Give the Anarchist a Cigarette

by Mick Farren

  And that was the end of it.

  The next day we convened at the place where Rudolph was staying, the home of some hostile ex-girlfriend. Ace did most of the talking. The little dears didn’t want to be underground clowns any more, they wanted to be legitimate musicians. To this end they were going to press on to San Francisco without me. I think I remarked how they could have had the balls to do the deed before we found ourselves stranded in bloody Canada. Then I came unglued, weeping and shaking. Many years later Russell admitted that they might have treated me with more humanity, and I totally agree with him. Out of there, my first stop was the biker bar, where it was still early enough to drink with some peace and quiet. As the night grew later and noisier, however, I could no longer wrap shock around me like an isolating shroud, and when a short bearded guy with jailhouse tattoos offered me an orange tab of sunshine I went for it. In for a penny, in for a pound. What the hell? When and where better to take your first full-blown trip? In a biker bar at the height of rejection shock.

  Safe at a Wild Bill Hickock table with my back to the wall, the first fairyland phase was quite delightful as everything became haloed in rainbow auras. For a while I think a hippie maiden sat beside me, gently warning those who sought to involve me in some bout of motorcycle rowdiness that I was tripped out of my mind. All might have gone on as it started, had not Jamie, with the timing of a demon from the pit, arrived just as things were undulating into the more serious. Acting like he was planning the Kennedy assassination, Ace insisted that I leave the table and follow him into the piss- and disinfectant-smelling corridor that led to the lavatories. As he handed me the envelope, he turned into an alien biped lizard from Draco 3. The envelope contained an airline ticket and some cash.

  ‘You’re going home.’

  I took the ticket, but never asked him how he’d managed the scam. I don’t think I thanked him. I’m not actually sure I had the power of speech at the time. The reality of having to organise myself onto a plane relatively early the next morning freaked me right out. I wandered the streets around Chemical Row horror-struck, at times hallucinating so intensely that I couldn’t see my feet, let alone understand traffic. I sat on the beach for a while watching the fog move in until I realised I was freezing. At one point I ran into Sandy, who talked at me in Hittite psycho-babble. The only place I felt safe was the biker bar, which I think is where Boss found me, fed me chocolate milk, then took me to where my stuff was stashed and had me in a cab to the airport in a blazing psychedelic dawn – as orange as the tab I’d swallowed.

  The Flying Zombie was on Air Canada to Heathrow, via Montreal. I didn’t want to go home because I wasn’t sure I had one, but what else could a poor boy do? I was too fucked-up to burn my visa and seek my fortune in the Americas. On the first leg of the flight, the plane was again all but empty. Some other freaks were sitting in the dark rear, with just a single reading lamp to indicate their presence. With the boldness of he who doesn’t give a good goddamn, I stumbled back and made myself known to them. Two guys and a girl who looked like the Mod Squad were drinking Jack Daniels and invited the Flying Zombie to join them. ‘Drinking Jack and kicking back.’ They believed I was a rock star but they didn’t know who, and I played along, if only for ego therapy. ‘You’re that guy, right?’

  ‘No, man, the other guy.’

  After about three more drinks one of the guys, with only a minimum of ceremony, pulled out a joint that he insisted on referring to as ‘doobie’, and we smoked it right there in the plane, with the cabin crew taking not a blind bit of notice. Eight miles high and by no means ready for touchdown, but like Mr Natural said, ‘Quest into the unknown’. And I was now so far gone I would follow any pointed finger.

  Chapter Seven

  They Don’t Call Them Decades for Nothing

  WHERE THE SIXTIES had the feel of a continuous rolling wave, constantly moving, sometimes with violent force, but always in the same direction, the Seventies seemed to be a succession of squalls and flurries that could come at you from any point of the compass, setting you spinning and bobbing and sometimes fighting to stay afloat. This wasn’t to say that the Sixties had been without risk. Quite the reverse. You either surfed the wave or you drowned. If you kept this in mind, the early Seventies weren’t as bad as many made out. Truth is, much that was credited to the Sixties didn’t really come to fruition until ’72 or ’73.

