by Mick Farren
‘I just don’t want you lot taking the paper down with you.’
‘But we’re going to make a profit. We can’t fail.’
The blind optimism was, of course, a put-on. Both Dave and I knew that a project of this kind could end in total financial disaster, and he wanted the paper buffered from liability for any Phun City debts. I believe he also figured that letting me run Phun City out of the IT office in Endell Street was a handy way of having me where he could keep an eye on me. I think Dave realised that I was an ideal figure for all those who didn’t like the current direction of the paper to rally behind, and if I was seriously motivated, I could take over the running of IT any time I wanted. Phun City was something to keep me busy, and I was happy to be busy. A novelty always gets my attention. After very little discussion, a deal was made. A separate limited-liability company, Phun City Ltd, would be formed as a fire wall, but, until I could generate my own finances, I’d be paid a modest salary out of IT funds, as some kind of special projects editor.
Obviously the first thing we had to do was to rent a field. Without a field to call our own, all else would be fantasy. Fortunately I had a card up my sleeve. I had spent my teenage years living down the way I was raised in the woods, but finally it was proving an asset. The woods in question were owned by an impoverished aristocrat who had inherited vast unproductive acres, and even vaster debts. The rumour in the village was he’d do pretty much anything for hard cash, and I got my field for £1,500 off the books, with funds for a fifty per cent down-payment raised from a consortium of London herbalists. With the field in hand, I realised that I was acting out a piece of psychedelic revenge for my childhood. I was depositing a rock festival little more than a mile from the village where I grew up. I would be confirming the worst expectations of the yokels who had once mocked me, the junior beatnik, wandering lonely as a cloud. Nothing like a few thousand hippies to put Dan Archer in his miserable Thomas Hardy place.
For a while, all seemed to run according to plan. We raised more money by selling the catering and other concessions. Posters and fliers began to be printed and Edward’s naked dancing guy was all over the place. Getting contracts on the best of the touring bands proved to be no great difficulty. Guys with inflatable domes and other art exhibits pledged to be there. We knew we were out of the music business running for any big international acts, like the Grateful Dead, but I did want to put on one band with a chance of ensuring that the name Phun City might live in infamy. The MC5 had carved themselves a niche as the house band of the revolution with their live album Kick Out the Jams, and as the only band that actually played at the riots at the Chicago Democratic Convention. Their manager, John Sinclair, had been handed ten years of Michigan jailtime for a couple of joints and, all in all, they had such a rep as radical troublemakers that it was unlikely they’d ever make it to Europe, unless someone like me brought them over for something like Phun City.
A dialogue was started with Detroit that revealed the MC5 as both ready and willing to play Phun City as the centrepiece of a UK mini-tour that would cover their expenses. Back in the USA, the band was having its problems. They’d been bounced off Elektra Records, home of the Doors, for being too loud and political. Although quickly signed by Atlantic, their troubles were by no means over. They’d been blacklisted by rock impresario Bill Graham after a group called the Motherfuckers – the New York equivalent of the London Street Commune – had trashed the Fillmore East while the 5 were attempting to play a benefit for them. After a massive initial promotion, Rolling Stone seemed to have turned on them, and rumours of first-phase destructive drug use were spreading.
Okay, so we had the MC5 as the capstone of what was rapidly growing into the alternative (or maybe read ‘parody’) rock festival, but unfortunately around that time we ran out of money, and the prospects of getting any more was rendered hard – going on impossible – when the West Sussex County Council and Constabulary obtained a court order against us. All I remember was riding a shrieking telephone, but the facts are succinctly laid out in Roger Hutchinson’s High Sixties.
On 17 July, lawyers acting for West Sussex County Council sought an injunction to prevent the festival taking place. On the following day its financial backers pulled out. On the day after that the injunction was withdrawn.
