by Mick Farren
Out front, while I roared some Beefheart stream of consciousness into any available mike – and, on nights like this, the consciousness could really be onstream – Twink started doing virtually anything that came into his head, which could easily include howling and climbing the scenery, all the way to stripping naked and exhibiting himself to the crowd. Took was also out front, scrambled and hopping, making noises like Baby Godzilla. After a while, particularly if Twink started stripping, I might retreat behind John Povey’s vacated organ and attempt to do an electric keyboard impersonation of the Air Cavalry attacking a VC village. Basically we were in a mode that would continue until a janitor pulled the plugs, some citizen called the cops or it was all forcibly brought to a halt by some other external deus ex machina.
That night in Chelsea, I was a little surprised when Twink vanished for a few moments, and then returned, naked to the waist and carrying three trays of eggs. The shocked silence was, of course, an illusion. The massed bands were actually going full steam, but it seemed like the world had stopped. We could see all too clearly what the outcome was going to be.
Twink unloaded on the crowd.
Egg was everywhere. Nasty, sticky, yellow, wet, coming out of nowhere, the floor grew slick and dancers fell. I guess it shouldn’t have been a surprise to us that not everyone, even in the Sixties, who gets dressed up to go out on a Friday night, to dance, drink and see a band, wants to be involved in an oozingly apocalyptic food fight. Very soon we were taking incoming shots – beer glasses, bottles and cans, the odd egg that had been caught unbroken. One group of students who really didn’t see the joke was a gang of rugby jocks, who thought they were at a dance to pick up girls and swill beer, not at a warm-up for slimy psychedelic Armageddon. They didn’t like getting egg on their sweaters and slacks and were clearly wondering what to do about it. Then they had it – the obvious answer.
Kill Twink!
Déjà vu all over again. I was back in Exeter Town Hall with Led Zeppelin and the farmboys. Jocks were coming at the stage and, in this instance, it was no less than we deserved. Twink had triggered the incident. No way to blame this on any kind of prejudice, except disliking being egged. We could also look for no exterior help in this mess. If anyone called the cops, the Chelsea Drugs Squad would almost certainly arrive as part of the package, and if they showed up, our jolly saucy crew were criminal toast.
Twink, determined not to die, was already making good his escape, vanishing into the wings while the rest of us were still standing perplexed. As the instigator, he had positioned himself for instant flight. The rest of us were not so well prepared. Mercifully I wasn’t tied to an instrument as death loomed near and the two bands were forced to save their miserable skins by recourse to the cunning and ever-reliable post-Gandhian tactic known as ‘running-away-and-letting-the-poor-fucking-roadies-deal-with-the-mess’. Into the kitchen, grab up clothes and bag, sweaty and dressing on the run, out on the street. It was cold and, I think, raining and a knot of jocks boiled out of another entrance, but mercifully cabs were cruising, yellow lights on their roofs. We discovered that the vengeful jocks had been directed to the street by the roadies, looking out for themselves, but we were into the first cab before the jocks spotted us and we didn’t stop or look back until, in the Deviants’ case, we were back in the comparative security of the flat on Shaftesbury Avenue. I say comparatively because the flat itself was rapidly turning into a three-ring circus all of its own.
212 Shaftesbury Avenue
To wake with a hangover to the smell of bacon and eggs and then find that it’s being served to you by the President of the San Francisco Chapter of the Hell’s Angels was an event a little out of the ordinary, even for 212 Shaftesbury Avenue. Perhaps not that far out of the ordinary, but certainly remarkable enough for it to remain a landmark. We’d been playing the night before, and I had almost certainly drunk enough to render myself semi-insensible. The breakfast smell made me decidedly queasy, and when this large man with sandy hair and stubble pushed a plate of crispy bacon, toast and three almost-perfect fried eggs in front of me, I nearly gagged. Too much of a coward to tell ’Frisco Pete that all I really wanted was a cigarette and a Coca-Cola, maybe with a shot of Scotch in it, I manfully breached an egg yolk with the toast. I felt it was expected of me when the guy had been decent enough to bring me breakfast in bed, something that hadn’t happened since I’d stayed with my grandmother as a child, unless you counted room service in the odd hotel on the road. Plus he was treating me with an almost formal deference.
‘You’re Mick, right?’
‘Right.’
‘You’re the one I have to thank for the hospitality?’
I gestured to the bacon with my toast. ‘I seem to be the one getting the hospitality.’
’Frisco Pete shrugged as if it was nothing. ‘I’m a guest in your house. I figured you could use some breakfast.’
I nodded and chewed. ‘It’s great.’
‘Steve Sparks said it’ll be cool if I bunked in here for a couple of days.’
I nodded some more. ‘Sure. Absolutely. No problem.’
So it was Sparks I had to thank for this unexpected morning. After breakfast, the presence of ’Frisco Pete was explained. He was part of a Bay Area scouting party dispatched to London by the Grateful Dead, and headed by two of their management team, Danny Rifkin and Rock Scully. The original plan was for the entire party, some seven or eight in number, all to share a house in Chelsea, but something had screwed up, the place wasn’t ready and the visitors had to be distributed around a selection of temporary hosts. Sparks, who’d seemingly been one of the welcoming group, had volunteered the Deviants’ home as temporary shelter for ’Frisco Pete, and had then proceeded to give the Hell’s Angel a guided tour of the city – Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace, King’s Road, the whole bit – from the back of Pete’s Harley, specially shipped over for the visit. As it turned out, the accommodation situation was sorted out later the same day, and we never did have ’Frisco Pete as a protracted house guest, but his arrival would produce a number of future reverberations.
One of the great drawbacks of living in the West End – and being known to live in the West End – is that one’s home tends to become a pitstop in the night-time perambulations of friends, acquaintances, total strangers and now legendary beings from other countries. In the end, the Shaftesbury Avenue flat would come close to driving me barking mad, but in the early, honeymoon stages it seemed like the fun magnet I’d always wished for as a domicile. The address even had a pop cadence to it. Sandy would sing it as a little rhymed couplet and snap his fingers, as in 77 Sunset Strip. If our home resembled any TV show, however, it could only have been The Addams Family. We were situated approximately five minutes from the Arts Lab, seven minutes from the IT building, slightly more than ten minutes from Middle Earth and twenty from either the heart of Soho or Indica Books in Bloomsbury. Thrown out of the pubs at closing time and wondering what to do next, far too many of our freak compatriots’ first suggestion was to ‘go round the Deviants’ gaff ’.
With three bedrooms, the oddly shaped living room, kitchen and bath, a balcony and access to the roof, it meant that, on occasion, two or more parties might be going on at the same time. In one sequence of warm summer days, David Bowie and Calvin Lee, his cohort from Mercury Records, visited repeatedly, hanging out on the roof in shorts, with Sandy and Tony Ferguson (our fey, sometime-keyboard player) taking photographs of each other and acting coy and girlish, while down in the darkness of the big bedroom I’d be sleeping one off, perhaps beside one of the lost and pill-damaged strippers we regularly met in the pre-dawn at the all-night Greek Restaurant and drinking joint in the conveniently close basement under the Wimpy Bar on St Martin’s Lane. One darker night, while a circle in the living room clustered around the yellow-painted TV set with the speech bubble that read ‘HELP!’ written in magic marker on the screen, positioned so that it was poised over the average talking head, Took, a male third-party a
nd a dangerously under-age-looking female decided to attempt a Mandrax orgy in the circular turret room. This was fortunately broken up by Joy who, with her rock ’n’ roll witch’s intuition sussed that the notoriously irresponsible pair of bastards were fully intending to leave the girl with us when they’d done with her. Joy and I had long since ceased to be married in anything but legality; the relationship had corrupted down to an arrangement, but she had removed herself only as far as the small bedroom, where she kept her own company, continuing to act as den-mother to the hopeless and helpless males.
Shaftesbury Avenue was where we watched the moon landing and learned about the Manson murders and whence we forayed out to the cinema to see Easy Rider, 2001 and The Wild Bunch. It was where I first saw myself on television. It was the scene of freak-outs that all but required the summoning of ambulances, and was progressively festooned with the debris of a dozen uncompleted projects, like the bubble-top Rock-Ola jukebox that we never got working, and bits of guitars and busted speaker cabinets from our auto-destructive period. The walls were pock-marked from the times that airguns or other non-lethal projectile weapons had passed through.
The flat even became a refugee centre the night that Middle Earth was busted. That evening the band wasn’t working, and I had intended to walk down to what was now the city’s premier underground rock club. If I’d left according to plan, I would been there in time to be right in the middle of the bust, but something had delayed me – I think a long and totally pointless conversation with Sandy – and instead I found myself turning the corner and seeing a flashing constellation of blue lights in front of the entrance to the large basement space. The crisis we’d guarded against so obsessively at UFO had now descended on Middle Earth. Police and their vehicles were all over the street, intimidating the slow straggle of hippies emerging from the club, the ones who had been deemed clean and who offered no cause for further detention.
Most melted away into the night, but a few of the braver souls formed a growing knot on the pavement, standing grim and hostile under a street lamp, radiating bad vibes and waiting for companions still inside. Some still seemed stunned by the speed at which the police had acted. ‘They were fucking fast, man. They came in, the lights went on, and they started herding everyone up against the walls. Guys against one wall and chicks against another. They must have had it all figured out in advance, because they knew exactly how the lights came on.’
‘Did anyone try and resist?’
The group shook their heads, comparing notes. ‘There was a bit of freaking out and yelling, but mostly everyone was taken by surprise. You know what I mean?’ The speaker looked rueful. ‘You think you should do something, but you can’t think what, and by then it’s too late.’
Someone else picked up the narrative thread. ‘After they’d got everyone up against the wall, this second lot came in, sergeants, inspectors, the bastards in charge, and these coppers carrying screens and floodlights. And they set up all this stuff, and start searching everyone.’
One of the first women to be let go chimed in. ‘Those policewomen are right fucking cunts. They start with the fucking assumption that every girl in the place is under-age, and if you can’t prove different, they bang you up.’
By this point a couple of people I knew, mates of Boss Goodman, had come out and they stated the obvious – that I was fucking lucky not to have been there when the cops stormed in. ‘We know you, man. You’d have been cursing the fuckers out and got yourself arrested straight away.’
It seemed that my reputation had preceded me. Maybe they were overstating it, but anger was already building inside me. A new category of freak was now being brought out of the club, the ones being held for possible charges, hustled by escorting officers to waiting police vans for the short ride to Bow Street. It was all so pointless and ugly. I knew I was watching nothing less than a classic round-up of undesirables. Okay, so they were long-haired druggers, and that supposedly precluded them from both toleration and public sympathy. They weren’t an ethnic minority or prisoners of conscience. The media would dismiss them as drug offenders, but didn’t the idea of the Metropolitan Police conducting mass raids on a Saturday night disturb anyone ever so slightly?
This was approximately the same time that Richard Nixon coined the phrase the ‘War on Drugs’. As far as I was concerned, it should have been the ‘War on Nonconformity’. The spectacle in this late-night street in Covent Garden was social control in the raw. A preference for the ‘wrong’ intoxicants was being used as an excuse to put a free-form cultural breakout back into the ordered box. As I watched more and more young men and women being led out to the vans, my anger was fanned to slow burn. I knew these kids were no danger to the social order, except in that they held different views and embraced different tastes. I could sense that everyone in the growing knot of people on the pavement shared my resentment. Some were even casting glances in my direction. My reputation really had preceded me, but what the fuck did they expect me to do? Lead some kind of hopeless, half-arsed rush, get myself beaten up, thrown in a cell and charged with assault on a police officer? Not tonight, ladies and gentlemen. You want a confrontation? So go for it, but don’t look to me to light the fuse.
