by Mick Farren
When Dylan abandoned his simple social protest – what he referred to as ‘fingerpointing songs’ – for lyrics that were more complex and oblique, he wasn’t copping out, simply attacking us all closer to where we lived. He was going for the jugular of the imagination. Maybe it was real and maybe it was a calculated put-on, but we began to think in more esoteric and symbolic terms. He was speaking to us in what Jim Morrison would later call secret alphabets, and we at least pretended to know what he meant. A few months later we heard ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and of the character ‘Napoleon in rags’, and every malcontent loser knew in his golden vanity that it was him, and what we were calling for – and would not be refused – was an even more powerful rock & roll cocktail that included not only the sound, fury, anger and dirty passion of the wild Fifties rock gods, but also the electromagnetic howl and psychotropic mind expansion that would be the key to the Sixties. The medicine Dylan mixed up tasted of stormed bastilles; it defied conventions and the change in the mode of the music that would shake the proverbial walls of the city.
Can you mix me one of those violent cocktails, bartender? Can you whip up that dangerous sucker in your shaker and stick a paper umbrella in it? And, if you can, what will it bring us? Utopia? Or maybe only an epic thousand-day global drunk? And, on reflection, what would be so wrong with that epic thousand-day global drunk? We might all learn something.
Chapter Two
The Mysterious East
I HAD FINALLY left the House of the Chinese Landlord and, as if that wasn’t enough, Ralph, Pete and I decided to get serious about this band business. To say I’d caught the rock-star disease from drinking at the Artesian Well would be misleading. The contagion had been on me since I’d seen Elvis in Lovin’ You, but the rowdy débâcles in the Irish boozer had certainly woken it from its dormant state. Visions of a rock & roll glory road were opening in front of me despite the overwhelming mass of factual evidence that logically indicated I didn’t have a prayer or a road map. Why exactly Ralph and Pete went with the idea to make the ad hoc band real was a mystery I never thought to solve. The madman-who-would-be-king doesn’t question the motivation of his followers, any more than he questions his own. That I could motivate anyone to accompany me on such an implausible journey was enough of a miracle, and further enquiry would surely cast a jinx. We lacked expertise, a guitar player and any coherent definition beyond that of a ragged, slap-back boho band; a bit of a joke, but we had found a resolve and that was a powerful asset.
Our first move to turn resolve into reality was to relocate ourselves in the historical heart of London’s legendary East End, home of Jack the Ripper, the Elephant Man and Ronnie and Reggie Kray. Artists inspired this migration east; Alex Stowell had scouted it and then led us there. With the first of a never-ending series of property booms under way, West London bedsits were being subdivided with ugly plasterboard and cheap emulsion paint, until there was no room in the average bijou flatlet to swing a cat (even if cats were permitted), let alone stretch a canvas or chip bits out of a block of marble. Art students and practising artists cast speculative eyes over Whitechapel, Spitalfields and Mile End, which were unfashionable, unmodernised, unreconstructed and, in parts, quite dangerous, but might just offer the necessary space to operate.
Although grim high-rise estates were being built further down the Thames, in mysterious places like Wapping and the Isle of Dogs, the areas immediately to the east of the City had remained untouched – except by the bombs of the Luftwaffe – since Victoria was Queen, and Shanghai opium dens flourished in Limehouse as haunts for the real Lord Alfred Douglas and the fictional Dorian Gray. Narrow streets were still lined with two- and three-storey houses that had been slums when World War I broke out. A scattering of open-fronted shops still remained, just as they’d been when the Ripper stalked prostitutes there. On Old Montague Street an actual soda fountain had survived complete with an elephant-head soda spigot, and the bombsites of the Blitz remained like the cavities of rotted teeth filled with rats, rubble, garbage, urban briars and bits of old prams and bicycles.
Down the centuries these areas had offered sanctuary to a spectrum of refugees, Spanish Jews fleeing Ferdinand and Isabella’s Inquisition and Huguenot weavers escaping the persecution of Protestants in France. The late nineteenth century saw a vast influx of Eastern European Jews driven out of Russia, Poland and Hungary by pogroms and Cossacks, and, of course, the cockneys had been there for ever, providing London with its unique and permanent underclass. The majority of immigrants had made only transitory settlement, close to the docks and the ships that had brought them. Some had enjoyed material success and moved on to Golders Green and Wembley. Others had decided to travel further, and headed out to America, Canada or Australia, making way for the next wave. For more than a hundred years the same areas had also been targets for politicians on the make, who would rail that the East End of London was a hotbed of socialists, anarchists, republicans, nihilists and revolutionists, plus thieves, cut-purses, white slavers, whores and drug traffickers, and needed cleaning out. This kind of rhetoric had regularly given the nod to local extremists to head east for violent bouts of home-grown ethnic, religious or cultural persecution.
In the 1890s the Ripper murders, committed in the exact neighbourhood to which we were moving, had all but caused lynchings and riots. In 1936 Sir Oswald Mosley had attempted to lead his British Union of Fascists on a huge anti-Jewish march through Whitechapel, but had been stopped by an implacable coalition of communists, and the rank and file of the various transport and dockworkers’ unions, armed with pickaxe handles and potatoes spiked with razor blades. In the Fifties, when Mosley enjoyed a brief renaissance, his blackshirts had again attempted to ferment the same kind of race riots in the East End that had blighted Notting Hill. Later, the National Front would try more of the same. The Nazis always knew their way to Whitechapel, and pro-and-con graffiti, the swastika, the hammer and sickle and the Star of David remained daubed on the walls, only gradually fading over the years, as graphic ghosts of hate gone by. On a less vicious level, an abandoned shopfront still carried a sign, white on industrial green, ‘Christian Mission to the Jews’, and many of the stores and businesses were open on Sunday but closed on Saturday.
The influx of a few visual artists, and the freaks like us who followed, hardly constituted a mass migration. I doubt our numbers could have topped a hundred even at the peak of the trend, but in a small way we added our own measure of spice to the exotic stew. The big arrival taking place when we got there was from India and Pakistan, the one that added the smell of vindaloo to the hot bread and bagels, and the perpetual yeast stench that came from behind the high, sooty walls of the huge Whitbread brewery at the top end of Brick Lane.
We might never have known about the potential of the East End at all, had Alex Stowell not kept up his art-school contacts. His entrée to the East End was via a painter called Martin, a character definitely ahead of his time. As a dyed blond skinhead with a taste in button-fly Levis, bomber jackets, boxing boots and Mary Quant girlfriends, he would have fitted perfectly anywhere in time between 1977 and the end of the millennium. In 1966, however, he was a visitor from the future. Fresh from the Royal College of Art, he painted soft-focus rectilinear abstracts in various shades of grey and was highly scathing of all that was representational. He had rented half of a building on Princelet Street, off Brick Lane, as both a home and studio, and then, to assist with the rent, sublet a room to Alex. Martin’s living quarters had been wallpapered in aluminium cooking foil. It was a Warhol effect, in tune with Andy’s Mylar balloons, but you didn’t mention that to Martin. His opinion of Warhol was as low as might be expected from one who painted grey rectangles. The place was decorated with partially inflated vinyl toys – a Fireball XL5, a jet fighter, a cartoon submarine with portholes and a fat drooping periscope, and a Donald Duck – all sprawled limply on flat surfaces or sagging from the edges of shelves, like small Claes Oldenbergs. Flop art, Martin proudly called th
em.
In addition to the visual arts, Martin was also in a band. He had even sculpted his own electric guitar. Square in overall configuration, a little like one of Bo Diddley’s custom instruments, except for the long spikes extending fore and aft from the body like the fins on a comic-book rocketship, it not only played very well, but was a work of art in its own right. The name of the band was the Brothers Grim, and they were fronted by a strange angular singer, whose name I forget. As tall and uncoordinated as Joey Ramone, sallow and with short greasy hair, he affected a voluminous tweed overcoat, ideal for shoplifting, and jumped up and down on the spot in a horrid prophetic vision of the pogo. Like Martin himself, the Brothers Grim were also nearly a dozen years ahead of their time and could easily have appeared on the same bill with X-Ray Spex or Wreckless Eric. The song that sticks in my memory was called ‘Crash My Party’, about a guy so obnoxious that his guests ejected him from his own party and he was now beating on the door trying to get back in. When, some months later, both the Brothers Grim and the Deviants were trying to get a gig at the UFO Club, we both met the same contemptuous resistance from Joe Boyd, who booked the talent, which gave us a certain outcast kinship, but that’s a slightly later story.
At the time in question the Deviants were only a gleam in my eye. The immediate task in front of us was to get a band – any band – together and functioning. Flushed from our mayhem at the Artesian Well, we had actually gone so far as to enter into a dubious hire-purchase agreement for a Vox Continental Organ for Ralph, a Japanese bass guitar for Pete and a couple of second-hand amps, with the amiable and fatherly Mr Traie who ran the musical instrument store on Portobello Road and, on occasion, cannibalised bits of broken guitars for Pete Townshend. Now we had our first bits of gear, we needed both a place to store them and somewhere to rehearse on a regular basis. When Alex first came round singing the praises of the near east, the thing he most strongly emphasised was the availability of space and tolerance. It was an overwhelming attraction, but the lure of elbow room wasn’t all that beckoned us to pastures new. Ralph and Pete were already having trouble with their landlord and needed to move anyway, and I had taken up with a woman named Joy Hebditch, and the circumstances of this romance began to shed new light on the House of the Chinese Landlord.
Although I can now write about it as romantic and adventurous, the festering and impacted squalor of the building was something that only a delusional and solitary young man could willingly tolerate. I realise in retrospect that Joy was coming at me with a definite nesting urge, and even a fresh coat of paint and some pictures on the wall didn’t give my sordid living quarters much nest potential. I had met Joy at a Saturday-night party in Blackheath held at the huge apartment she shared with three other girls, all students at Goldsmiths College in New Cross. We concluded the party in bed together, and having absolutely nothing to drag me away, I stayed until the following Tuesday, when I finally returned to the Grove and found my own home a lot less funky and quaint.
As Joy was perfectly happy to go on seeing me after our four-day orgiastic duet, I started spending more and more time in Blackheath, lured by the prospect of frequent and unpredictable sex, cooked meals and a television, which may sound exploitative but was a great temptation to any marginal young man. Blackheath was in the depths of South London, though, and an hour or more bus ride from the Grove, and thus I also saw less and less of my own so-called home. Very soon the subject came up that we were unnecessarily paying double rent, and, since we were all but living together, we should make some more economically viable plans.
Joy was from Carlisle, as far north as it’s possible to get and still remain in England. It always struck me as a place of grey winter, Roman ruins, intersecting railways and monotonous light industry, and had, as Joy freely admitted, offered very little for an adventurous young woman except the grubby delights of hanging out with the musicians who passed through the town on the northern beat-group circuit, where bands like Derry and the Seniors, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes and the Big Three ruled the road. Joy came at me with a decidedly superior erotic expertise. At the time I met her she had short, white blonde hair and the look of a working-class Edie Sedgwick. In fact, Joy was very taken with the Warhol Factory and the mode of the Chelsea girls, and accordingly wore her mini-dresses very short and her mascara almost as thick as Dusty Springfield’s. She was of medium height with full breasts and hips, and a narrow waist, the kind of shape someone once described as the ideal figure for a stripper, but Joy would never have stooped to such crass display. She had an extensive occult library and fancied herself as a neo-pagan before whom the boys should abase themselves to beg entry to a world of ruined purple sheets, lace suspender belts and black stockings, and the sure and certain knowledge that he who compliantly relaxes, and doesn’t ask too many questions, can be transported to any variety of streetlight fancies.
One spring afternoon, when the sun was bright but the air chill and clear after earlier showers, Joy and I lay side by side on the unmade bed, still in the House of the Chinese Landlord, sweat cooling on our bodies. I, at least, was silent, reflecting on the elaborate innovation we’d just achieved. Joy pushed herself up on one elbow and looked at me thoughtfully. ‘Sometimes I think I’m corrupting you.’
