by Mick Farren
As we all piled into the dressing room, Plant and Page cracked up, and even John Bonham, who up to that point had been drunkenly sullen, was grinning. ‘You must have been fucking terrible.’
Seemingly they’d heard the commotion from inside the dressing room and had assumed we were being booed off. With everyone inside, we found that the dressing-room door had fairly substantial bolts on the inside and quickly secured them. Now Led Zeppelin stopped smiling. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’
‘We seem to have roused a bumpkin lynch mob.’
We had bolted the door in the nick of time. A terrible pounding and kicking commenced, which could only be the farmboys trying to break in and kill us. Just as the door was ready to cave in, the sound of the commotion suddenly changed. After a protracted scuffle punctuated with a good deal of cursing, a new pounding started; far more ordered and authoritative. ‘Okay, open up in there.’
‘Not a fucking chance.’
‘It’s the police. Open up.’
With no drugs in plain sight, Tony opened the door to reveal an inspector and two constables. They eyed us with West Country hostility. ‘Are you the band?’
‘We’re two of the bands.’
The inspector looked us up and down. ‘You must have done something to get those lads’ blood up.’
‘They took an instant dislike to us.’
The inspector didn’t actually say he could see the farmboys’ point. ‘I think it’s all under control out there.’
We crept out with some trepidation to check on the amps and speakers. Fortunately the mob of rustics had been too focused on tearing us limb from limb for the idea of property damage to occur to them. LZ’s roadies were setting up as though there was going to be a show, although a line of uniformed coppers stood along the front of the stage, protecting them from the audience. Back in the dressing room, Led Zeppelin had reluctantly decided to go on. Doing ‘Whole Lotta Love’ over a line of helmets wasn’t the ideal way to present a rock show, but under pressure they’d agreed.
I didn’t stick around to watch, which was probably just as well. Led by Plant, they were back in the dressing room in the space of one and a half tunes. Despite the inspector’s confidence, the remaining farmhands who hadn’t been ejected had changed their tactics. With the line of police in place, they couldn’t mount a frontal assault on the stage, so they hurled missiles – primarily beer glasses – from the back of the crowd. This was more than enough for Led Zeppelin, who beat a hasty retreat. Now it was our turn to do the laughing.
‘You must have been fucking terrible.’
Being There at Grosvenor Square
Driving through the end of the night on the M1, maybe forty-five minutes out of London, with the Saturday-night/Sunday-morning pre-dawn starting to show in the eastern sky, a moment of weary impatience can envelop a travelling rock band. You’re almost home: near, yet far. You want nothing but your bed, but there are still the final miles to cover. It’s the last place you want to run into a police roadblock. The first signs were cones and lights narrowing the southbound highway down to a single lane, then we saw the flashing police cars. Definitely a roadblock. Our immediate reaction was that this was some kind of major War on Drugs operation. A flurry of checking pockets and stuffing pills and dope into hiding places ensued, as we joined the line of four or five vehicles awaiting inspection.
Fortunately we were on our way home, so the drug cache was largely depleted. Although a certain minimal trepidation was inevitable, it was largely displaced by a major vexation that our ETA at beds and welcome oblivion had been delayed by maybe an hour, and that in the meantime we were going to have to listen to a whole lot of heavy-handed cop mockery.
Immediately they had a clear look at the Deviants’ disreputable black Ford Transit, they decided they’d hooked a live one. Tony, the driver, was directed to the side of the road and, once on the hard shoulder, we were ordered out of the van. This in no way conformed to the typical motorway dope intercept. Usually this consisted of a lot of torches flashing around the passenger seats and an investigation of pockets and gig bags. This time, while we stood around looking cold and bemused, these defenders of the realm immediately headed for the back of the van. The coppers also looked different. They had the grim weight of the heavy mob who foreshadowed the highly programmed Special Patrol Group.
A sergeant started barking orders. ‘Okay, open up.’
