Give the Anarchist a Cigarette

by Mick Farren

  I pretty much continued in that frame of mind until the next day, when I picked up the Sunday Mirror and discovered a report somewhere around page seven that, in essence, described how a bunch of filthy, lice-ridden hippies had attempted to defile the shrine to the nation’s glorious war dead to protest at the closure of their nasty pornographic newspaper. It was no more than I should have expected, but it pissed me off. For the very first time in my life I fired off an angry letter to a newspaper. My argument was about as simple as the Sunday Mirror deserved, and certainly on the kind of emotional level to which it could relate. My father, Eric Farren, had been in an RAF Bomber Command aircrew and had died on a raid on Cologne. I pointed out that he and thousands of others had gone to war against Nazi Germany, among other reasons to prevent the world from being run by a power structure that could send in the goon squad any time it wanted to close down a nonconformist publication.

  I didn’t expect the letter even to be published, but it must have struck a chord with someone on the features desk, if only as a potential ‘War Hero’s Son Defends Rights of Hippie Rag’ piece of confused banality. The following Wednesday a Mirror Group car and chauffeur showed up at Princelet Street and I was whisked back to the Cenotaph for a photo opportunity. I gave a lengthy interview, enlarging on my original letter, but also plugging the band and generally aggrandising myself. I figured: what the hell? If you’ve actually managed to grab some media attention, go for it. And, the following Sunday, there I was on page seven, with a large and flattering picture.

  By Sunday lunchtime the phone was ringing. The first comments came from Miles, who thought it was hilarious, but warned me that there’d be those who’d resent what I’d done. The rest of the band could see the percentage in the publicity, but had the usual reservations that come when one member gets the ink and they don’t. Hoppy laughed like a maniac, treating it as a marvellous scam on the straight press, and my mother seemed generally to approve. It wasn’t until Monday that the adverse reaction manifested itself. As Miles predicted, the word ‘ego-tripping’ was bandied about by the lower strata of boggies, while the CND duffel-coat poets started muttering about my ‘appetite for fame’. To this I can only respond that if they wanted to see an appetite for fame, they should have spent an hour or so with Angela Bowie or Marc Bolan, and they’d discover that I was positively anorexic where my own celebrity was concerned. Of course, I didn’t say anything – modesty becomes the hero of the hour, even among his detractors – but I did learn that if you stick your head out of the swamp, someone will be looking to lop it off.

  This lesson came on top of an already pretty outlandish set of circumstances. Down the rabbit hole of the underground we were making our own newspaper in the barn; Hoppy intended to bring 10,000 people together at one mighty gathering; and, in some quarters, I was regarded as a highly suspect, self-publicising egomaniac. Curiouser and curiouser.

  Chapter Four

  Technicolor Dreamin’

  I DID NOT want to go down the helter skelter. The idea of going round and round and down and down the smooth spiral track was suddenly repugnant. What the hell did I want to do that for? I’d climbed the fairground tower because everyone else was doing it – never really a good reason for anything. When I reached the top I wanted to look around and take in the extraordinary sight from this new elevated perspective, but the pressure of other freaks behind me insisted that I take a fibre mat, sit on it and go down the slide. Through the course of the long evening I’d managed to consume hash, speed, beer, rum, Scotch and, I think, a little wine. At the top of the helter skelter I suddenly realised that I didn’t want to add the rush of gravity and the spin of centrifugal force to the mixture, but by then it was too late and down I went. Too inhibited to scream like a rube at the fair, I merely felt sick. Of course, that was when ‘helter skelter’ just meant a simplistic fairground ride. The Beatles had yet to write the song, and Charlie Manson and his family had yet to make the two words a rallying cry to mystic-nihilist mass murder.

