by Mick Farren
‘Freeing the fucking Stones, and closing down the fucking News of the World!’
By far the greatest coup was that we’d taken the police completely by surprise. A single car showed up first, took one look and drove off again. About ten minutes later a couple of police vans parked, but at first nothing happened. Finally an inspector and four constables got out and walked slowly to where the demonstrators were most densely congregated. The inspector asked the perennial policeman question: ‘Who’s in charge here?’
We immediately employed the hippie version of ‘I’m Spartacus’. Everyone pointed to someone else.
‘He is.’
‘She is.’
‘He is.’
‘We are.’
‘They are.’
‘We don’t follow leaders, man.’
With a look of contempt, the deputation withdrew. I don’t know exactly how the signal was given, but suddenly half a dozen old-fashioned Black Marias raced up from Ludgate Circus and screamed to a halt, spilling cops and dogs onto Fleet Street. Instant chaos, with the dogs creating their own kind of panic. Scuffles broke out and I saw the first arrests. Lorry drivers and print workers were now massed in the loading bays of the nearest newspaper offices and looked as though they would be only too happy to wade in on the side of the cops. It was clearly time to withdraw before real violence started and the police staged a riot of their own. In almost the same instant a means of retreat presented itself that was as unorthodox as the rest of the protest.
‘Just get on a bus!’
The cops had failed to close off Fleet Street and the late-evening traffic was still flowing, albeit somewhat slowly, which was completely to our advantage. About a dozen of us quickly piled onto a number-seven bus coming from Liverpool Street Station. Others jumped onto other buses going in both directions. A protest at the imprisonment of the Rolling Stones was ending in escape via London Transport.
The next day was one of post-mortems and, as usual, I took flack from some quarters. In this case it was from our avowed pacifists. The Fleet Street action had been ‘irresponsible’ – ‘people could have been hurt’. In fact, a number had been hurt and six arrested. Having not twisted anyone’s arms, I had little patience with this after-the-fact carping. ‘What was I supposed to do? Write to The Times?’
It was a flippant remark and hardly thought out. I was ignoring the profound effect that the day’s editorial in The Times would have on the case. Editor William Rees-Mogg had written a leader condemning the sentences imposed on Jagger and Richards. Under a quote from Alexander Pope, ‘WHO BREAKS A BUTTERFLY ON A WHEEL?’, he concluded:
Young people are searching for values and for sincere human relationships, individual and social, as never before and their destructiveness is directed only at the falsities and hypocrisies of the older generation.
Rees-Mogg had, from where we sat, come down squarely on the side of the good guys. Later the same day Mick and Keith were released on bail, pending appeal, but poor Robert Fraser was left to serve out his time. Jagger was immediately flown by helicopter to tape an edition of World in Action, in which he was questioned about his philosophy by Rees-Mogg, a Jesuit priest and the vicar of Woolwich. At the time Rees-Mogg seems to have observed a side of Jagger that seems far more in tune with the wrinkled multi-millionaire we know today than the Jumping Jack Flash figure with which so many of us were probably deluding ourselves:
He put forward these views which went so much against the grain of the currently fashionable left-wing ideology, I suddenly realised that Mick Jagger was in essence a right-wing libertarian. Straight John Stuart Mill!
John Stuart Mill or Karl Marx, the people for whom Friday meant UFO were still determined to use the jailing of the two Stones as an excuse for continuing to take protest against the drugs laws to the streets, even though the two protagonists were free on bail. The hippies, after their first taste of street action, apparently craved more, and one of the most voluble factions wanted to move the whole club – lock, stock and lightshow – down to Piccadilly Circus. Joe Boyd was one of the first to oppose this idea, and for once I supported him. The logistics of doing such a thing were, to say the least, problematic. The Thursday-night gathering had been a spontaneous outpouring of anger, even if it had received a little help from the coordinating telephone. Any repeat performance would have to be better publicised and better orchestrated if it were to have the desired impact. A protest not only has to be made, it has to be seen to be made. That’s why it’s called a demonstration, and I didn’t think a few freaks wandering around Eros were going to have the authorities shaking in their boots.
