by Mick Farren
I’ve always been a believer in the unexpected breakthrough just when progress has started to prove hopeless. As odd jobs and drifting took on an unhealthy routine, and the revelation for which I looked seemed determined not to reveal itself, I was becoming highly despondent. Then, walking along Westbourne Park Road one day, I discovered a record store where no record store had previously been. And not only a record store, but one with a stock close to revolutionary. No records by Cliff Richard or Cilla Black, no Beatles, not even any by Dylan, the Stones, the Yardbirds or the Animals. All this store appeared to carry was the cutting edge in jazz – John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Gil Evans, Eric Dolphy, McCoy Tyner – and spoken-word albums by Malcolm X, Melvin Van Peebles and Lenny Bruce. Just to make matters more bizarre, the store was closed, even though it was three o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon, clearly indicating that whoever ran or owned the place had little regard for conventional business hours.
I told Alex about it and we scouted the place three more times before we finally discovered it open for business. On that first visit Alex, who must have been in funds, bought Gil Evans’ Into the Hot. I merely chatted with the guys behind the counter. Subsequent visits and chats finally revealed that the strange store was the result of a collaboration between two characters called Michael de Freitas and Alexander Trocchi. I had heard about both of these men previously, and how the two of them might have teamed up in this odd business venture presented a mystery that was unfortunately doomed never to be solved. Trocchi was a Glaswegian writer, with something of a reputation as the Scottish outpost of the beat generation. A couple of years earlier I had read his best-known novel Cain’s Book, and then his earlier work, Young Adam. At the time I was somewhat in awe of Alex Trocchi, he being the first fully fledged avant-garde author I had ever met. For added cachet, he was also a fully fledged heroin addict and dope-fiend buddy of William Burroughs. This was nothing, however, compared to the different kind of awe in which I held Michael de Freitas.
By all accounts, de Freitas was a bad man. The local grapevine identified him as an associate of the slum-lord Peter Rachman, who owned some of the most loathsome, overpriced real estate in Ladbroke Grove and administered his holdings with an iron fist in an iron glove. Rachman had featured in the general media backwash of the Profumo scandal as another of the varied lovers of Mandy Rice-Davies. Michael was reputed to have provided the thumb and maybe a couple of the fingers of Rachman’s iron glove. The eviction service that he ran for Rachman went about its business armed with night sticks and attack dogs. Over the years Michael would change his name from Michael de Freitas to Michael X, and finally to Michael Abdul Malik. He would make a number of power-plays for leadership of London’s black militants, would found the Black House, would be the first individual jailed under the 1966 Race Relations Act and in the end would be hanged for murder in Trinidad. Michael would duck in and out of my life, and in and out of the London counterculture for the next six or seven years, and many of my closest friends (whom I have absolutely no reason to disbelieve) confronted him in situations where he plainly demonstrated that he had an evil streak as wide as Park Lane.
In all fairness, however, I have to say that I never personally encountered Michael as anything but soft-spoken and charming. It’s always possible, of course, that he saw some gleam of potential in me and that I was being worked for some supposed advantage I never knew about. Certainly Michael was a master of working individuals to get what he wanted, and this may have been the story behind his partnership with Trocchi in the record store. The other adventures with him will have to be related when the time comes, but in these initial meetings he seemed nothing but respectful and courteous.
Trocchi never spoke about how the partnership with Michael came about, although he did talk about just about everything else. Trocchi was a tall Scotsman who bore a passing resemblance to Laurence Olivier and had made a name for himself in Paris in the early Fifties when he edited the literary magazine Merlin. He moved in a circle that included Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, Robert Creeley, Eugène Ionesco and Pablo Neruda. By the time I met him, talking was, sadly, pretty much all he did. I have massive reservations as regards examining what might have been, but Alex Trocchi could well have been a great and significant writer, had he not resigned himself to heroin use as a substitute for creativity. By then he was already reduced to bolstering his self-respect by pontificating to young neophytes like myself. That was the difference between him and Burroughs. Where Bill was a writer who was addicted to heroin, Trocchi became an addict who, after an initial flash, never truly got round to writing with any power again. The distinction is a crucial, if cruel, one, and needs to be remembered as the characters in this narrative become increasingly drug-soaked and even start defining themselves by their stimulant of choice.
One of the things Trocchi talked most about was a scheme that he called Project Sigma. The dozens of pages of the Sigma proposal, complete with charts and diagrams, represented the design for an entire new social structure that was highly pluralistic, with legalised drugs, infinite tolerance, open education and everyone minding their own business instead of other people’s – even the abolition of money and brand-new means of exchange. I fell for it hook, line and sinker when, in the initial manifesto, he likened contemporary society to a ‘parasitic organism ultimately suffocating the host it was intended to nurture’. Many of the ideas that Trocchi incorporated into Sigma were identical to the ingredients of the psychedelic philosophical sundae soon to become known as the counterculture.
Trocchi was also a little sensitive about Sigma having been mauled and ridiculed, when he’d first revealed it, by fellow poets and artists like Jeff Nuttall, Spike Hawkins and Michael Horowitz, the ones I tended to think of as the CND Fifties old guard, lovers of jazz and loathers of rock & roll. The British have a tendency to ridicule anyone who actually has a plan. I guess it’s a reflex that protects us against the greater political excesses of the French, but it was also why the nineteenth-century revolution didn’t happen in England as Karl Marx expected. Maybe I was naive, but I went for it, if for no other reason than that someone – anyone – actually had a plan beyond the Victorian economic critiques of Marx and Engels, with a little more fun and prankster flamboyance. Cuba was fun until the hard-scrabble Marxism set in and Che Guevara left town. Sure, Sigma was impossibly romantic, wildly utopian and fundamentally unworkable. Sure, if Trocchi’s Invisible Insurrection had been attained and put into practice, we would all have died of either starvation or cholera in the first eighteen months. Okay, so it was the pipedream of an opiate-dependent poet. Back in those days of golden haze, though, it was also exactly what many of us wanted, and within a year or so a great many of us would be playing variations on Trocchi’s initial themes and embracing them as our own.
The Artesian Well
What I’d just done on the stage had shocked them, and they hated me for it. They really hated me, and although I pretended otherwise, I didn’t like it. I really didn’t need to wait around for another twelve years until John Rotten and Joe Strummer came along and validated what I was doing. The one who hated me most was, of course, the landlord himself. While the Irish drunks in the pub called the Artesian Well, on the corner of Talbot and Chepstow Roads, were prepared to tolerate me with six to eight pints of Guinness inside them, the landlord of this drab boozer was instinctively aware that my musical cronies and I were up to something in which he definitely wanted no part.
Of course, what went down at the Artesian Well wasn’t my first foray into guerrilla performance. Back in the early days at art school there had been a band that changed its name every Tuesday and Thursday, and which only really played in the protected environs of school events and endless garage rehearsals. I had started out as the bass player, but with only a borrowed bass and no talent for the instrument, I kept lobbying to become the singer and front man. This immediately caused a head-on conflict with the guitarist, who resembled a short-sighted and tubby Brian Jone
s. His dream was an instrumental band wearing matching grey mohair suits and ruffle shirts, playing Shadows and Ventures tunes, in which he was the front man. I, on the other hand, envisioned an outlaw ensemble drawing on the Eddie Cochran, Buddy Holly and Gene Vincent catalogues, and I’d be clinging to a mike stand in a bike jacket and one black glove. The guitarist had attempted to ace me out, he being a rich kid with a rich mum, by getting said mum to agree to shell out for the matching grey suits the first time we got a proper paying gig. This did actually come to pass, at the Rex Ballroom in Bognor Regis, but only after I was well out of the band. It still amazes me how young men’s egos are only too willing to clash and do battle over practically nothing. If we’d only known it, the band was doomed from the outset.
After that, a number of years had passed without my doing anything truly musical, except for a less than outstanding attempt to master the blues/folk acoustic guitar. Although I did manage to get my fingers around some immature twelve bars, a couple of Hank Williams songs and Woody Guthrie’s ‘Hard Travelling’, I was hard pressed to fool myself that this was where my future lay. John Renbourne I wasn’t. What I really needed was a couple of like-minded stalwarts who would follow me anywhere, if only out of a sense of morbid curiosity. Pete Munro and Ralph Hodgson could not accurately be described as ‘men who would follow me anywhere’, but they did share the necessary level of lunacy to go along with whatever half-baked and unformed goal I might be attempting to locate, if only to see what might transpire and maybe laugh heartily at the results.
