by Mick Farren
‘Chesterton Road, please. It’s fourth on the left past Ladbroke Grove station.’ At least the homing instinct still worked.
With Joy and Jamie asleep in the other room, I couldn’t rampage even the limited length and breadth of the flat. I wasn’t being considerate. I just didn’t want them anywhere near my nightmare. Never again. My best idea was to lock myself in the bathroom. Never again. At least no one could interrupt my disintegration. For a long time, I sat cold and rigid on the edge of the tub, but then I began to shiver and sag. Never, never again. A heater was attached to the bathroom wall, but it didn’t occur to me to turn it on. Never again, and the colder I got, the more that special resolve of petulant self-pity had me in its grip. I would never play rock ’n’ roll again. Never. I swore. Never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, (colder) never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never. I promised. I would never play rock ’n’ roll again. Never, never, never, never, never, never, never, (still colder) never, never, never, never, never, never, (I’m freezing) never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never. A mantric vow. Never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never. I wished to hell I had a Valium. Or a half-bottle of Scotch. The chill porcelain against my skull was far from adequate comfort. Never again.
Encounter and Reunion
Does the first door have to be closed before the second door opens, like the airlock on a spaceship? No matter how much you may drown destiny in acid during the quest for enlightenment, and no matter what grandiose hallucinations that may produce, at the end of the night, the patient comes down confused as ever. Okay, so I’d resolved never to play rock & roll again. Dandy. I wasn’t playing rock & roll anyway. Since Twink had departed, Took and I had done bugger all, except half-write a couple of half-songs, but he had also introduced me to a guitar player called Larry Wallis who’d just fallen out of a band called the Entire Sioux Nation.
Larry was a hard-drinking, dope-smoking, good old boy from South London with a red Fender Stratocaster and a quick wit, and was well versed in TV and movies. Indeed, just the kind of guy I figured I could live with in a band. The first time we all met up, Larry arrived with his girlfriend Shirley. Both had fluffed-out dandelion hairstyles and, before I could stop myself, I tactlessly observed, ‘My God, they match.’
For some sensitive artistes such a blurt would have been ample excuse to walk right out, but Larry just found it amusing. After some discussion he expressed a willingness to work with Took and me – if, and when, we had our ducks in a row – which as far as I could see would be sometime in the next century. Larry lived in the top-floor flat – what used to be called the attic – of a tall building above a busy row of shops in Walworth Road. To gain admittance, you rang the bell, Larry threw down a key protectively encased in a joke-shop rubber chicken, and the spectacle of the rubber chicken falling on the scurrying shoppers of SE17 added a suitably Toon Town prelude to any visit.
Larry Wallis wasn’t the only important face to emerge during this period of doubt and dilemma. A very old friend appeared out of schoolboy twilight to play, in the short term, a vital role in the next phase of my life. Gez Cox was the Saturday-night henchkid with whom I’d shared my teenage-weekend wee hours getting adolescently maudlin over Frank Sinatra’s ‘For Only the Lonely’. I don’t know if he called me or what, but somehow we arranged to meet. Years earlier, after we’d both left Worthing High School for Boys, I’d gone off to art school and he’d bummed around the world for a while, finishing up in Australia, working in an office in Sydney during the era when the bars in the business district closed at six in the evening and rail commuters threw up recycled Foster’s all the way back to the suburbs. Finding it all a little much for his mind and his liver, Gez wended his way back to England by an almost Joseph Conrad route, including stops in Hong Kong, Singapore and other romantic points east.
When the appointed reunion took place, I was slightly surprised to find that an extremely attractive young woman was with him, and she rather distracted me from giving Gez what should have been my undivided attention. Ingrid von Essen was a Finnish beauty with the ever-popular Brigitte Bardot look, except that Ingrid’s Bardot pout came with a more brittle Helena Bonham-Carter judgementalism.
