn’t blame him, but the closure came all too quickly. The staff were unexpectedly thrown out of work, and I was hardly happy to be one of them.

  I couldn’t argue any longer that closing UFO would deprive the London freaks of a place to go. The Middle Ear
th Club had opened up in Covent Garden. It was run by Dave Howson, whom Hoppy had taken into the Technicolor Dream organisation and who, as a result of the experience, considered himself a fully-fledged ‘underground’ rock promoter, but the story circulated that he was actually fronting for a couple of Scottish businessmen who’d seen the hippie potential. Under Howson’s direction, Middle Earth offered a more commercialised version of the original UFO formula.

  Not that UFO itself exactly conformed to the original UFO formula any more, especially since Joe had started booking acts like the tedious Ten Years After and Dantalion’s Chariot, the flower-power brainstorm of ‘prime looner’ Zoot Money. He was also bringing in more established performers like Jeff Beck – although the ever unpredictable Beck took one look at the crowd, muttered ‘Fuck this’ into the vocal mike and split without playing a note.

  On the positive side, the Deviants had played one of the UFO Roundhouse shows and had had one of their best nights so far. Some changes had occurred in the band during the summer. Clive Maldoon was gone. He’d failed to show up on a couple of occasions and proffered only the lamest of excuses. It turned out that he’d auditioned as a replacement for bass player Ace Kefford in the Move, and had been so super-confident of getting the gig that he’d convinced himself he could dump the Deviants. Unluckily, when fame and fortune with the Move fell through, and Maldoon came sheepishly home, we had already replaced him. Sid Bishop, a short, amiable musician from South London, came to us by the time-honoured route of a classified ad in Melody Maker. When he listed his favourite guitarists as Les Paul and Frank Zappa, we decided that he was our boy, all but sight unseen.

  Sid joined us just in time to find himself in the middle of the band almost coming to grief on its first adventure in foreign parts. Flight to Lowlands Paradise was supposed to be the Dutch equivalent of the 14-Hour Technicolor Dream, but the promoter made the mistake of holding the event somewhere outside the provincial city of Utrecht. The entire show was plagued by murderous acoustics, a lack of heat, pitifully underpowered equipment, massive confusion over where we were supposed to sleep and a corps de ballet of traditional Dutch clog-dancers who invaded the communal dressing room and stayed there all night, drinking gin and making the smoking of dope very difficult. As a result we commenced drinking the moment we arrived and didn’t stop until we were back on the boat train. Throughout the course of the ordeal we began to get poisonously irritated with each other, and I was forced to hide in a cinema watching John Wayne in The Comancheros, dubbed into Dutch with all the finesse of a Godzilla movie, while a gang of small children yelled, screamed and cheered at every outbreak of gunfire, and while rock & roll madness loomed nearby.

  Although the others in the band had been mightily gung-ho for the trip to Holland during the planning stage, after forty-eight hours of fuck-up they rivalled wet and hungry spaniels with their big-eyed reproach. This was another fine mess I’d led them into. Dylan should have amended his line to ‘Don’t follow leaders, but always keep one around as a scapegoat’. The crunch came on the boat back to Harwich. The ferry pitched and rolled in a Channel gale, and British soldiers on leave from Germany threw up their duty-free beer all round us, leaving the deck awash with vomit. It was then that Alex and Pete announced that they couldn’t see any future in what we were doing and were jacking it in. Sid, on the other hand, who’d only just joined the band and therefore had much more reason to be both daunted and appalled by the ways of the Deviants, was taking it all in his stride and expressed his willingness to stick around for whatever might come next. To my surprise, Russell – who, although our ideal drummer, was a past master at the art of complaint and recrimination – also decided that he would hang in with Sid and me if we could come up with a way to continue.

  Before drafting plans or hunting for a new bass player, I felt I needed time to wallow in depression and self-pity. Confronted by my near-suicidal misery, Joy dispatched me north to Carlisle to stay with her arch-groupie friend and one-time comrade-in-arms, Carol. Carol had apparently always fancied me and would be happy to take me in for a few days of rest and recuperation, which said a great deal about the way things now stood between Joy and me. I actually suspect that the move wasn’t as unconventionally and morally altruistic as it seemed. Joy may have wanted me out of the way not only because I was a pain in the arse to be around, but also because she had some extra-curricular romantic plans of her own.

