Give the Anarchist a Cigarette

by Mick Farren

  We moved on to ‘Play with Fire’, but the vocals did not go well, and as I sweated them I drank, hitting the bottle so hard that I was in a state of intermittent blackout when we finally got to ‘To Know Him Is to Love Him’. Our arrangement accelerated the Spector rock-a-ballad to a breakneck Ramones thrash, and I launched into it without harness or safety net. All I can recall is going into some stream-of-horror consciousness, ‘I’m here/All alone/Just me/And the microphone’. And, with that, the task was complete. The rest of the night was, at best, a confusion of fragmented images. Seemingly I wasn’t the only one fucking up. I can remember sitting in a shady pizza joint with large pictures of Frank Sinatra and the Pope on the walls; feeling like shit, but unable to leave because one of the company apparently needed to cop some smack, and we were waiting for the fucking man.

  Amid the next day’s hangover, I mercilessly beat up on myself. I’d had one more shot in the studio, and all I’d done was hit the booze and fuck up. Then Terry Ork came by with a couple of cassette copies and seemed overjoyed with the result.

  Huh?

  I listened to the intro to ‘Lost Johnny’, sick with trepidation. Did I really have to go through the whole thing twice? The vocal came in and I discovered, to my amazement, that by the intervention of some benign demon hand, it had worked. By the time we got to ‘To Know Him Is to Love Him’, I was laughing fit to fall off my chair. This wasn’t a fuck-up, I hadn’t blown it. The end result was psychotically funny. The tapes contained a magnificent dementia, wholly unobtainable except by methods as twisted as those employed.

  When I arrived back in England, I discovered that this Manhattan/White Plains adventure had been but a first step.

  Vampires Stole My Lunch Money

  I was back, proud, and I was loving every tactile moment of it. Live at Dingwall’s with the de-luxe treatment. One-two-three-four, and away we go! Let Alan Powell pound, let the guitars of Larry and Andy schlang and grind. Hail, hail, rock ’n’ roll. I was gracing a London stage in my own right for the very first time. Not with the Deviants. (No-no!) It was me, with a backing band that, for want of a better idea, I’d called the Good Guys. (Yeh-yeh!) Larry Wallis and Andy Colquhoun on guitar, Alan Powell on drums, Gary Tibbs playing bass, but I was the star of my own fucking show, ultimately responsible, but also the ultimate recipient of the accolades. Not bad, huh? (Shooby-do bop do-wah!)

  Everyone was being so amazingly nice. I felt welcomed home like the prodigal. Elvis Costello had complimented me on the quality of my lyrics. Everyone from Lemmy and Wilko to Chrissie Hynde and Judy Nylon, from the Hell’s Angels to the Pink Fuzzy Bunnies Against Racism, had shown up to wish me well. Abner Stein and Dempsey were there to lend their support, and a bunch of punks came, curious to see what the old boys might be up to. The Dingwall’s management had not only supplied us with a bucket of Red Stripe on ice, but also a large bottle of Jack Daniels and five shot-glasses. On first observing this charitable gift, I realised it could well be my – and Larry’s – downfall, and I resolved to pace myself, even though pacing has never been my strong suit. Perhaps the best gift of all came from Jonathan Smeaton, still with Hawkwind, but readying himself to go into the bigtime and light everyone from Billy Idol to the Stones. During the afternoon soundcheck, Smeaton had shown up, unasked and entirely of his own volition, with a couple of his crew and a whole mess of lights, to augment the regular Dingwall’s rig.

  ‘We figured you might like a bit of extra drama.’

  I could have hugged him. The band had played a number of shows before Dingwall’s; some good, some indifferent, and one at Sussex University in Brighton at which everything – from our memories to the technology – broke down. Now we were finally on home turf, and not fucking up was a matter of regimental honour. Boss capped the general generosity by acting as DJ that night, even though he now managed the club, and played a straight twenty minutes of Eddie Cochran, Little Richard and the like before we hit the stage, ensuring that the crowd was warm, rowdy and receptive. A recently unearthed tape demonstrates that I was drunk, aggressive and affecting a somewhat more gorblimey accent than usual. I fluffed the opening to ‘I Want a Drink’, but, on the other hand, I went into an extended Beefheart-like coda to ‘Half Price Drinks’, during which (if the tape is to be believed) the band stood back and listened in disbelief. Can’t sing, huh? I’ll fucking show you. I don’t think I went down on my knees to testify, but it was close. I’d had six years to ponder the moves and tricks, and I was putting them all through their paces.