  That a helter skelter stood in the middle of Alexandra Palace, projecting like a medieval phallus above the milling throng in the huge Victorian relic of the Great Exhibition was, to say the least, a wonderment, but 29 April 1967 was a night for wonderments. That Hoppy had managed to pull off a booking at the Alexandra Palace was a miracle in itself. Dubbed ‘The 14-Hour Technicolor Dream’, it had become the lavish summation of all that had gone before and had a definite feeling of an opium mirage. Everything that had been growing and developing over the previous two years had been brought together in one place. Lights, sounds, effects, costumes, a new ethos that echoed the Rabelais-via-Crowley Law of Thelema, ‘Do what thou wilt’. Conceptual art, spacial structures like geodesic domes and a styrofoam igloo had all been set down in the hall, along with stalls hawking all manner of acid-trip toys, from electric yo-yos to black light posters and cheap, sparking, pressed-tin Chinese rayguns. Every dope dealer in the Home Counties and beyond had shown up to ply his more clandestine trade, and the obligatory Italian film crew shot footage.

  Twin stages had been erected at either end of the huge main hall so that two groups could play simultaneously. It was the only way to work through a bill that read like a complete directory of all that was either new and hip, or tried, true and demented – the Move, Pink Floyd, the Soft Machine, the Pretty Things, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, Tomorrow, Alex Harvey, Graham Bond, Champion Jack Dupree, and the godfather of us all, Alexis Korner. Pete Townshend appeared on the bill, but I don’t remember him performing, simply grooving around in ruffle shirt and paisley jacket. Marc Bolan showed up with John’s Children, who, if memory serves, appeared in diaphanous togas like a trans-gender troupe of Isadora Duncan dancers, while a band called the Flies, another set of punks a decade before their time, exhibited a certain cultural confusion by throwing flour (as opposed to flowers) over themselves and everyone else.

  The Deviants had the dubious privilege of opening the show, and I believe we were pretty rank behind a combination of jitters at the size of the crowd, an acoustic nightmare of a hall and a PA still in shakedown mode. I wouldn’t argue with critic Fred Dellar, who recalled in a Mojo magazine retrospective that we ‘thrashed and trashed Chuck Berry riffs’, although other more contemporary reports actually commended us. Dear Sue Miles commented, ‘There was the Social Deviants with their astonishing lightshow. Micky Farren was great, cos Micky was angry. He wasn’t into love and peace. He had this hair and kinda lime-yellow nylon loon pants.’

  About the only advantage of going on first was that we didn’t have to compete with another band at the other end of the hall, and, being on first, we were off first, which left us plenty of time to thrash and trash ourselves, and watch British psychedelic history unfold before our bloodshot eyes. A number of instant stars were created that night. Arthur Brown blew everyone away with his white-boy soul voice, his dancing and his flaming helmet, the precursor to the ‘God of Hellfire’ act that would eventually put him in a mental-health facility. Tomorrow made their mark primarily on the inspired showmanship of their bass player, who went by the single name ‘Junior’. The Purple Gang pulled off a showstopper with their hippie anthem ‘Granny Takes a Trip’, and probably could have been the biggest jug-band act in British rock history, except that I never ever saw them play live again.

  Pink Floyd consolidated their pre-eminent position, but their set was surrounded by a good deal of controversy. They didn’t play until dawn, having flown back the same night from a gig in Holland. Syd Barrett, by all accounts, was flying so high on acid that he’d reached full orbital velocity; he mistook the first rays of morning for a fundamental transformation of the entire universe and may have decided that the sun was going nova. Daevid Allen of the Soft Machine voiced the general opinion. ‘It must have one of the greatest gigs that they ever did . . . I was hearing echoes of all the music I’d ever heard with bits of Bartok and God-knows-what.’ Miles, on the other hand, who was probably more together than most, reca
lled how ‘both Peter Jenner and Syd were on acid. The probability was that they weren’t that good, but in that atmosphere it hardly mattered’. Something must have mattered, though, because, although no one in the crowd knew it at the time, it would be Syd’s last stand with the Floyd.

