by Mick Farren
Busted
Miles was definitely a whiter shade of pale. It was a blustery March day and I had wandered into IT to see what was doing. Bright and breezy as the weather, I suddenly felt as though I’d walked into a wake. ‘You look fucking terrible. What’s the matter?’
‘We’ve just been busted.’
‘Jesus Christ, for what?’ I knew Miles didn’t keep dope around, so what was the beef?
‘They came storming in with a warrant under the Obscene Publications Act.’
I could see Miles was extremely shaken, and my immediate concern was for his welfare and state of mind, rather than the greater implications. ‘Was the warrant for the bookshop or IT?’
Miles shook his head and seemed to be at something of a loss. ‘It was for the premises. It wasn’t any more specific than that.’
As far as I could glean, the cops had been on a fishing expedition, designed to scare the hell out of anyone and everyone they encountered. Ten detectives had shown up, and although they had removed some books from the shop, primarily works by Bill Burroughs, their main concentration had been on the IT office in the basement. From there they had taken away just about everything – copies of the paper, manuscripts, subscriber lists, halftone photographic blocks for the forthcoming issue, unbanked cheques and even the personal address books of the staff. They had also carefully tipped the contents of the ashtrays into evidence bags and sealed them for analysis.
‘They’ve done just about everything they can to effectively close us down.’
‘Did they give any indication what they might have considered obscene?’
Miles shook his head. The detectives had been totally uncommunicative, and he’d been racking his brains to figure out what specific obscenity could be used on which to hang a case. The best he could come up with was an interview with comedian and anti-war activist Dick Gregory, in which he tossed around phrases like ‘white motherfuckers’, but that seemed hardly enough to form the basis of a successful prosecution, after the acquittal of Penguin Books in the 1960 obscenity trial of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The word ‘fuck’ hadn’t been grounds for seizure and prosecution for a full seven years. It was then that my naivety fell away. In East End parlance, the filth had been round to put the frighteners on us. So that was how the game was going to be played from here on in? Perhaps it was time to start thinking more like a hoodlum. Up to that point, I had assumed that marijuana prohibition would be the primary weapon of social control if the authorities wanted to suppress the new cultural underground. The removal of the contents of the ashtrays was evidence that the dope laws hadn’t been forgotten, but it hadn’t occurred to me that the Obscene Publications Act would also be brought into play to shut down what amounted to the counterculture’s first means of mass communication.
After the fact, some observers claimed that this first IT bust, and the others that followed, plus the subsequent Oz, Nasty Tales and Little Red School Book trials, really had little to do with politics and were more the result of endemic corruption of many in the Metropolitan Police during the Sixties. The graft generated by crime families like the Krays and the Richardsons had penetrated to all levels of the Met, and nowhere was this more evident than among the officers of what was known as ‘the dirty book squad’. Paid off to turn a blind eye to the porno bookshops and hole-in-the-wall ‘adult’ movie theatres, they needed flashy prosecutions, like those against IT and Oz, to maintain their credibility. Personally I never bought this theory as anything but a minor contributory factor. To send ten burly plainclothes scuffers storming into a respectable Bloomsbury bookstore must have been done with the knowledge, and at least tacit approval, of the Director of Public Prosecutions, and possibly even the Home Secretary.
My first reaction was to become very angry. This was Britain in the late 1960s, with a supposedly enlightened Labour government. Where the hell did Harold Wilson and Roy Jenkins get off using strong-arm tactics to shut down a dissident magazine? IT was tame, little more than a fringe arts paper, and certainly not preaching the violent overthrow of the government. To suppress such a publication said much about those in office, and none of it was good.