  Smeaton’s lights, even with my eyes closed in concentration, bored through my eyelids, the colour of blood with contrasting yellow floaters, and electric inspiration streamed from on high. I was bathed in the radiant breath of whatever god looks out for rock & rollers. Being lavishly illuminated can do wonders for the performing ego. I was having my night and – for this audience – I could do no wrong. Of course, the tape proves that technically I did dozens of things wrong, and the scrappy moments were as frequent as the inspired ones, but we were the Dogs of War, not Madame Fifi’s Precision Dancing Poodles, and we could afford scrappy. The suspension of disbelief was in place and the Reichian orgone circuit was never more complete. I poured all the whisky-sweat and energy I could summon into the crowd, and they returned it multifold. The upward spiral built into an increasingly vibrant and vindicating arc. As we encored with Gene Vincent’s ‘Say Mama’, they may not have been lending their ears to bel canto, but the punters had been well and truly entertained.

  The trip from White Plains to headlining at Dingwall’s was a long one: not in time, but in its creative stages. Terry Ork was as good as his word and put out a single. The album of Phil Spector material – eventually entitled Bionic Gold – came out a little later, and that might have been that, except that one day Jake Riviera accosted me and, with a definite air of challenge, demanded to know if I wanted to record for Stiff. By this point, Stiff was the hot and pre-eminent independent label. Larry was already in there on a retainer, having made a single called ‘Between the Lines’ with the Pink Fairies, and then having been hired as full-time number two house-producer after Nick Lowe. At that moment he was producing Wreckless Eric – a weird and wild talent, who fell too much under the shadow of Elvis Costello and never really obtained the recognition he deserved. Stiff was by no means either an exclusive punk or pub rock label. It had the Damned and Elvis Costello, Ian Dury and Nick Lowe, and for a while Richard Hell and Television for the UK.

  The offer almost certainly came in the pub on Alexander Street next door to the Stiff offices. I had probably gone down there to meet up with Larry. When Jake put the question to me, I know I answered carefully. Jake could be a terrible wind-up merchant and master deflator of egos. I didn’t want to come over all eager and then find myself the butt of some cruel and unusual joke. ‘I suppose I could do that.’

  ‘Say an EP, four tracks?’

  ‘Sounds manageable.’

  ‘And Larry would produce?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘So let’s do it.’

  I nodded. Let’s do it. I waited for the laugh, but no laugh came, and a couple of weeks later we went into Pathway Studios, which everyone claimed had the best sound this side of Sun Studios in Memphis, and where most of the Stiff masterpieces were recorded. Learning from my mistakes in New York, whisky was banned from the studio and, about four hours into the first session, cocaine was also banned. We’d had a toot at the very start to get us rolling, and then spent three hours attempting to eliminate weird noises from the drums that may not actually have existed, and all those involved become very edgy and irritated with each other. With the twin downfalls banished, however, everything progressed as smooth as a rhapsody. Larry was producing, as agreed, and he also played one of the guitars. A reunion was engineered with Paul Rudolph, who provided an extra guitar. Andy Colquhoun on bass, and Alan Powell, over from Hawkwind on drums, completed the conspiracy.

  I don’t think it took more than three day
s, and Jake drove over a couple of times in his Buick Riviera (what else would he drive?) and took us down the pub. All in all, such a good time was had by all that I bought everyone a pair of red plastic goggles in a discount toy store and they became the sessions’ Order of Merit. Of the four tracks cut, I particularly liked the EP’s title song, ‘Screwed Up’, and the archly punk ‘Let’s Loot the Supermarket Again Like We Did Last Summer’. The greatest pleasure of the whole episode was being produced by Larry Wallis. He did the diametric reverse of everyone else I’d ever worked with, and treated my weird singing as absolutely acceptable. He didn’t try to force me into some familiar, but – for me – highly contorted, rock & roll mould. It was something that should have happened years before, but I guess that an idea before its time has to learn to wait.

