by Mick Farren
It was fortunate that we had some non-gangster friends inside. One of these was Tony Howard. By day, he was the unflappable cockney booking agent for Pink Floyd and the Pretty Things, and he had even handled the Deviants for a while until we moved to Blackhill; by night, he doubled as the club’s ‘creative director’, which mainly involved hiring the talent and then sitting at his corner table in the restaurant, smiling benignly as all manner of mayhem roared around him. Tony guaranteed us easy access past the doormen, except after some especially rabid atrocity – like the night members of the Pink Fairies, the MC5 and a naked young woman finished up disporting themselves in the Regent’s Park canal.
Our other ally was Howard Parker, commonly know as H. Although I first encountered H as the DJ at the Speak – indeed, he was the first person to turn me on to the Stooges – he’d already racked up quite a résumé. A stocky, muscular man with long blond hair and a face that betrayed a far higher degree of intellectual curiosity than any run-of-the-mill roadie, he’d nursemaided Jimi Hendrix and been assistant to Frank Zappa, who never suffered fools gladly. H not only had many a tale to tell, but also owned the charred and decimated Stratocaster that Jimi had burned up at the Monteray Pop Festival. For the next few years he would participate in numerous of our adventures, and was always a tower of intelligence, strength and reassurance. He was unflappable, cheerful, effortlessly efficient and unwilling to admit that anything was impossible unless it absolutely was, and even then he’d search for other ways round the problem.
H seemed to know everyone and commanded a massive reserve of goodwill and respect. He had no time for hierarchies or pecking orders, taking an unusually egalitarian attitude to even the biggest stars. H wasn’t easily impressed, and H wasn’t a courtier, just a straight-shooting gem in an environment where flattery, deviousness and infantile tantrums were gangrenously endemic.
On most of the occasions I worked with him I was holding down some organisational role, but when the Deviants threw a reunion bash at the Roundhouse, H was stage manager, and I discovered why so many stars competed for his services. The band had been broken up for about two years and that night could have been one of tension, corner-of-the-eye distrust and wounds only superficially healed; also Sid was included and that could have brought another dimension of negativity. H, however, made certain the positive ruled. Through the run-up to the gig and while onstage, he made me feel every inch a star, all the way to the end when he handed me a huge magnum of champagne after the second encore.
When Dingwalls Dancehall opened up in Camden Lock, H left the Speakeasy and became the new club’s creative director. He very quickly designed a venue where the hot London bar bands could find a sympathetic stage, but one that was also big enough to book visiting luminaries like Bo Diddley and Curtis Mayfield. H saw no reason why rock stars and the regular punters shouldn’t enjoy the booze and the music in the same saloon-like atmosphere, without the velvet-rope discrimination of the Speak and other supposedly celebrity nightspots. He hired Boss Goodman as DJ, and made sure that all of his old Speakeasy cronies received lifelong get-in-free passes. No accusation of disloyalty or jumping ship could be levelled. H went way back with the owners of Dingwalls, and they’d given him the chance at least partially to fashion the club of his dreams.
Damn, but I wish H had stayed around. While on a well-earned holiday in the Greek islands the bloody fool bought himself a boat – a rickety, sprung-at-the-seams, piece-of-crap scow – and spent all his free time fixing it up and supposedly making the cursed thing seaworthy. At the launch for its maiden voyage, friends stood around laughing and applauding. They firmly believed it would leak so badly, even in shallow water, that H would be forced to turn back. To everyone’s amazement, he sailed on like the young-man-of-the-bloody-sea, rounded a headland and was never seen again. The boat had sunk – maybe even broken up – in deep water, and H, although a powerful swimmer, had been sucked down by an Aegean undertow. His body was never recovered, and it was one of those dumb, ill-luck, purposeless fatalities. Howard Parker was loved by too many people just to vanish without a trace.