My second shock was a little longer in coming. It was the awareness that the people I’d just begun to work with were frightened. Oddly, I didn’t share their fear. As I said, I was just plain angry. For the first time in my adult life I actually felt protective of a group of which I was a part. Maybe that was the plus-side of the gutter-level life I’d been leading since I escaped from further education. It would be overweeningly arrogant for me to say that I’d developed an outlaw consciousness. Meetings with the genuine article had made me aware that I didn’t have sufficient amoral sociopathic detachment, but next to Miles I was Billy the Kid, enough of a street cowboy to keep my head in a law-enforcement crisis. I believe I also relished the prospect of a fight, the thrill of anticipation that the adventure had become dangerous. Here was the cause that, as a rebel, I’d always needed. Far from being intimidated, I was determined that those in authority should see that they’d made the first move in creating a minor monster with their heavy-handed tactics.
Miles went off to make calls to lawyers and others, and I headed down to the IT basement to discover more despondency. With the exception of Miles, the Editorial Board had vanished, scattered to the metaphoric hills in the wake of the bust. Tom McGrath came in one time, wrote an editorial – ‘the police seizure had done us one favour in that it separated out those who are proud to associate themselves with IT when the praise and publicity are flowing, but quickly disassociate themselves when the trouble begins’ – and then vanished, never to be seen again, making the editorial vacuum complete. I think it was at that point that I started talking. Right then, stirring rap was about my only asset. ‘Are we going to lie down and give up, or will we carry on, no matter what?’ I think I asked this question in every form and from every possible persuasive angle, and never waited for an answer. I waxed pothead Churchillian. We’d fight them in the streets and on the fucking beaches. We freaks would never surrender.
Initially the IT vacuum was filled by just three of us – designer Mike McInnerney, a cat called Dave Howson, and me – and just about all we shared at first was a determination to pick up the pieces and keep the paper running. Beyond the rhetoric, the situation was dismal. Whatever infrastructure there might have been was smashed, printers were running from us like we had the plague and there was absolutely no money. Our only advantage was that the organisation had been so damned sloppy there wasn’t really much worth rebuilding. The most daunting problem was the money, but before we could get too depressed about that, Hoppy showed up, like a whirlwind of positive energy. His response to everything was just three words. ‘Far fucking out!’
‘Is it possible to put out a paper?’
We thought so.
‘Far fucking out!’
‘Can we manage without money?’
We thought so.
‘Far fucking out!’
Initially Hoppy, as a respected photojournalist, hit his Fleet Street contacts, hustling to drum up a little outrage and support, but he immediately ran into an impenetrable wall of apathy and, in some quarters, actual smug glee. Good riddance to an inky gadfly nuisance; IT was a little beatnik pest of a paper that should never have been launched in the first place, seemed to be the general reaction. Although he used what would later be Larry Flynt’s argument – if those in power bust even the most wretched publication, all free media are at risk – no one seemed to give a rat’s arse. After beating his head on indifference for a while, I believe he went away, brooded and then came back with a whole new strategy. Hoppy had decided to raise money and focus a massive spotlight on the situation by staging a huge, weekend-long event somewhere in London, with bands, side-shows and all the fun of a full-blown psychedelic fair. If anyone else had announced such a grandiose scheme, we almost certainly would have declared him insane and shuffled him up the basement stairs. Ho
ppy, however, was different. With his energy and track record, he was about the only one who could pull it off.
Now it was our turn to respond, ‘Far fucking out!’
In reality, it was even further fucking out. What I didn’t know at the time was that, on top of everything else, Hoppy had troubles of his own. He had been busted for a small amount of hash and was due to go for trial in the next few months, and his anti-establishment machinations were unlikely to endear him to a judge. Thus he was not only taking a wild cash and credibility gamble on this projected event, but one hell of a risk with his personal liberty by making himself such a high-profile irritant. I was a little surprised that some of his friends didn’t attempt to talk him out of it. On the other hand, maybe they did and he ignored them. It would certainly have been in character. As it was, we worked out a division of labour. Mike McInnerney and I would keep the paper coming out as best we could, and Hoppy would organise the Great Event. Effectively, the workload involved meant that we’d be going our separate ways, but, since the event and the paper were mutually dependent, we would liaise constantly.
