Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore

by Parkin, Lance

  The most serious trouble he had got into was when he published a poem in Embryo #1, written by his friend Ian Fleming, that used the word ‘motherfuckers’. Moore was hauled over the coals by the headmaster, H.J.C. Oliver, and promised to apologise in the next issue. Instead he handed over the editorial to Fleming, allowing a repeat of his offence:

  Also, in passing, a few words about some people’s objections to the use of certain streetwords in certain poems. (It’s a pity that all the ‘NAUGHTY’ poems were by the same naughty author.) All, except in one case, (‘Motherfuckers’, in ‘When they see us coming’, which was used partly to complete the poem’s contrasts, & partly because the word’s meaning(s) were used in context with the rest of the poem) were used, not to shock anyone, not to give anyone a cheap thrill, not deliberately, but simply because they were written down as part of the poem, as the poem was formulated, i.e. they were in perfect context.

  THE REAL OBSCENITY GOES ON ALL AROUND US, UNDER MANY DIFFERENT NAMES.

  (nice rhetoric, man, nice …)

  Embryo was banned, which only increased its notoriety and sales. Despite this, Moore remained in good enough standing with the school that when he was seventeen and the art department was featured in the local paper, he was the pupil chosen to appear in the photo. Moore had begun growing his hair, but it was shaggy at this stage, rather than shoulder-length. It seems clear that the school and Moore had found ways to cope with him being an artistically minded round peg in a square hole.

  It was a second grand egalitarian social engineering project that would devastate Alan Moore and his family, starting in 1965 when Northampton – first settled in the Neolithic – was designated as a New Town.

  Britain faced a housing crisis. Millions of Britons still lived in Victorian conditions – their houses were a hundred years old and many were now badly dilapidated. The Second World War had seen the Luftwaffe damage or destroy much of the housing stock, particularly in the cities; after the war, there had been a population boom. The British government set plans in motion to create large towns laid out with cars in mind, and with modern industrial plants, to ease pressure on the largest cities. This construction would be overseen by powerful development corporations. Northampton was part of the ‘third wave’ of such towns along with Central Lancashire, Milton Keynes, Peterborough, Telford and Warrington. Northampton is about sixty-five miles from central London, so was only about an hour away – in theory at least – by rail or via the brand new M1 motorway. The new arrivals were mainly from London, and tended to be young, aspirational working-class families.

  In some cases, like Milton Keynes, the New Towns were essentially entirely new settlements (they were built on the sites of tiny villages). Northampton, however, had an existing population of 100,000 in 1961. That would rise to 130,000 in 1971, with the target of a population of 230,000 by 1981. New Town status brought a great deal of government money, some of which would be used to replace the Victorian slums now considered unfit for human habitation, and on 3 July 1967, Northampton County Borough Council passed the first of a series of resolutions that designated parts of Northampton as ‘clearance areas’. The Northampton Development Corporation began operating in 1968, opening new tower blocks in the Eastern District in 1970 and buying up private property with compulsory purchase orders. Most residents, though, were council tenants and simply received a letter saying they were to be relocated. Whole streets were bulldozed.

  The Unprivileged ends with a striking image of the abandoned terraced streets; the people had gone, but left what possessions they had behind, including furniture, family photographs and even a bird in its cage. For countless people in Britain, this was a time of great social mobility and unparalleled opportunity, but according to Seabrook such euphoria did not last long:

  The great clearances of the fifties and sixties were like migrations – people couldn’t get out quick enough; you can’t blame them, because the conditions into which they were moving were so much better – it is only when all the new things fell apart in their hands that people began to think twice about the meaning of change. There was in the seventies a plan for a ring road in Northampton that would have demolished hundreds of houses which people were proud of, as their ‘little palaces’ – slum clearance struck at people’s contentment with their lot. Redevelopment principally served the building, concrete and steel industries before it served the people who were being moved.

