by Mick Farren
‘Don’t even think about it. Just get the fuck out of town.’ It was the best advice I could have been given. Any grand gestures could only result in Go-Directly-to-Jail, and I had no Get-Out-of-Jail-Free cards. I’d had another of those glimpses of how it could be if the system was subservient to us, rather than us being subservient to the system. Or, on a less grandiose scale, as Hawkwind manager Doug Smith put it, ‘It was exactly what would happen if you let Boss and Mick put on a festival.’
Twilight of the Gods
All the way from London to Southhampton we had worked hard on becoming increasingly intoxicated. Rock ’n’ roll class action couldn’t have been further from our minds. As far as the IT crew was concerned, the necessary subversion had already taken place and we were on holiday. By the time we drove aboard the ferry to the Isle of Wight we were roaring, but not so drunk that we didn’t square away the needs of narcotic security before disembarkation. This was fortunate, because almost as soon as the wheels of the truck touched dry land, the drug squad took us apart. They turned us upside down, inside out and sideways, but they never found the dope.
Our elation at having bested the law lasted all the way to the festival site, the unrecognisable Worthy Farm, but our first sight of the chaos was enough to slow us down. We arrived in gathering twilight in a place of complete confusion. People and vehicles milled about and, as the country darkness grew more total, no overall impression of the place was possible, except the tiny pinpoints of campfires that went on and on. At Phun City we’d been big on lights, but of course Phun City was less than one-twentieth of the size. This festival’s night was dark shadows, and a certain thrill of fear. I’ve always imagined the chaos of the prelude to a battle as being similar – the night before Waterloo, Agincourt or Marathon – or perhaps that was merely my own mindset. The blanket-swathed hippies could easily have carried pikes or muskets. We were, of course, in one sense, entering the compound of the enemy, and I knew that the chaos we were driving into was some of my own doing. What I didn’t know was that I’d also get the blame for chaos I hadn’t instigated. For a while, certain lace-curtain hippie factions treated me like the most hated man in the counterculture.
Run a rock festival, then wreck a rock festival. Examine the phenomena from both sides and test the concept to destruction. It wasn’t really like that, but to this day people still refuse to believe otherwise. I wish Carl Jung had lived long enough to take a good look at a rock festival. To put a quarter of a million or so people in an open field is a logistical nightmare, but psychologically it exceeds the boundaries of conception. The audience at a giant rockfest spends by the far the majority of its time being bored. It is expected to sit on either hard and dusty ground or in a sea of cloying mud, in various types and stages of intoxication, watching roadies break down the equipment of the band that has just played and re-rigging for the next. I’m sure Jung would have noticed that a multitude of this size develops a collective consciousness, sluggish at first, but picking up speed as it adopts a fantasy specific to the event.
At Woodstock, the fantasy had been one of striving and prevailing. ‘The person next to you is your sister or your brother.’ The myth was that united hippiedom could survive storm and stardom. With an almost predictable swing of the pendulum, Altamont had become the great convocation of imagined and symbolic evil under a winter sun; a visitation of angels from Hell and sympathisers for the Devil, with violence and death perceived as the only possible outcome. The previous Isle of Wight festival – which I hadn’t attended – seemed to have pulled through on the lone charisma of Bob Dylan. Now the attitude was rapidly turning into a confrontation between us and them, albeit with a large degree of confusion as to who was ‘us’ and who was ‘them’.
When I first became concerned about what might be going on down at the Isle of Wight, I was thinking economy rather than psychology or mass fantasy. At Phun City I’d clearly observed the counterculture’s disposable income already reduced almost to nothing, and the average freak so distanced from the macro-economy that he or she didn’t have the pot of proverb in which to piss. I could see the IoW event being close to a death blow. Acting like some giant Hoover, it would suck up every last quid, and recycle only peanuts back into the culture it purported to represent. Promoters Ricky Farr and the Foulks Brothers were staging an upheaval of money that might push the cashflow of dozens of underground enterprises clear into the toilet.