Through those days in the aftermath of the raid Mike proved to be a quiet tower of strength. He was a magnificent graphic artist, out of Ealing Art School, with an imaginative and decidedly psychedelic vision, and would ultimately go on to design the elaborate triptych packing for the Who’s first version of Tommy. Without Mike, I don’t think we would have made it. He not only managed to find a sympathetic printer, but one that would move IT out of the archaic world of letterpress, with its hot type, metal photographic plates and the look of a small-town newspaper, into the world of web offset which offered the potential for colour, flexibility of layout and lower production costs. Between us, we confirmed that our major distributor would still go on handling us, despite the police action, and then began sifting through what usable copy the cops had left us. For the first few days there were just the three of us, but we quickly discovered that although Dave Howson talked a good game, he had not even my basic art-school skills when it came to producing a newspaper and, after what might be called a frank and open discussion, Hoppy took him off to be his lieutenant on the Great Event. That left just two of us.
Fortunately we didn’t remain two for long. Joy pitched in and, with Miles’ then-wife Sue, worked the phones to try and rebuild the confiscated business records. A greatly increased number of street sellers turned up to hawk copies of the last issue, which hadn’t been in the office at the time of the raid, throughout the West End, Chelsea and Notting Hill. Finally some very serious help turned up in the form of a tall, blond, highly capable, if somewhat mysterious individual called Max Zwemmer. Max had economic acumen and a persuasive phone manner, and he quickly fell into the role of business manager. Prior to that, I’d attempted to hustle printers and suppliers by dredging my mother’s upper-class accent up from my DNA, but Max was the kind of natural-born wheeler-dealer we absolutely needed. He also freed up my time to assist McInnerney, who had his hands full actually designing and putting an issue into production. As no stranger to layout, I also prepared camera-ready pages. At the same time, I found myself answering what seemed to be an unending stream of questions from well-wishers wanting to know what was going on. I seemed to be doing ad hoc public relations.
With the actual production of an issue under way – it would miraculously come out only one week late – my next major concern was not only that the paper should survive, but that it should be seen to survive. With the overground media totally ignoring the IT bust, the word could only come out through the underground grapevine, and the fastest way to do that was to make use of UFO, not only as a public forum, but perhaps also as a source of much-needed cash. Some money had come in from various sources – I think, via Miles, that Paul McCartney had helped out with the print bills; Pete Townshend, a close friend of Mike’s, had weighed in with a contribution; and a handful of dope dealers had slipped Max some petty cash and some much-appreciated lumps of hash. Day-to-day running expenses were still needed, however, and, since UFO seemed to be booming, I rather naively enquired why some of the UFO proceeds couldn’t be channelled to IT in its current state of crisis.
To my innocent surprise, I was informed that IT and UFO were two distinct and separate entities. IT was controlled by Lovebooks Ltd and UFO by UFO Clubs Ltd, and although Hoppy was a common director, they had no other relationship with each other. I could understand that. Legally, and on paper, it made absolute sense. If one went down, it was singularly dumb for the other to be dragged down with it, but that wasn’t the whole story. It was quickly made clear to me that the separation went much further. UFO had absolutely no relationship with IT, except as one of the paper’s regular advertisers. Word even came down from Joe Boyd that he would go so far as to risk paying for the next two ads up-front, even though doubt remained that the paper would come out.
Wait just a fucking minute!
All this was news to me, and I’d been running the goddamned door at UFO on no set salary, just what Joe or Hoppy decided to hand me at the end of the night. I’d believed I was in an all-hands-to-the-pumps situation and had acted accordingly. In my mind – and, I was quite certain, in the minds of 99 per cent of the people who read the paper and went to the club – the two were indivisible: the weekly gathering and the communication medium, the two spearheads of the underground, mutually dependent and mutually supportive, building on each other’s strength and presumably helping each other in times of trouble. If the ‘all for one, one for all’ idea hadn’t been deliberately fostered, no effort had been made to dispel that impression. And it wasn’t just the dumb-ass hippies who believed this. When Pete Townshend slipped me a ‘contribution to the cause’, or, after the bust, kids offered to pay extra over the admission price, I’m sure they weren’t intending it to swell the profits of UFO Clubs Ltd.