I had met Ralph and Pete somewhere around the pubs of Ladbroke Grove. Ralph Hodgson was a Geordie from the Alan Price school, who played pretty fair keyboards, and Pete Munro was from Canada, on a post-educational wander around Europe. Along the way he had taken up the full-size stand-up bass, a less than mobile instrument that had rather anchored him in the ghettos of West London. Once we’d decided that we wanted to get together and make some kind of noise, we began by annoying Ralph’s neighbours in his bedsit on Chepstow Road. He’d hammer away on an upright piano, I’d strum guitar and sing, and Pete would plunk away on the bull fiddle. To describe exactly what we were doing was not easy. Most of it was Bob Dylan’s fault. Dylan was so much on a roll that he should have been topped with lettuce and tomato and covered in Branston Pickle. He had made the great step from ‘Be Bop A Lula’ to ‘The Gates of Eden’, achieving fully formed what Eddie Cochran had only hinted at. Before Dylan, the highest form of rock & roll lyric had been Chuck Berry’s canon of praise to American consumerism and under-age girls. Bob had changed not only the rules of the game, but also the shape, slope and dimensions of the playing field. He had hosted the great shotgun wedding between legitimate poetry and true rama-lama. He had destroyed all limits, and the world itself was now the rocker’s oyster. From love to politics, from philosophy to surrealist nightmare, Dylan had actually made it possible to say just about anything through the medium of rock & roll.
At every turn, he had been there and gone again, like Long Lost John. If I was smoking reefer, he was dropping speed. If I was dropping speed, he was shooting dope. The will-o’-the-wisp was always ahead of me. While I was merely reading Junkie and Naked Lunch, Howl and Kaddish, he was pillaging Burroughs and Ginsberg for style and imagery. John Lennon was in his thrall. The writing partnership of Jagger and Richards was being challenged as to content. Pete Townshend accepted Dylan’s verbal distortion, if only within a strict, power popsong context, an exercise in rock & roll discipline that would initially culminate in the stammering rallying cry of ‘My Generation’. As Allen Ginsberg noted around the time in question, ‘Dylan has sold out to God. It was an artistic challenge to see if great art could be done on a jukebox. And he proved it can.’
The London music business was even casting around for some poor schmuck who could be marketed as Britain’s Bob Dylan, just as, in the previous decade, Cliff Richard and Billy Fury had been hyped as the anglo-Elvis. The front runner was the aforementioned Donovan Leitch, a Glaswegian cat with a strangely configured jawbone in whom I had little trust. I had spotted him walking up and down Charing Cross Road, a guitar slung round his neck carrying the gauche message ‘This Machine Kills’, as though instructed by his manager to absorb added street credibility. Since those days I have wondered now and again what would have happened if I’d been offered the gig they gave to Donovan. Would I have had the courage to turn it down and go my own way? At the time I probably would have answered, ‘Yes, of course’, with the certitude of one who would never be put to the test. Who would have needed to be Donovan? You only have to watch his brutal humiliation in D. A. Pennebaker’s cinema vérité documentary Don’t Look Back. While paying his respects to Dylan during the 1965 tour, he is made to look a total idiot, playing ‘To Sing for You’ while Dylan radiates contempt like a demonic Mozart confronted by a gauche Salieri. Certainly Donovan paid the price for ‘Season of the Witch’, the one good song that is his legacy, and I sure as hell would like more of a legacy than that. But, I fear, had I been offered the gig in reality, I would have jumped at it – maybe even killed for it.
Of course, the music that Pete, Ralph and I were playing lacked even the commercial appeal of Donovan. To be blunt, we were raucous and horrible, and even our nearest and dearest saw no future in the acoustic cacophony and hinted that we should jack it in. It would be some months before we happened across an import copy of the Fugs’ first album and discovered we were not alone. Across the ocean, in the depths of New York’s Lower East Side, a trio of out-of-tune poets, also triggered by Dylan, were one step ahead of us, concocting their own maniac lyrics and setting them to backings as rudimentary as the din that Pete, Ralph and I were making. More importantly they were getting away with it, recording albums (albeit on some of the world’s smallest record labels) and even managing to recruit such luminaries as Allen Ginsberg to join in their raucous hoedowns.
