by Mick Farren
My determination to get out of the prophet-of-doom, rabble-rouser business had lasted about as long as any of my tenuous attempts to quit cigarettes. On this day in June NME published a lengthy diatribe of my dissatisfaction under the headline THE TITANIC SAILS AT DAWN, a decade-old quote from Bob Dylan’s ‘Desolation Row’. The peg on which the 3,000-word piece was conveniently hung was a stuffed bag of mail from disgruntled readers about how the current crop of first-division rock shows sucked the big one. Stadium rock had come to the UK, and no one seemed in the least bit pleased about it. Their immediate targets were recent shows by the Rolling Stones at Earls Court and the Who at Charlton football ground. That Princess Margaret had been spotted hanging around with the Stones seemed to be the last straw for our naturally disgruntled readers.
Responding with an angry diatribe to a fat mailbag is an easy ploy to expand the fan base, but my motives when I sat down to write the piece were not completely self-serving. I’ve always found it hard to stay mad at the Who for very long. The Stones, on the other hand, along with Rod Stewart, Elton John and visiting Americans like the Eagles, were starting to get right up my nose. I was coming to the conclusion that the current overblown stadium rock was not the music Eddie Cochran had died for. I used the SS Titanic as the obvious metaphor for the hubris of superstar rock as it wallowed in a lavish mire of luxury: the iceberg was the growing discontent among an audience that felt itself increasingly exploited. I ended the piece with these words:
If rock and roll is not being currently presented in an acceptable manner, and, from the letters we’ve been getting at the NME, this would seem to be the case, it is time for the Seventies generation to start producing their own ideas and ease out the old farts who are still pushing tired ideas left over from the Sixties.
The time seems to be right for original thinking and new inventive concepts, not only in the music but in the way that it is staged and promoted.
It may be difficult in the current economic climate, and it may be a question of taking rock back to street level and starting all over again.
Putting the Beatles back together isn’t going to be the salvation of rock and roll. Four kids playing to their own contemporaries might.
And that, gentle reader, is where you come in.
Some commentators would later claim that the article represented a contributory factor to the inception of punk, but that’s nonsense. By the time the rant was published, the Sex Pistols had played as far afield as Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall and a club called the Crypt in Middlesbrough. Patti Smith’s album Horses had been a cult hit for six months or more. Indeed, the famous incident at the Hundred Club in Oxford Street, when Sid Vicious put the brute boot in on a fallen Nick Kent – the attack chronicled in just about every history of punk all the way to the Alex Cox movie Sid and Nancy – occurred the very day before the issue of NME featuring the ‘Titanic’ piece hit the stands in central London. Punk was already well established among the pogo cognoscenti long before I put pen to paper.
Stepping back from the historical long view that the phenomenon really started with Eddie Cochran, punk as London knew it was spawned in much the same twin epicentres as the hippies. One bunch doing a street thing in the Grove and another, slightly more biased to trash, cash and fashion, doing much the same in Chelsea. The action in the Grove seemed to be among a fluctuating stew of musicians who orbited the bands the London SS and the 101ers, and who had something going in the Elgin – a pub with a bad reputation for low-rent speedfreaks and drooling cases of mandy damage – and would emerge as the Clash and the Damned.
The Chelsea boys and girls were a bit more of a mystery, but that was how it had always been. A certain coterie attended parties at the chic Butler’s Wharf studio of glass sculptor Andrew Logan. Logan had been around since the early Seventies, but I never really bothered to figure him out. Chrissie Hynde seemed to be in this same crowd, and I can only imagine Nick Kent too, since they were conducting an angular romance at around that time. I remember being introduced to a set of names. One was a character called Malcolm McLaren, who’d had something to do with the final red-leather phase of the New York Dolls and spouted second-hand situationism. He claimed to be a one-time Sixties activist, although I fail to recall him ever being anwhere I was. Apparently he’d become disillusioned with the failure of his generation to achieve ‘genuine or wacky changes’, and had opened a shop instead. His partner Vivienne Westwood took care of the commercial end by printing Tom-of-Sweden drawings on T-shirts. Bernie Rhodes, who would later manage the Clash, hung around, seemingly attempting to ape Malcolm. In addition a strange woman called Jordan and a crew of thug-like youth seemed to make up the numbers, but what did I know? My fish were fried elsewhere, and the rise of the Sex Pistols, Siouxsie or the Pretenders is hardly mine to recount.
