by Mick Farren
Carnival Saturday started out happily enough, moms and kids and dogs and all manner of good-smelling stuff cooking on the pavements, and the gang was out in force, waving to women we hadn’t seen in a while. Everyone was strutting their stuff, intersecting the procession as it zigzagged on its inexplicable route of steel bands, whistles and fat ladies in turbans with whom you would not want to mess. Lot of cops, but that was to be expected, and still the cans of Red Stripe and Carlsberg Special Brew were on sale from a plastic dustbin full of ice on every doorstep.
My first inkling that all was not well came when I noticed I was mitigating my swagger and holding my beer closer to my chest. Straighten up, stiffen the spine and walk a bit more Max Cadey. Rudies were up from Brixton in force; the ska revival had brought back the hats over the eyes and the Thelonious Monk shades. Sad to tell, but the average rudie didn’t give shit about Monk, just dug the shades. Early on they’d been tentative, blind-eyed watchful, but as Brew took hold they grew more boisterous. Responding in kind, the Met pushed a number of white SPG vans through the pedestrian-packed, closed-to-traffic streets, forcing their display of inconvenient authority through a crowd who uniformly yelled abuse. A testosterone compact was being made. Gauntlets were going down in the baboon dance of taunt and counter-taunt.
Sunday proved even worse. The rudies escalated to hit-and-run handbag snatching. First they robbed solo or in pairs working together, but then they joined into packs. A lot of helmets and white cop shirts suddenly appeared in the crowd. Each time a rudie was busted it triggered a mass stampede, very close to full-scale wilding. Fifty-strong rushes with hands grabbing at anything that could be ripped from the suddenly confused. I encountered Boss and we decided it was time to load up on beer and repair to Edward’s flat, a Portobello top floor from which we could see everything. Having accurately agreed with Ingrid that carnival was ‘going to be a fucking drag this year’, Edward had sworn he wasn’t stirring all weekend. He had, however, invited everyone to a Watch-It-out-of-the-Window Party.
For a while the epicentre of the trouble was down Portobello to the south of us. We could see nothing, but could hear shouts and screams, and an ebb and flow of mass roaring, against a constant background of sirens. Richard Adams stumbled in bleeding, having been punched in the face and robbed of his camera. Boss started waxing exceeding macho, not to say Rudyard Kipling racist, and informed us he wasn’t about to stay cooped up indoors, and that it was as much his carnival as anyone else’s. He made his Man Who Would Be King exit, but returned fairly quickly and freely admitted he’d underestimated the state of the battle. ‘It’s fucking stupid out there.’
As the shadows lengthened and the TV cameras went away, buses rolled up and fresh coppers were deployed – and deployed like a bloody Roman legion. It was the first time I’d seen English police with helmets and riot shields. They threw a line across Portobello Road at Cambridge Gardens, pavement-to-pavement on the north side. They’d taken the high ground, the top of a steepish section of street, that commanded all of Portobello Green and the rest of the open space created by the Westway flyover and the old tube-train bridge beside it. The police had coolly defined the battlefield.
The double ranks of coppers closed up, until they were a Plexiglas-shield wall. The rudies massed under the bridge and flyover, building in numbers and hostility, crowded into a brick-walled bottleneck. Bottle- and beercan-throwing sorties rushed out and then retreated. The cops caught the missiles on their shields, but held their ground, while more and more aspiring rioters gathered in the bottleneck under the bridge, ensuring that sheer weight of numbers must eventually force the rudies into a frontal charge. I suppose, in theory, they could have dispersed, but blood was up beyond any back-down. As if to dispel the most lingering doubt, the cops did something that caused those of those of us hanging out of Edward’s window to stare in amazement. Clashing truncheons beat on shields and London bobbies roared non-verbal defiance straight out of Zulu. They must have been rehearsing according to the dictates of Shaka and Cetshwayo at Hendon Police College; they’d welded themselves into a West London impi of entirely the wrong colour.
