by Mick Farren
Where Dylan had symbolically liquidated his folk business, the Stones were faced with the inescapable fact that the era of the screaming teenybopper was ending because the howling pandemonium of the old-style pop show had become dangerously redundant. The music couldn’t be heard over the mass hysteria – hysteria that was becoming life-threatening to the performers. During the Albert Hall shows, as documented in Peter Whitehead’s short film Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby?, both Mick Jagger and Brian Jones repeatedly came close to being dragged into the audience by the crazed fans who swarmed the stage. Pop stars were faced with a choice of either retreating into the protection of the recording and television studio or finding a whole new way of putting on a live show.
It had ceased to matter whether the performers were ready or not, or whether they liked it or not. A massively expanding audience, totally revised logistics and a musical technology advancing by leaps and bounds were forcing the mode of the music to change, and the walls of the city had better watch out.
The Making of the Man
One day during the Seventies punk era, the then enfant terrible, Julie Burchill – all tight black denim and surly mascara – strolled into the office at the New Musical Express that I shared with writer Charles Shaar Murray and declared, with that tone of dramatic accusation that would become such a part of her style, ‘Nobody would remember Che Guevara if he hadn’t been handsome.’
I probably looked up at her and blinked. Right at that moment nothing could have been further from my mind than the legendary Cuban revolutionary. ‘Huh?’
‘Nobody would remember Che Guevara if he hadn’t been handsome.’
I thought about this for a moment and then nodded. ‘You’re absolutely right.’
She wandered off, a little deflated by my instant agreement, looking to provoke elsewhere. The old-timers were supposed to rise to the bait and entertain her with an argument, but, against all the tenets of the conventional Left, I freely admitted she was right. Few have read Che on economic theory, land reform or guerrilla warfare, but millions have hung his image on their walls, or worn his face on a T-shirt. I agreed so readily because, over the years, I thought a lot about it. Eddie Izzard’s formula cannot be escaped. Impression rules, 70 per cent how you look, 20 per cent how you sound and only 10 per cent content. Physical appearance can make better agitprop than the most elegantly crafted theory.
I have never fully understood why revolution is expected to be so drab. The dictatorship of the proletariat has so often been interpreted as the dictatorship of the ugly and shapeless that it begs the question why glamour is anathema to so many advocates of social upheaval? In all of recent revolutionary history the only truly glamorous revolutionaries I can remember – Che notwithstanding, who was handsome but also a scruffy bastard – were the drag queens of Stonewall in Greenwich Village, who went toe-to-toe against the homophobia of the NYPD in 1969 and scored a major victory for gay rights and the crucial liberty of sartorial self-expression. Ever since, I have been with them all the way, a true believer in the legitimacy of fighting the good fight in high heels.
Prior to Joy and I living together, I too was pretty much a scruffy bastard. The care I took over my appearance consisted of selecting a look that I considered would enhance my romantic self-image and external impact, but then going for the lowest level of maintenance. At various times I borrowed from Gene Vincent, Miles Davis, Fidel Castro, Doc Holliday, Johnny Cash, or any combination of the five, but if the costume couldn’t be dropped on the floor at night, and put on again in the morning with little or no trouble, it was discarded. An ensemble should also be blessed with the dual function of being equally effective when it’s both crisp and funky. The white suit is a perfect example. Straight from the cleaners, you can look as dapper as Tom Wolfe, but when the suit is wilted and less than pristine, you can then pretend you’re Robert Mitchum playing Max Cady in the original Cape Fear.
No sooner had I moved in with Joy than she decided that this approach to dressing up left a lot to be desired. A protracted make-over commenced. Anticipating the winds of fashion by careful observation of the Rolling Stones, Joy eased me into my transvestite gunfighter period. I wore no actual dresses, but considerably more satins and velvets, jewellery and even eyeshadow on special occasions, although some of these occasions were more private than public. We discovered that we could exchange clothing. One of her dresses could double up on me as a medieval tunic or an Errol Flynn pirate shirt. Rumour had it that Brian Jones and Anita Pallenberg were doing exactly the same thing, so it was all perfectly acceptable. Further delight came from shopping for shoes in the women’s section. Having fairly small feet, I could fit into the larger women’s sizes of Victorian-style, lace-up, pointed-toed, Cuban-heeled boots, which were much cooler than anything sold for men at the time. This is not to say that I didn’t spend the working day in jeans and a T-shirt, but going out was also a form of coming out, and Joy instructed me in the cutting of a swathe. Even when I wouldn’t be parted from my black leather jacket, scarves, silk shirts and decoratively studded ethnic belts were added to the mix.
