Give the Anarchist a Cigarette

by Mick Farren

  It was only later, when we had a brief chance to speak to a couple of members of the jury, that I found out my initial flounder had actually won sympathy. Up to that point they’d considered me a little too slick, too well prepared, too combative and too clever by half. By stumbling, I’d actually humanised myself. We’d made a similar mistake on an earlier occasion, when, under cross-examination, Edward admitted, ‘If we had discouraged drug taking, it [Nasty Tales] would not have been bought.’ The admission had come before lunch, and in the pub across the street from the Old Bailey I raged at Edward for making such a dumb and damaging slip. I was so pissed off that my mother, who had come up from Sussex to see her son play the Central Criminal Court, took me to one side and told me that I really shouldn’t be so hard on Edward. ‘He wasn’t raised by your stepfather.’ Again, I had completely misjudged the effect on the jury. We discovered that Edward’s blurted admission had actually made him seem guilelessly honest, and they’d liked that.

  The two days I was on the witness stand were the closest I came to having real fun. I felt I was finally fighting them, face to face, on their own ground. If the technique was to keep the prosecution – and the judge, who seemed to act as the prosecution’s relief-hitter – at bay and prevent them scoring points, I figure they were hard-pressed to lay a glove on me. In an obscenity trial where the law is far from being clear-cut, the character who defends himself has something of an advantage. You may not know the law, and are obviously inexperienced in the ways of the courtroom, but you do get to say exactly what you want. Since you cannot ask yourself questions without appearing both absurd and a little demented, you take the stand and give your evidence in the form of a statement/monologue. The only permitted interruptions are by the judge – requests for amplification or clarification on certain points – but in King-Hamilton’s case these came thick and fast. I got the impression he was quite unable to keep quiet for more than five minutes at a stretch. It was his courtroom and he liked to remain centre-stage at all times.

  I think I talked for maybe an hour, and then had to brace myself for a lengthy cross-examination by the prosecutor, aided and abetted by the judge, who under the guise of gratuitously assisting me with my defence sought to negate or neutralise as many of my points as he could. The best word to describe the prosecutor was dogged. He had the determination of a bull terrier with its jaw locked. He appeared baffled by the idea that, as a responsible publisher, I should keep abreast of all the scientific studies of the effects of erotica and sexual imagery, and how they confirmed that such material was harmless and maybe even socially beneficial. When one line of questioning failed to get the desired result, he would come at it all over again from another angle, forcing me to repeat my argument until the jury must have known it by heart. I could only assume he hoped I’d break down and reveal a heinous Lex Luthor masterplan of fathomless mass evil.

  I think Joy had the greatest impact on the jury. The court persona she created made it abundantly clear that she was no mere office manager, or the little woman shut out from the boys’ exclusive loop. She presented herself as determinedly idealistic, but at the same time uncharacteristically prim. ‘I don’t like the idea of group sex, but it is possible in certain circumstances.’ She even managed a hint that she didn’t absolutely like Nasty Tales, but vehemently defended our right to publish it. At one point the cross-examination turned to how selling IT and Nasty Tales on the street was a means for runaway kids to survive without turning to crime or prostitution. In a sour and patronising aside, the judge wondered out loud if Joy might have been better occupied reuniting these people with their parents. Joy retorted irately that IT in fact operated a hotline for runaways and their families, and that, since us boys were too busy with our comic books, she actually handled most of the calls. I looked at the jury. King-Hamilton had taken the superior sneer a tad too far and Joy had them right in the palm of her hand.

  Expert witnesses are an almost mandatory interlude in an obscenity trial, but I’m really not sure how much they sway the jury. Lenny Bruce complained about the need for the defence to ‘schlep up dozens of expert witnesses’ to prove that his work was not obscene. Lenny very rightly contended that it reversed the entire principle of guilty until proven innocent. The onus is placed on the defence to demonstrate clearly that the material in question is innocuous, instead of the prosecution being compelled to show its potential harm. Nevertheless we followed tradition.

