by Mick Farren
It was the truth, and I think Harry Palmer realised it. My instincts told me that the group doing the bombing was very isolated and out-there, probably a political commune gone Manson family, but in a reptilian, Bader-Meinhof manner. Out on the mutant fringes of the counterculture, craziness was close to endemic. One thing I knew for sure, however, was that it had nothing to do with any of the old lags in my life. A few degrees of separation lay between us and the authors of these explosions. All we knew was that their communiqués had been left anonymously in the downstairs hallway at IT, just inside the street door. As Steve Mann would point out, when he was picked up a couple of days later, the likes of us were too stoned and disorganised to be blowing up the homes of Cabinet ministers. Disrupting The David Frost Show had been about our speed. Unfortunately Special Branch was pretty much as clueless as we were, and they had to start somewhere.
Personally I found the Angry Brigade a total pain in the arse. I suppose they had as much of an effect on the early Seventies as a marginally significant rock album, but it was an album I didn’t like. I was also puzzled by their long-term strategy. Did they have a five-year plan? Would they escalate to bigger and bigger explosions, and then take to the Scottish highlands and fight a guerrilla war with the SAS? Their wildest dream could only be a five-minute workers’ uprising, and – after it was ruthlessly crushed – fascism would get its three wishes, and start building the camps.
After the Brigade’s first detonation, my friends and I found ourselves with the heavy-duty security services of the nation running all over our creaking little alternative society in their size thirteens, learning far more than they needed to know. We were virtually compelled to offer the Angries a public right-on, as long as no one was actually dead, but my private and heartfelt wish was that they’d either blow themselves up or give themselves up. If these morons actually did kill someone, all hell was going to break loose and workers would be lynching hippies while onlookers cheered. How they eventually gave themselves away and went to jail has been told many times. I recount this segment only because, mercifully, one didn’t have Special Branch swarming over one’s flat every day of the week, even in the early Seventies.
Mists of Avalon
Two thickset, burly, roadie-like long-hairs stood beneath the pyramid stage looking at a length of thick steel chain. One end was wrapped around a pointed iron stake, while the other was attached to a horizontal scaffolding pole at the very centre of the base of the pyramid stage. One of the long-hairs was holding a formidable sledgehammer and clearly intended to drive the spike into the ground, like he was electrically earthing the large, complex structure. The other seemed intent on stopping him. ‘I’m telling you, man. You disrupt the leyline, and you could split the fucking planet in half.’
The one with the hammer shook his head. ‘Not a chance.’
The stage at Glastonbury Fair was a work of grandeur; a massive and precisely formed pyramid, constructed from scaffolding and transparent plastic sheeting that glowed silver in the night, from interior batteries of lights. It had been built according to the most sophisticated architectural plans, and some hoped it could be seen from space. I never knew if these two mystic yeomen were part of the masterplan, or just independent theorists adding what they supposed was an extra cosmic boost to the already energised mix.
The one without the hammer was having serious second thoughts. ‘You shouldn’t risk it, man. I mean . . .’
The one with the hammer was probably a Taurus. ‘I’ve done my calculations.’
‘You’re taking some fucking risk, man.’
‘It’ll complete a circuit connecting the power of the sounds with the power of the Earth.’
‘And suppose you’re wrong? Suppose you fucked up the co-sines or something?’
Hammer was exasperated. ‘These are leylines, man. Not fucking long division.’
No-Hammer wasn’t convinced. ‘I don’t know.’
Hammer hefted his sledge. ‘You don’t trust me?’
No-Hammer backed off a little. ‘No, man, I didn’t say that.’
‘Well?’
‘I . . . still don’t know.’
Hammer positioned the stake. No-Hammer continued to look distraught, but his innate passivity prevented him from actually doing anything. The hammer swung and I must confess that for an instant I held my breath. It struck, and the head of the stake was eight inches lower. The hammer swung again and the stake went deeper into the ground. No cataclysm occurred, and both men looked extremely relieved. No-Hammer made a drawn-out deflating sound of some profundity. ‘Sshiiiiiii . . .’
Hammer was a little more cocky than he really needed to be. ‘You should have trusted me, man.’