A New York City hashish dealer, with extensive contacts in pre-Soviet Afghanistan, donated enough money to keep us in a holding pattern and I went to see our last hope, Ronan O’Rahilly. The legend was that Ronan’s father was the O’Rahilly, a hero of the battle at the Dublin Post Office in 1916. This gave Ronan a lot to live up to and, both to fill a need in the marketplace and thumb his nose at the English, he conceived Radio Caroline, the great pirate radio station of the early Sixties that broadcast from an old trawler parked in the North Sea. By the time of our Phun City discussions, the Marine Offences Act had long since killed pirate radio. Ronan was now involved in a maniacal scheme to buy an old Lockheed Constellation that would circle the sky above London, landing only to refuel and broadcasting pirate TV. I was never sure whether this was for real or just a work of magnificent blarney, but either way the concept was one of grandly abstruse madness.
The real financial hope to make Phun City all it could be was to sell the film rights. To that end, Gez and I had trolled up and down Wardour Street meeting the proprietors of horror and soft-porn sweatshops at one end and David Hemmings at the other. We even talked to the Italians and the French. A couple of live ones were about to bite the bait, but then the WSCC injunction scared them shitless and they vanished. Early in the game, Ronan had told me that, if all else failed, I should come and talk to him. After forty-eight hours of legal drama, I had to face the fact that all else had definitely failed. Thus I called Ronan and took myself off to his mews house in Mayfair, with the cherry Harley Davidson Electroglide that Marianne Faithfull had ridden in Girl on a Motorcycle parked outside. Ronan had produced the trash classic and was justifiably proud.
He was a master of indecision and procrastination. He hummed, he hawed, he told irrelevant anecdotes, he phoned the MC5 in Detroit and checked that all was well with them, while all the time his huge bodyguard, Big Jimmy Houlihan, lurked in the background. We went down the pub for a Guinness and came back again. I sweated. Gez, Mac and Boss were already at the site waiting to build a rock festival. A full two days of nail-biting and hanging-in passed before Ronan finally called the travel agent for the MC5’s tickets and began to write cheques. As he spent money, he winked at me.
‘We’re flying here, boy. We’re really flying.’
Ronan had one stipulation. It should be a free festival. He not only wanted to maximise the crowd, but he had spotted the fatal flaw in our figures. As Ronan read it, security would cost us a pound to collect £1.30 from the paying customers. If you protected your site with something as formidable as the Berlin Wall, the cost curve might level out at the high end, but you needed to pull in about a million people to make the mathematics happen. I suspected that was what Ricky Farr was planning to do down at the Isle of Wight later in the summer. Okay, it was a free festival, and that was better than nothing, but I was being forced to abandon the original purpose of raising money for the IT bust. Before setting off for Sussex I had personally to break the bad news to Dave Hall. As it turned out, it may have been honourable, but hardly necessary.
‘Don’t worry about it. I figured this might happen.’
Dave was hip. He wished me luck and told me he’d see me down there. We were off to Phun City to have ourselves a rock festival. On the way down, I was torn between relief and the feeling I’d personally fucked up. I’d failed with the original objective, and I also realised the festival had now taken on a life of its own. Fortunately I was able to bounce back and, halfway through the two-hour drive, I was already preparing my address to the boggies.
The chronicle of Phun City is so replete with family legends that it’s hard to know which to include. Certainly the tale of Boss Goodman and how the
stage was moved manually in the manner of building the Great Pyramid has been told before, but it still deserves pride of place. My greatest regret is that I wasn’t there to witness it. As the large scaffolding stage was almost complete, Boss noticed an overhead high-tension cable, running between two National Grid pylons, right above the structure.
It would be fucking dumb to have a whopping great PA directly below the main electric cables, especially if it rained. The only and unavoidable answer was to move the stage. This little guy who had put the stage together couldn’t believe it . . . the thought of dismantling it all. But I said, ‘No, man, we’ll carry it.’
‘Impossible.’
‘Rubbish, we’ll get the hippies out of the woods and we’ll go 1–2–3 and lift, and we’ll carry the fucker over there.’
‘Go on then, fucking do it.’
So I got my gang and we went into the woods where about 500 hippies were camped out.
‘Can you do us a favour?’
