by Mick Farren
Ho-Ho-Ho Chi Minh!
Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids you kill today?
By Bond Street some of the other marchers were starting to irritate me. A group of earnest and disgustingly healthy-looking Germans kept breaking into a vigorous, arm-linked power run that drove everyone in front of them like a bulldozer. They’d learned it from Japanese rioters who’d perfected the move as part of a mob-handed martial art. It was designed to intimidate the police, but their masturbatory trial runs served no purpose but to annoy the people in their own ranks, and made sure that the police knew exactly who they were and would be looking to neutralise them from there on in.
Ho-Ho-Ho Chi Minh!
Ho-Ho-Ho Chi Minh!
Neutralising began for Miles, Sandy, Hugo and me, plus maybe 50,000 others, somewhere around the top of North Audley Street, which led down into Grosvenor Square. The vanguard of the march slowed and halted. Ranks closed and a crush developed as those still in Oxford Street continued forward while the ones in front, in the approaches to the square, had nowhere to go. Without communication, rumours flew. Some claimed that the demonstration had been effectively cut in two, and that those already in the square were being decimated, with mass beatings and arrests. Certainly a lot of noise was coming from Grosvenor Square, but we found out later that stories of police violence that early on were exaggerated.
The Germans continued to make a nuisance of themselves, as we milled around, immobilised and guessing. When the march was halted, our original quartet had lost the Merseyside Anarchists, but we saw a small group under a Situationist banner. Among them was Dick Pountain, who’d later become Felix Dennis’ formidable henchman. Instead of chanting about Ho Chi Minh, Dick and the Situationists were intoning a Cadbury’s Chocolate commercial of the time, which made them even more our people than the boys from Merseyside.
Hot chocolate! Drinking chocolate!
Hot chocolate! Drinking chocolate!
After maybe ten or fifteen minutes a sudden lurch ran through the crowd and we began to move. Whatever dam had been holding back this potential torrent of people had given way. I have never found out whether the demonstrators had forced their way through or the police had deliberately pulled back. Either the Germans’ tactics had actually worked or we were rushing eagerly into a trap. Such are the options of a leaderless mob, and there’s not a damned thing anyone can do about it.
For a few moments I felt like we’d won a victory, but then everything abruptly changed. The account I wrote in the fairly immediate aftermath of the event is probably more accurate than anything I could now dredge from memory. This is not to say that it’s not without embellishment or the small fictions that can tie a disjointed stream of consciousness into a logical narrative. I also know that I must have reconstructed some of the story from still photographs, the images from TV news coverage and other people’s accounts of the action. The truth in a confrontation of this kind is that you actually don’t know what’s happened anywhere but directly in front and to either side of you, and even that may be a blur of confusion. And before you start sniggering at the blatant right-on prose style and the unselfconscious use of terms like ‘pig’, remember that this is an artefact, and that’s how it was.
The sun was shining. ‘It’s like a fucking love-in,’ I said to Sandy. At that moment there was an alien sound, thundering hooves, and a line of mounted pigs hit us. It was like a 19th-century battlefield. Men and horses ran through the middle of us, the pigs striking out at everyone they could reach with long batons, like wooden sabres, they carried. A young girl beside me went down with blood streaming down the back of her head. Her friends carried her away unconscious. A pig was dragged from his horse, but the snatch squad of police on foot got him away from the crowd. The cavalry wheeled at the far end of the square and charged back through the crowd, again hitting out at everything they could reach. Those of us who could took shelter under a tree, where the police couldn’t wield their clubs on account of the low branches.
Ho-Ho-Ho Chi Minh!
Hot chocolate! Drinking chocolate!