At Phun City we’d given up on the impossible cost of actually collecting the money and made it a free festival. Fiery Creations – the company through which Farr and the Foulks were running the event – was plainly on a diametrically opposed course. With a million-pound roster of talent, including the Who, the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, Sly and the Family Stone and Jethro Tull, it was obviously going need to push the cash-collection equation to the crest of the curve. I couldn’t see how it could so much as break even without the most horrendous security measures, and I couldn’t come up with an image of any possible site that didn’t look like a prison camp. As it turned out, even my imaginings were completely outstripped by reality.
As an IT journalist, Gez talked the Fiery Creations’ publicists into letting a group of us take a tour of the site, about ten days before the bank-holiday weekend when the five-day fest was scheduled. We recruited Pete Currie and the Mercedes staff car yet again and headed down to see what was what. As we drove into Worthy Farm, we could plainly see that Fiery Creations were protecting their box-office with every security device short of a minefield, and appeared to be deploying the ambience of the East German frontier. Double walls of scaffolding and corrugated iron, with what looked uncomfortably like a freefire zone between them, were patrolled by security men in shabby, badgeless, ill-fitting coppers’ uniforms, accompanied by equally ill-trained and tense-looking Alsatian dogs. To make matters worse, the area in front of the stage, the main viewing arena, had recently been under crop and was a mess of broken earth and hard spiky stubble, which would be turned into a swamp by even a minor shower.
‘Dearie me,’ thought Edward, Pete, Gez and I quite independently of each other, ‘this is really not on.’
As we strolled around the festival-under-construction, it also appeared that all available capital had gone into these formidable defences, and that nothing had been allotted to peripheral diversions. Where was the helter skelter from the Technicolor Dream, the inflatable domes, the counterculture side-shows, or any of the other fun-of-the-fair stuff that could transform the event from Dachau-with-bands into a mighty gathering of the tribes? Before we’d left London Gez had done a bit of checking. The franchise fees for catering and the other sales operations were quite high enough to exclude all the small-time merchants who wanted to sell electric yo-yos, solar-powered beanie hats or bootleg Bob Dylan records. Commercial overkill was being taken to mammoth proportions.
‘Something needs to be done,’ we resolved. At that point we spotted the hill. As far as we could tell on first observation, the whole enclosed festival site was overlooked by the shallow side of a massive grassy escarpment with the Solent lurking behind it. Nonchalantly, and not wanting to appear overly interested, I hailed a passing guard. ‘That hill, is it part of the site?’
The guard shook his head. ‘No, and it’s going to be a right fucking headache.’
‘It is?’
‘We’re supposed to keep it free of gatecrashers.’
I think they call it the defining moment. I stared at the guard and his human and canine colleagues, their bits and pieces of ill-matched uniforms, and found that they suddenly and forcibly reminded me of the Black and Tans, the paramilitary bastards who had brutally stuck it to the Irish in the bloody aftermath of the 1916 uprising. Once the image had presented itself, I couldn’t shake it loose. This IoW bash was going to be a black hole of decidedly negative energy, and it was time to salvage whatever we could before we were buried under overpriced hotdogs.
‘This is a job for the White Panther Party.�
�
At the time, the British White Panther Party was a very secret society. The primary secret being that it didn’t exist at all. Driving back, Edward, Gez, Pete and I agreed that we could only call it as we saw it. We’d seen the IoW under construction, and it wasn’t good. We needed to put the word out, but at the same time we weren’t completely and suicidally altruistic. If we were going to put the Fiery Creations’ feet to their own fire, and wring some humanising concessions from them, we’d be daft to use IT as a spearhead. We needed some generic organisation that could appear out of nowhere and then vanish again. The organisational equivalent of Zorro, the Masked Avenger.
‘This is definitely a job for the White Panther Party.’
Accordingly we photocopied a few thousand copies of a single-sheet leaflet and put it out on the usual underground networks. For a first attempt, I thought the Red Guard, Newspeak prose style was suitably streamlined.