Although I never quite became the afro-haired Mick Jagger that she had in mind, Joy presented me with many more possibilities than I’d previously entertained. It was one more facet of the education process we were all going through, and, from Joy to Anita Pallenberg, the women taught the class. Revised history now paints us male Sixties radicals as sexist exploiters, keeping the women in the kitchen making tea and cooking dinner while we swilled beer and fantasised about world domination, but I have to wonder where customising your old man might stand in the light of liberation? Perhaps the balance of power and oppression may not have been so clearly defined as many imagine. This psychedelic cavalier flourish also didn’t come without problems, the worst being that any deviation from the drab could invoke instant belligerence among the conditioned mob. The scream of ‘Poof!’ and the sudden onslaught of violent rage taught straight boys like me indelible lessons about lumpen hatred of the suspected effeminate. Suddenly we were all Quentin Crisp, and, if nothing else, we learned how to leg it in silly shoes. Being threatened by lorry drivers and Millwall supporters became rock & roll, on-the-road routine as one slouched into a motorway service area in one’s finery for a 3 a.m. sausage, egg and chips.
Hostility, however, wasn’t limited to the resentful proles. Many traditional leftists refused to believe that anyone who came on like some neo-fop could be politically trustworthy. Jimi Hendrix could play revolutionary guitar in satin, velvet and trailing scarves, but God help you if you met with a crew of Trotskyites looking like that. My attitude was that I’d look like a bloody rock star, or as though I’d come straight from the pig-iron smelter, depending on my mood, hangover or the state of my laundry, and the idea of deliberately putting on the old army coat on which the cat slept for a meeting with the Claimants’ Union seemed just as patently dishonest as cutting my hair and assuming a suit and tie for a court appearance.
I’ve never been sure why to be dowdy is also to be politically correct. Perhaps because our only successful armed revolt was led by Oliver Cromwell and his militant puritans. The Roundheads considered silks, satins and falls of lace anathema in the sight of God, and what they would have made of vinyl or latex is anybody’s guess. Puritanism was conducted in monochrome and without frills, and almost all insurgents since have inherited that attitude. Another possible reason for the dourness of Eng-Soc is that its stereotypes were formed either during the Russian Revolution or the Great Depression, and neither was noted as a fest of glad rags.
A third explanation might be that the majority of the up-the-workers Left whom I encountered in the Sixties were really nothing more than renegade children of the middle class, who cleaved to the idea of the flat cap, muffler and overalls as a reaction against their semi-detached consumer heritage. They seemed totally unaware of the great tradition of the English working-class dandy. The wideboys of the Forties, like Pinkie in Graham Greene’s Brighton
Rock, the teds of the Fifties and the mods of the Sixties were all progressive versions of what George Orwell described as ‘young men trying to brighten their lives by looking like film stars’ and George Melly later called ‘revolt into style’. The workers never wanted to look like the proles of Metropolis, but they were too wretchedly paid and brutally overworked to do otherwise. Only their criminal cousins were able to cut the desired dash. One of the great attractions of the Blackshirts, the Nazis and other fascist movements was that they offered unemployed louts snappy uniforms. The lone Red of my acquaintance who had both an awareness of power through style and the flash that came with it was a self-proclaimed Stalinist who rode a Triumph Bonneville and favoured Jim Morrison-style leathers and a sawn-off Levi jacket, with a hammer and sickle in place of the motorcycle club patch. More than once he told me, ‘I’d join the Hell’s Angels, but it’s the bastards you have to ride with. They don’t have a clue. I mean, how many could I discuss Frantz Fanon and The Wretched of the Earth with?’