My first disillusionment with the underground spurred me on to a form of larceny to which, since the statute of limitations has long since run out, I can freely admit. The religious term is ‘tithing’, and a wiseguy would have called it ‘skim’. I called it survival. IT had single-handedly put UFO on the map, and what I now organised was a form of reverse payola that would pay for Letraset, paperclips and all the thousand things that a newspaper was heir to, and would ensure that the men and women who were working for nothing at least ate, and had a contribution to their rent and gas bill. The only people who knew what I was doing were Miles, Sue, Joy and Max, and I even kept them sufficiently in the dark to have what the CIA call ‘plausible deniability’.
The use of UFO as a public-relations springboard proved to be much less of a moral stretch and, to my relief, required absolutely no effort from me. Poet Harry Fainlight, the same skinny, emotional Harry Fainlight who had freaked out on speed the year before at Wholly Communion and had inspired Allen Ginsberg to write the poem ‘Who to Be Kind to’, was so incensed by the IT bust that he took matters into his own hands and organised a post-UFO piece of street theatre, in which Harry would be carried in a cardboard coffin, symbolising the death of IT. He would be borne aloft from UFO, escorted by a throng armed with drums, bells, tambourines, whistles and other noisemakers, down Tottenham Court Road, along Charing Cross Road, through Trafalgar Square and on down Whitehall to the Cenotaph. It occurred to me that the planned route was quite a hike, and it was lucky that Harry didn’t weigh more than about ten stone. Even so, I refrained from volunteering as a pallbearer. In fact, although I sympathised absolutely with the sentiments, I was glad I was having nothing to do with the organisation of the procession, since I’ve never been overly keen on street theatre. Usually a case of too much street and not enough theatre. Ambulatory Tennessee Williams it never is, and I was content to remain a spectator.
In this instance the street began to assert itself within a couple of blocks. Even Harry’s frail frame began to weigh heavy on those carrying him, and the coffin was set down, Harry climbed out and returned to the ranks of the living; the coffin was then
filled with some of the flowers that the ‘mourners’ had been carrying. With the load lightened, everyone set off again in the grey London dawn, and by the time we all reached the Cenotaph a couple of reporters with attendant photographers had shown up, so the peculiar protest at least hadn’t gone completely unnoticed. At the Cenotaph the enterprise hit another snag. Harry may have come up with the coffin concept, but he’d failed to script any scenario for the full duration of the protest. The merry band of faux-mourners now developed a bad case of what-the-fuck-do-we-do-next? The question became increasingly pressing as, in the wake of the reporters, constables began to hover, and many of us knew they wouldn’t hover too long. We were in one of the highest security areas in the city, right by the Houses of Parliament, 10 Downing Street, Scotland Yard itself and only a short distance down Birdcage Walk from Buckingham Palace. Perhaps a nice place to visit, but a nicer place to get the hell out of.
Someone suggested that we go down into the tube, an idea verging on the inspired. Not only would we be off these all too historic streets, but we’d cause the plods a good deal of jurisdictional confusion. Thus the underground decanted itself into the Underground, and rode around with its coffin and noise, spreading alarm among early Saturday-morning commuters. At first we rode at random, but, with a pigeon-like hippie homing instinct, we ended up circling the Circle Line until we arrived at Notting Hill Gate, where we re-emerged into the surface world and began to wend our way north up Portobello Road, to the obvious displeasure of the market traders who had just set up for Saturday, the big business day.
The problem was that these kinds of symbolic demonstrations never know how to conclude themselves and usually drag on, with dwindling numbers, until the police finally move in and break them up. I didn’t feel inclined to wait around for what would probably be the bitter end, so I peeled off to breakfast on Coca-Cola and a bacon sandwich in the Mountain Grill, the greasy landmark café right next door to where the Metropolitan Line to Hammersmith ran over the street and, in a couple of years, the Westway overpass would be constructed. As I ate and wondered if I should hang out in the Grove or face the long tube ride back to the East End, I figured the whole episode had been amusing while it lasted, but had essentially been a waste of time in terms of political practicality.