  For the Moores, it was a catastrophic disruption. When he was seventeen, Alan Moore’s family was relocated to Abington, formerly a prosperous part of Northampton. His eighty-four-year-old grandmother Clara died within six months. The council moved Moore’s other grandmother, Minnie, from the house in Green Street where she had lived all her life to an old people’s home and she died within three months. Moore has no doubt what caused their deaths: ‘Being moved from the place where you got your roots was enough to kill most of those people … the place where I’d grown up was more or less completely destroyed. It wasn’t that they put anything better there; it was just that they were able to make more money out of it without all those bothersome people.’

  Alan Moore was expelled from Northampton School for Boys two weeks after the death of his grandmother Clara. When asked about this in 1990, Moore would only say it was ‘for various reasons’; subsequently, one interviewer reported the offence had been ‘wearing a green woolly hat to school’, a remark Moore doesn’t remember making and suspects ‘might have been a facetious remark or it may even have been misheard, I’m not sure’. He first revealed the truth in The Birth Caul (1995): he was expelled for dealing acid. By the time he spoke to the BBC in 2008, though, it had become an anecdote for Moore the raconteur: ‘At the age of 17 I became one of the world’s most inept LSD dealers. The problem with being an LSD dealer, if you’re sampling your own product, is your view of reality will probably become horribly distorted … And you may believe you have supernatural powers and you are completely immune to any form of retaliation and prosecution, which is not the case.’ The Observer later reported that he had been taken to the headmaster’s office and confronted by a detective constable from the local drugs squad. Moore wasn’t charged or fined: ‘The expulsion was technically groundless. I was searched, but there was absolutely nothing on me and the only thing that they had was the hearsay evidence of a number of my schoolfriends who had named me – we were young then and easily intimidated by the police – and that wasn’t conclusive proof. I was expelled from school, but there were no charges brought. I have a clean record.’

  Moore’s initial reluctance to spell out why he was expelled was out of respect for his parents. It was only after their deaths that he started referring to his drug dealing in interviews. At the time, he had initially told them he’d been framed, but when he later admitted the truth, they were (unsurprisingly) very upset and disappointed. As Moore would say in 1987, ‘it must be terribly difficult being my parents’.

  Given Moore’s countercultural leanings, it would have been odder if he hadn’t tried LSD. Moore glosses his taking acid at the time as ‘purely for ideological reasons, believe it or not’, based on reading Timothy Leary’s essay The Politics of Ecstasy, which argued that people taking LSD were visionaries like the shamans of tradition, tasked with leading others out of the darkness. By this point, Leary was advocating the case that psychedelic experiences unlocked the next stage of human evolution, and so logically the more people who had LSD trips, the more likely it was that society could become more peaceful, harmonious and generous.

  Moore had first tried the drug on 12 September 1970, a couple of months before his seventeenth birthday, at a free open-air concert in Hyde Park. It was a wet Saturday afternoon, but the music was pure Californian psychedelic rock. Stoneground opened, followed by Lambert and Nutteycombe, Michael Chapman, General Wastemoreland, and Wavy Gravy. John Sebastian played ‘Johnny B Goode’. Even The Animals, originally from Newcastle upon Tyne, had by this time moved to San Francisco – lead
singer Eric Burdon celebrated his return to the UK by splitting his trousers during a performance of ‘Paint It Black’. Blues-rock band Canned Heat were the headliners. Moore bought some large purple pills from ‘some kind of shifty-looking dope dealer straight out of a Gilbert Shelton cartoon’ and had his first acid trip to the soundtrack of ‘Future Blues’, ‘Let’s Work Together’ and ‘Refried Hockey Boogie’. In the year between this event and his expulsion, Moore went on more than fifty acid trips – ‘LSD was an incredible experience. Not that I’m recommending it for anybody else, but it hammered home to me that reality was not a fixed thing.’