  Waiting, however, turned out not to be on the cards in this halcyon time. Shortly after completing the Stiff EP, I received a phone call from an outfit called Logo Records.

  ‘We’ve just acquired the Transatlantic catalogue, and we’re re-releasing two of your old records.’

  ‘You’re kidding me.’

  ‘We wondered if you’d be willing to help promote them.’

  ‘I’d rather make a new one.’ Pause.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘Listen, Mick, can we get back to you?’

  I assumed I’d heard the last of that, but forty-eight hours later the phone rang again. ‘We’d very much like to make an album with you, if we can work out a budget.’

  The budget wasn’t great, but in a matter of weeks we were back in Pathway. The interval between completing the work for Stiff and commencing the Logo album – eventually endowed with the cryptic title Vampires Stole My Lunch Money – was so short that it almost seemed to be two phases of the same project, with only a protracted coffee-break in between. The line-up was essentially the same, except that Paul Rudolph was out of the picture – I think he had gone back to Canada – and Larry and Andy were now sharing the bass and guitar chores, while Al Powell again played drums.

  With the initial tracks down, some guests came in to add a little icing to the cake. Most significantly, Wilko on guitar and Sonja Kristina and Chrissie Hynde to do back-up vocals. Since we’d last seen her, Sonja had enjoyed a moderate degree of success with a progressive pop band called Curved Air. Later she would marry Stewart Copeland, the drummer with the Police, only to lose him to an African safari fling with model Lauren Hutton. Chrissie, on the other hand, was still a star who’d yet to crest the horizon. After hanging out with the Chelsea punks for a while, she’d graduated to the Grove, where she wound up crashing at the basement home of my estranged (but still undivorced) wife Joy in Ledbury Road. As previously mentioned, Chrissie had done some writing for NME, but her heart was far from being in journalism. She wanted to create her own music, and with the energy and determination of an American in a strange land, she beat her head against the boys’ club bastions that still largely surrounded even punk rock. Along the way, she engaged in just about any project that would place her on a stage or in a recording studio, from an hilariously offensive single under the nom de guerre the Moors Murders, to strange and girlish Brill Building parodies with Judy Nylon and Patti Paladin, before she formed the Pretenders and carved her own influential niche in rock history.

  My contact with Chrissie and her ambitions mainly involved listening to her play guitar and sing each time I visited Joy’s – relations between the two of us being at least reasonably cordial now that she had dropped Jamie Mandelkau and become the tea-making, drug-dispensing den-mother to a whole coterie of local rockers. Sometimes Chrissie and I would goof around singing Johnny Cash songs in dubious harmony, but at others she’d play her own compositions. At the time, they struck me as strange and compelling, and her devil-may-care disregard for the accepted conventions of rhyme patterns and standard verse structures was stunning. Although they sounded nothing like her, the only people I could think of who worked in this way were Syd Barrett, Took and, now and then, Neil Young. Nick Lowe, on the other hand, had dismissed the same songs as formless and unworkable, but since, within a year, they would constitute the string of hits like ‘Brass in Pocket’ that would follow her first chart success with Ray Davies’ ‘Stop Your Sobbing’, I guess the master’s instincts for pure pop failed him in her case.

  Except for those fortunate bands with massive corporate bucks behind them, every record becomes a race against time and the money running out, and this was doubly if not trebly so with Vampires. Working on a low budget can produce crippling frustrations, but, at the same time, introduce all kinds of entertaining factors. Primarily it forces all concerned to focus on the mission, rather than wasting time shooting pool, playing pinball or attempting to write entirely new songs from the ground up, right there in the studio. We went back into Pathway prepped and ready to burn like Joan of Arc. I admit we went down the pub on a fairly regular basis – to do otherwise would have caused mutiny in the ranks – but cocaine and whisky were still verboten.