‘What?’
‘The stage has been put in the wrong place and we’ve got to move it.’
‘Let’s go.’
‘1–2–3.’
And the fucking hippies lift the stage and carry it a hundred yards across the field.
I also won’t forget two chilly Hell’s Angels and two Worthing coppers swapping Woodbines and tea from a thermos, at the top end of the field by the vehicle entrance, each pair keeping to their own side of the demarcation line, like guards on a Cold War frontier. Neither will I forget the Shit Squad – the crew of the strange and psychotic who had volunteered to empty the chemical toilets for free, provided they were equipped with wellies and yellow rubber gloves, and navy overalls emblazoned with shit squad in yellow biker-style script across their backs.
By far the most awkward moment came on Saturday afternoon when I had to explain to the MC5 how things at the festival weren’t exactly as they had first been pitched to them. Fortunately the blow had been softened, first by Ronan having (so far) taken excellent care of them, right down to hiring Howard Parker to do the hands-on babysitting. In addition we had a cat called Mitchell Rothberg – a passing-through American, a friend of John Sinclair and with the most impeccable of international radical-underground connections – to vouch for at least our good intentions. The 5 were far from stranded. They had return air tickets and other gigs were in place to pay their way, but they were silent at first; their faces a combination of disappointment and resignation. They’d seen this shit a hundred times before. A bunch of freaks sitting on a situation that hadn’t come out totally as planned. Guitarist Fred Smith finally turned to guitarist Wayne Kramer. ‘Let’s take a look at the equipment.’
I knew I was off the hook. At Phun City the gear was perfect; Boss had seen to that. The matched Hi Watt stacks came directly from a stage plan used by the Who, plus provision had been made for an extra guitar player. Absolutely nothing could be complained about.
It took until Saturday night, after sunset, for everything to start to make sense. I suddenly became aware I had nothing more to worry about. Whatever had happened had happened, and what was going to happen would run its course without any help or intervention. The bands had all done their part, although for me they tended to blur. The Pretty Things had delivered the goods. The Pink Fairies and the Edgar Broughton Band had engaged in a joust similar to the one in Hyde Park in which the Deviants had engaged a year earlier. Despite the Fairies’ two drummers, Edgar gained a riotous sing-a-long edge with the perennial ‘Out Demons, Out’, but then said drummers trumped Edgar’s ace when Twink and Russell stripped and cavorted naked and homoerotic, while Rudolph and Sandy did a fair impersonation of the solar wind on guitar and bass. If my recollection is correct, a relatively unknown and just-up-from-the-country Hawkwind first came to public attention at Phun City, but I’m afraid we old lags from London treated them with unconscionable city-slicker condescension. Phun City also saw the debut of the Blackheath Foot & Death Men, an atavistically violent, six-man team of Morris dancers, composed of three Hell’s Angels, two massive sociopathic roadies and Pete Currie, our driver. Eschewing the polite ribbons and garlanded poles of conventional folk-dance troupes, they stomped their engineer boots and knocked nine bells out of each other with full-sized Friar Tuck quarter-staves, totally vindicating the ethnomusicologists who claim that Morris dancing originated as a drunken rehearsal for Saxon shield-wall combat. Later in their career the Blackheath Foot & Death Men would open for Motorhead at the Marquee.
Enough of my mission had been accomplished for me to be happy that I’d accepted it, and it hadn’t self-destructed after fifteen seconds. I walked onto the stage, into the full glare of the lighting set-up. I think I was about to introduce the MC5, but was greeted with a standing ovation that I figured was merited. The MC5 were about to come on. Out there somewhere in the darkness, William Burroughs stalked the night in his FBI man’s hat and raincoat, requiring hippies to talk into his portable tape machine while he baffled them with instant cut-ups. Ronan had brought an entire British Lion Outside Broadcast unit, plus a mobile home for himself, like a villa on wheels; all under the command of Tom Keylock, the Stones’ old minder, and the formidable Big Jimmy Houlihan. The flare of the lights, and the big cumbersome OB cameras flanking the stage, lent an impressive – if probably spurious – media importance. The gang and I had thrown one hell of a party. Give the lads a big hand. On the light tower, the lightshow guys, not wanting to be outdone by the British Lion, plugged in everything they had and pointed their full battery of slides, loops and blob-shows at anything that would carry an image. The large inflatable dome pulsed with light from within, like a huge narcotised alien blob, while the canvas of tents became cinema screens and the field itself undulated.