  In the backstage area, the happening bands all met each other en masse for the first time. We’d been assigned one vast communal dressing room, a tiled, institutional room the size of a tennis court. We corralled ourselves in our own separate little camps, with instrument cases, bits of gear, props and stage clothes defining our defensible space. My first surprise was how the denizens of backstage – considering that they were looked up to as the prime motivators – were actually more conservative than the punters outside. Considerably more drinking was going on backstage, and although a few world-class druggers were among those assembled, I quickly realised two things. Most bands, even though they might have their flamboyant extremists, also had members who, despite their long hair and floral shirts, still clung to a decidedly brown-ale consciousness, and would probably never change. Too many didn’t believe a word of all this counterculture malarkey, and were only embracing the trend as another avenue to rock-business success.

  The rockbiz presence was more than evidenced by Tony Secunda, the Move’s outrageously extreme manager, who made an entrance like an incendiary whirlwind and commenced a one-man drama to ensure that the Move received the most favourable time slot, and that no other band was playing while they were on. In fact, Secunda was more out there than all but a handful of the musicians. Following a particularly outrageous promotion for the Move, he had been sued for libel by Prime Minister Harold Wilson. A few years later we’d become firm friends and do a hell of a lot of cocaine, and even get ourselves arrested together, but right then I merely watched in awe as he taught a class in rock & roll managerial madness.

  Forget the bands and the business, though. The unsung hero of the 14-Hour Technicolor Dream was Jack Henry Moore. Jack was short, rotund and as loudly and unfetteredly gay as anyone could be who grew up in small-town Oklahoma and was now happily cutting loose in the world at large. He had a sharp intelligence and an even sharper sense of humour, and a habit of whipping up his T-shirt to expose his nipples and Buddha-like stomach when confronted with overbearing pomposity.

  ‘Oh, please! Enough!’

  He had a bizarre fund of knowledge, including which London restaurants served the most ‘aggressively cold’ Coca-Cola, and was notorious around Covent Garden for projecting movies late at night on the walls of the buildings opposite, from the windows of his apartment on Long Acre. He claimed both to have studied with John Cage and to have been on the road with Little Richard. He was the most lively and outspoken of the original IT Editorial Board and would, with Jim Haynes, shortly found the London Arts Lab in Drury Lane, where he devised the notorious basement cinema in which, instead of seats, the patrons sprawled on a foot-thick foam-rubber floor to watch the latest Warhol or Kenneth Anger. The cinema also hosted legendary after-hours, multi-gender, multi-sexual-preference orgies, while the cutting edge of avant-garde pornography rolled grainily on the screen.

  Jack literally produced the entire Technicolor Dream. The performance stages at each end of the hall were his twin babies, as was the long span of lighting gantry that traversed the area’s entire width, like a rickety suspension bridge, thirty feet in the air, midway between them. At that midpoint, under the lighting gallery, the sound of the two opposing bands blended into a weird atonal cacophony that both Frank Zappa and Karlheinz Stockhausen would have totally relished. Knots of stoned freaks gathered in this narrow zone of audio fusion, grooving to the random combinations of key and time signature. I suspect this may have been Jack’s own devious plan to get his personal rocks off by creating a wholly arbitrary, instant, found composition, and for all I know, he may have been secretly recording the results. When he became my new-music mentor during the making of the Deviants’ first album, I found this was exactly how he thought. Sadly Jack became just too outrageous for the authorities in Britain, and around 1970 they cancelled his work permit and made it clear that he was no longer welcome in their green and pleasant land. He was forced to relocate to the more tolerant atmosphere of Amsterdam, were he continued his multimedia work and his extravagant lifestyle at the Melkweg (translated, Milky Way), one of the Dutch nightclubs where open marijuana smoking was first permitted.

  I may have been hallucinating, but I swear I saw John Lennon (who was certainly present at the event) standing thoughtfully in Jack’s zone of dissonance, moving first forward and then back and looking quite fascinated. The presence of Lennon at the 14-Hour Technicolor Dream also provided an odd footnote of rock & roll romantic trivia. In another part of the hall Yoko Ono was staging an event at which passersby were invited to scissor the clothing from the body of an attractive young woman, but the two of them never met that night.