  We brought in comic-book expert George Perry, who gave the court a concise history lesson on satire and sexuality in comic strips. He was supported by George Melly, ever-affable in his art-critic hat. Professor Bernard Crick, in his capacity as a humanist, vouched for our inner morality. Germaine took the stand, to an audible groan from both judge and prosecution, and became embroiled in a lengthy debate with the prosecuting counsel about Alexander Pope, in the course of which she cut him to shreds. It was highly entertaining, but of questionable benefit to our case.

  The closing defence speeches come last, following the prosecution, and I was the final speaker. All in all, we felt that we had made our case very well up to the point when King-Hamilton reached his final summing-up. The judge went straight for the jugular, and our hearts descended to our boots. Ninety per cent of the time a jury will follow the judge’s instructions, should he care to be specific, and, if he was anything, King-Hamilton was specific.

  ‘In this country in peacetime there is no press censorship.’ The statement was delivered with an expression that seemed to indicate he considered it a very bad idea. ‘The body that decides if anything is obscene is not a censor, but a jury armed with common sense and good taste. The only point at issue, to wit, is whether or not this magazine is obscene. If you find any one item in the magazine obscene, it is sufficient to render the whole magazine obscene. Bear in mind the probability that some of the readers are already corrupted, but it’s possible for some to be further corrupted . . . There are some items liberally sprinkled with four letters. What is the effect of them on young children? The motive of the author, artist or publisher is irrelevant. You cannot get someone to give evidence that they have been corrupted or depraved. In a civilised society there must be a line of conduct below which what is published is regarded as obscene. The position of that line is not fixed by the “New Morality Brigade”, it is fixed by the public at large. Mr Farren contends that the magazine has social merit because it makes jokes about serious problems, drugs, pornography and violence. He says, “I don’t have a great deal of faith in the sanctity of marriage.” It may have surprised you that anyone could come forward to tell you that anything in this magazine has literary or artistic merit . . . but the world is full of surprises.’

  In other words, find the scum guilty as quickly as you can, then we can all go home for tea. The jury retired and, having given our word not to leave the precincts of the Old Bailey, we were not confined to the underground cells of the labyrinth, but discovered the little-known Old Bailey bar that, for reasons we never discovered, was not subject to the prevailing licensing laws. As the long afternoon inched on, the drinking grew progressively heavier. We now had nothing to lose, and if the day was going to end in Wormwood Scrubs, I preferred to know as little as possible about it. When word came that the jury had asked if the judge would be willing to accept a majority verdict, we assumed the worst. One hold-out wanted to let us go and eleven had voted for the chop. The majority verdict was a comparatively new innovation in British law, and a few years earlier we would have walked, at least to a new trial, on a hung jury. King-Hamilton seemed also to have assumed that the majority verdict was a guilty one. He sent the jurors back for one last token try at unanimity, and then, after an hour, announced that he would go with the decision of the majority. I was less than steady as we climbed the stairs to the dock, and I was swaying when the foreman pronounced us not guilty by a majority of eleven to one.

  The news took a moment to sink in. We’d done it. We’d won. King-Hamilton’s face was
a study in fury. The jury – his jury – had betrayed him. One of our barristers was curtly told that the judge saw no reason why we should be awarded costs, and then King-Hamilton stormed from court and all was over. After being in that dock for a subjective eternity, I experienced trouble knowing what to do next; my mind was in a state of exhausted shock. A screw ushered me into the well of the court where Ingrid, who had sat among the lawyers taking notes for the duration, took Edward and me by the arm. Joy was crying. Out in the corridor, wellwishers and the media surrounded us. Felix was shaking me by the hand. People were slapping me on the back and hugging me. Richard Neville congratulated Edward while I talked to reporters. Su Small had organised a car and a party. I was floating. Victory is sweet, oh my droogs. Don’t let anyone tell you different. Nothing hollow about this one. Solid! Free at last, free at last!

  We’d won, but in the next few days I had to face the fact that I was exhausted. Mercifully, Roger Hutchinson had come down from Yorkshire to replace Paul Lewis as editor. He was a good lad and could keep IT going. I was so creatively and emotionally tapped-out that my only viable option was to get as fucked up as possible and see where the tide might wash me.