A few days later some gossip would come to my attention. Apparently some piqued freaks were repeating in hushed and scandalised tones that ‘Mick Farren was there, watching it all, and didn’t do a thing.’ So what did they think I was? Fucking Batman? At times like that I had to seriously consider whether the bloody hippies were actually worth saving. I suspected it was probably the same ones who criticised my supposed inclination to violence who were now put out that I hadn’t rushed straight at the coppers, bull-headed and swinging. In fact, what these malcontents were saying wasn’t even true. I had done something. I’d invited a number of the people hanging round on the street back to the comfort of 212 Shaftesbury Avenue, where we sat around till after dawn, smoking dope and talking. I had always excelled at talking rather than fighting, but few seemed willing to give me credit for it.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that, while cops chased and imprisoned the counterculture, the corporate entertainment industry was more than happy to turn a profit from it. It should also come as no surprise that we found this extremely irksome. That the musical Hair should be playing in the theatre under our apartment brought the vexation just a little too close to home. From the building-sized billboard with the huge silhouette of a generic freak with a haircut just like mine, to the crowds of gawpers who thronged the pavements at showtime and seemed to assume that we were some kind of pre-show attraction hired by the producers, the proximity of Hair proved a strain on the nerves. It grew to be even more of strain when the denizens of 212 became familiar with the prevailing attitude of the theatre. When the wretched show first opened we gullibly took the advertised nudity and audience participation as an open invitation to stroll into the auditorium and maybe even play an impromptu part in the proceedings. We discovered the error of our assumptions the first time we tried it, when we were immediately and bodily ejected by burly commissionaires who hadn’t been told about the dawning of the age of Aquarius.
We only learned later how we were actually causing some amusement among the cast of Hair, and even creating a minor polarisation between the straight actors simply playing freaks and the performers with ties to the rock/drug/counterculture who were doing the show for the pay cheque. While we were living upstairs, the late Alex Harvey, who’d earn notoriety with the Sensational Alex Harvey Band, was playing guitar in the pit orchestra, and Sonja Kristina – who’d go on to front the band Curved Air, cut a swathe on the Brit folk circuit as a singer songwriter and be married for a while to Stewart Copeland of the Police – was singing onstage. Sonja was the only Hair inmate to figure out who and where we were and, after an initial enquiry and introduction, became a regular visitor to the den of iniquity that lurked above.
Shaftesbury Avenue was also the location of one of the first UK experime
nts in the consumption of quasi-legal cannabis. When doctors Sam Hutt and Ian Dunbar discovered a loophole in the peculiar convolutions of the British cannabis laws, I hurried to the practice they’d established at the Holland Park end of Ladbroke Grove to become a patient. It was possible their alternative clinic wouldn’t last too long, being under almost continuous fire from both the BMA and the National Health Service. Sam and Ian had discovered that to write prescriptions for cannabis paste and tincture was not specifically illegal under the statutes. The kicker was that writing a prescription for either lacked any real point, since no pharmacist in the country had the means to dispense it. Both tincture and paste had not been manufactured since the Thirties – or so everyone thought. I never learned how Sam and Ian had discovered that an eminent and long-established chemist just off Harley Street had an ancient – but still potent – stock of both tincture and paste. With my dubious mental health and bad lungs, I was a natural candidate for legal cannabis therapy. (Did I mention previously that I have chronic bronchial asthma and have been totally addicted to Albuterol inhalers since the age of thirteen? If not, it’s probably because it’s one of those legacies of childhood that I prefer not to dwell on, and because, after I first read William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, I felt nothing but contempt for the asthmatic complaining fat kid and never wanted to resemble him in the slightest.)