Regarding the horses, I don’t think I exaggerated. The completely unexpected development of being confronted by men on charging horses – the Cossacks, the Seventh Cavalry – was something one didn’t exactly expect, and it remains vividly imprinted on my memory. In the quoted paragraph I’m merely telling the story. How it felt was a hell of a lot more complicated. As the ground actually seemed to shake from the pounding of hooves, my mind wrestled with the impossibility of it all. Fear was able to exist in tandem with a detached curiosity – ‘So this is what it’s like’. I was able to compartmentalise. Self-protection told me to move – get out of the reach of those swinging clubs – while incomprehension looked around in awe, and memory dredged up movies I’d seen and all the books I’d read, for images and ideas. Above all, it was so bright and graphic. The horses were so large, nostrils flared, and the muscles under their shining coats so well-defined. Harness leather and metal hardware gleamed. Their riders were pumped up, rushing on adrenaline, wide-eyed, teeth bared, so pink in the face, so clean-shaven and with no idea but to strike out and hurt. The faces of the demonstrators on the ground were more distorted, but, at the same time, more human, sharing shock, surprise, fear and anger, not only at the sudden onslaught but at the way we’d been transported to another time, where we didn’t know the rules of engagement.
After their charge the mounted police formed a line in front of the embassy itself, supported by more coppers on foot, three or four ranks deep, with senior officers and the TV cameras behind them. For a while it became a static face-off.
A hail of missiles came from the crowd. Rocks, bottles, lumps of earth . . . Smoke billowed up, and for a moment we thought they were using gas, but it seemed more likely that it was a smoke bomb thrown from our ranks, not theirs . . . a few of the mounted section appeared to freak and rode full tilt into the crowd lashing out indiscriminately with their clubs, but these blind charges usually ended with the pig being overwhelmed by demonstrators and dragged from his horse. A snatch squad would detach itself, now and then, from the lines of the police on foot and charge into the crowd, either to rescue one of their mounted buddies who had got himself into trouble, or to grab a few demonstrators at random. They evolved a neat technique for transporting those they had arrested. If the victim put up the slightest struggle he or she would be knocked down, then five pigs would lift him, two holding arms, two legs, while the fifth supported the victim’s head and shoulders by hauling on his hair.
Of course, I was a terrible prig and hypocrite. While abhorring all the violence in print, I had relished the raw, alpha-male buzz. Even Hugo from Indica was spotted throwing wild punches, and stories circulated about Mick Jagger doing his dance in front of the horsemen, although no one got a photograph. In times to come I could boast about my confrontation with the mounted police. On the other hand, I would attend no further demonstrations, with the exception of a couple of unplanned street eruptions that had more to do with drunkenness than politics, until the hoo-ha surrounding the OZ trial. Oh, sure, it had been fun while it lasted, before we trailed off home to watch ourselves on television, but as far as I was concerned, television was the key. If it wasn’t on TV, it hadn’t happened. The revolution had to be televised and, in this show, we had been little more than extras in a lavish VSC commercial. My contemporary summation was typically simplistic: ‘If we learned one thing from the anti-American demonstrations of 1968, it was that demonstrations don’t mean shit.’
My thinking did, however, go a little deeper. As both a post-McLuhan baby and a terrible cultural snob, I knew I had better things to do with my time than act as cannon fodder at Tariq’s and Vanessa’s riots. My contribution lay in mass communication rather than merely being one of the masses. Newspapers, magazines, film and TV, rock ’n’ roll records – these were going to be the weapons of change, not some ritualised gang-fight-by-prearrangement. This may sound elitist, but I considered myself p
art of an elite, the craft brotherhood of propagandists.
Chapter Six
Disposable
THE ALBUM DISPOSABLE was named after a popular generic form of syringe that could be used once and thrown away. It should probably never have been made in the first place. (The album, that is, not the syringe.) By the point when we went into Morgan Studios to record this second album in the autumn of 1968, some of our number had graduated to shooting methedrine, hence the name. Fortunately I wasn’t one of them. A phobia of needles has saved me from a lifelong mess of trouble. I have one silver ring in my left ear, the full extent of my body piercing.
