by Mick Farren
We also lived next door to a family of low-echelon Kray Brothers’ associates who could be discovered, as we returned from a party in the early dawn, or, later, coming home from gigs in the band’s filthy Ford Transit, busily respraying a stolen Jaguar right there in the street. They seemed to take a liking to us, probably because we were white, unconventional and knew how to keep our mouths shut. Regularly we’d be slipped some item that had ‘fallen off the back of lorry’ – sweaters, shirts, sunglasses, kitchenware, a couple of bottles of Scotch – with the instruction to forget where we got it. Finally, in full exploitation of the neighbourhood, Pete even got himself a job for a while at the Whitbread brewery, but finished each day so mindlessly drunk that he quit after a month fearing complete alcoholism.
We also learned that we weren’t as alone as we initially imagined. In addition to Martin and Alex, the performance artists Gilbert and George – who, as ‘human statues’, painted themselves gold and went on display, moving in slow robotic unison – lived in a house on Fournier Street amid a clutter of Victoriana and weirdness. A few old Gully Jimson types could be spotted shopping in the markets, or scavenging for interestingly shaped debris on the bombsites, but they were generally irascible and hard to befriend. More outgoing was the scattering of art students from St Martin’s, Goldsmiths and the Royal College, easily recognisable by the self-conscious paint on their jeans.
Not everything in the East End was quite so wonderful, however, and some of the drawbacks took some getting used to. Not least of these was the lack of a bathroom, and the need for regular visits to the public bathhouse, a few streets away. This was an echoing institution of Orwellian zinc and industrial piping, where bathers would hammer on the metal partition and yell, ‘More hot water in number seven, guv.’ It was too prole-like to sustain its novelty, but we could do nothing about it. Ralph might have been ingenious but, even with our assorted lengths of plastic pipe, he couldn’t plumb in an entire bathroom from scratch. On a more general level, the area had a large population of incredibly poor and fucked-up people. From the winos who made their home on the small and dirty tract of grass next to Spitalfields Church known as Itchy Park, and the dully desperate hookers who took their lives in their hands turning grim and disconnected street tricks, to the struggling families whom the new affluence had failed to touch, a lot of folks were hurting. The daily contact could grow deeply depressing unless you took a firm grip and didn’t go near the idea that there, but for the grace of God, went you.
Of course, one of the most efficient and expedient ways of avoiding the grace of God is to get high on a fairly regular basis. In the Grove, we’d been spoiled for drugs. Beatniks with hash, West Indians with grass and mods with pills; dodge the coppers and the world was your oyster. In this respect, the East End was an unknown quantity. Did they have these things here, or would we have to take the Central Line to the other side of town? To our great relief we discovered that all things were possible in or near a pub just a short stroll down Brick Lane.
Holes in the Albert Hall
The greatest danger in homesteading was that we’d become insular. Much as we might defend our adopted manor, most of what was happening was occurring to the west, and we weren’t there. For months we had to manage without a phone, having to conduct business with a pile of pennies in the phone box across the street. In those days, when British Telecom was still the impossible dream of Tory privatisers, it could take Post Office Telephones months to install a new phone line in a twilight zone like Brick Lane. They seemed to take the attitude that we were damned lucky to get letters and packages delivered. Looking back from an environment of email and cell phones, it seems almost impossible that we could have achieved anything with such primitive communications, but we worked it out.
The business of the band consumed a great deal of loose change. We seemed unable to keep either guitar players or drummers. No matter how many ads we put in the Melody Maker, drummers and guitarists came and went. The guitarists all aspired to be God, or at the very least Eric Clapton, and the drummers all seemed to want to be rich and famous, like Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Titch, and on Top of the Pops by a week on Thursday. Many wanted to play like Keith Moon, and since no one but Keith Moon could play like Keith Moon, what generally suffered was their ability to keep time. In other words, the cats we wanted weren’t emerging. From the drummers’ and guitarists’ point of view, my own strange and mostly nebulous ideas were what turned them off. I knew the end product would be offensive to a great many people, and simple commercial logic dictated that if you set out to offend large numbers of people, it was unlikely they’d go out and buy your records in sufficient numbers to put you in the top forty.