  A lot of fence-sitting, quasi-hip pundits have always made a big deal of the exact point at which the Sixties ended, and the spirit of peace and love slunk off snarling. The easy answer in America was that – woe is us – the Rolling Stones and the Hell’s Angels killed it off at Altamont. Their Brit counterparts like to pin it on the violence and confusion at the Isle of Wight pop festival. Others cited the deaths of Jimi, Jim, Janis and Brian. Get the fuck out of here! Nothing died except people. Only the superficial went away, and some rethinking had to be done regarding some of the more excessive stupidity. Any gambler worth a damn knows that luck fluctuates. A down-trend doesn’t mean you have to go out on the terrace and blow your brains out. You hang in. Ignore that bloody silly Don McClean song ‘American Pie’. The music didn’t die, Don, it simply mutated.

  We certainly knew, if there had ever been a revolution, we’d lost it, and a multitude of betrayals and sell-outs would occur as the establishment that we’d so carelessly challenged looked for payback. Ironically, we would later learn from his White House tapes that, of all people, Richard Nixon took the so-called youth revolt absolutely seriously. What the future had in store was a series of holding actions and regroupings, devilish compromises and constant struggles to hold on to anything that we might deem worthwhile and actually survive. I suppose, in terms of survival, that we one-time bigshots of the underground had it easy.

  Easy? You Call This Easy?

  After stumbling reasonably unscathed from the clutches of customs and immigration at Heathrow, a phone box and a handful of change were my only implements to discover the immediate shape of my life and even where I’d sleep that night. What was that song? ‘I just called up to see what condition my condition was in’? It took about four calls before I discovered not only my condition, but also where my estranged wife and what was left of my possessions might be after the hasty departure from Shaftesbury Avenue – 212 was history, but Joy had borrowed some money from my mother and rented a two-room k&b on Chesterton Road at the top end of Ladbroke Grove. So we were back in the Grove. Okay, life went on. I didn’t know, as I walked away from the phone box, that Joy’s plan wasn’t intended to include any we. My only response was intense relief that I could now get in a cab and give the driver an address that was substantively home.

  The flat on Chesterton Road was a step down from Shaftesbury Avenue, but it had a certain charm. It was the top-floor flat and therefore self-contained. The place seriously needed painting, but Joy had negotiated a deal with the landlord for a number of weeks rent-free if she did the redecorating. Some junkies had just been evicted and, as Joy told it, the landlords had been reluctant to rent the place again before they’d renovated and refurnished, but she’d managed to talk them into letting it to her as it was. All the landlords had put in were a couple of brand-new double mattresses. I guess the ones the junkies left behind were simply too disgusting for even the most flexible of tenants.

  To my surprise, when I rang the bell, it wasn’t Joy who answered, but Su Small. Su was short, fulsome and with long, straight dark hair and a taste for short skirts and black beatnik sweaters. She was practical, smart and vivacious, and had great legs. She had been the advertising manager of IT almost since Dave Hall had taken over the business, and we’d been friends for maybe eighteen months or so. In the last few days before I’d left for Canada we’d also become lovers. She had turned up one evening and stayed, happily determined to bed me, something I found both flattering and highly acceptable. Su was skilled in fun and its arts. She made me feel like the warrior hero receiving the blessing before going off to war. No
w it seemed that she was there for my return, and for this I was profoundly grateful. I wasn’t exactly on my shield, but damned close. She grabbed me and kissed me. ‘You look shell-shocked.’

  ‘In some kind of shock.’

  Su kissed me again, a don’t-worry-kid-you’re-back-home-now kiss, and led me up the three flights of stairs to where Joy was waiting. On the first landing she looked back at me and grinned. ‘Did you know there’s stories going round that you went off into the forest to live with the bears?’

  ‘The bears wouldn’t have me.’