Ever the roadside lawyer, I came back with the obvious retort. ‘You got a warrant?’
‘We don’t need no stinking warrant.’ Well, no, the sergeant didn’t actually say that, but he intimated that if we didn’t do so, a nice comfy cell waited at some nearby nick. Reluctantly Tony and Boss worked on the locks and bolts that had to be disengaged before the rear doors of the truck could be opened. Theft of gear from a parked bandmobile was a serious problem back in those days, and still is by all accounts. When the doors finally swung back, they revealed that the rear of the van was stacked from floor to roof with speaker cabinets, drum cases and all the hugely oversized luggage that a rock & roll band is forced to drag around with it.
‘Okay. Let’s have all that out of there.’
At the sergeant’s urging, two constables moved forward to start pulling at the equipment. Tony quickly intervened. ‘Hang on, hang on. We’ll do it. We know how the stuff is packed.’
The system in the Deviants’ truck was fundamentally simple. Humans in the front, heavy equipment in the back. It ensured that we travelled in at least minimal comfort, but also pretty much guaranteed that we’d be smashed to a dead and bloody pulp by flying cargo if the van ever hit anything. Only Tony and Boss really knew the secret of this specialised arrangement and, to their obvious annoyance, it made more sense if they did the unloading rather than a pair of incompetent and uncaring PCs. Punctuating their efforts with obscenities and cursing, they pulled out enough gear to allow the cops to look inside and see that we really were what we appeared to be. As the cases and cabinets were piled up on the hard shoulder, the police took an almost obsessive interest in them. They felt around inside the speakers and peered down the barrels of mike and cymbal stands. I glanced at the others. ‘Anyone would think they were looking for weapons.’
Under normal circumstances the rest of the band would have given me the well-known look that indicated my paranoia was working overtime. Fortunately for my general credibility, the circumstances were fairly abnormal. A huge anti-Vietnam demonstration was scheduled for the next day and an anticipatory hysteria had been mounting on TV and in the press. With Tariq Ali, Vanessa Redgrave and the Vietnam Solidarity Committee on one side and the Home Secretary and the Metropolitan Police on the other, the debate had moved far beyond the rights and wrongs of US policy in South-East Asia, to rhetorical questions like who owned the streets. The growing feeling in both camps was that, if the worst-case scenario actually came to pass, the following Sunday afternoon would see more than just a simple peace march from Trafalgar Square to the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square. Both fears and hopes were being cultivated that it would provide the spark to ignite a mass uprising of students, malcontents and the rest of what the media considered to be the great unwashed. Big-time overreaction, both conservative and radical, had begun to conjure up visions of a Trotskyite field day, at which massive blows would be struck against the Empire, and maybe the government would stagger, if not actually topple. Under these circumstances the roadblock, and the way in which it was being conducted, made absolute sense. The police had bought into the hubbub, and were now in the process of protecting London from terrorists attempting to infiltrate the capital via the M1.
Although to say that I was opposed to the war in Vietnam would be putting it mildly, some of my thinking was not quite in line with VSC and most of the conventional New Left. Years later it was summed up by the fictional Captain Willard in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. ‘In Vietnam, the shit piled up so fast, you needed wings to stay above it.’ From my perspective, the America
ns, with an anti-communist mindset so blinkered that it fully qualified as criminal, had blundered blindly into a situation they absolutely didn’t understand. The Vietnamese had been doing battle with foreign invaders for more than a thousand years, fighting for their land, their homes, the uniqueness of their culture and their identity as a nation. Unfortunately America was unable to comprehend anything of a thousand years’ duration and interpreted Ho Chi Minh’s struggle for independence against the Japanese and the French as merely another domino in the Great Communist Conspiracy to dominate the world. It reacted by sending in hundreds of thousands of young conscripted American males, armed and trained for some strange and unworkable high-tech version of World War II.
Obviously the war had to be stopped by any means at our disposal. No superpower should be allowed to dictate its ill-formed will by psychotic military might. The Soviet Union was being condemned for the shit that it was pulling in Czechoslovakia, and would soon pull in Poland. Harold Wilson might tacitly support him, but Lyndon Johnson should be made equally accountable. Down the hill from this humanitarian moral high ground, though, was a feeling that the prospects of mass anti-war protests presented the chance to get a few licks in against the establishment and the status quo, and to let off steam and settle some grudges by rumbling with the police. The Vietnam demonstrations provided an ideal excuse for a big televised gang fight; young men against young men, us on them, hair against uniforms, venting frustrations, and with everyone getting their fair share of abuse.
With mass protest against the Vietnam War firmly under the control of the conventional New Left, it came saddled with the entire weight of their beliefs and misconceptions. Of these, I think the one that sat most uneasily with me was their belief that the working class would provide the genesis of any revolution. It has always been my contention that revolution is, in reality, fermented by disaffected refugees from the middle classes – educated renegades, cultural outlaws, frequently abetted by forward-thinking professional criminals. Historically, the mass of the workers really only became involved in large numbers when social breakdown reached the point of shut-down and starvation, or the fall of the power structure was absolutely inevitable. That was how it had appeared in Cuba, and that was certainly my somewhat individualist reading of the Bolshevik takeover in Russia.
Unfortunately for the drawing-room Left, belief in the workers as agents of change was so much an article of faith that any questioning of it was looked on as a criminal renunciation of Marxist credibility. The worst heresy was to suggest that the industrial working class, as the Left knew and loved it, would largely cease to exist in twenty or thirty years – certainly by the end of the century – and would increasingly be replaced by an underclass that would either be unemployed and grimly dependent on state handouts or eking out a dreary living in minimum-wage service jobs. The radical rhetoric was of worker solidarity, but practical observation had convinced me that, by the Sixties, this was pure myth. The beatings that so many long-hairs had suffered at the hands of lorry drivers, housing-estate skinheads and drunken bricklayers on a Friday night had convinced me at least that a stratum of the working class was as culturally conservative as any High Tory, and as willing to put in the boot as any aggressive young copper.
At the usually disastrous social functions where New Left and counterculture mixed and mingled, I was always left with the distinct impression that should Tariq and Vanessa actually assume power, I would undoubtedly find myself executed in the first wave of purges. At the time, I wrote:
The effectiveness of a demonstration on anyone but an eyewitness is only in how it is presented in the media, and the media work for the system and against revolution. These first giant demonstrations have convinced me of one thing. It is both impractical and immoral to throw an unarmed, untrained mob against a symbolic objective like an embassy guarded by trained police.
To say that I woke on the Sunday of the demonstration bright and early would be a complete exaggeration. Having done a gig the night before, and then been delayed by the police on the M1, made it a fairly radical effort not to succumb to the temptation to forget the whole thing and lie in bed all day. Indeed, as it turned out, the rest of our Deviant comrades did exactly that. The plan had been that the others would either phone or simply show up at the flat in Shaftesbury Avenue, all set for the possible uprising, but no one did. Presumably they were all still snoring in their respective pits, all thought of social upheaval forgotten. Living in the same apartment, however, Sandy and I managed to motivate each other, and by two in the afternoon we found ourselves setting off on our mission to stop the war.
The day’s schedule, as we understood it, was that the proceedings would start at approximately lunchtime with a rally in Trafalgar Square, at which Vanessa, Tariq et al. would address the assembled multitudes; after sufficient rousing speeches, a mighty march of protest would wend its way up Charing Cross Road, turn left onto Oxford Street, head along there as far as Selfridges department store and then turn south for the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square. We had left it far too late to be there for the speeches, which didn’t bother either Sandy or me in the slightest.