No-Hammer shook his head. ‘I still think you’re fucking lucky.’
Hammer became at least a little defensive. ‘I knew what I was doing.’
No-Hammer saw his chance to wax portentous. ‘There are powers down there we can’t even imagine.’
The exchange was a dumbly weird, Dada/psychedelic echo of the conversation Robert Oppenheimer reportedly had with his colleagues on the Manhattan Project. Just prior to the test of the very first atomic bomb, the fear had been expressed that the bomb might trigger a nitrogen chain reaction and entirely burn off the Earth’s atmosphere. Although I don’t equate the crude paranormal engineering of Hammer and No-Hammer with the technology behind the A-bomb, it was interesting to watch someone go ahead with an action even after the suggestion had been made that it might destroy the planet.
Scenes like I’d just witnessed were due in no small part to the fact that Glastonbury Fair was held on one of the most myth-steeped pieces of geography in all England. The tents, wickiups, kraals, hooches and pavilions swept down a grassy incline to the unbelievable pyramid stage, beyond which was a view of the Vale of Avalon where the sixth-century wizards of paganism made their last stand in the face of the drably determined monks of Christianity. This was Merlin’s turf. The great earthwork of Glastonbury Tor reared up less than a mile away, the towering and ancient man-made pyramid with its allegedly psychotropic spiral path to the summit, and the bizarre Christian chapel perched on the top, clear indication of how the monks feared the power of that mound, be it the burial place of Arthur or a landing marker for mother-ships.
The first night of the festival, when the underground press convoy arrived in its truck and Land-Rover, Camelot was drenched by torrential rain, but by morning the skies had cleared for a full week of uninterrupted sunshine. We had churned up enough mud, however, trying to drive through the site and pitch tents in the downpour that, come the sun, everything was covered in a layer of red dust, which made it all too easy to imagine oneself in a very benign spaghetti western, or maybe one of the more relaxed and amusing bits of the Third Crusade. The combined underground press had a large military tent with a Soviet naval flag flying above it. Our next-door neighbours were Hawkwind, in a massive tepee of psychedelic tarpaulin supported on a conical cluster of scaffolding poles.
Our crew, which included the Pink Fairies and other wastrels of the parish, drank, drugged, made music and fell where we lay. We ate custard pies from the baker’s in the village. We took LSD from strangers and swilled it down with the local scrumpy which had the taste and potency of gasoline and crushed apples. I became an absolute obsessive about building fires at night. After sundown, to have the biggest and most roaring orange blaze in your section of the landscape was akin to declaring that the pub was open. Strange hippies appeared out of the darkness offering up what they had to the circle around the fire: rum, kif, magic mushrooms or an opium pipe. We might as well have been in the sixth or even the twenty-sixth century as we told tall travellers’ tales of intoxication, of outwitting the law, of the lights in the sky, lost continents, the lies of governments, collective triumphs and personal moments of gross stupidity, while the music of past, present and future roared from the pyramid stage. On that same stage Hawkwind hammered out their legend, and David Bowie, in a dres
s and still with his Veronica Lake hairstyle, played a magical set in the dawn.
And we all got along so fucking well, the Elves and the Bladerunners, the Druids and the Gunslingers, the Earth Goddesses and the Suspected Aliens. No one to shock and nothing with which to shock them. The only flurry of authoritarianism came when an Eco-Attitude Squad descended on us, wanting to know where we were finding all our firewood. They feared we were hacking down trees and burning them. Mac, John Manly and I – the trio of Fire Panthers responsible for all this pagan flame and jollity – responded irately. Had we not driven all the way to a local sawmill in the mighty Land-Rover and filled it with a few hundredweight of off-cuts and trim? And we would probably do the same again on the morrow.
Regretfully the Glastonbury Fair constituted a last meeting of many tribes, a final potlatch before we all took our separate paths into a future few of us believed would be anything but inescapably darker. It was symbolic that we should come to this place, this land of our Once and Future King. I really hoped Hammer had tapped us into the power of the leys, because – whether you believed in the myths of Avalon or not – we’d soon need all the help we could get.
