by Mick Farren
‘Wow!’
Wow, indeed. The place was definitely a ruin, but I recognised that I’d lucked into something exciting, new and maybe magical. In an environment of dirt, damp and debris, the same breed of freaks I’d seen at the Dylan concert at the Albert Hall were moving in the gloom, but instead of sitting in their seats absorbing Bob, they were interacting, mingling, dancing. Holy moley, Batman, what do we have here? The reek of old decaying plaster, rusting cast iron and dark satanic mildew was tempered by incense and – yes – the covert whiff of marijuana. I love the smell of marijuana in the evening. It was the smell of . . . well, maybe not victory, but perhaps some devil-may-care anarchy.
The Roundhouse was little more than a huge circular shell, with a floor of cracked brickwork, littered with chunks of masonry, empty cable drums and broken components of Victorian machinery. A rotting deathtrap of a gallery ran around the entire circumference, some thirty feet up. Later I would climb up to investigate, and discover its missing boards and multitude of holes, each one potentially lethal to the unwary. I had assumed the building had originally housed a locomotive turntable, but Miles quite recently informed me that hadn’t been the case at all. It had in fact accommodated winding gear that, in Victorian times, had hauled trains up the hill from Euston. It was owned by an organisation known as Centre 42, which had acquired it from British Rail in some art-for-the-masses deal fronted by the playwright Arnold Wesker, and it had been rented to IT for forty quid for the single night. The Wesker plan was to create a workers’ fun palace and a mecca for the socialist arts, but Centre 42 had estimated that they would need a half million pounds to start and had only managed to hold a few meetings and put up a sign proclaiming how much money they wanted in donations. The IT crew had scored the rental by playing on Wesker’s guilt that, under his stewardship, the place was lying useless and empty.
A rickety scaffolding stage had been erected, and slide and movie projectors threw film clips and abstract images on plastic sheets hanging on clothes lines. Today it would all seem tattily pathetic, but right then, it was the stuff of dreams. When Joy and I first walked in a steel band was playing on the stage. I have never been fond of steel bands. I’ll stick to ska and blue beat, if we’re going that totally tropical route. Fortunately, there was plenty more to occupy my attention. To one side of the stage, someone had attempted to create a six-foot jelly. The assumption had been that it would stand up on its own, but when turned out of the cauldron-like container that had been used as its mould, it proved how a giant jelly cannot maintain the same integrity of form as the smaller, household dessert jelly. It lay in a multi-gallon glutinous blob-mass on the uneven floor, like the remains of a dead alien in a horror movie, and the more extrovert partygoers were already sliding about in it.
The first person I recognised was a young mod from around the clubs, a frequenter of places like Tiles, the mega-dance club on Oxford Street. I had no idea how he’d got there, but he seemed highly excited by all that was going on and rushed up to me, with a closed fist discreetly extended, as though he wanted to slip me something illegal. ‘Here, have a bit of fun on me.’
I found myself holding four yellow pills. Dexedrine. I took two and Joy took two, and things geared up a notch. The next person I encountered was Zoe, with her new boyfriend, who looked like a Mossad agent. With boyfriend in tow, she introduced me to John Hopkins – Hoppy – for the first time. Simultaneously frenetic and stoned, hyperactive and endowed with a boundless enthusiasm, he was one of the organisers of the event and one of the group that was launching IT, which, with a Bill Burroughs ring, called themselves the Editorial Board. As, over time, Hoppy’s background unfolded, I discovered that, after reading physics and maths at Cambridge, he had worked as a reactor physicist for the Atomic Energy Commission at Harwell, mainly to avoid national service, but had then fallen into CND, the beat generation, playing in a jazz band, dope and dealing, and had become a professional photographer. He’d already had a number of adventures in embryonic underground publishing, and had even formed early white-boy contacts with some of the first Notting Hill Rastafarians. I told him that I thought it was a fantastic thing that he was doing, with the Roundhouse party and IT, but after that there didn’t seem much to say. Rather than degenerate to small talk, I moved on, unaware of the pivotal role Hoppy would play in my life, and in the lives of a lot of other people, over the next few months.