  It was immediately clear that Joy had so recently moved in that she’d hardly begun to unpack. I dropped my bag and flopped down on one of the new mattresses. She was superficially pleased to see me, but I could sense a tension in the air. Joy went to the kitchen to make some tea, and Su began to roll a joint. ‘So it was a bit rough?’

  I let out a long sigh. ‘Fuck . . .’

  Su was the kind of person with whom I didn’t feel I had to make constant conversation. It was enough just to watch her deftly roll a joint. She lit it and passed it to me. ‘Get that down you, kid. You’ll feel a whole lot better.’

  Joy came back with the tea, but after a few minutes Su got up and started putting on her coat. I didn’t get it. ‘You’re going?’

  ‘Just to the shop. I need some fags.’ She looked at Joy. ‘Maybe I’ll bring back a take-away.’

  ‘That sounds like a great idea.’

  As Su exited, even my scattered instincts told me something was up. Her departure looked too much like a discreet withdrawal so that Joy and I could talk about something. Since I had absolutely nothing to talk about, I bided my time and waited to see what Joy had on her mind.

  ‘Listen, Mick, there’s something we have to get straight.’

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t think I’m up to any more revelations just now.’

  She ignored me and pressed on. ‘I’ve had a talk with Jamie . . .’

  Now that was news. He’d told me he didn’t know what was happening back in London.

  ‘. . . and he doesn’t think he could be comfortable if you were living here.’

  ‘Right at this moment, I don’t give a fuck about Jamie Mandelkau’s comfort.’

  ‘We are living together.’

  ‘You conned the money out of my mum to get this place.’

  ‘I had to do something.’

  ‘You told some bullshit sob-story to my family so that you could set yourself up in a cozy little love nest with fucking Mandelkau.’

  ‘It’s not like that.’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘We want to have a place together.’

  ‘And what the fuck am I supposed to do? I’ve just been to hell and don’t even know if I’m back yet.’

  ‘I don’t want it to go like this.’

  ‘If you and Ace want the place, give me back the money my mum gave you and I’ll sling my hook.’

  ‘I can’t do that.’

  ‘Of course you can’t.’

  ‘But . . .’

  I’d had enough. ‘Shut up, Joy. Just shut up and listen. Since I’ve known him, fucking Mandelkau has shacked up with my wife, manipulated me out of my fucking band and now he wants my folks to provide him with a home, while I sleep in the street. How fucking stupid do you think I am? I’m going to set up home in the small bedroom and, if Jamie doesn’t like it, he can go fuck himself.’

  Right then the bell rang. ‘That’ll be Su coming back.’

  I churlishly didn’t move, so Joy went to get the door. She and Su came back up the stairs preceded by the smell of curry. I suddenly realised how hungry and tired I was. Su set down the food and looked from me to Joy and back again. ‘So did you get everything settled?’

  ‘I’m staying in the back room, pro tem.’

  Su raised an eyebrow, and I got the vibe that she and Joy might already have discussed the situation and that Su hadn’t approved of the neat little Joy-and-Jamie scheme. With the housing crisis at least temporarily settled, I knew the only thing left for me to do was fall over. Which I did, Su along with me, and oh lord, was I glad of the warmth and comfort. I slept on and off for about three days. It seemed to be the only cure for the immobilising combination of jetlag, hangover and total exhaustion. Throughout those seventy-two hours Su ministered to my needs, and even Joy weighed in with cups of tea and bowls of cornflakes. I think she realised I’d been pushed too far. On the third day I rose from the dead, and decided to survey the wreckage. I didn’t feel my perspectives had been drastically or fundamentally transformed by all the acid I consumed in Vancouver. I certainly hadn’t undergone the kind of Road-to-Damascus mental make-over to which other acidheads laid claim, but that might have been because my thought processes were pretty made-over already.