WHITE PANTHER MINISTRY OF INFORMATION
BULLETIN ON THE ISLE OF WIGHT FESTIVAL
The Isle of Wight Festival is an obvious example of capitalist interests seeking to exploit the energy of the People’s music.
They have erected ten-foot double corrugated-iron fences around the main arena and manned it with dogs and guards to enforce this exploitation.
The festival site has weaknesses.
A) The fencing would not withstand a well-organised attack by the People.
B) The arena is overlooked by a large hill (not part of the site) from which the bands can be seen in comfort and for free.
The Panthers, together with the Pink Fairies and other groups, will be running a free festival on land adjoining the official site. It will attempt to provide information, free music and free food.
Take part.
POWER TO THE PEOPLE
We also called Joly, the Badge Man, and distinctive white-on-purple White Panther Party badges were on Portobello and moving outward within a matter of hours. Although I didn’t know it at the time, Jungian psychology was coming into play. Even before the festival started, I had seemingly kindled the sparks of a collective fantasy, anticipating a mood whose time had come, and I’d also projected it into an area devoid of too much other Jungian magic.
Not a great deal of magic is derived from the unilateral ambition to make a lot of money, for the romance of a fiscal killing is monochrome and very limited. Even the faux-flamboyance of a faux-revolution will outshine it like a rainbow every time. Of course, it wasn’t just us. Anarchists in Paris, Provos in Holland, God knows what in West Berlin, and probably malcontents all the way from Stockholm to Tangier – not to mention a couple of hundred thousand domestic boggies, bikers, acid heads, university students, rock fans and pop kids, plus half the dealers in Europe – were planning to converge on what was now building to be the last of the truly enormous rock festivals. And the huge gathering would attract, both on and offstage, a great many individuals with fuses ready to blow.
Ricky Farr sussed out who was behind the White Panther Party in less than twelve hours and was on the phone to me at IT. At first he threatened, then he attempted to convince me that he was part of the revolution, too. He seemed most concerned that I’d revealed that one could see from the hill for free, as though a bloody great hill was something that could be kept a secret. Finally he demanded to know what we wanted. Basically all I could tell him was to let in the counterculture – provide facilities for the macrobiotic caterers, the underground service organisations, the underground press, theatre groups, street performers, and give the local street bands a stage on the camp site.
Ricky defended his participation in the community. ‘Release is already putting in a bad-trips tent.’
‘Release always puts in a bad-trips tent. I was thinking more of the proactive, rather than the reactive.’
Ricky wanted to know what he’d be getting in return if he waxed proactive. My answer was not what he wanted to hear. ‘You’ll be getting a very much more enjoyable and manageable festival.’
He seemed to think we were still negotiating. If he agreed to my demands, I’d essentially call off the troops? Right? That was where the philosophical chasm suddenly yawned. All I had was a few leaflets and some badges. Everything else was an illusion. No troops to call off, and no control or even influence over the crowds who were already setting up camp on the hill. No one was leading the charge, but no one could sound the retreat, either. In no way could Ricky embrace the lesson I’d learned at Phun City. Appear to give them what they want, because if you don’t, they will take it anyway. A few concessions were made, but on the Wednesday night Fiery Creations made their fatal tactical blunder. With what must have been the tacit approval of the local police, they sent in their Black and Tans to clear the hill. They attempted to rout the hippies with dogs and batons, but the hippies weren’t about to go. The Black and Tans skirmished with Brit bikers and ’68 riot-hardened Parisians, plus a lot of youth who’d been pushed around just too often. The die was cast and grudges were set.
From there it went off on its own parabola of confusion, chaos, violence and disorder. French Anarchists, British Trots and Hell’s Angels had a whale of a time pulling down sections of fence and mixing it up with the B&Ts, while I mediated dozens of pointless arguments between opposing factions of troublemakers, alternately calming them down and winding them up as the increasingly deranged humour took hold. I’d stumble into the FREEk press tent, which stank of sex-sweat and patchouli, and where Richard Neville was playing newsman with a Gestetner machine, and dictate hideously grandiose, Red Guard communiqués, royally pissing off Richard with Dadaist radical shtick way beyond his Australian sense of humour.
