by Mick Farren
The Children’s Crusade
The feeling was one of being carried by the riptide, with no time to stop, take stock or plan ahead. The Technicolor Dream looked to have opened the floodgates on something unstoppable. My new-found friends and companions assured me we were on the Golden Road to Samarkand, and castigated me for being a chronic pessimist and natural-born worrier, but I still feared that we might be part of one vast Donner party that would be forced to eat each other after a wrong turn in the mountains. Even I, however, had to admit things did seem to be going our way for a change. After a wait of some two months the Director of Public Prosecutions decided that no charges were going to be brought against IT, and the same cops who raided Indica in the first place were forced shamefacedly to hump everything back into the basement, with the exception of the bags containing the contents of the ashtrays. This was definitely good news, not only as a moral triumph, but because, had there been a court case, we would have been in pretty dire shape. Almost all the proceeds from the Technicolor Dream had vanished. The honour system among the advance ticket sellers had completely broken down. They’d sold the tickets, but then made off with the money, and the event barely managed to break even.
On the other side of the coin, the sales of papers, T-shirts and other IT junk at Alexandra Palace had brought in some needed cash and established the paper as a natural adjunct of the new lifestyle that vibrated in Chelsea, Notting Hill and the West End. The hoardings around building sites were now decorated with shimmering acid-art posters for psychedelic bands and clubs, with those created for UFO by Mick English, Nigel Weymouth, Mike McInnerney and Martin Sharp taking pride of place. It became a matter of honour that this form of advertising shouldn’t give up its message too easily. Assorted hippies could be spotted peering intently at the posters attempting to glean information from among the curlicues.
At the crass end of the rainbow, Carnaby Street had turned floral overnight. The trendy boutique chain Take 6 was now selling knockoffs of clothing designs from Granny Takes a Trip – the pioneer King’s Road boutique. You could hear opportunist idiot bands like the Flower Pot Men, or the saccharine Scott McKenzie singing ‘If You’re Going to San Francisco’ (be sure to wear some flowers in your hair). Everywhere one looked, money was being generated. Even before it was fully formed, the philosophy had become a fad, and the fad’s economy was inflating so fast it made one’s head spin. A plethora of hustlers oozed from the woodwork promoting every imaginable fly-by-night scheme involving hippy-trippy, peace ’n’ love garbage. As a craps player since my art-school days, I recognised this commercial largesse as a temporary roll rather than a way of life, and wondered what would happen when flower power stopped shooting natural sevens and came up snake eyes. I knew that beads, bells and bad copies of Peter Max were no sustainable foundation. Hairline cracks were already starting to show in the Day-Glo magic castle.
Some of the most serious and most quickly widening schisms were the ones beginning to divide what could already be called the old guard. The Editorial Board had moved back into IT now that the legal threat had abated, and conflict immediately broke out as to the future direction and emphasis of the paper. The board seemed to feel that the crew who’d kept things running during the emergency was leaning too far in the direction of the prevailing hippie boom, and serious course adjustments were required. Needless to say, this hardly sat well with Mike and me. While we hardly wanted to turn IT into a flower-power comic, we were less than happy about policy being dictated to us from on high. Having saved the bloody paper against all the odds, we considered that we should be free to have some fun, or what the hell were we doing there?
One of the first fights was over design. Mike was fascinated by the graphic innovations being made by the US underground press, particularly the San Francisco Oracle, which was pushing the offset print process to its limit, with multiple colours and rainbow underlays. Of course this often made the text unreadable, but that was hardly a concern of any magazine designer in the late Sixties who was rolling in front of the curve. The board, on the other hand, thought we should return to a more conservative and readable style, and the dispute would ultimately lead to Mike’s departure. For my part, I was still pushing the same rock ’n’ roll iconoclasm as before, but with the added momentum of using it as an antidote to the dippier excesses. While it was finally recognised that rock & roll had its place, plans were mooted to relegate my ideas to a ghettoised ‘music section’.