What did worry us was that we’d emerged too late to stop at the pub for a couple of fortifying pints or gin and tonics before the possible insurrection. (England still groaned under the repressive weight of the absurdist licensing laws, which should, quite by themselves, have been cause for revolution, if we weren’t so damned passive when it came to domestic oppression.) The only plan left was to take a short stroll to where Charing Cross Road intersected Oxford Street. In the instant that we hit the street, a tension was already in the air. The whole city seemed quiet and waiting. The sense of an impending storm was validated by the half-dozen police motorcyclists sitting silently on their bikes, faceless in white crash helmets, goggles in place, beneath the sooty trees on the large, roughly triangular traffic island opposite our front door. The vignette was like something out of a Costa-Gavras movie, an image from the prelude to a military coup d’état in some Central American republic. They looked at us, we looked at them. Both appeared to have seen the enemy.
Arriving at Centrepoint, we had not only unwittingly timed it so that we got there at about the same time as the first of the marchers, but one of the first people we spotted was Miles, along with Hugo, his right-hand man at Indica. Together we stood and watched as the marchers streamed past. The time-honoured red ensigns were mingled with the yellow star on red of North Vietnam, and with the banners identifying various student and political groups. They snapped and fluttered on the brisk Sunday afternoon, while placards and pictures of Uncle Ho bobbed and the marchers broke into now familiar chants.
Ho-Ho-Ho Chi Minh!
Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids you kill today?
We waited on the pavement for a while, sufficiently pragmatic to be aware that hooking on to the front ranks was not a good idea. In the Napoleonic Wars the front ranks of an infantry assault were known as the ‘Forlorn Hope’, and if Miles, Sandy and I shared anything, it was a sense of history. Although the marchers were in a jovial, almost cocky mood, few could have seriously believed that the day wasn’t going to end in confrontation. Plenty were hoping for it. Many demonstrators wore construction hard hats or motorcycle crash helmets. Others had heavy protective jackets. (Me? I was in a black leather bike jacket. Later I’d write a book about the garment.) Glasses and earrings had been removed and, boys and girls both, had tied back their hair or tucked it into hats or helmets. The demeanour of the police completed the pointers to what was to come. Although stony-faced and, for the moment, doing everything by the book, their body language betrayed the anticipation they shared with the demonstrators. I saw it in the set of their shoulders, the deliberation of their slow strides and the swing of their arms, the fact that a large percentage of them wore black gloves, although the day was far from chilly, and the way they refused to make eye contact with the marchers.
Ho-Ho-Ho Chi Minh!
Hey
, hey, LBJ, how many kids you kill today?
I have often wondered how many of the officers that made up the immense police presence actually shared our belief that the United States should get the hell out of Vietnam and stop tearing up the real estate and killing the population. Simple probability would seem to dictate that there had to be a few, but my gut instinct told me it was a precious few. I’d often noticed, after being busted for one reason or another – either in the nick or waiting in the magistrates’ court for one’s case to be called – that hippies and other malcontents would try to engage young coppers in political discussion, but these conversations would be broken up by a more senior officer. It seemed that, to join the Metropolitan Police, you traded your capacity for free thought in return for the uniform, the warrant card, the authority and the pension.
Ho-Ho-Ho Chi Minh!
Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids you kill today?
The appearance of a small group under a banner that read ‘Merseyside Anarchists’ decided us that it was time to join the crusade. The Merseyside Anarchists seemed like an outfit whose temporary identity we could assume without too many philosophical problems, and we were off to the fair. As we progressed down Oxford Street we could see that the stores had been rigged for violence. Display windows that didn’t already have built-in shutters had been uniformly boarded over. These precautions definitely served to feed the mood that, despite the police all around us, we were taking the city. Even before we reached Oxford Circus the sense of spoiling for a fight bubbled over. Amazingly Miles, usually the most non-violent of individuals, was the first of our small group to give way to the impulse. A motorist – a gin-soaked Biggles in a Vauxhall – tried to force his way out of Wardour Street and through the march. While others yelled and cursed, Miles, without preamble, took a running kick at the buffoon’s headlights, and then looked extremely pleased with himself as we whisked him away before some constable could grab him.