  Taking LSD may have given Moore insight into new realms of the imagination, but it was also directly responsible for dumping him out of school in the winter of 1971. He faced the problem that while his consciousness may have expanded, ‘I found that my horizons had rapidly contracted. The headmaster who had dealt with my expulsion had, I think, taken me rather personally. He had written to all of the colleges and schools that I might have thought of applying to and told them that they should under no circumstances accept me as a pupil, because this would be a corrupting influence upon the morals of the other students. I believe that he did at one point in the letter refer to me as “sociopathic”, which I do think was rather harsh.’ Moore has, however, elsewhere described his younger self using exactly that word: ‘I did decide to get revenge. I decided that there would be some way in which I could get my own back for this upon everybody that had annoyed me. I was a monster! … Very antisocial. Sociopathic.’ He concluded that those in authority were out to get him – an idea that’s stuck with him throughout his life.

  Moore continued to live with his parents on Norman Road in Abington. He soon discovered that having ‘the antimatter equivalent of references’ meant he would not be going to Northampton Arts School, though he did make one attempt to get a job where his artistic skills would be appreciated:

  I noticed that there was an advert for ‘cartoonist wanted’, somebody to draw advertising … and they asked as a trial ‘give us something that would work for a pet shop’ and I did this – in retrospect – quite scary dog, and I’d used Letratone on it to show that I was au fait with sophisticated shading techniques. It was rejected of course. What they actually wanted was a smiley picture of a puppy, which I could have done, but I’d thought they wanted to see what a brilliant artist I am. No, they actually wanted to see you could follow a brief intelligently, which I was incapable of doing. So, with that, I gave up. That’s when I decided to go down to the labour exchange and take whatever was available.

  Moore understood what he was in for: his father, grandfather and great-grandfather had all been labourers. The first job he took was in the Co-op skinning yard on Bedford Road. He was paid £6 a week to cut up sheep that had been soaking overnight in vats of water and their own bodily fluids. It was a place ‘where men with hands bright blue from caustic dye trade nigger jokes’. He was there for two months before being sacked for smoking cannabis in the tea room. He then worked as a cleaner in the fifty-seven-bedroom Grand Hotel on Gold Street (now the Travelodge Northampton Central), and later he worked in a W.H. Smith’s warehouse packing books, magazines and, of course, comics.

  When asked about these early jobs, Moore has made the same joke on more than one occasion: ‘I tend to think of it as a long downward progression that ends as a comics writer.’

  ‘When you’re at that stage of your career there is a sort of a terror that becomes associated with actually sending your first piece of work in because I think that the reasoning that’s going through your head – if you can call it reasoning – is that if I send this in and it gets rejected, I won’t even have the dream that I could’ve been a great writer or artist. Better to never send it in and never have that rejection so I’ll always have the dream.’

  Alan Moore, Vworp Vworp #3 (2013)

  The end of Moore’s 2011 book The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 1969 skips from the aftermath of a sunny, psychedelic pop festival to an epilogue set ‘eight years later’ in a black-and-white basement punk club. It’s a transition that sums up Moore’s feelings towards and experience of the seventies, a decade that started at the peak of the countercultural idealism that is close to his heart but ended with wholesale rejection and open hostility towards it. The time jump also matches a relatively uncharted period of Moore’s life. Having been expelled from school and consigned to the first in a series of menial jobs, in late 1971, his professional creative career began only with the publication of two illustrations for the New Musical Express in October and November 1978, and his first published work in mainstream comics did not appear until the summer of 1980, in Doctor Who Weekly and 2000AD. He’s summed up what happened in between by saying, ‘My occupation from the time I left school was in a series of thoroughly miserable jobs that I wasn’t interested in at all … I hadn’t got any ambitions other than a vague ambition to make my living by writing or drawing or by something which I enjoyed doing. Since those sorts of jobs weren’t on offer I didn’t really have any clear idea of how to go about getting one, or even if I was good enough to get one.’ His published work in the period adds up to less than two dozen pages of material for local zines and community magazines, none of which were paying jobs.