  The Great Nitrous Oxide Heist

  The imagination of Philip K. Dick was hardly needed to see the situation as at least a trailer for dystopian collapse. The protracted struggle between government and unions had commenced. The era of riot shields and flying pickets was upon us. The miners had walked out in their first series of strikes, protesting against pit closures and redundancies. As the strike took hold, coal supplies to the power stations dwindled and the demand for electricity in many cities, including London, began to exceed the available supply. Emergency plans went into action. The first was to cut the industrial working week to three days, but as the miners’ strike bit deeper and the power stations struggled to remain online, other more drastic measures were seen to be needed.

  Rather than impose random blackouts when the capital’s drain on the National Grid became more than it could handle, the city was divided into an enormous checkerboard of electric squares, measuring maybe a quarter of a mile on each side. According to a prearranged rota, alternating squares were cut off from all power for periods of around two hours. The only exceptions were hospitals, police stations and other vital services.

  An alarmist might have expected angry mobs to run amok in the eerily darkened streets. Resonances of the last days of Tsarist Russia were unmistakable, but instead of rioters being cut down by Cossacks, we went visiting. People hit the streets, but not to loot and burn, only to drop in on friends who had power. Rather than sit round in a silent, candlelit flat, slowly freezing, we made our way to the home of one of the gang who continued to be blessed with TV, music and an electric fire. What did we do there? We got high-high. And, in an economy that looked about to go Weimar, a considerable degree of criminal ingenuity was needed to ensure this. One of the most ingenious schemes was the Great Nitrous Oxide Heist.

  Although the statute of limitations is up many times over, I’ll still refrain from revealing the names of the malefactors, even though they should have full credit for their acute observation and bold opportunism. Power was never shut off to hospitals, but even they eliminated all unnecessary lights. At St Charles Hospital, at the top of Ladbroke Grove, one of the lights deemed needless was a floodlight over a huge stack of cylinders full of both nitrous oxide and oxygen, piled against an outside wall. The light had been positioned so that the night-security guard could keep an eye on the stack, but in the energy crunch it was decided they could forgo that floodlight, reasoning that no one in their right mind would attempt to make off with these big, heavy, four-foot-long, iron cylinders. The hospital administrators hadn’t, unfortunately, allowed for the deviousness or cunning of veteran, battle-hardened drugfiends, and the extremes to which they were willing to go for some novel intoxication.

  No one was too interested in the oxygen, but the nitrous oxide was something else. Laughing gas, the same stuff the dentist used, and its potential for abuse had preceded it. Boss Goodman had returned from California to tell of attending a nitrous-oxide party hosted by the Hell’s Angels backstage at a Grateful Dead show. This and similar tales, plus recall of post-dental hallucinations, was quite enough to convince our anonymous drugfiends that a raid on the St Charles cylinder dump would be a worthwhile caper. A truck was backed up and as many cylinders as could be manhandled into it – while the perpetrators’ nerve held – were removed and driven to a basement in Cambridge Gardens.

  According to Boss, the Angels’ tank came with a screw-on chrome valve complete with pressure gauge and multiple hoses. Our delivery system was far less sophisticated. We opened the valve with a spanner, and gaffer-taped a length of bicycle-tyre inner tube to the nozzle. Suck on the rubber and see the elephant. When civilisation seemed to be collapsing all around us, what was there to lose? The trick was to sit on a chair or couch – part of the circle – and, when your turn came, the tank would be manoeuvred so that it was gripped between the knees. You leaned forward and twisted the spanner. As the gas flowed, ice would rapidly form on the outside of the tank, sometimes freezing your jeans to the metal as you lost consciousness. When you started to fall forward, the next person in line – who by that time had come down and wanted to go up again – would pull you off the hose, wrestle the tank from between your nerveless extremities and start again.

  The joy of nitrous oxide is not only in the full-blown, candy-land hallucinations, but in the accompanying time distortion. The objective few seconds of high – before the gas is taken away by the next greedy bastard – can stretch to subjective hours. In my most vivid memories of the experience, I seemed to fly indefinitely over the bright plains and through the colourful canyons of a Dan Dare/Flash Gordon, comic-book alien planet. A joyous experience of total escape, and it was probably lucky that our supply was limited, because we could have made incredible fools of ourselves, and maybe even sustained damage, behind the allure of the tank and hose. The aftermath of the Great Nitrous Oxide Heist had a slightly macabre air. When the original raiding party became uncomfortable with the empty tanks lying around, they decided that a second mission was called for to dump them into the Thames off Putney Bridge, a task that one of the volunteers compared to dumping bodies.