Our own hard times kicked in faster than I’d imagined. We were still at Glastonbury, communing with the tribes, when we learned we’d been busted. A messenger came hotfoot from the farmhouse to tell Edward, Gez and me that Joy – who had no empathy for fields and was holding the fort in London – had phoned from the IT office. The Metropolitan Police Obscene Publications Squad had visited with a warrant and seized all the copies of Nasty Tales they could find. Our first response was to break camp and hightail it to London, but Joy made clear the pointlessness of rushing back like headless chickens. It was unlikely we’d be charged with anything for at least a month, so we might as well stay and enjoy ourselves while the Director of Public Prosecutions considered our fate. We did our best, but in the time left to us in Camelot, we switched from psychedelics to the local cider and fire-water whisky purchased in the villages of men.
A Nasty Ball
Each of the Pink Fairies arrived bearing the head of a dead pig on a pole. Although we assumed they had obtained them from a pork butcher rather than mounting their own hog hunt, it set the tone. Lord of the Flies meets Monster Mash. The preparations for a legal engagement – particularly one that might cost us our freedom – took some diverse forms. To hold a series of what we called ‘Nasty Balls’ was one of the more obvious and enjoyable ideas. We needed to raise money, and organising a string of fairly outrageous parties took our minds off our troubles. I was reading everything I could get my hands on about obscenity, jurisprudence and erotica, and I needed a break.
We had found a down-on-its-luck disco called Bumpers in Piccadilly, on the site of what had once been a Lyons Corner House, and the owner offered us a very tempting deal for an evening’s event. One factor that especially endeared itself to Edward and me was a central Plexiglas DJ booth that lit up and flashed like a flying saucer going into warp drive. ‘Cool,’ we muttered as the owner turned it on for a demonstration. And just to prove that wonders sometimes did never cease, the place also had a late-night liquor licence. We had finally caught ourselves a break, and it was about time. Matters had not been going well up to that point. Not only had the Director of Public Prosecutions brought charges against Nasty Tales, and its editors and publishers, but, in a ten-minute hearing, a magistrate rubber-stamped them and we’d been committed for trial. We were also discovering that the earlier OZ obscenity circus was a hard act to follow. The underground and its sympathisers were suffering from prosecution fatigue.
Felix, Jim and Richard had just about done it all; from showing up at Marylebone Magistrates Court dressed as schoolgirls, to proving themselves lucid and eloquent at their trial at the Old Bailey. They had thrown some splendid parties, and John Lennon had cut a benefit single, but, like Mick and Keith before them, they’d been found guilty and freed only after protests ranging from editorials in the ‘quality papers’ to a free-form demonstration that meandered around the West End, with John and Yoko in the vanguard. The same funfair and day at the races could not be repeated. About the only option open to Nasty Tales was to win. I was pretty damned sure that, if convicted, Edward and I at least would do some time. No editorials, no demos and definitely no deal. The primary task in front of us was to convince a jury that cartoons of anthropomorphic dogs having sex might not be to their taste, but posed no threat to society. The riff had been played over and over; from Henry Miller to Lenny Bruce, to poor Jim Morrison who might have been doing time right then, if he hadn’t taken the poet’s way out and fled to Paris to die. Wasn’t it finally time the general public accepted that judicial censorship was a dead issue? Our tales might be nasty, but surely not a crime.
My reading of the situation told me that winning was crucial not only to keep us out of durance vile, but also because scoring ourselves a not-guilty verdict might actually put an end to this nonsense. If the DPP failed to get a conviction, that might actually act as a deterrent to future busts of the same kind, and those in power would have to use something other than the criminal law as a means to censor print.
Four of us had actually been charged: Edward, Paul Lewis, Joy and myself as the directors of the parent company; and then Edward and I were double-dipped as the actual editors of the offending publication. Our only fallback, should our fortunes turn ugly, was that Edward and I would attempt to distance ourselves from Joy and Paul and absorb the worst of the heat. If there was to be a rap, Edward and I, as gentlemen, would attempt to take it, but winning always remained the goal. To achieve this we first avoided all the usual liberal lawyers and went to a well-known criminal-law practice, defenders of the Krays and other villains, and presented them with our problem. Far from telling us to piss off and not bother them with our hippie nonsense, the senior partners were amused by the challenge. It would be a diversion for some of the younger chaps, a wit-sharpening change from routine fraud, armed robbery and GBH.