  I did find myself a little reluctant to reunite with my old drinking buddies straight away. I felt a trifle too bruised to leap right back into the old routine and, besides, for the moment I had no credentials. A drunk without a band is nothing more than a drunk. I needed to assess the situation with some care. For a start, I had no money to speak of, but in the short term, this was fairly easily solved. The Deviants’ PA had been purchased with part of the Transatlantic advance, was still in excellent condition, nominally mine and I was able to sell it back to the manufacturers for a sum that would keep me going for a couple of months. Next I called on the end of the music business that directly affected me, and discovered to my pleasant surprise that everyone was very pleased to see me safe, well and back where I belonged. The general opinion was that the other Deviants didn’t have a clue, because I’d totally been the driving force behind the band. Nat Joseph wanted me to go into the studio as soon as I felt ready and make my solo album. I began to feel a good deal better about myself.

  I also found that our Canadian disaster hadn’t gone totally unnoticed. Steve Mann, one of the pre-eminent Ladbroke Grove freaks, had been hired as a publicist at Transatlantic when Nat had decided to move into the psychedelic rock business. Jamie had apparently sent him some kind of managerial bulletin about the Deviants and I parting company, and how the other three would be going on to greater fame and glory by completing a tour of America and then returning to the UK in triumph. Steve hadn’t been particularly impressed, and Ace’s boasts were rather negated by word from Seymour Stein that the Deviants were of little interest to him without me. Accordingly, Steve had put out a hilarious press release that I’d gone completely mad and was missing in the Canadian forest like some kind of neo-Jeremiah Johnson. As Su had put it, ‘living with the bears’. The story had run in Melody Maker under the headline ‘Farren Deviates Away’ and, if I’d planned it myself, I couldn’t have imagined a better welcome home. When I saw the piece, I laughed like a drain.

  Trouble at Mill

  When beset by care and woe, the suggestion that life continues outside one’s own sphere of misery, and that other people also have their troubles, can come as quite a surprise. In this case the surprise came almost as soon as I was ambulatory, and Su filled me in about the problems at IT. Since I’d been off in the world of rock & roll, a mess of change had come to pass at the underground newspaper. Bill Levy had gone, and so had Nigel Samuel. Hoppy had pulled some strange number after he’d come out of jail, which had dissolved the original Editorial Board and turned IT into a supposed workers’ cooperative. The paper had moved out of Nigel’s building and into new offices above an Italian café, just down the block in Endell Street.

  Dave Hall was still there, but new editors had arrived, in the form of Peter Stansill and Graham Keen, and under their stewardship IT had grown fat but not half so sassy. Although many other underground ventures were hard up against a contracting economy, IT had two lucrative factors going for it. The corporate music industry had finally embraced the counterculture. For the alternative press, the advertising revenue was now rolling in. At the same time IT had stumbled across the huge growth market in gay men’s lonely-hearts adverts. As I’d observed
during Bill Levy’s tenure, the gay ads had a weird effect on the paper. They made it money and increased its circulation, but – although the gay classifieds would provide an excuse for the first criminal charges against the paper and its editors – the money buffer they created seemed to have made it possible for the paper to turn decidedly white-bread and red-brick.

  To compound the problem, this combination of comparative affluence and political domestication drew a bottom-feeder envy that was at its most tangible in the form of a crew of low-rung activists and dopefiend opportunists who called themselves the London Street Commune. I suppose you could describe Phil Cohen and the London Street Commune as the Jacobins – the sans-culottes – of the Sixties underground, and I’ve always preferred Jacobites to Jacobins. During the summer of 1969 they had come into the public and TV eye by occupying an empty building at 144 Piccadilly, right by where the Hard Rock Café now resides. I was never sure of the exact political goal of the occupation, except as another gadfly irritant to the establishment, but I assumed it was an attention-getter for squatters’ rights and the city’s lamentable housing situation. What the LSC did manage to achieve was an agitprop eyesore right on Hyde Park Corner, within spitting distance of both Buckingham Palace and the London Hilton. They held it for a number of weeks – the time it took the authorities to move through the cumbersome legal process that would allow the police to storm the building and evict the malcontents.