A few of the musicians with whom we attempted to work tagged me and my singing as the band’s primary problem. One guitarist even told Ralph how, if they got rid of me, the band might have a chance as a commercial blues band. When I heard this I wasn’t sure whether to be mortally hurt or fiendishly pleased. I disliked that plank-whacker from the start, but that didn’t prevent me from wanting him to like me. That seemed to be the conundrum in a nutshell. How could you scream abuse in the face of society and expect to be universally loved? When Duncan Sanderson eventually became the Deviants’ permanent bass player, he would waffle a lot when stoned about the innate duality of what we were doing. Right then, the innate duality – what one might call the primal duality – was akin to attempting to set up a side-show attraction with the barker out front screaming, ‘Roll up! Roll up! Step inside and take your extremely nasty medicine and have a violent and unpleasant experience!’
How the hell could one expect to attract a crowd with a pitch like that, and a show that was everything it promised? Who in their right minds would be lured in? Was it maybe possible to base a career on performing for people who weren’t in their right minds? Hardly logical, Captain. I had yet to make the connection that the next best thing to an audience not in its right mind was an audience heavily drugged, and I freely admit that I was pretty damned confused. Not so confused, though, to exclude the possibility that I might be right and everyone else wrong.
My strong sense of impending change was about the only thing that didn’t confuse me. It was a distant – but not too distant – scent on the wind. This proved a very good defence against insularity. Keep your eyes open, boy. Something’s coming. Don’t miss this bus. Signs of possible change were now citywide, and some of the most significant seemed to centre on a series of benchmark events at, of all places, the Royal Albert Hall. One was the Dylan concert, but also in the summer of 1965, on 11 June to be precise, an event entitled Wholly Communion took place, which both contemporary commentators and current Sixties historians cite as the genesis of the counterculture in England. Wholly Communion was promoted as an ‘international gathering of poets’, but in reality it turned out to be a magnificent shambles. And I, of course, didn’t bloody go.
Originally instigated by New York filmmaker Barbara Rubin, the billed luminaries included Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso, all of whom conveniently happened to be in Paris at the time, plus Bill Burroughs, who was already in London but ultimately didn’t appear. Among the domestic attractions were Christopher Logue, Mike Horovitz, Harry Fainlight, Adrian Mitchell and George MacBeth. Pablo Fernandez represented Cuba, and Simon Vinkenoog came in from Amsterdam. Alex Stowell had tried to persuade me that I had to be there, but I decided to sulk and blow it off. I’d already seen Ginsberg, along with Corso and Ferlinghetti, at a reading at the ICA, and had also attended a reading by Burroughs somewhere in Bloomsbury, at which his movie Towers Open Fire had been screened along with a demonstration of his flashing, rotating strobe-light ‘Burroughs tubes’. When Alex didn’t feel this was a good enough excuse, I angrily retorted that I never wanted to hear ever again Adrian Mitchell bore the shit out of me with his long and lousy poem ‘Tell Me Lies about Vietnam’.
The real reason I didn’t want to go was actually because Alex, and
anyone he brought with him, would be there under the auspices of Jeff Nuttall, and I had a problem with Jeff. The plan was that we were to be part of some Nuttall-staged event involving being effectively naked and painted blue. I’ve never had any enthusiasm for being nude in public, and the fate of Shirley Eaton in Goldfinger had more than alerted me to the danger of allowing one’s flesh to be covered in an impermeable coat of paint: 007 had warned me about dermal asphyxiation. As things turned out, I probably did well not to make it. With their pores effectively sealed, Nuttall and his crew began to feel decidedly ill, and Jeff himself was forced to lie in a bath in Sir Malcolm Sargent’s dressing room.