No reason existed why Gez shouldn’t have a good-looking girl with him. Although, like mine, his nose was a little over-large, he was slim, charming and urbane, and I naturally assumed that Ingrid was his girlfriend, or, at the very least, his date for the evening. They didn’t act like a couple, though, with no signs of either courtship or intimacy. They had known each other for years, Ingrid having spent time in Worthing as a teenager as part of a student-exchange programme, but, if anything, Gez seemed to act as Ingrid’s neutral escort. This was, in fact, revealed as the case, when, as we prepared to go our separate ways, he confided in me that Ingrid would be more than happy to spend the night with me, and that she’d actually pressurised Gez to take her to meet me in the first place.
This took me completely by surprise. I’d been too much of a gentleman even mildly to come on to what I was still thinking of as ‘my mate’s bird’. I was also flattered and excited, turned on by this forward and unorthodox approach – and I didn’t hesitate to invite her back to Chesterton Road, where we discovered an unexpected sexual compatibility. She also revealed a highly complex personality, part of which was an admiration for me that, from today’s perspective, would seem totally unhealthy, but at the time was truly marvellous. In a very short space of time, Ingrid would become my girlfriend and companion for the next nine years, and Gez would be a strong right arm in the next phase of my adventures, even though that strong right arm would often be lifting a pint of Guinness.
Phun City, Here We Come
I sat on the bonnet of the official Mercedes, one foot on the heavy steel fender and the other swinging free. A few hundred people were gathered round to hear what I had to say. And, for a few moments, I didn’t say a word. After the angst, tension, waiting and worry of the previous ten days, I was now acting out at least three lifelong fantasies at once; worse than that, I was enjoying it shamelessly. I’d even dressed for the moment: jeans tucked into Victorian riding boots, a studded biker belt and one of those blue denim jackets that Parisian garbage-men wear. Ingrid had embroidered a multicoloured dragon on the shoulder of the jacket, a quasi-military, mystic insignia, and I’d pinned a de luxe scarlet-and-gold Chairman Mao badge to my lapel. I was aiming for a combo of Che, Rommel and some Sicilian bandit chief. Getting a large number of the dedicatedly undisciplined to acquiesce to one’s will is far from simple. Triumphs of that kind require bluff, ingenuity, bullshit, downright lies, plus a mess of projected vanity. It’s Patton and his pearl-handled revolvers. No one wants to be led into a potential disaster by a drab schlepper. They prefer to convince themselves that they’re following a warrior poet, even if it’s only into a three-day rock ’n’ roll orgy in a damp Sussex field.
The trick of waiting before you say anything is one used by both Churchill and Marlon Brando in The Godfather, and, for what I was about to do, it seemed applicable. This was going to have to be a tad Churchillian. The vibe at the half-constructed Phun City was on the cusp of ugly, and I was expected to restore morale. All day Boss, Gez and Mac had bought themselves time by insisting that all would be made clear when Farren arrived from London. Mad Dog Pete Currie from Africa had gone to fetch him in the Mercedes staff car. Don’t worry. He’d have all the answers. (Sons-of-bitches.) Thus, after Boss had called everyone to order, I took a moment to look out over the assembled hippies. Their expressions ranged from sullen to disgruntled, and my task was to win them over and head off any dopey ideas of yet another people’s takeover. Before I’d even been driven down from London, Boss and Gez’s phone bulletins told of the natives, who were arriving in larger and larger numbers and far earlier than we ever expected, growing progress
ively restless. They started calling him and the other organisers, and even the freaks building and installing all the rock and open-air art hardware, the ‘super-hippies’ in a tone that was growing more uncomplimentary by the moment. The super-hippies had retaliated by referring to these early-to-arrive nomads as the ‘boggies’.
‘Okay . . . here’s what’s happening. The first thing you have to know is that it’s going to be a free festival.’
I think it was Edward who coined the term boggies. It came to indicate a Neanderthal form of hippie: stoned insensible, generally uncooperative, prone to complain and likely to steal everything that wasn’t watched, let alone nailed down. They looked at me suspiciously, requiring to be convinced. I was after all the capo da tutti capo, the autocrat of super-hippies.
‘We don’t intend to put up any kind of fences or try to collect any money. The stage is up, the generators are in, the water’s connected, although we can’t pipe it as far as the woods.’