The MC5 were the icing on the cake and I believe we got to them in the nick of time. We witnessed one of the very last shows that offered the original majesty, before the road and the bullshit took their toll. With Rob Tyner on his knees offering the testimonial, Wayne Kramer spitting a stream of Johnny Walker Red with great accuracy into the lens of a camera, and Fred Smith tumbling back over a bent-double Boss, as our yeoman stage manager attempted to rescue a fallen mike stand with roadie panache, what more did I want? My cup ranneth over. Then, after the 5 had climaxed, encored and exited, I was taken on a conducted tour of Narnia by night, and moved from campfire to campfire and from habitation to habitation until I was as ripped as Crazy Horse. All of this put me in such a good mood that I didn’t even get irritated with Took constantly pestering me as to when his new band, Shagrat, featuring Larry Wallis on guitar, would get onstage. I simply referred him to Boss, who was much sterner in these things and took no guff from bleating artistes.
Sunday at Phun City was enough to convince me that the tradition of the damp-and-doomed English Sunday went back to pre-history, and came from deep within the mother-earth of Albion. A light drizzle and, even in a field of freaks, you can’t escape an English bloody Sunday. The ground was wet and the crowd had dwindled. In Narnia many had decided to sleep late. Some snored and others had sex, only minimally disguised by the less-than-complete walls of their Ewok bivouacs. Others cooked breakfast with a fifth-century ad domesticity, while on the stage Sonja Kristina charmed everyone with gentle acoustics. Pastoral but wet.
Sunday was also the time for taking stock. Item one – the bar tent had been looted by the Hell’s Angels. The bar tent was organised by the Marquee Club. By a loophole of licensing laws designed for gymkhanas, it had to be that way, and the word was that their prices had been less than humane. One of the bartenders had been left to guard the liquor through the night, but the Angels neutralised him by getting him comatose, then made off with all they could carry. When the Marquee guys came to the operations tent to complain they’d been robbed, Gez, Edward and I had difficulty keeping straight faces as we promised to conduct a full investigation, while standing up to our ankles in empty Carling Black Label cans, representing our cut of the heist.
&nbs
p; Item two – a reporter from The People, who’d arrived to do a sex ’n’ drugs shock exposé, had been dosed with acid and had decided to give it all up to become a nomad. Item three – the talk in Narnia was that they had a good thing going, so why not camp where they were, at least until preparations for the massive Isle of Wight Festival got under way? They were all for setting up a free state in the few acres of woodland, encouraged by the presence of a pub called The Fox less than 500 yards away. Item four – a large contingent of dope dealers had somewhat overestimated the size of the crowd and were now conducting a mass going-out-of-business sale, and a haze of hashish smoke flavoured the mist. When a squad of pathetically disguised ‘undercover’ drug-squad officers made their way through the haze, they were surrounded, publicly ridiculed and forced to flee. Later in the evening, after a stomping, revival-meeting set from Mungo Jerry, the entire cast of hundreds climbed on the stage to take a bow, and the stage slowly and majestically collapsed, finally succumbing to the torque it had endured while being carried a hundred yards by straining boggies. After that absolutely nothing was left to say, and I went back to our rented farmhouse to sleep for maybe twelve hours.
I was shaken awake with the information that we were under no circumstances to go back to the field. The constabulary had arrived loaded for bear and were making busts right, left and centre, while also ripping up Narnia by the roots. They had freaked out a couple of Worthing councillors who had come to inspect the squalor, but had actually been rather charmed and were just taking tea with some hobbits when the coppers crashed in.