  We’ll Always Have Paris

  I love Paris, especially in the springtime. It always reminds me of . . . teargas. It was so essentially French that its rock ’n’ rollers should still be acting out the revolutionary pose when glam rock had pretty much taken over the rest of the planet. This cultural time-lag was brought forcibly home when an invitation was extended to me to perform at a Maoist rock festival at the vast Palais des Sports. The teargas in question was liberally used by the gendarmerie to break up the riot that ensued, both within and without the stadium. In this instance the disturbance owed absolutely nothing to any rabble-rousing on the part of the performers. As far as I could tell, it was just one more example of overexcited in-fighting on the part of various factions in the ever-volatile French Left. My hosts at this Gallic bunfight, it transpired, were Maoists, and as far as I could piece it together, they had some major beef with a Trot group who’d decided that the festival should be free and had attempted to storm the turnstiles of the big Paris stadium. The riot police had arrived with their sirens playing full third tones, and everyone immediately engaged in a spot of rock-throwing, gas-billowing, blast-from-the-past nostalgia for ’68.

  The Pink Fairies had also been invited to the Mao-fest, so we combined forces, giving the promoters two acts for the price of one. By this time Larry Wallis was the band’s guitarist and the boy from Walworth made it easier for me to play with them, now that the negative vibes of Paul Rudolph were no longer around. The presence of Larry also helped to ensure that we confronted the French with an attitude more recalcitrant than the sum of its parts. The problem with the French is that everything has to be defined by political philosophy. A perfect example occurr
ed on the night we arrived in town. We had been taken by our Maoist hosts to La Coupole. The restaurant had such a tradition of catering to all of bohemian Paris, since who knows when, that it was possible to find punks at the bar rubbing shoulders with left-wing politicians. What looked like a bike gang walked in, and I enquired of my comrade host who they might be. He replied that they were Stalinists, and we shouldn’t have anything to do with them. I could only shrug. They looked like a bunch of drunken French bikers to me, but what did I know?

  Very little, it would seem. At the end of the meal the hosts declared the idea of the promoters buying dinner for the musicians a bourgeois concept, and we were expected to pay for our own Steak Tartare. Crème Brûlée and the gallons of booze we’d consumed. The Pink Fairies and I were aghast. Maoist they might be, but they looked like escargot-fed rich kids, and instantly we registered our displeasure at this sudden attack of inappropriate Red Guard socialism by rising as one from our seats and leaving them stuck with the bill. To add greater injury, H, who was the general English-contingent escort and make-it-nice-and-easy guy, grinned at us. ‘I nicked their car keys.’

  The Maoists had been driving around in a large, almost new Mercedes, which, led by H, we then proceeded to commandeer. On returning to our hotel in Pigalle sometime around dawn, we were confronted by our decidedly angry hosts.

  ‘You steal our car.’

  We shook our heads. ‘We borrow your car.’

  And H, who spoke perfect French but didn’t choose to, explained, ‘We decided that we were putting the people’s car to the best possible use.’

  The next day was even better. We’d been flown into town a couple of days early so that we could do some radio and TV promotion, which involved the consumption of more alcohol, and also left us plenty of time to take the Metro to Clichy to pay homage to Henry Miller and buy illegal flick-knives to smuggle home with us. Since the Maoists no longer wanted to come out to play with us class traitors, we saw them only when they came to collect us for a visit to a radio or TV station, and even these short exposures to our collectively swinish Anglo-behaviour were enough to bring down the disapprobation of what we termed the ‘attitude squad’. We avoided them, and they avoided us, and the net result was that Larry, Sandy, Boss, Russell, Little Ian, Larry’s mate Al, H and I were pretty much left to our own devices. To leave a rock & roll band in a romantic foreign city with too much time on their hands is invariably a bad idea, and this occasion proved no exception.