I looked at her, at a loss for words. I suppose if I’d been clever I would have made some remark like, ‘Corrupt away, darling, I’m loving every minute of it.’ But I wasn’t clever. It never occurred to me that I could be corrupted. Wasn’t I a wretch among the wretched, if only in my dreams? Didn’t I dream dreams to outstrip the Marquis de Sade and his libertine mates? All I could think of was to lean over and kiss her, and from the way that she then took hold of me, I knew it was exactly the response she wanted. I suppose I was symbolically putting myself in her hands, giving her tactile control. Down the years we would marry, divorce and remain for some time quite literally partners in crime, even after we’d gone our separate ways. She saw me through some bad times and precipitated a number of others, but we’d stay friends until she ultimately took herself off to a strata of the drug culture that I was absolutely unwilling to accept even as a nice place to visit.
As I look back, I guess I was probably being seduced in those first weeks we were together. The clincher would seem to be Joy’s very early pressure that we ought to move in together. For my part, I would have been more than happy to give notice to the Chinese landlord, gather up my stuff, such as it was, and trundle it down to Blackheath, but me moving to Blackheath didn’t seem to be part of Joy’s masterplan. She may have wanted me, but at the same time, and much more importantly, she wanted a mate. I don’t think Joy considered the large communal apartment at all suitable for the projected ménage à deux. Too much craziness with four women living together. Jealousies, rivalries, conspiracies, constant partying, boys coming and going and, I believe, discreetly being handed round, although the girls – or the boys – in question might not have expressed it exactly that way. I think Joy saw too much danger in the environment that deux might escalate to trois or even quatre.
When we heard from Alex that there was another empty house for rent, across the street from him and Martin, at 10 Princelet Street, we decided to go over and take a look. As it turned out, the house had the space we craved in spades. Three whole floors, plus a dank but intriguing basement, and an industrial area out the back, which wasn’t strictly ours but was eminently usable until someone else rented it. Unfortunately space was about all it had. In all other respects the structure was hardly fit for human habitation and might well have been condemned, had any LCC inspector bothered to take a look. The Edwardian wiring would support nothing more than a forty-watt bulb in each room; it lacked a bath; and we had to find our own furniture. All in all, we were homesteading from the ground up and might have been daunted if we hadn’t been so energised by the possibilities.
The landlords were two orthodox Hasidics with the full kit of hats, sidelocks, Z.Z. Top beards and long black coats, a father-and
-son act, one in his forties and the other apparently in his early hundreds, who discussed us in Yiddish while we looked on uncomprehendingly. They struck us as almost unacceptably strange, and I firmly believe the reverse was true. Fortunately strangeness clinched the deal. We looked just strange enough voluntarily to elevate their property to a habitable state. The first phase was that we’d move in rent-free and they’d pay for the materials, if we’d supply the expertise and labour to fix the electrical wiring. This would, of course, have been completely impossible had not Ralph (God only knew where) trained as an electrician; he was therefore not only able to install ring mains on each floor, but also to bribe the London Electricity Board inspectors to overlook any deficiencies in the work. Pete and I also had a few manual skills, and Joy made it clear she could do her part, so, not without a certain recklessness of spirit, we made a deal with the minimum of formalities and became de facto Eastenders.
Although it was hardly Little House on the Prairie, we went to work with a pioneer spirit. I wouldn’t say we exactly whistled as we worked, but we hammered, sawed and pushed paint rollers to the sound of either Radio Caroline or (wonderful) Radio London, two of the loudest pirate stations breaking the BBC monopoly by broadcasting illegally from ships moored in the North Sea, and playing the hardest of contemporary rock & roll. To a background of the Who, the Yardbirds, the Pretty Things, the Four Tops, Otis Redding, and the Righteous Brothers, we started to elevate 10 Princelet Street from a hollow shell to a habitable slum.
We quickly discovered that the East End was highly conducive to our brand of homesteading. The local markets, small wholesalers and discount stores yielded cheap paint and fabric remnants suitable for curtains and cushion covers. Weird stalls sold mismatched speakers and lengths of plastic tubing. Odd pieces of furniture could be found in the street and on bombsites, absolutely usable if you didn’t speculate as to why they’d been dumped. Building sites could be looted for bricks, breeze blocks and timber for building bookshelves. Food of all kinds was plentiful and cheap, and, once we’d developed a taste for the real-deal cuisine at the local curry joints, which proved a far cry from the mild and anglicised dishes served on Queensway or Westbourne Grove, it got even cheaper.