By this point the steel band had given up the stage to a band called the Soft Machine. Loosely jazz-based, and with an amazing drummer, they were a quantum leap beyond anything I’d heard in rock & roll. Partway through the set a motorcycle cranked up and, as it spewed exhaust fumes into the already loaded air, the noise of its engine was amplified by the PA. Hey, an electric BSA. Towards the end of their set the band went into an extended chant, an early version of their live classic ‘I Did It Again’. With the speed providing the energetic basis for a fine high of multiple abuse, I augmented it with a number of hits from a communal bottle of scotch, some wine, a few beers and many lungfuls of smoke from the joints that were in free circulation. Although, stylistically, the Soft Machine had absolutely nothing to do with any musical endeavour I might have in mind, their breaking from the current norms, and open-ended innovation, gave me hope. If they could amplify a motorcycle, surely my weird-ass atonal singing could find its place.
Although equally out there, the next band up, obliquely named Pink Floyd, were located more in what I recognised as the current forms of rock ’n’ roll. Back then, they had yet to lay the bricks in their wall, or develop a taste for gloomy pomp and circumstance. They sounded like one continuous Pete Townshend guitar solo, but without the physical flamboyance. Their one advantage over the Soft Machine was an extensive use of reverb and repeat echo, which was greatly enhanced by the monster-movie acoustics of the cavernous building. They had also brought their own lights, which gave them a definite visual edge as the shape of things to come. This event, however, wasn’t about the bands. Although it’s now a cliché, the party was solidly and unashamedly about the people. Some media-familiar faces and household pop-names moved through the crowd. Paul McCartney, in full Lawrence of Arabia burnoose and heavy sunglasses, seemed concerned that he might be recognised. And, of course, he was recognised immediately, but no one particularly cared. No shrieking Beatlemania, just a smile and a nod, ‘Oh look, darling, there’s Paul McCartney.’
While I was sharing a joint with a circle of complete strangers, a sheet of corrugated iron crashed down behind us, and I turned to see Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull creating their own private entrance. Again no fanatical reaction, although one of the group I was with turned angrily. ‘Fuck you, mate, you scared the shit out of me. I thought you were the coppers. We’re being a bit illegal here, if you know what I mean.’
Some claim that a camel was at the party, but I didn’t see it – and a camel at a party, even in a place the size of the Roundhouse, is hard to miss. Logic would seem to dictate that it would have been wholly impossible for a camel to climb the stairs by which we entered the building. What you might call the eye-of-the-needle syndrome. On the other hand, I suppose it could have come in through the same hole in the wall as Mick Jagger. I do know that an Italian movie crew was present, filming topless young women smearing themselves with pink paint. As I gave Joy the slip and stumbled forward to take a closer look, an aggressive production assistant pushed me back, as though it was his exclusive movie set, instead of a free-form psychedelic party. The combination of speed, booze, marijuana and my natural aversion to authority caused me to snap back at him with old-fashioned rocker belligerence, ‘What’s your fucking problem?’
‘We’re trying to make a movie here?’
‘So?’
‘So fuck off, you’re spoiling the spontaneity.’
The idea that spontaneity could be spoiled really touched an inebriated nerve, and I think I might have taken things further, had not Joy and Zoe spotted me and diverted my attention away from the e
scalating confrontation. For the next year or so Italian or French movie crews seemed to be present at every psychedelic event, filming forgettable starlets against a backdrop of freaks. The end product was usually a hippy-trippy sequence in some sub-Bond spaghetti spy epic. To be fair, in many instances, the Italian or French movie crews, and the facility fee they paid, could be crucial in staging the event. Their contribution to the up-front financing could make all the difference.
A little while later (all time being relative) I again slipped away from the women, looking for fresh mischief. I was still fascinated by the holes in the wall, and the possibility that they might be admitting hallucinations. Lurching around the outer circumference, I discovered that quite a few fissures gaped jaggedly in the nineteenth-century brickwork, probably knocked through in anticipation of some future construction. Some were covered by bits of corrugated iron, like the one Jagger had apparently come through, while others were draped only with a builder’s tarpaulin. The obvious next move was to see what lay beyond. I ducked through and found myself facing the broad expanse of train tracks that led ultimately to Birmingham, Manchester and all points to north to Glasgow. Cheerfully courting death by misadventure, I skipped blithely across rails and sleepers, aware that some of the rails might have been electrified, but too bent on adventure to care. When I was at a sufficient distance, I turned and looked back to take in the Roundhouse as a whole. All around me railway traffic signals, and the lights of the trains themselves, were reflected to infinity in the wheel-polished steel of the rails, like a Brian Haresnape painting. Rolling stock moved in the distance, but, luckily, no trains came near me. Beyond it all squatted the rotund bulk of the building I’d just left, with its odd conical roof; a dumpy fortress where some kind of tentative banner seemed to have been unfurled. Was it a place where a new-found culture could be defended? I returned more carefully. Now I was thoughtful rather than elated. I wanted to come back to this place and the people gathered inside. It was as though I had finally found my tribe. The question asked by my insecurity was: would they want to accept me?
Chapter Three
Show Me Your Money
THE HIPPIE POINTED disapprovingly at my T-shirt. ‘Oh wow, man, that’s . . . like . . . so aggressive.’
The slogan on the T-shirt read HERE COMES THE INCREDIBLE HULK, and above it was a full-colour image of the Marvel comics character. Muscular, angry, green and naked but for ragged purple trousers, this product of unchecked gamma radiation strode from the front of the garment brandishing a knotted rope. The back of the shirt had a gag payoff. It showed the rear view; the Hulk striding away. The threatening knotted rope was, in fact, attached to a small wooden toy rabbit on wheels, indicating that the monster was really quite lovable. there goes the incredible hulk. Of course, the silly bloody hippie couldn’t see the back, and like so many of his kind, his verdict was rendered by what met the eye, without feeling any need to probe further. So fuck him. ‘Just get inside, okay?’
When I ran the door at UFO, that was one of my two stock responses to everything. ‘Just get inside, okay?’
Keep the line moving, don’t impede the flow or cause a log-jam. The policy of UFO was the diametric opposite of Studio 54 and all the ‘exclusive’ Seventies discos. Back in the Sixties, we wanted them inside the club. A rabble of freaks jamming the pavement was an instant provocation to the police, and the bottleneck was tight enough at the best of times, without plugging it by engaging in some pointless psychedelic discussion. The other stock reply was ‘How much money have you got?’
Working the door at the UFO Club probably taught me more about the true nature of the counterculture than any other single task. Yeah, I’d found my tribe all right and now I was in the thick of it, playing psychedelic traffic cop to a multitude of chemically incapable lemmings. I didn’t know if they’d accepted me, but, by God, they had to do what I told them. Each Friday night, if the Deviants couldn’t hustle together a gig of some kind (which in those days was most Friday nights), I spent three or four highly intense hours confronting a constant stream of freaks in all their manic glory. My role was that of problem-solver and troubleshooter – what Chet Helms, who ran the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco, on which much of the style of UFO was modelled, dubbed the ‘hassle guy’, a post I obtained by being the only hippie mean enough to deal with the creative nonsense of our stoned clientele.
‘Hey, man, you know what?’
‘What?’
‘If we all, like, concentrated our individual vibrations, and, you know, focused, we could turn the place into a real UFO, and actually, like, take the whole thing into space, you know?’
‘Just get inside, okay?’
‘No, really, man . . .’
‘Just get inside and explain it to someone else.’
‘Listen . . .’ ‘No, I don’t want to hear it. Just get inside.’
The price of admission was, if I recall correctly, ten shillings. It might have been more dramatic to declare that the price of admission was your mind, but it wasn’t. Ten bob. Not cheap, but hardly exorbitant. Even so, many balked or tried to weasel out. For example: ‘Don’t freak me out with money, man.’
‘Tell that to Pink Floyd.’
‘Money should be abolished, you know what I mean?’
‘I absolutely agree with you, and so does Fidel Castro.’
A look of doubt would cross the anti-materialist’s face. ‘You do?’
‘Sure, I do. How much money do you have?’
‘What?’
‘How much money do you have? In your pockets right now.’
(A literary echo: ‘What have you got in your pocketses?’ The crucial Tolkien riddle from The Hobbit by which Frodo wins the Ring of Power from Gollum.)