During a political phase in the very early Seventies, when I was ramrodding the publication of IT, I was intimidated into going for the denim and boots end of radical chic, the basic biker-Yippie street-fighting drag of jeans, workshirt and an old Air Force jacket. I tried to maintain a certain snap by sticking to basic blue, and avoiding khaki and fatigue green, but, God, was it dull, and after maybe nine months I rebelled against the Marxist-Leninist dress code. Gussy up, and start dressing again. David Bowie was, after all, now waiting in the wings. Mac McDonnell, one of the Deviants’ ex-bass players, had given me a rather beautiful white jacket for my birthday, and I began building a new look around it. It must have worked, because the second time I strolled down Portobello so arrayed, I ran into Stacia, Hawkwind’s towering and statuesque dancer. We exchanged flirtatious pleasantries, as was our practice, and then, as we turned into the pub, she grinned at me. ‘I’m so glad you’ve started dressing rock & roll again.’
I laughed and nodded. It was always good to receive compliments from a very tall woman with massive breasts. ‘Yeah, so am I.’
Devoting time and space to the clothes we wore may seem shallow and facile, and all the care and planning that went into how we presented ourselves nothing more than self-indulgent narcissism. My only response is ‘Think again, pilgrim’. The use of dress for self-definition is the most instant and obvious means of protest available to an individual. The doubter only has to look on the other side of the fence. A marine bootcamp takes equal pains to break the will and destroy the individuality of its conscripts with uniform olive drab and identical shaved skulls. The violent reaction to the first wave of hippie freaks indicated, as far as those in authority were concerned, that you were absolutely what you wore. Police body-search harassment of the long-haired and outlandish, under the pretext of drug enforcement, became such a matter of routine in 1966 and 1967 that, by June 1967, Home Secretary Roy Jenkins was forced to issue a directive that race, personal appearance or hairstyle was not enough on its own to constitute reasonable grounds to stop and search an individual on the street. Naturally the beat cops largely ignored the directive, but at least the statement had been forced out of the Home Office.
Historically a political revolt without a similar revolution in style was a conspicuously rare creature outside of England. The bare-breasted women and the red, white and blue sashes of the Jacobins in the French Revolution, the charro look of the followers of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, the ghost shirts of the last Native American guerrillas, the red and black bandannas and red and white santeria necklaces of the Cuban Fidelistas – all of these were costume used as a personal banner of insurrection. The Black Panthers in their berets, leather jackets and sunglasses scared the shit out of Middle America even before they took to carrying guns.
If further proof were needed that costume operates as a potent psychological weapon, one has only to examine how the outrage of style escalated through the Sixties and Seventies, deliberately pushing the collective buttons of society at large. The unkemptness of the beatniks offended the short-back-and-sides public sense of order. The hippies, flaunting a colourful hedonism, set off the jangling alarms of accepted decency, the androgyny of the glit-glam attacked the barriers of strict gender division, while the punks launched a visual assault on society’s Freudian id by dragging all its best-kept psycho-sexual fetishes out from under its Jungian collective mattress.
Although the punks cultivated a scathing contempt for us old hippies, and their style owed more to Joseph Goebbels and Morticia Addams than Shiva and William Morris, their attitudes and objectives differed only by a nuance. Malcolm McLaren certainly borrowed heavily from the Situationists of the Sixties, and may even have cast his net much closer to what I consider home. John (Rotten) Lydon effectively gave the game away when he came up to me during my very first visit to the Roxy, the prototype punk club staged in what had been a venerable drag-queen bar in Covent Garden. To show the old-guard flag at the Roxy, I had dressed to a fairly carefully drawn line between old fartism and compromise with fickle trend. I had done my best neither to conform nor antagonise in my old black leather jeans, and a splendidly flowing black coat with a medieval eagle on the back that the brilliant Phoebe Cresswell-Evans had designed for me. The jeans did however have a slight flair, just enough to make them hang correctly over my cowboy boots. Rotten said nothing, but just stooped down and measured the offending flair with his thumb and forefinger, then looked up at me and slowly shook his head. The flair might have been minimal, but it was still unacceptable to the new generation. A man’s loyalties, antecedents and social pedigree will ever be judged by the cuff and cut of his pants.