  Having negotiated a dusk-to-dawn fiscal sweetheart of a deal with engineer Chas Heatherington, we’d gone back to long all-night sessions. As producer, Larry had decided that we would abandon the cut-ups, blackouts and all the Mothers of Invention tricks of yesteryear, and would create an album of properly crafted, well-produced songs, and I bowed to his decision even though I missed the Zappa tricks. That’s why you recruit a producer in the first place. You trust his judgement. Again we rented electronic outboard boxes from an obliging Pink Floyd sound guy to obtain the maximum magic for our money. We even had some cheap and sneaky laughs when we discovered that, when not in use, the echo plates clearly picked up all conversation in the TV room and relayed it to the control booth. Hilarity knew no bounds the night we eavesdropped on drugged girlfriends talking about the boys, although keyholing doesn’t come without a few unwanted insights.

  The negative side of a low budget is that you can only do so much, and the moment comes when you have to stop and turn in your efforts as product. I was very aware that we’d spent most of our money on five or six of our favourite tracks, while the remainder had been banged down as little more than jamming, art-school R&B, with only a thin coat of metalflake. Despite this perceived defect, critic Ira A. Robbins wrote:

  Released at the height of the punk wave but springing from a much deeper creative well, Vampires Stole My Lunch Money is Farren’s solo masterpiece . . . he dishes out a harrowingly honest collection of songs about drinking, dissolution, depression and desperation. About as powerful as rock gets, this nakedly painful LP is not recommended to sissies, born-again Christians and prohibitionists.

  After the completion of the record, I didn’t exactly feel this way. I fretted about the cheaply finished filler. Larry also had a bad bout of pre-release jitters, and Lemmy further undermined my confidence in the work by pointing out – well after the fact – that not only could I have used Motorhead as a backing band, but I was a fool not to have done so. I know a wind-up when I meet one, and this was a wind-up, but I didn’t have time to get depressed. I had to transform the recording ensemble into a live band – the one-time-only Good Guys – and hit the trail of gigs that would lead to the already described night of fabulousness at Dingwall’s. In the middle of these endeavours, to add an historic and quite surreal element from the far external, Elvis Presley breathed his last on the toilet at Graceland.

  The Night Elvis Died

  Larry Wallis had temporarily moved out on his girlfriend Shirley and was living in a place called the Church, which was exactly that. An old church, or, at the very least, a chapel; Methodist, I think, abandoned and deconsecrated, and then taken over – either officially or unofficially – by a bunch of long-haired marginals and turned into a kind of bickering squatter commune. To this day, I’ve never been sure exactly where the Church was located. Innate snobbery has always prevented me from truly understanding the geography of South London. Larry occupied what had previously be
en the Church’s church hall, a structure of institutional wooden walls and a tin roof, which had once housed whist drives, jumble sales, Sunday-school classes, and had doubtless reverberated regularly to the sound of ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ to the accompaniment of a wheezing pedal-harmonium. A small stage that had borne its share of nativity plays and harvest-festival pageants added, in the new Wallis incarnation, a touch of split-level theatrical exotica, while the crossbeams supporting the roof offered a certain suspension potential, had ropes and pulleys ever been introduced.

  The place must have been a monster to heat in the winter, and if memory serves, heating was one of the major causes of the constant bickering. At this moment in the narration, however, it was benign August, so no thermal worries, although inclemency would play a crucial part in what was to come. After visiting the off-licence, we went to work with a couple of six-packs and a half-bottle of Scotch, in addition to the ever-present bong to see us through. The task at hand was the preparation of demos for Vampires Stole My Lunch Money. When Larry decamped to the Church, he took his Sony quarter-inch four-track, his mixing board, his drum machine and the Auratone mini-speakers that were then all the rage, and of which he was inordinately proud. After spending a couple of weeks wiring together the set-up, he was living in his own home studio. Although common enough today, back then home studios were unknown, except among big-arse wealthy rock stars, but Larry had a way with technology.

  As always, at any home of Larry’s, the TV was on, but as the avowed aim was to write a handful of great pop songs, the sound was down. I think the tune we were working on was ‘Half Price Drinks’, yet another lament of the bar-room floozie. Thematically a happy-hour close-relative of the country standard ‘Honky Tonk Angels’, but a relentless mid-tempo four-four shlang instead of a country twang made it pure rock ’n’ roll. We’d hoped to sell it to Marianne Faithfull, but since she didn’t want it, we cut it ourselves. Partway through tracking the demo, the skies opened in a spectacular summer thunderstorm, complete with blue-black anvil clouds and forked lightning against a night sky.