  After Moore was expelled from school, almost all of his friends cut ties with him. He puts this down to their squeamishness over the jobs he was forced to take, but it’s clear that the long-haired, sullen eighteen year old who was ‘not quite in my right mind, and believed I had supernatural powers’ was a very different creature from the shaggy, drug-free sixteen-year-old Moore. Many in his circle of friends took drugs, but those who stayed on at school must have been inclined to see Alan as an example of the terrible fate awaiting them if they didn’t hunker down to work on their A-levels.

  Moore did however have an oasis of continuity: the Northampton Arts Lab. About a year earlier, he had been a member of a poetry group that teamed up with the Arts Lab to run an event at the Racehorse Inn (it took place on 16 December 1970 and was advertised in Embryo #2). Soon after that, the group had merged with the Arts Lab, and from #3 (February 1971) onwards, Embryo was billed as a Northampton Arts Lab publication. This would grant Moore a social life and an outlet for his creative energies over the next few years. As he said, ‘the Arts Lab was what I was living for to a degree … because, all right, I was kind of trapped in terribly miserable circumstances with no obvious way out. In the evenings I could write something that I was pleased with and then a couple of weeks later there’d be a poetry reading – I could go along and read it; maybe do some work with some musicians reading the poems to music … And that felt like that was taking me somewhere.’

  Arts Labs had sprung up across the country, following the lead of Jim Haynes, co-founder of the hippie magazine International Times. Haynes had known John Lennon and Yoko Ono before they knew each other, as well as Germaine Greer and a very young David Bowie. In September 1967, he reopened an old cinema on Drury Lane as a rehearsal room, exhibition space and hangout. The venue had quickly become a hub for London’s counterculture, and by 1969 there were more than fifty Arts Labs in towns around England. Each had its own flavour – the Brighton Combination, led by the playwright Noel Greig, for example, produced work that concentrated on gay liberation themes – but outside the Drury Lane original, the real powerhouse was Birmingham, which put on concerts of classical and rock music, made films and ran an arthouse cinema, as well as publishing numerous magazines and posters. Alumni of the Birmingham Arts Lab would go on to be early players in the punk music scene, as well as key figures in alternative comedy. They also boasted a particularly strong line of comics artists and cartoonists, including the vicious political cartoonist Steve Bell, the less vicious Suzy Varty, British underground comix mainstay Hunt Emerson and the graphic novelists Bryan Talbot and Kevin O’Neill.

  In September 1969, fresh from a top-five hit with ‘Space Oddity’, David Bowie told the magazi
ne Melody Maker:

  I run an Arts Lab which is my chief occupation. It’s in Beckenham and I think it’s the best in the country. There isn’t one pseud involved. All the people are real – like labourers or bank clerks. It started out as a folk club. Arts Labs generally have such a bad reputation as pseud places. There’s a lot of talent in the green belt and there is a load of tripe in Drury Lane. I think the Arts Lab movement is extremely important and should take over from the youth club concept as a social service … We started our Lab a few months ago with poets and artists who just came along. It’s got bigger and bigger and now we have our own light show and sculptures, etc. And I never knew there were so many sitar players in Beckenham.

  It’s a quote that sums up a lot of the appeal and philosophy of the movement. Music journalist Dave Thompson, who has written books about Bowie including Moonage Daydream and Hello Spaceboy: The Rebirth of David Bowie, says:

  The beauty of the Arts Labs was that they truly were open to all, a precursor in many ways to punk rock – or the equivalent of an open mic night in Los Angeles, except they encompassed all the arts, and not just music. The guiding principle was that all art was valid; the organisers, at least, regarded the ‘doing’ to be of far greater value than the actual accomplishment. There was no ‘quality control’ button – if someone claimed to be an artist, a performer, a sculptor, an orator, then that was what they were, and some phenomenal talents emerged from the scene …

  A lot of Arts Labs were in pubs (Bowie’s was at the Three Tuns), often utilising the same space that was a folk club a few years earlier; a blues club before that; and would become a disco a few years hence. Others used church halls, scout huts, any place where a decent space was available for a once-a-week rental, and a stage of some sort could be erected.