  Cumberland in November was hardly a resort location, but Carol and I didn’t find ourselves going out very much. For the first couple of days we hardly got out of bed. Lewd and uncomplicated, and comfortably drunk most of the time, we turned her one-down, two-up, Victorian terraced house into a happily sordid love nest. I was actually able to switch off my brain, eat, sleep and fuck, sustained by a diet of vodka, cigarettes, hash and bacon sandwiches. I didn’t have to answer to anyone as long as I kept Carol amused, and since she was a working-class heroine who bore a passing resemblance to the young Glenda Jackson, this was anything but a chore. Early in this interlude of welcome depravity I made the remarkable discovery that, even though she’d been running with rock bands for as long as she’d had the inclination, she had never had a man perform orally on her before, and that I would happily oblige was a welcome novelty. The admission may seem amazing – even alarming – but it does provide a gauge of the sexual benightedness of the supposedly hip English rock ’n’ roll male as late as the late Sixties. In return for making up for all this lost time, she indulged my own fascination with black stockings, heels, garter belts and other traditional whorish trappings. A threesome with one of her friends was also discussed, but sadly the logistics were never finalised and this fantasy was left unrealised.

  It was only after a blissful week that I had to own up that I couldn’t hide in passion’s cheap oblivion for ever, more’s the pity, and reluctantly dragged myself back to London, where, to my surprise, two things immediately lifted my spirits. First, we encountered a seemingly competent bass player who went by the name of Cord Rees and looked absolutely like the generic hippie musician. Second, in a surprising turnaround after helping oust me from IT, Nigel Samuel phoned and suggested we meet. Over yet more alcohol, he stunned me with a proposition. He would put up the money for the Deviants to make an album. Not only would we make an album, but we would press it ourselves and use our own pool of artists and designers to create the packaging, and the distribution network established by the underground press, psychedelic poster makers, headshops and the rest would distribute and sell it. Obviously this wasn’t the lazy rocker’s dream of following Pink Floyd and signing with a major label for beaucoup bucks and instant fame. Here was a finite challenge.

  I’d always been throwing shitfits over what I saw as concessions to the corporate capitalist music industry, and demanding to know why the cream of the underground bands were being sold off to EMI and Decca. Surely if we could get our shit together to distribute underground newspapers, psychedelic posters and comics, why the hell couldn’t we do the same with bigger-ticket items like records? Nigel had called my bluff, and I had to go for it or fall on my sword. I felt it was only fair, however, to warn him that the learning process would have to go into high overdrive, since we knew nothing about what the project really entailed. Such an admission might have caused other potential backers to retreat hastily from the deal, but Nigel and I seemed to have one thing in common. Neither of us considered ignorance a reason to be daunted. Almost all the other enterprises of the underground had started with the same uninformed optimism. If you didn’t know something, you could always ask; and if you didn’t understand the rules, you didn’t have to worry about breaking them. Nigel’s name for the company fronting the deal was Underground Impresarios. Kind of pompous, but I wasn’t going to argue. My own fantasies were being indulged, so let him have his. All we had to lose were Nigel’s money and my dubious reputation.

  PTOOFF!

  The album was to be called PTOOFF! and, for once, no one had thought up th
e title. It came ready-made: the onomatopoeic lettered explosion that was part of the Marvel Comics panel that inspired the huge, three-by-two-foot foldout psychedelic-Lichtenstein cover. The cover concept had been Nigel’s brainchild when he discovered that a large, foldout, single-sheet sleeve was actually cheaper than the conventional twelve-inch record cover. We could be flamboyant and cut costs; a fine example of underground lateral thinking. Nigel may have been alcoholic and crazy, but he wasn’t stupid and could be counted on to come up with one inspired idea every couple of weeks. Unfortunately, the good ideas were more than offset by the dozens of zigs, zags and outbreaks of drunken lunacy that accompanied them.

  In fact, my first education was in what a pain the very wealthy can be – especially the inherited wealthy. Not only on their own account, but also because they affect those around them. Like flames to a moth, they attract ad hoc courts and would-be courtiers wanting their attention, their confidence, their time and their patronage. Their world is seen through the distortion of the entourage. Their whims are humoured, and their tantrums are tolerated. They rarely receive objective opinions, are the last to hear the bad news and are constantly outfitted in the Emperor’s new clothes. With Nigel being so young, impressionable and drunk, this went in spades with him, and every time we recruited a newcomer we had to figure out how he or she was going to react.