Rudies began to emerge from under the bridge, tentatively at first, but in growing numbers. They advanced up the slope towards the shield wall, yelling, throwing stuff, working themselves up to break into a run. Just when the charge of the rudies was about to coalesce, the cops pre-empted them. They charged. The rudies fled, but were trapped by the bottleneck that had previously been their shelter. The cops were out to put the hurt on as many of the opposition as they could. Beatings were administered. A lesson was being taught here, sunshine. Some kids tried to escape, but found themselves outflanked, and the round-up wasn’t pleasant. Leaving a lot of bleeding rudies, the blue impi withdrew in good order and re-formed the shield wall. The rudies gave the coppers best and melted away to pub, bus and tube.
The lesson had been both taught and learned. At the next year’s rematch, a mob of more than just rude boys hit hard early and without restraint. The police cars burned on TV across a world that marvelled at British race riots, and banners were ostentatiously unfurled, red flags and black flags, red, gold and green, the Anarchist Circle A and the Broken Cross; flags whipping and snapping against driven Wagnerian clouds. Except that the music wasn’t Wagner; it sounded like Sham 69 without the subtlety. The Nazi mosh pit and Stalinist romance. Rock Against Racism v. The Doc Marten Jungen. On to Brixton and Broadwater. Double-plus ungood.
Mo the Roller
Double-plus good for the novelist, though. In fact, I was probably one of luckiest sons-of-bitches on God’s green Earth, in that I got a deal on my first novel with no rejections and almost no effort. I’d run into a character called Michael Dempsey. An odd cove, but we seemed to recognise each other as a kind of kin. Dempsey was a highly educated, alcoholic Irishman, puffy like Dylan Thomas and constantly suffering epiphanies. I first met him in the very early Seventies, when he waxed angry and aggressive at post-hippie political meetings, spouting the basic Socialist Workers’ Party line, but doing it with a level of abuse and artery-popping vehemence that set him apart from the rest of the Chelsea Reds.
The saving factor in Dempsey’s personality was a short, grasshopper attention span. He dropped the SWP and their dour doctrines within a matter of months, which was just as well because if he hadn’t, we might never have come to know each other. Later he admitted he had only joined the party to ease his way into bed with some woman he fancied, but after attending a few meetings, his natural anti-establishment fervour had bought the whole ideological package. His Red rabidity while with the SWP was typical of Dempsey’s bull-headed and often drunkenly myopic dedication to the cause of the moment. Dempsey saw himself as a Room at the Top character: the angry scholarship boy from the northern town who had made it to university and laboriously learned to eat his fish with the correct fork. Unfortunately, like most Room at the Top characters, he had bad attacks of class-traitor guilt, which, coupled with a Fenian love of lost causes, would precipitate black-dog whisky drunks and trigger unspeakable incidents at totally the wrong cocktail parties.
I first met Dempsey at the instigation of my then agent, the marvellous Abner Stein. Dempsey and the legendary Sonny Mehta were the two star editors at Granada Publishing. Dempsey had been responsible for bringing both Ed Sanders and Hunter S. Thompson to the house. Stein was a suave, swift-witted, expatriate New Yorker who had seemed to enjoy the tempo and civility of English publishing, but still maintained a Sixth Avenue savoir-faire and Manhattan determination that enabled him to run rings round the coterie of upper-class twits who seemed, at the time, to have been installed in publishing, because, in the opinion of their families, publishing houses were places where idiot second sons could do the least damage.
Dempsey took on the challenge of publishing and marketing books with typical bull-at-a-gate radicalism. He wanted to put out books that upset people and was a natural magnet for trouble. That was, of course, why Abner paired the two
of us in the first place. When I arrived on the scene Dempsey was under intense fire from the legal big guns of the Church of Scientology over the chapter in Ed Sanders’ book The Family that alleged links between Scientology and the Manson family. Dempsey was also an editor who liked to hang out with his authors, if they’d have him, and this helped sculpt his legend. When he raised hell with J. G. Ballard through the painful creation of the novel Crash, it triggered another obsession. He bought a huge old Mercedes and, although I don’t know if he ever consummated hammer-down, high-speed vehicular sex, he certainly constituted a menace to the public at large. Inevitably he wrecked the Teutonic beast and was banned from driving, although that did little to deter him.