Back at the Speakeasy, had it not been for the tolerance and tacit encouragement provided by H and Tony Howard, it would have been unlikely that our particular clique would have formed what became known as the Pink Fairies Motorcycle Gang and Drinking Club. The name would ultimately be appropriated and truncated by Twink for a supposedly commercial rock band, but in its original form the PFMG&DC was dedicated to the most raucous after-hours fun we could devise. The ‘fun’ usually began under the guise of ‘getting up to jam’, which in reality meant a mass stage invasion followed by about forty minutes of shrieking cacophony until all players declared themselves exhausted and retired to the bar, leaving a debris of bottles, glasses and distressed equipment. The hard core of Pretties and Deviants would be augmented by the usual suspects: Viv Prince, Steve Took, a harmonica player called Mox and, more occasionally, ‘Legs’ Larry Smith and Viv Stanshall.
These impromptu events caused massive consternation among the up-and-coming bands who had actually been booked to play. Many were conned into appearing at the Speak for no money, in the naive belief that it would provide a rock-biz showcase and they’d have a single zooming up the charts by the following Thursday. When our intervention resulted in a ravaged stage and an alienated audience, they were understandably miffed. On the nights when ‘Legs’ Larry was joined by Moon, miffed would turn to wide-eyed nightmare as a brand-new drum kit was reduced to kindling. Fortunately Moon had a habit of staving off the horror by instantly handing a signed cheque for the full purchase price to the stunned drummer. The worst of these confrontations took place when the entire crew, including a mute Syd Barrett, dragged along by Took, arrived in full cry and loaded for beer after finishing Twink’s Think Pink album. We were also unnaturally flush with money. As the producer, I’d conned noteworthy drinking money out of Decca Records, by invoicing for session men – phantom string and oboe players who were in fact nothing more than the Pretty Things’ keyboard ace John Povey reproducing them on a Melotron – to finance what we hoped would be a party sufficiently apocalyptic that it would have impressed Attila and his Huns. What we didn’t know was that another party was also supposed to be taking place that night. The showcase, record-industry debut of a new band called King Crimson.
At that stage in their development King Crimson had a habit of playing very loud, then going into a sudden breakdown and playing very quietly. Of course, the PFMG&DC had no idea of their arrangements and cared even less. During the loud bits we could only communicate by yelling to each other, and in the quiet bits it took us a minute or so to adjust, making our conversation suddenly louder than the band. Some sections of the audience, especially the reserved tables of corporate-entertainment flunkies, assumed that we were vociferously disrespecting the musicians onstage, and even suspected some stinking underground intrigue to disrupt the show. In fact, nothing could have been further from the truth; just two celebrations running headlong into each other with the force of a train-wreck. Record moguls started calling for our ejection, but – and here I’d played my cards rather shrewdly – on arrival I’d handed Mino some hundreds of pounds with the instructions to keep the booze coming until the cash ran out. No way was Mino going to hand back our alcohol deposit, so no way were we going to be bounced. The mayhem continued until Twink staggered up to the stage and started demanding that King Crimson play Chuck Berry’s ‘Nadine’, because he didn’t like their other songs. Even some of us thought that was going a little too far. Happily, my peace was made with Bob Fripp years later in the Grass Roots Tavern in New York City and all was water under the bridge.
Hey, Hey, Hey, Mona
Personal vindication may not be the best or most sensible reason to create art, and my wonderful solo album entitled Mona – The Carnivorous Circus was, in almost every respect, the product of a desperate need for vindication. After my fall from the Deviants I had a lot to prove. The hard part was
my confusion as to what exactly I wanted to prove, and in the end all the recording really demonstrated was the confusion itself. For the longest possible time I thought John Lennon and Yoko Ono were the only people on the planet who liked this record. Even I couldn’t stand to listen to it. The packaging was a pretty fair indication of my fucked-up motivation during the making of the conflicted gem. The front cover bore a custom logo by Allen Jones, who’d designed the cover of A Quick One for the Who, overlaid by the famous photograph of the long, faceless ranks of Wehrmacht soldiers, hands raised, taking their personal oath of loyalty to the Führer. The choice had been between that and one of those Fifties shots of a cinema audience all staring at the screen through 3D glasses. I was looking for a symbolic image of the cookie-cutter destruction of the individual, which alone should have been a measure of my mood. That my final selection should have been of the helmeted Nazis was an even more precise gauge of the bleakness of my hostility, there at the end of Nixon’s first year in the White House.