We made it clear that we wanted to win and they agreed that they did, too. When we added that we wanted to win, but we weren’t going to grovel merely to stay out of jail, they stayed with us. They pointed out, though, that to use the technicalities of the law in our own defence should not be considered dishonourable, and they reserved the right to dive into any loophole that might present itself. They conceded that, in return for not ideologically tying their hands, I could conduct my own defence, enabling me to rant when I felt the need. Our barristers had defended enough gangsters to know the thin line between the law and show business. Joy, Paul and Edward had a barrister apiece, plus an extra one representing the company. That gave us four barristers and me arrayed against the prosecution. We could but hope.
Nasty Tales itself proved to be one of our greatest sources of income, and we put out new issues as fast as Edward and I could commission and gather material. To do otherwise would have been an admission of guilt, and we figured the dirty book squad wouldn’t be back until the ongoing case was concluded. Bust us again and our lawyers would be screaming harassment. To our great delight, these new issues sold like hot cakes; I think to pessimistic collectors who wanted copies before they were all consigned to the incinerator. The only compromise – after issue no.2 – was the words ADULTS ONLY printed boldly on the cover. The core of the prosecution case was that comics, by definition, are for the young and thus, once again, we were sinister tot-corrupters, only one step from actual molesters.
We entered a time of hyper-activity, with that unique energy generated by fear. IT came out, on the deadline, and in our spare time we decided to raise some small (but, we hoped, historic) debauchery before we found ourselves carted off to the Scrubs – or, in Joy’s case, Holloway. Hence the Nasty Balls at Bumpers, with the flying-saucer DJ booth ready to count down, and booze till 3 a.m.
Although this prosecution was part of the running fight that started with the first raid on IT in 1967, it was now being conducted against the bac
kground of a city, from its sleazy heart outward, in the throws of profound change. Something hummed – same instrument, but with a new and different note. Hardening times were bringing back decadence, if only as a shelter from the storm. Kurt Weill was chic all over again, as was a brief vogue for swing bands played at dance-mix volume. The Radical Fems were on the loose and still never found time to shave before putting on their make-up. The Ladies of the Canyons had also pretty much had it with dressing like Chairman Mao, and embraced a Rita Hayworth retro-vogue for pearlised metalflake slink, feather boas and rising platforms, the second-hand-store version of what, in modernised and mass-produced form, would appear in Kensington Market and the King’s Road within about a year. David Bowie – laughing gnome that he was – would start looking like Katharine Hepburn, and where were the spiders from Mars?
The Spiders were still waiting in the wings when Iggy, Lou Reed and Bowie were conducting their pre-Ziggy gavotte, which would yield Raw Power and Transformer. Coloured girls were definitely going doop-da-doop some place not too far away. Bowie had formed an alliance with the two refugees from the Sixties underground who – in his opinion – had the best chances of survival. And I would never in a million years have disagreed with him. At that moment in time, Bowie’s sense of wind direction was Darwinian in its accuracy. The early Seventies were so philosophically lean that I knew they were ready for CANNIBAL POP MESSIAH TAKES STEP DOWN THE FOOD CHAIN.
I received reports from the neo-faux-gay labyrinth that seemed to be centred on the Sombrero Club. They came mainly via my friend Gwen, late of the Exploding Galaxy psychedelic dance troupe. After doing some time in the Cook County Jail for a bit of ill-conceived hash-muling into Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, Gwen – who had flaming red hair and freckles, but otherwise looked a lot like Sophia Loren on amphetamine – had become what is now known as a lipstick lesbian (a new rail on the Rita Hayworth track) and, while still dallying with the boys, had formed a fairly violent relationship with a female Swiss stormtrooper whom we nicknamed Madame Charles. She cursed like a stevedore and could be counted on to pursue Gwen publicly across town by phone and furious cab on nights when Gwen’s heterosexuality reasserted itself.