We found an initial kinship in the demon drink, and any vestige of the hippie-hating Marxist-Leninist was swiftly drowned in Jameson’s. When I showed him the initial chapters of my first novel The Texts of Festival, a fantasy set in a new Dark Age with technology on a par with The Wild Bunch and a fractured memory of twentieth-century pop-culture, he went bananas and wanted to publish it. I don’t think any author had it so easy. Many may have copped more cash, but in terms of a lack of hassle and grief, the deal was unparalleled. This is not to say that, later in life, I didn’t suffer my share of rejection by dyslectic bastards who decided that one or other of my deathless masterpieces ‘wasn’t for them’. First time round, though, I rode into town in a first-class compartment of outrageous good fortune.
The Texts of Festival was rapidly followed by The Tale of Willy’s Rats, a sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll minor opus about a fictional rock band. Dempsey didn’t think it was the best I could do, but deemed it publishable and put it out in lurid paperback with a T&A cover. Now I was looking at a third novel and I really had to put up or shut up. With athletes it’s ‘going for the burn’; with writers (at least, this writer) it’s ‘dipping in the slime’. A matter of sliding a fist and even a forearm into the unholy ooze that collects in the dark depths of the imagination. Into the Parisian-sewers-of-the-mind with you, boy, and see what you can find. And the first thing I stumbled across, among the albino rats and phantom organists, was the very idea I needed.
During the merry days at IT I had written and published a story called Mo the Roller. In an environment known as the ‘Damaged World’, even reality itself had achieved a state of terminal entropy, and the inhabitants of this happy nightmare had to generate their own by means of devices known as stasis generators. To create something the size of a city required huge Nikola Tesla devices buried in the foundations, but an individual could be provided with a plausible physical existence by a device about the size of a Walkman, slung on the belt or carried in a handbag. Without a stasis generator, all became the Nothings – ageless and dimensionless, infinite wastes of time and matter, shimmering grey, all colours and none. If you tossed a beer can into the Nothings, it smoked, evaporated and was no more. Entropy even took care of the garbage.
When Ingrid read the first detailed description of the Nothings, lolling in Biba velvet in front of the Magicoal electric fire at Chesterton Road, she informed me they were a classic and accurate, if maybe idiot-savant, description of clinical depression. I then explained the system by which all material goods and artefacts were beamed in from Stuff Central and life was exactly what one made it, either collectively or as an individual. Ingrid leaned forward, and wrapped her arms around her knees protectively and considered this. ‘Stuff?’
‘Every kind of stuff.’
‘From Stuff Central?’
‘Anything you desire.’
‘I suppose it does have an elegant simplicity.’
‘And saves a great deal of time.’
Mo the Roller I’d only written in enough of the metaphysical quasi-technology to support a bizarre game of pool. In the novel,The Quest of the DNA Cowboys, I had to expand the concept and blend in the details to support an entire fantasy universe. For the raw materials, I pillaged everything from Star Trek and Kung Fu to the Marquis de Sade and Sam Peckinpah. I had huge domesticated lizards with twin brains; I had a pre-teen evil dictator of her own private universe; I had living, growing biocomputers, tended by monks who also had their own futuristic martial-arts disciplines. Fanciful weapons, medieval jails, public hangings, Albert Speer architecture, gunfights, some obligatory whips and chains, stiletto heels and femmes fatales in tight and fetishistic clothing, orgies and organisms, and monstrous undefined monsters called Disruptors which sucked up every semblance of life or logic into their all-consuming maws. In a bout of wish-fulfilment, I also created a comprehensive pharmacy of fictional narcotics and psychotropics.
The Quest of the DNA Cowboys, and its two sequels, The Synaptic Manhunt and The Neural Atrocity, were crammed with a fine and chaotic ground-clutter of contemporary pop culture. No effort at distortion went untried to realise more fully those fantasy worlds to which I’d been given tiny tantalising glimpses by Robert Johnson, Jim Morrison or Bob Dylan. I wanted the full picture of what lay beyond the crossroads or inside the Gates of Eden, fleshed out in fully formed (if surreal) geography. By the time I’d completed some 700 printed pages that made up the three volumes, I was pretty damned happy. The plan was for the DNA Cowboys trilogy to make me world-famous and rich for life, but like most plans of its kind, it didn’t quite pan out that way. (In retrospect I think it was a good thing. Fame would have made me even more insufferable and would have compelled me to die young.) The first snag was defining what I’d done. W.H. Smith and other legitimate booksellers didn’t know what to do with these books. A few got racked as science fiction, but many stores reacted with the suspicion that these three tomes might be inexplicable to all but psychedelic drug-users. At times like this an author learns the value of a good editor, and Dempsey wasn’t the most diligent of mentors.