I really can’t recall where the enmity with Jeff Nuttall started. The irony was that I pretty much agreed in principle with everything he said. Later, as the author of Bomb Culture, the book that defined the emergent ethos in terms of the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation, he made a staggering contribution to the currency of ideas in the Sixties, and my only serious dispute with him was over his stance on psychotropic drugs. Jeff didn’t trust the stoned, and, as one of the stoned, I thought that sucked and distrusted him right back. We had a conflict of style. Nuttall and his ilk seemed to be promoting a woolly, slapdash and amateurishly English confrontation. While I adored Elvis’ gold suits, and the fins on the pink Cadillac, Nuttall seemed to be taken with dirty-neck trad jazz and the Ford Prefect. I liked slick and he cleaved to the gangrenous. He liked Tony Hancock and I liked Frank Zappa. (This is not to say that I didn’t like Tony Hancock; quite the reverse, I worshipped him, and still to this day find myself adopting his helplessly outraged speech patterns in times of stress.) With Nuttall, though, it always seemed to become an either/or situation. I assumed the verbal broadsides that were fired when our ships passed in the early days of International Times were just another example of the Young Turks versus the old guard. Just as the punks slagged off us old hippies in the late Seventies, so ten years earlier we set about our CND elders. I must admit, though, I had supposed that a certain level of respect existed between us until I read his remarks in Jonathon Green’s oral history of London in the Sixties, Days in the Life.
Mick Farren was a bad man – I thought he was a bad man, anyway. I somehow thought he was a person who was a frustrated rock star who wasn’t going to get there. He had all the attributes of a rock star except the talent. His appetites for fame were infinitely greater than his comparatively right-minded politics.
Until that point I didn’t really suspect quite how much the man loathed me.
I’ll leave the first-hand accounts of Wholly Communion – Harry Fainlight freaking out behind too much speed, Alex Trocchi attempting to host the show from behind a miasmic heroin fog, and all the other anecdotes – to those who were there. To me, and probably to most of those more directly involved in the event, the greatest excitement was generated by the 7,000-plus people who showed up. Prior to the event, the organisers feared that they wouldn’t attract the 450 paying customers they needed to break even. It wasn’t the commercial success, though, that signified; it was the graphic demonstration that so many were even interested in cutting-edge poetry and inspired weirdness. The head count was what counted, and much the same could be said the next year when Bob Dylan played his second Albert Hall gig, this time with the Hawks behind him.
We’ve already dwelled at some length on Dylan, the measure of his achievements, his possible motivations and his effect on the culture. The two concerts at the Albert Hall have been pawed over and picked apart for the last three and a half decades by everyone with a computer and a leaning to rock-crit. Recordings of the concerts were extensively bootlegged – except, with a uniquely Sixties irony, that we all later discovered that the various bootlegs we’d listened to had, in fact, been recorded in Manchester a few days earlier – and were finally legitimately released by CBS in 1999. Again, like Wholly Communion, the most fascinating parts of the show, in hindsight, were the audience and its subdivisions, their reactions to Dylan and his interaction with them. From the start, it was clear that the shows were going to be an extremely big deal. Even the folkies who were now openly crying ‘traitor’ wanted to do it to the man’s face, and two hours after the tickets went on sale they were sold out. How did I secure mine? Don’t ask.
Going into the venue, the atmosphere was decidedly strange. The tension and anticipation were neither pleasant nor healthy, like a weight pressing down on the staid auditorium, more akin to a sporting grudge match than a concert. The schism was instantly evident. The folkies were out in force, but also a high percentage of what I could only categorise as freaks, people with whom I could empathise and identify. Arrayed in thrift-shop capes, spray-painted wellington boots, Edwardian dresses and Victorian military jackets, they presented a DIY version of what, in twelve months, would be hawked on Carnaby Street and the King’s Road as flower power. Even before the show started, it struck me that this was the welcoming committee for the electric Dylan. If not, I was going to be severely disappointed.
As Dylan walked out for the first half of the show with his solo guitar, the tension crackled in a way I’ve not experienced before or since, and far from defusing it, he seemed bent on pushing it for all it was worth. Even his appearance was calculated to antagonise the folk conservatives: an outrageous, black-on-brown, hounds tooth suit, a polkadot rocker shirt – and his hair. Well, his damned hair was just like mine, and believe me, there was very little of that style about back then.
The agonisingly drawn-out reading of ‘Visions of Johanna’ told it all. He seemed to have either smoked an awful lot of dope or been doing heroin, but far from slurring his words, he was enunciating with slow and unnatural care. In a rambling set-up, he had mockingly explained how he’d never written ‘a drug song – it would be vulgar to think so’. We freaks didn’t believe a word of it, while the folkies’ restlessness was palpable. A message was being delivered. Folksinging Bob was shutting up shop and going out of the hobo business for all time. The freight-train masquerade was over, his pseudo grapes of wrath were being trampled into a new and intoxicating wine. The traditionalists would probably have started walking out right there and then, but they’d learned how to protest in their CND days and were aware that the art lay in the timing. If they erupted before he strapped on his Fender, they’d blow their impact and diminish the point they were trying to make.
Throughout the interval everyone marked time. Hurry to the bar for a gin and tonic, and wonder what would happen next. Then back to our seats for the moment Dylan brought out the Hawks, and the shitstorm became history. No one screamed ‘Judas’ – that was in Manchester – but the bellowed sentiments were similar. What history doesn’t record is that a lot of the noise was the result of arguments breaking out within the audience, and freaks yelling at the folkies to sit down and shut the fuck up. A good percentage of the duffel coats walked, but enough stayed to keep up their barracking all the way through to the interminable introduction to ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’. It was a pity they all didn’t go and leave Dylan to us, his new electric audience. Now and then I wonder what became of the anti-Dylan folkies. I’ve never met anyone who admitted to being among their number, but I can’t believe they spent the rest of their lives abhorring electric music, and I suspect they went on to apply the same purist intolerance to blues guitar players, prog rock or real ale.
This time I left the Albert Hall after Bob Dylan thinking simply, ‘Jesus, there really are a lot of us. Where do we go from here?’ I’d only previously seen this new breed of freaks in brief and scattered sightings, down the road, across the street, from the top of a bus. We’d maybe smiled or nodded, but these near-encounters had offered no idea of the real numbers involved. As Dylan had just told us once again – and we had no reason to doubt him – something was actually happening, but did any of us have a clear idea of what it was? Could all these people be brought back together on other pretexts? Could any kind of further cohesion be achieved, or was Dylan the sole uniting force? Whe
n his rebel-stoned electric circus moved on, would we all return to our separate and isolated ways? Was it beyond the realm of possibility that we might find other common ground beyond the appreciation of a single artist and his work? To think that my own untogether efforts could be a part of it seemed far too ambitious, but if some common ground could be achieved, it might provide a forum for my ideas. The obvious and crucial factor in creating that common ground had to be a means of communication, a network for contacts and interaction. Although I didn’t know it at the time, I wasn’t the only one thinking along those lines.
The last of these four significant shows at the Albert Hall took place in September 1966, and although no one ever talks about it in the context of Wholly Communion or the Dylan concerts – perhaps because it was an ending rather than a beginning – it had a similar impact on me. The Rolling Stones, with Ike and Tina Turner opening for them, began their UK tour in the autumn of that year with two Albert Hall concerts. If Wholly Communion was one sort of shambles, these Stones shows were a mess of a different kind. Although the Stones’ music had grown in both ambition and sophistication, and they were playing their new, more complex songs like ‘Get Off My Cloud’ and ‘19th Nervous Breakdown’, a section of their audience had failed to grow with them.