By the time Disposable was being made, the band had exhausted everything pills had to offer, and bootleg amphetamine sulphate, so common in the Seventies, was still only a gleam in the eyes of the Hell’s Angels. We’d discovered, however, a way to obtain ampoules of liquid methedrine, the only clinical use of which is the operating-theatre revival of the technically dead. These were scored from an old croaker straight out of a William Burroughs novel by the name of Dr Brody, who, when evicted from his seedy consulting rooms, just down the street from us in Shaftesbury Avenue, was actually reduced to sitting in Boots, the all-night chemist in Piccadilly, writing prescriptions for anyone who could pay. The band was divided into two factions: those who injected their meth, sometimes chased by a shot of vitamin B12 for the sake of their health, and the ones who popped the glass top off the ampoule and poured it into a Pepsi-Cola, putting a whole new slant on the Pepsi slogan ‘Come Alive’.
As might be expected, the record was a summation of all that had gone down since we’d completed PTOOFF!, but it also attempted – and with no great measure of success – to conform to some of what was expected from a conventional rock & roll band. That was both its meagre, if frantic, strength, but mostly its overwhelmingly fatal weakness. To put it bluntly, we’d reached a point where we knew enough to be bad. To craft a tune in the manner of, say, Lennon and McCartney brings one hard up against one’s limitations, and ours were considerable. The drugs didn’t help. When we knew we were going back into the studio, Sid and I sat side-by-side on the edge of my bed, him strumming his unamplified Gibson, and me with a lyric sheet in my trembling hand, and worked a new song into what I now recognise as a promising start. Unfortunately the promising starts tended to become entire pieces. Too speedfreak-pleased with myself to wonder about a bridge, a logical hook or a more plausible chorus, I simply suggested winding the thing up with some guitar bit, and then leapfrogged on to the next idea on the anxious agenda. I shortchanged myself with the excuse that to scream the warning you didn’t have to be good, just very loud.
When we actually arrived in the studio – this time an eight-track, Morgan Sound in Neasden – our primary ignorance was to think that we could rush into the studio, straight from being on the road, and make an entire album without allowing ourselves any time for decompression. An even worse idea was to schedule a string of mammoth twenty-four-hour sessions because – full of methamphetamine as we were – we imagined we could do our best work without either sleep or lucidity. I’d convinced myself that, if I could tap into the primal rage and then stick a lot of spooky echo on it, we would have a marketable product. All that could be said in favour of this process was that it made it possible to bypass both talent and expertise and reveal neither.
Not that a very genuine undercurrent of darkly urgent, violent and impending anger wasn’t flowing through the band’s collective subconscious. If the album had a message at all, it was that the sword of Damocles hung over us and our kind, and we were extremely pissed off about it. The world in which we lived writhed in a protracted agony. We saw it on TV, we saw it on the streets and we even saw it in each other’s eyes. In such desperate days, could pretty pop songs have any moral justification, when I was convinced – to borrow a phrase from J. G. Ballard – that a deadly downhill bicycle race was under way? Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King had been shot down. Cities were burning all across the USA. The horror show in Vietnam had intensified despite all pleas and protests. At the Chicago Democratic Convention, Mayor Daley turned his police and National Guard loose on the Yippies, beating kids and even reporters senseless ‘to preserve disorder’.
Closer to home, the first major clashes in the War on Drugs were in full swing, with law enforcement aggressively on the offensive; doors were being kicked in and judges handing down jailtime. The drugs themselves took their own toll of the reckless, careless and depressed, and friends and acquaintances began nodding out dead. In the darkness before a less than guaranteed dawn, our fledgling revolution was fragmenting into a state of extreme confusion. The problem was: how did one communicate confusion lucidly? The legend ‘If you can’t trip on garbage, you can’t trip on nothing’ was scrawled across the inner sleeve like a policy statement and, for years afterwards, I couldn’t listen to the album, referring to it in interviews as the ‘meth-monster’. I was certain I’d fucked up so badly that Disposable lived right up to its name; an unsaleable work that, worse still, was inarticulate in its rage. The only fond memory I had of the sessions was being all on my own after everyone else had flagged or dropped, and building my own sound collage for a gloomy spoken-word piece called ‘Last Man’.