If the NME rant contributed anything, it was to spread the ripples a little wider in the pond. And I was dealing the propaganda from a stacked deck. When I exhorted the youth of England to seek the rama-lama among their own contemporaries, I was sneakily aware that something worth the seeking definitely lurked, waiting to be found. I felt I was bringing punk to the lumpen. (And what better place for it?) But that was as far as it went. I’d always considered it my task to break ground, not follow the plough. Also, I wasn’t quite ready to venture too close to out-of-tune fuzz guitars and tuneless vocals.
The Non-Judicial Use of Handcuffs
Julie Burchill has already gone fully, if not scandalously, public with anecdotes about our affair in the Seventies. I guess we all build our histories as we become aware of encroaching time – I’m shamelessly doing so here – and writers get especially good at it when the bloom of youth is fled and the tales and the commentary are all that remain. The most implacable truth can be improved in the telling, and I’m rather honoured to be included in her narrative:
I was stalking Micky; drunken old fool that he was, he didn’t get the hint for ages . . . So I poured myself into my Levis . . . shrugged on my leather jacket . . . stole a red, red apple from a greengrocer’s in Westbourne Grove and turned up on his doorstep one morning when I knew his girlfriend was away.
It was high noon but when he opened the door I knew he had just woken up. He rubbed his eyes with beautiful fists. ‘Julie?’
‘Hello, Micky.’ I bit into the apple. He gulped and swallowed. I smouldered up his three doorsteps at him. ‘Aren’t you going to ask me . . . in?’
‘Yeah . . . sure.’ He stepped back, as he always did for me, and I passed him into the hallway. He pointed up. ‘The flat’s up there.’
‘Right.’ I put my hand on the banister and felt him tremble. ‘Micky?’
‘Yeah?’
‘You know this thing sado-masochism?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Can you show me, please?’
Annie Lennox had it down. To abuse and be abused are the infinitely interchangeable sides of the same coin, but how many of the boys and girls wanted to flip that coin and roll it over on their knuckles? Appealing to fetishistic triggers from the wrong side of midnight is hardly cricket, but I was well and truly stalked and now, with all available nonchalance, I attempted to live up to a few of her teen expectations. I was highly flattered to have this young woman with all this raw talent hanging round me and making me feel like Lee Marvin.
She was well aware that my life was going through a phase during which, if I wasn’t sleeping, I was either sober and working or out on the town and drunk. What she seemed to like about me was that I’d been through the wars and was still snarling, ‘Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.’ Julie seemed able to tolerate me well, after most had given up and left me to my whisky strangeness. In fact she seemed to be everywhere I went, and even when I was well into the zone of the werewolves she seemed to show up. I would find her in cabs with me and wonder how she got there, but be dimly aware that we were drifting towards an inevitable impropriety probably worth some comment on a slow-gossip day.
When
floating through the nets and entanglements of the very young and determined, one can run an all-too-serious risk of overreaching yourself and appearing a total fool for your presumption. There’s no more damned fool than a fool revealing a mistaken passion, and I simply waited to see what might happen next. I also had to consider the matter of Tony Parsons. Parsons had been recruited to NME at exactly the same time as Julie, part of the same package of new punk blood, and he seemed to have taken a proprietorial interest in her, exuding tribal warnings that if any of us ‘old hippies’ laid a hand on her, we’d have him to reckon with.
The mating habits of punks seemed alien and a little atavistic, all the way back to mods under the pier at Brighton. If Parsons had some yob bee-in-his-bonnet that there was anything between Julie and me, then a minor outbreak of primate unpleasantness was definitely on the cards and should probably be avoided. On the other hand, I wasn’t about to allow his Y-chromosome jitterbugging to disturb me, now that she was so explicitly on my doorstep. Hell, no, even though a colleague had warned me that I should watch out for him.
‘Oh yeah?’
‘You’re the only thing in the way of him being you.’