At the bottom of the large sloping field were a gratuitous six or seven acres of densely overgrown woodland that the landowner didn’t mind including as part of the rented site. The boggies had immediately taken to the woods, cleared some of the undergrowth and commenced to set up Narnia, which turned out, in fact, to be extremely magical, with highly creative treehouses and, at night, fairyland candle play (there being no generators in Narnia). Unfortunately most boggie construction and special effects had been created with pilfered materials, which were needed for stuff like the stage and the lighting rigs. Boss had been forced to lead a raid into Narnia to retrieve irreplaceable items, and hostilities had been briefly joined, followed by an uneasy truce that left the boggies to their own devices in the woods, on condition that the thieving kindly be mitigated. I could live with the deal as long as no idiot Robin Hood strode from our own little Sherwood to waste my time. We had enough slings and arrows already, thanks. Our super-hippie backs were so far up against the wall that the boggies could have made it a free festival themselves any time they wanted, and we couldn’t have done a damned thing about it. Accordingly, we beat them to the punch by giving them what they could easily have taken. What needed to be impressed on them, however, was that only us super-hippies – and most specifically Gez Cox and I – were standing between them and the outside world.
‘We also have a deal with the police, by which uniformed officers won’t come onto the field unless they observe a disturbance.’
‘What’s a disturbance?’
‘It’s anything the cops think constitutes enough excuse to come steaming in team-handed and bust everyone.’
‘You think they will?’
‘Yes, but they’ll wait until it looks like some major fuck-up, or they’ll wait until no media are around.’
That was the truth as I saw it, but the meetings with the police had been little short of Dadaist. Me in one of my old rocker velvet suits and Gez in business pinstripe with his hair gathered in a ponytail and stuffed down the back of his shirt; we sat in an imposing wood-panelled office, attempting to convince an inspector from the West Sussex Constabulary and a couple of local Worthing councillors that what we were having was some combination of a Renaissance fair and folk-music festival, rather than a psychedelic picnic-of-the-damned. Legally, we had them by the balls. We had every break that the West Sussex upper crust had built into the local by-laws for their horse shows and point-to-point meetings. The same rules that allowed the aristocracy to rampage around the countryside, drinking themselves stupid and riding roughshod over the lower orders applied to any minor multitude of freaks who wanted to get fucked-up in field. After firmly but diplomatically pointing this out, we spent the best part of two hours hammering out an informal policing agreement, but whether it would hold remained to be seen.
‘I’m not going to bullshit you. We don’t have a clue as to what’s going to happen next.’
The admission of total mystification went down well. Boggies like their leaders a little bemused. An excess of clarity is viewed with frowning suspicion.
‘When the bands show up they’re going to be presented with an ultimatum. There’s no money, except to cover their expenses, but there’s a good time to be had, so they can either stay and play or fuck off. That should separate the sheep from the goats.’
With some irony the only sheep were the band called Free, who heard the deal and fucked off without even getting out of the car. All the other performers had a look around and decided that, if they were looking for trouble, they’d come to the right place. Unfortunately it fell to me to explain the situation to each band in turn. It was something I obviously couldn’t delegate, and it quite spoiled the first night of the festival for me, until someone noticed I’d started walking in small circles, muttering how all this bloody stress wasn’t worth it and wondering if I should kill myself. This worthy interventionist insisted that I swallow an assortment of various forms of speed and tranquilliser, making me finally able to operate from a point of view of philosophy rather than embarrassment.