Right from the start, the making of Mona was a supposedly planned descent into a very dark labyrinth. I have friends who even now tell me that the record frightens them. By the time I got to ‘Mona’, I was determined to aim for the furthest extremes I could achieve. The rest of the Deviants had chickened out and become a guitar band, but I would demonstrate my superiority by walking on to the crossroads and beyond, totally alone. A Nietzschean fucking Übermensch, right? I would fight with monsters, and take no care lest I become one.
Of course, I still wanted to be a rock star like Elvis. (Who was a monster anyway, but I was one of the very small minority who’d noticed at that point.) Not by any conventional, or even rational route, though; I still remembered the parts of Naked Lunch that had put me off my toasted bacon sandwich. Could I do the same, for other up-coming, would-be bohemian sprogs, and be loved for it? In fact, a deeper and more devious cunning may have been at work. With hindsight, I suspect I might have been looking to destroy myself as an artist, and maybe even as a human being, in some personal audio twilight of the gods. Fight the monsters in order to be one. It is absolutely no mere whim that I solicited, and received, the seal of approval of the local Hell’s Angels and displayed it proudly on the cover.
I could in part validate what I was doing by claiming, with some degree of truth, that, with Mona, I was attempting to destructure the rock LP as Burroughs had destructured the novel. Whether I was actually equipped to do this was another matter completely but who had tried it, except maybe John and Yoko? I didn’t have any yardsticks against which I could be measured. Thus I started preparing pre-production tape loops and finding material. Even the recruitment of the band was somewhat unorthodox. I ran into an American called Steve Hammond at some record-company party and, after a few measured yards of small-talk, we got round to exchanging the information that I had an album to make, and he not only played guitar but could act as musical director and put me a band together. The musicians he seemed able to bring in certainly sounded impressive. As a bass player, he suggested Johnny Gustavson, who had played with Liverpool’s legendary Big Three. Steve also claimed to be able to get Paul Buckmaster, the classical cellist who had turned to rock ’n’ roll when he’d orchestrated ‘Eleanor Rigby’ for Paul McCartney.
Usually in these situations it’s the booze that’s talking, and when the pretty balloon has burst and both the party and the hangover are over, the call-me promises and plans prove a chimera. Not so with Steve Hammond. He called the very next day, confirming not only his reality, but also his togetherness, efficiency, determination and being as good as his word. Johnny Gus would do the session for only a tad over scale, and we could go and talk to Paul Buckmaster later in the week. Trying for a soft landing on a very strange planet here, Skipper, but hell, wasn’t that what I wanted? It was sometime around this point, though, that I made a fairly serious mistake. Steve asked me if I had any special drummer in mind and, without thinking, I responded, ‘Twink’.
The choice was a damned fool one. Aside from having a self-serving personality and a secret agenda that would only be revealed later, Twink’s timing could be decidedly suspect on the wrong night. Since, courtesy of Nat Joseph, I was actually paying people, I could have had an almost free choice, but I had to fall victim to bar-room loyalty. Ah well. The meeting with Paul was considerably more inspiring and productive. When I told him that I was making the main theme of the album a protracted variation of Bo Diddley’s ‘Mona’ interrupted by a lot of electronic cut-ups, he said one word.
‘Bartók.’
‘Bartók?’
Paul got up from his chair and went to a wall-sized record collection. He pulled out an album of string quartets by Béla Bartók and put it on the turntable. Partway through one of the pieces, there it was, clear and plain. Unsyncopated, maybe more percussive, but beyond any shadow of a doubt the Bo’s trademark rhythm pattern. Paul elaborated: don’t fear the gulf between classic and pop. It’s only in the mind and radio marketing. Steve strummed the rhythm on an acoustic guitar, and Paul hummed a possible Bartók-based figure that would work as a counterpoint to the Diddley beat. For the first time in recent memory I was truly excited. I was hearing . . . well, maybe not something new, but a totally original juxtapositioning and matching of sources. Intercut with a dubbed version of Hitler’s speeches, backward tam-tams, Sabre jets in a power dive, a recurrent serial-murderer character, a chant of ‘who needs the egg’ and a gratuitous Eddie Cochran song, it could hardly fail. Oh yes, this was assured to get me on Top of the Pops.
We went into Sound Techniques in Chelsea, where we’d made PTOOFF!, I guess looking to cook up some past magic. The sessions were efficient and the musicians came and went, and either I worked on my own with Sister George, or Took and I overdubbed the vocal whoops and chipmunk yodels he’d perfected behind Marc Bolan. We mixed the thing with the same relatively sober dedication, and what I then believed was attention to detail. And we delivered the tapes and people listened to them and started looking at me very strangely. I still claim the song ‘Mona’ with the cello – all ten minutes of it – has a unique and timeless quality, but I had come out with something a tad too bizarre even for those who wished me well. I reacted by turning round and going into a complete physical collapse.
As I Was Lying in My Hospital Bed
I was walking down Ladbroke Grove on a chilly afternoon when the tops of my cowboy boots felt as if they were cutting into the flesh of my legs. At home I investigated, and found to my horror that I was being attacked by an organic unpleasantness. The next day a mysterious swelling appeared under my right ear. I’m glad that AIDS had yet to be invented, otherwise I would have been convinced I was doomed. As it was, I was more than a little perturbed. I went to the doctor and fell asleep in his waiting room. The doctor took one look at me and sent me to hospital. I took a cab to Wormwood Scrubs, past Her Majesty’s Prison, into Hammersmith Hospital, and had myself dropped off at Emergency. I then fell asleep again in the waiting room. At the hospital they took one look and admitted me.
They put me in a cubicle all by myself and, for an indeterminate length of time, I drifted in and out of functional awareness. People came in, looked at me and went away again. I might effectively have been abducted by aliens. I hadn’t been in hospital since I’d had my adenoids removed at the age of two, and that long-distant memory in no way prepared me for hospitalisation’s disorientating lack of reality. Even the headphone radio didn’t seem to get anything but Mahler on the BBC Third Programme. Hospitals possess an eerie hollowness, no matter how crowded they are. People die in those places, and it’s noticeable.
A nurse informed me that I was going to be operated on, couching the information in medical baby talk – ‘Just a little cut so the doctors can see what that thing under your ear is’ – which caused me immediately to assume I had cancer. Naively believing that honesty was the best policy, I’d attempted to explain my unyielding lifestyle to a doctor. He’d asked what drugs I’d taken in the la
st year or so, and how much I drank, but before I’d even completed the list, or outlined the quantity, his eyes had glazed over. I ought to be dead a couple of times over, so how could he diagnose me? He hadn’t studied mutants in medical school. I suggested that he should put me on some wide-spectrum antibiotic and see what happened, but doctors hate patients with specific suggestions. He vetoed the antibiotics and opted for the knife.
They prepped me, wheeled me in, the anaesthetist loomed over me and I had that inevitable thought that I might not wake up again, flavoured with a dash of ‘That’ll show the sons-of-bitches’. But I did wake up, from a dream in which all the secrets of the universe were revealed unto me; but, as I opened my eyes, I forgot the entire thing, down to the smallest detail, and burst into tears. I was wheeled back to my isolation cubicle, and then no one came near me for the next twelve hours. With unchanged dressings, and the distinct impression that I’d gone astray in some NHS-Kafkaesque bureaucracy, I started to worry that nobody knew I was there. Finally a sister discovered me, and I heard some just-out-of-earshot berating going on. My dressings were changed by an upset-looking nurse, I was fed and then put on the wide-spectrum antibiotic I’d wanted in the first place. My condition rapidly began to improve – so much so that I was beginning to wonder why all my lousy, so-called friends weren’t flocking to visit me. I learned later that when they called, they’d been told that I was still post-operative and not ready for visitors. In fact, I was lost in the system, but they weren’t to know that.