To add even more insult, the board began hiring staff and actually offering them money. After living off theft and beggary for so long, I looked a bit askance at this, especially as the first hiring was of a brand-new editor. He turned out to be a cat by the name of Bill Levy. Bill was East Coast, campus Jewish, with a goatee, a Fifties’ Mad-magazine, bohemian haircut and a tendency to snigger at shit I didn’t even find particularly amusing. He seemed to fancy himself as some sort of renegade literatus, and I knew we had problems when I discovered that his idea of a major scoop was to publish correspondence between Anaïs Nin (whom I always imagined self-obsessed and a lousy fuck) and Antonin Artaud (whose Theatre of Cruelty had its points, but had, after all, died in 1948). I also knew that confronting him would have to wait. Whatever grief Bill Levy might potentially create was eclipsed by more pressing problems that were threatening to engulf UFO.
Joe Boyd had decided to make UFO commercial. With Hoppy’s time taken up by Alexandra Palace, and then his own drug bust, the original checks and balances were history. Over two Fridays, Boyd had decided to make his mark as a club promoter by booking Pink Floyd and the Move, and he was rubbing his hands over the truckload of money that was going to be made. The Move had a single in the charts and the Floyd were now massive. Unfortunately, Joe had neglected to discuss the matter with any of us humble minions who would have to cope with the crowds generated by his megalomaniac promotion. UFO was filled to near-capacity each week with the likes of Arthur Brown and Tomorrow, and we simply didn’t have the logistical resources to handle the numbers Joe anticipated.
In addition to the increasing headache of crowd control, and moving people into the club fast enough to keep the police happy, two other problems had reared from the slime. The same moddy scooter boys who had attempted to cause grief at the 14-Hour Technicolor Dream had discovered UFO and had been attempting, in small groups, to muscle their way in. I didn’t think we could rely on the sensual Zen psychology of Creamcheese’s Angels on any permanent basis, but at the same time the idea of hiring conventional bouncers stuck in my craw The first time I attempted to turn away one of these skinhead scouting parties, the confrontation started to turn ugly, but, with the uncanny luck that seemed to manifest itself in those days, help came from another unexpected quarter. A strange American who answered to the name of Norman, and looked fresh out of some Vietnam rice paddy, had been coming by the club for a few weeks. I have to admit that I’d been keeping an eye on him, wondering, if he was a vet, just how tightly wrapped he might be.
As the mods looked set to run right over me, Norman appeared out of nowhere, sprang onto the table at which the money was collected and landed in a ferocious martial-arts stance, making noises like a Shaolin priest about to crack boulders with his bare hands. The mods couldn’t have been more shocked if I’d conjured up Beelzebub from the hellish pit. For a moment they stood rooted and then turned away, muttering ‘Fuck this’ and attempting to save face with a retreating attitude of ‘We didn’t want to go into your fucking hippie club anyway’. Needless to say, Norman was immediately put on the payroll with a roving brief to keep an eye out for any trouble that might be brewing, either at the door or inside the club.
Other staunch allies in combating the mod/skinhead problem were a motley bunch of Jewish East Londoners known as the Firm. The Firm were ex-mods themselves, but of the earlier, stylish variety whose twin dedications were music – primarily the blues – and creating mayhem and chaos wherever they went. Led by the dire duo of Peter Shertser and Ian Sippen,
the Firm had taken a bunch of acid, but managed to retain a highly mutated version of the traditional mod obsession with making and spending money. They’d grown their hair and now dressed in sharp, custom-tailored suits of the most outrageous fabrics they could find. These bespoke monsters were made by an elderly tailor in the East End to whom they would present lengths of William Morris curtain material and demand that he sew it according to the same pattern as a three-button Tonik. At UFO, the Firm’s capacity for confusion and disorder reached inspired peaks. They spiked a number of people, including the hapless John Peel, attacked the more disorientated hippies with water pistols and, on one memorable night, let off an assortment of fireworks right on the dance floor. After that, the choice was either to ban them or co-opt them, and since they would only treat a ban as a challenge to return by hook or by crook, I suggested that they became our resident mod neutralisation squad.