How I’d come to that point had started innocently enough. As far as I can recall, the decision that we should stage some kind of open-air event was taken late one night, in someone’s flat around a pipe and a bottle. It might well have been at my brand-new flat in Clifton Gardens in Maida Vale, where I was now living with Ingrid and her friend Caroline McKechnie. In very short order, even by the standards of the early Seventies, I had exited the less-than-healthy situation with Joy and Jamie at Chesterton Road, and Ingrid had moved out of her minuscule bedsit in darkest Earls Court. She and Caroline had gone househunting, and had found a light, airy, first-floor flat with high ceilings, two bedrooms and french windows that opened onto a narrow wrought-iron balcony. I could almost have pretended that I was in Paris, but for the red number-six buses trundling by. The rent was a bit steeper than Ingrid and I could manage between us, so Caroline took the extra bedroom, a plan with which I readily concurred, despite everything that Shaftesbury Avenue had taught me about the hazards of flat-sharing. I was still young and self-aggrandising enough to be taken with the idea of sharing a pad with two glorious women. While Ingrid was the Nordic/Bardot blonde, Caroline had luxuriant red hair, pale freckled skin and could have modelled for Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Aside from the aesthetics of the arrangement, I also found myself living in a state of previously unsurpassed cleanliness, and eating real food on a regular basis. I hadn’t entirely cleaned up my act, however; and Ingrid enjoyed a daily routine of Valium and amphetamine, and rolled an expert joint. Ingrid and I were going through the getting-to-know-you, wonder-of-us phase of our relationship, having a great deal of sex and talking almost non-stop. I learned that she was far better read than I, coming as she did from an awesomely educated family of Swedish-speaking Finns. I think her great-aunt had dated August Strindberg or something, and she loved books to the point that she would wince in pain to hear the spine of one crack. She was also passionate about the Beatles and had a full religious devotion to Elvis Presley. She identified with Alice and all things Lewis Carroll, and with the hard-pressed and anxiously courageous rabbits in Richard Adams’ Watership Down. She doted on the plays of Tom Stoppard, the films of Michelangelo Antonioni and the writing of Margaret Drabble. She maintained a subscription to the New Yorker, and had a chill meticulousness that I would find echoed decades later in overdrawn cartoon form by Jeri Ryan as Seven of Nine in the TV show Star Trek: Voyager.
It was while I was with Ingrid that I finally buckled down to some serious writing. I guess it was inevitable. Germaine had repeatedly urged me to get started on a book, but she’d also suggested that said book should be a study of male violence, at which I inwardly groaned. ‘Yeah, right.’ Before I backed into what I feared would be literary isolation, however, I still felt the need for a couple more piratical adventures, and the first of these would be Phun City.
At the gathering where the idea of an open-air festival was first mooted, after we’d resolved we’d attempt to do
this thing, someone asked the first and most obvious question. ‘So what, right at this moment, are our collective resources?’
A fast audit revealed that our assets totalled a half-finished bottle of vodka, an almost untouched quid deal and two and ninepence in cash.
‘Is that enough to launch a rock festival?’
We all looked at each other and shrugged. No one had told us it wasn’t, so what the hell? Hoppy had launched the Technicolor Dream without too much more going for him and, like Hoppy, we had a newspaper and its resources pretty much at our disposal. I’m a little hazy about who exactly was at that first meeting. I know Gez was there. He’d been a regular visitor since he’d come into my life and brought Ingrid with him, and seemed eager to get in on whatever the next scheme might be. I know Edward Barker was there, and may well have been scribbling the first sketches for the festival logo even as we talked. Edward and I had pretty much hit it off since we first met, and had become drinking partners well before we got into anything more serious. Su Small and Steve Mann were definitely present. Su and I had made the transition from friends and comrades to lovers, and back again, with none of the formally expected weeping, recrimination or gnashing of teeth. Not even a diatribe in an underground newspaper. In the best possible terms, Su was a highly progressive woman. I think the only key figure absent was Boss Goodman, off on the road with the newly formed Pink Fairies, who were attempting to take up where the Deviants had left off.
After the first crystallisation of the idea and intent, the next move was to go into IT and sell the idea to Dave Hall. I think by that point the name Phun City had been mooted, and Edward had created a logo, a naked dancing cartoon figure with an expression of demented gullibility that seemed to symbolise our hopes and aspirations. It had also been agreed that we would make the event an IT benefit, all profits going to pay the fines and legal expenses for the bust. Dave, who was nothing if not shrewd and totally versed in the devious wiles of freakhood, knew what we were up to straight away. He recognised that our most pressing desire was simply to have the biggest and most subversive party possible, somewhere in an English meadow.