The real target that deserved to be hurt where it mattered still had to be the News of the World. The paper had conducted a deliberate campaign of vitriolic disinformation, calculated to provoke unpleasantness, violence and worse. If the skinheads who tried to crash into UFO and the Roundhouse, or the lorry drivers who wanted to beat up musicians in the car park of the Blue Boar, needed any justification, then the News of the World amply provided it by suggesting that we were little short of a diseased, subhuman evil. With the News of the World only coming out on Sundays, Saturday was the paper’s big night. If we could again stage a large enough gathering in Fleet Street – this time around midnight – we could disrupt the production and dispatch of the paper’s early editions.
Again the pacifists accused me of promoting violence and, in the light of subsequent events, I suppose I was, but they were in a minority. Too many had tasted the catharsis of confrontation and wanted to do it all over again. The first thing we learned was that, just as we’d had an extra day to prepare, so had the police. In fact, they were more than ready for us. This was the City of London force, the ones with the extra Graeco-Roman ridge on their helmets, like firemen or gladiators. The minimum height requirement of their recruits was two inches more than that of the rest of the Met, and they’d always had a reputation for being hard cases. Their objective on that particular night seemed to be one of providing ample verification of this reputation.
They moved in before the demonstration was fully assembed, using batons, boots and dogs, and arresting anyone who so much as looked sideways at them. One of the first to go was Suzy Creamcheese, carried bodily to a paddy wagon by three burly coppers while she cursed like a drunken stoker. I was surprised I wasn’t grabbed at the same time, but the police seemed to have something more up close and personal in mind for me. I don’t know if they had me tagged as a ringleader, or whether it was just my attitude and bloody afro. The coppers grabbed me, but instead of hustling me off to one of the waiting wagons, they dragged me to a dark doorway and began working me over with short jabs to the body, in that unique law-enforcement manner that causes the most pain with the fewest visible marks. Battered and decidedly bowed, I was left with a final admonition.
‘Now, you little cunt, maybe you’ll think twice about coming down our manor and causing aggravation.’
Saturday Night Fevour
At various points on its journey to enlightenment a band needs a friend and, despite the Social Deviants’ mean and filthy demeanour, we actually locked into more of our fair share of boosters. Some much-needed early support came from Jack Braceland who, along with Mark Boyle, had created the first lightshows for Pink Floyd back at All Saints’ Hall. By some process that scarcely bears looking into, Jack had converted a former stripclub and shebeen at 44 Gerrard Street in darkest Soho into a psychedelic club, and had named it Happening 44. During the time that Joe Boyd wasn’t having us at UFO, Jack offered us a residency on Saturday nights, which continued even after Joe had finally relented.
Happening 44 was one of the weirdest hippie dungeons anywhere. Although Jack had taken it to the max with the lighting and ambience, it could never quite shed its previous image. The back room was filled with cans of ancient porn loops and bits of bondage hardware, which were now and again dragged out to be part of the show. Serious gangsters from the Richardson family would shoulder their wa
y down the stairs thinking the gaff was still a late-night drinker, and become totally bemused by the lights and the Deviants doing some impromptu fucked-up shaman ritual on the stage. Fortunately a bottle was always at hand to keep them happy. The rockers who came by usually brought their own bottles. I recall splitting one of Johnny Walker Red with a very drunk Eric Burdon, who mumbled on that the Deviants were the shape of things to come, but probably forgot all about it in the morning. Another time John Mayall inexplicably stopped by to show off his hand-carved Laurel Canyon guitar. Of all who stumbled into Happening 44 by mistake, we were most pleased to see the chemically confused strippers from the other clubs on the block, who’d sometimes shake it with the band in stockings and G-strings like their equivalent of sitting in, and maybe later treat us to weird Sunday-morning naked breakfasts.