The second problem that I sensed bearing down on us was that of media attention. For a while rumours had been circulating that one of the downmarket Sunday newspapers was gathering material for a major exposé of the hippie drug menace. Digging up tales of hippie horror was childishly simple. In the cowslip field of public relations, flower children were their own worst enemies. Far from being discreet or circumspect, most refused to shut up when confronted by an investigative muckraker. Even the most muddled and benighted reporter could manage to find some freak who’d spout a line of quasi-mystic, acid-head nonsense that could be twisted into a damning admission of narcotic degeneracy. On its own, a bad press wasn’t too worrying. The movement seemed to thrive on abuse. The real danger lay in the fact that a bad press was almost inevitably followed by some kind of police action, as the authorities sought to demonstrate they were doing something about the evil that the media had brought to the public’s attention. One set of hippie/drug exposés in the News of the World early in 1967 had resulted in the arrest of Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Robert Fraser at Redlands, Keith’s country house near Chichester. It was anybody’s bet what kind of round-up a second set of shock-horror revelations might produce, but UFO, as Hippie Central, was favourite for being busted.
Despite my vocal opposition to courting a potential shitstorm by pushing the club to the limits of its capacity and maybe beyond, the big nights of Pink Floyd and the Move went ahead. As expected, they were sweaty, uncomfortable and claustrophobic. The police complained a number of times about the overspill on the pavement, skinheads attempted to maraud and were repelled, and both staff and audience finished these nights irritable to pissed-off.
I don’t really mean to single out Joe Boyd as the embodiment of the unacceptable face of hip capitalism. We had managed to resolve the problem of the Social Deviants playing UFO. Joe claims it was just a reward for loyal service, while I still maintain that he had to cave in when faced with the fact that the Deviants not playing UFO was plainly absurd. At first we were lumbered with the 5 a.m. graveyard slot, playing to the demented or sleeping, but after a while folks discovered that, although we might be inept, it was an entertaining ineptitude, and we were elevated to the kind of earlier spots allotted to Arthur Brown and his flaming head.
As hustlers went, Joe was actually one of the more scrupulous but, in the wake of the Technicolor Dream, lines were quickly being drawn between the believers in some kind of cultural or political revolution and the rock & roll entrepreneurs wheeling and dealing in the new and the groovy. It was just unfortunate that Boyd and I should find ourselves facing each other across that line. I am not averse to making money when need be. While we continue to exist under capitalism, the rent has to be paid, as do the phone bill and the bar tab. I suppose I am cursed, though, by a form of puritanism that demands the profit motive should be declared up-front. What I couldn’t stand was enterprising avarice concealed behind some spurious revolutionary smokescreen – the kind of thing that came to a head in 1969 when CBS Records began running a bizarre advertising campaign with the slogan ‘The Man Can’t Bust Our Music’.
I remember on a number of occasions meeting with some record-company house hippie, who would slip me that knowing wink that, although we might be talking the anti-establishment talk, when it came to walking the walk, we were all secretly in it for what we could get. At that point he’d see my own eyes harden, would suddenly realise that I wasn’t going to enter his neat little conspiracy of profit and deception and would manoeuvre me out of their office as swiftly as if I had leprosy.
Breaking the Butterflies
Mid-afternoon, 30 June 1967, and, like all good adventures, it started with the phone ringing. I can’t now remember who was calling. A number of people around the IT periphery had gone down to the Crown Court in Chichester, where the charges stemming from the raid at Redlands were being heard. The voice on the other end was agitated. ‘That fucking bastard Block has given Mick, Keith and Fraser jail time.’
‘Oh, shit. How long?’
Midsummer and the judicial chickens were coming home to roost. Hoppy was already in Brixton for nine months for simple possession, and now it seemed that two of the Rolling Stones would be seeing out the rest of the year behind bars.
‘Mick got three months, Fraser got six months and Keith a year.’
‘You’re fucking kidding?’
‘I wish I was.’
‘Shit.’ I felt unexpectedly angry and sick, as though it had happened to a close friend, and later I wondered why. When Judge Block handed down time to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, a genuine personal response was completely illogical. These weren’t friends, they were symbols, and the only explanation I can offer is the potent might of symbolism. In reality, any number of poor bastards went to jail every day and were even less deserving of incarceration than Jagger and Richards, so why make a fuss about a couple of rock stars? The answer was that they were being shafted as an example to the rest of us, and the rest of us therefore took it personally.