Friends and colleagues shared my misgivings. John Peel, who’d been sympathetic to PTOOFF!, loathed the record. Felix Dennis wrote a review in OZ in which he described the recording as inexplicable, except as a ‘poke in the balls for the record buyer’. Anne Nightingale, in the Evening Standard, wrote nice things about the single ‘You Gotta Hold On’, likening it to a combination of Zappa and the Rolling Stones, but I think that may have been the result of some arm-twisting by Steve Sparks.
It was only in the early Nineties that I read the following comments by Robert Wyatt, back then still drumming with the Soft Machine:
I didn’t know Mick Farren very well and don’t think he particularly welcomed what we represented. But I certainly admire him because he was a sort of protopunk and saw elements immediately that were false. He heard sour notes being rung all round him at a time when everyone thought everything was in tune.
Also in the Nineties, punk obscurists rediscovered Disposable. Critic Dave Thompson lauded both band and album in Rock 101:
Punk before anyone figured out how to spell it, Heavy before anyone applied the term to Metal, the Deviants remain among rock’s most timeless unsung heroes. Farren once described ‘Disposable’ as ‘a methedrine monster’, a series of freak form jams which did or didn’t resolve themselves into riffs seemingly at random. The sound of the Deviants had always hinted at violence, but ‘Disposable’ went beyond simple contemplation. If ever a record should have been charged with assault, it was ‘Disposable’.
In the fanzine Black to Comm, Bill Shute raved: ‘If the Clash had pared “Sandinista” down to one diverse LP, and had recorded it fifteen years earlier and had a sense of humour about themselves, their music and their message, they might have been as significant as the Deviants.’ Well, thanks, guys, at least for one more demonstration of the Noah Cross theory that survivors will inherit the Earth, and that everything comes around if you wait long enough.
In keeping with the general air of driven disarray, Steve Sparks, after much lobbying, produced the record all by himself. Unfortunately, in the middle of the sessions, just as we were finishing up the recording phase and were about to start mixing, Steve – as if to prove that a grasshopper attention span was not an invention of the Eighties and Nineties – was made an offer he couldn’t refuse and went off to nursemaid Jim Morrison around Europe. With Sparks gone, we only had the Morgan Sound engineer, Andy Johns, whose brother Glyn was over at Olympic working with the Stones, to look out for us. This might have succeeded if we hadn’t deliberately undermined his critical judgement by insisting that everything be played at maximum volume, and spiked his coffee with methedrine every time he showed signs of wilt or fatigue.
‘Come on, Andy, just a couple more hours,
okay?’
Andy, a neophyte as far as drugs were concerned, and not recognising that he was being both dosed and ruthlessly conned, would soldier on, becoming temporarily more deaf and totally confused. Damn, but I wish I had access to the original eight tracks. In the modern world they’d edit down to a monster creation.
The Doors of Perception
When Steve Sparks took off to work for the Doors, we could hardly blame him. Jim Morrison was having even more self-destructive fun than all of us combined. It was also not without irony that Steve should desert us for the Doors. He could have run off with Steppenwolf or Country Joe and the Fish, but oh dear, no. It had to be the Doors. Among the Deviants, the Doors were a bone of contention. Russell did not like the Doors. He didn’t like their drummer, and he accused Morrison of being an inflation of pose and bombast. I, on the other hand, admired Morrison almost to the point of jealousy. The rest of the Doors I wasn’t as sure about. I suspected that, without Jim, they’d be little more than a pretentious lounge trio. Jim, on the other hand, was the business. He seemed to have completed the phase through which I was still struggling. He’d mixed himself a cocktail of shaman mysticism, Freudian darkness, radical politics and horny guy in leather pants, and was willing to exhibit himself in public, loaded on the concoction. He was also unreasonably blessed by being almost as pretty as Elvis before the bloat. He was the psychedelic rebel who could make it to the cover of Tiger Beat.