The Deviants had entered a new phase of perversity, and we also began to locate the perverse among the audience. Although they were in an intense and colourful environment of black light and blob-show, the crowd was nonetheless rubbing shoulders with a small but significant scattering of hoods, whores, strippers, deep Soho lurkers and, this being on the edge of Chinatown, a few token junkies. The clientele at Happening 44 was amazingly tolerant of what went down in the way of entertainment, and the percentage of oddities also meant that the kind of hippie naivety flourishing at UFO simply couldn’t be maintained. Night-blooming flower power took on a hint of Berlin cabaret and an edge of danger and decadence. Chock full o’ amphetamines, we could blast all night, but at other times I remember sitting on the edge of the stage, glaring balefully at the audience with Alex’s light boxes close up on either side of me, so that I seemed to be in a blinding prison of light, like a Klingon military execution, droning some doomed Martian-gothic stream of coming-down consciousness. And they bought it.
Happening 44 also ran like a cabaret. Bands, of course, predominated, and I well remember a night with Fairport Convention when the Deviants challenged Richard Thompson to stretch ‘Reno Nevada’ to a full twenty minutes. A lot of other weird eclectic stuff, however, also graced the stage. Hippie sirens Mimi and Mouse, and their gay friend Alan, went under the collective title of Shiva’s Children; the women performed a kind of yab-yum ballet, while Alan played percussion and intoned. He rather charmingly tried to seduce me one night, but it wasn’t to be. The Sam Gopal Dream also had a Hindu theme, as Sam warrior-pounded the tablas behind an electric raga, first provided by Andy Clarke and Mick Hutchinson and later by Lemmy.
A protracted residency can really edge a combo towards the twilight zone. The longer the run, the deeper the twilight, and it seemed like we played at Happening 44 to infinity and back. Experimentation sets in as familiarity breeds confidence, and a breakthrough comes with the realisation that risks aren’t really risks if the audience is with you. An ill-gotten copy of a demo tape by a New York band called the Velvet Underground helped open us up to wider potentials with songs about sado-masochism, copping heroin and terminal narcissism, and artistically we robbed them blind. We had their classic ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’ down well before their famous ‘banana’ debut album came out and every half-arsed, pre-punk, three-chord band – including David Bowie – started playing it.
Most important, we were sorting out our audience, and finding our friends. The perverse gravitated to the perverse, and the sordid cleaved to the sordid. Unless I hallucinated the whole thing, Miles dropped in briefly one night with William Burroughs after dining in some Peking-duck emporium nearby, or drinking in the French Pub on Dean Street. Bill looked slowly around and nodded, acknowledging it as the fledgling mugwump sanctuary it was. Then he left, having seen it all before and not being particularly taken with close-proximity rock ’n’ roll.
Avoiding the Light
A lot of nonsense is talked these days about the degeneracy of the Sixties, but the early hippies readily embraced an eccentric but nonetheless tiresome moralism. Hippies didn’t drink, hippies avoided junk food, hippies sought enlightenment rather than oblivion, and hippies didn’t wear handcuffs to bed. In fact, the hippies were bloody puritan about what Camille Paglia called ‘expanding the scope of erotic response’ and frowned on many passionate rituals that were close to my tainted heart. A relentless mood of sunshine is downright oppressive, and I was passing up almost all chances to attend events that took place out of doors and in broad daylight. I never went to the post-UFO bouts of euphoria on Primrose Hill, I missed Mike and Kate McInnerney’s wedding, all sunshine and bells and white clothing in Kensington Gardens. I failed to see Allen Ginsberg at the Legalise Pot rally in Hyde Park. I had always been a devoted night person, but now I really cleaved to the darkness. I didn’t want to watch the flower children play, finding myself completely out of place amid such bliss.
All I could hear in Hobbit Heaven was the voice of Mordor. The busts, the jailings, the gunships over Vietnam on TV every night, the US cities that, from 1966 onwards, burned every summer intruded on the Maxfield Parrish paradise. Germaine Greer called me a ‘wheezing Jeremiah’, but I simply couldn’t shake the feeling that nothing was being stored up for both the real and metaphoric winter. The Ant and the bloody Grasshopper was being written in psychedelic script, and could anything survive the winds of November? Commercial flower power had bloomed fast and would die fast. Fashion is the fertiliser of entropy, and when rock manager Tony Secunda announced that he was pulling the Move out of ‘the flower-power racket’, I braced myself for the fall.