I wasn’t sure that I totally agreed with the theory, but I knew what he meant. As far as I was concerned, Parsons was a half light-year from paying the kind of dues I’d slapped on the counter over the years, but his ambition was palpable.
In the wake of Julie’s overt doorstep proposition, the ensuing romance was doomed to have a discretionary short shelf-life. And then, of course, she couldn’t resist the teen temptation to flaunt, and the inevitable fist-fight broke out – as it happened, in the empty file room of the NME offices at King’s Reach Tower. I swear it was a blighted building. I figure if the two of us hadn’t been consciously set up for the confrontation, its inevitability had been subliminally promoted, but once a charged distillation of testosterone is bent on throwing punches, the reasons why become a trifle redundant. With Parsons’ Roy-of-the-Rovers physique, and eleven years on me, I knew I wasn’t liable to do much damage, short of hitting him with a typewriter or something equally industrial. My best, and probably only, strategy was to keep ducking and weaving, covering up until he realised, fit as he was, that he wasn’t really going to be able to hurt me.
Meanwhile, Julie was seemingly delighted. In her own words, ‘I sat on my desk, dangling my legs like an innocent ten-year-old, and I couldn’t help but smirk. My dream had come true; I really and truly was, at the age of seventeen, a fully-fledged femme fatale.’ Femme fatale, definite devilment, DNA round the twist, and no easy thing being a principal player in the fantasy of another, but punks demanded violent complexity in all areas.
Nothing But the Haircuts
I was being flash in leather jeans and black wool jacket with a tie belt and a symbolic thunderbird on the back, an amalgam of Geronimo, Robin Hood and a Klingon space pirate. As you might guess, I rather fancied myself. The costume hardly fitted in at the Roxy Club, where the boys seemed uniform in black jeans and motorcycle jackets, or ripped and torn ted drapes and bondage strides, while Siouxie and her cohorts had strategised to startle in a dog-eared, laddered-stocking version of Ilsa She Wolf of the Confidential Leather Catalogues. In theory, in a place like the Roxy, ‘do what you will’ should once more have been the law – straight back to Aleister Crowley and no messing – but, as I was quickly to learn from John Rotten himself, punk enforced a dress code as draconian as the Flamingo at the height of mod. The punks were far less tolerant of deviance and aberration than the hippies had ever been, unless said deviance and aberration conformed to their own norms of perversity.
The Roxy Club was a made-over transvestite refuge in Covent Garden and qualified as the Big City ground zero for the first punk detonations, the showcase for the first wave bands and the consolidated fashion parade of the new style. Déjà bloody vu. ‘The art-school dance goes on for ever,’ as old George Melly observed. The hippie counterculture had made its first stand in a borrowed ballroom. In our case, an old Irish dance club, and the punks had a definite advantage in finding themselves a former drag-queen hangout. The immediate neighbourhood was better conditioned to wandering travesties. The styles and attitudes may have been diametrically different, but the fundamental ambience was unmistakable. Crowley’s Rites of Eleusis rode again and Nietzschean finality was back in new threads and haircut.
Every youth movement likes to flatter itself that it was born fully formed on the half-shell, and exempt from any cultural genealogy. No punk walking would have admitted that he or she was of a noble dissident tradition going directly back through the freaks of the Sixties, the beat generation, Crowley and the Dadaists to, at the very least, Lord George Byron and the opium-den romantics, if not Ned Ludd and Wat Tyler. I was happy to see a new generation of bohemian urban guerrillas on the move, going up against the status quo, attacking the target from yet another angle, but I’d seen a hell of a lot of it before. The primary difference was that the hippies operated in a period of economic abundance, while punks were scavenging on the leftovers of a post-affluent society. Such was the difference a decade made.
I’d hardly started on my first Roxy beer when Rotten spotted me from across the crowded room and started in my direction with a couple of spiky-haired goombahs in tow. I’d never met Rotten before, although we certainly knew each other from our pictures in the paper. I knew confrontation was on the cards, but I was fairly confident. What kudos would there be in duffing up Mick Farren, for fuck’s sake? I was hardly Nick Kent. Punks seemed to respect this, with the possible exception of Tony Parsons.