‘I don’t know.’
‘So take a look.’
The anti-materialist would fumble in his jeans, pull out a handful of coins and take inventory. ‘Uh . . . four and ninepence . . .’
‘Give it to me.’
‘What?’
‘Just give it to me.’
Reluctantly he would hand over the four and ninepence. I’d drop it into the shoebox that passed as a cash register. ‘Now, inside, okay?’
Finally realising that he’d gained admission for slightly less than half price, the anti-materialist would gather his pragmatism and scuttle on into the crowd, the noise, the smoke and the lightshow. The easiest to handle were the totally vacant. They would be put through the same routine as the anti-materialist, but without the dialogue. Their proffered coins would be taken, and they’d be pushed gently on. The real pests were the ones who wanted not only to get in, but also to make a point, like the fool taking exception to my Hulk T-shirt. ‘You really need to do something about your ego, man.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘No, really, man. Mellow out.’
Usually I was patient, but on occasion a verbal chastisement had to be delivered, if only to retain my own sanity. ‘Listen, fuckhead, try doing what I’m doing without a fucking ego.’
The hippie would recoil from the out-and-out fascist bastard. ‘Oh wow, man . . .’
‘Just get inside, okay?’
I didn’t need any criticism of my Hulk T-shirt. I was damned proud of it. It had been hard to obtain and was a psychological weapon in the UFO door operation in which I was the sole authority figure. Once inside the club, the hippies could do pretty much what they wanted. The only two points at which a semblance of, if not order, then at least coherent form had to be imposed were moving the bands on and off the stage and getting everyone into the club, making sure that at least the majority of them paid so that the bands, the rent and all the other expenses could be met, and the venture could continue to function. The first of these tasks was performed by a redoubtably efficient stage manager called Dave Harper, who would eventually be offered a job by the Doors. I did my best to take care of the latter, feeling, most of the time, that I was attempting to stuff 300 or 400 dithering and recalcitrant whit
e rabbits down a very narrow Lewis Carroll rabbit hole, which endowed me with a certain reputation for aggression that I have been trying to live down ever since.
UFO was the next logical stage in counterculture public events. It attempted to re-create the ambience of the IT launch party, with its unique combination of experimental rock show and do-your-own-thing free-form theatre, on a regular basis. Although maybe a dozen or more individuals made decisive contributions, the prime movers behind UFO were Hoppy – yet again – who at that time seemed to be achieving velocities close to the speed of light, and a character called Joe Boyd, a very tall and somewhat aloof American expatriate whose roots were in the US East Coast folk-music scene from which Dylan had just made his last exit.
In the beginning, the partnership between Hoppy and Boyd looked like a symmetrical set of checks and balances. It was only in later times of crisis that the flaws in the equation would reveal themselves, and that the duo would come to represent the very basic conflict between hard commercial opportunism and radical shooting for the moon. The initial strength of the two lay in the fact that Hoppy understood the freaks and Boyd ‘knew about music’. Hoppy had a gut understanding of the hippies’ idealism, while Joe was able to bridge the gap between psychedelic mania and rock & roll booking agents. IT, also Hoppy’s baby, was now appearing on the newsstands every fortnight, pretty much without fail, and could be used as a means of spreading the word, while Joe could organise a roster of bands that would bring in the right kind of crowd. They had even managed to come up with a venue.
The Blarney Club was located in a basement halfway up Tottenham Court Road, ironically just a few doors from the police station. It was an old Irish dance club, with a legal capacity of just over 600, a place of show bands, Guinness, a revolving mirror ball and a polished parquet dance floor. One of the first problems was the Irish drunks who wandered in on a Friday night wondering why the fuck there weren’t jigs, reels and a Joseph Locke tenor singing ‘Danny Boy’. The owner was Mr Gannon – I never knew his first name, he was always Mr Gannon – an old-time, West End club owner who had a good relationship with the police (he used to drop off a case of Scotch at the police station at Christmas) and generally maintained a quiet life. I didn’t think he had a clue what he was letting himself in for when he cut the deal leasing Friday nights to Hoppy and Joe.