The only personal consolation was that, even though flower power might lose its petals by autumn, I was getting out of the bloody East End. Red-romantic as it might have been, a life lived both literally and figuratively between skid row and the waterfront tended to become tired. The rebels craved a few of the creature comforts, an escape from Brick Lane and society’s bottom feeders. And no sooner had the desire been admitted than temptation was offered, just as if we’d said the magic word to Groucho Marx and the duck had dropped. In the summer of 1967, we – that is to say, Joy and I – were offered the chance of an apartment in the West End.
Prior to their wedding Mike and Kate McInnerney had lived in a flat on the top floor of the building that was part of the same structure as the Shaftesbury Theatre, and when they moved the place came under offer. It stood at the intersection of Shaftesbury Avenue, Endell Street and High Holborn, a junction that is actually called Prince’s Circus, although few know that and even fewer care. That anyone I knew had a lease on a flat in a building which not only had a lift, but where the rest of the tenants appeared to be either psychiatrists or the kind of banker who shuttled between the City of London and the gnome caverns of Zurich, was a miracle on the level of the loaves and fishes. This rental conjuration had in fact been wrought by a wealthy globe-trotting American called Simon, who had no visible means of support, but would babble endlessly about schemes to involve the Kelloggs breakfast-cereal empire in the marketing of psychedelic posters via adverts on the back of Sugar Frosted Flakes.
After Simon abruptly left town we finally discovered that his invisible means of support was, in fact, cocaine. I imagine, in the Seventies, we would have sussed him out instantly (I mean . . . Kelloggs as part of the revolution?), but at the apogee of the love generation we were actually a little naive regarding powdered intoxicants, and the penny only really dropped when some dark and dangerous men showed up in search of Simon, and intimated that if they weren’t fully assured that their quarry had done a runner, someone might have to die. Fortunately his departure was plainly demonstrable, and his flatmates Chris and Sandy – after Mike and Kate left, even Simon had to have some help with the astronomical rent – remained shaken but alive, and holding the tenancy. Although expensive, the flat, with its size and location, was too good to let go. Three bedrooms (one a circular turret), a living room, kitchen and bath, plus french windows and a sixth-floor balcony, plumb-centre in the happening city; Brian Jones didn’t have it this good.
Chris Rowley and Duncan Sanderson had been at pu
blic school together, and seemed to have fallen into UFO and the underground at approximately the same time. Chris was short, curly-haired and intensely bright, a definite seeker after answers and enlightenment. Sandy was tall, reed-thin, devastatingly handsome and a magnet to women. When I first met them, they were getting by on odd gigs in and around UFO and other psychedelic enterprises. Chris sold IT and posters at the club, and both would work for Yoko Ono rigging the gallery show at which she first met John Lennon. Sandy would shortly join the Deviants on bass and commence a career that would include playing with the Pink Fairies, the Lightning Raiders and a number of other bands, while Chris would go on to become a well-respected science-fiction and fantasy writer, and we would remain close friends for the next three decades.
Mercifully the landlords at 212 Shaftesbury Avenue were not able to employ the same methods as the cocaine wholesalers who came looking for Simon. They couldn’t simply send round a trio of heavies to demand that everyone split. Simon had made a legal transfer of the cast-iron lease, and as long as Chris and Sandy continued to come up with the rent each month, there was very little they could do about any of us, no matter how much we might offend the bankers and psychiatrists when they encountered us in the lift. Joy and I followed Mike and Kate into the big room that opened onto the balcony. Sandy, who did a lot of entertaining, had the turret room and Chris was cloistered bookishly in the smaller bedroom at the far end of the rather odd triangular living room in which we all smoked dope and watched television.
