by Mick Farren
My own recruitment to NME was still a while down the pike. In the meantime, I had to concentrate on my writing, and put it out there to be judged, without the protection of my own publication. With ultimately narcissistic nepotism, I had been my own editor and publisher for what was now running to two or three years. This had to stop. I needed to see if I could survive in the real world, buy groceries and pay the rent on my craft and talent. The material problems could, at least in part, be solved in the scuzzy editorial offices of various T&A girlie magazines, and by the chance to supply mildly raunchy grey text at 10p a word, to go between the colour spreads of naked women.
Maybe some are still under the illusion that writing for the girlie glossies in that libertine era was a died-and-gone-to-heaven, Hugh Hefner fantasy of casting couches, hot tubs and hot running bimbos. The truth was quite depressingly the opposite. The words that spring to mind are, at best, tacky; at worst, wretched. The truth is that all but the most prestigious of skin monthlies were produced out of publishing sweatshops, where the only women were serious secretaries, bookkeepers and picture editors. The girlie sets came from agencies who specialised in that kind of thing, and no vast-breasted models were ever to be seen in the organic flesh. The girlie-mag industry was also chickenshit in the extreme. When we turned in our copy, they worried about lesbianism; and ambiguity frightened them. Don’t even mention S&M or bondage; plus, we writers were expected to remain within the strict vocabulary of the near-illiterate. In the USA, Larry Flynt was pushing the envelope by making Hustler increasingly gynaecological. In Europe hard porn was selling on the newsstands, but in London publishers like Paul Raymond agonised over how far they might push an already sagging envelope. Nasty Tales had inadvertently given them a gift. After our court victory, it was tacitly assumed that almost anything in print was legal, if it was clearly marked ADULTS ONLY, but the T&A publishers still cringed and worried. Every now and then I might get an honest-to-God short fiction piece published, or be assigned a medium-cool, true-crime story, but most of the time the whole transaction was extremely depressing, except for the moment the cheque fell through the letter box.
With a facility for language, and an extremely well-developed imagination, I clearly deserved more than a life hacking for skin mags. The primary target had to be books – specifically a novel – and I figured I was ready for it. Edward and I had already done a slim piece of non-fiction that William Bloom had published during the brief time he had an imprint at Hutchinson, before he went off to the Sahara and became a Sufi or something. Watch Out, Kids was a colourful and graphic-intensive history of youth rebellion, and a fairly wild countercultural political statement. It might well have been called The IT Annual, heavy as it was with the best of underground graphics, but the text was all mine, so I got the glory – such as it was. For some reason, though, I’ve always felt that fiction is the highest form of writing and, with the same recklessness with which I dived into the Deviants, I figured I was ready for the plunge into a novel. I’d been honing my imagination since I was a small child, when I’d spent a lot of time in retreat, passing otherwise unbearable periods in fully formed and highly detailed fantasy worlds. Thus I opted for a form of science fiction. Fantasy, I figured, was a fine way of avoiding the issue of how much of myself I was really prepared to reveal – as though I seriously believed that one could hide anything behind exposed fantasies. I guess if I hadn’t had that illusion of detachment, I would never have had the courage to get started.
Arrogant as ever, though, science fiction had to be written according to my own terms. Too many psychedelics had flashed through my neurons for me to write any Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future, no matter how many millions George Lucas might be investing to make Star Wars the most magnificent Saturday-morning serial of all time. Science fiction had experienced a revolution in the mid-Sixties with the so-called New Wave. Kurt Vonnegut, Brian Aldiss, Harlan Ellison, Samuel R. Delany, Thomas Disch and the mighty, amphetamine-fuelled Philip K. Dick had all banished space opera. They concurred with T. S. Eliot: the way might well be hidden in the mind. Argument continued as to whether William Burroughs could be classified as a science-fiction writer. My vote was a wholehearted yes, but others tended to disagree. Uncle Bill was, of course, the pinnacle to which I aspired, but knowing considerably more about literature than I’d know about music at the start of the Deviants, I was well aware that aspiring was about the outer limit of my capability. I needed to prove I could write a novel before I started deconstructing the form.
When I was a very small boy, I evolved a formula for climbing Mount Everest. Knowing next to nothing about mountaineering, death or the limitations of human endurance, I figured it was just a matter of putting one foot in front of the other, and not stopping until I reached the top. In a later state of innocence, I decided the writing of a novel could be achieved by much the same process, maybe with the addition of the old Daffy Duck admonition never to look down when you’re walking off the edge of the cliff into thin air. The novelist started on page one and advanced page by page until eventually he came to the conclusion. In the case of this first novel, I was even ahead of the game. I already had the first fifteen or sixteen pages in the form of a short story. All that remained was for me to create a suitable environment in which to write.
An awful lot of nonsense has been said about the writer and his environment. Some writers can be positively fetishistic about their working conditions. When Jack, in The Shining, tells Shelley that he needs absolute peace and quiet, his character is, of course, already insane. I would set far more store by Charlie Bukowski, who figured that ‘no writer worth a damn ever wrote in peace and quiet’. The great New York sports writer Red Smith is another source of irrefutable truth for the neophyte. ‘There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down and open a vein.’ I quickly discovered that opening the vein is the hard part – that’s what hurts – and the bleeding is relatively painless. Thus the old gag about ‘avoiding writing’ is really an explanation of how starting requires all the effort, but, once you get under way, you’re in the fantasy world moving your characters through wondrous places on adventures that are – you hope – much more exciting than the mundane room in which you’re doing the work.
Rarefied peace and quiet might have been nice, but I suspect – even had it been possible – it would have produced a prose style equally rarefied and, for me, wholly unacceptable. My instincts were to go with the Bukowski maxim, but I really had little or no choice in the matter. Ladbroke Grove was a turbulent environment of incipient crisis, seductive stimulants, constant distraction and people dropping by. Lemmy, now playing bass for Hawkwind, could be counted on to turn up at all hours of the day or night, as speed challenged him to go for days on end without sleep and he felt the need for company or to borrow money. John Manly, a local entrepreneur, came over pretty regularly, sometimes with guitar player Andy Colquhoun, allowing Andy and I to make the first acquaintance that slowly but ultimately led to friendship, and then to a songwriting and performing partnership that would last into the next millennium. Gwen might stop by from time to time, as did Mark Williams, and Felix when he could be dragged out of the West End. Of course Edward, Boss, Gez and Roger Hutchinson were always in and out, although Gez came less frequently after he shacked up with a woman called Tuppy Owens, a rising mogul in the sex-toy industry.
The traffic was heavy around Chesterton Road, but the fledgling author adapted accordingly. Indeed, the furious energy that some critics claimed was the overwhelming strength of my first efforts may well have been a product of the equally energetic environment. Ingrid and I lived a near-Japanese, floor-based existence. We formed our personal nests. Books, pads, pens, drinks, toys, unanswered mail, the flick-knife from Paris, an antique Navy Colt revolver, a green telephone and a red tray with a picture of a Vargas pin-up girl, which contained the house drugs and paraphernalia, all lay around within easy reach. (Look, Ma, no coffee table.) All was observed by a motheaten stuffed ant-eater that Le
mmy had christened Mrs Anderson, which he would inherit when I left town. A human skull that Ingrid had given me for Christmas took pride of shelf space, and I still have it to this day.
Phone ringing, TV blaring, I wrote – stoned or straight – a green rollerball pen moving compulsively across yellow legal pads. Despite all the interruptions, even with company, even through adventures with Parisian drag queens, I wrote, and Ingrid organised the flow. She edited, advised and copy typed. I suppose some might find this sexist and exploitative, but at the time I was on an astonishing roll, and she seemed happy to be a part of it. She might not agree after all these years, but I can’t say; you’d have to ask her. Sometimes I wrote the novel, at other times I hacked nonsense for the rent. Nonsense and the novel, the novel and nonsense, a continuous cycle, heading into a whole new creative territory.
Kill ’Em and Eat ’Em
In the darkness before the dawn, the acid still hadn’t run its course, but a certain resignation had set in and, with it, a demented feeling that we were never to leave the place. We were doomed for ever to this field, like rock & roll Flying Dutchmen. The question that then presented itself was: how would we survive? The conversational carousel went round and round, and the painted ponies – as was still their wont – went up and down and kept telling us that cannibalism was the only answer.
‘Kill ’em and eat ’em.’
The sequence of events that had brought us to the very precipital edge of eating our own had started eight hours earlier, in mid-afternoon, when John the Bog, the old-time acid dealer from Middle Earth, who had earned his nickname because his place of business was the men’s lavatory, showed up in our camp. He came equipped with a bottle of liquid lysergic acid, of the sinister colour that’s now known as X-Files green, but back then didn’t even have a name. The collective – comprising the Pink Fairies, the former underground press gang and a slew of other Ladbroke Grove reprobates – formed a line and held out their right hands, palms down, fists loosely clenched. John produced an eye dropper and proceeded down the line as though inspecting the platoon. He dropped a roughly measured dose on the back of each of our hands. The idea was that we should consume the psychedelic by licking the stain on our skin, but even before I could do that, I felt a distinct tingle as some of the drug was already being dermally absorbed. The tingle told me the stuff was maybe the strongest I’d ever encountered, and it carried the promise that anything could happen. With the acid on the back of my hand, and obviously too late now to turn back, I licked, along with all the rest, and away we went.
The Wheeley Rock Festival, one of the last of the big Sixties-style events to be held in the Seventies, had proved a mess from start to finish. Fires had started in the dry grass on the camp site and a couple of cars had exploded in flames. An alliance of outlaw motorcycle clubs had gone toe-to-toe in a grudge match with the festival security, but were soundly routed. The Pink Fairies had been effectively too hammered to play, but had gone on anyway. As the hallucinatory night dragged on, we hit the wall of acid boredom and started to convince ourselves that we were living in the most final of the Final Days, condemned to endure the fall of civilisation on this wretched festival site. We knew we’d survive, the only question was by what means. No matter how many times we approached the problem, or from what direction, we kept coming back to the inescapable conclusion. By far the least complicated solution would be to live off the flesh of all these worthless, witless, left-over hippies.
‘Kill ’em and eat ’em.’
Finally Boss had enough. He seized an army-surplus machete, which had been brought down as part of our festival equipment. ‘I’m going out to get dinner!’
After his dramatic exit, the rest of us looked at each other. In one possible future, Boss would return dragging a dead hippie by the foot and, at that juncture, we would be morally obligated to eat the kill, abandoning all pretence of humanity. As it turned out, Boss didn’t return for maybe an hour or more, and when he did he seemed to have forgotten the whole thing, although he did remember to bring the machete back. Mercifully, we’d been spared damnation, but I couldn’t help but wonder if that was the kind of incident that had launched the Manson family. I felt this was a serious LSD near-miss, and decided, in the future, that the horror show always lurking beneath the surface must be strictly confined to fiction.
Aid and Comfort to NME
The first story I wrote for NME was about the Bruce Lee cult. For a while I’d watched the rock weekly move closer and closer to becoming a faux-underground paper (as far as anything could be faux-underground inside the monolithic International Publishing Corporation that, at the time, owned everything from the Daily Mirror to Woman’s Own), but I’d avoided making any moves in that direction. The initial overture had come from Charles Shaar Murray at a party on Portobello Road. He suggested that I should meet Ian McDonald, the deputy editor, I guess as a preliminary to going one-on-one with Nick Logan. I’d heard that I made Logan nervous, and maybe he felt he needed an initial buffer. McDonald – I-Mac as he was universally known – was one of the gentlest and most soul-searching cats I’ve ever encountered. He made me extremely welcome and comfortable. He knew I viewed working for IPC as somewhere between taking the king’s shilling and cutting a deal with Lucifer, and was racked with ambiguity.
At first I’d tried to have my cake and eat it, too, by writing about anything but music. Like I said, Bruce Lee, Star Trek and Evel Knievel’s jetbike. I thought if I didn’t actually get into the rock-crit business, I could stay honest. But who did I think I was kidding? I knew there’s no such thing as a demi-virgin or part-time whore, so in the end I figured I might as well get stuck in with the rest. Germaine hadn’t called me a wheezing Jeremiah for nothing. With the clout and contacts to ensure my choice of assignments, I commenced mercilessly laying about the fools and philistines of rock-biz like Jesus clearing the temple. Rock & roll had sunk to that slough of pampered foolishness where Yes, Deep Purple and ELP were regarded as truly great musicians, and tours by the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin or the Who would be a mobile, multimillion-dollar bacchanalia involving private jets, helicopters, convoys of majestic Kenilworth semi-trucks and limousines driven into hotel swimming pools. Drug abuse wasn’t considered fun unless it was a dance with death, groupie culture had reached its orgiastic pinnacle and the nuts were running the fruitcake. Friday afternoons at most major record labels in London, New York and Los Angeles were completely consumed by the business of arranging the weekend’s cocaine supply. Nothing was a higher priority.
In the middle of all this major lunacy, Nick Kent and Charlie Murray were gleefully using NME to promote themselves as stars in their own right. The critic as celeb. As physical figures, Kent and Murray couldn’t have been more dissimilar. Kent was tall and narrow, epicene and wasted, a definite Keith Richards clone in tattered black leather and grubby silk scarves, like Isadora Duncan on methadone. Charlie, on the other hand, was a nervously determined young man with an Hebraic afro, a wardrobe inspired by the E Street Band and a devotee of amphetamine sulphate. The pair’s commonality was as kick-arse and opinionated writers, with a devotion to rock ’n’ roll like diamonds in their prose.
That I should join them as another bullshit star byline seemed manageable. What NME needed to complete the team was a gonzo alcoholic who knew the Bukowski-Thompson opening tactic of starting a story by describing the hangover. If I couldn’t lose myself in the role, I could just about lose my self-loathing, provided I dived deep enough. If you’re going to behave disgracefully, go the whole hog and be hanged for a goat. As I saw it, a personality cult forming around a writer is actually not a bad thing. It worked for Frank Harris, Damon Runyon, Dorothy Parker, Marge Proops, Jimmy Breslin, Harlan Ellison, Pete Hammill and Hunter S. Thompson. At Creem, Lester Bangs was single-handedly raising the circulation and, back home, the punters seemed to love it when Kent feuded with Lou Reed, or Bryan Ferry took umbrage at some comment of Charlie’s. The readership could agree or violently object,
but at least they were able to rest assured they were getting the straight dope, because they knew exactly where the writer was coming from. While Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone reduced his writers to Stepford typists by forbidding them to trash the stars, Logan gave us our head and we built up a readership of comprehensive-school misfits who dug and depended on our shtick.
The free stuff was also a great temptation.
With UK radio still a thing of pathos, the weekly music rags had a massive influence on record sales, and the record labels would do just about anything to get our attention, short of sending over a hooker and an envelope of money. (This had proved just too illegal in the Alan Freed Fifties.) The payola and record-industry perks started out as seductive and, once we were corrupted, exceedingly handy, not to say needed. Stuff came from the record companies all the time. They sent us T-shirts, workshirts, bowling jackets, Levi jackets, cheap watches and junk jewellery, silk scarves and cowboy belt buckles, mechanical toys and other bits of crap and, of course, the inexhaustible supply of duff records that could be traded for a quid or so at the Record Exchange on Golborne Road. One Christmas, Company A sent over a case of Remy Martin, while Company B gave each of us a small mirror bearing a picture of the world’s most famous wabbit eating a carrot, and later a publicity hack came round to fill the mirrors for us. Best of all, they’d fly us to exotic and romantic places, limousine-class all the way, to see their rotten bands in the best and most lavish circumstances.