  By most estimates 10–11,000 showed up at the Alexandra Palace to ride the helter skelter, smoke the joints, drop the acid, take in the bands, buy the geegaws and generally wander around in a haze. (The word ‘haze’ is common to most accounts of the event.) That the number of consumers for this kind of thing had swelled from under a hundred to a full five figures was nothing short of amazing. What the hell was going on here? Was it merely a vast fashion aberration, or were we seeing a brand-new mass art movement, like the Pre-Raphaelites or the Aesthetes, only quantum multiplied by the vast numbers of the baby boom? The idea that seemed almost dangerous to entertain was that Miles’ abstraction of an alternative society was actually coming to pass, but at a frightening and uncontrolled rate, like a viral culture growing exponentially, each cell dividing and reproducing over and over again. I had a stoned vision of the calendar. As the sun came up on the Technicolor Dream, it was just a day away from 1 May, the high holiday of communism and the ancient date of the rites of spring fertility. Was the combination a bell-wether to the wind of change?

  I also feared for whatever it was. Hoppy had created a magnificent gathering at Alexandra Palace, but the underground was no longer underground. He’d placed us right in the shop window, without cover or camouflage, and I worried that far from hastily developing new and needed survival skills, we were going public with a contrived and ‘groovy’ innocence. I couldn’t identify with this and I could never comfortably be a part of it. I had a vision of it all devolving into an absurdly naive children’s crusade, such easy prey for sharks and charlatans that they’d be destroyed before they reached the end of the night, let alone came within sight of any New Jerusalem.

  Even at the Technicolor Dream itself, the wolf packs were already in evidence. In the headlong rush to organise the large and complicated celebration, neither Hoppy nor anyone else had paid much attention to the matter of security. Again it was a symptom of innocence; the belief that good vibrations would conquer all. Thus far the only trouble at UFO had been limited to the odd crazy Irishman and a handful of bad trips, and, if that was the model, no real reason existed to believe it would be any different at Alexandra Palace. Unfortunately the Technicolor Dream was massively more visible than the small, fairly anonymous club in the West End. Out in the hinterlands of N22, and highly publicised in the press and on TV, it was just too tempting a target for anyone who fancied a spot of freak-bashing. The first to avail themselves of the opportunity were rabid teams of North London scooter boys and lumpen mods who crashed the party, eager to beat on unresisting flower children.

  Flurries of ugliness swirled as the mods attempted to escalate verbal abuse to pushing and shoving, but before the violence became gratuitous the cavalry arrived in the most unexpected form. Hoppy’s girlfriend of the time, the manic Suzy Creamcheese, and a recruited crew of hippie maidens descended on each new flashpoint and smothered the potential conflagration with promised, if not actually delivered, Xanadu visions of sex and drugs beyond any skinhead comprehension. After receiving the Creamcheese treatment, the would-be troublemakers were seen daze
d and wandering, staring wide-eyed and clearly wondering if maybe there were more amusing things in life than putting the boot in.

  Mystery always surrounded Suzy Creamcheese (née Zieger). Was she really the Suzy Creamcheese featured on the first few Mothers of Invention albums, or had she merely usurped the name for British consumption and her own expatriate self-aggrandisement? I didn’t really care. She did have these conservative parents somewhere in California, who were so appalled by her free-form lifestyle that they kept having her committed to various expensive mental institutions, causing Hoppy to array himself in a ninja outfit to break in and spend the night with her while she was so incarcerated. She also had sufficient flamboyance of character to qualify for the same Zappa encouragement given to Captain Beefheart, Wild Man Fischer, Alice Cooper and the GTOs. Even if counterfeit, Creamcheese was outrageous enough to serve our British requirements, and I will always be grateful for her innovative peacekeeping at the Technicolor Dream.

  The hallmark of a good party is supposedly that you can’t remember how you got home, and I have absolutely no recollection of how I returned from the 14-Hour Technicolor Dream. I did note later that, out in the ‘real’ world that same week, David Bowie released a single called ‘The Laughing Gnome’, Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead opened at the National Theatre, the Beatles were finishing up Sgt Pepper after 700 hours in Abbey Road studios and Muhammad Ali was stripped of his heavyweight title after refusing to be drafted and sent to Vietnam. The times were not only changing, but becoming really interesting.