The tale of the jailing of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards has been recounted a hundred times in a hundred different contexts. Set up by the News of the World, busted by the West Sussex County Constabulary and sentenced by Judge Block, they would provide the first salutary opening salvo lesson, before those in power went on to get the Beatles and put a stop to this drug nonsense once and for all. Fortunately, even as Jagger and Richards were being removed from the court in very visible handcuffs, the potheads of the nation cried out in a loud and metaphoric voice.
‘Fuck this shit! Just hold up a minute!’
Fuck this shit was the prevailing sentiment, but beneath the anger, hand on heart, I have to admit to a certain degree of calculation. When Hoppy had gone down, he had not been of sufficient national stature to mount any significant protest, even though it was plain he was being jailed for pranks like the Technicolor Dream as much as for the hash they’d found in his Queensway flat. Judge Gordon Friend had substantiated this during sentencing: ‘You are a pest to society.’ The best we could do in Hoppy’s case was put out a special poster edition of IT – ‘Summer Sadness for John Hopkins’. Mick ’n’ Keef, on the other hand, presented an unparalleled opportunity to cause a fuss.
Within half an hour of receiving the news of the sentences the IT offices began to fill with people, asking questions and bearing tales. Weeping teenyboppers were gathering outside Jagger’s and Richards’ London homes. Psychedelic socialite Nicky Kramer had apparently leaped off a bus in the King’s Road screaming ‘The revolution starts here!’ and doubtless scaring the tourists. A group of designers was already working on a poster with the slogan ‘Let Him Who Is Without Sin Jail the First Stone’. A couple of UFO groupies swept in, trailing patchouli and radical chiffon, demanding that we should all go to Paul McCartney’s house because ‘Paul will know what to do’, but were completely ignored. Miles had been on the phone to his contacts. In the corridors of Westminster it was being pointed out to the Home Secretary that maybe Judge Block had gone too far. Miles also reported that the Beatles had left town. (So much for going
to Paul’s house.) Brian Jones had been busted the night before, doubtless to provide a side-bar to the news reports of his bandmates going to jail, and fears of a mass round-up abounded.
I was adamant we shouldn’t go quietly. We must use our resources to get as many people as possible on the streets. If they were going to drag away the hopheads, let the hopheads be visible. No night and fog; if we went, we’d go kicking and screaming. I think it was Sue Miles who suggested the phone tree. It was an idea I really liked. Call one person and get them to call five more. In theory, one could raise a huge number of people in a matter of a couple of hours. It was a telephonic pyramid scheme I’d never had a chance to use, and I was academically curious to see it work.
If a demonstration was to be mounted, the first question was: where? Obviously everyone had to be concentrated in one place, or the exercise was pointless. It was then that inspiration struck.
‘Fleet Street.’
‘What?’
‘In front of the News of the World building. At ten o’clock this evening.’
As had to be expected at any gathering of freaks, counter-suggestions were immediately made – from Hyde Park (that was impractical) to Stonehenge (that was implausible). Another time-wasting discussion threatened to kill all momentum, but I’d brook no argument. Sue Miles, who could be mightily forceful when she wanted, backed me up. ‘It makes absolute sense. They were the bastards who started all this.’
After working the phones for about three hours, the die was cast. The word was out and beyond recall. Nothing remained but to go to the pub and wait. Many of my more Gandhian friends disagree, but I’ve always found it’s better to go to a demonstration a couple of parts drunk. I’ve always preferred my courage a little Dutch. Which was just as well, because in the cab to Fleet Street I experienced a bad bout of revolutionary first-night nerves. Suppose no one showed? The sight of fifty or sixty people already there came as a mighty relief, and more were arriving in a substantial flow. Some, like me, came in cabs; others got off buses. Cars and vans disgorged more protesters and then drove off to find places to park. Others simply wandered up on foot, while a few, with elegant forethought, emerged from Fleet Street pubs where they’d been hanging out until the appointed time. By ten-thirty we were a few hundred people strong and more kept coming. ‘Satisfaction’ and ‘Time Is on My Side’ were blasting from speakers hidden in the back of a van. It had all worked. Reporters flocked out of monolithic newspaper offices to ask us what we were doing, and were informed in no uncertain terms.