And, of course, it still continues today. In the USA in 1999 the CNN-watching world saw the phenomena of the Trenchcoat Mafia, the cult of disconnected white kids borrowing the long, sinister black coat from movies like The Crow and The Matrix, the gangsta accessory tip of carrying automatic weapons under said coats, and the philosophy of nihilist homicide from the disgruntled employee. They not only instilled fear in the squares by their look, but also punched their message home by conducting bloody high-school massacres. In comparison, the excesses of the Woodstock Nation seem positively benign.
Oh yes, we hippies of the Sixties paid far too much attention to style and almost none to political theory (or automatic weapons, for that matter). It was part of both our charm and our downfall, but what could you expect from the first generation of television babies, who believed that all the problems of the planet could be solved simply by doing it in the street and scaring the horses?
A Shed in Chalk Farm
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s the IT girl.’
‘Wasn’t Clara Bow the IT girl?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Well, that’s Theda Bara.’
Primary fuck-up.
It was always a great source of comfort and amusement that the logo of IT – the International Times, England’s first and most successful underground newspaper – carried the picture of the wrong movie star. Instead of Clara Bow, the real IT girl, it bore the intense and sensual stare of Theda Bara, whose name was an anagram for ‘Arab Death’. I wasn’t around at the very start, so cannot be held responsible. According to legend, it was some friend of Jim Haynes who actually perpetrated the error, but I’ve always kept the primary fuck-up dear to my heart, as something to remember when we of the ‘underground media’ started taking ourselves too seriously. Oz magazine had a similar primary fuck-up. While Richard Neville and his crew were putting the third or fourth issue to bed, word came that Che Guevara had been murdered in Bolivia by the Rangers and the CIA. With no time to do a full obituary, Neville decided the smartest move would be to bind in a centre-spread memorial poster. The poster was quickly designed, no one bothered to proof it and the magazine went from the layout table to the printers and hit the street with Guevara wrongly spelled. We may have stormed the twin bastilles of censorship and disinformation, but we co
uldn’t spell, and we confused our movie stars.
As I already said, I wasn’t in on the planning and launching of IT as anything except an interested reader, and I only came to it because of a young woman called Zoe Harris. Zoe was very young, vibrantly attractive but highly insecure, and moved at about a million miles an hour. When she told me, in October of 1966, that I should go to a party at the Roundhouse celebrating the launching of IT, I paid attention and asked pertinent questions.
‘What’s IT?’
‘It’s a new fortnightly newspaper that some friends of mine are putting out.’
‘And what’s the Roundhouse?’
‘It’s an old locomotive shed in Chalk Farm Road.’
‘Okay.’ Strange but intriguing, and I decided I would make it my business to attend. Joy took some persuading, but when I threatened to go on my own she acquiesced.
As the cab pulled up outside the odd Victorian building, just down from Chalk Farm tube station, I realised that I’d seen the place before, but never taken the time to wonder exactly what it might be. I’d assumed it was something to do with the main-line railway tracks that led down to Euston Station, but that was about as far as the theorising had gone. From the outside, the entrance, distinguished only by a small cardboard sign, appeared to lead to nothing more than a derelict building, more the venue for a gangland murder than a party.
‘Is this a joke?’ Joy, in a short satin dress and spindly heels, was hardly dressed for cavorting amid ruins, and she had a natural female suspicion for information originating from an ex-girlfriend. Inside the door, a rickety and very narrow set of stairs, little more than a ladder, ascended into semi-darkness, but we could hear music, which is the standard encouraging sign when looking for a party. At the head of the stairs a young man was checking tickets, and three equally young women in silver dresses were handing out sugar cubes. The legend was that one in twenty had been dosed with a trip. Mine hadn’t, and, since no one else ever claimed to have scored a live one, I think I had just encountered my first psychedelic myth. Once inside, we stood and stared.