Sweating the details wasn’t his strong suit, and also he had the memory of a drunk. He could get the Granada sales force good and plastered, but forget that the object of the mission was to hype them on moving the books into the shops. And then, of course, he magnificently self-destructed at the Frankfurt Book Fair, charging rounds of booze and hookers to Granada and wiping out about fourteen months’ worth of the Book Division’s promo budget. The pièce de résistance came when he tossed a recliner chair out of a fifth-floor window.
The three books sold to exactly those for whom they were intended, but, with Dempsey not only fired from Granada, but banned from the building, they simply lay and waited to be picked up by the few in the know. No advertising, no fanfare, no reviews in the Sunday Times. In fact, enough were picked up to make the exercise worthwhile and, in short order, the first printing was gone. No one however, was sufficiently involved to order a reprint, and over the years the trilogy became much sought-after rarities. All in all, the project left me feeling a lot like Kilgore Trout, Kurt Vonnegut’s archetypal fucked-over novelist.
I was exceedingly pissed-off at Michael Dempsey until I discovered that his flamboyant exit had not been as mindlessly excessive as it might have appeared. He had not only organised his severance from Granada, but had voided his contract with the company. This left him free to start his own publishing company with capital that he’d miraculously raised, despite his track record and predispositions. We went on to do two more books together. Get On Down was a beautifully printed collection of rock & roll posters that proved to be a great source of pride and pleasure. It concentrated mainly on the psychedelic era. Obviously this was to my own taste, and a period of intense graphic as well as musical innovation, but this was not the only motivation.
Psychedelic art was disappearing at an alarming rate, and the only comprehensive collections of psychedelia belonged to people as careful as Miles, and of course Felix, who seemed to have collected everything and already had a set of big, brass-bound plan-chests for his hoard of posters, artwork and printed ephemera. The time was right to reproduce the best of the graphic work in book form, before the endangered species vanished entirely. The quest to preserve graphic psyc
hedelia for posterity triggered another of Michael’s manic enthusiasms. The finished book was designed by Richard Adams and manufactured by a Dutch fine-art printer who used an incredibly expensive colour process to give a near-perfect reproduction of the metallic golds and silvers, but Dempsey still wanted to keep the cover price low enough for the book to be street-accessible. The numbers never really crunched, and although the book sold well, Get On Down cost Dempsey and his backers a small fortune by the final accounting. No small part of the cost was a monster champagne-and-acid party at a bookstore in Charing Cross Road. Hundreds showed up, including a huge contingent of punks, who stole everything that wasn’t nailed down, and Dempsey got about as drunk as was survivably possible.
The presence of a large number of punks at the Get On Down party was no accident. Dempsey was early in his recognition of the importance of punk. In the beginning he reacted like a publisher and made a deal with Mark P., the creator of the fanzine Sniffing Glue, to publish a collection of his writing in book form, but, as always with Dempsey, it didn’t stop there. By a series of coincidences and hustles he wound up managing the band the Adverts, who then proceeded to have a minor hit with the single ‘Gary Gilmore’s Eyes’. Dempsey’s home became filled with speed-rapping punks and others nodding out on heroin, and he himself made the acquaintance of both drugs, in addition to his usual whisky intake. The band’s two focal points, TV Smith and Gaye Advert, were, to say the least, a volatile handful, especially in the first flush of their brief success, but while his life seemed to be reduced to a chaos of nose rings, tattoos and bad dope, Dempsey still went ahead and published my sixth novel, The Feelies. This book ran closely parallel with the punk ethic in which Dempsey had enmeshed himself. In a stressed-out and overpopulated near-future, a form of virtual reality is being marketed as the next opiate of the people, while massive TV game shows pit near-psychotic greed against the fear of mind-bending humiliation. The packaging of The Feelies was, in its own way, just as elaborate as that of Get On Down. Instead of a modest paperback, Dempsey – flying on a punk-rock hit single, Glenlivet and amphetamine sulphate – ordered an illustrated de-luxe soft-cover extravaganza.