On first hearing the Fugs, I experienced another bad case of why the hell didn’t I think of that? More like-minded parallel thinking. The real difference between us and the Fugs was that they’d grasped the nettle of writing original songs and we hadn’t. We still contented ourselves with a grab-bag of other people’s material, although we did cast our net pretty wide in the swamp water of common musical experience, having a shot at everything from the obvious Dylan and Woody Guthrie tunes to vintage blues like Jesse Fuller, Bukka White and the Memphis Jug Band; we even made forays into blackshirt rockabilly with select cuts from Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee Lewis, and even Elvis’ ‘Baby, I Don’t Care’. Except for Ralph, we weren’t any too good, but we sure had a full measure of enthusiasm and gall, and actually started discussing how we might take what we were doing out into the world and inflict it on the public at large.
The first target was the Artesian Well, named for the Victorian wells from which London derived much of its water – wells unique in that, as the handy encyclopaedia defines, ‘the water rises under hydrostatic pressure above the level of the aquifer in which it has been confined by overlying impervious strata’. In this instance, the famous London clay. Why anyone should name a pub after this device is a mystery, unless it had some whimsical connection with the quenching of thirst. The Artesian’s main advantage was that it lay close at hand, less than fifty yards from Ralph and Pete’s place, and only about four streets from the House of the Chinese Landlord. Travel is complicated by a stand-up bass. The Artesian also had a music licence and a side-room with a small stage, and that’s what interested us. On weekends, entertainment was provided by this old geezer that I began to refer to as Mr Showbusiness, a Grade Z variety performer and obnoxious professional cockney, who played ukulele-banjo, plus a harmonica slung on a rig like Dylan’s, although that was where any resemblance ended. Not a million miles from Archie Rice in John Osborne’s The Entertainer, his deep and enduring hatred of humanity, and his bitterness over all the accolades and showbiz fame and fortune out of which he clearly thought he’d been cheated, was concealed beneath a smu
tty bonhomie, and a capacity for gin that rivalled any I’ve ever seen. His musical repertoire ran to fast knees-ups of the ‘Any Old Iron’, ‘Lambeth Walk’ variety, and banal music-hall pieces of maudlin slime like ‘My Old Dutch’ and ‘If You Were the Only Girl in the World’. Since the pub’s clientele included a high percentage of Irish building labourers, he also threw in sing-alongs like ‘I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen’ and ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’, and less nationally specific ones like ‘Goodnight Irene’ and ‘You Are My Sunshine’.
All in all, the act was hideous in the extreme, but we observed that Mr Showbusiness had a weakness. As the evening drew on and the gin flowed freely, he started to flag. He’d invite up ‘amateur talent’ (for this, read drunks who are too far gone to know any better), primarily so that he could verbally humiliate them afterwards, using them as a mark for his tired shtick. One of his favourites was a tall angular Irishman with a face like Gabriel Byrne’s battered brother who, when sufficiently intoxicated, would insist on giving an impassioned a cappella rendition of the Four Seasons’ ‘Walk Like a Man’, attempting all the parts simultaneously. We figured that we could slip under the wire during this ad hoc talent segment and bend matters to our will.
Ralph, being able to play traditional pub piano, acted as a fifth column. He would wander onto the stage when Mr Showbusiness decided it was time to take a break, seat himself at the piano, pushing his limp, dark brown hair out of his eyes and eyeing the assembled lushes with a slight but impish smile. He would then launch into spirited generic barrelhouse, guaranteed never to fail anywhere alcohol is consumed in quantity. Having won a superficial general approval, he’d wave Pete up to join him on bass and continue in a similar vein. I’d join in, initially on my limited guitar, which mercifully could hardly be heard over the piano, and then I’d actually start singing some acceptably classic bits of ten-year-old rock ’n’ roll, like Buddy Holly’s ‘Rave On’ or Jerry Lee’s ‘Down the Line’. We also had another trick up our sleeves. Between us, Ralph and I knew a few Irish rebel songs – ‘Kevin Barry’, ‘The Rising of the Moon, ‘The Bold Fenian Men’ – enough to get the Irish section singing along with a fervour so close to sacred that neither Mr Showbusiness nor the landlord could bring the impromptu set to a finish and return things to business as usual.