Now Rotten was in front of me, but he didn’t say a word. Instead, he leaned forward and extended a hand to the cuff of my jeans. The leathers had a slight flare to them. No loon-pants nonsense, oh dear me, no; just enough to make them slide over the tops of my pale-blue cowboy boots. Rotten measured the flare with his thumb and forefinger like a disapproving East End tailor. His expression said it all. So, grandad, not so hip as we thought we were, are we?
Rotten had adopted the old mod’s ruthless sense of fashion, but I wasn’t prepared to give ground. My cowboy boots might be just too boring and American, but I liked them, and I cringed for no punk. A shrug of: who gives a fuck, what do I know? I’m not even in the game, Boy John. As I’d long ago told the mods in Brighton, ‘I’m a beatnik like Bob Dy-lan.’ That seemed to do the trick. I believed that my status had just been defined for all to see. I was an old fart with far too much track record to fuck with. I was the real deal, when rising punk mini-stars didn’t know shit from their elbows. And, my Lord, did I milk that for all it was worth. If you can’t have your youth back, be the veteran with the 1,000-yard stare.
Beneath my jaded bluff, though, I was generally impressed with young Rotten. He was a presence to be very strongly reckoned with. The achievement I most admired, beyond the artfully contrived persona, was the way he’d pulled off the very difficult trick of singing rock & roll in his native London accent, when all but a few of us had striven to sound American, sometimes at the risk of sounding as dumb as Mick Jagger on ‘The Girl with the Faraway Eyes’. John Lennon might have concocted himself a mid-Atlantic, post-Beatle drawl, somewhere between the Mersey and the Hudson, but the last geezer really to sing with a cockney accent had been Joe Brown of Joe Brown and the Bruvvers. To rock in cockney always seemed to conjure a perky gorblimey factor, the musical equivalent of Barbara Windsor, and hardly the sneering and snarling of our early American role models. To drop one’s ‘h’s on a Howlin’ Wolf tune is just too bizarre. Rotten, however, had taken the cute and turned it as feral as a Limehouse wharf rat – though I suspect he had watched a lot of Ian Dury before anyone noticed. He’d also managed to introduce an element of the Victorian music-hall drunk into the standard Gene Vincent/Jim Morrison microphone clutch, and folded in our most treasured English influences – Tony Hancock, Arthur English, even Wilfred Bramble. (In fact, a lot of Wilfred Bramble.)
Rotten, unlike so many of
his more gothic cohorts, was also colourful. He shied away from funereal S&M black, and was bright, primary, even garish. Brooding like Byron was boring. Onstage he was a put-on merchant, a ruffian joker, with a scathing humour and disdainful body language. He incited, but then turned round and scorned what he’d achieved. He’d whip a crowd into the expected adoration, and then castigate them for their masochism. I recall at (I think) the Hundred Club – but not on the night Kent was stomped – Rotten standing and regarding the bouncing crowd and slowly shaking his head, as if dismayed at how easily the sheep were led. Apt that Rotten’s most well-recalled words, over and above the lyrics of the Pistols’ three legendary singles, should be the terminal comment at the end of their final show at Winterland in San Francisco. ‘Ever feel you’ve been had?’
A con-artist to the last, Lydon could play the post-modern Artful Dodger because, in the Sex Pistols, he had his very own cartoon dark-half. I can only assume that was why Glenn Matlock was eased out of the band and Sid Vicious eased in. Sid could be John’s suicidal second banana, eliminating the need for Johnny to carve his own flesh; a Frankenstein creation who, considering the general quality control of the era, inevitably had to fall apart, all seams ripping. He was seemingly without function, except first to mutilate himself and then die as an encore, providing an early and much needed martyr. Dumb as a bull in a bullring, he lurched down Satan’s shortcut. Couldn’t sing, couldn’t play, but an idiot savant who, stoned and in the dark, could find the trail left by Jones, Jimi and Jim. Like Iggy before him, he was punk’s stuntman, who refused to fake the falls. When Sid fell, he was obliged to hurt himself. The only permitted airbag was a degenerate consumption of powdered drugs. Although I tended to look at Sid as little more than a degenerate surly thug, I couldn’t fail to recognise his comatose charisma, the lacerated, lights-on-but-no-one-home beauty. Rotten might have been the Dodger, but Sid was the Face of ’78.