I recall the ticket-holding punters being quite upset when the rebels got in for free, and I remember walking slowly down the Desolation Row encampment, reflecting on its post-nuclear refugee squalor. Su Small earned everyone’s admiration by inventing an exchange system for backstage passes, because the backstage bar was the only place one could get an acceptable cocktail. Unfortunately I had constantly to dodge Ricky Farr whenever I dropped in for a quick gin and tonic. As we foraged away from the site for whisky, cigarettes and other essentials, the locals bad-vibed us like a loathsome army of occupation as we roared around in Pete Currie’s jeep. The Who were magnificent. Jim Morrison looked desperate. Sly Stone blew the roof off the sky. And Jimi was disturbing, like a man on a mission but without a map.
As the situation worsened, Charlie Murray thought it was the end of the dream and maybe the end of the world. Young Liberals took over direct negotiations with Fiery Creations. A crew of Trots running the food-refrigeration trucks threatened to shut down the freezers unless retail food prices came down. The Angels seemed to be conducting an internal purge. Things burned. Smoke markers normally used by yachtsmen were regularly being detonated, creating thick billows of multicoloured smoke. A flare hit the stage while Hendrix was playing and set fire to the canopy. I was blamed. I didn’t bother to explain that any freak could buy flares and smoke markers at any of the dozens of marine chandlers on the island. The organisers appealed for peace, love and good vibes, and even sent Joni Mitchell out to do their dirty work for them, calling for docile passivity from those who were no longer either stardust or golden. I’m recorded as responding, ‘Rock’s becoming an opiate designed to create docile consumers.’ Even Richard Neville, who, I was coming to suspect, really didn’t like me at all, had to grudgingly admit that I was ‘not only right-on, but right’.
My most vivid memory came sometime on Sunday afternoon when I stepped through an iron fence that was twisted into a tortured sculpture. Ricky was on the stage, barking-crazy and abusing the crowd for having thrown beer cans at the local vicar. A hotdog stand was burning and part of the stage was also charred from the flare of the previous night. Helicopters circled overhead, while at ground level blanket-wrapped figures, and others in togas of plastic sheeting, wandered around aimlessly. I was looking at a Class One Rock Apocalypse, and filing away the visua
ls. Mad Max had arrived a decade before they ever made the movie. And I wasn’t the only one taking pleasure in all of this. As far as I could tell, everyone – each in his or her own perverse way – had a jolly good time. Wasn’t it a little silly to be mourning some burst balloons? Another party was over, and yes, maybe a certain part of the Sixties was over, too. Lou Reed was starting to make a lot of sense. What costume would we wear for all tomorrow’s parties?
Chapter Eight
Screwing Causes Clap
THE MOMENT WAS one of inspiration and giant Letraset. For a number of weeks the first statistical proof that cigarette-smoking causes lung cancer had been made public, as if anyone but a few self-hypnotised ad-men had entertained any doubts in the first place. A phoney media furore dragged on, while the medical profession stated the obvious and the tobacco industry blew smoke. I think Steve Abrams suggested in The Times that maybe marijuana should be substituted for tobacco, but was largely ignored. A parody of the whole spurious debate seemed in order, and almost like automatic spirit-writing, the huge headline stared back at me from the camera-ready art for the front page:
SCREWING CAUSES CLAP! – Official
In two-inch sans-serif type, just like the New York Post or the old Brooklyn Eagle, it stated the crudely obvious as though it was the bombing of Pearl Harbor. I had always admired the worst kind of banner tabloid, at times to the point of fetish, and it was one of the games Edward and I agreed we’d play directly I took over the running of IT again. I can’t pretend that moving back to IT wasn’t inevitable. At the risk of sounding coldly Darwinian, I was on the loose, I knew how to do the job, I had some things I wanted to try and the old guard were close to burned-out. I also can’t pretend that my assuming control was exactly a smooth and rationally conducted transfer of power, or that it was achieved without major personality clashes and some legal sleight of hand. A couple of major rows did blow up, as Chris Rowley recounts:
