by Mick Farren
The other tenants were solitary, male and Irish to a man. Labourers who had taken the Dublin ferry in search of a better hourly rate working on the post-war reconstruction of Greater London. The men in the Chinaman’s house weren’t the wild boys who drank and sang and fought in the local pubs on a Friday and Saturday night. These were lonely sub-social individuals, far from family and friends, focused on little but the wage packet, sending it home or saving for something better, or maybe just plain lost.
One corner of a strip of wallpaper, an equilateral triangle some eighteen inches on each side, was held up by a drawing pin. Whatever paste had originally kept it in place had long since decomposed and turned to dust. The wallpaper might once have been an institutional shade of dull pink, but now, like everything else in my room that didn’t actually have a thin coat of grease or grime, it had faded to an approximation of the colour of dust. In mitigation the room was relatively large, with a high ceiling still showing the paint-eroded ruins of a plaster rose. It had probably been the rear area of the drawing room, when originally a middle-class, Victorian, one-family home. It was also almost devoid of furniture. A straight-backed chair, a small table, a wardrobe that I would destroy directly I consolidated my position as the one aberrant tenant. If nothing else, I had space to pace and bemoan my lot.
My new home may have been inversely gothic in its drab squalor, but drab and squalid were pretty much the way of West London in those distant days. Outside was the Colin MacInnes world of uneasy coexistence between the white working class and newly arrived West Indians; a lot less colourful than those who never saw it would have us believe. The lights may have been on Piccadilly and the West End undergoing its Swinging London facelift, but, just a few tube stations out, the city was the monochrome of an Ealing comedy, brown on grey, highlighted in sepia, with maybe the odd yellow-painted front door, and of course convoys of red double-decker buses, but mainly dented dustbins and black, upright taxis. Even the garbage was dull, the oily black and white of newspaper-wrapped fish and chips. The garish styrofoam professionalism of American fast food had yet to arrive, and all that remained was the hardly exotic frontage of the odd Wimpy Bar or Golden Egg. About the only real indication that the times might actually be a’changing was the new look in Sunday-supplement advertising: billboards of David Bailey Beefeaters urging one to Drinka Pinta Milka Day, and photo-noir reminders by a guy who looked like Frank Sinatra that you were never alone with a Strand.
Sunday-supplement advertising, or, at least, Sunday-supplement graphic design, had been my masterplan maybe eighteen months earlier. At least it was the aim I dutifully recited when asked. Yes, I was going to rise to the affluent paradise of pink shirts, black knitted ties, suits from the younger, more dashing end of Savile Row, a black Volvo sports and a James Bond apartment. David Ogilvy, Hugh Hefner and Ian Fleming had all contributed to a deception, an illusion and eventually a lie that I’d maintained throughout my four years of art school. Except that, with each succeeding year, it had become harder and harder to remain convinced. A part of that fantasy had been chipped away in Dealey Plaza when they’d caught Jack Kennedy in triangulated sniper fire. (And please don’t irritate me with any lone gunman crap. We know by now pretty much what went down, don’t we? All that’s lacking are a few of the lesser details and the necessary public admission.) JFK had been the apex of that specific daydream. The handsome young president, with the beautiful wife and the beautiful children, our president, who had faced Nikita Khrushchev across the unthinkable abyss and then stepped back from the brink of nuclear holocaust at the eleventh hour, just when us kids were close to accepting we all had only a day or so to live before being flash-fried to a thermonuclear crisp. The old men had ordered him cut down in his prime and, ever after, faith in the yellow brick road to material success had been much less easy.
Despite this, for a long time I continued to pay lip service to a conventional ambition. Even when I grew my hair, cleaved to the bohemian and began to dress in a manner that one life-drawing instructor referred to as ‘a sociopathic Fidel Castro’, I still fostered the illusion that the corporate straight and narrow was my goal. It kept the grown-ups quiet. A phase, they told themselves, and I let them believe it. The truth was that I’d only ever had two true ambitions in life. One was to be the first man on the moon, but that died around the time that Sputnik went into bleeping orbit around the Earth, and I realised that I was born too late. Immediately after that I switched my desires to Elvis Presley. Many years later, in New York City, a psychiatrist would ask me, ‘So you wanted to have sex with Elvis Presley?’
A disillusionment with psychiatry was already setting in, but this was idiocy. ‘No (you damned fool), I wanted to be Elvis Presley.’
That ambition would be maintained until 1977, when the big, bloated Elvis croaked on the Graceland toilet, irrefutably proving that not even Elvis could be Elvis. Does a pattern start to emerge? A tangible need to make a mark, to be adored? To beat death and become immortal? Hardly a target orientation congruent with a career in advertising, where all is sublimated to the product. I didn’t realise until years later, but I was the only product I wanted to promote.
In the House of the Chinese Landlord I moved to the window. The landlord had long ago decided curtains were too good for tenants, and my isolation was protected from the eyes of overlooking buildings only by a sheet of greaseproof paper, turned with age to the colour and consistency of parchment. Clearly the landlord considered we had no need to see out. I scraped the paper experimentally with the nail of my right index finger. It flaked like the wrapping of a pharaoh’s cadaver, so I picked a hole about the size of a postcard and peered out into a dank, semi-drizzle of a London winter evening. Lighted windows, vertical rectangles, the yellow of electric bulbs and the electric blue-grey of black-and-white TV sets; outside was not only Colin MacInnes’ Ladbroke Grove, but also, in a wider sense, and to paraphrase Bono, outside was England. In 1963/4 we were about a year and some months into the fall of the thirteen-year Conservative government, courtesy of John Profumo, Stephen Ward, Mandy Rice-Davies and Christine Keeler. The venerable and aloof Harold Macmillan, of the Fifties economic, you’ve-never-had-it-so-good boom, had resigned, and the stage was set for the ascension to Prime Minister of Harold Wilson in his Gannex raincoat.
The Profumo scandal had also blown the lid off a particular stratum of London prostitutes operating exactly in this neighbourhood. The News of the World enjoyed a lip-licking field day with night-shadow women like Ronna Ricardo, and black hustlers like Lucky Gordon. Notting Hill was portrayed as a sink of commercial perversion. With singular irony, the self-same Conservative government had commissioned the Wolfenden Report on national sexual morality. While recommending the legalisation of homosexual acts between consenting adults, the report had also created the Street Offences Act, which effectively drove the whores from the pavements of Soho and Bayswater and into damp Victorian basements, gas-fire emporia of equally Victorian accessorised sex, where naked accountants and insurance salesmen knelt before corsets and boots, canes and riding crops. Instead of soliciting passing males, the hookers of London remained out of sight, if not out of mind, advertising their services on discreetly euphemistic postcards in the windows of local newsagents. ‘French Lessons’, ‘Large Chest for Sale’, ‘Stocks and Bonds’, ‘Remedial Discipline by Stern Governess’ – the oblique side of obvious, with a local phone number.
Only a complete inability to come up with a substitute for the old morality allowed an exhausted hypocrisy to maintain its grip. How could a young man like myself aspire to any status quo when the status quo was fragmenting into disfunctionality? Paradox abounded. An elderly gent wrote to Penthouse bemoaning that, in the wake of Courrèges, Mary Quant and The Avengers, young women now boldly walked abroad in a style of costume that he had formerly paid professionals to model for him while he guiltily masturbated. His illicit thrill was no longer thrilling in the free light of day, and his former sex life was shot to shit in
the face of now and happening fashion.
The fall of governments and the crash of ethics were producing a myriad of reverberations. Somewhere beyond the window the Beatles existed, as did the Rolling Stones. A band called the High Numbers were thinking of changing their name to the Who. Two albums worth of Bob Dylan had made their way across the Atlantic, and John Coltrane had revolutionised bebop by recording Giant Steps. Joe Orton and Tom Stoppard were changing the course of the London theatre, Rudolph Nureyev was making ballet hip, and even the iconography of advertising, my route of least resistance and career choice of last resort, had adopted a wholly different form. The new pop art of Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol used the Campbell’s soup can, and Marilyn Monroe, in a context that – to me and my art-school mates – was, at the very least, non-specifically subversive. This was the carnival with which I wanted to run away, but so far I had failed even to find the fairground.
If I claimed that only external events, trends and even fundamental changes caused my disillusionment with the fine rewards of Sixties capitalism, I’d be lying through my teeth. A nightmare childhood and an eleven-plus, grammar-school education, in a day-release penal colony, with a headmaster who knew instinctively that Eddie Cochran’s big Gretsch guitar was the instrument of Lucifer, had left me with a lorry-load of baggage that made the straight-and-narrow tricky to navigate. I have resolved, in this book, not to delve into my childhood except where absolutely necessary. In recent years I’ve seen too many inadequates on Oprah looking for excuses and absolution in a lack of nurture, and attempting to blame their psychosis, stupidity or criminal self-obsession on parental deprivation or abuse. I can’t comfortably cop a plea. That I had free-fallen out of higher learning, and finished up in this first-floor slum bedsit, was no one’s fault but my own. This is not to ignore the fact, however, that I spent a good deal of my life being exceedingly angry.
Suffice to say that I was angry from the get go. Too angry for a life selling Sure deodorant and Smith’s crisps. Maybe too angry even to be saved by full sensory deprivation and back-up drugs. Maybe too angry to do anything but strap dynamite all over my body and detonate out of this mortal coil in a crowded theatre or tube-train carriage, taking with me as many of the sons-of-bitches as I could. Alternatively, I could climb to the top of a tall building with a high-powered rifle and start randomly sniping. This anger also came with its own insoluble chicken-and-egg equation. I had been angry for as long as, if not longer than, I could remember. I had no recollection of a time when I wasn’t angry. No single event could in any way qualify as the Great Primal Piss-Off. From the age of three to the age of fifteen I had engaged in violent conflict with my wicked stepfather, but I seemed to recall I’d been angry even before that combat commenced. Okay, so delving deeper, the Nazis had blown my father out of the sky over Cologne and had even, according to legend, attempted to drop bombs on Baby Me. I was convinced, however, that neither of these represented the true roots of my rage. I was certain the fury came first, and then went looking for acceptable targets, rather than the more normal process of objects, individuals, ideas and situations arousing my fury. I was constantly looking for trouble and hoping I’d come to the right place.
Perhaps that was why I had wound up in the House of the Chinese Landlord, a setting in which self-destructive rage might fester. Even back then, I was aware that self-destruction could go hand-in-hand with unwarranted self-aggrandisement, the last resort of the previously unnoticed. Here I am! Look at me, the most wretched of the Earth! Notice me or I’ll do something grandiosely violent. Even striving to be last among the worst was just another way of begging for attention. The only factor stopping me becoming a human bomb, a serial killer or curling into a Kafkaesque foetal ball and hoping that I’d wake up a cockroach was that I didn’t seem to be alone.
In the new culture that had been gaining momentum since the mid-Fifties, symptoms abounded of a common and similar rage. The blood, gore and hilariously twisted plot lines of EC horror comics came from roots I instantly recognised. Why else had Dr Frederick Wertham and the US Congress driven them out of business? Likewise, in the cinema, James Dean and Marlon Brando glowered with a similar, self-righteously fuck-you attitude. ‘What are you rebelling against, Johnny?’ ‘Whaddaya got?’ Jack Kerouac wrote with a familiar frenetic compulsion and, at the other end of the rainbow, Mad magazine’s ‘humour in a jugular vein’ tilted at exactly the same windmills at which I longed to lunge a lance.
The mother-lode of rage, though, seemed to have firmly lodged itself in rock & roll. The pre-army Elvis wasn’t only handsome, overtly sexual and blessed with the Voice of God, he was also sneeringly mad as hell and unwilling to take it. Through the duration of ‘Be Bop A Lula’ and a dozen other deceptively innocuous tunes, Gene Vincent positively vibrated with malcontent frustration. Even the Beatles, no matter how moptop lovable the Daily Mirror might pretend they were, included the baleful myopic stare of the angry young Lennon.
The only problem was that all of those on my list of supposed kindred spirits not only had skills and access to a medium through which they could channel their anger, but were finding fame and fortune into the bargain. My own attempts at an angry creativity had been notably low-yield. I had yet to try writing like Kerouac, but I had furiously slashed and splashed paint on canvas, but then sensed that to achieve any success in painting one eventually had to play the gallery game, and that seemed scarcely possible in my current mindset. Without the social/commercial skills of a Peter Blake or a David Hockney, who was currently swanning around in a gold lamé jacket proclaiming his genius, the path of painting could lead only to Vincent Van Gogh and penniless death, certifiably insane with only one ear. I had sung with my first garage bands, succeeding in frightening not only any potential audience, but also some of my band mates. The general consensus seemed to be that I ‘couldn’t fucking sing’, but I wouldn’t let that deter me. The signs were marginally in my favour. If Bob Dylan could grab the world’s attention with his bizarre and grating imitation of Woody Guthrie, surely I could continue to hope?
Thus far, my only really successful channelling of anger had been in a relentless guerrilla warfare against any authority figure that presented itself. Teachers, police constables, bus inspectors, park attendants – all received the bad vibes of this baby Bolshevik and, in this, I came back full circle to the problem of self-destruction. Short of becoming a professional criminal, which I didn’t see happening – lacking as I did any flair for the covert and the necessary material motivation – I knew that the automatic challenging of authority was essentially a no-win situation. As Bobby Fuller would point out a couple of years later, when you fought the law, the law inevitably won.
I moved to the bed and gingerly sat down, relieved to find that no phalanx of insects immediately rushed me. I took a Rothmans from a packet of ten and lit one. I’d smoked king-size Rothmans since I was thirteen. As the smoke drifted up into the silent air of the Chinese Landlord’s room, I realised that I was making my first mark and maybe my first modification. Like a cat marking its territory, the smell of my fresh cigarette smoke was invading the room. As I dragged on the fag, I realised it was hardly the time to dwell on the wretched pass to which life had brought me. If I didn’t find a distraction, the odds were on the room forcing me into a state of severe depression, and that was a victory I couldn’t concede so early in the game. I stood up. With no television, no radio and my blue-and-white Philips record player still needing to be picked up from someone else’s flat, plus a total disinclination to unpack my stuff or otherwise make myself any more at home, the logical course appeared to be to go down the pub. Maybe the House of the Chinese Landlord would look different with three or four pints inside me.
The Sphere of Alex Stowell
After approximately a week and a half in the House of the Chinese Landlord, I came to the conclusion that a human being could ultimately adjust to just about anything. An optimistic social worker might have said I was accepting the situation
for what it was, as a prelude to turning my life around. Needless to say, I didn’t see it like that. As far as I was concerned, I was questing into an indefinable unknown, without a road map and maybe without a paddle. It was also possible that the room was starting to adapt to me. The sinister presence had fallen back as I consolidated my beachhead, progressively invading its evil ambience with my own occupational smells, possessions and influence. In the matter of the bugs, I had thrown caution to the winds and courageously removed the tins of paraffin from under the legs of the bed. The presence of these makeshift devices was simply too depressing to live with. Strangely, nothing happened. No Mongol horde of six-legged bloodsuckers descended like wolves on the fold and, indeed, from that moment on the room never played host to any more insects than might tolerably be expected. In an attempt to make home a little more homely, I had obtained for myself a length of dark-blue fabric and fashioned it into a curtain after scraping away all of the dried and deceased greaseproof paper on the window. Magazines, newspapers and books had started to gather. The cover of William Burroughs’ The Naked Lunch single-handedly helped to put a new perspective on my abode. Although I was hardly living the life of Burroughs’ fictional alter ego William Lee, I could perceive certain points of commonality. Through half-closed eyes and stretching my imagination, I could convince myself that the room might exist somewhere in the labyrinths of Interzone, which gave me some solid fantasy cover into which I could retreat when the need arose. All my life, I had sought refuge in the sanctum of fantasy when stress or boredom grew too oppressive. At a very early age I had perfected the trick of becoming Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future, or Paladin from the TV show Have Gun, Will Travel whenever reality became insupportable, and I made such daydream sanctuary the frequent saviour of my mental health.
